Study Notes on Human Development and Personality

Prenatal Development

  • Stages
    • Germinal Stage:
    • A zygote develops into a mass of cells that implants in the uterine wall.
    • The placenta begins to form.
    • Embryonic Stage:
    • Vital organs and bodily systems begin to develop.
    • This period is marked by significant vulnerability.
    • Fetal Stage:
    • Organs continue to grow and begin to function.
    • The fetus reaches the threshold of viability around 23-25 weeks.

Development in Childhood

Motor Development

  • Patterns of Growth:
    • Physical growth is rapid and uneven during infancy, characterized by sudden bursts of growth.
  • Motor Skills Development:
    • Traditionally attributed to maturation, but recent research emphasizes the importance of infants' exploration.
  • Cultural Variations:
    • Differences in the pacing of motor development across cultures highlight the role of learning.

Attachment

  • Definition: Attachment is defined as the close emotional bonds that form between infants and their caregivers.
  • Harlow's Studies:
    • Research with infant monkeys indicated that reinforcement is not the main factor in attachment formation.
  • Bowlby's Perspective:
    • Argues that attachment has a biological and evolutionary basis.
  • Ainsworth's Research:
    • Identified three attachment categories: secure, anxious-ambivalent, and avoidant.
    • Infants with secure attachment typically become resilient, competent toddlers with high self-esteem.
  • Cultural Influences:
    • Child-rearing practices vary culturally and influence attachment patterns which develop in a society.

Personality Development

  • Erikson's Theory:
    • Proposes eight stages of development across the lifespan, with each stage marked by a specific psychosocial crisis.
    • Assumptions:
    • Stages progress in a specific order, strongly related to age, bringing significant changes.
    • Childhood Stages:
    • Trust vs. Mistrust
    • Autonomy vs. Shame and Doubt
    • Initiative vs. Guilt
    • Industry vs. Inferiority

Environmental Influences

  • Maternal Malnutrition:
    • Linked to complications at birth and other developmental issues.
  • Maternal Emotions:
    • Have an impact on prenatal development.
  • Drug Use:
    • Illicit drugs pose a great risk to fetal health.
    • Normal drinking and tobacco use during pregnancy can also be hazardous.
  • Programming of the Fetal Brain:
    • Prenatal development has implications for long-term vulnerability to illnesses.

Cognitive Development

  • Piaget's Theory:
    • Proposed four stages of cognitive development.
    • Sensorimotor Period (Birth to Age 2):
    • Major achievement: Development of object permanence.
    • Preoperational Period (Ages 2-7):
    • Characterized by centration, animism, irreversibility, and egocentrism.
    • Concrete Operational Period (Ages 7-11):
    • Ability to perform operations on mental representations emerges.
    • Formal Operational Stage (Age 11 Onward):
    • Thought process becomes systematic, abstract, and logical.
    • Critiques:
    • Piaget may have underestimated certain aspects of cognitive development, including blending of stages and cultural impacts.
  • Vygotsky's Sociocultural Theory:
    • Asserts that cognitive development is influenced greatly by social interactions, language progression, and cultural factors.
  • Basic Cognitive Abilities:
    • Evidence of infants understanding complex concepts like addition suggests that some abilities are innate.

Moral Development

  • Kohlberg's Theory:
    • Individuals progress through three levels of moral reasoning:
    • Preconventional (focus on consequences),
    • Conventional (importance of social order),
    • Postconventional (working out a personal code of ethics).
    • Research shows age-related progress in moral reasoning, but significant overlap between stages exists.

Development in Adolescence

Physiological and Neural Development

  • Adolescent Growth Spurt:
    • Typically begins around age 9-10 in girls and 10-12 in boys due to hormonal changes.
  • Puberty:
    • Marks complete development of primary sex characteristics.
    • Current generations tend to enter puberty earlier, potentially due to improved nutrition and medical care.
  • Psychosocial Implications:
    • Early maturation in girls and late maturation in boys is associated with increased risk for psychological and social difficulties.
  • Brain Development:
    • The prefrontal cortex matures last, typically completing development in early adulthood.

Search for Identity

  • Erikson's Challenges:
    • The primary challenge during adolescence is forming a coherent identity.
  • Marcia's Identity Crisis Framework:
    • Adolescents resolve identity crises in four ways: foreclosure, moratorium, identity diffusion, and identity achievement.
  • Emerging Adulthood:
    • Arnett argues this new developmental stage exists in contemporary societies.

Development in Adulthood

Personality Development

  • Stability and Change:
    • Personality remains stable overall, but mean scores in traits often change predictably with age.
    • Increased agreeableness, openness, and conscientiousness is typical during adulthood.
  • Erikson's Adult Stages:
    • Three main challenges: intimacy vs. isolation, generativity vs. self-absorption, integrity vs. despair.

Family Transitions

  • Transition Challenges:
    • Optimism is associated with smoother marriages, but idealistic expectations can lead to declines in well-being.
    • Premarital cohabitation was historically linked to higher divorce rates, but trends are changing.
    • Adjustment to marriage is difficult when spouses have differing expectations about roles.
    • Generally, parents report satisfaction with child-rearing, though having a first child can disrupt life routines.
  • Conflict in Parent-Adolescent Relations:
    • Conflicts exist, but they are often less contentious than assumed.

Physiological and Neural Changes in Adulthood

  • Sensory Declines:
    • Vision and hearing acuity can decline in older age, though compensatory aids like glasses and hearing aids are available.
  • Menopause:
    • The experience varies among women and is typically less stressful than commonly believed.
  • Chronic Diseases with Age:
    • Chronic diseases tend to increase with age, but some individuals age more successfully than others.
  • Brain Changes:
    • Starting at age 60, brain tissue and weight generally decrease, but not necessarily linked to dementia conditions.
    • Dementias affect 15-20% of individuals over age 75 but are not classified as normal aging.
    • Alzheimer's disease is characterized by substantial brain tissue loss and characteristic neural anomalies.

Cognitive Changes

  • Memory Capabilities:
    • Older adults often show decreased memory capabilities, although debate exists over the extent of these declines.
  • Processing Speed:
    • Cognitive processing speed typically begins to decline in middle adulthood.
  • Mental Activity:
    • Engaging in high levels of mental activities during late adulthood may help delay cognitive decline.

Death and Dying

  • Kübler-Ross Model:
    • Proposes five stages of emotional response to death, but variations in progression exist.
  • Cultural Variation in Grieving:
    • Different cultures exhibit diverse responses to bereavement.
  • Grief Patterns:
    • Studies show five patterns of grief reactions, with absent grief/resilience being most common.

The Nature of Personality

Personality Traits

  • Definition:
    • A personality trait is a durable disposition to behave consistently across various situations.
  • Five-Factor Model:
    • Suggests that personality is largely structured around five main traits:
    • Neuroticism
    • Extraversion
    • Openness to experience
    • Agreeableness
    • Conscientiousness
  • Predictive Value:
    • Big Five traits are associated with significant life outcomes such as academic performance, job success, marital stability, health, and longevity.

Psychodynamic Perspectives

Freud's Theory
  • Psychoanalytic Foundations:
    • Developed from Freud's work with clients; emphasized the unconscious mind's importance.
  • Personality Structure:
    • Three components: id (pleasure principle), ego (reality principle), superego (moral component).
  • Levels of Awareness:
    • Three levels: conscious (current awareness), preconscious (material just below awareness), unconscious (material well below awareness).
  • Anxiety & Defence Mechanisms:
    • Anxiety stems from conflicts regarding sex and aggression, often dealt with through defence mechanisms (e.g., repression, projection).
  • Psychosexual Stages:
    • Five stages: oral, anal, phallic, latency, and genital; experiences in these stages, like the Oedipus complex, shape adult personality.
Jung's Theory
  • Analytical Psychology:
    • Focuses on unconscious determinants of personality, including the personal and collective unconscious.
    • Collective Unconscious:
    • Storehouse of inherited memories from ancestral history; contains archetypes—emotional thought forms with universal meaning.

Behavioral Perspectives

Skinner's Theory
  • Operant Conditioning:
    • Not primarily a theory of personality, but applied to it; views personality as response tendencies linked to specific contexts.
  • Lifelong Process:
    • Personality develops continuously, shaped by reinforcement.
Bandura's Theory
  • Social Cognitive Theory:
    • Emphasizes cognitive factor roles in personality; relies on observational learning for response tendencies.
  • Self-Efficacy:
    • Belief in one’s ability to perform behaviors that lead to desired outcomes.
Mischel's Theory
  • Social Learning Theory:
    • Emphasizes situational differences in behavior, creating debates about the person-situation relationship in behavior.

Humanistic Perspectives

Rogers's Theory
  • Person-Centered Theory:
    • Focuses on self-concept—subjective beliefs about oneself; incongruence occurs when there is a gap between self-concept and experiences.
  • Congruence vs. Incongruence:
    • Unconditional love fosters congruence; conditional love leads to incongruence, contributing to anxiety.
Maslow's Theory
  • Hierarchy of Needs:
    • Proposes that human motivation is organized hierarchically, with basic needs needing fulfillment before higher-level needs arise.
  • Need for Self-Actualization:
    • At the top of the hierarchy; fulfilling one’s potential is crucial to personality health and development.

Biological Perspectives

Eysenck's Theory
  • Hierarchical Trait Perspective:
    • Personality traits represent a hierarchy; many traits emerge from a few fundamental ones.
  • Genetic Influence:
    • Personality is deeply rooted in genetic legacy, influencing traits like introversion and extraversion through conditioning ease.

Behavioral Genetics Research

  • Twin Studies:
    • Identical twins raised apart show greater personality similarity than fraternal twins raised together; heritability estimates hover around 50%.
  • Environmental Impact:
    • Shared family environment has minimal impact on personality.

Evolutionary Approach

  • Reproductive Fitness:
    • Buss argues the ability to assess the Big Five traits has likely contributed to reproductive success; Nettle posits these traits evolved for adaptive purposes.

Culture and Personality

  • Trait Structure Across Cultures:
    • Evidence for a consistent trait structure across cultures but with variability in average trait scores.
  • Stereotypes:
    • Often inaccurate perceptions regarding national character.
  • Cultural Views of Self:
    • American culture tends to encourage independence of self, while Asian cultures foster an interdependent self-definition.

Applications

  • Self-Report Inventories:
    • Tools like MMPI and NEO rely on individuals describing their traits.
    • Vulnerable to bias and errors such as social desirability.
  • Projective Tests:
    • Rely on responses to ambiguous stimuli but suffer from low reliability & validity.
  • Hindsight Bias:
    • People often believe they knew the outcomes of events after they happen, even without predictions.

Person Perception

  • Influence of Physical Appearance:
    • Attractive individuals are often perceived to have desirable personality traits and greater competence.
  • Stereotypes:
    • Formed from widely held beliefs about individuals based on group memberships; can affect personal judgments.
  • Categorization:
    • Evolutionary views suggest we categorize people as friends or foes for survival reasons.

Attribution

Basic Processes
  • Attributions Defined:
    • Inferences about causes of events and behaviors; can be internal (personal traits) or external (situational factors).
  • Weiner's Attribution Dimensions:
    • Success and failure can be stable-unstable and internal-external analyzed.
Biases
  • Fundamental Attribution Error:
    • Tendency to favor internal attributions for others’ behavior while favoring external for one’s own behavior.
  • Self-Serving Bias:
    • Individuals attribute their successes to internal causes and failures to external factors.

Interpersonal Attraction

Factors in Attraction
  • Key Determinants:
    • Attractiveness plays a central role in romantic attraction across genders.
  • Matching Hypothesis:
    • Males and females of similar attractiveness are likely to select each other as partners.
  • Similarity Effects:
    • Couples display similarities on various traits, potentially formed through attraction fostering similarity.
Perspectives on Love
  • Sternberg's Triangular Theory:
    • Three dimensions: intimacy, passion, and commitment lead to different love types.
  • Adult Attachment:
    • Similar to infant attachment with secure, anxious-ambivalent, and avoidant categories during adulthood.

Cultural Influences

  • Cultural Variations:
    • Although common traits exist, societies differ in valuing romantic love within marriage structures.

Social Behavior

Yielding to Others

Conformity
  • Asch's Studies:
    • Demonstrated strong tendencies to conform, influencing factors like group size.
  • Dissenting Effects:
    • Presence of dissenters can significantly reduce conformity rates.
Obedience
  • Milgram's Study:
    • Revealed high levels of obedience to authority figures, with 65% administering maximum shocks.
  • Ethical Considerations:
    • Led to stricter ethical guidelines in research.
Power of the Situation
  • Stanford Prison Experiment:
    • Displayed the influence of social roles and situational pressures on behavior.

Behavior in Groups

  • Bystander Effect:
    • Individuals are less likely to help in groups due to diffusion of responsibility.
  • Productivity Issues:
    • Group dynamics can lead to social loafing and loss of coordination.
  • Group Polarization:
    • Discussions can lead groups to extreme decision-making in existing directions.
  • Groupthink:
    • Cohesive groups may suspend critical thinking in favor of agreement.

Applications of Social Dynamics

  • Modern Prejudice:
    • Often subtle, reflected in microaggressions; automatic biases persist despite diminished stereotypes.
  • Attributional Biases:
    • Including dispositional assumptions contributing to prejudice.
  • Realistic Group Conflict Theory:
    • Competition for scarce resources can foster prejudices.
  • Social Influence Tactics:
    • Techniques like foot-in-the-door, lowball, and reciprocity norms can exploit social influence power.