As an individual grows, many factors play a critical role in their development. To take a closer look into what plays a role into the changes observed, Delayni, a 21-year old student, will be examined. Overall, this analysis will include an overview of her physical, cognitive, and social development, and how certain aspects of her life influenced each.
Physical Development
As a 21-year-old, Delayni’s brain has gone through a large portion of its development already; however, brain development is never fully complete. Currently, her brain is still developing her pre-frontal cortex which is the part of the brain involved in complex thinking, language ability, and emotional intelligence. The prefrontal cortex also encompasses the risk taking and long-term reward portions which not fully developed during adolescence. Delayni reports that compared to her teenage years, she has been able to notice an increased self-control and determination as well as decrease in risky behaviors. One of her long-term goals is attending medical school; however, Delayni said she found it hard to always make good decisions as a freshman such as beginning studying for exams early instead of binging a Netflix series.
She claimed to have not done as well in her first couple semesters that she was involved in more risky behavior, such as drinking and promiscuity as a first-year student compared to as a fourth-year student. As her prefrontal cortex developed, she was able to see a difference in understanding how her decisions now affect her goals in the future. After adolescence, the brain begins a pruning process that include myelination. Myelination of neural fibers insulate and increase efficiency of message transfer. It also increases one’s ability to integrate thoughts and emotions which increase clarity of thinking in high emotion situations. Delayni reported that compared to her teenage years, she has been able to separate her thoughts and emotions when making important decisions, and she is able to think more logically about situations even when she is emotionally invested.
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A few months prior, Delayni went in for her yearly check-up. In prior years, Delayni had struggled with low iron which is common among women, so she began to take iron supplements around age 18. Additionally, she takes B12 supplements because her vegan diet does not provide the vitamin that aids in iron uptake. At this check-up, her iron and B12 levels were within normal range. Her blood pressure was 118/78 which is considered normal blood pressure, and she had a BPM of 54 which is below the average of adults (60-100 BPM). A low BPM is likely attributed to the constant athletic training she does as a collegiate athlete. Delayni also had her eyesight examined last week. Her vison was reported at 20/200 which is quite poor. Around age 10, her vision started to decline, and she began to wear corrective lenses. It stopped declining after age 12 until age 19 where it has become much worse. Increased reading in university likely contribute to this recent decline.
In comparison to a relatively healthy body, Delayni has developed some mental illnesses in recent years. Around age 16, Delayni began receiving treatment for depression and anxiety. She takes medication in addition to regular meetings with a psychologist. As a self-proclaimed perfectionist, she believes she sets high expectations for herself and pushes herself to hard sometimes. Additionally, at a very young age, a large amount of pressure was placed on her as the oldest child to succeed and set an example for her younger siblings. She believes this created a need to please her parents in order to be seen as “good enough”.
In addition to this, she also developed bulimia at age 19, and she was admitted to inpatient care at a mental health facility for three weeks after about a year of developing her mental illness. After an extensive rehabilitation, she claims to have had minor relapses, but she gets back on track with the help of therapy and healthy eating practices. Eating disorders among westernized societies are increasingly becoming a problem, and an estimated 5-10% of all women have eating disorders. Eating disorders are usually triggered by traumatic events that push a young vulnerable woman to the edge.
Eating disorders among female athletes, especially in aesthetic sports like gymnastic and swimming where you are visually vulnerable constantly, are very common. They also experience added pressures of increased school work load, maintaining a good physique for optimal performance (Kirk, Singh, & Getz, 2003). Delayni believes that her poor performance at her final competition on the year pushed her into her eating disorder; moreover, that if she was thinner, she would perform better.
After going through puberty, her body has finally reached it maximum growth. Delayni claims that she had a slightly delayed physical maturation in comparison to her peers. She reports that her first menarche occurred at 14 and seemed quite late in comparison to most of her friends, but it falls within the normal range of 11-15- years old. Since Delayni had been a competitive swimmer since she was 8, she had a rigorous training schedule which can offset a female’s pubescent changes. Delayni is 5 feet, 7 inches tall and weighs 170 pounds. Her height falls above the average of 5’4”. When her body mass index is measured purely off weight and height, it is 26.1. This is considered overweight; however, because she is an athlete, she has developed and maintained an increased muscle mass with a lower fat content. Her body fat of 10.2% is clearly within healthy range of 8-19% for women 20-40-years-old.
She reported no noticeable increase in body fat until about age 17; however, most girls report an increase in body fat during puberty. As Delayni was growing up, she was involved in many sports and activities. At age 8, she began to swim competitively which allowed her to exercise regularly and develop a healthy exercise regimen. Currently, she is a member of the collegiate swim team, and she trains on average 20 hours a week. This training consists of both weight training and swimming which has allowed her body to build physical endurance and strength. Physical activity also enhances cognitive and psychological function. Specifically, it enhances effective executive functions like planning and goal directed behaviors.
Additionally, swimming has allowed Delayni to develop other healthy habits in her life. As she grew up, she was able to be fueled with a balanced diet with produce and healthy portions. She believes because of this, she has developed healthy eating habits. She also notices that she has an increased food intake compared to many of her non-athletic peers. This is because she must increase her food intake to support her metabolic increase to sustain the body and brains energy consumption. Additionally, Delayni had learned the value of a good night sleep. Even though she knows sleep is important, she claims that she does not get enough sleep often due to studying or work. Chronic sleep deprivation can impact learning and memory development as well as increased depressive symptoms. Delayni claimed that she tries to sleep well when she can, but she does notice a difference in cognitive and physical performance when she does not get adequate sleep.
Cognitive Development
At age 21, Delayni falls into the stage of early adulthood which encompasses ages 20-40. She has reached the final stage of Piagets’s theory of cognitive development: formal operational thought stage. This stage is displayed by an ability to think abstractly and logically about their experiences and ideas. During emerging adulthood, the development of postformal thought allows for more complex than formal thought including relativistic and dialectic thinking. Relativistic thinking is being able to understand that knowledge is situational; essentially, the truth depends on the context and the knower.
Dialectical thinking is understanding that many ideas involve a synthesis of multiple conflicting concepts. As she has become more aware of the world around her such as problems in politics and the environment, Delayni realized that nothing has an easy solution. She likes to use many sources to gain knowledge on topics to allow for a more complete idea of them. When she compounds differing ideas, she can integrate contradictions into a broader dialectical understanding. Just because Delayni has an increase in abstract thinking in domains she is familiar with does not mean her cognition on all topics is advanced. In terms of new and underdeveloped domains, she will likely revert to concrete thought processes.
Because Delayni is a Psychology pre-med major, she has developed an ability to use formal and postformal cognition for biological and psychology courses; however, when taking classes outside her major such as engineering, her cognitive ability seems to deteriorate to a concrete cognition. Since they are not relevant to her ‘expertise’, she reverts to using more concrete operations, and finds it harder to perform well without increased effort. Over her life, she will likely streamline what domains she develops making her an expert in few fields but a novice in many.
In Western culture, we often analyze intelligence and thinking ability through various testing. In a college course, Delayni was able to take the Stanford Binet IQ test. A large portion of people fall into the range of 85 to 115 where 100 is the test’s average. She scored a 120 which is considered above average. IQ is influence by both genetics and environment. Delayni reports that when her father took the test, he scored a 125 which is exceptional, and her mother scores 114 which is also quite above average. Considering both her parents have an above average IQ, it was likely that Delayni would have a higher intelligence; however, genetics are not certain, and many factors play a role in expression. Factors such as a poverty, race, and family all have displayed an ability to influence intelligence. With an enriched socioeconomic background, Delayni’s IQ was also given a chance to flourish. Additionally, she was only exposed to a minimal amount of the risk factors that diminish intelligence including having a family with four or more kids and a mother that is highly anxious.
During Delayni’s upbringing, her parents clearly found it important to advantage their children with many intellectually challenging tasks. Tasks such a reading to and with their children allowed them to develop advanced literacy abilities. Her parents often read to her before bedtime, and they would ask her questions while they read. Interactive reading encourages children to think about what they read and allows for the child to develop a set of skills necessary in emergent literacy. Emergent literacy is composed of linguistic and cognitive skills such as narrative discussion, phonological awareness as precursors to successful reading and writing later in life.
Additionally, growing up with parents who had a diverse vocabulary, she was able to develop a more diverse language through listening and mimicking her parents. Her parents also tried to foster a creative mind by supporting their children developing problem solving skills. For example, she remembers when she wanted a specific toy, but her mother told her they could not afford it but encouraged her to raise her money on her own. Then, her mom asked what people do to get money and if there was something Delayni could do to make it. The two ideas she remembered were a yard sale with some of her old toys and a lemonade stand. Because she was often pushed to think about complex situations without being given the answer directly, she was able develop a sense of creativity and develop problem solving skills which both foster mental growth.
Social Development
Delayni claims she was not raised with a family-oriented mindset; however, she is close with all her siblings and currently has a good relationship with both parents. When she was growing up, Delayni reports that her parents were both very involved in raising her; however, her mother definingly had a larger influence on how everything was done. She explains how her mother would use authoritative parenting styles which include high demands and low acceptance. She reports having many strict rules growing up as well as her mother responding with “because I said so” when she questioned her. Authoritarian parenting styles tend to produce children that are moody, lack confidence, and pessimistic; moreover, they do not learn self-reliance and lack confidence decision making skills.
When asked about her confidence, she reports that she has always had a low self-confidence and reports an overall pessimistic behavior. Additionally, she claims that her family’s socioeconomic status was “not the best”, and a low-socioeconomic status usually place more emphasis on obedience and show less warmth. Delayni claims that she grew up with a highly obedient mindset. She said her mother always pushed for her to excel in all domains of her life, likely leading to her perfectionist mindset. She even remembers thinking she must get good grades or she would be letting down her mother. These constant attempts to please her mother through excellence may have contributed to her preoccupied attachment behaviors during her late adolescent period analyzed later.
In the romantic domain, Delayni was in her first relationship as a freshman in college which heavily influenced her social development in many ways. During this relationship, she described that of a preoccupied relationship attachment type where she needed that relationship to validate her self-worth and was afraid of abandonment because that meant she would not be “worthy”. Additionally, she claims that the relationship was abusive physically and mentally. Looking back, she reports that he was highly manipulative, possessive, and sexually assaulted her on multiple counts. Once she broke up with him, she “did not want to be hurt again” or “waste her time”: moreover, she became emotionally numb to protect herself. This caused her to develop a dismissive attachment style where she expressed no need for love, avoided intimacy, and was compulsively self-reliant.
Because of this, she avoided any type of relationships with more than a superficial meaning leading her to be sexually promiscuous and take part in risky behaviors. After 2 years of being alone, she had slowly warmed up to the idea, with the help of therapy, to allow herself to be emotionally vulnerable. Now, she is currently in a relationship of 6 months and sees a possible future with her significant other; however, there are many times where her dismissive attachment style impedes the maturation of her relationship. For example, Delayni claims that sometimes when he offers to do things for her, she will refuse because “she can do it herself”, showing that she still employs her compulsive self-sufficiency. As this new relationship has grown over time, she reports to have worked very hard to ‘rewire’ the way she acts and reacts in a relationship to strive toward a healthy secure view of relationships.
Delayni has many friends; however, she realizes that only a few of them are close, lifelong friends. As one moves from adolescent to adulthood, many find that they have few friends; however, as quantity of friendships decrease, the quality of friendships increase. Delayni reports that over her four years at college, she has noticed a shift from a large number of superficial friends as a freshman to less, more meaningful friendships. Many of the initial friendships that developed early in her college career would based upon the fact that the individuals were also involved with the swim team. This is likely because many friendships emerge from the similarity in physical and behavioral characteristics; however, these relationships begin to increasingly involve psychological qualities as well. Thus, Delayni reports that she did not become friends will all the people on her team, just the ones that displayed similar interest, attitudes, and values. From this group, Delayni had many friendships deteriorate over years, so she has spent more time with her meaningful friends and further solidified close relationships. As she ages, she will likely keep a few close friends with deeper relationships.
References
- Kirk, G., Singh, K., & Getz, H. (2001). Risk of Eating Disorders Among Female College Athletes and Nonathletes. Journal of College Counseling, 4(2), 122-132. doi:10.1002/j.2161-1882.2001.tb00192.x
