Reading focus
Syllabus: How Should Psychological Treatment Change Across Childhood and Adolescence?
Notice how capacities, autonomy and context enter the proposed adaptations.
Why you’re reading it. Build a framework for examining the later treatment comparisons.
A question to consider. Two adolescents of the same age struggle with the same exercise for different reasons. What would you assess before proposing an adaptation?
Why this reading
A treatment asks people to notice, explain and act on their experiences. Sauter and colleagues ask how those demands interact with developing capacities, autonomy and relationships. Their framework makes developmental adaptation a set of questions that can be investigated.
Before you read
Chronological age is time since birth; it is an imperfect proxy for a person’s capacities and circumstances. Metacognition means thinking about one’s own thinking. A moderator identifies variation in a treatment effect; a mechanism explains how change occurs.
Read for
- Distinguish evidence about age differences from proposals about developmental processes.
- Connect the six adaptation domains with the research needed to evaluate them.
Consider afterwards
- How could two adolescents of the same age need different support to use the same exercise?
- What comparison would show that a proposed adaptation improves outcomes?
Editorial context
This 2009 review concerns CBT for adolescent anxiety. Many suggestions are clinically reasoned proposals rather than separately tested ingredients. Its developmental concepts are useful beyond that example, but its coverage does not establish universal age cutoffs or one suitable treatment for all young people.