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Transcript Provided by YouTube:
00:00
So far in our exploration of how the mind grows,
00:02
we’ve talked about a lot of different philosophies and models and ways of looking at things.
00:06
But here’s a surprisingly useful tool for understanding developmental psychology:
00:11
The Breakfast Club. This video, by the way, will contain Breakfast Club spoilers.
00:15
That classic 80s movie about a band of teenagers
00:17
stuck in detention one fateful Saturday morning.
00:20
Do they do Saturday detentions anymore?
00:22
That was never a “thing” at my school.
00:25
That was crazy, the idea that kids would come in on a weekend for detention.
00:28
You got the hoodlum, the jock, the nerd, the princess, and the so-called basketcase,
00:32
And at first, they’re all salty and standoffish with each other.
00:35
Because you know, let’s face it, American high schools are sort of a breeding ground for that kind of thing.
00:39
But as the day progresses, they start to open up and share things
00:42
and have a little fun by way of a dance montage.
00:45
And at some point they each kind of crack, revealing something very important
00:48
about adolescence in the process, which is –
00:50
The struggle between the need to stand out, and the need to belong.
00:54
All these kids feel tremendous pressure to maintain their image in their particular group
00:58
in part because there’s just some security in belonging to a group,
01:02
even if that group gets picked on by another group.
01:04
And so they wear the corresponding diamond earrings,
01:07
combat boots, lettermans jackets, and spectacles, and act how their roles dictate.
01:11
But the thing is, none of those kids are satisfied with their outward identities.
01:15
Instead, they’re all stuck in the classic teenage struggle,
01:18
one that German psychoanalyst Erik Erikson –
01:21
yes, his name is actually Erik Erikson –
01:23
called the crisis between identity and role confusion.
01:26
In other words, their newly-forming identities were at odds
01:29
with other people’s expectations of what roles they should play, hence the confusion.
01:34
The past couple weeks, we’ve been talking about childhood as
01:36
a crucial period of growth, learning, and change, and it definitely is,
01:40
but anyone who’s ever seen a John Hughes movie knows
01:43
that there’s way more to growing up than just that.
01:45
And I got some news for you –
01:47
from adolescence into adulthood and into old age,
01:50
the drama of your personal psychological development never ceases.
01:54
Never! So get used to it.
01:56
[INTRO]
02:06
Today, most psychologists view our psychological development as a lifelong process
02:10
from infant, to adolescent, to adult,
02:12
to card-carrying senior citizen, people keep right on changing.
02:16
Just as Piaget gave us a helpful framework for thinking about early development,
02:20
other scholars have given us ideas about how we develop
02:22
through the rest of our lives, particularly Erik Erikson.
02:26
Like many others, Erikson believed our personalities develop in a predetermined order,
02:30
which he outlined in an eight-stage model.
02:32
And each stage, from infancy to old age, is defined by
02:35
its own predominant issue or crisis.
02:38
If it freaks you out to think that you will always be dealing with a crisis
02:41
at every stage of your life, we can just call them “issues.”
02:44
Since we already talked a lot about early childhood development,
02:46
I’m gonna skip ahead to the teenage meat of it.
02:49
But you can consult this table to learn about the rest.
02:51
Erikson defined the adolescent years, or “Stage 5,”
02:54
as starting in our teens, and extending for some as far as our early twenties.
02:58
And as The Breakfast Club so artfully depicted,
03:00
its main crisis is the one of identity vs. role confusion.
03:04
Teen years are marked by lots of physical changes
03:07
in the body and brain and sex hormones, along with growing independence,
03:11
but also a real need to belong to something.
03:13
This often angsty time is when teens reexamine their identities,
03:17
figuring out how to both blend in and how to stand out,
03:20
often by trying on different roles.
03:23
Maybe they’re experimenting with punk rock,
03:25
or hockey, or theater, or ancient philosophy.
03:27
Maybe sophomore year they’re preppy. Junior year they’ve got green hair.
03:30
Hopefully a person comes out of this stage with a reintegrated sense of self,
03:34
but this stage can be particularly confusing as I’m sure anybody watching this video can attest to.
03:39
But of course, that’s not the last crisis – sorry, “issue.”
03:42
Erikson believed that young adulthood, which in his view,
03:45
started in a person’s 20s and ended as late as the early 40s,
03:48
was marked by another struggle, one between intimacy and isolation.
03:52
By this stage in life, most of us have begun exploring intimate relationships,
03:55
whether that’s with a steady sweetheart, or just an active OkCupid profile.
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A good relationship here can lead to feelings of safety and caring and commitment,
04:02
while a lack of intimacy can lead to loneliness and isolation and depression.
04:06
Recently, a number of psychologists have begun to refer to the first few years of this stage as
04:10
emerging adulthood, and some suggest that it warrants its own classification
04:14
distinct from adolescence or full adulthood.
04:17
And at least in modern western culture, many people in this stage
04:19
do feel like they’re stuck in a sort of in-between time.
04:22
They know that they’ve pulled through all that high school stuff, but they’re still pretty tied to their families.
04:26
In 2011, the U.S. Census found that 65% of people under 24 still live with their parents.
04:31
Just a reminder of how things like economic factors can weigh on development.
04:35
For Erikson, after young adulthood came the middle adulthood of our 40s to 60s.
04:39
This stage, Stage 7, highlights our tendency toward either generativity or stagnation.
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By now, many people have established jobs or careers or perhaps families of their own.
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We better understand the bigger picture of life and contribute to society
04:52
through productive, or generative, activities
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like work, community involvement, raising kids, paying taxes, all that grown-up stuff.
04:58
The lack of those things, an overall boredom or absence of purpose,
05:02
can make Stage 7-ers feel stagnant and unproductive,
05:05
hence the often cliched, but really real and potentially painful, mid-life crisis.
05:10
And finally, at the end, comes Stage 8.
05:12
In our late adulthood, from 65 and up, we often struggle with integrity vs. despair.
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Maybe you’ve hung out with a grandparent or some other senior and heard them contemplating
05:21
their lives and accomplishments and reminiscing about how cheap a milkshake used to be.
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Well, if their overall vibe is positive,
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they’ve probably developed a sense of integrity and completeness,
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meaning they’re pretty satisfied with a life well lived.
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The flip side of that is looking back on life and feeling guilt and regret, and that kind of
05:36
retrospective disappointment can ruin old age with depression and feelings of hopelessness.
05:41
Again, Erikson’s model isn’t really a perfect contemporary one,
05:45
but it gave us an early idea of conflict and growth over our whole lives.
05:49
His ideas have been developed further and even challenged by other scholars,
05:52
but like Piaget, he remains a crucial figure to know in Western psychology.
05:57
So Erikson tackled our progressive psychosocial development,
05:59
but what exactly happens to our bodies and brains after we hit adulthood
06:03
and keep racking up the birthday cake candles?
06:05
It’s hard to generalize these stages of adulthood because
06:07
we don’t really hit yearly milestones like we did when we were kids,
06:10
and adult lifestyles can vary a whole lot. I mean, in a lot of ways,
06:14
70-year-old Mick Jagger’s still living a younger lifestyle than a lot of 20-somethings I know.
06:18
But despite all our differences, many of our life courses do have some similarities —
06:21
physically, cognitively, and socially.
06:23
First, there are, yes, physical changes:
06:25
the slow decline of reaction time, muscle tone, and strength,
06:29
cardiac output, sex hormone production,
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and sharpness of senses like hearing and sight.
06:34
For most of us, bifocals are inevitable, and perhaps hearing aids as well.
06:38
None of this is to say that a jacked 50-year-old couldn’t beat a lazy 20-year-old on a 100-meter dash,
06:42
because, of course, how well you take care of your body counts for a lot.
06:46
But still, you can’t stop, let alone reverse the process of aging.
06:50
The good news is our intelligence remains pretty stable throughout adulthood.
06:54
Although some people might feel that their wits get a bit fuzzy with age,
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research suggests that while one kind of intelligence decreases after adolescence,
07:00
another kind keeps increasing throughout your lifetime.
07:03
Psychologists Raymond Cattell and John Horn were the first to develop the concepts of
07:07
fluid and crystallized intelligence, suggesting that
07:10
intelligence itself is made up of different abilities that work together.
07:13
Fluid intelligence deals with your ability to solve problems
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independent of your personal experience and education.
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It’s typically associated with thinking both quickly and abstractly,
07:23
like teasing out the logic of a puzzle, rather than
07:25
remembering how to find the cosine of an angle.
07:28
So relatively inexperienced teens often show high fluid intelligence.
07:32
The bummer is it peaks in adolescence,
07:35
then typically starts its slow decline in the 30s…
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So I’m experiencing that now…
07:40
Crystallized intelligence, on the other hand, is just what it sounds like:
07:43
knowledge that’s based on facts, solidified by past experiences and prior learning.
07:47
This type of experiential intelligence gets stronger with age,
07:50
as we continue to take in new knowledge and understanding,
07:53
and it’s part of why grandmas are so good at crossword puzzles!
07:56
Both fluid and crystallized intelligence are equally important on any given day,
08:00
and ideally, they work together to get the job of thinking done.
08:04
So in the end, some of our thinking gets rusty with age, but some of it keeps getting better.
08:08
Of course, there are exceptions.
08:10
While most people who live into their 90s are still pretty sharp,
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some will experience a substantial loss of brain cells and suffer serious consequences.
08:18
Brain tumors, small strokes, or continued alcohol dependence
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can all progressively damage the brain, increasing the risk of dementia.
08:24
Dementia isn’t a specific disease, but rather a set of symptoms related to
08:28
impaired thinking, memory loss, confusion, and potential changes in personality
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that become severe enough to interfere with regular functioning.
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Alzheimer’s disease is a form of progressive, irreversible dementia.
08:39
First, memory declines, then reasoning, and then eventually basic physiological functions
08:43
as vital brain neurons continue to deteriorate.
08:46
It strikes about 3% of the world’s population before age 75,
08:49
although from there, the rate roughly doubles every five years.
08:53
But again, not all dementia is related to Alzheimer’s disease, nor is it as extreme.
08:57
And while the risk of dementia certainly increases in older adults,
09:00
it’s important to remember that it is not part of normal, healthy aging.
09:04
Some memory changes are normal, but most memories should remain intact.
09:08
In the end, we still have a lot to learn about the aging process.
09:11
As our lifespans continue to get longer, we might need to
09:13
tweak what we think we know about its effects on human psychology.
09:16
In some ways, you might say that this is psychology’s next frontier.
09:19
By the time we figure out what that looks like, the cast of The Breakfast Club might just be
09:22
ready for a reunion… and they’d better make a movie about it.
09:25
Today, your developing brain learned about
09:28
Erikson’s eight stages of progressive psychosocial development and their accompanying issues.
09:33
You also learned about emerging adulthood,
09:35
the differences between fluid and crystalline intelligence,
09:37
and some facts about dementia and Alzheimer’s disease.
09:40
Thank you for watching this episode of Crash Course,
09:43
especially to all of our Subbable subscribers who make this possible!
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To find out how you can become a supporter, just go to subbable.com/crashcourse.
09:51
This episode was written by Kathleen Yale, edited by Blake de Pastino,
09:55
and our consultant is Dr. Ranjit Bhagwat. Our director and editor is Nicholas Jenkins.
09:59
The script supervisor is Michael Aranda who is also our sound designer,
10:01
and the graphics team is Thought Café.
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This post was previously published on YouTube.
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Photo credit: Screenshot from video.