What were You Thinking

thinking represents a cognitive advance; however, it can also usher in new liabilities, as Fischer cogently observes. For example, abstractions are conceptually removed from specific traits and even further removed from concrete, observable behaviors. As a result, they are therefore more susceptible to distortions because they are more difficult to verify than traits, which build upon concrete behaviors. Theories of self-based on abstractions are thus likely to be somewhat inaccurate. Such distortions can lead to vulnerability and defensiveness, if the young adolescent is confronted with “What were you thinking?” interrogations. For example, an adolescent may have constructed the abstraction that he or she is “intelligent”, combining the attributes of being curious, studious, and scholastically competent. These psychological trait labels, in turn, are based on observable behaviors such as good grades and report cards. However, if the adolescent is primarily thinking at the level of abstractions, rather than at the level of traits or the observable behaviors at the bottom of this hierarchy, abstractions may be challenged. Consider the dreaded standardized achievement tests that teachers may loathe, that students can fear, and that parents try unsuccessfully to comprehend. When the results are painfully made public, the adolescent, who considered himself quite intelligent, has not done as well as anticipated. “What were you thinking?” the parents demand, “Why didn’t you study? Did you think you were so intelligent that you could just blow off the test? You know how important these achievement tests are, if you ever want to go to college!”ions may be challenged. Consider the dreaded standardized achievement tests that teachers may loathe, that students can fear, and that parents try unsuccessfully to comprehend. When the results are painfully made public, the adolescent, who considered himself quite intelligent, has not done as well as anticipated. “What were you thinking?” the parents demand, “Why didn’t you study? Did you think you were so intelligent that you could just blow off the test? You know how important these achievement tests are, if you ever want to go to college!” The young adolescent has little in the way of a compelling retort his abstraction about his perceived intelligence cannot be realistically defended. The abstraction that he is intelligent fails him, in light of his inadequate test performance. It does not immediately provide a ready answer to the inquiry into what he was thinking. In point of fact, he was not thinking logically about the implications of his test results which contradicted his self-concept as an intelligent student. He unrealistically just assumed that he would do well, given his general self-theory that he was intelligent. Thus, although abstractions about the self are advanced, cognitively, they do not necessarily equip the adolescent with the defensible strategies to protect the self against “What were you thinking” queries of parents. Middle-to-Late Adolescence Another one of the major contributions of Fischer’s theory of cognitive development is that the documented normative developmental trajectories are not necessarily linear. That is, the developmental progression of theories about one’s experiences in the minds of children and adolescents does not necessarily lead to increasingly more positive outcomes. Cognitive advances can lead to setbacks. That is, there can be minefields on the path to more complex thinking. Middle-to-late adolescence provokes the creation of new, and the destruction of old, theories of self that can lead to troublesome new-found “What were you thinking?” situations. Perplexity is shared by both the adolescent and his or her parents. Both are impacted by the changing thought processes that normatively emerge in middle adolescence, at ages 14 to 15 in U.S. culture. As Fischer has observed, new cognitive skills now include the ability to compare abstractions about the self, including his or her emotions in different roles. For example, the adolescent can now realize that he or she can feel both hopeless and optimistic about the future, at the same time. There is an acknowledgement that one can be both an introvert and extrovert, simultaneously. To take a very common culturallydetermined preoccupation, one can believe that one looks attractive when looking in the bathroom mirror, but when faced with the social mirror at school, one’s appearance is woefully inadequate. Thus, contradictions between self-attributes in different roles now become painfully apparent (whereas in early adolescence, compartmentalization spared the young teen from recognizing these intrapsychic clashes). The new-found ability to compare these abstractions about the self in different roles becomes problematic. Attributes that define one’s multiple selves now clash, provoking internal conflict and confusion [5,7]. Adolescents at this stage do not have the cognitive ability to reconcile these contradictions that they can now vividly and painfully recognize. They cannot integrate these disparate self-perceptions which, in turn, produce emotional distress. All-or-nothing thinking can now be observed at the level of abstract thought. At one moment, the adolescent feels totally intelligent yet quickly can shift to feeling like a total dork. Another such example can be observed when an adolescent girl faces the prom. When she