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Chapter 7 discusses the notion of attention over the period of development from infancy through adolescence and emphasizes the importance of teasing apart attention subcomponents and tracing their pathways through this entire period. A rich literature exists on age-related changes in the preschool and childhood years that include developmentally sensitive periods characterized by spurts of growth followed by periods of stability. However, different attention subcomponents produce very different developmental trajectories. The relative paucity of research in the adolescent period prevents firm conclusions from being drawn about age trajectories from late childhood to early adulthood, a critical time period that needs more substantive research. As well, future longitudinal designs need to include developmentally sensitive paradigms that can identify subtle changes in performance. It will also need to adopt more sophisticated methods of identifying and evaluating specific attentional functions across a wide age range. [

Chapter 10 addresses the significant issue of treatment of attentional impairment through both stimulant medication and psychosocial intervention. A considerable literature exists examining the positive impact of stimulants, mainly methylphehidate (MPH), and psychosocial treatments in reducing the symptoms of ADHD. With respect to pharmacologic intervention the authors discuss the influence of co-morbid disorders and dosage, and note adverse side-effects of these agents. They also discuss findings of such psychosocial approaches as parent-based, cognitive-based, and computer-based training, and discuss the findings of the Multimodal Treatment Study of Children with ADHD. Nevertheless the treatment of other neurodevelopmental disorders of attention is one that should be addressed by innovative future research.

To understand the modulation of prefrontal cortical activity by dopamine (DA), it is critical to consider not only different receptor subtypes and the cell type DA acts upon, but also complex changes that occur postnatally, sometimes as late as during adolescence. A large body of literature deals with DA actions on physiological properties of the prefrontal cortex (PFC), ranging from recordings in cultured neurons and brain slices to anesthetized animals and awake, freely moving animals. All these levels of analysis offer unique perspectives on the complex pattern of DA actions; combined, they have produced a reasonable understanding of how this modulator affects function in this critical brain region. However, many divergent views persist, and a lot of them arise from the use of different techniques on animals at different postnatal developmental stages. For example, cellular physiology studies using the whole-cell technique typically rely on slices from very young animals, in many cases obtained before weaning, while behavioral and anatomical studies are conducted mainly in adult animals. This chapter summarizes recent work bridging those age groups, highlighting the maturation of DA electrophysiological actions in the PFC during adolescence.

Following the same youth over about three years of their adolescence, this chapter examines various dynamics in religiosity during adolescence. First, it looks at average change as well as individual trajectories in multiple measures of three dimensions of religiosity: conduct, content, and centrality. Then, combining these measures to consider religiosity more holistically, the chapter considers the likelihood of an adolescent’s changing religious profiles over time. Quotes from youth who typify the five most common types of religious change in adolescence are provided to illustrate these dynamics. This chapter reveals a reasonable degree of stability in adolescent religiosity, but describes the moderate refinements that often take place usually involving decreases, but sometimes increases, in certain dimensions of religiosity.

Narratives of religious change in adolescence are the focus of this chapter. Included is an exploration of what youth mean when they say they have become more or less religious or stayed the same. Few youth describe dynamics in their religiosity by referencing the content of their religious beliefs. A greater proportion discuss their religiosity in terms of religious conduct such as religious service attendance or prayer, but these are usually youth who are describing a decrease in religiosity during adolescence. Youth who rely on the centrality of religion in their life to describe stability or an increase in religiosity are (1) often the Abiders or Adapters who started with a very high level of religious salience and (2) at times report stability or increase in religiosity’s centrality despite decreasing religious conduct. In this period of life called adolescence, as autonomy grows and brain development continues, youth find increasing meaning and confidence in personally refining their religiosity.

This chapter explores how three critical contexts of youth—family, peers, and religious institutions—can facilitate or pose barriers for religious refinement in adolescence. What appears to be the most positive model is reminiscent of what other scholars have called “social scaffolding.” Scaffolding is providing support around the learning or development of youth, but leaving just enough space between the foundational scaffolding and where youth are in the process of developing their own religiosity. When youth know the support is there, but that they are free to further refine their faith relatively autonomously, they are more confident and happy in their religious and spiritual lives. When parents, peers, or religious institutions under- or over-scaffold, youth sense they are being misunderstood and often disengage from the process of religious refinement.

This chapter considers, through the eyes of another group of emerging adults, the passage from emerging adulthood to young adulthood, focusing on the question of what it means to become an adult. The discussion starts by exploring how adulthood has been defined in traditional cultures and in the past in American history, then at how emerging adults today define adulthood and assess their own progress toward adult status. The subjects in this chapter then reflect on their mixed feelings about leaving adolescence — from the perspective of emerging adulthood. They also describe their mixed feelings about becoming adults — from the perspective of emerging adulthood, reaching adulthood promises stability but evokes fears of stagnation. Finally, their views of the future are examined, and how they foresee a happy and successful life for themselves even as they believe the world in general is fraught with peril, are examined.

This chapter looks into the lives of adolescents in foster care. It previews the challenges likely to be faced by older youths who have been in or have recently entered the foster care system. It is hypothesized that children remaining in the parental home will be higher in bonding social capital but lower in bridging social capital than children taken into foster care. There is partial support for this hypothesis in terms of the “closeness” in-home youths report feeling with their caregivers, but there are lower levels of child protection and monitoring there than for children in out-of-home care. For bridging social capital there are expected differences, with youths in out-of-home care having potential access to greater educational, occupational, and economic resources than youths who remain in the parental home. The analyses suggest that bridging social capital may decline over time for youths with increased amounts of time in the parental home.

This chapter examines critically the widespread belief that many 5th-century Athenian dramas reflect in various ways institutionalized practices or rituals connected with the young male's transition to adulthood. It argues that there is no good evidence that any such institutions existed in 5th-century Athens. However, the education and socialization of the adolescent male was a major theme of Athenian drama between about 430 and 400 BC; some deal with youths whose education has left them ill-equipped for adult life, others with youths who have been corrupted by their teachers. This is known to have been a time of educational crisis, with traditional education seeming inadequate and sophistic education deeply suspected, but no effective reform was found until the two-year, full-time ephebeia was introduced in 334.

Slang only becomes associated with young people in general during the period covered by this volume. The production of dictionaries of youth slang was fuelled by fears of juvenile delinquency and by the influence of ‘black’ music on white teenagers. However, many glossaries of youth slang from this period were produced as tools in marketing and advertising campaigns.

Development of executive functions and self-regulation, two important goals for school age children, are described in this chapter. To better understand their development, we examine the evidence for several early skills as precursors, including social communication, language, and pretend play. The potential for the quality of caregivers' early verbal input to also support these skills is described, particularly as this input occurs during early childhood. Finally, evidence is provided for the links between early precursor skills and caregiver input with school age executive functions and adolescent social competence. Evidence for these relations comes from a unique longitudinal study of 360 children and their caregivers examined in home settings from 6 months to 13 years of age. Findings highlight how skills developing in infancy and early childhood provide a foundation for executive functions and self regulation in middle childhood and early adolescence and the importance of the child's social context.