ACD Exam 3

Freud

• Current influence is limited to braod psyclogical concepts, not the specifics of theories

• Psychosexual development: Id, ego, superego

Erikson

• Accepted basic elements of Freud’s theory and added social factors

• Eight related developmental stags with specific crises at each age → stage resolution needed for growth

Watson’s behaviorism

• Development is determined by the social environment

• Learning through conditioning

• Behavior should be studied, not the mind

• Advised parents to be extremely strict to achieve distance and objectivity in their relationship with their children

Little Albert experiment

• First exposed to small animals, including a white rat, Albert reacted positively

• Paired rat exposure with a loud noise- Albert became frightened to the rat itself

• Generalized fear to include other furry animals

Skinner’s operant conditioning

• Believed that all behavior is a response influenced by the outcome of past behavior

• Intermittent reinforcement

• Behavior modification therapy

• Discoveries relevant for parents/teachers: attention as a powerful reinforcer, time-out/temporary isolation

Intermittent reinforcement

• Inconsistent response to a behavior

• Makes behaviors difficult to extinguish

• Comes from Skinner’s operant conditioning

Bandura’s social-learning theory

• Most human learning is inherently social

• Emphasizes observation and imitation

• Cognitive processes that underlie observational learning: attention, encoding, storing, and retrieving

• Emphasizes the role of the active child

Reciprocal determinism

• Child-environment influences operate in both directions

• Proposed by Bandura

Punished

(Bobo doll experiment) Children who saw the model _______ limited the behavior less than the other two groups.

Rewarded

(Bobo doll experiment) Children who saw the model ______ were equally likely to imitate the aggressive behavior.

Selman’s Stage Theory of Role Taking

• Focused on the ability to think about something from another’s point of view

• Stage 1 begins at age 8

• Relies on the assumption that as children grow less egocentric in their thinking, they can consider multiple perspectives simultaneously

Dodge’s Information Processing Theory of Problem Solving

Emphasizes the role of cognition in social behavior

Hostile attributional bias

• A general expectation that others are antagonistic to them

• Associated with harsh parenting and physical abuse

Dweck’s theory of self attributions and achievement motivation

• Children’s achievement motivation is based on either learning goals or performance goals

• Entity/helplessness orientation vs. incremental/mastery orientation

Learning goals

Goals for seeking to improve competence or master new material

Performance goals

Goals seeking to receive positive assessments of competence or to avoid negative assessments

Incremental view

• Belief that intelligence can be developed through effort

• Motivated by a desire for mastery → meeting challenges and overcoming failures

Entity view

• Belief that intelligence is a fixed and unchangeable trait

• Feel helpless when failure occurs

Entity/helpless orientation

• Based on approval received (or not received from other people)

• Seek out situations that guarantee success

• Intelligence is fixed

Incremental/mastery orientation

• Based on own effort and learning, not on evaluation from others

• Will persist to solve a hard problem

• Growth mindset

Emotions

• A combination of physiological and cognitive responses to thoughts or experiences

• Neural responses, physiological responses, subjective feelings, emotional expressions, desire to act

Discrete emotions theory

• Emotions are viewed as innate, and each emotion has a specific set of bodily or facial reactions

• Emphasizes evolution and adaptation

Functional perspective of emotions

• Argues that individuals experience emotions to manage the relationship between themselves and the environment

• Emotion promotes action toward achieving a goal and occurs most often at a subconscious level in both children and adults

Happiness, sadness, anger, fear, surprise, disgust

The six basic emotions

Social smiles

• Response directed toward people around 3 months

• Promotes social interaction and relationships

Laughter

• Occurs during pleasurable activities around 3-4 months

• Strengthens parent-child relationship

Separation anxiety

• Feelings of distress that children experience when separated from emotionally attached other (exp: caregivers)

• Appears around 8 months, declines around 24 months

• Some is normal and adaptive

Anger

• Adaptive response to frustrating or threatening situations

• Self-defense mechanism or motivation

Sadness

Adaptive emotion, draws attention/support from caregiver

Surprise

• Emotional reaction to a sudden, unexpected event

• Involves cognitive understanding that something is not as it usually is

• Infants begin to express around 6 months of age and usually transforms into another emotional expression

Disgust

• Evolutionary basis → avoid potential poisons or disease-causing bacteria

• Learned, in part, from observations of adult behavior (exp: eating insects)

Self conscious emotions

• Require that children have a sense of themselves as separate from others

• Ability emerges around 2 years of age, with discontinuous growth

• Guilt, shame, embarrassment, jealousy, empathy, pride

Guilt

• Associated with empathy for others

• Feelings of remorse and regret

• Desire to undo the consequences of behavior

Shame

• Not related to concern about others

• Self-focused, personal failure

3 months

The age that children are able to distinguish facial expression of happiness, surprise, and anger

7 months

The age that children appear to discriminate several additional expressions, such as fear, sadness, and interest

16-18 months

The age that preferred toys associated with surprise and happy faces and avoided toys associated with anger or fear

Social referencing

The use of a parent’s or another adult’s facial expression or vocal cues to decide how to deal with novel, ambiguous, or possibly threatening situations

12 months

The age that social referencing emerges

2-3 years

The age that rudimentary ability to label a narrow range of emotional expressions emerges

3-5 years

The age that children realize emotions people express do not necessarily reflect their true feelings

Display rules

• Social group’s informal norms about when, where, and how much one should show emotions

• Two main strategies: simulating emotion, masking an emotion

Emotional regulation

Using internal/ external resources to automatically/ volitionally emotions to accomplish a goal at a given time at place

Modulate

Amplify or reduce the occurrence, duration, and intensity of internal states of affect and/or their behavioral displays

Situation selection, situation modification, attentional deployment, cognitive change, response modulation

5 steps emotional regulation process

External

In the first few months, _______ regulation of biological function

Oxytocin

The neurotransmitter released during nursing, leading to reduced levels of maternal anxiety

Prefrontal and paralimbic

Areas of the brain that develop to support increasing complex emotional experiences

Temperament

• Individual differences in emotion, activity level, and attention

• Consistent across situations, relatively stable over time, present in infancy, influenced by genes and environment

Easy babies

• Adjusted readily to new situations, quickly established daily routines such as sleeping and eating, and generally were cheerful in mood and easy to calm

• 40% of babies

Difficult babies

• Were slow to adjust to new experiences, tended to react negatively and intensely to novel stimuli and events, and were irregular in their daily routines and bodily functions

• 10% of babies

Slow-to-warm babies

• Were somewhat difficult at first but became easier over time as they had repeated contact with new objects, people, and situations

• 15% of babies

Five key dimensions of temperament

Fear, distress/anger/frustration, attention span, activity level, and smiling and laughter

Dopamine

Neurotransmitter especially relevant for self regulation

Goodness of fit

Degree to which an individual’s temperament is compatible with the demands and expectations of their social environment

Family

• A group that involves at least one adult who is related to the child by birth, marriage, adoption, or foster status and who is responsible for providing basic necessities as well as love, support, safety, stability, and opportunities for learning

• Complex social units whose members are all interdependent and reicprocally influence one another

Family structure

• The number of, and relationships among, people living in a household

• Can change

Single parents

• More common over the last 60 years

• Less time to spend with children

• More likely to be low SES

Older

First-time parents are ______ than in the past

Grandparent

• 1 in 10 children live with a ________ (either with and without their parent)

• _______ as a primary caregiver has doubled over the last 50 years

Obergefell v Hodges (2015)

Same-sex marriages ruled constitutional

Social parents

• Biological parent’s partner, not biologically related to the child

• Less likely to spend money on their non-biological children → couples spend less money on goods/activities for their children

Negative effects of divorce

• More depression, low self-esteem, less socially competent, more externalizing problems, drop in academic achievement

• Most children do not suffer significant, enduring problems

Positive effects of divorce

• Less conflict, fewer emotional problems

• High levels of warmth from parents can buffer children from negative effects

Simple

A new stepparent joins another parent and their children

Complex/blended

Involves both a new stepparent and new stepsiblings

Family dynamics

The way in which family members interact through various relationships

Discipline

A set of strategies/behaviors parents use to teach children how to behave appropriately

Internalization

The process by which children learn and accept the reasons for desired behavior

Other-oriented induction

• Reasoning focused on the effects of a behavior on other people

• Effective in promoting internalization and teaching children empathy for others

Punishment

• Negative stimulus to reduce behavior

• Makes it clear that the parents disapprove of the behavior, but on its own it does not teach the child how to behave in the future

Parenting style

• Constellation of parenting behaviors and attitudes that set the emotional climate of parent-child interactions

• Two dimensions: warmth/responsiveness, parenting control/demandingness

Authoritative parenting

• High in demandingness and supportiveness

• Clear standards and limits, attentive/responsive, respect and consider children’s perspectives

• Children tend to be competent, self-assured, popular with peers, and lower in antisocial behavior

Authoritarian parenting

• High in demandingness and low in responsiveness

• Oriented toward parent’s authority and child’s obedience

• Enforce demands through “parent power” and threats/punishment

• Expect children to comply with demands without question or explanation

• Children tend to be low in social/academic competence, unhappy/unfriendly, less capable of coping with stress, higher in depression/aggression/delinquency/substance abuse

Permissive

• High in responsiveness but low in demandingness

• Overly lenient → no encouragement of emotion regulation or appropriate behavior

• Children tend to be impulsive, low in self-regulation, high in externalizing problems, low in school achievement, higher misconduct/substance use

Uninvolved parenting

• Low in both demandingness and responsiveness, generally disengaged

• No limits set nor monitoring of behavior, not supportive

• Can be rejecting/neglectful

• Focused on own needs over child’s

• Children tend to have insecure/disturbed attachments, struggle with peer relationships, more antisocial behavior, lower academic competence, more internalizing problems

Mothers

• Tend to spend more time with their children

• More likely to provide physical care and emotional support

Attachment

• Affective connection through time

• Serves two basic functions: secure base and safe haven

• A universal phenomenon

The bonding hypothesis

• Posits that first few minutes are critically important for mothers to bond with their newborn children

• Initially supported by experiment conducted with “at risk (replication of results failed in populations who were not considered ‘at risk’)

• Not a universal theory

Behaviorism

• Proposed that the infant-mother bond is classically conditioned as the mother provides nourishment to the child

• Food = unconditioned stimulus that evokes pleasure

• Mothers = conditioned stimulus linked with food

Drive-reduction theory

Freud suggested that infants become attached to the people who satisfy their need for food

The Naure of Love

• Tested whether pleasure of food or pleasure of comfort was ore important to infant monkeys

• Harry Harlow

• Infant monkeys strongly preferred, and thus likely needed, the comfort provided by the “cloth mother”

Attachment theory

• John Bowlby and Mary Ainsworth

Bowlby’s Attachment Theory

• Biological predisposition to develop attachment to caregivers

• Evolutionarily rooted → increases an infant's chance of survival

• Innate bias to the attachment process → however, the cevelopment and quality of the infant’s attachment depend on the anture of their experiences with the caregiver

Survival, emotional security, co-regulation

Why attachment is important

Internal working model of attachment (IWM)

• A mental representation of the self, of attachment figures, and of relationships in general

• Bowlby proposed that this guides an individual’s relationship expectations across life

• Constructed via experiences with parents/caregivers

• Thought to impact children’s overall adjustment, social behavior, perceptions of others, self-esteem, and sense of self

Asocial phase

• First phase of normative development of attachments (0-6 weeks)

• Infant behaviors that are conductive to attachment are present (exp: staring, giggling, grabbing)

Phase of indiscriminate attachments

• Second phase of normative development of attachments (6 weeks - 7 months)

• Infants prefer people to inanimate objects but do not show a preference for one specific individual

Specific attachment phase

• Third phase of normative development of attachments (7-9 months)

• Specific and direct attachments to a small number of individuals (exp: parents)

Phase of multiple attachments

• Fourth phase of normative development of attachments (10+ months)

• Development of hierarchy of attachment figures that can change over time, particularly over the tranisiton to adulthood

Mary Ainsworth

• Concluded that two key factors provide insight into the quality of an infant’s attachment to their caregiver

  • The extent to which an infant uses their primary caregiver as a secure base

  • How the infant reacts to brief separations from, and reunions with, the caregiver

Strange situation

• Age range: 9-18 months

• Child’s behavior is observed and rated

  • Attempts to seek closeness/contact with the parent

  • Resistance/avoidance of the parent

  • Interactions with the stranger

  • Interactions with parents from a distance

• Reunions with caregivers are the most important

Secure Attachment

• 65% of children

• Uses parent as a secure base of exploration; separation distress effectively alleviated by caregiver

• Mothers read signals accurately

Insecure-Anxious/Avoidant attachment

• 20-25% of children

• Avoids caregiver upon reunion after stressful separation

• Mothers tend to be indifferent and emotionally unavailable

Insecure-Anxious/Resistant attachment

• 10-15% of children

• Poverty of exploration, unable to be settled by caregiver, seeks but resists comfort

• Mothers inconsistently respond to signals

Disorganized/disoriented attachment

• 15% of children

• Want to approach their caregiver, but also see them as a source of fear from which they should withdraw

• Rate is significantly higher among maltreated infants

• Mother is abusive or exhibits disoriented behavior

Universality hypothesis

All human infants develop specific attachment to their caregivers

Normativity hypothesis

Most infants develop effective bonds involving the ability to use their primary caregiver as a secure base for exploration and a safe haven in times of distress

Sensitivity hypothesis

• Security is engendered by sensitive caregiving (exp: being responsive to distress-related cues)

• Sensitivty → security

Parental sensitivty

Caregiving behavior that involves the expression of warmth and contingent responsiveness to children