Adolescence Stage Experience: Perspective Taking and Empathy

The adolescence stage in human development is a very hard, confusing, and fun filled years of a persons life. Along with it come good/bad experiences, physical growth, cognitive, and social development. In further analysis of adolescence stage experience let’s focus in this essay on 2 things: perspective taking and empathetic concerns for others. With these 2 ideas in mind, the cognitive development in adolescences is what plays the biggest key role.

When going through puberty our way of thinking, our physical nature, and self-consciousness start to develop in what you will soon become. Through this pubertal status adolescence believe that the whole world revolves around them. Imaginary audience, adolescence believe that they are he focus of everyone’s attention and concern. Adolescent are so caught up on their themselves that they forget that there are other people around them that are affected by the way they behave. In diverse western and non-western cultures, concerns with matters of personal choice strengths during the teenage years, a reflection of adolescences quest for identity and increasing independence. At a younger age, when kids are still able to be swayed easier by parents, they are more prone to say exclusion or bad treatment of others is unfair. By 10th grade, increasingly mindful of fairness, indicate that under certain conditions, intimate relationships, private contexts, on basis of gender, and race exclusion is okay. Going through puberty comes with many challenges, you start to develop a clearer state of mind, you start thinking for yourself, and depend less on your parents. Pubertal status does affect the empathy and perspective taking of others.

Study Analysis on Adolescence Stage Experience

Graff, Branje, Wied, Hawk, and Lier designed a study to investigate the development of perspective taking and empathetic concern from age groups 13-18 years, then examined the results to see if pubertal status has an effect on these 2 ideas. “Cognitive and relational changes can be expected to impact adolescents’ abilities, or tendencies to take others’ perspectives and to experience feelings of concerns. Adolescence is also marked by rapid physical changes, and empathy development might undergo a temporary decline that coincides with puberty. This longitudinal study has been taking place in Netherlands. Up to date, six annual measurements have taken place. This research is based off of data from “Research on Adolescent Development and Relationships (RADAR) project. Throughout the years they have followed and tested the same adolescents and tracked how much they have changed in the perspective taking and empathic concern. While the own adolescent is going through his own physical and cognitive changes, the goal is to see how aware and understanding of another’s person’s emotion.

The method used in this experiment were done in various different parts. Every adolescent selected were part of the RADAR. A sample of 497 adolescents (214 girls and 283 boys) were selected randomly from schools in province of Utrecht as well as four other cities located in the Netherlands. The adolescents were measure in three different areas, Empathy, Perspective taking and Pubertal status. “Adolescents reported on their own empathic disposition, using two 7- item subscales of the Dutch version of the interpersonal Reactivity index'. An example of this type of subscale is, the kids were asked a question like “I often have tender, concerned feelings for people less fortunate than me” then they were to score themselves on a rate from 0 to 4, 0 regarding doesn’t descry very well and 4 meaning describes me very well. After testing them on the empathy scale they tested them on their Perspective taking. They used the same kind of subscales, asking similar questions. An example would be “ I try to look at everybody’s side of a disagreement before I make a decision”. Again they scored themselves the same way, with that 0 to 4 scale. Adolescence’s pubertal status was the measure by using the adapted version of the “Self-reported Pubertal Development Scale”. They used the same fur items on this scale for both guys and girls. Boys were asked if they had noticed pubic hair growth, underarm hair, facial hair, and the voice change. While girls were asked if they had noticed growth of pubic hair, underarm hair, breast development, and their first menstruation had already occurred. After asking these questions for the three categories and scoring themselves, the analyses part was conducted in two parts. First they averaged the results for both the Perspective thinking and the Empathy concern, using the same baseline model for bot girls and guys. Secondly, they divided the results up between girls and guys to determine if their was any association between the pubertal status and growth in Perspective thinking and Empathy concerns.

The results for these experiments, were as they thought at the beginning. For boys, Empathic concern decreased throughout middle adolescence, but then increased again through late adolescence almost the same as where they had started. Perspective taking for boys, decreased as well throughout the middle years, but through the later years increased to a higher level than they had even started with. For girls, they showed higher levels of empathic concern since the start and they increased through the early and middle ages and then stayed steady throughout the later years. For perspective taking, girls again had a higher level than boys and they increased dramatically throughout the middle ages and then towards the end steadied out again. “The model of boys and girls PT with concurrent pubertal status at ages 13-16 fit the data, pubertal status was not significantly associated with PT”. The model for boys when examining EC was that there is a correlation between pubertal status and Empathic Thinking (EP). So for the end result, the results tell us that pubertal maturation plays a big role is the development of empathic concern for boys, not girls as much.

This was very interesting experiment to review, it really opened my eyes up to how different genders develop certain things more than others during a period of time. The only thing that could have changed would be the components. This test was conducted in the Netherlands and they didn’t state how diverse the schools they elected from where. Diversity would be a really big factor in how different the result would be, having different ethnical backgrounds and seeing the lifestyle on how these kids were put through and live in also affect their development. Besides those factors not being specific, the sampling size is decent sized, over 400 people were tested so it does make it somewhat credible, if it was to have a smaller portion size then it would be harder to believe, but it did contain a lot of kids.

Conclusion

This article relates to my topic because they tested on some parts of the cognitive and emotional development throughout the adolescence years. They also used different genders to compare them to each other, just like I am doing in my paper. My paper is obviously going to include a lot more then just the cognitive and emotion differences and changes, but it gave me a perspective of where to start. It was important because it demonstrated how they conducted step by step their evaluations and how carful they were with the results. Overall, I thought this was a very helpful article, helped me see different ways of approaching my own project and what kinds of questions to ask.

References

• Berk, L. E. (2018). Exploring lifespan development (4th ed.). Boston: Pearson Education
• Graaff, J. V. D., Branje, S., Wied, M. D., Hawk, S., Lier, P. V., & Meeus, W. (2014). Perspective taking and empathic concern in adolescence: Gender differences in developmental changes. Developmental Psychology, 50(3), 881–888.