Lifespan Development and the Personality

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Lifespan Development and the Personality PSY/103 9 August, 2010 Lifespan Development and the Personality There are many times in our lives as we grow that we evolve into the person we will be when we grow up. There are five major developmental periods in our lives that have an effect on us and our evolution as human beings. They are Infancy, childhood, adolescence, adulthood and our senior years. In my opinion adolescence has more of an impression than the others on us. It is during our adolescence that we go through what I feel are the most vital changes to our personalities and process of thinking that will shape us into the adults that we are to become. We will be discussing a couple of the theories that have bearing on our development as humans in regards to our cognitive and emotional development. Our adolescent years run between the ages of 12 and 20 years old. According to Piaget’s theory, we are in our formal operational stage during this time period. This stage according to theory begins at the age of eleven and continues through the rest of our lives. During this time, children (Carpenter, 2010) “begin to apply their operations to abstract concepts in addition to concrete objects” and also apply critical thinking to problems we encounter during our lives. An example of this would be a young adult trying to take on a sport or activity that they are interested in and thinking about the schedule they already have and what sort of complications would be added to it by adding the new activity. According to Piaget’s theory, an adolescent in their formal operational stage has two major characteristics in regards to their cognitive thinking; they are the personal fable and the imaginary audience. The personal fable is a form of egocentrism where the adolescent feels that they have insight that no other person can understand or may have in

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