Volume 2

Adolescence : its psychology and its relations to physiology, anthropology, sociology, sex, crime, religion and education / by G. Stanley Hall.

  • Hall, G. Stanley (Granville Stanley), 1844-1924.
Date:
1904
Catalogue details

Licence: Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International (CC BY-NC 4.0)

Credit: Adolescence : its psychology and its relations to physiology, anthropology, sociology, sex, crime, religion and education / by G. Stanley Hall. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by The University of Leeds Library. The original may be consulted at The University of Leeds Library.

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    pass-points in man, and less so in woman, with advancing age. Otherwise, both he and Lombroso thought touch more acute in young girls than later. This accords with Czermak, who found the topographic skin sense of children more acute than in adults. Since then this has generally been assumed, and ascribed to the fact that while the dermal surface increased, the number of tactile end organs remained constant. Thus it is plain that the most characteristic changes in dermal sensi- bility are not in fine distance discriminations. This declines somewhat with growth, which increases the interval between the tactile organs. Carman 1 found that sensibility to pain decreased as age increased, except at twelve, with both sexes; that the left temple grew more sensitive than the right; and that girls were more sensitive than boys. Gilbert, too, found a gradual decrease of pain sensibility to pressure from sixteen to nine- teen, boys being less sensitive than girls throughout. Girls seemed to have reached the minimum of sensibility at thirteen, while for boys the most rapid decline began at that time and the difference increased from about 0.4 kg. to more than 1 kg. All these tests, however, have a large mean variation. Other algometric tests, although perhaps less care- ful than these, have led to somewhat different results. All tests, too, leave it undetermined whether it is less sensibility or increased power to bear pain that causes the threshold to be set higher. In view of the increased hardships, battles, etc., of this age, teleological modes of thought might have anticipated this general result. It suggests that tenderness now may be excessive, and that impact with the world of things must be more vigorous to produce the same result. Susceptibility to esthetic pain in the higher senses and in the skin itself seems to increase, and in the wondrous system of balances and har- monies in our nature this may be compensatory. I have some- where read statistics showing that of all wounds leaving per- manent scars found on the bodies of adult men, the time of which could be remembered, most were received during pubes- cent years. 1 Pain and strength measurements of 1,507 school children in Saginaw, Mich Am. Jour, of Psy., April, 1899, vol. x, pp. 392-398.