Developmental Psych exam 2

Freud

• thought that even very young children have a sexual nature that motivates their behavior and influences their relationships. He proposed that children pass through a series of universal developmental stages. In each successive stage, children encounter conflicts related to a particular erogenous zone,

Erogenous Zone

• The area of the body where the id's pleasure-seeking energies are focused during a particular stage of psychosexual development.
• Ex: Mouth, Anus, Genitals

Id

• in psychoanalytic theory, the earliest and most primitive personality structure.
• It is unconscious and operates with the goal of seeking pleasure

Pleasure Principle

Freud's theory regarding the id's desire to maximize pleasure and minimize pain in order to achieve immediate gratification.

Pyschosexual Theory

Freud's theory proposing that sexual desire is the driving force behind human development

Oral Stage

• Freud's first stage of psychosexual development during which pleasure is centered in the mouth
• Conflict: baby wants to suck on something all the time, but at some point, the mother/parent say that the baby needs to stop that behavior
• How it is resolved in 2 ways: satisfactory resolution OR become fixated (seek to satisfy that drive in other ways as you get older; ex: bite nails)

Ego

• in psychoanalytic theory, the second personality structure to develop.
• It is the rational, logical, problem-solving component of personality

Anal Stage

• Freud's pychosexual period during which a child learns to control his bodily excretions
• Ages 1-3
• Conflict over toilet training
  Kid wants to go whenever they want to wherever they want to
  Society says you cannot wear a diaper, so you need to hold it and only go in a toilet when you are trained

Phallic Stage

• Age: 3-5
• Freud also believed that young children experience intense sexual desires during the stage, and he proposed that their efforts to cope with them leads to the emergence of the third personality structure, the superego.
• Pleasure center has moved to the genital area
• Where the child realizes that they have a penis or a vagina: Realize that girls don't have the same parts as boys or vice versa
• Figure out that touching their genital parts feels good

Superego

• in psychoanalytic theory, the third personality structure, consisting of internalized moral standards
• essentially what we think of as conscience and is based on the child's adoption of their caregivers' standards for acceptable behavior.
• guides the child to avoid actions that would result in guilt

latency period

• Kids are not so much interested in sexual urges
• Wanted to create friendships and develop skills
• Academic accomplishments, Playing sports, etc.
• Ages: 6-12

Genital Stage

• Freud's last stage of personality development, from the onset of puberty through adulthood
• More mature feelings
• Romantic feelings
• Sexual desires come back and are more intense

Erik Erikson

Known for his 8-stage theory of Psychosocial Development

Erikson's Theory of Pyschosocial Development

• Each stage is characterized by a specific crisis, or set of developmental issues, that the individual must resolve.
• If the dominant issue of a given stage is not successfully resolved before the onset of the next stage, the person will continue to struggle with it

Trust vs Mistrust

• Erikson's first stage during the first year of life,
• In the first year of life, babies are trying to figure out if the world is a trustworthy place or not
• Can they depend on consistent care
• If this ability does not develop, the person will have difficulty forming intimate relationships later in life

Autonomy vs Shame and Doubt

• Age 1-3.5
• Challenge for the child is to achieve a strong sense of autonomy while adjusting to increasing social demands
• Will develop a sense of shame and doubt if they cannot do things on their own Ex: dressing themselves
• If children are subjected to severe punishment or ridicule, they may come to doubt their abilities
• in a supportive atmosphere that allows children to achieve self-control without the loss of self-esteem, children gain a sense of autonomy

Initiatve vs Guilt

• Age: 4-6
• A crucial attainment is the development of conscience
• Challenge for the child is to achieve a balance between initiative and guilt

Industry v. Inferiority (Erikson)

• Age: 6 to puberty
• Crucial for ego development
• Become proficient at skills that are important in their culture, and they learn to work industriously and to cooperate with peers
• Successful experiences give the child a sense of competence, but failure can lead to excessive feelings of inadequacy or inferiority
• comparisons, am I "good" at things

Identity vs Role Confusion

• Age: Adolescence to Early Adulthood
• teenagers and young adults search for and become their true selves
• adolescence / identity crisis
• adolescents must resolve the question of who they really are or live in confusion about what roles they should play as adults

Social Learning Theories

• theories that emphasize the behavior-consequences associations that children learn by observing and interacting with others in social situations
• emphasizes observation and imitation

Albert Bandera

• advocate of the social-learning theory
• argued that most human learning is inherently social in nature
• Children learn simply from watching what other people do and then imitating them

vicarious reinforcement

observing someone else receive a reward or a punishment — would affect the children's subsequent reproduction of the behavior.

Bobo Doll study

• Experimental study where children watched adults either being punished or praised for rough play with an inflatable doll
• Kids watched a video of adults performing aggressive actions on a bobo doll
• The question was whether vicarious reinforcement (observing someone else receive a reward or a punishment) would affect the children's subsequent reproduction of the behavior
• Boys had higher aggression but it increased for girls when they were rewarded

Reciprocal Determinism

child-environment influences operate in both directions; children are both affected by and influence aspects of their environment

Ecological Theories

• Study behavior as it emerges in a particular environment
• Evolutionary perspective toward behavior
• Focused on what helps to explain how animals behave in context of how they live
• Focused on what helps explain how animals survive and reproduce
• The developmental issue that is front and center in ecological theories is the interaction of nature and nurture

Ethology

• study of behavior within an evolutionary context,
• attempts to understand behavior in terms of its adaptive or survival value.

Konrad Lorenz

researcher who focused on critical attachment periods in baby birds, a concept he called imprinting

imprinting

an animal or human forms a strong, early, and irreversible bond with a specific object or individual during a critical period in their development

Evolutionary Psychology

• Natural selection and Adaptation
• What behaviors enhances survival and spreading genes?
• Humans have prolonged youth and strong social ties
• Longer brains = longer development
• Parental Investment Theory

Parental Investment Theory

parents are motivated by the drive to perpetuate their genes, which can happen only if their offspring survive long enough to pass those genes to the next generation.

Cinderella Effect

refers to the fact that rates of child maltreatment are considerably higher for stepparents than for biological parents

Bioecological Model

-Bronfenbrenner's approach, in which the individual develops within and is affected by a set of nested environments, from the family to the entire culture.

• all levels are interconnected
• effects are bidirectional

Microsystem

• first level of bioecological model
• the immediate environment that an individual child experiences and participates in
• ex: School, sports team, church, family

Mesosystem

• in the bioecological model, the interconnections among immediate, or microsystem, settings
• Ex: Parental Involvment at school

Exosystem

• environmental settings that a child does not directly experience but that can affect the child indirectly
• ex: Parents work enviornment

Macrosystem

• consists of the general beliefs, values, customs, and laws of the larger society
• Cultural and class differences permeate almost every aspect of a child's life

Chronosystem

• historical changes that influence the other systems
• Ex: technological advancements, Covid

Emotions

neural and physiological responses to the environment, subjective feelings, cognitions related to those feelings, and the desire to take action

Components of Emotions

1. Neural responses
2. Physiological factors, including heart rate, breathing rate, and hormone levels
3. Subjective feelings
4. Emotional expressions
5. The desire to take action, including the desire to escape, approach, or change people or things in the environment

Six Basic Emotions

· Happiness
· Fear
· Disgust
· Anger
· Sadness
· Surprise

Happiness

• Smiling:
  · Rare in the first month
  · Between 3-8 weeks start
  · Early smiles are not just to people
  · Around 2-3 months start to see social smiles
  · Then laughter starts 3-4 months
  · 7 months smiling more at familiar people

Fear

• Begins typically around 8 months
  · Possibly associated with gaining mobility (crawling)
• Both stranger and separation anxiety
• Common cross-culturally
  · Still have some individual differences

Anger

• Begins to emerge around 4 months
• Peaks around 18-24 months
• As they get older, intent matters more

Sadness

• At removal of a desired object
• When separated from caregiver
• Newborns cry about 2 hours a day
• Adaptive emotion

Surprise

• emotional reaction to a sudden unexpected event
• involves a cognitive understanding that something is not as it usually is
• most infants being to express around 6 months
• thought to be important to early learning
• extent of expression is influenced by emotional enviornment provided by parents

Disgust

• is thought to have an evolutionary basis, as it helps humans avoid potential poisons or disease-causing bacteria
• Fetuses show disgust face when fed kale
• Culture plays a factor (e.g., food)

Self-conscious Emotions

• Involve a sense of self
• Ex: embarrassment, envy, pride
• Emerge at around age 2
• Shame: hiding, thinking they are "bad"
• Guilt: feeling remorse, trying to fix things
• Influenced by parenting
• Cultural practices are also important

By 3 months

When can infants distinguish facial expressions of happiness, surprise, and anger?

By 7 months

infants appear to discriminate a number of additional expressions, such as fear, sadness, and interest

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
• children seem better at it if they receive both vocal and facial cues
• 12 months

Children's Understanding of Emotions

• 4-7 months: distinguish emotions in others
• ~ 12 months: social referencing
  § Using emotions of others as information
• Age 3: label emotions in others (better with positive emotions)
• around age 3: begin to understand false emotions
  § display rules
• cannot label the self-conscious emotions pride, shame, and guilt until early to middle elementary school

Autism difficulties with emotion

difficulties with interpersonal communication and interaction, including difficulties expressing one's own emotions and responding to emotions in others

emotional intelligence

the ability to cognitively process information about emotions and to use that information to guide both thought and behavior

display rules

• a social group's informal norms about when, where, and how much one should show emotions and when and where displays of emotion should be suppressed or masked by displays of other emotions
• two strategies: Simulating false emotions, Masking real emotions

Emotional Regulation

• set of both conscious and unconscious processes used to both monitor and modulate emotional experiences and expressions
• develops gradually over the course of childhood and paves the way for success in social interactions as well as in academic settings
• infants show rudimentary signs of doing this by 5 months

co-regulation

the process by which a caregiver provides the needed comfort or distraction to help a child reduce their distress

self-comforting behaviors

• repetitive actions that regulate arousal by providing a mildly positive physical sensation
• ex: sucking thumb

self-distraction

looking away from an upsetting stimulus in order to regulate one's level of arousal

social competence

the ability to achieve personal goals in social interactions while simultaneously maintaining positive relationships with others

emotional regulation strats

• Young children : behavioral strategies (leaving and going to your room, going away from the things that make them upset)
• Older children: cognitive strategies
  · As you age, you use more cognitive abilities to think through issues
  · Delay of gratification

Temperament

• Individual differences in emotional reactivity, activity, and attention
• Biology based and stable
• Also influenced and modified by environment

New York Temperament study

• Longitudinal study
• Thomas and Chess
• Started in 1956
• 141 New York families
• Interviewed moms
• Three Categories: Easy, Difficult, Slow to warm

Easy Temperament

• 40%
• Positive mood,
• low reactivity,
• adaptable

Difficult Temperament

• 10%
• Irritable
• active
• high reactivity

Slow-to-warm temperament

• 15%
• negative mood
• slow to adapt
• mild reactions

Current Approaches to Temperament

• "Within person approach" - not categories
• Research from Mary Rothbart and colleagues:
  · Fearfulness
  · Distress to limitations
  · Attention span
  · Activity level
  · Smiling and laughter (positive affect)

True

Ratings of temperament tend to be fairly stable over time and tend to predict later development in areas such as behavioral problems, anxiety disorders, and social competence

Fearfulness (Rothbart)

Tendency to experience unease, worry, or nervousness to novel or potentially threatening situations

Distress to limitations (Rothbart)

Negative emotional response related to having ongoing task interrupted or blocked

Attention span (Rothbart)

Attention to an object or task for an extended period of time

Activity level (Rothbart)

Rate and extent of gross motor body movements

Smiling and Laughter (Rothbart)

Positive emotional response to a change in the intensity, complexity, or incongruity of a stimulus

Measurments of Temperament

• Parent report (questionnaires)
• Observation
• EEG (hemispheric differences)
• Heart rate and variability

Determinants of Temperament

• genetic (biological factors)
• parenting (environmental factors)
• prenatal maternal stress (teratogens)
• active child theme: dynamic systems

Temperament Outcomes

• Related to social adjustment
• Goodness of fit: individual child's temperament may fit better in certain homes
• Differential susceptibility: family environment determines outcomes of the same temperamental traits

differential susceptibility

a circumstance in which the same temperament characteristic that puts some children at high risk for negative outcomes when exposed to a harsh home environment also causes them to blossom when their home environment is positive

WW2 Orphans

• Dr. Rene Spitz
• Films of "depressed" infants
• Physical needs cared for but little emotional contact
• "Failure to thrive"
• "Maternal deprivation" hypothesis
• demonstrates that emotional deprivation and a lack of meaningful relationships with caregivers in the first years of life hinder optimal social and cognitive development

Harry Harlow's attachment research

• Separated monkeys from their mothers
• Two surrogate mothers
  · One cloth, one wire
  · One would have bottle
• Testing whether feeding or "contact comfort" was key to development
• Monkeys preferred the cloth covered monkey regardless of which had the bottle

Attachment Theory

theory based on John Bowlby's work, which posits that children are biologically predisposed to develop attachments to caregivers as a means of increasing the chances of their own survival

Jown Bowbly

• Psychoanalyst
• Proposed that infants are more competent than needy (a break from Freudian thought)
• Attachment: children use trusted adults as a source of safety and security from which to explore
  · How would this help survival and well-being?
• Internal working models

How attatchment helps with survival

• keeping the caregiver (who is also the source for food and protection) in close proximity
• helps the child feel emotionally secure, which allows the child to explore the world without fear
• it serves as a form of co-regulation that helps children manage their levels of arousal and their emotions

attatchment

innate basis but the development and quality is high dependent on the nature of experiences with caregivers

Internal Working Model of Attatchment

• the child's mental representation of the self, of attachment figure(s), and of relationships in general that is constructed as a result of experiences with caregivers
• guides children's interactions with caregivers and other people in infancy and at older ages
• believed to influence children's overall adjustment, social behavior, perceptions of others, and the development of their self-esteem and sense of self

Mary Ainsworth

• Student of Bowlby
• Observations in Uganda
  . Even in large communal settings kids still used mother as a secure base
• Developed the Strange Situation to measure attachment

Strange Situation

• a procedure for studying child-caregiver attachment;
  -the child, accompanied by the parent, is placed in a laboratory playroom equipped with interesting toys
• the child is exposed to seven episodes, including two separations from, and reunions with, the parent, as well as two interactions with a stranger — one when the parent is out of the room and one when the parent is present (3 minutes Each)
• observers rate the child's behaviors, including attempts to seek closeness and contact with the parent, resistance to or avoidance of the parent, interactions with the stranger, and interactions with the parent from a distance using language or gestures

Secure Attatchment

• 50 to 60% of the infants
• Usually upset by separation
• Greets parent warmly upon return
• Use caregiver as secure base

Insecure-reistant attachment

• 10% of Infants
• "ambivalent"
• Little exploration; clingy
• Distressed when caregiver leaves
• Ambivalent when they return
• Resist the caregiver's initiations
• Ex: wants to be picked up, but fights to get free when actually picked up

Insecure-avoidant Attachment

• 15% of infants
• Little distress when caregiver leaves
• Mostly ignore the caregiver

Disorganized Attatchment

• 10% to 15% of infants
• Approach and avoidance
• Confused, sometimes "freeze"
• they want to approach their caregiver, but they also seem to regard the caregiver as a source of fear from which they want to withdraw
• More prevalent in population with high stress or abuse

Predictors of Attatchment Style

• Parents temperament
• home enviornment

parental sensitivity

caregiving behavior that involves the expression of warmth and contingent responsiveness to children, such as when they require assistance or are in distress

Cultural variations in attachment

• Secure is most common world-wide
• German parents: discourage clinging
  · Higher proportion of avoidant
• Japanese Families: lots of holding, little separation between mom and baby
  · Higher proportion of resistant

Parental Causes of Attatchment

• depends on quality of caregiving
• Secure: Mothers are sensitive and responsive, affectionate and expressive
• Avoidant: Mothers are indifferent and impatient
• Resistant: Mothers are inconsistent and anxious
• Disorganized: Mothers are more intrusive or emotionally unavailable, sometimes harsh

Attatchment Effects

• Secure: more exploratory, better self-regulation
  · Better Peer relationships
  o Even into adolescence
• Insecure: more avoidant or clingy
• Disorganized: more hostile
• "Internal working Models"

James Marica

• Instead of a "crisis", proposed that individuals move through exploration and commitment
• alternate way of describing adolescents' identity development by considering where an individual falls on the dimensions of identity exploration and identity commitment.

Identity Acheivement

• an integration of various aspects of the self into a coherent whole that is stable over time and across events
• Successful resolution to Erikson's Adolescent identity crisis

Moratorium

exploration with no commitment

Identity Foreclosure

commitments based on the choices of others with no exploration

Identity Diffusion

no commitments and no exploration

Typical sequence of identity change

diffusion → foreclosure → achievement, or from diffusion → moratorium → foreclosure → achievement