Psychological Development Study Notes

Heredity and Environment

Nature vs. Nurture: Centuries-old debate on whether heredity or environment is more important in human development.
John Locke: Introduced the concept of "tabula rasa" (blank slate), emphasizing experience through senses as the source of knowledge.
Charles Darwin: Emphasized the biological basis of human development, focusing on heredity.
Behaviorism: Watson and Skinner argued that early training can mold a child into any kind of adult, regardless of heredity.
Interaction: Today, psychologists believe that both nature and nurture interact continuously to guide development.
Brain Development: Heavily influenced by both genetic factors and environmental stimulation, with rapid neural connections forming after birth.
Maturation: Genetically determined sequence of growth relatively independent of external events.
Environmental Impact: Abnormal uterine environments or maternal factors can disrupt maturational processes, affecting fetal development.
Motor Development: Sequence is universal, but rates vary; influenced by practice and stimulation.
Speech Development: Requires a certain level of neurological development, environment affects the rate skills are acquired, not the skill level.

Stages of Development

Discrete Steps: Several psychologists propose discrete, qualitatively distinct stages of development.
Implication: Behaviors at a given stage are organized around a dominant theme.
Fixed Sequence: All children go through the same stages in the same order, but environmental factors may speed up or slow down development.
Critical Periods: Crucial time periods when specific events must occur for development to proceed normally.
Sensitive Periods: Periods that are optimal for a particular kind of development, may not develop to its full potential past this mark.

Capacities of the Newborn

Sensory Systems: Newborn infants enter the world with all sensory systems functioning, prepared to learn.
Vision: Poor visual acuity, nearsighted. Attracted to areas of high contrast and complex patterns.
Facial Preference: Newborns prefer normal faces over scrambled ones. Rapid early learning about faces occurs.
Hearing: Fetuses respond to sound. Newborns prefer mother's voice and language. "Motherese" or “Babytalk” is helpful for infants detecting the boundaries between words.
Taste and Smell: Infants discriminate tastes, preferring sweet. They discriminate smells, showing preference for mother's milk.
Learning and Memory: Infants can learn and remember from birth, preferring human voices and sounds experienced prenatally.

Cognitive Development in Childhood

Jean Piaget: Focused on the interaction between a child’s naturally maturing abilities and interactions with the environment.
Schemas: Children construct schemas (theories) about how the world operates.
Assimilation: Understanding new objects or events in terms of pre-existing Schema.
Accommodation: Modifying a schema to fit new information.
Sensorimotor Stage (0-2 years): Discovering relationships between actions and consequences; development of object permanence.
Preoperational Stage (2-7 years): Use of symbols, but illogical thinking; lack of understanding of reversibility and conservation; egocentrism.
Concrete Operational Stage (7-11 years): Mastery of conservation concepts; logical manipulations related to concrete objects.
Formal Operational Stage (11+ years): Abstract reasoning in symbolic terms; systematic hypothesis testing.

Critique of Piaget's Theory

Underestimation of Abilities: Newer methods show that Piaget underestimated children’s abilities.
Task Complexity: Tasks require multiple skills undermining results.
Object Permanence: infants might know that the object still exists but be unable to show this knowledge through searching behavior, as discovered through the screen test.
Conservation Tasks: judgment of equality are less likely to be influenced by irrelevant perceptual transformations for testing number.

Alternatives to Piaget's Theory

Information-Processing Approaches: Cognitive development as the acquisition of specific information-processing skills.
Knowledge Acquisition Approach: Differences between children and adults are quantitative; adults possess a more extensive knowledge base.
Sociocultural Approaches: Emphasize the social and cultural context, with the child seeking to become native learn how to look at social reality through the lens of that culture.
Vygotsky: The child’s actual level of development, as expressed in problem-solving ability, and the child’s level of potential development, which is determined by the kind of problem solving the child can do when guided by language

Theory of Mind

Mental States: Understanding that others have minds and thoughts different from one's own.
Research Example: An experimenter shows a 5-year-old child a candy box, discovering crayons, and responding with an amused 'Candy'.
Sequence: (1) Elementary conception of desires and emotions. (2) Talking about beliefs, and true/false values. (3) Beliefs affect and don’t reflect reality.
Pointing: Intentionally direct the mind (attention) of an adult of a certain way, that’s the infant already know the adult's mind is different from her own.
-Lack of fundamentals: Can seem like any other object of lack of interest in others.

The Development of Moral Judgement

Cognitive Development: level of cognitive development determines their moral judgment.
-Social conventions: Cooperative agreements that can arbitrability change if everyone agrees.
-Moral Realism: Give weight to subjective considerations such as a person's intentions.
-American Psychologist Lawrence kohlberg: Presentation for research participants with moral dilemmas in the form of stories.
-6 developmental stages: Grouped into 3 different levels
-Preconventional, conventional, Postconventional.

Personality and Social Development

Temperament: Inborn, mood-related personality characteristics.
Early Social Behavior: Babies can imitate as early as birth. Starts smiling at months old.
-Social Interaction: Maintained through system and maintained.
Stranger Anxiety: Distress at the approach of a stranger.

Attachment

Closeness: is used to describe an infant's ten-dency to seek closeness to particular people and to feel more secure in their presence.
-Artificial Mother Studies: (Harlow Study)- Infant monkeys prefer the soft terry cloth artificial mother to the wire mesh mother that provides food- the infant turns to the terry cloth artificial mother like contact comfort and comfort that does not depend on nutrition
Bowlby Stud- A child’s failure to form a secure attachment to one or more persons in the early years is related to an inability to develop close personal relations in adulthood.

Self-Concept

Mirror Test- Put a red smudge on the forehead of an 18-month-old child without knowing it, then put her in front of a mirror, she will reach up and touch the mark on her head.

Gender Identity and Sex Typing

Sex Typing: Acquisition of behaviors and characteristics that a culture considers appropriate to one’s sex.
Gender Identity: A firm sense of themselves as either male or female.
Social Learning: Emphasizes rewards and punishments for sex-appropriate and sex-inappropriate behaviors, as well as ways children learn sex-typed behavior by observing.
Cognitive Developmental: Gender constancy understanding that a person sex remains the same to changes.
Gender Schema Theory: Children become sex-typed because sex happens to be a major focus around which their culture chooses to organize its view of reality that teaches children to view the world through the lens of Gender.

Adolescent Development

Puberty Sexual Maturation: rapid physical growth and development.
Timing of Puberty: Affects appearance . Early or late affects adolescents satisfaction with appearance.
-Erik Erikson Adolescent Development- developing a sense of identity.
-James Marcia- 4 identity statuses
identity achievement.
foreclosure.
moratorium.
identity diffusion.