Adolescent Behavior

According to developmental literature, adolescence is a time an individual develops and consolidates social relationships and creates the identity that is essential to goals of adolescent development and progression into adulthood (Cook et al. At this stage, the teenagers are faced with questions of identity intertwined with peer pressure and an unstable sense of self and most times lack negotiation skills with their parents. With all the problems the teenagers' encounter, it proves difficult to establish how and what these individuals think. As a result, researchers have come up with volumes of literature about the adolescent behavior and their development. This paper examines the teenage thought and behavior to establish four key themes: adolescent egocentrism, intuitive thinking, systematic thought and adolescent flexibility.

Arnett (115) proposes two kinds of egocentrism-the “personal Fable” and the “Imaginary Audience”. Both the “imaginary audience” kind and the “personal fable” egocentrism were observed among the adolescents. For example, while interacting with a teen on the topic of school life; it could be noted that the young woman was full of “personal fables” concerning her dreams ambitions, the feeling of being special and unique from others. On the other end, sexually related topics could reveal the adolescents'' imaginations and their curiosity about sex. The “imaginary audience” egocentric behavior observed included the presence of social behaviors that are sensitive to self-admiration, feeling shame, and need for privacy; self-identity and the adolescents are preoccupied with their demise. According to Phillips et al. (26), the reason behind such poor intuitive thinking among the adolescent is because their brain areas that quickly grasp the gist of situations and control judgments are still developing during teenage years.

Systematic thought Systematic thinking refers to the kind of thinking aimed at understanding how various parts of a system can influence one another as a whole. The study found that Adolescents acquire the ability to think systematically on the logical relationship within a problem. Most adolescents transition from the concrete thinking to the formal logical operation where they are forced to think more complexly. Although there is an increase in the cognitive flexibility, most teenagers are faced with problems of flexibility presented by the inflexible behaviors they encounter. For example in the research, most teenagers agreed that it’s hard to sit for an examination when one is sick, implying that a more cognitive flexible child tend to be inflexible during such occasions.