Psychological Changes in Adolescent Years - Research Paper Example

Psychological Changes in Adolescent Years By The growth and development of humans occurs in different stages, starting from infancy to adulthood. Adolescence is a highly critical stage in human growth and development, as this marks the transitioning of an individual from the childhood stage to the adulthood stage. As such, it is therefore, expected that the period of adolescence comes with many changes in an individual. These changes vary and are physical, psychological, social and emotional in nature. The period of adolescence mainly starts at the stage of puberty mostly when an individual is aged around twelve years, and continues up to the age of twenty. During the puberty stage, an individual experiences immense development in their reproductive system and their sex hormones increase rapidly. This essay focuses on the aspect of psychological changes in human growth and development, and specifically during the adolescent years, by reviewing two peer-reviewed journal articles on the topic. There are different developmental psychologists who are mainly interested in studying the aspect of human growth and development, examining how humans develop physically, socially and mentally throughout their lifespan. Laura Berk is a renowned scholar of psychology that specialises in human development. In her book Development Through the Lifespan (2009), Berk widely examines human development starting from infancy to adulthood; she adopts a cross-cultural focus and bases on theory and research in explaining the sequence of human development and relates the physical, social, emotional, and cognitive domains as they relate to human development. Apart from Berk, there are other scholars that have paid keen interest to human development and conducted research on different aspects of human development. The selected peer-reviewed journal articles to be reviewed in this paper include Inflexible parents, inflexible kids: A 6-year longitudinal study of parenting style and the development of psychological flexibility in adolescents (2012) published in the Journal of Youth and Adolescence and authored by William, Ciarrochi and Heaven. A second journal article published in the same journal in 2010 and authored by Yuan is Body perceptions, weight control behavior, and changes in adolescents psychological well-being over time: A longitudinal examination of gender. Basically, in their article, William, Ciarrochi & Heaven (2012) focus on the role and effect of parenting style on the development of psychological flexibility in adolescents. On the other hand, Yuan (2010) in his article focuses on the psychological changes in adolescents as well as their body perceptions, and weight control behaviour. The two journal articles address a part of the wider human development topic. These however, focus on adolescents and the psychological changes that take place during the period of adolescence. The connection between these two journal articles and Berk’s text is that they all focus on human development. Narrowing down further, in her text, Berk devotes one the chapters solely to adolescence, and here she focuses on the physical and cognitive development of adolescents and emotional and social development of adolescents. Therefore, together, these sources can generate a wealth of knowledge on the psychological changes in the adolescent years. William, Ciarrochi & Heaven (2012) studied the link between parenting behaviours and psychological flexibility of adolescents. Psychological flexibility is the ability of an individual to respond to appropriately to the demands in their environment and internal experiences in relation to the goals that they have set and aim to achieve. Results showed that psychological flexibility reduced with the age of adolescents. For instance, authoritarian parenting reduced the level of psychological flexibility of adolescents in Grade 7. On the other hand, authoritative parenting decreased psychological flexibility of adolescents in Grade 9. Overall, this study revealed that different styles of parenting have different effect on the psychological flexibility of adolescents. The results of this study imply different things. First, the style of parenting can make adolescents to either be psychologically flexible or psychologically inflexible. This therefore, makes parenting of adolescents to be very critical, as the level of flexibility that an adolescent adopts will influence how they respond to their environment, solve problems and commit to their personal goals in future. In other words, this psychological aspect in adolescents shapes their personality that will remain even as they become adults. Furthermore, the parenting style will affect adolescents with regard to self-esteem, confidence, skills development and self regulation. Therefore, parents play a big role in shaping the personality of adolescents. In exploring body perceptions, weight control behaviour and the changes in the psychological well-being of adolescents, Yuan (2010) used a national longitudinal study of adolescent health with a cross-cultural sample of 12,814 adolescents of both genders. The aim of this study was to ascertain whether body perceptions and weigh loss behaviours had an effect on the psychological well-being of adolescents, and how this varied across the two genders. Overall, the results showed that body perceptions and behaviours had a negative influence on girls as compared to the influence they had on boys. These results would therefore, imply that psychological changes in adolescents vary between boys and girls, and this largely depends on the nature of the different factors that trigger the changes. In his study, Yuan (2010) also established that non-Hispanic white adolescent girls were the most influenced by body perceptions and behaviours, leading to great psychological changes in these girls, while the non-Hispanic white boys were the least influenced by body perceptions and behaviour, leading to no or little changes in their psychological well-being. This would therefore, imply that psychological changes in adolescent years may vary from race to race, as genetics play a role in determining how the changes will occur in an individual. Overall, this study depicts two major aspects including self esteem and depression. Whereas the adolescents that are least influenced by body perceptions and behaviour have a higher level of self-esteem, those that are more influenced by body perceptions and behaviour will have a lower self-esteem and are predisposed to depression. The aspect of self-esteem is critical in the psychological development of adolescents, as this shapes the kind of person the adolescent will become in their adulthood. For different reasons, this paper is important and it holds major benefits to any student that is studying human growth and development. First, the paper has focused specially on adolescents and not generalized. For this reason, there is specialised knowledge on psychological changes that this paper presents. Therefore, this may benefit any student of human growth and development that has special interest in adolescents and specifically the psychological changes in adolescent years. This paper has also addressed the aspect of psychological changes in adolescents in a deeper manner. This has not just identified the psychological changes that take place in adolescents but has taken a deeper approach, as it has examined different factors that influence psychological changes and development in adolescents. Parenting style is one of the major factors that have been seen to influence the psychological development of adolescents. This has therefore; shown that parenting style and other factors such as body perceptions may influence the personality of an adolescent. Furthermore, this paper has also addressed the role that genetics and experience play in behaviour and psychological development of adolescents. The aspect of psychological flexibility has also been addressed in this paper. This is quite resourceful to students of human growth and development considering the fact that this aspect has not been addressed by different scholars of psychology, even though it is critical to human development. Adolescence is a critical and sensitive stage of human development, yet different scholars of psychology and human growth and development among other scholars and specialists have failed to focus more attention to this. By focusing on adolescents, this paper identifies the importance of adolescent years and the need for more attention to be driven to studying and researching different aspects of growth and development that are pertinent to adolescents. This is therefore, meant to influence students of human growth and development to focus more on adolescent studies in their future scholarly works. The relevance of this paper to the modern society cannot go unmentioned. Although this paper focuses on adolescents, there are different lessons that adults in the modern society can learn. For instance, from this paper, an adult living today can look back to their adolescent years and compare with their personality today hence learn why they are the person they are today based on their past experiences in their adolescent years. This paper is also highly relevant to all parents, and anyone wishing to be a parent in future, in the modern society. Parents play an important role in bringing up children and young adults. From this paper, parents today can draw the knowledge that the parenting style they adopt and use on their adolescent children plays a significant role in shaping the personality of their adolescent children in their adulthood. Therefore, parents can learn to provide the best parenting for their adolescent children so that they can turn out to be functional and all-round adults in future. References Williams, K. E., Ciarrochi, J., Heaven, P. C., & L. (2012). Inflexible parents, inflexible kids: A 6-year longitudinal study of parenting style and the development of psychological flexibility in adolescents. Journal of Youth and Adolescence, 41(8), 1053-66. doi:http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s10964-012-9744-0 Yuan, A. S. V. (2010). Body perceptions, weight control behavior, and changes in adolescents psychological well-being over time: A longitudinal examination of gender. Journal of Youth and Adolescence, 39(8), 927-39. Read More