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Example research essay topic: Heredity And Environment Moral Reasoning - 1,560 words

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The transition from infancy to adulthood is common to all normal members of the human species. William Shakespeare, Pablo Picasso, Albert Einstein, and your mother all followed the same general course that characterized your own development; a familiar path that is governed by the combined action of heredity and environment. The psychologists who have studied the process of human development like Eric Erikson, and Kolhberg were faced with two key questions: How do people change physically, mentally, and socially as they grow? And why do these particular patterns of change occur as they do? These two basic questions the how and the why of human development are explored by assessing the contributions of heredity and environment and the possibility of the sensitive periods in human beings. Adolescence is the period between reproductive maturity and the assumption of adult responsibilities.

Its beginning is marked by puberty, the period of sexual maturation that transforms a child into a physical adult. A major concern during this phase of life is the need to establish an independent identity, gender identity and decisions made at this time can have lasting effects on the task. Individual decisions, such as whom to date, whether to have intercourse, take drugs, select a certain major, work part-time, or become politically active, combine to form a more or less consistent core that shapes personality and the course of an individual life. In time, these early decisions influence the major decisions each adolescence eventually faces.

These decisions and different adolescence problems are shown in two movies "Life as a House", and ''Thirteen. The first movie explores the relationship between a teenage male and his estranged father. For George, father, things are not going well. Divorced from his ex-wife, Robin, and estranged from his rebellious son, Sam, he lives in a run-down shack overlooking the ocean. Things go from bad to worse when he loses his job, then learns that he has terminal cancer.

Knowing that the best he can hope for is another four months to live, he decides to spend his last summer with his son, tearing down the shack and building his dream home. 16 -year old Sam, needless to say, is unhappy about exchanging a wild summer of drinking and drugs for several months of working alongside the father he doesn't really like. Sam is in the full throes of teen angst. He listens to heavy metal and gothic music, dresses in black, wears makeup, does drugs, and is pondering selling his body for money. Sam does not listen to George or his mother Robin, and detests the fact that George wants him for the summer. Once living with George, Sam considers running away, but the pretty girl next-door, Alyssa, gives him something to stick around for. As the summer wears on and the old house comes down, Robin begins stopping by, and, during the course of these visits, she and George re-connect.

This movie greatly show the period of adolescence for a boy character and his identity and gender development. According to Erikson's ideas late adolescents are especially concerned with the pursuit of their personal identity. Erikson holds that the characteristic crisis of adolescence is the establishing of a self-chosen identity. Actually, identity formation is a lifelong task that begins in infancy and continues into old age.

What makes the search for identity so critical at adolescence according to Erikson is the combination of changes that occur at this age. Long before the emotional and social conflicts that are associated with adolescence erupt, hormonal changes being to have their effect on a young persons body. These changes trigger the maturation of the reproductive organs and the development of secondary sex characteristics, such as facial hair in males and breasts in females, a process that generally takes about four years to complete. Although the timing of these changes varies considerably with the individual, puberty usually begins between the ages of ten and twelve in girls and twelve and fourteen in boys. With physical maturation, the urges associated with sexual maturity arise. The first forays into dating are not associated with sexual maturation itself but with peer pressure.

Adolescents who fail to date are dropped by their peer group, and studies have found that chronological age (which is related to the peer group) is a better predictor of the onset of dating than is sexual maturation. The development task of this period is the achievement of a positive identity based ones emerging adulthood, with the attendant danger of identity confusion. Although this is a period of great growth potential, it is also a time when individuals suffer more deeply than ever before or against from the confusion of roles. As Eric Erikson has pointed out, the physical, sexual, and social demands on the adolescence may produce internal conflict, an identity crisis, that requires the adolescent to develop a new self-concept.

To resolve this crisis, adolescents must incorporate their new physical and sexual attributes, developing a sense of continuity between what they were in the past and what they will become. This is meant by identity: an individuals sense of personal sameness and continuity. The identity and gender development as well as sexually problems can be seen in the second movie Thirteen. A gut-wrenching portrait of adolescence, Thirteen is made all the more powerful because it was co-written by a genuine teenage girl, Nikki Reed, who also co-stars in the movie. Tracy, a serious good student, finds herself needing to express her anger and resentment at her fractured family life. To rebel, she pursues a friendship with the reckless, alluring Evie, who seems to have all the cocksure freedom that Tracy desires.

What follows is both harrowing and compelling: Tracy becomes enmeshed in a relationship with Evie that empowers Tracy and drags her deeper into the misery she wants to escape -- and terrifies her mother, who struggles desperately to hold on to her daughter's love. The film doesn't offer any solutions on how to deal with wild teenagers, nor does it offer us a smiley-faced ending where it all works out and everyone winds up happy. Instead, in its final minutes, it offers only wrenching emotional truth and a quiet, subtle message of hope. Teens moral development is the main theme is this movie.

Lawrence Kolhberg's theory of moral development is one of the best-known approaches to how adolescents develop their sense of fight and wrong. Building on Piagets model of cognitive and moral development, Kolhberg has formulated a comprehensive, life span theory of moral reasoning. Kolhberg holds that children and adolescents progress through a sequence of six distinct stages of moral reasoning that parallel cognitive development, with higher stages of moral reasoning presupposing the attainment of formal or abstract thinking. Each stage develops out of and includes the attainments of the previous stages, so that the individuals moral reasoning becomes increasingly complex with age and experience. Kolhberg views the sequence of stages of moral reasoning as invariant, though the rate of development varies considerably among individuals, with those thwarted in their moral development remaining at a given stage of moral development, perhaps permanent. As adolescents reach the stage of concrete operational thinking and the beginning stage of formal thought, an increasing proportion of them can use conventional moral reasoning.

Besides, the development of moral reasoning in adolescents depends largely on the interaction between the teenager and his / her social environment. And it can be vividly seen in movie Thirteen. Tracy gets involved with the bad girl Evie, and the environment and people that Tracy is with influences a lot her behavior, way of thinking and reasoning. ] These teens search for identity took dramatic forms. In many cases this search in lives of many teenagers occur gradually and unconsciously. As James Marcia reminds, the achievement of a new identity gets done by bits and pieces. In many cases various decisions are not made once and for all, but have to be made again and again.

In order to test Erikson's theoretical notions about identity, James Marcia and others have used a fourfold concept of identity status identity achieved, moratorium, foreclosure, and identity confusion. These identity statues are best seen as four different models of dealing with the adolescent identity crisis and provide a greater variety of styles of identity formation than does Erikson's simple dichotomy of identity versus identity confusion. Concluding all this I can say that adolescence life stage is a very complex one and it is hard to put every teenager to some theory or explain hie / her behavior according to specific standards. Each young person is different in his / her way of thinking and search for identity, his / her relationships with parents and friends. I also believe that todays youth are likely to have a more personalized identity than their counterparts of a generation ago.

References Erikson. E. H. Youth and the life cycle. In R. E.

Must (Ed. ), Adolescent Behavior and Society, 3 rd ed. New York: Random House, 1980. Eastwood, Atwater. Adolescence, 8 th edition. New Jersey: Prentice Hall. 1988.

Kolhberg. L. The Psychology of Moral Development, vol. II San Francisco: Harper & Row. 1984. Marcia, J.

Identity in adolescence. In J. Anderson (Ed. ), Handbook of Adolescent Psychology. New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1980. Newman, J.

Adolescents: Why they can be so obnoxious. Adolescence, Fall 1985.


Free research essays on topics related to: identity confusion, identity crisis, identity formation, moral reasoning, heredity and environment

Research essay sample on Heredity And Environment Moral Reasoning

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