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PubMed1983

The diary as a transitional object in female adolescent development.

The concept of the diary as a transitional object adds a new perspective to the theory and treatment of adolescents. The findings of this pilot study suggest that the diary mirrors, soothes , helps inhibit frightening impulses, and helps integrate inner and outer realities. These functional aspects of the diary become internalized into the evolving psychic structure just as the analogous functions of the therapist in the context of a positive transference are internalized. The use of the adolescent diary in psychotherapy enhances and enriches the meaning of the treatment alliance and promotes the progress of the "second separation-individuation." The therapist's sensitive and creative understanding of the diary- diarist relationship can lead to improved treatment strategies for adolescent patients. Further empirical research on the phenomenon of adolescent diary writing may deepen our clinical and theoretical understanding of this challenging population.

Adolescent↗
PubMed2006

Father absence and adolescent development: a review of the literature.

Rapid social change has seen increasing numbers of woman-headed single-parent families, meaning that more and more children are growing up without a father resident in the home. Father absence is a term that is not well defined and much of the literature does not discriminate between father absence due to death, parental relationship discord or other causes. This article presents a critical review of the extant literature on father absence, particularly as it relates to adolescent well-being and development. Findings from the literature point to the importance of father presence in children's lives and suggest that father absence has ramifications for children and adolescents. The conclusions drawn from this literature review suggest that father absence and its effects on children and families is an area for further research, with the view of developing strategies to ameliorate the impact of father absence on children and adolescents.

Adaptation, Psychological↗
PubMed2004

Social cognition as a mediator of the influence of family and community violence on adolescent development: implications for intervention.

Several studies have shown that exposure to family and community violence during childhood and adolescence is associated with an increased risk for development of externalizing behavior problems, but less is known about specific mechanisms that mediate this relation. Variations in social cognition serve as one possible mechanism by which these environmental experiences influence aggressive behavior during adolescence. Children who have been maltreated tend to display negatively biased social-cognitive processing styles, which may in turn increase their likelihood of reacting aggressively in ambiguous social situations. Similarly, witnessing community violence is associated with aspects of social cognition, including beliefs that support aggressive responses to threat. Recent studies also suggest that exposure to extreme forms of stress and violence can produce changes in children's neurobiology that may increase their hypersensitivity and reactivity to interpersonal threat. Some of the strongest evidence of the role of social cognition as a mechanism in this association comes from intervention studies which reduced aggressive behavior by targeting negatively biased social-cognitive processing styles.

Adolescent↗
PubMed2000

Modeling adolescent development and alcohol use in animals.

Though certain characteristics found in human adolescents are clearly unique, there are other key characteristics of this developmental stage that are common across a number of species. Animal models offer researchers unique insight into the effects of alcohol on the adolescent. This age period is particularly important for study, because this is the time during which many people first experiment with alcohol. It is possible that features of the adolescent brain may in fact predispose a youngster to behave in ways that place him or her at particular risk for experimenting with alcohol or other drugs. In addition to behavioral changes, a number of important physiological alterations occur during adolescence, including changes in brain regions implicated in modulating the reinforcing effects of alcohol and other drugs of abuse.

Adolescent↗
PubMed1995

Adolescent development and transitions to motherhood.

OBJECTIVE: To use both qualitative and quantitative methods to examine the experience of motherhood during adolescence and to evaluate developmental influences on the concept of maternal role. DESIGN: (1) A grounded theory approach was initially used to generate a hypothesis. Focus groups and individual interviews were analyzed for concept and theme. (2) A quantitative method using correlational analysis was used to test the hypothesis generated by qualitative study. A structured interview using five specific, scored questions about self and about motherhood was used to examine the relationship between developmental complexity of responses to questions about self and questions about motherhood. SETTING AND PARTICIPANTS: The qualitative study involved group and individual interviews with 42 teenage mothers. The quantitative study involved individual interviews with 25 mothers, ages 14 to 18 years, at an innercity clinic for young parents and their infants. Race and ethnicity were heterogeneous, and 100% received Aid to Families With Dependent Children. RESULTS: The major hypothesis generated from the qualitative analysis was that an adolescent mother's conceptualization of her maternal role is related to her own psychosocial and cognitive development. The quantitative study revealed a strong correlation between the developmental complexity of responses to questions about self and the complexity of responses to questions about motherhood (r2 = .81). CONCLUSION: The experience of motherhood and the conceptualization of the maternal role in adolescence is related to young mothers' psychosocial cognitive development.

Adolescent↗
PubMed1975

Adolescent development and the onset of drinking. A longitudinal study.

Junior and senior high-school students were studied over a 4-year period. The likelihood of drinking was directly related to the degree of transition- or problem-proneness, and a developmental relationship between onset of drinking and other socipsychological attributes was found. It is concluded that becoming a drinker is an integral aspect of the process of adolscent development.

Achievement↗
PubMed2001

Adrenocortical activity in at-risk and normally developing adolescents: individual differences in salivary cortisol basal levels, diurnal variation, and responses to social challenges.

The purpose of this study was to examine adrenocortical activity (basal, diurnal variation, and responses to social stressors) in adolescents at risk for psychopathology. Salivary cortisol levels were examined in normally developing and at-risk youth with internalizing and externalizing symptoms ranging from subclinical to clinical levels. Adolescents showed expected patterns of diurnal variation, with high early morning cortisol levels and a pattern of decline throughout the day. Females showed higher midday and late afternoon levels than males, and these patterns interacted with risk status. Internalizing problems sometimes were associated with gradual rather than steep declines in basal cortisol production. Both immediate and delayed cortisol reactivity to a social performance stressor were associated with internalizing symptoms. There was no evidence of relations between externalizing problems and underarousal of the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal (HPA) system. These and other results suggest that gender is an important moderating factor linking psychopathology. development, and context with HPA axis functioning in adolescence.

Adolescent↗
PubMed1997

HIV prevention among Zambian adolescents: developing a value utilization/norm change model.

Peer-led interventions are effective in reducing risk for HIV among adolescents. A pre-intervention study was conducted to determine how to successfully carry out a possible future intervention to reduce HIV risk among adolescents in urban Zambia. Ethnographic and sexual data were collected on 276 males and females both attending and not attending secondary school during a 14-month period in 1992-1993. Additionally, several focus groups were conducted. This paper reviews the cultural background of Zambian adolescents and presents an overview of the study results. Among the findings, it was learned that most of the male and female adolescents (average age of 17) are sexually active, very few routinely use condoms, less than half of sexually active adolescents have ever used a condom, AIDS is omnipresent in Zambia, the threat of HIV infection is a very real concern for most of the adolescents, there is a strong desire to protect themselves from HIV infection during sex (but condoms are often seen as ineffective and other forms of safer sex are not discussed), nearly all of the sexually active females and some of the males have received money or gifts for sex, and some of the out-of-school females are engaging in very risky sex (e.g., unprotected anal intercourse, and anilingus) with adult men. The ethnographic data, including a brief trial risk reduction workshop, suggests that the core values and social norms of the adolescents may shape behavioral change. A value utilization/norm change (VUNC) model is developed, which is intended to provide a conceptual framework for understanding how to utilize selected core values of the adolescents to strengthen or alter norms within the social networks in order to elicit desired HIV risk reduction.

Adolescent↗
PubMed1983

Cognitive and neuropsychological test performance of persons with abnormalities of adolescent development: a test of Waber's hypothesis.

20 children with idiopathic precocious puberty, 27 adolescents with clinically delayed puberty, and an equivalent number of controls matched for age, sex, and IQ were given a battery of tests. These included measures of verbal and spatial abilities and a task assessing hemispheric lateralization using a dichotic listening procedure. Comparisons with matched controls revealed poorer verbal and spatial abilities for precocious males and poorer verbal, but better spatial, abilities for precocious females. Delayed developing males demonstrated superior verbal skills compared with controls, whereas delayed developing females did more poorly than controls in both verbal and spatial areas. On the dichotic task, the only group differing from controls was the delayed developing males, who demonstrated stronger lateral asymmetries. It was suggested that the present findings, which are not consistent with those of former investigations, may reflect methodological differences between studies and the disruptive influence of atypical pubertal onset on normal patterns of sex difference in cognitive functioning.

Adolescent↗
PubMedDate not supplied

Some ways in which neighborhoods, nuclear families, friendship groups, and schools jointly affect changes in early adolescent development.

This study assessed some ways in which schools, neighborhoods, nuclear families, and friendship groups jointly contribute to positive change during early adolescence. For each context, existing theory was used to develop a multiattribute index that should promote successful development. Descriptive analyses showed that the four resulting context indices were only modestly intercorrelated at the individual student level (N = 12,398), but clustered more tightly at the school and neighborhood levels (N = 23 and 151 respectively). Only for aggregated units did knowing the developmental capacity of any one context strongly predict the corresponding capacity of the other contexts. Analyses also revealed that each context facilitated individual change in a success index that tapped into student academic performance, mental health, and social behavior. However, individual context effects were only modest in size over the 19 months studied and did not vary much by context. The joint influence of all four contexts was cumulatively large, however, and because it was generally additive in form, no constellation of contexts was identified whose total effect reliably surpassed the sum of its individual context main effects. These results suggest that achieving significant population changes in multidimensional student growth during early adolescence most likely requires both theory and interventions that are explicitly pan-contextual.

Adolescent↗