PSYC 3310 Lecture Notes - Lecture 12: Positive Youth Development, Dysfunctional Family, Socalled
20 Jun 2018
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CHAPTER 12 POSITIVE PROSPECTS
Introduction
• Scientific approach: involves trying to find the most accurate, useful, and
economical ways to describe and understand what is
• Medical approach: involves trying to describe and understand problems and
to develop ways to correct them
• Positive youth development: an approach to studying adolescence that
focuses on factors that encourage young people to develop healthy attitudes
and become engaged in productive, life-enhancing activities
o Aims at understanding, educating, and engaging children in productive
activities rather than correcting, curing, or treating them for
maladaptive tendencies or so-called disabilities.
• Traditionally, people tended to think of healthy adolescence as the absence of
such problems as substance use, antisocial behaviour, early sexual activity,
pregnancy, eating disorders, and suicide.
Stress, Coping, and Resilience
Stress
• Stress: a physical, hormonal, and psychological response to the perception of
danger or threat
• Acute stress: a response to a sudden and short-term stressor
o E.g., break-up, bad grade
• Chronic stress: a response to a long-term stressor
o E.g., dysfunctional families, poverty
o Reduce the ability to deal with acute stress
o Has consequences that can include a compromised immune system,
high blood pressure, depression, and suicide
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• In puberty, their systems are more sensitive and reactive to stress.
o Adolescents may be at greater risk for the negative consequences of
threats, even if the threats themselves were just as severe earlier,
during childhood.
Coping
• Coping: the various ways adolescents develop to handle situations that
create stress
• The same adolescent who responds coolly and effectively to a moderate
stressor may panic and react impulsively in a situation that causes a very high
level of stress.
• Chronic stress may reduce the capacity to cope with further stressor of any
type.
• Problem-focused coping: when you try to manage stressful situation by
analyzing the problem and mobilizing the means to change it in a positive
direction and to reduce the stressor
o More likely used when it seems possible to change the situation
o More closely linked to competence, positive functioning and healthy
emotional states
• Emotion-focused coping: trying to manage the negative psychological
effects of a stressful situation that does not seem open to being changed
o When you change the way you see and feel about the situation
o E.g., minimizing the importance of the situation, seeing the causes as
external and temporary, and framing the problem in a larger, more
positive context
• Compared with children, adolescents show greater flexibility in switching
between problem-focused and emotion-focused coping strategies, depending
on the demands of the situation.
• Hutchinson et al. (2006) found that coping strategies were also related to
choices in leisure-time activities.
o Avoidance-type coping orientation – uses TV, listening to music, and
avoiding family-based activities
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o Active coping orientation – likely to use both structured and
unstructured activities and to participate in family-based activities
Personality Differences
• Reactive children and adolescents – tend to take a longer time to choose a
coping strategy, tend to panic and not cope well
Gender Differences
• Girls tend to use emotion-focused coping more than boys.
• Boys are more likely to use problem-focused.
• Among both male and female adolescents, those with higher femininity scores
tend to prefer emotion-focused strategies and those with higher masculinity
scores tend to prefer problem-focused strategies.
Parents and Coping
• Parents can help shield children from stressors and teach them to learn from
their bad experiences.
• If parents themselves have problems, their problems may become a source of
stressors for the child.
• The way parents deal with their problems offer the child examples of more or
less mature ways of coping with difficulties.
• Parents provide emotional and practical support.
• If the situation is uncontrollable, they will go to their parents than their peers.
• Self-determination theory – adolescents have a need for relatedness,
competence, and autonomy
o When authoritative parents support these needs, the teens are more
likely to use active, engaged coping behaviours.
o If the family is hostile, chaotic, and coercive, adolescents are more
likely to adopt passive or avoidant coping strategies, such as denial or
wishful thinking.
Document Summary
In puberty, their systems are more sensitive and reactive to stress: adolescents may be at greater risk for the negative consequences of threats, even if the threats themselves were just as severe earlier, during childhood. 2: active coping orientation likely to use both structured and unstructured activities and to participate in family-based activities. Personality differences: reactive children and adolescents tend to take a longer time to choose a coping strategy, tend to panic and not cope well. Parents and coping: parents can help shield children from stressors and teach them to learn from their bad experiences. Learning coping strategies: parents teach and model coping strategies, coping strategies can also be taught in the school context. Resilience: resilience: the capacity to develop normally and positively under difficult conditions, and to overcome adversity with few negative effects, psychologist ann masten called resilience ordinary magic:
