Human performance

OBJECTIVES OF ADOLESCENCE 
    To develop emotional and cognitive abilities. Young humans have access to abstract thinking and reflexive knowledge. 
    To build a personal identity, integrating and accepting their body image, have expectations and future projects. This includes accepting puberty’s physical changes, redefining familiar relationships, achieve emotional independence and a sexual identity. 
    To acquire new social abilities (relations with other classmates and adults), an autonomous moral, new interpersonal relationships (couple relationships) and exercising a studying or working role. 

PSYCHOLOGICAL CHANGES:
   It reaffirms the Ego. Individuals take conscience of themselves and acquire more emotional control. This takes to... 
   Trying to achieve more freedom and independence, as well as searching new experiences. Adolescents want more autonomy. This causes conflicts with parents, that struggle to understand that their sons and daughters have grown up. 
   These conflicts cause a more susceptible behaviour with all authority figures, as the adolescent can now look at a rich interior psychical world. From the outside seems an excess of egocentrism and personal overvaluation, but it’s a necessary process.

THE RESEARCH FOR AN A IDENTITY:
   Freud linked puberty to the birth of a new psychosexual identity, manifested by the passage from childish sexuality to adult sexuality. 
   Erikson considered that identity is born from the period of crisis caused by puberty, marked by extreme vulnerability and sensitivity.  To search an identity, adolescents arrange their own abilities, necessities and desires to adapt them to the social demands. 

IDENTITY CRISES MAY HAPPEN DURING ADOLESCENCE:
   The assignation of a gender (and all the implicit values of it) to our own sex. 
   The necessity to confront ever more demanding social roles. 
   The search for an ideological compromise 
   The contradiction between being treated as an adult or as a child. 

COGNITIVE DEVELOPMENT 
   Opening to the possibility realm: the discovery that life has many more possibilities than personal experience. Can distinguish between real and possible, try hypotheses… 
 Logical thinking. An adolescent can make logical assumptions without having all the data (all A are B ≠ all B are A). 
   Capability of hypothetical deductive reasoning. 
   Egocentric thinking. Many times, adolescents gives too much power to ideas as agents of change, and think the world should adapt to their ideas, not their ideas to reality.

MORAL DEVELOPMENT 
Lawrence Kohlberg 
   LEVEL 1: Premoral. Receptiveness to cultural norms. (4-10) 
   LEVEL 2: Conventional moral. Respect social expectations (10-13) 
   LEVEL 3: act through universal values (13<) 

SOCIAL SKILLS 
   No one is born knowing how to relate to others, this needs learning. 
   Social skills have cognitive components (social perception, language), physiological (verbal conduct) and affective (anxiety or joy). 
   Social skills are a characteristic of the behaviour, not the person. Anyone’s social competence varies in different situations. 

INTERPERSONAL RELATIONSHIPS 

    Desire is rooted in biology and is lived as a need that requires satisfaction. During adolescence it becomes more specific and is consolidated in a sexual orientation. 
   Attraction feeds from desire but the objects of attraction can be many; this differentiates it from infatuation. 

WHAT IS LOVE? 

Love is the most intense of human emotions. But it’s not the same as infatuation. 

Infatuation has some characteristics, such as a process of enchantment, the desire of exclusively another person, enthusiasm when there’s reciprocity and pain when there’s none, and the desire of a future affective and sexual intimacy, as well as compromise. 

JOHN LEE’S 6 FORMS OF LOVE:
Eros (sexual magnetism) 
Ludus (sexuality without affection) 
Storge (affection born from friendship) 
Mania (emotional turbulence) 
Pragma (love searched with a list of qualities) 
Agape (affection with no demands, patient and kind) 

STERNBERG’S “TRIANGULAR LOVE”
   Intimacy: it’s the feeling of proximity, communication and linkage in the relationship. Sharing experiences, promoting wellness and acknowledging the value of the other person in our lives. 
   Passion: it’s the physical and emotional attraction. It’s lived as something unstable, we have the desire to be, talk and live with the other person and we think no one else will be able to make us so happy. 
   Compromise: it means the will to take care and maintain the love for it to evolve and not disappear because of boredom or lack of interest. It’s the active decision to love the other and the will to keep that relationship. 

DIFFERENCE BETWEEN SEX AND SEXUALITY:sexuality=3,sex=1
   SEX: Sex constitutes a process in different levels (genetic, gonadal, genital, hormonal and biographical) which makes us unique. 
   Sexuality (-ies): It’s the way any sexed person, men or women, perceive, feels and lives their own sex. We all have our own personality; the same can be said about our sexuality. 

FUNCTIONS OF SEXUALITY:
   Communication: both with and without words. Looks, caresses & touch, kisses, hugs...Are also a spontaneous and sincere language. 
   Pleasure: it’s the result of a gratifying experience both with ourselves and with others. Therefore, it’s a good human value we must develop, and not something we must be ashamed of. 
   Reproduction 

SEXUALITY IN ADOLESCENCE: 

Adolescents have to assume their own sexual orientation, respect the orientation of the rest, and understand that they can both desire and be desired. 

SEXUAL IDENTITY:

This is one of the main tasks of adolescence:to reach and consolidate a personal identity. And one of its components is the sexual identity. 

The two basic components of sexual identity are sex and gender. 
   Sex refers to biological conditioning that causes the appearance of males and females… 
   ...But gender is very different. It refers to the cultural, behavioural and psychological traits that each culture associates to what is believed to be “masculine” or “femenine”. 
   And then there’s the “sexual role”, or the perceived attitude that a sexual identity should have. Related to gender.