Social Development Review

What are social partners?

They are self-propelled, unpredictable, have hidden causes of behavior, have competing/deceptive motivations, and often have to deal with >1 at a time.

What do individual differences in social-emotional & prosocial skills at nursery age predict for adulthood?

Number of friends, quality of relationships, success in school, university, & work, likelihood of committing a crime, and likelihood of substance abuse problems.

Why is it that differences in social-emotional & prosocial skills predict certain things in adulthood?

The skills involve things like empathy, perspective taking, communication, cooperation, and social problem solving.

What social behaviors do nonhuman animals have?

Communication, competition, dominance hierarchies, social learning, and maybe some forms of teaching.

How do humans facilitate bonds with caregivers?

Appearing adorable

What is babyness?

Babies of animal species have distinct features that distinguish them from adults, these appeal to adults and evoke caregiving behaviors from them.

What is the most important social relationship?

With the primary caregiver(s)

What is imprinting?

Some species have an early critical period where they learn to imprint onto their mother and follow her around.

What are the benefits of imprinting?

Protection, finding food, learning

What is an example of early social sensitivity?

Recognizing mother’s voice, infants within 2-3 days after birth prefer their mother’s voice to any female stranger

Do infants recognize their mother’s voice prenatally?

Yes, listening to story read by mother vs. someone else changed their reactions

What do faces provide?

A vast amount of social information (identity, emotions, gaze direction, etc.)

Do infants prefer mother’s face over a stranger’s face?

1-3 day old infants prefer their mother’s face, vision still nearsighted.

What do 2-5 day old infants prefer?

Direct gaze over averted gaze

What do 1-3 day olds prefer?

Happy faces to fearful ones

What is face perception like in chimpanzees?

1 month old chimps prefer to look at mother’s face, 10-32 week old chimps prefer direct gaze to averted gaze

What is neonatal imitation?

Infants copy several facial actions, even if they have never seen their own face; chimps & monkeys do this too

What occurs in the 2 month revolution?

Social smile and primary intersubjectivity

What is early smiling like?

Newborn infants & even fetuses sometimes smile, often when sleeping and usually internal causes

What is social smiling?

Between 1.5-2 months, infants smile in response to social stimuli; linked to age since conception; transforms social interactions & relationships

What is primary intersubjectivity?

Around 2 months, infants have mutually responsive face-to-face interactions between people; they are dyadic, share & align emotions, coupled, reciprocal, turn-taking

How do we know infants play an active role in primary intersubjectivity?

Still-face experiments & delayed video experiments

What occurs from 7-8 months?

Increased interest in objects

What occurs in the 9 month revolution?

Sharing and aligning attention & attitudes about the outside world with others

What is secondary intersubjectivity?

Coordinating attention to people and objects, triadic interactions (person-person-object), joint attention, intentional communication, gaze & point following, imitation, social referencing, and cooperation

What is joint attention?

Coordination of attention with others to an object of mutual interest, important in human development

What is intentional communication?

9-12 months, using intentionally communicative gestures to direct others attention to objects

What is gaze & point following?

Looking where others are looking or pointing, newborns are sensitive to whether gaze is directed/averted, point following develops around 11-12 months

What is social referencing?

The ability to seek out & use emotional information from others about ambiguous new object or people, by 10-12 months infants look for & use the adult’s expression to decide what to do

What is imitation?

Infants begin imitating others’ actions on objects around 9 months

What are the key social learning mechanisms?

Imitation (copying means + end), emulation (reproducing end in own way), and mimicry (copying without understanding/consideration of the goal)

What is over-imitation?

3-5 year old children copy clearly irrelevant actions

What is cooperation?

Working together to achieve a joint goal, 13-18 months

What is attachment?

A strong emotional bond between infants & caregivers, develops between 7-9 months

What are the theories of attachment?

Freud’s drive-reduction theory, behaviorist theory, and John Bowlby’s ethological theory

What is Freud’s drive-reduction theory?

Infants become attached to caregivers because they satisfy biological drives & this causes pleasure

What is the behaviorist theory?

Caregivers are associated with reinforcement

What is John Bowlby’s ethological theory?

Caregivers are more to infants than just sources of food

What did Harlow’s experiments find?

That Bowlby’s ethological theory was correct, monkeys preferred cloth covered mother

What is secure attachment?

Balance between contact & exploring environment, infant is distressed when caregiver leaves, not comforted by stranger, happy when caregiver returns

What is avoidant attachment?

Indifferent to caregiver when playing, little distress when caregiver leaves, when caregiver returns doesn’t seek contact

What is resistant/ambivalent attachment?

Distress when caregiver leaves, not comforted by caregiver’s return, simultaneously seeks contact & resists caregiver’s attempts to comfort

What is disorganized attachment?

No coherent attachment behaviors, sometimes dazed, confused, apprehensive in caregiver’s presence

What are the consequences of disrupted attachment?

Children don’t grow up to be normal socially, long-term consequences for future relationship quality

What is prosocial behavior?

Voluntary behavior intended to benefit others

What are humans naturally?

Altruistic, help from a very young age without being asked & with no reward

What is antisocial behavior?

Aggression, stealing, teasing, lying, cheating

What is theory of mind/mentalizing/mindreading?

Attribution of mental states to other people, understanding mental states allows us to explain & predict external events by inferring internal entities, involves understanding that others’ mental states may differ from our own

What is the understanding of others’ perception & attention?

Others can see, hear, etc.; others can choose to attend to some aspects in their environment over others

What is the understanding of others’ goals & intentions?

Others have an aim in mind & behave with persistence until they achieve that aim; others choose particular means or action plans to achieve their goals

What is the understanding of others’ emotions & empathy?

Begin to show concern for others in distress at 8-10 months, start to comfort around 14-18 months, by 18 months can engage in affective perspective taking

What is the understanding of others’ desires?

18 month olds understand that others’ desires can differ from their own, apes can understand others’ emotional expressions too

What is the understanding of others’ knowledge/ignorance?

Knowing as having seen vs. not seen something in the past, found in 12 month olds & chimpanzees

What is the understanding of others’ beliefs (especially false beliefs)?

The mental state doesn’t match the state in the real world

What do classic, explicit false belief tests find?

4+ year olds pass, understand what others might expect, participants make active choice/decision

What do new, implicit false belief tests find?

Participants behave without making active choice, anticipatory looking at 2 years 11 months, violation of expectation at 15 months, behavioral measures at 16 months

What is intentional communication?

Begins at 9-10 months, infants must realize that their signals will serve a communicative purpose & must be aimed at adult listener instead of the goal itself

What are referential gestures?

Draw the recipient’s attention to an object, person, or event, are triadic

What are imperative gestures?

Request objects (give, reach, imperative point)

What are declarative gestures?

To share attention & interest in objects with others (show, declarative point)

What are informative points?

To provide information

What are interrogative points?

To ask a question

What are iconic gestures?

Pantomiming gestures, around 2-3 years, learn from caregiver but also can create new ones

What is chimpanzee communication like?

Use gestural communication, is complex

Why do infants & apes pass implicit but not explicit false belief tests?

Explicit tests have more processing demands, dual systems theory (later-developing, more flexible but more cognitively demanding theory-of-mind ability)

What do Vervet monkeys’ alarm calls show?

Different responses to different predator alarm calls show they are functionally referential

What are the two steps in children’s language development?

Comprehension & production

What is comprehension?

Discrimination of speech sounds, gradually lose ability to distinguish between sounds irrelevant to their culture’s language, understand first words at 8-12 months

What are the steps in language production?

1. Pre-linguistic vocalizations (coos, squeaks, squeals, gurgles)

2. Babbling: 6 months, playful production of speech sounds, no meaning/intentional communication

3. First intentional communication: 9-12 months, communicative looks & gestures

4. First words: 1 year, one-word utterances

5. Two or multi-word utterances: 1½ years, telegraphic speech, vocabulary spurt

6. More complex sentences: 2½ years, increasing complexity, adult-like grammar by 5 years

Do children have grammatical rules?

Yes, have abstract rules but sometimes overdo generalization & show over-regularization

What are theories of language acquisition?

Behaviorist theory, nativist theory, and social-pragmatic/social interaction theory

What is the behaviorist theory of language acquisition?

Language is acquired through same mechanisms of conditioning & reinforcement that govern all other behavior

• Classical conditioning: children associate particular sounds with the objects that are paired with those sounds

• Operant conditioning: spoken language is shaped by parents through the selective reinforcement of infants’ vocalizations

What are problems with the behaviorist theory for language acquisition?

• Parents rarely reinforce grammatically correct & incorrect sentences, usually respond to meaning/truth value instead

• When parents do correct grammar it has little effect

• Children often produce words & sentences they have never heard adults say

What is the nativist theory?

Children learn language quickly, independently of their intelligence, without explicit teaching, so must by innate and comes from Language Acquisition Device where children select rules required by the language they’ll speak

What are problems with the nativist theory?

• Parents provide simplified, clear language for young children

• Parents provide indirect feedback about grammaticality: recasts, clarification requests

What is the social-pragmatic/social interaction theory?

Children learn language in the flow of naturally occurring social interactions as they attempt to understand what adults are trying to get them to do, adults may facilitate

What are problems with the social-pragmatic/social interaction theory?

• Not clear how it generalizes to non-Western/middle class societies where different levels of parental support are available

• Problem of reference - how do children figure out what novel words mean

What are solutions to the problem of reference?

Adult & child establish what the discourse is focusing on through other, non-linguistic means (routines & scaffolded interactions, joint attention, gaze & point following, the child’s understanding of the adult’s goals & intentions)

What are ways to facilitate language acquisition?

Motherese & ZPD, routines & parental scaffolding, parents who follow into their child’s focus of attention when providing new words, parents who spend more time talking & reading to children

What are critical periods in language acquisition?

Young children learn languages effortlessly, children raised without language exposure never develop normal competence with language, deaf children not exposed to sign language early have difficulty

What is moral development?

The process by which we come to understand what society accepts as right & wrong/good & bad

What are the theories of moral development?

Piaget’s theory & Kohlberg’s theory

What is Piaget’s theory of moral development?

Morality is based on reasoning & develops in stages that correspond to his stages of cognitive development

• Up to 4 years, children have no moral principals

• 4-10 years: naughtiness is based on act’s consequences rather than actor’s intentions

• 10+ years: naughtiness depends on actor’s intentions

What is a problem with Piaget’s theory of moral development?

Recent studies show young children do take intentions into account if you measure in more naturalistic contexts rather than verbal vignettes

What is Kohlberg’s theory of moral development?

• Preconventional level (up to 9-10 years): whether something is good/bad is determined by consequences

• Conventional level: one should strive to please others & obey the law

• Post-conventional level (12+ years): self-chosen, personal ethical principles that are comprehensive, universal, & consistent

What are problems with Kohlberg’s theory of moral development?

• Progression of stages isn’t clear cut

• Cross-cultural differences in who reaches which stages

• Verbal vignette methods overestimate the age at which children have different types of understanding

What is the problem with Piaget’s & Kohlberg’s moral development theories?

They completely discount what very young children understand about morality

What is group membership?

Humans have preferences for certain groups, based on natural group or minimal group

What is a natural group?

A preference for those with same language, race, gender, age, nationality, etc.

What is a minimal group?

A preference for novel, arbitrary groups

Why are groups important to humans?

Prevent ostracism and critical to survival

What is cultural learning?

It results in faithful transmission & differences in ways of doing things across cultures, supports cumulative culture

What is shared intentionality?

Skills & motivation to share psychological states like attention, attitudes, and goals

What is the cultural intelligence hypothesis?

Hermann et al. (2007): humans and apes differ in social cognition, specifically with the social skills needed to participate & exchange knowledge in cultural groups