Psychological development

Ottilia Boross McDaniel College Budapest 2008

Capacities of the newborn Cognitive development in childhood

Piaget Kohlberg

Personality and social development

attachment gender development

Adolescency

Nature nurture debate

maturation
- innately determined growth and change - fixed schedule - different rates - some environmental influence (e.g. motor development)

Environmental Influence
Experience affects brain development

Impoverished environment

Rat brain cell

Enriched environment

Rat brain cell

Capacities of the newborns

Vision

short-sightedness poor visual acuity double-vision

Prefer
big contrasts (edges) complex features curved lines

Excellent Recognizes mothers milk Sweet-preference

Taste and smell

Hearing
excellent at birth
6 weeks-4 months shift sensitive to tones (Mozart) speech (foreign languages)

Learning and memory

fast and excellent even remember their fetal experiences

Experimental methods with babies

Conditioned kicking
3-6 months

Eye-tracking

Stages of development infancy childhood adolescency adulthood

behaviors are organized at a given theme / a coherent set of characteristics are qualitatively different from behaviors at later or earlier stages All children go through the same stages in the same order

Windows of opportunity
Sensitive period
time-window for the brain the individual is particularly receptive to certain types of stimuli or interactions begins and ends gradually period of maximal sensitivity

If missed
-

the brain has progressed past the point at which information can be simply absorbed
attachment mental modeling of the environment music sports

Critical period:
time-window for the brain exclusive period for acquiring a specific ability the relevant stimuli must be there begins and ends abruptly
Like: binocular vision (1-3 years) hearing language acquisition

 Influenced by Kant's constructivist theory of knowledge Are children just young adults? Is development just a lot of learning?

Jean Piaget
1896-1980

Children are born with some genetically inherited (and evolved) mental structure ...
... all subsequent learning and knowledge is based on it

Children are active builders of their knowledge Like little, inquiering, naive scientists, children
constantly construct and test their own theories of the world

Schemas (theories)

to understand features of the world

Assimilation:
incorporating new materials from the environment into a schema

Accomodation
changing the schema to better fit the environment

experience fails to

conform to existing schema

operation: logical thinking

Sensorimotor stage: (birth to 2 years)

adapting to & exploring the environment

brain makeup sucking and visual orienting reflexes innate tendencies to adapt to environment learn through senses repetitions with variations

Out of sight, out of mind

8-10 month - Object permanence
Understanding that objects exist independently of our thoughts and actions

Preoperational stage (2 to 7 years)

Magical thinking
there are witches, fairies ...

... and Santa Claus is coming tonight

thinking to inanimate objects (see religions and mythology!)

Animism: attributing life and

The sun is shining directly on to them ...

.. and there is a spirit in every tree ....

Egocentrism: the inability to take another

person's perspective or point of view.

 Centration: The tendency to focus or center on

only one aspect of a situation and ignore other important aspects. Unable to see that objects alike in one property might differ in others

Pick the yellow triangles!

 Conservation: Two equal physical quantities

remain equal even if the appearance of one is changed, as long as nothing is added or subtracted.

Centration (height OR width) and lack of conservation Irreversibility: The inability to mentally reverse a sequence of events.

 Make-believe play Pretend-play and imitation

cooking, mum-and-daddy play

Thinking is literal and concrete (do not understand proverbs)

Theory of mind
... understanding,that
others have feelings and thoughts, different from ours they are intentional agents ...

Autistic children do not have a theory of mind

Concrete operational stage

Class inclusion Classifying and generalizing on observable properties (all dogs are animals but that not all animals are dogs). Serial ordering Arranging a set of objects according to an observable property; establishing a one-to-one correspondence between two observable sets (the smaller the animal the faster its heart beats) Reversibility Mentally inverting a sequence of steps. Conservation Realizing that a quantity remains the same if nothing is added or taken away, though it may appear different.

Formal operational stage

Theoretical Reasoning Thinking scientifically, being capable of mental operations such as drawing conclusions, constructing tests to evaluate hypotheses. Combinatorial Reasoning Considering all combinations of abstract items. Proportional Reasoning Stating and interpreting functional relationships in mathematical form. Control of Variables Recognizing the necessity of an experimental design that controls all variables but one. Probabilistic and Correlational Reasoning Interpreting observations that show unpredictable variability and recognizing relationships among variables.

Piagets theory of moral development

(moral reasoning)

morality = developmental process interpersonal interactions

parallel play - no rules

 "heteronomous" stage
strict adherence to rules and duties obedience to authority moral realism (objective responsibility, when the letter of the law is above the purpose of the law; the outcomes of actions are above the intentions of the person) immanent justice (punishments automatically follow acts of wrong-doing).

autonomous stage
consider rules critically apply them in a selective way

Lawrence Kohlbergs
theory of moral development moral reasoning

continues throughout the lifespan

Levels of moral behaviour

Level 1 (Pre-Conventional)
1. Obedience and punishment orientation 2. Reward orientation

Level 2 (Conventional)

3. Interpersonal accord and conformity ( The good boy/good girl orientation) 4. Authority and social-order maintaining orientation ( Law and order morality)

Level 3 (Post-Conventional)

5. Social contract orientation 6. Universal ethical principles (Principled conscience)

Personality and social development

Temperament:
mood-related personality characteristics can predict emotional and behavioral characteristic features later in life

Easy (40%) Difficult (10%) Slow to warm up (15%)

Emotional development
Love Between Mothers and Babies: are mothers only a mere source of food ...?

attachment

tendency to seek closeness to important others

Separation anxiety 8. months

tested the idea

TERRY-CLOTH MOTHER
well proportioned and streamlined monkey body made of wood covered with rubber, sheathed in cotton towelling (soft to touch) light bulb behind made her warm

WIRE-MASH MOTHER

made of wire mesh lacked contact comfort had breasts

the young monkeys clung to the terry-cloth mother whether it provided them with food or not

got protection and comfort

Strange Situation
Parent and child are alone in a room
Child explores the room without parental participation Stranger enters the room, talks to the parent, and approaches the child Parent quietly leaves the room Parent returns and comforts the child

Mary Ainsworth

1913-1999

Strange Situation
Securely attached

Insecurely attached, ambivalent Insecurely attached, avoidant

Parental attitude
Goodness of fit
(matching temperament)

Sensitive responsiveness
(tayloring the answers to the babies needs)

gender identity:

a firm sense of being a member of one of the sexes

Psychoanalytic theory Social learning theory Cognitive developmental theory Gender schema theory

sex-typing

culturally determined stereotyped attitudes towards men and women

PSYCHOSEXUAL DEVELOPMENT

Psychoanalytic theory

Oral Anal Phallic Boys (Oedipus complex/castration

complex identify with father, develop stronger sense of morality identification with mother, less developed sense of identity)

Girls penis envy, weaker Latency

IDENTIFICATION

HOMOSEXUALITY: WRONG IDENTIFICATION

Rewards and pubishments of gender-appropriate and inappropriate behavior by adults and peers (reinforcement) It is like any other of behavior (so it is subject of modification) Observation and imitation of models feminine and masculine behavior

Social learning theory

Lego for boys

Barbie for girls

Cognitive developmental theory

children learn gender (and gender stereotypes) through their mental efforts to organize their social world (not because they are rewarded or punished).

Gender constancy: to

understand that people cannot change genders the way they can change their clothes, names, or behavior (it is a function of cognitive development)

Gender-schema theory
Three key gender lenses (hidden assumptions):
gender polarization (men and women are different and these differences constitute a central organizing principle of social life)
androcentrism (males are superior to females; male experience is the normative standard) biological essentialism (the first two lens are due to biological differences between the sexes).

gender acquisition = self-fulfilling prophecy