Developmental Psychology - Scientific Research

Empiricism & Scientific Research

• Last time, developmental psychology and figures like Goldberg and Erickson were discussed, along with physician-assisted dying. Delaware recently legalized physician-assisted dying, making it the 12th place in the US.
• Session two will cover scientific research in psychology, including case studies, naturalistic observation, experiments, and correlational research.

Science and Patterns

• Science involves identifying patterns, such as those in development and language.
• Science is evidence-based and involves theories.

Empiricism

• Empiricism is a crucial concept in science, emphasizing the need for proof.
• Empiricism relates to science, scientists, evidence, proof, data, and research.

Empiricism Example: Near-Death Experience

• An anecdotal story discusses the phenomenon of life flashing before one's eyes at death.
• A brain scan of an 87-year-old epilepsy patient revealed a surge in brain activity 30 seconds after cardiac arrest.
• Brainwave patterns were similar to those during higher cognitive functions like dreaming and memory recollection.
• The patient was already monitored with brain and heart scans in the hospital.
• The brain activity in the dying person was significant in areas related to thinking, dreaming, and memory formation.

Human Development

• Something is always changing inside the human mind.
• Environments present opportunities for change.
• People are drawn to certain qualities in others, forming an image of them.
• Encountering information that contradicts this image requires mental reconciliation.

Dialectical Thought

• Dialectical thought is the ability to hold two opposing thoughts about the same person simultaneously.
• It involves understanding that opposing thoughts can coexist and working to ensure they do.

Principles of Development

1. Development is Multidisciplinary:
   • Study methods from many academic disciplines such as psychology, sociology, biology, and anthropology.
   • Combining insights from various fields provides a more comprehensive understanding of human development.
2. Plasticity:
   • Development is characterized by plasticity, i.e., our ability to change.
   • Many characteristics can change, including cognitive skills, personality traits, and social behaviors.
   • Plasticity underscores the potential for intervention and improvement throughout the lifespan.
3. Medical Advancements:
   • Medical advancements and standards of living have come a long way.
   • For example, today someone having a heart attack can survive if they get to the hospital in time.
   • Even in cases of cardiac arrest someone can survive if you can get AEDs.
   • Heart transplants haven't been around for a long time yet almost $50$. Other organ transplants too.
   • The first heart transplant patient died from drugs to stabilize their immune system.
4. Limits to Growth and Change:
   • We have a good amount of ability to grow and change and to survive things; however, there is always a limit.
   • Biological and environmental factors can constrain development despite our capacity for change.
5. Development is Multicontextual:
   • Development happens in many contexts.
   • Normative age-graded influences: An age grade is a specific age group.
   • Depending on the age that you're in, you can expect certain things to happen, to have already happened, or be expected to happen.
   • Normative history-graded influences: Cohort: think of a cohort as more or less when you were born.
   • Even if we don't think we're changing, the environments that we're in will present things that we're gonna have to just adapt to and change with and mold with.
   • Cohort effects: things that happen to people because they're just simply put when they're born.
   • Socioeconomic Status (SES): SES is essentially put, it's what someone has, like how much money do they have?
   • What kind of social position do they have?
   • What kind of neighborhood do they live in?
   • What's their future gonna be like based on where they're from?

Family and Culture

• Family environment shapes values and beliefs.
• Culture impacts norms and expectations.

Lifespan Changes

• In the 18th century, the lifespan was about 28.5 to 32 years.
• In 1900, it was about 31, 32 and 22 years old.
• The average presidential term is 4 years. Someone may have seen 33 presidents come and go.
• Someone lived on her own until almost like her one hundreds.
• They mentioned that they don't worry about things happening because they're already so old, and if it could happen, it probably already has.
• In 2024, The highest life expectancy is in the country of Monaco, 89 years. Afghanistan's life expectancy is 54 years.
• Depending on where someone lives and when they were born, their life expectancy can drastically be different.
• Disease often kills people in developing countries.

Ways of Looking at Age

• Chronological age: number of years since birth.
• Biological age: An estimate of individual's present position with respect to their potential life span. Living habits involved (smoking, not smoking).
• Psychological age: The adaptive capacities of an individual, i.e., learning, memory skills, feelings.
• Social age: Refers to social roles and expectation by virtue of chronological age, social norms of our culture, and also things like societal and cultural expectations of where we, quote, we should be depending on our chronological Age.

Continuity vs. Discontinuity in Development

• Discontinuous development: Development occurs in distinct stages like Piaget's four stages. They are different from one another and happen in a set sequence.
• Continuous developmental theories: Development is a much more slow and gradual pattern or process.

Views of Development

1. Preformatist View:
   • The idea that babies are basically miniature versions of people.
2. Phrenology:
   • Different areas of the scalp, like, mapped out.
   • Different words are written on the scalp.
   • This was thought to be state-of-the-art for what personality involved.
   • To get, like, a personality test, the person would go to a person would go to a phrenologist.
   • The phrenologist would literally use this scientific instrument and this scientific instrument and begin the examination.
   • Literally feeling on someone's scalp and feeling for bumps or divots. And as they were feeling for bumps and divots, they would cross-reference with their chart, and if there was a bump, cross-reference with whatever word that person meant they had more of that trait. And if there was a divot, they would check the map and say, this person has less of that trait
3. Tabula Rasa (Blank Slate):
   • Children are born as blank slates, and their experiences shape them.
   • Children blobs. As far as, like, ethics and morality, kids are blobs, and you put whatever meaning you want onto them.
   • Children are taught everything, and they learn. You think about what is good for you, what is normal for you, what is acceptable for you, what is regular for you.
4. Noble Savages vs. Nasty, Brutish, and Short:
   • Jean-Jacques Rousseau believed humans were noble savages, learning to live in society.
   • Thomas Hobbes believed human lives were nasty, brutish, and short.
5. Internal Plan for Development:
   • Jean Jacques Rousseau believed that children developed according to an internal plan.
   • They developed according to an inner biologically programmed timetable.
   • He is looked at as the founder of developmental psych.

Sigmund Freud

• Freud was a medical doctor, eminent psychologist, and psychiatrist.

Freud's Theories

• Oedipus Complex: Every little boy desires his mother and looks at his father as competition for his mother.
• Electra Complex: Every girl desires her father and looks at her biological mother as competition.

Freud's Life

• Freud was Jewish and atheist.
• The Nazi's burned Freud's books.
• Because they were progressing as a society that made them burn his books.
• Freud smoked 20 cigars a day for decades and contracted jaw cancer.
• As the cancer spread, he lost parts of his jaw.
• He asked his personal physician to draw a lethal dose of morphine before he died.

Freud's Ideas

• Early Childhood: Crucial for development.
• Attachment Style: Develops from the relationship between an infant and caregiver.

Attachment Styles

1. Secure Attachment:
   • Psychologically healthy.
   • When the infant clearly expresses needs, are they met?
   • Characterized by trust, emotional availability, and the ability to form healthy relationships.
2. Anxious Attachment:
   • In adult relationships might think, oh, man. I bet I've made you mad. Oh, man. I haven't heard from you in a little bit. I bet you're upset. Even if you tell me I didn't do anything, I know that I did.
   • The anxious attachment style might come just to let me go. I know this is gonna happen.
   • Often involves a fear of abandonment, a need for constant reassurance, and difficulty trusting partners fully.
3. Avoidant Attachment:
   • Caregiver nonexistent, needs not met.
   • An individual that more than likely has a really hard time getting close to other people because the initial lesson learned in life is you can't trust others because they're not gonna be there.
   • You're only gonna get so close - A caregiver that wasn't there.
   • Characterized by emotional distance, a reluctance to form close relationships, and a tendency to suppress emotions.

• People can change attachments styles. You know? Yeah. Because maybe for different relationships, they're looking for different things.
• The foster parents realized that because of the environments that the children were in, they just have to be really careful in how they're going to raise these two kids down to how do I talk to them?

Learning Theory and Behaviorism

• Based on the idea that the mind cannot be studied scientifically, so behavior should be the only thing that counts.
• Big names were John B. Watson, Ivan Pavlov, and B. F. Skinner.
• Only one path to go because that was the only way to go. That was behaviorism.
• John Watson said that the environment controls behavior. The environment gives people all of the options that they can possibly have at any one given time.
• Little Albert experiment.
  • His idea was that everything is learned, including fear.
  • He successfully conditioned fear and little Albert.
  • He believed the environment controlled everything.

Social Cognitive Theory

• Vygotsky: teaching because good teaching involves closing the gap.
• Scaffolding: when a teacher basically gives you just enough support to get to where you need to go.
• The teacher can do it over again until you're comfortable. We're not moving forward.

Research Methods in Developmental Psychology

• Research is key to understanding developmental conditions and disorders.
• Research moves on, as we understand why these conditions happen, things will change.
• Used to be there was a separate diagnostic category for what was called High functioning people, like Asperger's syndrome. Asperger's is now lumped into an overall autism spectrum disorder diagnosis.
• Very first patient that we now know that was being seen by a doctor thought that their patient had early dementia.
• That's why the original name of schizophrenia was Dementia praecox, precocious dementia.

Research Design

• Specific method to collect, analyze, and interpret data.

1. Descriptive Research:
   • Description of things as they're occurring at some point in time
   • Aims to observe and record behavior without manipulating variables or drawing causal inferences.
2. Correlational Research:
   • Understanding of if a relationship exists between two things, predictive power, if this, then that.
   • Examines the extent to which two or more variables are related, allowing for predictions but not causal conclusions.
3. Experimental Research:
   • Says this caused that. This happened and it directly led to this next thing.
   • Involves manipulating one or more variables (independent variables) to determine their effect on another variable (dependent variable), allowing for causal inferences.

Research Types

1. Case Study:
   • In-depth research often on one subject or one group. Like, rare medical conditions.
   • Examples include:
     • cotard syndrome/Walking corpse syndrome: When when they look at their skin, they dont see skin, like, healthy. They see rotten skin. When they smell, like, putrefaction. They think some way, somehow, they have that, but they're still here.
     • Locked-in syndrome: when a person, for whatever reason, like, just like that, they can no longer move, they can no longer communicate. The only thing that works is they can blink their eyes voluntarily. Nothing works.
     • Provides detailed insights into a specific individual or group, often used in exploratory research or to study rare phenomena
2. Correlational Research:
   • Involves measuring two or more variables.
   • Variable is anything, any kind of quantity, any kind of anything, when I say correlation doesn't imply causation, it means, okay, just because we saw one thing, doesn't doesn't mean it necessarily caused something else.
   • $Correlation <br><br />\neq Causation$
   • Assesses the statistical relationship between variables, indicating the strength and direction of the association, but not causation
3. Experiments:
   • Two groups are set up.
   • One thing will be different between those two groups, and then at the end, they'll be measured on some metric.
   • Whatever is measured, that's the dependent variable.
   • Involves manipulating an independent variable to determine its effect on a dependent variable, allowing researchers to establish cause-and-effect relationships.
   • Ethical Considerations Are highly considered.

Ethical Research

• No harm, within reason. (This is said with sarcasm).
• Participants can be told something that kind of gets pretty close, but might not be the whole story. Can't involve, you know, you can't say to a patient like, yeah, we're not gonna do this and then turn around and do that.

Example

• Stanley Milgram. More Information:
  • Milgram's obedience experiments demonstrated the extent to which individuals would follow orders from an authority figure, even if it meant causing harm to another person.
  • The experiments raised significant ethical concerns due to the psychological distress experienced by participants.
• What did you learn today about research?
• Milgram did his experiment looking at, you know, how far would subjects go and a lot of them went all the way. But the subject was told that they were taking part in an experiment on the effect of punishment on learning.
• Participants were deceived about the true nature of the experiment.

Stanford Prison Experiment

• Prisoners didn't know how the experiment was gonna begin for them. The experiment how they were arrested by of a car, driven to the basement of Stanford where the psych department was, where, like, a bunch of offices have been converted into the prison, the blindfolds come off and the guards are there waiting.
  • More Information:
  • The Stanford Prison Experiment aimed to investigate the psychological effects of perceived power, focusing on the struggle between prisoners and prison officers.
  • Participants quickly internalized their roles, leading to abusive behavior by the guards and psychological distress among the prisoners. The