SUMMARY

1. Emerging adults usually have strong and healthy bodies. Homeostasis and organ reserve allow most emerging adults to withstand fatal disease.

2. The sexual-reproductive system reaches a peak during these years, but most current emerging adults postpone childbearing. The results include both increased use of contraception and higher rates of sexually transmitted diseases.

3. Willingness to take risks is characteristic of emerging adults. This allows positive behaviors, such as entering college, meeting new people, volunteering for difficult tasks, and finding new jobs.
   It also leads to destructive actions, such as unprotected sex, fatal accidents, and an increase in violent deaths.

4. Extreme sports are attractive to some emerging adults, who find the risk of serious injury thrilling. The same impulses can lead to drug abuse, which peaks in emerging adulthood, especially among college students.

5. Adult thinking is more flexible, better able to coordinate the objective and the subjective. Some scholars consider this development a fifth stage of cognition, referred to as postformal thought.

   425

6. Whether or not a fifth stage exists, there is no doubt that maturation of the prefrontal cortex allows more advanced thought. Emerging adults are more able to combine intuitive and analytic thought.

7. The flexibility of young-adult cognition allows people to reexamine stereotypes from their childhood. This may decrease stereotype threat, which impairs adult performance if left unchecked.

8. Worldwide there are far more college students, especially in Asia and Africa, than there were a few decades ago. Everywhere, the students’ backgrounds and current situations are more diverse than formerly.

9. Although a college education has been shown to have health and income benefits, observers disagree as to how, or even whether, college improves cognition. Evidence suggests that it does. Diversity has increased, and emerging adults expand their minds when they have honest conversations with people of different backgrounds.

10. Identity continues to be worked out in emerging adulthood. The current economic climate makes achieving vocational identity even more problematic than a decade ago. The average emerging adult changes jobs several times.

11. Personality traits from childhood do not disappear in emerging adulthood, but many people learn to modify or compensate for whatever negative traits they have. Personality is much more plastic than people once thought or experienced.

12. Family members continue to be important to emerging adults. Parental support—financial as well as emotional—may be more crucial than in earlier times.

13. The need for social connections and relationships is lifelong. Emerging adults tend to have more friends, of both sexes, than people of other ages do.

14. In earlier times, and in some cultures currently, emerging adults followed their parents’ wishes in seeking marriage partners. Today’s emerging adults are more likely to choose their own partners and postpone marriage.

15. Cohabitation is the current norm for emerging adults in many nations. Nonetheless, marriage to partners of similar backgrounds still seems to be the goal.