The evolutionary basis of risky adolescent behavior: implications for science, policy, and practice

This article proposes an evolutionary model of risky behavior in adolescence and contrasts it with the prevailing developmental psychopathology model. The evolutionary model contends that understanding the evolutionary functions of adolescence is critical to explaining why adolescents engage in risky behavior and that successful intervention depends on working with, instead of against, adolescent goals and motivations. The current article articulates 5 key evolutionary insights into risky adolescent behavior: (a) The adolescent transition is an inflection point in development of social status and reproductive trajectories; (b) interventions need to address the adaptive functions of risky and aggressive behaviors like bullying; (c) risky adolescent behavior adaptively calibrates over development to match both harsh and unpredictable environmental conditions; (d) understanding evolved sex differences is critical for understanding the psychology of risky behavior; and (e) mismatches between current and past environments can dysregulate adolescent behavior, as demonstrated by age-segregated social groupings. The evolutionary model has broad implications for designing interventions for high-risk youth and suggests new directions for research that have not been forthcoming from other perspectives.     

The empirical testing of Harter's self-concept matrix on female adult students

This research aimed at testing an hypothetical matrix to be used for the study of self-concept development within a life-span perspective. Following data categorization collected from 111 female university students, a significant relationship was found between structural levels and content dimensions, demonstrating a linear form of development. Also several content dimensions were often used in subjects' self-definitions, illustrating the multidimensional aspect of such development in adults.     

Representation of Similar Well-Learned Cognitive Procedures

Continued practice on a task is characterized by several quantitative and qualitative changes in performance. The most salient is the speed-up in the time to execute the task. To account for these effects, some models of skilled performance have proposed automatic mechanisms that merge knowlege structures associated with the task into fewer, larger structures. The present study investigated how the representation of similar cognitive procedures might interact with the success of such automatic mechanisms. In five experiments, subjects learned complex, multistep mental arithmetic procedures. These procedures included two types of knowledge thought to characterize most cognitive procedures: “component” knowledge for achieving intermediate results and “integrative” knowledge for organizing and integrating intermediate results. Subjects simultaneously practiced two procedures that had either the same component steps or the same integrative structure. Practiceeffect models supported a procedure-independent representation for common component steps. The availability of these common steps for use in a new procedure was also measured. Steps practiced in the context of two procedures were expected to show greater transfer to a new procedure than steps learned in the context of a single procedure. This did not always occur. A model using component/integrative knowledge distinction reconciled these results by proposing that integrative knowledge operated on all steps of the procedure: An integral part of the knowledge associated with achieving an intermediate result or state includes how it contributes to later task demands. These results are discussed in the context of automatic mechanisms for skill acquisition.