What About it?

The most important psychological and psychosocial changes in puberty and early adolescence are the emergence of abstract thinking, the growing ability of absorbing the perspectives or viewpoints of others, an increased ability of introspection, the development of personal and sexual identity etc.

Erikson, who died in 1994, theorized that personality is developed through eight different life stages, later called Erik Erikson’s stages of psychosocial development. Knowing what each stage is—and the lesson at the heart of it—can provide helpful insight into your own personality, as well as others.

The key idea in Erikson’s theory is that the individual faces a conflict at each stage, which may or may not be successfully resolved within that stage. For example, he called the first stage ‘Trust vs Mistrust’. If the quality of care is good in infancy, the child learns to trust the world to meet her needs.

The main idea behind Erikson’s theory of psychosocial development is that our personality develops in stages, and at every one of these stages a psychosocial crisis unfolds in a way that determines our personality development based on the outcome.

On the other hand, many biological changes take place during the adolescent years. Most obvious are the physical changes, for example, increment in height, acquisition of muscle mass, the distribution of body fat and the development of secondary sexual characteristics.
All these changes can be looked on as developmental tasks during normal development, but they can also help in understanding developmental deviations and psychopathological disorders.