Chapter 9: Developmental Psychology
- Research Methods
- Cross-Sectional Research
- Uses participants of different ages to compare how certain variables may change over the life span
- Produces quick results
- May be affected by historical events or cultural trends
- Longitudinal Research
- Examines one group of participants over time
- Time consuming
- Precisely measures the effects of development on a specific group
- Prenatal Influences on Development
- Genetics
- Determine which abilities we are born with
- ex: process of developing motor skills
- Teratogens
- Can cause harm if ingested by the mother
- they can pass through the placenta barrier
- Alcohol
- FAS (fetal alcohol syndrome)
- mental retardation
- malformed skull
- caused by heavy drinking during pregnancy
- fetal alcohol effect
- caused by moderate drinking
- learning disabilities
- behavioral problems
- not all symptoms of FAS
- Psychoactive drugs
- newborns can share their mother’s drug addiction
- withdrawal symptoms can lead to death
- Polluting chemicals in the environment
- Motor/Sensory Development
- Reflexes
- Reflexes
- inborn, automatic responses to specific stimuli
- Reflexes humans are born with
- rooting reflex
- when touched on cheek, baby turns head and seeks to put the object in his mouth
- sucking reflex
- when object is placed in baby’s mouth, he will suck it
- grasping reflex
- a baby will try to grasp an object that is placed on his hand or foot
- moro reflex
- when startled, baby will fling out and then retract his limbs
- makes self as small as possible
- babinski reflex
- when a baby’s foot is stroked, he will spread out the toes
- we lose these reflexes later in life
- The Newborn’s Senses
- Hearing
- babies can hear before birth
- minutes after birth, baby will try to turn head toward mother’s voice
- Taste and smell
- same basic preferences as we do
- love sugar
- Vision
- not the dominant sense
- hearing is
- can see well 8-12 inches in front of them
- everything else is a blur
- normal vision by 12 months old
- prefer face like objects
- Motor Development
- Roll over
- five and a half months old
- Stand
- eight- nine months
- Walk alone
- fifteen months
- The effect of environment is slight
- Parenting
- Attachment Theory
- Attachment
- the reciprocal relationship between caregiver and child
- Harry Harlow
- raised baby monkeys with two artificial wire frame figure “monkeys”
- one figure was fitted with a bottle the infant could feed from
- the other wrapped in soft material
- when frightened, infants preferred soft mom
- demonstrated the importance of physical comfort in formation of attachment
- monkeys raised by real mothers were less frightened in new situations
- Mary Ainsworth
- observed infants’ reactions when placed into strange situations
- parents left for a short time and returned
- three reaction categories
- secure, avoidant, anxious/ambivalent attachments
- secure attachment
- 66% of babies in experiment
- explored novel environment while parents were present
- distressed when parents were absent
- came to parents when they returned
- avoidant attachment
- 21% of participants
- resist being held by parents
- explore novel environment
- don’t go to parents for comfort when they return
- anxious/ambivalent attachment
- 12% of participants
- may show extreme stress when parents leave but resist their comfort when they return
- Parenting Styles
- Authoritorian
- set strict standards for their children’s behavior
- no discussion about the rationale behind them
- punishment is used more than reinforcement
- Permissive
- don’t set clear guidelines for their children
- rules are constantly changed
- rules are usually not enforced
- easy to get away with almost anything
- Authoritative
- set consistent standards for their children
- reasonable and explained
- encourage their children’s independence
- praise as often as they punish
- Children produced
- authoritative parents
- more socially capable
- perform better academically
- permissive parents
- emotional control problems
- more dependent
- authoritorian parents
- less trusting
- more withdrawn from peers
- Stage Theories
- Continuity vs. Discontinuity
- Continuity
- develop at a steady rate from birth to death
- Discontinuity
- development happens in fits and the rate is variable
- stage theories
- discontinuous theories of development
- Sigmund Freud
- We develop through four psychosexual stages
- sexual (to Freud)
- how we get sensual pleasure from the world
- if we fail to resolve a significant problem in our lives in one of these stages, we become fixated in the stage
- remain preoccupied with behaviors associated with that stage
- Oral stage
- infants seek pleasure through their mouths
- put many objects into mouth
- fixation
- overeating, smoking, childlike dependence on things and people
- Anal stage
- develops during toilet training
- fixation
- retentive- overly controlling
- expulsive- out of control
- Phallic stage
- babies realize their gender
- Oedipus complex and Electra complex
- fixation
- problems in relationships
- Latency stage
- period of calm
- low psychosexual energy
- most psychologists don’t regard it as a separate stage
- age 6- puberty
- Genital stage
- focus of sexual pleasure is genitals
- remain for rest of life
- fixation
- normal
- Erik Erikson
- A neo-Freudian
- a theorist who believed in the basics of Freud’s theory but adapted it to fit his own observations
- Psychosexual stage theory
- eight stages
- he thought our personality was profoundly influenced by experiences with others
- Trust vs. Mistrust
- babies need to learn that they can trust their caregivers to fulfill their needs and that their requests are effective
- sense of trust or mistrust carries for life
- Autonomy vs. shame and doubt
- toddlers begin to exert their will over their bodies (autonomy)
- potty training is an early effort at this
- learn to control temper tantrums
- if we learn how to control ourselves and our environment in reasonable ways:
- we develop a healthy will
- we can control our body and emotional reactions through following social challenges
- Initiative vs. guilt
- if trust and autonomy achieved:
- natural curiosity about our surroundings
- ask many questions
- if our curiosity is encouraged, we will feel comfortable expressing it always
- if not, we feel guilty and will not express it
- Industry vs. inferiority
- in first grade, we are asked to produce work that is evaluated
- if we perform as well as our peers, we feel competent
- if not, inferiority complex!
- → anxiety about our performance in that area
- Identity vs. role confusion
- in adolescence, our main social task is to discover what social identity we are most comfortable with
- maybe try out different roles
- identity crisis
- if an adolescent doesn’t figure out a sense of self, they might have one later in life
- Intimacy vs. isolation
- a. young adults figure out how to balance time and effort between work, relationships, and self
- the patterns we choose become relatively permanent
- Generativity vs stagnation
- we look critically at our life path
- we try to ensure that our lives are going the way we want
- if not, we try to change it by controlling others or changing our identity
- Integrity vs. despair
- toward the end of life
- we look back at our accomplishments and decide if we’re satisfied
- if so, we can step outside society and offer wisdom
- if not, we may fall into despair over lost opportunities
- Cognitive Development
- Jean Piaget
- Worked for Albert Binet, creator of the first intelligence test
- noticed that children of the same age gave similar answers
- hypothesis: they think in similar ways which differ from the ways of adults
- led to theory of cognitive development
- Theory of cognitive development
- children view the world through schemata
- cognitive rules we use to interpret the world
- assimilation
- we incorporate our experiences into this existing schemata
- when info violates our schemata, we accommodate and change our schemata
- Four stages of thinking
- sensorimotor stage
- birth- 2 years
- we explore the world through our senses
- behavior is governed by reflexes until we develop our first cognitive schemata
- major challenge- develop object permanence (objects continue to exist even when out of our sensory range)
- preoperational stage
- 2 years- 7 years
- object permanence prepares us to use symbols to represent real world objects
- → the beginning of language
- we speak our first words
- we are limited in the ways we can think about the relationships between and characteristics of objects
- egocentric in thinking- can only see world from their perspective
- concrete operations
- 8 years- 12 years
- we learn to think more logically about complex relationships between different characteristics of objects
- concepts of conservation
- → the realization that properties of objects remain the same even when their shapes change
- → ex. volume, area, number
- formal operations
- 12 years- adulthood
- we gain metacognition (the ability to think about the way we think)
- abstract reasoning
- → hypothesis testing. someone in this stage can reason from a hypothesis
- we can manipulate objects in our minds without physically seeing them
- we can contrast ideas in our minds without real world correlates
- Criticisms of Piaget: Information Processing Model
- He underestimated children
- many go through the stages faster and enter them earlier than he thought
- his tests relied too heavily on language use
- results biased in favor of older kids
- Information- processing model
- a more continuous alternative to Piaget’s stage theory
- our abilities to memorize, interpret, and perceive gradually develop as we age, not in stages
- ex: attention span
- → could explain some apparent cognitive differences Piaget attributed to different cognitive stages
- Moral Development
- Lawrence Kohlberg
- Described how our ability to reason about ethical situations changes over our lives
- Asked children to think about specific moral situations
- Heinz dilemma
- Heinz must make a moral choice about whether to steal a drug he can’t afford to save his wife’s life
- Responses to Heinz dilemma
- preconventional
- youngest children
- focus on making the decision most likely to avoid punishment
- moral reasoning limited to how the choice affects themselves
- conventional
- look at the moral choice through the eyes of others
- make the choice based on how others will view them
- try to follow conventional standards of right and wrong
- postconventional
- moral reasoning
- examines the rights and values involved in the choice
- self-defined ethical principles involved
- the morality of societal rules are examined, not blindly accepted
- Criticisms of Kohlberg
- Carol Gilligan
- Kohlberg developed the model based on responses of boys
- gender differences in development of morals and ethics?
- according to her research:
- boys have a more absolute view of what is moral
- girls pay more attention to the situational factors
- recent research doesn’t support her theory of gender differences in moral development
- Gender and Development
- Biopsychological (Neuropsychological) Theory
- Concentrates on the nature element in the nature/nurture combo that produces our gender role
- behaviors that a culture associates with a gender
- Look for more subtle gender differences
- Women have larger corpus callosums
- may affect how the brain hemispheres communicate
- Psychodynamic Theory (Freud)
- Oedipus and Electra complex
- Proper gender development:
- child realizes that they can’t beat their same sex parents for the attention of the other parent
- child identifies with the same sex parent instead
- Social-Cognitive Theory
- Concentrate on the effects of society and our own thoughts about gender on role development
- Social psychologists
- look at how we react to boys and girls differently
- Cognitive psychologists
- focus on the internal interpretations we make about the gender messages we get from the environment
- Gender-schema theory
- we internalize messages about gender into cognitive rules about how each gender should behave
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Aboukhadijeh, Feross. "Chapter 9: Developmental Psychology" StudyNotes.org. Study Notes, LLC., 12 Oct. 2013. Web. 12 Oct. 2024. <https://www.apstudynotes.org/psychology/outlines/chapter-9-developmental-psychology/>.