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Emotional development in adolescence: what can be learned from a high school theater program?
1Department of Human and Community Development, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, Urbana 61801, USA. larsonr@uiuc.edu
Child Development
|July 26, 2007
Summary
Adolescents actively develop emotional understanding and management skills through contextual experiences. Learning occurs via direct emotional episodes and internalizing the social environment's emotion culture.
Area of Science:
- Developmental Psychology
- Adolescent Psychology
- Social Psychology
Background:
- Understanding adolescent emotional development is complex.
- Emotional experience requires examination within its specific context.
Purpose of the Study:
- To formulate propositions on adolescent emotional development processes.
- To explore how adolescents learn emotional knowledge and management strategies.
Main Methods:
- Grounded-theory analysis of qualitative data.
- Data collected during a high school theater production involving adolescents (ages 14-17).
Main Results:
- Adolescents demonstrated active extraction of emotional knowledge.
- Participants developed strategies for managing emotions through contextual experiences.
- Learning involved "hot" emotional episodes and internalizing the setting's emotion culture.
Conclusions:
- Adolescent emotional development is an active, context-dependent process.
- Experiential learning and social/cultural internalization are key mechanisms.
- High school theater provides a rich setting for studying these processes.
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