Early Social Development

nfant devleop interest in other people very quickly

  • At 4 days after birth, babies prefer caregiver’s face

  • Stranger Anxiety starts at 8-9 months

  • Differences in social and emotional styles reflect differences in termperament

Temperament: Thomas and Chess

  • Theory that temperament appears early and is genetic

  • Thomas and Chess proposed three major styles

    1. Easy

    2. Difficult

    3. Slow-to-warm-up

    4. Other

Behavioural Theory of Temperament: Kagen

  • 10% of children may be behaviourallt inhibited

  • Behaviourally uninhibited and less restrained

Attachment

Attachment (Kondrad Lorenz)

Found that there is a critical period for attachment. Used geese to examine gees

  • Human attachment is not as strict and it is a sensitive period

    • A bond can form with more time and support and in strict and bad environments there is less attachment

Contact Comfort (Harry Harlow)

Believed that children bonded with their parents because parents provide them with food

  • Used monkeys to see which fake mother the monkey would be attached to

  • Found that the fake money with warmth and fuzz, the konkey was more attached to. Signifying that comfort is more effective for attachment

Attachment Styles

Strange Situation Task: how infants react when separated from primary caregiver

  • Secure attachment: Babies with more secure attachment become more developed (60%)

  • Insecure-avoidant attachment

  • Insecure-anxious attachment

  • Disorganized attachment

Issues:

  • However, rates develop by culture

  • Mono-Operation bias: Relying on one measure of a concept

  • Lack of reliability

    • Changing attachment style over brief times and different parenting styles

Parenting Styles (Baumrind)

Believed that there are 4 parenting styles

  1. Permissive: Lenient, little disciple, very affectionate

  2. Authoritarian: Very strict

  3. Authoritative: Supprtive but clear and set limits

  4. Uninvolved: Neglectful and ignoring

  • More dissipline is needed if a child is more violent and aggressive

Moral Development

Piaget thought that there is objective and subjective responsibility

  • There is an intention of how harm is done vs the intention to harm

Kohlberg’s Stages of Moral Development

Three major stages:

  1. Pre-conventional: Focus on punishment and reward

  2. Conventional: Focus on societal values

  3. Post-conventional: Focus on internal moral principles

Criticisms:

  • Cultural bias (individualist vs collectivist cultures)

  • Gender bias

  • Low correlation with real life moral behaviour

  • Confounded with verbal intelligence