Evolutionary Psychology Focused on Children and Adolescents: Example of Free Spanish Writing
Evolutionary psychology is the part that occupies a space in general psychology that focuses on processes of psychological changes that occur to the length of a human being. It has two fundamental objectives: describe the behavior of the subjects and the way it evolves and identify the causes and processes that produce changes in the behavior between one time and another.
Evolutionary psychology deals with the description, explanation and modification of the inter-individual change of behavior throughout the life cycle, and interindividual differences in interindividual change.
It can be studied in the form of longitudinal design or transverse design existing three trajectories within the development of the human being on which evolutionary psychology is based as a method of study and are:
- Physical development: These are the changes that the body has such as height, weight, brain development and the development of motor skills.
- Cognitive development: changes in the mental processes of people that affect learning, linguistic skills and memory.
- Psychosocial development: changes in social and emotional interaction of personality.
Definition of adolescence
The subject developed is focused on the identity crisis, having in response to the question ‘Who am I actually’. Young people need to develop their own way of thinking by developing their own values, and not only think about repeating those of their parents. Discover new things and feel pride of your goals. Realizing that doing things on their own will realize the feeling of feeling loved and valued by how they are and not for those who wanted to be.
The child achieves her identity through an identification process with others, endorsing the values and ideas of others. Teenagers, on the other hand, must form their own identity and be themselves. One of the most important characteristics is in search of profession and who wants to be in life. It usually happens that teenagers usually adopt childhood and little carefree aptitude to avoid solving problems and acting badly towards other people. It is possible to observe all the definitions resemble and have several characteristics in common, and the most prominent is the following: Biopsychosocial Development of the adolescent during this period.
Teenager stages and sex factor
From my point of view these stages both sexes differ in their struggle to define identity. In general, women are usually judged according to the ability to take care of themselves and others. They tend to achieve their identity more through cooperation than competition. Teenage girls mature faster than men. These differences arise towards the end of childhood, increase around 11 years and are quite wide during adolescence.
While the boys remain in their egocentrism, the girls have gone through the stage of social conformity, and when they begin to be part of that stage the girls become self aware. It is ironic that as time passes, more freedom and independence are granted to boys more than girls knowing that at that age they are more mature.
- First adolescence (10 to 14 years)
- Average adolescence (15 to 17 years)
- Late adolescence (18 to 21 years)
Identity crisis
Young people are vulnerable to having identity crisis during their adolescence which allows them to analyze their options seeking to commit to something they may have faith. This situation can help with the entry of a well -equipped university with all the activities that the student wants. These commitments make the character of the adolecent. The level that reaches during this period effectively influences its capacities to resolve its identity crises. During the identity crisis arises fidelity or loyalty to something being constant and persevering at the same time.
It is not uncommon for the identity crisis to last until about 30 years. While during childhood it is important to trust others, especially in parents, during adolescence it is important to trust oneself. They also transfer their parents’ trust to other people, such as close friends or couples. Love is part of the path to identity.
When he opened emotionally towards another person in whom he deposits his trust, the adolscent is exploring the possible identity of her, and being reflected in the other person through which he can better clarify who is who is who is. However, mature intimacy, which implies commitment, sacrifice and delivery, is not achieved until a stable identity has achieved.
Identity levels
- Exclusion at this level there is a commitment, but there has been no crisis.
- Moratorium (crisis without obligation) when the adolescent is in a crisis situation: the young man considers several alternatives while fighting a decision which personally compromises it.
- It reaches the identity of it (crisis that leads to commitment) on this level, the adolescent has committed to something after a period of crisis; that is, after a time dedicated to thinking and weighing alternatives.
- Confusion of identity (without any commitment, uncertain crisis) during this level the options could have been considered, but the commitment is avoided.
Decision making
Adolescence is a stage in which the adolescent begins to experience several experiences in his life such as: getting together with bands, their first sexual intercourse are a condom, they begin to try drugs or attract their attention, extreme sports.
These behaviors are associated with changes that occur at the physiological and psychological level traditionally, to explanation to this peculiar psychological stage, reference is made to the cognitive perspective proposed by Piaget and Inhelder, which states that these behaviors are mainly due to immaturity in the Reasoning skills (Inhelder, 1975) adolescents, unlike young people and adults, show greater inefficiency in all their thinking strategies along with metacognitive skills in general, which prevents them from adequately analyzing in situations and situations in situations and The consequence is that it hinders the adaptive decision taking. It has recently confirmed that an alternative explanation has been offered to these behavioral peculiarities of adolescence.
According to this new theory, the difficulty of adolescents to make adequate decisions does not lies exactly in their cognitive immaturity, but in the imbalance between the emotional and rational processing of situations (Steinberg, 2009)
This new approach, called "Dual System Model" argues that immaturity is a characteristic in decisions in adolescents which is due to the interaction between two neural systems with different degrees of development: an essentially emotional system, oriented towards the search of rewards and a system of logical and rational nature.
According to the model, during this period as adolescence is the cognitive control system has not completely reached its maturation, while the socio -emotional system does. For this reason, at this stage behaviors with high risk components appear, because the impulses generated by deep brain structures cannot be properly inhibited by the prefrontal cortex regions.
It is true that these situations do not occur during childhood because the two systems have equivalent levels of development, as also occurs in youth and adulthood.
This peculiarity becomes a challenge when regulating behavior in adolescents, because most emotional impulses do not find a "barrier" that can contain the emotional intensity that motivates behavior.
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