The dramatic changes that characterize puberty present the adolescent with serious psychosocial challenges. A person who has lived for 12 years has developed a certain sense of self as well as of self-capacity. In adolescence, however, this knowledge of self is challenged. As has been discussed, the rather sudden bodily changes in this period are accompanied by equally dramatic changes in thoughts and feelings. Thus, not all the assumptions adolescents held about the self in earlier stages may still be relevant to the new individuals they find themselves to be. Because a coherent sense of self is necessary for functioning productively in society, adolescents ask a crucial psychosocial question: Who am I?

At precisely the time that adolescents feel unsure about who they are, society begins to ask them related questions. For instance, adolescents are expected to make the first steps toward career objectives. Society asks adolescents, then, what roles they will play as adults—that is, what socially prescribed set of behaviours they will choose to adopt. Thus, a key aspect of this adolescent dilemma is that of finding a role, which is generally taken to be the outward expression of identity. The emotional upheaval provoked by this mandate is called the identity crisis. In order to resolve this crisis and achieve a sense of identity, it is necessary to synthesize psychological development and societal directives. The adolescent must find an orientation to life that not only fulfills the attributes of the self but at the same time is consistent with what society expects; that is, a role cannot be self-destructive (e.g., sustained fasting) or socially disapproved (e.g., criminal behaviour). In the search for an identity, the adolescent must discover what he believes in and what his attitudes and ideals are, for commitment to a role entails, to a greater or lesser degree, commitment to a set of values.

If the adolescent fails to resolve the identity crisis by the time of entry into adulthood, he will feel a sense of role confusion or identity diffusion. Some young adults waver between roles in a kind of prolonged “moratorium,” or period of avoiding commitment. Others seem to avoid the crisis altogether and settle easily on an available, socially approved identity. Still others resolve their crises by adopting an available but socially disapproved role or ideology. This latter option is called negative identity formation and is often associated with delinquent behaviour. Resolution of the adolescent identity crisis has a profound influence on development during later adulthood.

All societies traditionally prescribe stereotyped roles to each sex. These roles have adaptive significance; that is, they allow society to maintain and perpetuate itself. From this reasoning, it follows that differences in sex-role behaviour, at least initially, arose from the different tasks males and females performed for survival—especially those tasks centred on reproduction. Differing biologies exert differing pressures on psychosocial development; however, these pressures do not occur independently of the demands of cultural and historical milieus. The biological basis of one’s psychosocial functioning is believed to relate to adaptive orientations for survival. Many differences exist between males and females, but the nature of individual differences between the sexes is dependent on interactions among biological, psychological, sociocultural, and historical influences.

Central nervous system processing

There is relatively clear evidence that, with advancing age, individuals show a tendency toward decreasing speed of response. This is a gradual change occurring across the entire life span that shows up in a variety of so-called speeded tasks (those in which errors would be unlikely if the individual had an unlimited amount of time to complete the tasks). For example, reaction time tests (which measure the time elapsing between the appearance of a signal and the beginning of a responding movement) are usually viewed as a measure of central nervous system processing. Mean speed of response on such tasks increases with age until the late teens, remains constant until the mid-20s, and then declines steadily throughout the remainder of the age range.

Much evidence has been accumulated to link changes in brain electrical activity to the slowing of behaviour. The electroencephalogram (EEG) provides a record of the brain’s electrical activity. The normal human EEG displays continuous rhythmic activity in the form of wavelike patterns varying in frequency and amplitude. The dominant rhythm is the alpha wave, which reaches its maximum frequency in adolescence and begins to slow gradually after young adulthood. This slowing may be related to disease processes (particularly vascular disease) and to basic aging processes. The older adult’s central nervous system appears to be in a state of underarousal in comparison to that of the younger adult.

Cognition

Decline in the rate of central nervous system processing does not necessarily imply a similar change in learning, memory, or other intellectual functions. However, considerable evidence indicates that the learning ability of young adults is superior to that of older adults and that the faster the pace of the task the more difference age makes. Older learners benefit more from slower pacing of tasks than do younger learners. When allowed to regulate the pace of the task themselves, older learners often show an improvement in performance, whereas this is not necessarily the case with younger learners.

However, in regard to memory, as opposed to the learning or acquisition of information, research suggests that there are relatively few age-related differences within the primary-memory system, the temporary maintenance system for conscious processing of information. Age is a significant factor, however, in the functioning of the secondary-memory system. Secondary memory depends on the elaboration and organization of information in terms of its semantic content or meaning. Compared with younger adults, older adults appear to be deficient in these processes. Generally, they do not spontaneously use organizational strategies as extensively as do younger adults, or, if they use them, they do so less effectively. But, when organizational strategies are built into the situation, the performance of older adults improves markedly.

Most studies examining memory for general knowledge have found that older adults retrieve such information as well as or better than do younger adults. Within some contexts, older adults appear to integrate and retain the meaning of sets of sentences and texts as well as younger adults. For example, when young, middle-aged, and elderly adults are asked questions covering such topics as famous people, news events, history, geography, the Bible, literature, sports, and general information (e.g., “What was the former name of Muhammad Ali?”; “What is the capital of Cambodia?”), their answers typically show no evidence of age differences in the retrieval of knowledge. In fact, elderly people may actually answer more questions correctly than younger groups. Older adults also appear to have accurate knowledge about their own memory processes—knowledge that has been labeled metamemory. For example, research has found no age differences regarding subjects’ assessments of the relative reliability of visual and verbal memory, regarding the use of memory strategies (e.g., reminder notes), or regarding memory monitoring (e.g., prediction of the number of items that would be recalled following memory tasks).

Psychometric approaches to cognition suggest that intelligence is characterized by two distinct properties. Fluid intelligence, measured by tests that minimize the role of cultural knowledge, reflects the degree to which the individual has developed unique qualities of thinking through incidental learning. Crystallized intelligence, measured by tests that maximize the role of cultural knowledge, reflects the degree to which the individual has been acculturated through intentional learning. Fluid intelligence shows a steady decline from adolescence through middle age. Across the same age range, however, a steady increase occurs in crystallized intelligence. When measures of both properties are taken, few age-related differences appear.

Finally, there are age-related differences on several measures of cognitive functioning. In general, older adults perform more poorly than younger adults on tasks requiring both concrete-operational thought and formal-operational thought.

Some features of cognitive functioning—speed of response, secondary memory, and fluid intelligence—seem to decline with age. Others—contextual memory and crystallized intelligence—increase. Aging does not inevitably precipitate a decline in cognitive functioning. Indeed, there is growing evidence that older persons can largely modify their intellectual performance, documenting a clear lifelong capacity for cognitive change in human beings.