Early Adulthood Flashcards
Early adulthood age and intro
◦ Leaving home
◦ Completing education
◦ Beginning full-time work
◦ Attaining economic independence
◦ Establishing a long-term intimate relationship
◦ Starting a family
Young adults are at their peak of physical abilities, with
any decline in physical abilities showing a very gradual
decline
Physical Functioning
- Growth in height and weight
◦ Secular trend
◦ Full height achieved by mid-20s
◦ Weight gain from more sedentary lifestyle - Strength
◦ Peaks in early-30s, then slow decline - Age-related changes
◦ Cardiovascular, respiratory, sensory
Health in early adulthood
- Pathological ageing
◦ caused by illness, abnormality, genetic factors,
exposure to unhealthy environments - Health compromising behaviours
◦ can lead to illness e.g. smoking - Important influence of an individual’s
Socioeconomic Status (SES)– pollution, toxic
communities, poverty - Diet – cardiovascular disease, cancer
- Exercise
Stress
Early adulthood brings new levels of stress
*Establishing career, starting family
*Level of stress is associated with a wide range of health
problems
*General adaptation syndrome
* Alarm
* Resistance
* Exhaustion
*Direct effect on health – unhealthy stress levels directly
affects the physiological system and can produce changes
that lead to illness
The experience of stress
Primary appraisal
* Present harm
* Future damage
* Challenge to overcome and benefit
Secondary appraisal
* Assessment of coping resources
* Stress reaction depends on controllability
and predictability of stimulus
Societal Stress
Post-traumatic stress disorder
(PTSD)
* Numbness, intrusive memories, problems with sleeping and concentrating, hyper-vigilance
* Long-lasting effects on health, relationships, economic stability
* Important to distinguish PTSD and Complex PTSD
Health Compromising
Behaviours
- Many young adults still engage in behaviours that put them at increased health risk:
◦ Smoking
◦ Alcohol consumption
◦ Unsafe sex
◦ Eating disorders
Health beliefs model
- Engagement in health-risk behaviours depends on:
◦ perceived susceptibility
◦ severity of outcome
◦ external or internal cues
◦ balance between benefits and barriers - People’s health behaviours often inconsistent
Theories of Adult Cognition
- Piaget’s formal operationsstage
- Final stage of cognitivedevelopment
- Focus on logical-mathematical thought
- Later researchers see limitations of Piaget’s stage
theory - Postformal thought
- Knowledge is relative, non-absolute
- Accept and synthesise contradictions
- Problem finding stage (Arnett, 2006)
Is there a fifth stage?
- Several theorists have proposed a fifth stage and beyond, emphasising pragmatic, relative and changing nature of adult knowledge
- Fifth-stage theorists recognise change and disequilibrium
- Arlin – problem finding; asking questions about oneself
- Basseches (1988) proposes dialectical thinking as the post-formal cognitive stage
- Labouvie-Vief’s Theory
oPragmatic thought – develop rational ways of thinking
oCognitive affective complexity - more adept at integrating cognition with emotional - organising the contradictions into a structure that recognises individual experiences. - Expertise - knowledge in one specific field – years of experience and learning; thinks at a deeper and more abstract level
- Always be open to new ways of thinking…
Development of contextual thinking
Schaie’s stages of adult thinking builds on Piaget – argues
that cognitive abilities become more goal-directed during
adulthood
◦ Acquisitive stage
◦ Achieving stage
◦ Responsible stage
◦ Executive stage
◦ Reintegrative stage
Contextual relativism
- Perry (1970)
◦ Move from basic dualism to multiplicity – contextual relativism
◦ Study not generalisable - Women’s knowledge
◦ Silent knowing
◦ Received knowing
◦ Subjective knowing
◦ Procedural knowing
◦ Constructed knowing
Adult moral reasoning
- Kohlberg’s stages
◦ No social or emotional context - Gilligan’s stages
◦ Survival orientation, conventional care, integrated care - Differences in moral reasoning arise from different
experiences rather than sex differences - Moral voice – includes class, context, and opportunity, not
just sex - Ethnicity and moral voice
Spirituality
- Faith or spirituality is another aspect of moral development
that depends on cognitive growth - As young adults develop their own ethical viewpoint, they
become capable of finding their own spiritual meaning or
faith - Fowler (1991) argued that the growth of faith is a universal
development that can occur within or outside a specifically
religious context
Social clock
- On time – following the social
timetable - Off time – out of phase with peers
