GoingToMeet

Our understanding of adolescent biological, cognitive, moral, and social development has been significantly revised over the past decade. The view of adolescence as the culmination of progressive, qualitative, and developmental changes has given way to the view that adolescence is a period of vulnerability and instability entailing developmental continuity from childhood and to adulthood. However, the current views may obscure what makes adolescence a unique period in the life cycle. One of the major goals of the JPS meeting in 2008 is to explore the distinctiveness of adolescence
from a constructivist and developmental perspective.

The JPS meeting will address adolescence as a unique time of opportunity and vulnerability, as adolescents actively coordinate capacities, skills, and understandings within and across domains. The symposium will examine these issues from neurological, cognitive, self-system, moral, and social perspectives. Interrelationships across these areas will be considered, and associations between these developmental processes and adolescents’ vulnerabilities to psychosocial problems and difficulties will be examined.