Life Span Development II School Age and Adolescence

Life Span Development II: School age and Adolescence 3 (2+1)

Lesson 20 : Emotions during adolescence

Common emotions of adolescence

1. Love: Among the positive, integrative emotions love and compassion are the most important. Love has a very special significance for the adolescents. He must satisfactorily sort out the different kinds of love he feels for family, friends and mankind in general. Love may be active, promote another’s welfare or it may be passive, simply accepting loving behavior or it may be mutual.

Love is compassion, which involves with others who are in distressful experiences – sorrow, shame, fear or despair. The compassionate person is not only sensitive to how another person feels but also cares why that person so feels. The adolescent’s acquisition of a capacity for compassion depends on his experiences and adjustments. Exposure to experiences is necessary to permit him an intelligent comprehension of the situations to which different persons have different reactions.

2. Shyness: Shyness is more a manifestation of feelings of inferiority than an emotional state. The shy person feels self conscious when he is in group and withdraws himself. He has no confidence in his own social qualifications and fears exposing himself to ridicule.

There are several reasons for manifestations of shyness –

• As it is socially oriented age, adolescent desperately wants to prove himself and becomes more sensitive to failure.
• Over protection of parents.



The problem of shyness can be solved best within the context of social situations.


The shy adolescent should:

• Have simple ample opportunities to participate in group work, which can divert his attention from himself.
• Develop special talents, interests and skills which build his feeling of ego and boost his confidence.
  



3. Feeling of guilt: Guilt is a feeling of wrong doing when a person sees his own action as having violated what is ‘right’, ‘ethical’, or ‘moral’ in a certain situation. He feels guilty and a sense of guilt is painful. Adolescents often experience feelings of guilt in the areas of conduct with societal expectations.

4. Fears: Fears, worry and anxiety are feelings which arise as a result of one’s relations to other people or imagined happenings in his environment. Fear is specific. It impels actions to escape an immediately threatening situation and where as anxiety is less threatening but makes the individual to feel help and lacks capacity to cope with the threat.

5. Worry: While fear subsides when the fear stimulus is removed, worry involves repeated mental rehearsal of the fear producing situation. Worry is non adjustive and involve continuously increasing tension which further reduces the individuals capacity for action. Worry involves fear, anxiety and tension in a complex state of mind. Adolescents are susceptible to many worries over choice of vocation, school/college work, relationships with other people and sex. Research studies revealed that adolescents worry is centered around their weight, postures, studies and examination grades, expressing self, unpopularity and friendships.

Suggestions may help the teenage worrier to overcome his problem. He should –

1. Allot some time to consider his problem.
2. Confide in someone he trusts and talk it out.
3. Obtain full and authentic information concerning his difficulties.
4. Seek professional help if he is not able to overcome worry.
   



6. Anxiety: Anxiety cannot be explained as clearly as worry and fear, because it is a blend of many emotions. Anxiety is more generalized, the adolescent expresses many situations which are likely to serve as reservoirs of anxiety. Anxiety arises chiefly from strong impulses that are blocked by social taboos. Examinations and need to meet social obligations also cause anxiety. Adolescents whose early home environment was not favorable suffer from a certain amount of basic anxiety. Anxieties, like worries vary with the individual, age, sex and circumstances. There are no specific formulae for treating anxiety. The adolescent has to evolve his own techniques to overcome anxiety like prolonged therapy involving reevaluating one’s own resources and threats offered by the external world.

7. Jealousy: Is a special form of resentment. It arises in an adolescent when he is threatened by actual or supposed loss of affection or prestige by a rival. Jealousy may result due to varying combinations of threatened love, fear, anger, hate, failure, dejection and shame. The stimulus to jealousy is always social in origin. Adolescents tend to feel jealous with respect to their achievement in various areas – school, athletics and sex and in peer relations. In order to overcome jealousy, adolescents need to be helped to understand that their emotion is the natural outcome of their own feelings of inadequacy based on real or imagined deficiencies. They should try to overcome this by themselves or with the help of others in approved ways.

8. Depression: The emotional state of depression lacks excited drives which characterize anger, fear and anxiety. Essentially, depression is a self punishing, harmful method of adjustment representing passive acceptance or resentment, instead of constructive solution. Feelings of guilt forms basis for depression. It is also likely to result from failure to achieve their self-ideal. Solution to depression requires discovering and dealing with its specific causes. If the individual is not able to overcome on his own, may have to take expert professional help. The depressed must decide upon action instead of passive resignation. He should analyze his problems and take concrete measures to correct them. Suggestions to overcome depressive thoughts – He should

• Seek positive emotional experience which will throw out the depressive thoughts.
• Do things for others which will divert his inner thoughts to external activities.
• Restructure his environment and goals, thus permitting the building of self esteem through successes.
  



9. Hostility: Is an act of showing enmity. Unlike depression which is passive in nature, hostility is active and seeks an object for attack. Anger is the underlying stimulus to it, usually directed towards a person or persons or none in particular. A common cause of hostility is frustration. Persons in authority are more likely to arouse hostility in adolescent as they hinder his independence. The adolescent needs plenty of hand driving sports and creative activities to release his tensions arising out of goal directed activity. His achievements of autonomy should be encouraged in proportion to his effort.

10. Feelings of inferiority: Inferiority feelings involve emotions of depression and shame arising from unfavourable self evaluation and are based on deficiencies either imagined or real. A person may have inferiority feelings in areas even where he really excels, simply because he falls below his own standards. These feelings are damaging and manifest themselves in many unfortunate symptoms; the person who feels inferior is hypersensitive to criticism. He feels others are actively seeking his down fall. He has tendencies to shyness, seclusion and day dreaming.

Factors leading to development of feelings of inferiority in adolescents are:

1. His experiences in home, peer group, school/college, society influences his personally structure.
2. Hyper sensitivity to failure to live up to parental goals.
3. Unfavorable comparison by parents with siblings and peer group.
4. Opinions of peers especially with physique, physical defects.
5. Feelings of inadequacy due to lower caste and income, which in turn effects his scholastic achievement.



Adolescents with feelings of inferiority need guidance in– a) identifying his deficiencies and finding ways to remedy them and b) adopting goals more appropriate to a realistic perception of himself.

Helping adolescents to solve their emotional problems :

One should recognize factors associated with their stresses and take measures that will prevent arousal of emotional problems. The adolescents differ with respect to emotionality, I.Q., social class, sex, behavior and environment. The sexes differ in terms of neuroticism. The adults should

1. Develop a comfortable rapport involving mutual trust.
2. Be permissive and remain calm, unshocked, expressing neither approval nor blame.
3. Not assign motives to the adolescents’ behavior.
4. Maintain proper record of the troubled individual’s rate of progress, it may be a show, but praise as it will improve self confidence.
5. Help the adolescent develop hobbies, sports and temporary distractions.

If improvement does not occur, perhaps the needs of adolescents have been diagnosed in correctly or possibly, the adult standards of evaluating progress are in adequate. Then professional psychotherapeutic help will be needed.