PSYCH 600 Week 4 Adolescence, Identity and Social Development Example

Four Friends in a Borrowed Truck: Peer Influence, the Adolescent Brain and Identity in One Yuma Sixteen-Year-Old

[Student Name]

University of Phoenix

PSYCH/600: Developmental Psychology

Week 4 Assignment

[Instructor Name]

[Date]

The teenager, his family and the crash are composites written for a model paper; research findings come from the sources listed.

Adolescence brings rapid changes in the body, brain, thinking and relationships, along with the task of forming an identity. Popular accounts often reduce adolescent behavior to "teenage brains," but research offers a more precise picture. This paper applies that research to one case from my work.

The Case

Andrés Molina is sixteen and lives with his mother and two younger sisters in Yuma, Arizona. His mother, Lucía, received home visiting services from my agency when Andrés was small and called me last month. On a Friday night, Andrés took his uncle's pickup truck without permission, picked up three friends and drove to the desert outside town. Racing along a dirt road, he lost control and rolled the truck onto its side. Everyone walked away with bruises; the truck was badly damaged. Andrés has a learner's permit, not a license.

Lucía described her son as kind, a good student until this year and a talented soccer player. This year his grades have slipped, he spends most evenings with friends and he has started asking questions about his father, who was deported when Andrés was eight, and about whether he is "really Mexican or really American." She asked me to help her understand what is happening.

Risk With an Audience

Gardner and Steinberg (2005) put teenagers, college-age adults and older adults in front of a computer driving game. Each yellow light offered a choice: stop and lose time, or keep going for points and risk a wreck that wiped them out. Participants played either alone or with two same-age friends watching. Adolescents took substantially more risks when friends were present, young adults somewhat more, and adults were unaffected. Peers did not pressure participants; their presence alone changed behavior. Adolescents also rated the benefits of risky choices more highly in front of friends.

The finding fits Andrés's night closely. He is not known as reckless when alone. With three friends in the truck, the thrill of speed and the approval of his friends likely outweighed his awareness of the danger, which he described clearly to his mother the next day.

Why the Adolescent Brain Responds This Way

Steinberg (2008) proposed that adolescent risk-taking reflects a mismatch in timing between two brain systems. A socioemotional system, centered on reward-related regions, becomes much more responsive around puberty, increasing sensitivity to rewards, especially social ones. The brakes, a control network built around the prefrontal cortex and its wiring to other regions, keep strengthening slowly until roughly age twenty-five. During middle adolescence, the reward system is highly active while control is still developing, and peers amplify the reward system's activity. Steinberg emphasized that adolescents can reason as well as adults in calm, low-arousal situations; their decisions differ most in emotionally charged, social settings.

This account explains why Andrés could describe the risks perfectly well the next morning but did not act on that knowledge that night. It also cautions against treating him as incapable: he is a capable reasoner whose decisions in exciting peer situations are vulnerable.

He knew the risks on Saturday morning; on Friday night, with three friends watching, knowing was not enough.

Who Am I?

Erikson described adolescence as a period of identity versus role confusion, in which young people work to form a coherent sense of who they are. Marcia (1966) made this idea measurable by interviewing college men about their occupational and ideological commitments and classifying them by whether they had explored alternatives and whether they had made commitments. The resulting identity statuses were achievement, having explored and committed; moratorium, exploring without yet committing; foreclosure, committed without exploring, often by adopting parents' values; and diffusion, neither exploring nor committed. The statuses related to differences in performance under stress and in other characteristics.

Andrés appears to be entering moratorium. His questions, his new friendships and his drifting from school reflect active exploration. Moratorium is often uncomfortable for adolescents and their families, but it is a normal and productive path toward an achieved identity.

Being Mexican American on the Border

Identity in adolescence includes ethnic and racial identity, especially for young people of color. One synthesis of the field (Umaña-Taylor et al., 2014) built a model in which ethnic-racial identity includes both a process, exploring what one's group membership means and resolving that meaning, and content, such as how central the identity is and how positively one regards one's group. The authors found that a positive, explored ethnic-racial identity is generally associated with better psychological adjustment, academic engagement and resilience to discrimination, and that this identity develops through family socialization, peers, school and community contexts.

For Andrés, questions about being Mexican or American are intertwined with his father's deportation and with daily life in a border city where both identities are visible. His exploration is not a distraction from development but a central part of it.

Family and Peers

Research on adolescence shows that relationships with parents remain important even as peer relationships intensify. Adolescents seek more autonomy, and conflict over everyday issues often rises, but warm relationships with parents that combine support with clear expectations remain protective. Andrés's mother is warm but works long hours, and the uncle whose truck he took has been a father figure. Repairing that relationship is as important as consequences for the crash.

The Slide in School

Andrés's falling grades deserve attention of their own. Middle adolescence often brings a dip in school engagement as students move into larger, less personal high schools, as peer life competes for attention and as the abstract reasoning that adolescents are developing makes them question why schoolwork matters. For Andrés, the questions about his father and his identity may also be draining energy he once gave to school. A conversation with his soccer coach and his school counselor, both adults he respects, could help him connect effort in school to goals he chooses for himself, such as playing at a community college, rather than to rules imposed from outside.

Recommendations

First, I suggested that Lucía and the uncle agree on consequences that relate to the event, such as Andrés helping pay for repairs through work, rather than consequences unrelated to it. Second, research on peer presence supports graduated licensing rules: when Andrés earns his license, Arizona's restrictions on carrying more than one young passenger during the first six months are worth enforcing at home for longer. Third, Andrés's need for excitement and status can be channeled into structured risk, such as competitive soccer, which gives peer approval within safe limits. Fourth, I encouraged Lucía to talk with Andrés about his father and family history, and connected them with a youth mentoring program at a local community center whose mentors include Mexican American young men from Yuma.

Limits of the Analysis

Laboratory driving games only approximate real driving. Brain research describes group averages, and adolescents vary widely. Identity status classifications describe a moment, not a fixed category. And I have heard Andrés's story mostly through his mother. These limits mean the analysis should guide conversation, not label Andrés.

Conclusion

Andrés's crash reflects a predictable vulnerability of adolescence: heightened sensitivity to reward when peers are present, while control systems are still maturing. His questions about who he is reflect normal identity exploration, shaped by his family history and his community. Research suggests responses that combine structure with warmth, channel the need for excitement and support his search for identity rather than treating it as a problem.

References

Gardner, M., & Steinberg, L. (2005). Peer influence on risk taking, risk preference, and risky decision making in adolescence and adulthood: An experimental study. Developmental Psychology, 41(4), 625-635. https://doi.org/10.1037/0012-1649.41.4.625

Marcia, J. E. (1966). Development and validation of ego-identity status. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 3(5), 551-558. https://doi.org/10.1037/h0023281

Steinberg, L. (2008). A social neuroscience perspective on adolescent risk-taking. Developmental Review, 28(1), 78-106. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.dr.2007.08.002

Umaña-Taylor, A. J., Quintana, S. M., Lee, R. M., Cross, W. E., Jr., Rivas-Drake, D., Schwartz, S. J., Syed, M., Yip, T., Seaton, E., & Ethnic and Racial Identity in the 21st Century Study Group. (2014). Ethnic and racial identity during adolescence and into young adulthood: An integrated conceptualization. Child Development, 85(1), 21-39. https://doi.org/10.1111/cdev.12196