Abstract
This chapter presented aspects of cognitive–emotional development from adolescence to adulthood. Adolescence brings major advances in cognitive development, advances that Piaget refers to as “formal operations”—the ability to deal with propositions that are highly abstract rather than concrete. Piaget assumed that formal operations was the penultimate level of cognitive development, but since about 1980, a number of researchers offered critiques of the implication that cognitive growth abated in adolescence. Instead, a number of proposals appeared that, though independent, converged on an extension of Piaget’s theory. These extensions proposed that thinking needs to be integrated with emotional and pragmatic aspects, rather than only dealing with the purely abstract. This integration of emotion and cognition provides youth with a more flexible understanding of emotions—an understanding that reaches its heights only in mature adulthood under the form of post-formal thinking. The chapter gives definitions and examples of such post-formal thinking in the realm of emotional complexity from preadolescence to late adulthood.
A second major theme of the chapter follows up on Erik Erikson’s theory, stating that in order to reach cognitive–emotional maturity, adolescents require an alliance with more mature adults who can provide admired generative models who can guide the young towards affirmation of important goals. The current chapter continues, however, in discussing the fact many adults may not be effective models of generative ideals, because they themselves may suffer from long-term consequences of problematic upbringing that carry into adulthood an early acquired incapacity of dealing with affect and integrating it with emotion. As a result, they pass on some of their own lack of integration to the younger generation as exemplified, for example, in the gender disparity related to depression. The chapter discusses research demonstrating such failures to integrate at different stages of the life span—failures which may result in incapacity to form a coherent narrative of one’s life (or even a coherent vision of oneself), and to block out memories of important emotionally salient events altogether. As a case in point, examples of functional Amnesia in adults are presented.
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Notes
- 1.
A syllogism is a formal argument in logic that is formed by two statements and a conclusion which must be true if the two statements are true (Merriam Webster).
- 2.
Amnesia.
- 3.
Person retreats from affect to using words and abstractions that are often inappropriate to the specific situation. Uses jargon and is pseudointellectual.
- 4.
The person ignores past or present facts that would be unpleasant to acknowledge and instead focuses on the benign.
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Labouvie-Vief, G. (2015). Cognitive–Emotional Development from Adolescence to Adulthood. In: Integrating Emotions and Cognition Throughout the Lifespan. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-09822-7_6
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