Adolescents and Their Emotional Development

Psychologists have several different points of view on the term `adolescent’. Roughly speaking, adolescents are those aged between 13 and 19. Boys and girls of these ages tend to smile even when they see a leaf flutter on the tree due to the wind, as the Myanmar saying goes. This means that adolescents betwixt and between in their lifetime like to get lost in a daydream as their body changes become apparent, especially growth hormones. Meanwhile, adolescents can meet many physiological and psychological development, namely, physical development, cognitive development, moral development, social development, and emotional development. Out of these developments, emotional development is the most difficult to control and resolve well for adolescents, so far as I am concerned.
Before the emotional development of adolescents, all about emotion wants to be described at first. Emotion suggests a mental state of being stirred up one way or another. It involves three major components: 1) physiological changes within the body, such as shifts in heart rate or blood pressure, 2) subjective cognitive states, i.e. the personal experiences labelled as emotions, and 3) expressive behaviours, i.e. outward signs of internal reactions. The major types of emotion are love, anger, and fear, whereas its minor types are joy, jealousy, disgust, hate, grief, and affection. Robert Plutchik once proposed that animals and human beings experience eight basic categories of emotion that motivate various kinds of adaptive behaviour – fear, surprise, sadness, disgust, anger, anticipation, joy, and acceptance, each of which helps adjust to the demands of the environment, but not in the same way. Within any of Plutchik’s eight categories, emotion varies in intensity, and that intensity does differ considerably among individuals, too. Generally, the more intense the emotion, the more it motivates behaviour.
Today, it is essential to live with emotions and feelings simply because we cannot survive without them like a non-living statue. The nature of emotional development makes life enjoyable, satisfactory, and worth living if one is healthy and emotionally mature. Hereditary as emotion is, health and environment can influence it. The ability to respond emotionally is innately present as well as cannot be learned, although if the child matures and learns more, then his emotions develop, which are also responses to events, people, and circumstances. Despite the fact that people face many different types of emotions in daily life for their personal existence, these emotions are broadly grouped into two types. Some are positive, for example, interest, excitement, joy, or happiness, while some are negative, for instance, distress, fear, anger, or shyness.
In terms of the relations between effect – subsequent cognition, learning, and performance, there are four general routes by which emotions may dominate a mixture of outcomes. The first route is through memory processes like retrieval and storage of information. Retrieval of information is enhanced if the person’s mood at the retrieval task matches that at the encoding phase. A mood or affective state facilitates the recall of affectively congruent material such that people in a good mood are more likely to recall positive information and those in a bad mood negative information. A negative effect might even influence working memory by mediating the effects of goal orientations, but a positive effect might not. The second route influences the use of different cognitive, regulatory and thinking strategies, which could then offer numerous types of achievement and performance outcomes. Positive effects as a general approach orientation ease more assimilation processes such as generative, top-down, and creative processes, including seeking out novelty.
In contrast, negative effects reflect more of an aversive or avoidance orientation and can result in more accommodation, including a focus on external information and details as well as being more stimulus-bound and less willing to make mistakes. The third route increases or decreases the attentional resources that are available to students. Emotions can take up space in working memory and increase the cognitive load for individuals. Under this cognitive load, any emotion, positive or negative, would allocate attentional resources and lead to reduced cognitive processing or performance. The fourth route is that emotions can work through their effect on intrinsic and extrinsic motivational processes. Motivational and affective processes will interact to influence cognitive and behavioural outcomes. From the perspective of intrinsic motivation, that is, the experience of enjoyment and deep engagement in a task, negative emotions such as boredom should decrease the intrinsic motivation for undertaking the task, albeit some, like fear, also ought to increase the extrinsic motivation for the task.
Adolescence may be a time of great risk for most, at which they engage in behaviours or make decisions that usually have long-term consequences. They encounter emotional conflicts at some point since they are going through rapid and dramatic changes in body image, expected roles, and peer relationships. Essentially, the transition from elementary to middle school and then on to high school is quite stressful. Temporary though emotional distress that most adolescents will have handled successfully, some stresses can even lead to suicide attempts. Other emotions of this age group include anger, guilt, frustration, and jealousy. Preadolescents need help in realizing that these emotions are a natural part of growing up. Feelings of guilt often arise when there is a conflict between children’s actions, mainly based on the values of the peer group and their parents. Anger is, however, a common emotion at this age and is displayed with more intensity than others. Such emotional problems related to the physical, cognitive, and social development of middle or high school children are common as well. Some of the problems are emotional disorders, bullying, dropping out, drug and alcohol abuse, delinquency, risk of pregnancy or sexually transmitted diseases, and sexual identity.
Instead of trying to deal with problems after they are already serious, embedding preventive strategies into the regular curriculum should be carried out by such programs as introducing life skills training, focusing on making good decisions or resisting peer pressure, building norms of cooperation, altruism, or social responsibility, and involving community agencies to engage children in prosocial behaviours. Comprehensive whole-school reform models can have an impact on such high-risk behaviours as truancy and dropping out in middle and high schools. Maturing adolescents are beginning to take a more active part in the learning process, accept responsibility for their own learning, seek real-life applications of what is being learned, and bring their own experiences into consideration. Hence, senior assistant teachers will have to adapt their instruction to afford more individual choice of research projects and reporting the format, encouraging collaborative investigations by groups of students. Also, classroom environments are most likely to allow improvement if they include a wide variety of learning materials that can foster emotional, social, linguistic, physical and academic development.
In fact, it is not hard to solve those common emotional problems. But sometimes, the problems are so complex that they cannot be solved easily or practically. If the adolescent’s disturbed state is to be alleviated, the adult needs to understand the background of an emotion-arousing situation and the habit patterns of the young person involved. Parents and teachers make good use of commendations to assist an adolescent in overcoming his real or fancied hurt, which may divert the wrath and reduce the tension. The practice of self-control is a matter of importance to the adolescent in all emotional states. There are many ways to solve emotional problems, some of which are removing the causes of the problem, making the child face the problem, and giving the child emotional outlets in accordance with traditional culture and customs. For parents, they must not be biased concerning their children. They are to guide the adolescent towards building high behaviour for himself. They should not criticize the behaviour of adolescents in the presence of others. If an adolescent shows undesirable behaviour in front of people outside the family group, the wise parent ignores such behaviour until he is alone with the adolescent. Penalties should never be administered when the parent is in an emotional state as well as parental attitude must be objective and consistent. Noticeably enough, a divided parental attitude gives rise to bewilderment in the adolescent. Either too much rigidity or too much laxity on the part of parents tends towards the weakening of adolescent confidence in parental judgement. And finally, parents should not set behavioural standards for their teenage children which they themselves do not even follow.