Transcript Unit XIII - The Independent School

Unit XIII*
Developing Through the Life Span
*of XVII total
Developmental Psychology
 Three big questions:
 Nature versus nurture?
 Continuity versus stages?
 Stability versus change?
 Three major areas of development:
 Physical
 Cognitive
 Social
 Four areas of study:
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Prenatal and barely postnatal
Childhood
Adolescence
Adulthood
Prenatal Development and Newborns
 Conception
 1+1=1
 Prenatal development
 Zygote – Embryo – Fetus
 Genetic and environmental factors
 Placenta, teratogens and fetal alcohol syndrome
 Newborns
 Reflexes: Rooting, Moro, Babinski, grasping and more
 Research with newborns
 Habituation
 Novelty-preference and facial stimuli
Physical Development:
Infancy and Childhood
 Brain development
 Neuronal production
 Maturation
 Motor development
 Standard course of m.d.
 Genetic functions = maturation
 Infant memory
 Infantile amnesia
 Senses and physical growth
 Sensory development
 The visual cliff study
 Height and weight increases
Cognitive Development:
Infancy and Childhood
 Cognition
 The roots of consciousness
 Jean Piaget
 A Swiss psychologist who worked at a school run by Binet
 Became interested in similar wrong answers on IQ tests
 Developed a stage theory of cognitive development
 Basic ideas
 Schemas
 Assimilation
 Accommodation
Piaget’s Stages: Sensorimotor
 Sensorimotor stage
 Birth to 2 years of age
 Child begins to associate sensory activity and motor activity
 Divided into multiple stages by Piaget
 At around 8-12 months, an infant learns causal relationships
 Object permanence
 The awareness that things exist even when they are unseen.
 Originally thought to manifest by 8th month
 Now it is believed to manifest as early as the 4th month
Piaget’s Stages: Preoperational
 Preoperational stage:
 2 years – 7 years old
 Children are able to use language and symbols, but are
only able to think intuitively.
 Conservation
 Egocentrism
 Animism
 Artificialism
 Theory of Mind
 Jenkins and Astington experiments
Piaget’s Stages: Concrete Operational
 Concrete Operational stage
 About 7 years through 12
years of age
 Children are able to think
logically
 Children are able to
concentrate on two sides of
a problem – conservation
 Mathematics and concrete
analogies are possible
 Children lack deductive
reasoning and ability to
comprehend abstraction.
Piaget’s Stages: Formal Operational
 Formal Operational Stage
 Age 12 onwards
 Children are capable of:
 Abstract thought
 Deductive reasoning
 Hypothetical situations
 Inferring consequences
 Detecting hypocrisy
 The potential for mature
moral reasoning increases
 Some reasoning skills likely
form sooner than Piaget
thought
Modern Reflections on Piaget
 Positives about Piaget’s research
 Sparking interest in the cognitive lives of children
 Emphasis on sequence rather than milestones
 Criticisms of Piaget’s research
 Continuity supplants Piaget’s stages
 Piaget’s tests underestimated some cognitive functions
 Lev Vygotsky
 Russian developmental psychologist
 Emphasized interaction with social environment
 Famous for the “Vygotsky spiral” in education
 Implications for parents
 Children do not think like adults
 Children are cognitively engaged with the world
Social Development in Childhood
 We are born to be social creatures – both in eliciting
social responses and seeking social bonds.
 Childhood social development centers on two concepts:
 Attachment: An emotional tie with another person,
demonstrated through outward behaviors.
 Self-concept: After self-awareness, we learn to assess and
understand “who we are” as separate individuals.
 As noted in the nature and nurture chapter, parenting
styles also influence childhood social growth (although
cognitive and physical growth can be affected, too)
Attachment – Formation and Variation
 Separation and Stranger
anxiety
 Harry Harlow and Contact
Comfort
 Animals and imprinting
 Konrad Lorenz
 Critical period
 Secure vs. Insecure
 Mary Ainsworth and the
“Strange Situation”
 Secure attachment
 Insecure attachment
Attachment Disorder and Child Abuse
 Romanian orphans and Harlow’s monkeys
 Child Abuse and Neglect
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Statistics
Abuse and the brain
Effects of abuse
Neglect
 Attachment disorder (RAD)
 Recovery from disrupted attachment
 Daycare and Attachment – doesn’t belong here
 Quality daycare situations do not effect attachment
 Positive and negative benefits of daycare.
Self-Concept
 Who am I?
 The answer to this is
central to the idea of a
self concept.
 The mirror test
 My disagreement with
the textbook
 Self description
 Adoption and selfconcept
 Positive self-concept
Parenting Styles
 Two basic axes:
 Emotional responsiveness
 Warm and cold
 Order and control
 Strict and undemanding
 Four parenting styles
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Authoritarian: C + S
Permissive: W + U
Uninvolved: C + U
Authoritative W + S
 Diana Baumrind
Adolescence
 Many believe that adolescence is the easiest stage of life.
 Although it was once believed that childhood was the time in
which all of our important traits were formed, experts now see
development as a continuous process.
 Adolescence represents the time between puberty to
independence from parents.
 The idea of adolescence has shifted through time.
 In cultures where teens assume adult responsibilities, adolescence
may not exist at all.
 Adolescence has been described as “blissful” as well as full of
“storm and stress” – à la “The Sorrows of Young Werther”.
Adol.: Physical Development
 Puberty: The period of sexual maturation
 Primary sex characteristics
 Secondary sex characteristics
 Gender specific milestones
 Sequence > Timing
 Brain development
 Pruning of neural connections
 Frontal lobe and myelin development
 Hormonal changes
We all were.
Adol: Cognitive Development
 Abstract thinking begets ego-centrism of a higher order.
 Formal operational stage
 Moral Development
 Lawrence Kohlberg and the ethical dilemmas
 Preconventional Morality: Age<9
 Stages 1 and 2
 Conventional Morality: Late childhood – early adolescence
 Stages 3 and 4
 Postconventional Morality: Formal operational thought
 Stages 5 and 6
Moral Dilemma and Moral Feeling
 Kohlberg dilemma examples
 Carol Gilligan and critiques of Kohlberg
 Moral feelings (moving beyond behavior)
 Social intuition model (Feelings Thoughts
 The runaway train question.
 The runaway train question, part 2.
 Brain differences in moral choices
 The power of magnets – Liang Young et al.
Actions)
Adol: Social Development
 Social development is
thought to involve the
search for identity.
 Social Identity
 Erik Erikson
 German of Danish heritage
 Worked in Vienna
 Expands upon Freud
 8 Psychosocial stages
 One crisis per stage
Erikson’s Psychosocial Stages
 Infancy (Birth – 1)
 Trust vs. Mistrust
 Drive and hope
 Early Childhood (1-3)
 Autonomy vs. Shame and Doubt
 Self-control and Will
 Preschool (3-5/6)
 Initiative vs. Guilt
 Purpose
 School age (6-puberty)
 Industry vs. Inferiority
 Method and Competence
 Adolescence (Puberty -20s)
 Identity vs. Role diffusion
 Devotion and fidelity
 Young adulthood (20s-40s)
 Intimacy vs. Isolation
 Affiliation and Love
 Middle adulthood (40s-60s)
 Generativity vs. Stagnation
 Production and Care
 Late adulthood (60s-death)
 Integrity vs. Despair
 Wisdom
Adolescent Relationships
 Parental relationships
 Many see this as the
essential time when
parental nurture gives way
to peer nurture.
 Relationship changes
 Peer relationships
 Conformity vs. Identity
 Emerging adulthood
 Rites of passage
 Prolonged adolescence
Physical Development: Adulthood
 In general, it is more difficult
to generalize about
adulthood.
 Decline of physical abilities
 General motor function
 Fertility – menopause
 Changes late in life
 Life expectancy
 Chromosomes and telomeres
 Sensory ability
 Health and Brain function
 Alzheimer’s and Dementia
Adulthood: Cognitive changes
 Memory
 Recognition and recall
 Crook and West study
 Prospective vs. timed tasks
 Intelligence
 Cross-sectional and
longitudinal research review
 Crystallized vs. fluid
 Terminal decline
Is this too much?
Adulthood: Social Development
 The midlife crisis myth
 Social clock – culturally prescribed milestones
 Chance encounters and the changing directions of life
 Love
 Lasting intimacy
 Work – relates to Unit X
 Identity and emotions
 Regression towards the emotional mean – biological causes
 The End
 Grief, dying and death
Final Developmental Reflections
Continuity vs. Stages
Stability vs. Change
 Maturation and other
biological processes tend to
support stages.
 Although certainly
personality does
demonstrate stability, many
people also demonstrate
change through a lifespan.
 Learning and environmental
experiences tend to
support the idea of
continuity.
 While stages may not be
accurate, they are still
useful.
 Aging tends to increase
stability, but there are
exceptions.
 Under normal conditions,
adaptive traits are stable,
and maladaptive traits
change. Both S and C are
important.