Recap:

Main Lessons
Nursing Adolescents

Development and change across childhood

The School of Health Sciences, Ngee Ann Polytechnic, Singapore

Your Learning Points

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The Adolescent Mind

Adolescence is the time between childhood and adulthood. During adolescence, teens are highly influenced by their peer groups, as they become independent of their parents and explore their identity.
The adolescent brain is not fully developed yet. The brain is still growing and changing and that affects the way that adolescents see the world and the way that they behave. Up until puberty, brain cells continue to bloom in the frontal region. Some of the most developmentally significant changes in the brain occur in the prefrontal cortex, which is involved in decision making and cognitive control, as well as other higher cognitive functions. During adolescence, myelination and synaptic pruning in the prefrontal cortex increases, improving the efficiency of information processing, and neural connections between the prefrontal cortex and other regions of the brain are strengthened. However, this growth takes time and the growth is uneven.
The limbic system develops years ahead of the prefrontal cortex. Development in the limbic system plays an important role in determining rewards and punishments and processing emotional experience and social information. Pubertal hormones target the amygdala directly and powerful sensations become compelling. Brain scans confirm that cognitive control is not fully developed until adulthood because the prefrontal cortex is limited in connections and engagement.
When the overall brain chemical system is working well, it seems that these chemicals interact to balance out extreme behaviors. But when stress, arousal or sensations become extreme, the adolescent brain is flooded with impulses that overwhelm the prefrontal cortex, and as a result, adolescents engage in increased risk-taking behaviors and emotional outbursts possibly because the frontal lobes of their brains are still developing.

Social Perception

Social Perception refers to the processes through which we use available information to form impressions of other people, to assess what they are like. Key question: How do we form impressions of others? How do we combine the diverse info we receive about someone into a coherent overall impression?
Factors that can influence the impressions you form of other people include the characteristics of the person you are observing, the context of the situation, your own personal traits and your past experiences.

Social Cognition

The theory provides a framework for understanding how people actively shape and are shaped by their environment.
A major component of the theory is observational learning: the process of learning desirable and undesirable behaviors by observing others, then reproducing learned behaviors in order to maximize rewards.
Cognitive biases are flaws or distortions in judgment and decision-making.; and they can have a serious impact on our health.
Adolescents tend to focus mostly on their own perceptions, especially on their behaviors and appearance, because of the “physiological metamorphosis” they experience during this period. This leads to adolescent egocentrism results in two distinct problems in thinking: the imaginary audience and the personal fable. These likely peak at age fifteen, along with self-consciousness in general.

Theory of Congruence

Carl Roger's Theory of Congruence postulate that all individuals can be anakysed using two concepts of Self. In hsi tehory, Rogers represented this in the form of two circles. One is the Ideal Self. The Ideal Self represent the hopes and aspiration of the individual. The other circle is the Real Self (also called Self Image). This represent how the individuals see themselves in relation to the feedback from their social environment.
If the Individuals Ideal Self is close to their Real Self, Rogers call this a state of congruence. Rogers' represented this state in the form of two circles intersecting each other. If the two imaginary circles are apart, Rogers termed this state as the state of Incongruence.
Roger's theory is closely linked to Abraham Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs. Rogers theory suggest that a well-adjusted/supported individual will be in a state of Congruence. This approximate Maslow's Self-Actualisation state. On the opposite end, a person who is in an Incongruent state will be in a state of stress and would not be able to achieve his or her full potential.