Chapter 2

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2.1: Developmental Theories and the Issues They Raise

Major Issues in Human Development

Nature-Nurture: strong believers in nature stress the importance of individual genetic makeup universal maturation presses guided by genes, biologically, based predispositions built into genes over the course of evolution and other biological influences

- Nurture emphasize environment (influences outside the person), includes influences of the physical environment and social environment

Role of bio vs the environment

Activity-Passivity: centering on whether humans are active contributors to their own development or are passive shaped by focuses beyond their control

- Focus on the extent to which human beings are active in creating and influencing their own environments and, in the process in producing their own development, or are passively shaped by forces beyond their control

How much humans actively create influence their environment vs being passively shaped by forces

Continuity-Discontinuity: the debate among theorists about whether human development is best characterized as gradual and continuous or abrupt and stage like

- Focus on the changes people undergo over the life span are gradual or abrupt

Small gradual changes vs large sudden changes

Universality-Context Specificity: the debate over the extent to which development changes are common to everyone or it differs from person to person

Development is common to all human vs development differ across culture

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2.2: Freud: Psychoanalytic Theory

Instincts: inborn biological forces that motivate behavior

Unconscious Motivation: the power of instincts and other inner forces to influence our behavior without our awareness

Personality Structure

Id: the impulsive, irrational, and selfish part of the personality whose mission is to satisfy the instincts

Seeks pleasure and gratification

Pleasure principle

Ego: the rational side of the individual that tries to find realistic ways of gratifying the instincts

Negotiates between desires of Id and conscious of superego

Reality principle

Superego: the individuals internalized moral standard

Moral conscience, knows right and wrong

Morality principle

Psychosexual Stages

Libido: Freud's term for the biological energy of the sex instincts

Our sexual instincts

Fixation: in psychoanalytic theory, a defense mechanism in which development is arrested and part of the libido remains tied to an early stage

If we don't pass through each stage successfully and obtain gratification, we become stuck

1) Oral Stage (birth-1yr): libido is focused on the mouth as a source of pleasure. Obtaining oral gratification from a mother figure is critical to later development (psychosexual)

- Infants must learn to trust their caregivers to mute their needs. Responsive parenting is critical (psychosocial)

Important that we obtain nourishment, mouth is the source of pleasure

Fixation - eating, smoking

2) Anal Stage (1-3yrs): libido is focused on the anus , and toilet training creates conflict between the child's biological urges and the societies demands (psychosexual)

Important that we learn to control our bowels; anal area is the focus

Fixation - being too orderly and neat

3) Phallic Stage (3-6yrs): libido centers on the genitals. Resolution of the oedipus or the electra complex results in identification with the same-sex parent and development of the superego

Genital area is the focus, need to resolve oedipus/electra complex

Oedipus complex: boys experience when they develop on incautious desire for their mother and a jealous and hostile rivalry with their father

Boys desire their mother but fear the father will castrate them

Fixation - attraction to older people

Electra complex: girl is said to envy her father for possessing a penis and would choose I'm as a sex object in the hope of sharing this valuable organ she lacks

Girls desire their father and envy that he has ...

Fixation - attraction to older people

4) Latency Stage (6-12/puberty): libido is quiet; psychic energy is invested in schoolwork and play with same-sex friends

No impulse

5) Genital Stage (12/puberty-adulthood): puberty reawakens the sexual instincts as youth seek to establish mature sexual relationships and pursue the biological goal of reproduction

Genital area is the focus, reproduction is the goal

Fixation - too sexually promiscuous

Defense Mechanism: To defend itself against all the anxiety that can arise as these psychic conflicts play out, the ego adopts unconscious coping defines

Identification: individual's tendency to emulate, or adopt the attitudes and behaviors of another person, particularly the same-sex parent

Taking on attitudes and behaviors of another person

Repression: removing unacceptable thoughts or traumatic memory from consciousness

Blocking thoughts and feelings from our own awareness

Displacement: transferring a negative feeling onto something or someone less threatening

Regression: retreating to an earlier, less traumatic stage of development

Projection - falsely attributing our feelings to another

Rationalization - concealing true motivations through elaborate but incorrect explanations

Reaction formation - acting/thinking in the opposite way you feel

Sublimation - Directing negative feelings into socially appropriate behavior

Strength and Weaknesses

Weakness

ambiguous

internally inconsistent

difficult to pin down and test

Strength

influenced theories of human development, personality, and psychotherapy

highlight the importance for later development of early experiences

emphasized the importance of emotions

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2.3: Erikson: Neo-Freudian Psychoanalytic Theory

Differences from Freud

Placed less emphasis on sexual urges as the drivers of development and more emphasis on social influences - not only parent but peers, teachers, schools, etc

Placed less emphasis on the unconscious irrational, and selfish id and more on the rational ego and its adaptive powers

Held a more positive view of human nature, seeing people as active in their development, largely rational, and able to overcome the effects of harmful early experiences

Put more emphasis on development after adolescents

Put less emphasis on sexual urges

More positive view on human nature

Erikson's Psychosocial Theory

1) Trust vs Mistrust (Birth-1yr): infant must learn to trust their caregivers to meet their needs. Responsible parenting is critical

Successfully resolved if you're able to trust caregivers, rely on them, feel secure

2) Autonomy vs Shame and Doubt (1-3yrs): children must learn to be autonomous to assert their wills and do things for themselves, or they will doubt their abilities

Need to become more independent and explore the world

3) Initiative vs Guilt (3-6yrs): preschoolers develop initiative by devising and conversing out bold plans, but they must learn not to impinge on the rights of others

Continue trying new things, free to have their own opinion

4) Industry vs Inferiority (6-12yrs): children must master important social and academic skills and keep up with their peers; otherwise, they will feel inferior

Sense of mastery, know what you're good and bad @

5) Identify vs Role Confusion (12-20/Adolescence): adolescents ask who they are and must establish social and vocational identities otherwise, they will remain confused about the roles they should play as adults

"Know who you are," own ideas and values that may conflict with parents

6) Intimacy vs Isolation (20-40/young adulthood): young adults seek to form a shared identity with another person, but may fear intimacy and experience loneliness and isolation

Mutual relationships

7) Generativity vs Stagnation (40-65/middle adulthood): middle age adults must feel that they are producing something that will outlive them, either as parents or as workers, otherwise they will become stagnant and self-centered

Contributing to society, making your mark

8) Integrity vs Despair (65+/late adulthood): older adults must come to view their lives as meaningful to face death without worries and regret

Feeling you accomplished what you wanted, lived a good life

Strength and Weaknesses

Strength

Easier to accept than Freud's

Great impact on thinking about research on adolescent identity formation and adult intimacy

Useful description of human personality development

Weaknesses

Sometimes vague and hard to test

Does not provide an adequate explanation of how this development comes about

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2.4: Learning Theories

Tabula rasa: the idea that the mind of an infant is a "blank slate" and that all knowledge, abilities, behaviors, and motives are required

Watson: Classical Conditioning

Behaviorism: a school of thinking in psychology that holds that conclusion about human development should be based on controlled observations of overt behavior rather than on speculation about unconscious motives or other unobservable phenomena; the philosophical underpinning of early theories of learning

Skinner: Operant Conditioning

Positive reinforcement: the process in operant conditioning whereby a response is strengthened when its consequence is a pleasant event

Negative reinforcement: behavioral tendency is strengthened because something unpleasant or undesirable is removed from the situation or is escaped our avoided after the behavior occurs

Positive punishment: occurs when an unpleasant stimulus is the consequence of a behavior

Negative punishment: desirable stimulus is removed following the behavior

Extinction: the gradual weakening and disappearances of a learned response when it is no longer reinforced

Bandura: Social Cognitive

Observational learning: simply learning by observing the behavior of other people

Latent learning: learning occurs but is not evident in behavior, children can learn from observations even though they do not imitate the learned responses

Vicarious reinforcement: a process in which learners become more or less likely to perform a behavior based on whether consequences experienced by the model they observe are reinforcing or punishing

Self-efficacy: belief that they can effectively produce a particular desired outcome

Reciprocal determinism: the notion in social cognitive theory that the flow of influence between people and their environment is a 2 way street; the environment may affect the person, but the person's character and behavior will also influence the environment

Strength and Weaknesses

Strength

Theories are precise and testable

Important application

Highly effective behavioral and cognitive behavioral techniques for optimizing development and treating developmental problems

Weakness

It does not demonstrate that learning is responsible for commonly observed developmental changes

Does not provide normal changes across the life span

It puts too little emphasis on biological influences on development

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2.5: Piaget: Cognitive Developmental Theory

Constructivism: the position taken by Piaget and others that humans actively create their own understanding of the world from their experiences, or opposed to being born with innate ideas or being programmed by the environment

We actively construct new understandings of the world based on our experiences

Piaget's Cognitive Development Stages

1) Sensorimotor (Birth-2yrs): infants use their senses and motor actions to explore and understanding the world. At the start they have only innate reflexes, but they develop increasingly intelligent actions. By the end, they are capable of symbolic thought using images/words and can therefor plan solutions to problems mentally

Acquire knowledge through senses and motor abilities

2) Preoperational (2-7yrs): preschoolers use their capacity for symbolic thought to develop language, engage in pretend play, and solve problems. But their thinking is not yet logical; they are egocentric and are easily fooled by perceptions, filing conservation problems

Solve problems, develop language, but they make a lot of errors with their thinking

Symbolic thinking - pretend thinking

Object permanence - understanding that objects continue to exist even when you can't currently see them

Egocentrism - thinking that everyone sees the world as you do

3) Concrete Operations (7-11/12yrs): school-age children acquire concrete logical operations that allow them to mentally classify, add, and otherwise act on concrete objects in their heads. They can solve practical, real-world problems through a trial-&-error approach but have difficulty with hypothetical and abstract problems

Abilities improve, become more logical and concrete

Asking more intelligent questions about the world

Still unable to understand abstract thinking

4) Formal Operations (11/12-adult): adolescents can think about abstract concepts and purely hypothetical possibilities and can trace the long-range consequences of possible actions. With age and experience, they can form hypothesis and systematically test them using the scientific method

Can engage in abstract reasoning, philosophy

Possibilities, future thinking

Strengths and Weakness

Strengths

Thinking changes in qualitative ways during childhood, that children are active in their own development

Influenced education and child rearing

Weakness

Underestimated the cognitive abilities of young children

Critics question whether Piaget's stages really hang together as general modes of thinking

Put too many demands on children

Putting too little emphasis on social and cultural influences on cognitive development

Other Perspectives on Cognitive Development

Sociocultural perspective: cognitive development offered by a contemporary of Piaget, Russian psychologist Lev, Vygetsky

Information-processing approach: an approach to cognition that emphasize the fundamental mental process involved in attention, perception, memory, and decision making

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2.6: Systems Theories

Bronfenbrenner's Bioecological Model: emphasizes the roles of both nature and nurture as the developing person interacts with a series of environment systems over time

Development is not universal; it varies according to one's environment

Microsystem: an immediate physical and social environment in which the person interacts face-to-face with other people and it influences and is affected by them

Immediate physical and social environment, face-to-face interactions

Mesosystem: consists of interrelationships between 2 or more microsystems

Relationships between microsystems

Exosystem: consists of linkages involving social settings that individuals do not experience directly but that can still influence their development

Social settings not directly experienced but still influential

Macrosystem: the larger cultural context in which the microsystem, mesosystem, and ecosystem are embedded

Larger cultural context

Chronosystem: to capture the idea that people and their environments and the relatives between the 2 changes over time and unfold in particular patterns or sequences over a person's lifetime

Changes over in a specific timeframe and unfold over time

Strength and Weaknesses

Strength

Conceptualizing development as the often unpredictable product of biological and environmental forces

Weakness

Does not provide a clear picture

May never provide a coherent picture of development