Adolescent Development and Mental Health Essentials
1) Adolescence: Key Changes
Adolescence is a transitional stage between childhood and maturity. Adolescents experience significant body changes, intellectual development, and emotional shifts. This includes developing cognitive abilities, abstract thinking, constructing personal identity, and exploring sexuality. Moral and ethical development also occurs, involving the acceptance of values and understanding of norms.
2) Social Skills Essentials
Social skills are behaviors manifested in our social interactions. They have observable motor, emotional, affective, and cognitive components. Styles are responses to specific situations. Behaviors in personal relationships can be:
- Passive: People do not express their thoughts or emotions, often due to insecurity.
- Aggressive: Expressing thoughts and feelings without considering others, using threats and insults, leading to tense relationships.
- Assertive: Expressing feelings and thoughts appropriately, respecting others’ rights, and indicating self-confidence.
3) Improving Communication
In interpersonal relationships, especially with partners, communication is essential and depends on each member’s social skills. It’s crucial to know what we say and how we say it, expressing likes and dislikes. Destructive messages like ridicule, criticism, and forced choices can hinder communication. We must learn to communicate effectively to avoid misinterpretations.
4) Functions of Sexuality
The main functions of sexuality are:
- Communication: Through body contact and affection.
- Pleasure: Experiencing rewarding sensations for personal development.
- Reproduction: Perpetuating the species, though some view it as the sole function.
5) Forbidden Attitudes to Sexuality
Conservative individuals or institutions often reduce sexuality to procreation, limit it to marriage, consider only heterosexual desire acceptable, and restrict pleasure to men.
6) Psychological Boost in Sexual Response
Sexual responses are influenced by sex hormones, internal and external stimuli. External stimuli include family, culture, religion, and friends. Internal stimuli involve mental images, fantasies, mood, personality, and maturity.
7) Major Sexual Dysfunction
In women: Inhibited sexual arousal (frigidity), vaginismus (muscle spasms), dyspareunia (vaginal pain), lack of lubrication.
In men: Erectile dysfunction (impotence), premature ejaculation, inhibited orgasm.
Psychological causes include lack of information, cultural fears, routines, poor communication, and sexual orientation. Other factors include hypertension, alcohol, and drugs.
8) Motivation Essentials
Motivation is the incentive that maintains and directs action towards a goal. It integrates cognitive-affective aspects and persists over time. Types include intrinsic, extrinsic, innate, biological, and social motivation. Social motivation includes achievement motivation (need to achieve) and power motivation (need to control).
9) Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs
Maslow’s theory arranges needs in order of priority:
- Physiological needs (hunger, thirst, sex)
- Safety needs (protection from harm)
- Belonging and love needs (acceptance, affection)
- Esteem needs (self-esteem, positive self-concept)
- Self-actualization (achieving full potential)
10) Cognitive Theory of Attribution
Human actions are caused by personal (internal) forces like ability and motivation, and environmental (external) forces, either stable (difficult task) or unstable (fate). Successes and failures are explained by these forces. School failure is often attributed to lack of effort or learning strategies, but students may blame uncontrollable factors.
11) Emotions
Emotions are physiological responses to stimuli and situation assessments, identified with moods or feelings. They have mental, neurophysiological, and expressive components.
12) Personality Essentials
Personality is a set of psychological characteristics expressed in actions. It is inferred from behavior, represents a person’s usual behavior, results from heredity and learning interaction, develops throughout life, and is unique to each individual.
13) Dimensions of Personality
Eysenck proposed three dimensions: introversion-extraversion, emotional stability-instability, and psychoticism. Recent authors suggest five dimensions: extraversion, agreeableness, conscientiousness, emotional stability, and openness to experience.
14) Personality Disorders
Personality disorders are maladaptive behaviors. They are determined by interpersonal relationships, cognitive style, defense mechanisms, self-image, and mood. Examples include antisocial, narcissistic, dependent, histrionic, passive-aggressive, obsessive-compulsive, schizoid, schizotypal, borderline, and paranoid personality disorders.
15) Mood Disorders: Depression
Depression is characterized by negative thoughts, physical symptoms, sadness, and hopelessness. Types include endogenous (biological factors) and exogenous (psychosocial conflicts). Symptoms include sleep problems, appetite loss, irritability, cognitive difficulties, and decreased motivation.
16) Anxiety Disorders
Anxiety involves fear, guilt, shame, distress, and despair. It includes physiological (palpitations, muscle tension), cognitive (fear, negative thoughts), and motor (tremor, paralysis) responses. Types include phobias, obsessive-compulsive disorder, post-traumatic stress disorder, and generalized anxiety disorder.
17) Phobias
Phobias are excessive, irrational fears of specific people, objects, animals, or situations. Examples include claustrophobia, acrophobia, agoraphobia, and xenophobia.
18) Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder
Obsessions are intrusive thoughts, and compulsions are repetitive behaviors performed in response to obsessions.
19) Schizophrenic Disorders
Schizophrenia is a serious mental illness treated with antipsychotic drugs, characterized by disturbed perceptions, disorganized thoughts, emotional disturbances, and social withdrawal.
20) Eating Disorders
Anorexia: Fear of weight gain leads to food restriction, distorted body image, and potential death. Treatment involves specialists.
Bulimia: Involves binge eating followed by purging (vomiting, laxatives). Associated with guilt, depression, and anxiety.