Question

1) How are physical and cognitive growth related in adolescence? How do both of these affect how adolescents are perceived by their peers? (i.e., early devlopers vs late developers, and "nerds" vs "jocks." etc.)

2) Research has shown for the last 30 years that adolescents have a different sleep pattern than other developmental ages that affects cognitive functioning. What does it say? Why is Chesterfield County considering new/different start times for their high schools?

3) How do parents and others perceive adolescents based on their physical development? Why can this be an incorrect perception?

4) What theory of Piaget describes why adolescents think everybody is looking at them? ... Describe AND give an example.(Can be an experience you or a friend may have had.)

5) What theory of Piaget describes why adolescents think they are the only ones to have the worst parents ever? ... Describe AND give an example.(Can be an experience you or a friend may have had.)

1) What roles do media, such as Facebook and Twitter, play in the lives of adolescents?

2) How do they influence adolescent SOCIAL development?

3)How have they positively and negatively influenced COGNITIVE development?

4)How have these industries used developmental characteristics of adolescence to create billion dollar industries?

Answer 1

What is cognitive development?

Cognitive development means the growth of a child’s ability to think and reason. This growth happens differently from ages 6 to 12, and from ages 12 to 18.

Children ages 6 to 12 years old develop the ability to think in concrete ways. These are called concrete operations. These things are called concrete because they’re done around objects and events. This includes knowing how to:

· Combine (add)

· Separate (subtract or divide)

· Order (alphabetize and sort)

· Transform objects and actions (change things, such as 5 pennies = 1 nickel)

Ages 12 to 18 is called adolescence. Kids and teens in this age group do more complex thinking. This type of thinking is also known as formal logical operations. This includes the ability to:

· Do abstract thinking. This means thinking about possibilities.

· Reason from known principles. This means forming own new ideas or questions.

· Consider many points of view. This means to compare or debate ideas or opinions.

· Think about the process of thinking. This means being aware of the act of thought processes.

How cognitive growth happens during the teen years

From ages 12 to 18, children grow in the way they think. They move from concrete thinking to formal logical operations. It’s important to note that:

· Each child moves ahead at their own rate in their ability to think in more complex ways.

· Each child develops their own view of the world.

· Some children may be able to use logical operations in schoolwork long before they can use them for personal problems.

· When emotional issues come up, they can cause problems with a child’s ability to think in complex ways.

· The ability to consider possibilities and facts may affect decision-making. This can happen in either positive or negative ways.

Types of cognitive growth through the years

A child in early adolescence:

· Uses more complex thinking focused on personal decision-making in school and at home

· Begins to show use of formal logical operations in schoolwork

· Begins to question authority and society's standards

· Begins to form and speak his or her own thoughts and views on many topics. You may hear your child talk about which sports or groups he or she prefers, what kinds of personal appearance is attractive, and what parental rules should be changed.

A child in middle adolescence:

· Has some experience in using more complex thinking processes

· Expands thinking to include more philosophical and futuristic concerns

· Often questions more extensively

· Often analyzes more extensively

· Thinks about and begins to form his or her own code of ethics (for example, What do I think is right?)

· Thinks about different possibilities and begins to develop own identity (for example, Who am I? )

· Thinks about and begins to systematically consider possible future goals (for example, What do I want? )

· Thinks about and begins to make his or her own plans

· Begins to think long-term

· Uses systematic thinking and begins to influence relationships with others

A child in late adolescence:

· Uses complex thinking to focus on less self-centered concepts and personal decision-making

· Has increased thoughts about more global concepts, such as justice, history, politics, and patriotism

· Often develops idealistic views on specific topics or concerns

· May debate and develop intolerance of opposing views

· Begins to focus thinking on making career decisions

· Begins to focus thinking on their emerging role in adult society

Anser:2

Here we report the first and most robust evidence about how sleep habits are associated with regional brain grey matter volumes and school grade average in early adolescence. Shorter time in bed during weekdays, and later weekend sleeping hours correlate with smaller brain grey matter volumes in frontal, anterior cingulate, and precuneus cortex regions. Poor school grade average associates with later weekend bedtime and smaller grey matter volumes in medial brain regions. The medial prefrontal - anterior cingulate cortex appears most tightly related to the adolescents’ variations in sleep habits, as its volume correlates inversely with both weekend bedtime and wake up time, and also with poor school performance. These findings suggest that sleep habits, notably during the weekends, have an alarming link with both the structure of the adolescent brain and school performance, and thus highlight the need for informed interventions.

School grade average and GMV correlates

Based on the six voxel-wise correlation analyses between sleep habits and GMV, three region-of interest masks were identified for the following variables: (1) wake-up time during weekends (including areas of the left frontal medial orbital cortex and the left ACC); (2) bedtime during weekends (including areas of the right precuneus and paracentral lobule, the right middle and superior frontal gyrus, the right frontal superior medial cortex, and the left ACC); and (3) time in bed during weekdays (including areas of the left middle and superior frontal gyrus).

School grade average correlated with GMV within two of the three applied region-of-interest masks in medial brain regions: (i) within the weekend wake-up time region-of-interest mask, in a cluster of the bilateral anterior cingulate cortex extending to the bilateral frontal superior medial cortices, and (ii) within the weekend bedtime region-of-interest mask, in three clusters located in the left paracentral lobule and middle cingulate, the left anterior cingulate, and the right anterior cingulate cortex (No statistically significant correlations between school grade average and GMV were found within the weekday time in bed region-of-interest mask.

3) Background/aims: The developmental tasks of adolescence, combined with physical changes, can interfere with self-management behaviour. Yet little is known about how parents view these challenges as they attempt to help their children cope with diabetes. Our objective was to understand how living with an adolescent with diabetes influences parents' perceptions of their child's well-being, their relationship with their child, and how they perceive the influence of peers and school on their child's diabetes.

Methods: Twenty-eight parents of adolescents with Type 1 diabetes, aged 13-18 years, participated in focus groups. Transcripts were analysed using qualitative methods to determine dominant themes and incidence density.

Results: Themes included how diabetes negatively influences their adolescent's lifestyle, how diabetes makes it difficult for parents to understand developmental challenges experienced by their child, concerns regarding the potential to develop long-term complications, perceptions on how diabetes impacts on their relationship with their child and relationships with peers and how their children's school impacts on their diabetes self-management

Conclusions: This qualitative focus group study provides insight into parental perceptions of adolescents living with Type 1 diabetes, specifically as it relates to lifestyle implications, relationships with parents, peers and physicians, and school experiences.

4 and 5)Piaget (1970) devised several tests of formal operational thought. One of the simplest was the 'third eye problem'. Children were asked where they would put an extra eye, if they were able to have a third one, and why.

Schaffer (1988) reported that when asked this question, 9-year-olds all suggested that the third eye should be on the forehead. However, 11-year-olds were more inventive, for example suggesting that a third eye placed on the hand would be useful for seeing round corners.

Formal operational thinking has also been tested experimentally using the pendulum task (Inhelder & Piaget, 1958). The method involved a length of string and a set of weights. Participants had to consider three factors (variables) the length of the string, the heaviness of the weight and the strength of push.

The task was to work out which factor was most important in determining the speed of swing of the pendulum.

Participants can vary the length of the pendulum string, and vary the weight. They can measure the pendulum speed by counting the number of swings per minute.

To find the correct answer the participant has to grasp the idea of the experimental method -that is to vary one variable at a time (e.g. trying different lengths with the same weight). A participant who tries different lengths with different weights is likely to end up with the wrong answer.

Children in the formal operational stage approached the task systematically, testing one variable (such as varying the length of the string) at a time to see its effect. However, younger children typically tried out these variations randomly or changed two things at the same time.

Piaget concluded that the systematic approach indicated the children were thinking logically, in the abstract, and could see the relationships between things. These are the characteristics of the formal operational stage.

What roles do media, such as Facebook and Twitter, play in the lives of adolescents?

Answer:-

Indirect communication

Teens are masters at keeping themselves occupied in the hours after school until way past bedtime. When they’re not doing their homework (and when they are) they’re online and on their phones, texting, sharing, trolling, scrolling, you name it. Of course before everyone had an Instagram account teens kept themselves busy, too, but they were more likely to do their chatting on the phone, or in person when hanging out at the mall. It may have looked like a lot of aimless hanging around, but what they were doing was experimenting, trying out skills, and succeeding and failing in tons of tiny real-time interactions that kids today are missing out on. For one thing, modern teens are learning to do most of their communication while looking at a screen, not another person.

“As a species we are very highly attuned to reading social cues,” says Dr. Catherine Steiner-Adair, a clinical psychologist and author of The Big Disconnect. “There’s no question kids are missing out on very critical social skills. In a way, texting and online communicating—it’s not like it creates a nonverbal learning disability, but it puts everybody in a nonverbal disabled context, where body language, facial expression, and even the smallest kinds of vocal reactions are rendered invisible.”

Critical Evaluation

Psychologists who have replicated this research, or used a similar problem, have generally found that children cannot complete the task successfully until they are older.

Robert Siegler (1979) gave children a balance beam task in which some discs were placed either side of the center of balance. The researcher changed the number of discs or moved them along the beam, each time asking the child to predict which way the balance would go.

He studied the answers given by children from five years upwards, concluding that they apply rules which develop in the same sequence as, and thus reflect, Piaget's findings.

Like Piaget, he found that eventually the children were able to take into account the interaction between the weight of the discs and the distance from the center, and so successfully predict balance. However, this did not happen until participants were between 13 and 17 years of age.

He concluded that children's cognitive development is based on acquiring and using rules in increasingly more complex situations, rather than in stages.

How do they influence adolescent SOCIAL development?

Answer:

Adolescent development is characterized by biological, cognitive, and social changes. Social changes are particularly notable as adolescents become more autonomous from their parents, spend more time with peers, and begin exploring romantic relationships and sexuality. Adjustment during adolescence is reflected in identity formation, which often involves a period of exploration followed by commitments to particular identities. Adolescence is characterized by risky behavior, which is made more likely by changes in the brain in which reward-processing centers develop more rapidly than cognitive control systems, making adolescents more sensitive to rewards than to possible negative consequences. Despite these generalizations, factors such as country of residence, gender, ethnicity, and sexual orientation shape development in ways that lead to diversity of experiences across adolescence.

How have these industries used developmental characteristics of adolescence to create billion dollar industries?

Answer:-

The new age of food marketing: How companies are targeting and luring our kids — and what advocates can do about it

Marketing has long been a feature of our daily landscape. But the explosion of digital culture in recent years has dramatically changed the playing field and the rules, especially for children and teenagers, and companies marketing fast food, snack food, and soft drinks are at the forefront of the game.

Young people’s relationship with media is no longer limited to the passive, one-sided consumption of TV commercials, print ads, and the like. Now our kids are interacting with brands and products every day, often unwittingly inviting marketers to connect with them and their friends online. Marketers are carefully tracking teens online and by cell phone, mining conversations on Facebook and Twitter, collecting data to develop and record personalized behavioral profiles, and more.

The traditional marketing paradigm is spinning into an unprecedented new world, as fast food, snack, and beverage companies draw from an expanding toolbox of sophisticated online and social marketing techniques.^1,2 Today, powerful and intense promotions are completely, seamlessly integrated into young people’s social relationships and minute-by-minute interactions.

Why should health advocates be concerned about the new marketing paradigm? Because young people’s choices about what to eat and when are largely shaped by food and beverage marketing — and these industries are now reaching our kids through a multitude of interactive devices and platforms, pushing products onto young consumers who lack the information and capacity to understand the consequences of an impulsive decision.^{3, 4}

Food and beverage marketing to children in America represents a direct threat to the health prospects of the next generation.⁵ Now more than ever, children in the United States are growing up in environments saturated with marketing for fast food, snacks, and sugary beverages. Today, one in three teens is either overweight or obese, and overweight young people are likely to stay overweight throughout their lives, which puts them at higher risk for serious and even life-threatening health problems.

Teenagers are an obvious prime audience for digital marketing strategies, given their avid use of mobile phones, media players, blogs, online video channels, social networks such as Facebook and Twitter, and other digital media platforms and devices. And they’re especially vulnerable to food and beverage marketers’ tactics: The teen years are a critical developmental period when consumer and eating behaviors are established that may well last throughout an individual’s lifetime.^{6, 7}

What’s more, growing research suggests that biological and psychosocial attributes of the adolescent experience may play an important role in making teens more vulnerable to marketing.^{8, 9} Research on brain development, for example, has found that the prefrontal cortex — which controls inhibition — may not fully mature until early adulthood.^{10, 11 ,12, 13} Meanwhile, children entering puberty experience hormonal changes that make them more receptive to environmental stimuli.

In other words, at the time in their lives when their biological urges are particularly intense, adolescents have not yet acquired the ability to control these urges. Researchers suggest that these innate factors are likely to make teens more susceptible to advertising, especially when they are distracted, exposed to high-level stimuli, or subjected to peer pressure — all hallmarks of digital marketing tactics.¹⁴

The impact of food marketing on ethnic minority youth is a particular concern. Obesity rates are significantly higher for African-American girls and Hispanic boys than for whites, and ethnic youth are targeted aggressively by the food, beverage, and fast food industries. Research shows that ethnic minority youth are more interested in, positive toward, and influenced by marketing than non-Hispanic whites.^{15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20} A research group backed by McDonald’s, Kraft, PepsiCo, Burger King, and others calls Hispanics “the most important U.S. demographic growth driver in the food, beverage, and restaurant sectors.”²¹ And African-Americans and Hispanics are more likely than “general market” consumers to use social networking spaces to share opinions with friends about products, services, and brands, according to a column in Advertising Age.²² Driven by the growing number of ethnic youth, as well as by their heavy use of new media and cultural trendsetting, digital marketers have made understanding and connecting with ethnic youth a priority.