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Late- and Early-Maturing Boys and Girls Studies
Within the field of child development, Jones believed there was some evidence that supported the idea that adolescent children who’ve started maturing (reaching puberty) at an earlier age - were perceived and treated differently by their peers and other adults.

In Child Development, the flagship journal of the society of Research and Child Development, published an articles were published by Paul Mussen and Mary Cover Jones (1957, 1958) and that investigated the relationship between physical maturation status and self-concepts in late- and early-maturating adolescent boys and girls, respectively.

Mussen and Jones (1957) hypothesized that within our culture, boys who have started puberty at an earlier age were viewed and treated more favorably than boys who have started puberty at a later age, which in turn allows for the early maturing boys to develop in more positive or favorable environments than the later maturing boys. Mary Cover Jones believed that the favorable and unfavorable treatment in early-and late-maturing boys could have lifelong implications.

33 seventeen year old adolescent boys from an urban public school, ranging in maturation status, and who were also part of the Adolescent Growth Study were included in the study. The participants represented a normal sample of the population. In the study, the participants were individually shown images of people and objects and were asked to create stories about the images that they were shown. The researchers expected that the stories the participants created about the images shown would uncover certain aspects of the participant’s personality, such as aggression, dependency, and needs for recognition.

The results in the study supported Jones’s general hypothesize, that within our culture, boys who have started puberty later are at greater risk to be expose to averse social-learning environments.

By contrast, the favorable social-learning environment seen in early maturing boys is not the same for early maturing girls. In 1958, almost one year since their study on late maturing and early maturing boys was published, Jones and Mussen performed the study with adolescent girls using the same procedures.

The results of this study were similar in some aspects to the study conducted with the boys. Late-maturing girls were at greater risk of being exposed to adverse social-learning environments.