Language & Development - Block 2

4 Ps

Profound, permanent, progressive, pervasive

Profound

Changes individual's entire outlook on the world, e.g., attachment formation

Permanent

Unlike learning, developmental changes are not easily reversed

Progressive

Developmental changes bring about improvement

Pervasive

Affects all areas of life —> can't look at only one developmental domain

Plato

All ideas are innate — mental development is a process of discovering what is already known

Shakespeare

Seven ages of man

Descartes

Nativism - mind-body dualism

Rousseau

Innately good child who develops according to natures plan

Locke (1690)

Mind as a tabula rasa - no innate structure/blank slate. Development of mind entirely determined by the experience (empiricism)

First experiment in developmental psychology

James IV's testing whether language was innate

Darwin

Origin of species and theory of evolution, studied his son Doddy

Darwin's main contributions

• Idea of development as progressive adaptation to environment

• Systematic methods — no longer reliant on anecdotal evidence

• Biological origins of human nature — idea of genetic and evolutionary inheritance

Extension of Darwin's ideas

• Notion of adaptation gave rise to stage theories

• Recapitulationism

• Haeckel's maxim otnogeny recapitulates phylogeny

• The development of the individual replays the development of the species

• Some misapplications — Hall's evolutionary hierarchy

recapitulationism

The idea that the stages of each person's intellectual, emotional, and psychological development pass through the same stages as our pre-human ancestors as they developed into the humans of today.

Phylogeny

Evolutionary history of a species

Five issues in developmental psychology

• Nature and nurture

• Continuities and discontinuities

• The passive and active child

• Longitudinal stability and influence

• Individual differences

Extreme empiricism

Watson (1930) - you can train a child to become anything - doctor, engineer, etc, regardless of talents, abilities, etc

Extreme nativism

Gesell - encourage innate drive

Nature and nurture

• Both extremes are equally untenable

• On the one hand, we possess an innate potential for development, but this may be for learning rather than a fixed developmental plan

• On the other hand, learning requires a prior capacity to learn

• Modern position (Plomin): emphasis on relative contributions of nature and nurture, on the assumption that both are important

• Piaget's and Vygotsky's theories are both example las of such interactionist perspectives

Continuities and Discontinuities

Development can be discontinuous:

Freud's stage theory of psychosexual development (oral, anal, phallic, latency, genital)

Piaget's stage theory of cognitive development

Or continuous

Bandura's learning theory

The passive and active child

•Are children passive participants in development, primarily moulded by experience…

•…or do they have an active role to play in exploring the world, constructing concepts, etc.?

•Example: Piaget's theory => children are active determinants of developing their psychological perspectives on the world - children are scientists.

Longitudinal stability and influence

•Do certain developmental constructs remain stable over time?

•Are some developmental constructs particularly important in predicting subsequent development?

•Example: attachment

2 year old child

• Language comprehension and production (vocab, syntax)

• Autobiographical memory

• Has to keep question in mind during recall processing (working memory)

• Has correct concept of self!

• Talks about significant others

• Theory of mind!!! Remembers she was scared of the giraffe

• Sophisticated motor skills

• Mimic another creature

Theory of mind

people's ideas about their own and others' mental states—about their feelings, perceptions, and thoughts, and the behaviors these might predict.

Methodological problems

• Children are not reliable participants

• Infants cannot talk

• Development is noisy (influenced by range of factors)

• Ethical considerations severely limit the kinds of studies we can do to establish directions of cause and effect

Infant

Younger than 24 months

"Data problem"

Traditionally, naturalistic observation has been central to developmental research

• Problem 1: how to obtain satisfactory measures while maintaining naturalistic context?

• Problem 2: naturalistic contexts differ

Developmental task

Because of the data problem:

• Rather than relying on qualitative observation, many researchers tend to design tasks to measure specific abilities

• Example: "unexpected transfer" task

Unexpected transfer task

Involves presenting a scenario in which a character believes something that the child participant knows is not true Tests theory of mind! The child will be aware of the other's false belief

Establishing causal relations

Central challenge: how to move from a description of how mind develops, to an explanation of what causes these changes

Drawbacks of the correlational study

Problem 1: establishing direction of causation

Problem 2: possibility that a third factor may underlie the association

Drawbacks of the experimental method

• Problems of participants complying with training or intervention.

• Problem of generalising results to population at large.

• Over-reliance on performance on specific tasks, without establishing whether improvement generalises to other contexts.

• Effects may not be maintained over time.

Choosing the 'right' age

Need to ensure that your tasks and procedures are age-appropriate - avoid floor and ceiling effects.

If you want to include a range of ages, how do you ensure that tasks suitable for different age groups are assessing the same construct?

Attachment

• The relationship between the caregiver and child

• The child's behaviour toward the caregiver

• The more abstract theoretical construct of a close relationship to any significant other

Bonding

Only refers to maternal responses to the infant in the first hours or days (attachments do not begin to form until around second half of first year)

Bowlby

• British child psychiatrist

• Reported to WHO on problems associated with maternal deprivation after WW2

• Sought to return to Freud's ideas on the importance of the infant-mother relationship - But in doing so, challenged accepted psychoanalytic wisdom and caused massive controversy

Accepted wisdom

Before Bowlby, attachments were believed to form to those who provided for the child's psychological needs (e.g., food and warmth)

Based on the favored psychoanalytic theory of attachment as a secondary drive

Bowlby (1944)

44 juvenile thieves study. 86% of affectionless thieves had experienced frequent early separation from their mothers.

Bowlby (1958)

• Proposed for the first time that infants have an innate, primary drive to form a close relationship with a caregiver

• Used ethnological studies as support

• Identified primary attachment behaviors: sucking, clinging, crying, smiling, following

• Highlighted inconsistencies between psychoanalysts real life observations and their acceptance of secondary drive

• Aligned himself firmly with Freud's original views on infant-mother attachment

Supporting evidence of Bowlby

• Freud & Dann's (1951) report of the mutual attachments of 3-4 year olds who lived together in a concentration camp

• Harlow's (1961, 1962) studies on monkeys

Unjustified criticism of 1958 theory

• Bowlby was savaged by the British Psychoanalytic Society who found his ideas heretical.

• Bowlby's ideas "becloud the observational facts, are oversimplified, and make no contribution to the better understanding of observed phenomena" (Spitz, 1960, p. 93).

Justified criticism of 1958 theory

• Generalization from clinical observations to "normal" children being reared at home —> focus on all separation as trauma

• Concerned with the making and breaking of attachments

• Single attachment to mother: "good mothering from any kind of woman ceases to satisfy the infant - only his own mother will do"

Mary Ainsworth

• Worked with Bowlby

• Wanted to observe Bowlby's attachment behaviors in real life

• Interested in how individual differences in infant behavior were rooted in the quality of infant mother interaction

Ainsworth's early observations

• Observed attachment behaviors while with the Ganda in Uganda

• Reported how infants formed multiple attachments to people providing care, not just the mother. (Challenged monotropy!!!!)

Monotropy

The idea that the one relationship that the infant has with his/her primary attachment figure is of special significance in emotional development.

Schaffer and Emerson (1964)

Multiple attachments observed in a sample of Scottish infants

Infants were attached to both parents, grandparents, siblings, etc.

Challenged monotropy, but supported abandoning secondary drive theory

Abandoning secondary drive theory

The child forms attachments to brothers and sisters who don't provide them with food or warmth (just time)

Robertson (1946, 1952)

• Films of children staying in hospital
• Separation initially caused by extreme distress
• Prolonged separation seemed to have the potential to break the attachment
• Sequence of protest, despair, detachment

[Supported abandonment of secondary drive, but highlighted the dynamic nature of attachment]

Bowbly's revision

These studies led Bowlby to concede that psychologically healthy children could have more than one attachment figure

• Abandoned Monotropy

• Focused on the dynamics of the attachment relationship

Bowlby's (1969) theory

Goal-corrected system, rather than innate responses

Mother most notable and interesting cue in environment, proximity to her becomes set goal

Attachment not a purely innate instinct, but depends on environmental conditions activating the innate attachment systems

***Attachment is a life-long process

Bowlby's strengths

• Courage of his convictions to propose a radically different theory

• Willingness to use empirical data to adapt and improve his theory

• Proposed a theory that has become a very powerful and widely used theoretical framework for understanding individual differences in development

Ainsworth's empirical work

• As well as identifying multiple attachments, Ainsworth was struck by the diversity in infants reactions to separation and reunion with their mothers

• The strange situation procedure which is used to assess the security of the infant - caregiver attachment relationship

strange situation procedure

infants are exposed to a series of eight separation and reunion episodes to assess the quality of their attachment based on 4 dimensions: proximity-seeking, contact maintenance, avoidance, resistance

proximity seeking

The way that infants try to maintain physical contact or be close to their attachment figure

Contact Maintenance

efforts to maintain self-initiated contact with figure

avoidant attachment

attachments marked by discomfort over, or resistance to, being close to others

resistant attachment

characterized by the child's tendency to show clingy behavior and rejection of the parent when she attempts to interact with the child

Main and Solomon (1986, 1990)

• Established a fourth attachment category: Type D (insecure-disorganized)

• These infants are anxious, disorganized, and disoriented

• D babes have no obvious strategy for gaining contact with mother or for being soothed and comforted

• May show bizarre or conflictual behaviors

• Disorganization is exclusive to ABC categories — infants also given forced choice ABC classification

Van Ijzendoorn et al. (1999)

Meta-analysis of 80 studies -

62% secure (B)

15% avoidant (A)

15 % disorganized (D)

9% resistant (C)

BADC

Madigan et al. (2023)

Meta-analysis on 20,000 strange situations

51.6 % secure

23.5% disorganized

14.7 % avoidant

10.2% resistant

Disorganization is higher when:

• Low SES

• Parental psychopathology

• Child maltreatment (rate is still substantial in low risk families)

Ainsworth's contribution

• Since Ainsworth's work in the 1960s, attachment research focuses on the security of the attachment relationship

• Move away from making/breaking of attachments and viewing infants as attached or not attached

• Most influential notion of early individual differences in development

Attachment beyond infancy

The strange situation classifies security on the basis of attachment behaviours (proximity-seeking, contact maintenance) Measures in older children can be behavioural or representational

Preschoolers

Behavioral: Preschool Strange Situation (Cassidy & Marvin, 1992) - longer separations, no stranger Reunion behaviour after 1 longer (e.g., 45 minute) separation (Main & Cassidy, 1988) Attachment Q-Sort (AQS, Waters et al., 1990)

Representational: Separation Anxiety Test (Klagsbrun & Bowlby, 1976) Various story-stem tasks

School age (6-13)

Problems! Separation Anxiety Test and story-stem tasks are suitable for lower school age Child Attachment Interview (CAI) can be used from age 8 upwards - modelled on AAl (see later) Self-report measures can be used for the older school age None of these measures are based on behaviour

Adolescents

• CAI (Child attachment interview)

• Various self report measures Parental Bonding Instrument (Parker et al., 1979) Attachment History Questionnaire (Pottharst, 1990) Inventory of Parent and Peer Attachment (Armsden & Greenberg, 1987)

IWM (internal working model) of attachment relationship

is the caregiver sensitive, responsive, available, rejecting, etc.?

IWM of self-am I worthy of love and attention?

IWMs of both self and relations with other can be positive or negative

IWMs are representational Initial plasticity in IWMs, but become fixed at ~4 or 5 years

IWMs predict the child's future interactions with others

Adult Attachment Interview (AAI)

• Developed by Mary Main and colleagues to assess IWMs

• Semi-structured interview for classifying an adult's overall 'state of mind' w.r.t. attachment relationships

• Deals with the adult's IWM of attachment relationships

• NOT a retrospective assessment of the adult's attachment security in childhood

AAI classifications

Dismissing (Ds)

Preoccupied (E)

Autonomous (F)

Unresolved (U)

Dismissing Attachment

Insist on lack of recall of attachment relationships, devalue attachments, or idealize attachment figures

preoccupied attachment

Still preoccupied with early attachment experiences topic of attachment is overwhelming —> anger or passivity

Autonomous attachment

Attachment is an open topic, coherent, and believable account of childhood, presented in a lively and objective fashion

Unresolved Attachment

Become incoherent specifically when discussing loss or abuse

Longitudinal stability in attachment

Not particularly good for strange situation classification even over periods of 6m (Belsky et al., 1996)

Only 46% stability from 15 to 36m (NICHD Early Child Care Research Network, 2001)

No good evidence for stability from strange situation to representational attachment measures in childhood

Conversions

Secure attachment —> autonomous AAI

Avoidant attachment —> dismissing AAI

Resistant attachment —> Preoccupied AAI

Disorganized attachment —> Unresolved AAI

Hamilton (2000) and Waters et al. (2000)

Two studies found longitudinal stability from infancy to adulthood in quite diverse samples

Weinfield et al. (2000) and Lewis et al. (2000)

Two studies found no longitudinal stability from infancy to adulthood in both high and low risk samples

Predicting

All studies identified life events (e.g., family functioning, parental divorce) as _______ adult attachment

Booth-LaForce & Roisman (2014)

1,195 infants participated in the strange situation at age 15 months

1,197 infants assessed on AQS at 24 months

Largest ever study involving the AAl (over 800)

No stability from strange situation in infancy to AAl at age 18 Some significant associations between AQS and AAl, but small effects

Nothing

Attachment assessed between 6 and 38 years of age

Delinquency assessed between 7 and 38 years 82% of the studies assessed attachment & delinquency concurrently so they tell us ______ about whether early attachment predicts delinquency

Bowlby expected

He expected change and reorganization of IWMs in response to changes in the individual's social environment

Piaget

theorist that developed a series of stages in which an individual passes during cognitive development.

Piaget's theory

Constructivism

Adaptation

Stages

Constructivism

Concern with how the child actively constructs understanding of the world

A "third way" in the nature/nurture debate: both innate endowments (reflex schemas) and experience (active engagement with the world) necessary for the construction of knowledge

Adaptation

Saw intelligence as a special form of adaptation to the environment

This continuous process — creation of ever more satisfactory "theories" about the world — is main engine of cognitive change

Cognitive schema

Basic component of intelligence is the schema (e.g., sucking, grasping) The first schemas are reflexes (i.e., part of the infant's genetic endowment) Two complementary and simultaneous process: assimilation and accommodation

Assimilation

Different objects become assimilated into the schema

Accommodation

Schema changes to accommodate different objects

Equilibrium

The balance between these processes required for the creation of consistent internal models

Video

Isaac has to assimilate new objects (finger, knuckle) to his sucking schema

At the same time, the schema has to change to accommodate the new objects

stage theory

Famous emphasis on discontinuities in development: the Piagetian stages Stages can be seen as major points of equilibration Sequence of stages is fixed

Sensorimotor

in Piaget's theory, the stage (from birth to about 2 years of age) during which infants know the world mostly in terms of their sensory impressions and motor activities

Sub stage 1 - sensorimotor

Innate reflexes

0-6 weeks

Sub stage 2 - sensorimotor

Primary circular reactions Repetition of body movements for their consequences (sucking thumb)

6 weeks-4 months

Sub stage 3 - sensorimotor

Secondary circular reactions Repetition of actions that have interesting effects on environment (kicking cot to shake it and produce sound)

4-8 months

Sub stage 4 - sensorimotor

Means-end behavior infants can combine actions to achieve results (pull on a blanket to get a toy)

8-12 months

Sub stage 5 - sensorimotor

Tertiary circular reactions Infant begins to experiment to discover new means to ends 12-18 months

Sub stage 6 - sensorimotor

Representation Infants become able to imagine the consequences of their planned actions 18-24 months

Object concept sub-stages

•Stage I: state of adualism

•Stage II: 'out of sight, out of existence'

•Stage III: can retrieve partially occluded objects BUT not fully occluded

•Stage IV: can retrieve fully occluded objects BUT A not B error

•Stage V can manage the A not B, can't manage invisible displacements

•Stage VI: full object permanence