Unit 3 - Developmental Psychology

Module 3.1 —————————

What is developmental psychology? ↓↓↓

Developmental psychology: the branch of psychology that studies physical, cognitive, and social change throughout the lifespan.

In developmental psychology, we see major issues that are continually debated:

Nature vs. nurture: How does our genetic inheritance (our nature) interact with our experiences (our nurture) to influence our development?

Continuity vs. stages: What parts of development are gradual and continuous, like riding an escalator? What parts change abruptly in separate stages, like climbing rungs on a ladder?

Stability vs. change: Which of our traits persist through life? How do we change as we age?

How we study development? ↓↓↓

Longitudinal Studies: research that follows and retests the same people over time

Cross-Sectional Studies: research that compares people of different ages at the same point in time

Module 3.2 —————————

Prenatal Development ↓↓↓

Because pinpointing the moment of conception is nearly impossible, prenatal development is measured based on the date of the last menstrual cycle.

Stages of Prenatal Development:

Conception → one of several million sperm cells penetrate a mature egg creating a fertilized egg or zygote

Zygotes enter a 2-week period of rapid cell division as it travels to the uterus and develops into an embryo.

Embryos (the developing human organism from about 2 weeks to 2 months) are protected by the placenta - a specialized organ that transmits nutrients and oxygen from the mother to the embryo. During this stage, organs and nerves begin to form and function.

From around nine weeks after conception until birth, the developing human organism is known as a fetus. At 22-23 weeks, the fetus reaches the threshold of viability, meaning it has developed enough and is likely to survive if born prematurely.

Influences on Prenatal Development ↓↓↓

A growing human is fully dependent on the human it inhabits, and the life they lead and the choices they make can have a huge impact on the development of their baby. Teratogens are agents, such as chemicals and viruses, that can reach the embryo or fetus during prenatal development and cause potential harm:

Environment
Stress → Stress hormones can cause early delivery.
Diet → Pregnant people are encouraged to eat lots of fruits and vegetables, and discouraged from deli meats, soft cheeses, fish, raw meat/eggs, sugar, spicy food, and fast food.
Medicine
Illness → While you cannot always prevent yourself from getting sick, certain illnesses should be avoided at all costs while pregnant, as they can affect the development of a fetus (ex. Zika virus).
Drugs and alcohol should be strictly avoided during pregnancy. Fetuses exposed to certain drugs may experience withdrawal after birth, as well as, serious health complications and physical abnormalities.
- Fetal Alcohol Syndrome: physical and cognitive abnormalities in children caused by excessive drinking during pregnancy

Statistics about Fertility & Birthrates ↓↓↓

The current birth rate for the world is 17.299 births per 1000 people, a 0.94% decline from 2023.
One in four women will experience a miscarriage.
- At least 10 to 15% of all known pregnancies end in miscarriage, but experts say the actual rate of miscarriage is probably greater because some miscarriages occur before women even realize they are pregnant.
Around 17.5% of the adult population – roughly 1 in 6 worldwide – experience infertility.

Factors that Increase Infertility:

Stress
Diet/Weight
Genes
Environmental factors (drug use, exposure to chemicals/heat, etc.)
Age
Egg/Sperm quantity/quality

Newborns ↓↓↓

Habituation: decreasing responsiveness with repeated stimulation, similar to sensory adaptation

Maturation ↓↓↓

Maturation: the biological growth processes that enable orderly changes in behavior, relatively uninfluenced by experience.

In other words, regardless of environment, as long as a baby is alive, it will continue to grow and develop, though the extent of that development depends on exterior factors.

Critical Periods ↓↓↓

a time during someone's development in which a particular skill or characteristic is believed to be most readily acquired, and if not acquired by a certain time, it may be impossible to learn.

Brain Development ↓↓↓

Neuropathways are created at a rapid rate after birth.

Motor Development ↓↓↓

The developing brain enables physical coordination. Skills emerge as infants exercise their maturing muscles and nervous system.

Memory Development ↓↓↓

Studies suggest that we consciously recall little from before age 3. But as children mature, this infantile amnesia wanes, and they become increasingly capable of remembering experiences, even for a year or more. The brain areas underlying memory, such as the hippocampus and frontal lobes, continue to mature during and after adolescence.

The Teenage Years ↓↓↓

Adolescence: the transition period from childhood to adulthood, extending from puberty to independence

Puberty: the period of sexual maturation during which a person becomes capable of reproducing

Cognitive Development in Adolescence ↓↓↓

selective pruning: unused neural connections are lost to make other pathways more efficient

the frontal cortex: your center for planning, reasoning, personality, etc. - is not finished developing until you are about 25 years old, which may contribute to the poor reasoning skills of teenagers. Hormonal surges and the limbic system may also explain occasional teen impulsiveness

Physical Changes in Middle Adulthood ↓↓↓

Muscular strength, reaction time, sensory abilities and cardiac output begin to decline after the mid- twenties.

Around age 50, women go through menopause (the time of natural cessation of menstruation), and men experience decreased levels of hormones and fertility.

With age, sexual activity lessens.

Nevertheless, most men and women remain capable of satisfying sexual activity, and most express satisfaction with their sex life.

Physical & Sensory Changes in Late Adulthood ↓↓↓

The immune system weakens, increasing susceptibility to life-threatening illnesses.

Chromosome tips (telomeres) wear down, reducing the chances of normal genetic replication.
But for some, longevity-supporting genes, low stress, and good health habits enable better health in later life.

Visual sharpness diminishes, as does distance perception and adaptation to light-level changes

Muscle strength, reaction time, and stamina also diminish, as do smell, hearing, and touch

Other Elements of Aging ↓↓↓

Life expectancy keeps increasing (now about 79). Women outlive men by about 4 years and outnumber them at most ages.

The body’s disease-fighting immune system weakens, making older adults more susceptible to life-threatening ailments such as cancer and pneumonia.

Older people take a bit more time to react, to solve perceptual puzzles, and to remember names. Brain regions important to memory begin to atrophy during aging.

Exercise slows aging. Active older adults tend to be mentally quick older adults. Physical exercise not only enhances muscles, bones, and energy and helps prevent obesity and heart disease, it maintains the telomeres that protect the chromosome ends and even appears to slow the progression of Alzheimer’s disease.

Module 3.3 —————————

Sex vs. Gender ↓↓↓

Humans share an irresistible urge to organize our worlds into simple categories. Immediately after your birth (or before), everyone wanted to know, “Boy or girl?” Your parents may have offered clues with pink or blue clothing. The answer describes your sex, your biological status defined by your chromosomes and anatomy. For most people, those biological traits help define their assigned gender, the socially influenced characteristics by which people define boy, girl, man, and woman.

Simply said, your body defines your sex. Your mind defines your gender. But your mind’s understanding of gender arises from the interplay between your biology and your experiences.

Sexual Development Variations ↓↓↓

Intersex individuals are born with unusual combinations of male and female chromosomes, hormones, and anatomy.

For example, a genetic male may be born with normal male hormones and testes but no penis or a micropenis. Such individuals may struggle with their gender identity.

Onset of Puberty ↓↓↓

For boys, puberty’s landmark is the first ejaculation, which often occurs first during sleep (as a “wet dream”). This event, called spermarche, usually happens by about age 14.

In girls, the landmark is the first menstrual period, menarche, usually within a year of age 12½. Genes play a major role in predicting when girls experience menarche.

But environment matters, too. Early menarche is more likely following stresses related to father absence, sexual abuse, insecure attachments, or a history of a mother’s smoking during pregnancy.
Menarche - the first menstrual cycle - signals the beginning of puberty in females around age 11
Spermarche - the first ejaculation - signals the beginning of puberty in males around age 13

Biological Differences of Sex ↓↓↓

In two ways, biology influences our gender psychology:

Genetically—males and females have differing sex chromosomes.

Females: XX
Males: XY

Physiologically—males and females have differing concentrations of sex hormones, which trigger other anatomical differences.

Primary vs. Secondary Sex Characteristics ↓↓↓

A flood of hormones, primarily estrogen (main female sex hormone) & testosterone (main male sex hormone), triggers another period of dramatic physical change during adolescence, when boys and girls enter puberty. Girls’ slightly earlier entry into puberty can at first propel them to greater height than boys of the same age. But boys catch up when they begin puberty, and by age 14, they are usually taller than girls. During these growth spurts, the primary sex characteristics—the reproductive organs and external genitalia—develop dramatically. So do the nonreproductive secondary sex characteristics. Girls develop breasts and larger hips. Boys’ facial hair begins growing and their voices deepen. Pubic and underarm hair emerges in both girls and boys.

Primary sex characteristics include the body structures (ovaries, testes, etc.) that make reproduction possible.
Secondary sex characteristics are the non-reproductive sexual traits → side effects of puberty (breast growth, widening of hips, deepening of voice, body hair, etc.)

Formation of Gender Identity ↓↓↓

Gender Role: a set of expected behaviors, attitudes, and traits for males and females.

Role:
- Men go to work. Women keep house and raise children.
Sexual Aggression

Gender Identity: our sense of being male, female, or some combination of the two. In other words, how do you show the world your gender?

Social Learning Theory:

Gender Typing: the acquisition of a traditional masculine or feminine role
- How did you learn about what it means to be male or female?
Androgyny: displaying both traditional masculine and feminine physiological characteristics → nonbinary
Transgender: an umbrella term describing people whose gender identity or expression differs from that associated with their sex designated at birth

Sexual Orientation ↓↓↓

We express the direction of our sexual interest in our sexual orientation—which usually is our enduring sexual attraction toward members of our own sex (homosexual) or the other sex (heterosexual).

Other variations include an attraction to both sexes (bisexual) or no sexual attraction at all (asexual).

We experience our sexual orientation in our interests, thoughts, and fantasies.

Due to the controversy surrounding differing sexual orientation, research has been done in regards to how it develops and have found the following:

Sexual orientation as neither willfully chosen nor willfully changed.
There is no evidence that environmental influences determine sexual orientation.
Evidence for biological influences includes the presence of same-sex attraction in many animal species, straight-gay differences in body and brain characteristics, higher rates of homosexuality in certain families and in identical twins, the effect of exposure to certain hormones during critical periods of prenatal development, and the fraternal birth-order effect

Alfred Kinsey ↓↓↓

Became the founding director of the new Institute for Sex Research and published Sexual Behavior in the Human Male in 1948 and the complementary work, Sexual Behavior in the Human Female in 1953.

Both works were based on over 100,000 interviews he conducted on participants’ sexual history. His research concluded that there is more to sex than physical attraction and that human sexuality is a spectrum (known as the Kinsey Scale).

Physiology of Sex ↓↓↓

Among the forces driving sexual behavior are the sex hormones. The main male sex hormone is testosterone. The main female sex hormones are the estrogens, such as estradiol. Both males and females have testosterone and estrogen, though at differing levels. Sex hormones influence us at many points in the life span:

During the prenatal period, they direct our development as males or females.
During puberty, a sex hormone surge ushers us into adolescence.
After puberty and well into the late adult years, sex hormones facilitate sexual behavior.
When a female enters the fertile window (ovulation), their estrogen levels rise, often causing a rise in testosterone levels of the men nearby.

The Psychology of Sex ↓↓↓

Believe it or not, the biggest and most important sex organ you have is your brain. Obviously, hormones have a large influence on our sexual behavior, but much of our motivation for sex comes from external or imagined stimuli.

While it is natural to view explicit material, too much exposure can have some adverse effects:

Believing rape is acceptable
Reduced satisfaction with partner’s appearance
Desensitization

Sexually Transmitted Diseases/Infections ↓↓↓

Every day, more than 1 million people worldwide acquire a sexually transmitted infection (STI; also called STD, for sexually transmitted disease).

Condoms offer only limited protection against certain skin-to-skin STIs, such as herpes, but they do reduce other risks. When used by people with an infected partner, condoms also have been 80 percent effective in preventing transmission of HIV (human immunodeficiency virus), the virus that causes AIDS (acquired immune deficiency syndrome).

Although HIV can be transmitted by other means, such as needle sharing during drug use, its sexual transmission is most common.
AIDS is a life-threatening, sexually transmitted infection that depletes the immune system, leaving the person vulnerable to infections.

Sexual Risk Taking ↓↓↓

Sexual attitudes and behaviors vary dramatically across cultures and eras.

So, what produces variations in teen sexuality? Twin studies show that genes influence teen sexual behavior—by influencing pubertal development and hormone levels. But what environmental factors contribute?

Communication about contraception & birth control → knowledge is power
Impulsivity → frontal lobe is not fully developed yet
Alcohol Use → decreased inhibition and poor judgement
Mass Media → Social scripts can pressure teens into engaging in sexual activities to feel normal or fit in.

Factors that Predict Abstinence ↓↓↓

High Intelligence: Teens with high rather than average intelligence test scores more often delayed sex, partly because they considered possible negative consequences and were more focused on future achievement than on here-and-now pleasures.

Religious Affiliation & Engagement: Actively religious teens more often reserve sexual activity for adulthood or long-term relationships.

Presence of Father: Close family attachments—as in families that eat together and where parents know their teens’ activities and friends predict later sexual initiation.

Service Learning Participation: Several experiments have found that teens volunteering as tutors or teachers’ aides, or participating in community projects, had lower pregnancy rates than did comparable teens randomly assigned to control conditions.

Module 3.4 —————————

Jean Piaget ↓↓↓

Developmental psychologist Jean Piaget studied children’s cognition—all the mental activities associated with thinking, knowing, remembering, and communicating.

Organizing the Mind ↓↓↓

schemas: concepts or mental molds into which we pour our experiences.

assimilate: new experiences—we interpret them in terms of our current understandings (schemas)

accommodate: adjust our schemas to incorporate information provided by new experiences.

Jean Piaget’s Stages of Cognitive Development ↓↓↓

In Piaget’s view, cognitive development consisted of 4 major stages:

Sensorimotor
- Experiencing the world through senses and actions
Pre-operational
- Representing things with words and images
Concrete Operational
- Thinking logically about concrete events
Formal Operational
- Reasoning abstractly

Stage 1 - Sensorimotor ↓↓↓

In the sensorimotor stage, from birth to nearly age 2, babies take in the world through their senses and actions—through looking, hearing, touching, mouthing, and grasping. As their hands and limbs begin to move, they learn to make things happen.

Sensorimotor → senses & movement
Lack of object permanence: the awareness that things continue to exist even when not perceived (gained around 6-8 months)
Stranger anxiety: fear and apprehension infants commonly display around those unfamiliar to them (starts at around 8 months of age)

Stage 2 - Pre-operational ↓↓↓

Piaget believed that until about age 6 or 7, children are in a pre-operational stage—able to represent things with words and images but too young to perform mental operations (such as imagining an action and mentally reversing it).

Preop → before a surgery, you have to have the knowledge to continue
Pretend play
Egocentrism: a child’s difficulty in seeing another’s point of view (not the same as egotistical)
Lack of conservation: the principle that properties such as mass, volume, and number remain the same despite changes in form (mastered around age 6)

Stage 3 - Concrete Operational ↓↓↓

By about age 7, said Piaget, children enter the concrete operational stage. Given concrete (physical) materials, they begin to grasp operations such as conservation. Understanding that change in form does not mean change in quantity, they can mentally pour milk back and forth between glasses of different shapes.

Concrete → hardening, concepts get harder
Mathematical formulas & transformations → 1 + 3 = 3 + 1 (a.k.a. reversibility)
Start to understand puns and elements of sarcasm

Stage 4 - Formal Operational ↓↓↓

By age 12, our reasoning expands from the purely concrete (involving actual experience) to encompass abstract thinking (involving imagined realities and symbols). As children approach adolescence, said Piaget, they can ponder hypothetical propositions and deduce consequences: If this, then that. Systematic reasoning, what Piaget called formal operational thinking, is now within their grasp. Although full-blown logic and reasoning await adolescence, the rudiments of formal operational thinking begin earlier than Piaget realized.

Formal → like a formal dance, those only start in middle school
Abstract thought
Potential for moral & logical reasoning

Criticisms of Piaget’s Theory ↓↓↓

He underestimates the abilities of children.
Information-Processing Model says children do not learn in stages but rather a gradual continuous growth.
Studies show that our attention span grows gradually over time

Piaget’s stage theory has been influential globally, validating a number of ideas regarding growth and development in many cultures and societies. However, today’s researchers believe the following:

Development is a continuous process.
Children express their mental abilities and operations at an earlier age.
Formal logic is a smaller part of cognition.

Lev Vygotsky & the Social Child ↓↓↓

Russian psychologist Lev Vygotsky was also studying how children think and learn.

Where Piaget emphasized how the child’s mind grows through interaction with the physical environment, Vygotsky emphasized how the child’s mind grows through interaction with the social environment.

scaffold: a framework that offers children temporary support as they develop higher levels of thinking

Theory of Mind: people’s ideas about their own and other’s mental states (feelings, perceptions, thoughts, etc.) and the behaviors these might predict

Moral Intuition & Action ↓↓↓

Psychologist Jonathan Haidt believes that much of our morality is rooted in moral intuitions—“quick gut feelings, or affectively laden intuitions.”

delay gratification: to decline small rewards now for bigger rewards later

basic to our future academic, vocational, and social success.

Cognitive Decline ↓↓↓

As the years pass, recall begins to decline, especially for meaningless information, but recognition memory remains strong. Crystallized intelligence increases with age while fluid intelligence peaks in our 20s and then starts to decline.

Terminal decline: describes the cognitive decline in the final few years of life.

Neurocognitive disorders (NCDs), formerly called dementia in older adults: are marked by cognitive deficits. Alzheimer’s disease: causes the deterioration of memory, then reasoning.

Neurocognitive disorders are those marked by cognitive deficits, often related to Alzheimer’s disease, brain injury or disease, or substance abuse.
Alzheimer’s Disease is a neurocognitive disorder marked by neural plaques and entailing a progressive decline in memory and cognitive abilities.

Module 3.5 —————————

What is language? ↓↓↓

Language is our spoken, written, or signed words and the ways we combine them to communicate meaning. Language serves a variety of purposes:

Form bonds
Promote cooperation
Record history
Represent complex ideas

Theories of Language Development ↓↓↓

Noam Chomsky - Nativist Theory

Universal grammar
Believed we are naturally equipped with a “language acquisition device” that helps us acquire language easily and rapidly but if language acquisition does not occur by a certain time, it may be impossible

B.F. Skinner - Behaviorist Theory

Believed we learned language through imitation & reinforcement

Lev Vygotsky - Sociocultural Theory

Believed we learned language through social interaction

Developing Language ↓↓↓

receptive language: where we focus on those that are speaking to us and try to respond.

At 4 months, we begin babbling: uttering sounds

At 10 months, the babbles sound more like our household’s language.

By a year, we know words, and by 2, we can talk in simple two-word phrases (telegraphic speech). From there, our vocabulary rapidly develops.

Childhood is a critical period for mastering certain aspects of language before the language- learning window gradually closes. Lack of exposure to either spoken or signed language by about age 7, can cause them to lose their ability to master any language.

Children exposed to low-quality language—such as 4-year-olds in classrooms with 3-year-olds, or some children from impoverished homes—often display less language skill. We know this because of the case of “feral children” like Genie.

The Brain & Language ↓↓↓

aphasia: the impairment of language

Can happen if Broca/Wernicke’s area is damaged

Broca’s Aphasia - difficulty with speech production

difficulty in putting words together in sentences or even speaking single words, although a person can sing a song

Wernicke’s Aphasia - difficulty with language comprehension

May struggle putting words into meaningful sentences → word salad

Linguistic Determinism ↓↓↓

linguistic determinism: the theory that our language influences the nature of our thought and how we interpret the world around us.

Ex:

The Hopi tribe do not have a past tense, thus they don’t think about the past.
While we have only one word for snow, Eskimo has dozens of different words for snow.
Additionally, multilingual speakers report having a different sense of self depending on the language they are using.

Module 3.6 —————————

Origins of Attachment ↓↓↓

parent-infant attachment: an emotional tie with another person, shown in children by seeking closeness to their caregiver and showing distress on separation

a powerful survival impulse that keeps infants close to their caregivers. Infants normally become attached to those— typically their parents—who they are comfortable and familiar with.

Three key studies helped researchers understand the importance of attachment:

Harry Harlow’s Monkey Experiment
Konrad Lorenz’s Imprinting Geese
Mary Ainsworth’s Strange Situation Procedure

Konrad Lorenz & Imprinting ↓↓↓

critical period: an optimal period when certain events must take place to facilitate proper development.

when attachments based on familiarity form

imprinting: the process by which certain animals form strong attachments during early life

Mary Ainsworth & the Strange Situation ↓↓↓

Mary Ainsworth designed the “strange situation” experiment. She observed 1-year-old infants in a strange situation (usually a laboratory playroom) with and without their mothers.

60% of infants and young children display secure attachment: where, in their mother’s presence they play comfortably, happily exploring their new environment. When she leaves, they become distressed; when she returns, they seek contact with her.

But insecure attachment, marked either by anxiety or by avoidance of trusting relationships. These infants are less likely to explore their surroundings; they may even cling to their mother. When she leaves, they either cry loudly and remain upset or seem indifferent to her departure and return.

Strange situation: a procedure for studying child-caregiver attachment; a child is placed in an unfamiliar environment while their caregiver leaves and the returns, and the child’s reactions are observed

Secure attachment: demonstrated by infants who comfortably explore environments in the presence of their caregiver, show only temporary distress in their absence, and find comfort in their return

Insecure attachment: demonstrated by infants who display either a clinging, anxious attachment or an avoidant attachment that resists closeness

Temperament: a person’s characteristic emotional reactivity and intensity

Diana Baumrind & Parenting Styles ↓↓↓

Diana Baumrind has identified four parenting styles:

Authoritarian parents are coercive. They impose rules and expect obedience.
- “Don’t interrupt.” “Keep your room clean.” “Don’t stay out late or you’ll be grounded.” “Why? Because I said so.”

Permissive parents are un-restraining. They make few demands, set few limits, and use little punishment.

Negligent parents are uninvolved. They are neither demanding nor responsive. They are careless, inattentive, and do not seek to have a close relationship with their children.

Authoritative parents are confrontative. They are both demanding and responsive. They exert control by setting rules, but, especially with older children, they encourage open discussion and allow exceptions

Erik Erikson & Psychosocial Development ↓↓↓

Erik Erikson contended that each stage of life has its own psychosocial task, a crisis that needs resolution.

intimacy: the ability to form close loving relationships

Erikson’s Stages of Psychosocial Development ↓↓↓

Stage One: Trust vs Mistrust - Is my world supportive or unpredictable? → attachment to caregiver

Stage Two: Autonomy vs Shame & Doubt - Can I do things for myself or must I rely on others? → potty training

Stage Three: Initiative vs Guilt - Am I good or bad? → preschool

Stage Four: Competence vs. Inferiority - Am I capable of success? → elementary school
Stage Five: Identity vs Role Confusion - Who am I? → high school

Stage Six: Intimacy vs Isolation - Will I go through my life alone or share it with others? → college, independence, marriage, children

Stage Seven: Generativity vs Stagnation - What do I want to do before I die?→ middle adulthood, possibly midlife crisis

Stage Eight: Integrity vs Despair - Have I lived a good life? → retirement

Parent & Peer Influence ↓↓↓

Parents do matter. But parenting wields its largest effects at the extremes: the abused children who become abusive, the deeply loved but firmly handled who become self-confident and socially competent. As children mature, what other experiences do the work of nurturing? At all ages, but especially during childhood and adolescence, we seek to fit in with our groups.

Family environment and parental expectations can affect children’s motivation and future success. Personality, however, is mostly not attributable to the effects of nurture.
As children attempt to fit in with their peers, they tend to adopt their culture—habits, accents, and slang, for example.
By choosing their children’s neighborhoods and schools, parents exert some influence over peer group culture.

Emerging Adulthood ↓↓↓

a period from about age 18 to the mid-20s when many in Western cultures are no longer adolescents but have not yet achieved full independence as adults

Social Clock ↓↓↓

midlife crisis: distress that peaks in midlife

social clock: a culture’s preferred timing for social events, such as marriage, parenthood, and retirement

Grief ↓↓↓

Not everyone grieves the same way, the stages do not work in a certain order, you CANNOT tell someone how to grief

Stages:

Denial
Anger
Bargaining
Depression
Acceptance

Module 3.7 —————————

What is learning?↓↓↓

learning: the process of acquiring through experience new and relatively enduring information or behaviors

associative learning: realizing that certain events occur together

both humans and animals learn through association

habituation: decreasing responsiveness with repeated exposure to a stimulus (like sensory adaptation)

If a stimulus causes a behavior, that is classical conditioning

If a behavior causes a response, that is operant conditioning

Types & Terms of Learning↓↓↓

Dr. Ivan Pavlov was a physician studying digestion in dogs who noticed that these dogs would start drooling at the sight of his lab assistants, despite the absence of food. Because they associated food with these assistants, the dogs knew food was coming and responded accordingly. Pavlov found this curious and decided to change his experiments to test the theory of what he called “psychic reflexes”.

classical conditioning - a type of passive learning in which we link two or more stimuli

behaviorism: the view that psychology should be an objective science that studies observable actions without reference to internal mental processes.

Stimulus: any event or situation that evokes a response (cause of an action)

Respondent Behavior: behavior that occurs as an automatic response to some stimulus

Operant Behavior: behavior that operates on the environment, producing consequences (learning through reinforcement & punishment)

Cognitive Learning: the acquisition of mental information, whether by observing events/others or through language

Pavlov’s Dog Experiment↓↓↓

US: dog food

UR: dog drooling

NS: bell

CS: bell
CR: dog drooling

^^when this happens (the bell taking on the role of dog food), it is called acquisition

Unconditioned Stimulus (US): unlearned, naturally occurring cause of behavior
Neutral Stimulus (NS): elicits no response before conditioning
Unconditioned Response (UR): unlearned, naturally occurring behavior
Conditioned Stimulus (CS): learned cause of behavior
Conditioned Response (CR): learned behavior

Terms in Classical Conditioning↓↓↓

Acquisition: the initial stage of learning in which one links a neutral stimulus and an unconditioned stimulus so the neutral stimulus triggers the unconditioned response

Bell = food

Extinction: the diminishing of a conditioned response

Pavlov’s dogs are freed from the lab, adopted by nice families, and don’t drool every time a bell rings.

Spontaneous recovery: the reappearance, after a pause, of an extinguished conditioned response

Pavlov’s dogs are living happily on a lovely farm, and find themselves drooling randomly when the farmer rings the dinner bell.

Higher-order conditioning: a procedure in which the conditioned stimulus is paired with a new neutral stimulus (as if it were the unconditioned stimulus) creating a second (often weaker) conditioned stimulus

If bell = food, and bell is with light, then light = food

Generalization vs. Discrimination↓↓↓

Stimulus generalization is the tendency for stimuli that are similar to the conditioned stimulus to elicit a similar response.

Pavlov’s dogs drooling to all bell-like sounds - telephones, door bells, dinner bells, etc.

Stimulus discrimination is the learned ability to distinguish between a conditioned stimulus and similar stimuli that do not\ signal an unconditioned stimulus.

Pigeons trained to respond to a red light will not respond to a green light.

Little Albert↓↓↓

This experiment proved that fear can indeed be conditioned. This type of classical conditioning is also known as: aversive conditioning.

Biological Constraints on Classical Conditioning↓↓↓

preparedness: each species’ predispositions prepare it to learn the associations that enhance its survival

taste aversion - when exposed to the sight or smell of something that is associated with nausea or vomiting, one feels ill and is unlikely to expose themselves to it again.

Module 3.8 —————————

What is Operant Conditioning?↓↓↓

Operant conditioning: a type of learning in which a behavior becomes more likely to recur if followed by a reinforcer or less likely to recur if followed by a punisher.

This is based on Edward Thorndike’s law of effect: the principle that behaviors followed by favorable consequences become more likely, and behaviors followed by unfavorable consequences become less likely.

B. F. Skinner↓↓↓

elaborated on the law of effect, studying how pigeons and rats learn through reinforcement.

operant chamber/Skinner box: contained a bar or key that an animal can manipulate to obtain food or water.

Reinforcement↓↓↓

In operant conditioning, reinforcement: any event that strengthens (or increases the likelihood) the behavior that follows.

positive reinforcement: increasing behaviors by presenting rewarding stimuli
- Getting good grades encourages you to study, getting complimented on your looks encourages you to dress a certain way
negative reinforcement: increasing behaviors by stopping or reducing aversive stimuli
- Putting on a coat to stop feeling cold cleaning your room to get rid of the mess/smell
- NOT THE SAME AS PUNISHMENT

Shaping Behavior↓↓↓

Shaping: the process in which reinforcers guide behavior toward closer and closer (successive approximations) to the desired behavior (a.k.a. training).

Types of Reinforcement↓↓↓

Primary Reinforcers are innately rewarding by satisfying a biological need (food, water, shelter, etc.).
Conditioned (Secondary) Reinforcers are those that gain power through association with a primary reinforcer (money to buy food, water, shelter, etc.).
Reinforcement Schedules are patterns that define how often a desired response will be reinforced.
- Continuous reinforcement - the desired behavior is reinforced every time
  - Used in the acquisition stage
  - Learning occurs faster, but doesn’t last as long
- Partial or intermittent reinforcement: the desired behavior is reinforced only some of the time
  - Used once behavior is mastered
  - Learning occurs slowly, but lasts longer
  - Token economy: a system in which the learner earns tokens by engaging inga targeted behavior and those tokens can be exchanged for a reward

Schedules of Reinforcement↓↓↓

Fixed means a set number, variable means a random or changing number.

Interval requires time to pass, ratio requires actions to be taken.

Fixed ratio: a reinforcement schedule that reinforces a desired behavior only after a specific number of actions have been completed (ex. Getting a bonus for every three cars sold)
Fixed interval - a reinforcement schedule that reinforces a desired behavior only after a specific amount of time has passed (ex. Getting a paycheck every week)
Variable ratio - a reinforcement schedule that reinforces a desired behavior only after a specific number of actions have been completed (ex. Slot machines)
Variable interval - a reinforcement schedule that reinforces a desired behavior only after a unpredictable amount of time has passed (ex. Cooking times)

Punishment↓↓↓

Punishment: any event that tends to decrease the behavior that it follows.

Positive punishment: administration of an aversive stimulus

Traffic tickets, given extra chores

Negative punishment: removal of a pleasant/rewarding stimulus

Fines (losing money), losing car/phone privileges, getting grounded (losing freedom)

Shaping & Reinforcement↓↓↓

discriminative stimuli: a stimulus that elicits a response after association with reinforcement

Escape learning: a type of negative reinforcement in which a behavior that removes an unpleasant stimulus is increased

Faking sick to leave a social gathering, sneaking out the back of the restaurant to get away from a bad date

Avoidance learning: a type of negative reinforcement in which a behavior that prevents removes an unpleasant stimulus is increased

Claiming your parents won’t allow you to attend the social gathering, ghosting people you are not interested in

Learned helplessness ↓↓↓

the feeling of hopelessness and passive resignation an animal or person learns when they are unable to avoid repeated aversive event

Module 3.9 —————————

Constraints on Operant Conditioning ↓↓↓

Beyond instinct, we cannot dismiss all cognition from the learning process, as there is evidence that mental processes play a huge role in acquisition of knowledge.

Latent learning: learning that occurs but is not apparent until there is an incentive to demonstrate it → Edward Tolman’s Maze Study
- Cognitive map: a mental representation of the layout of one’s environment
- If you were blindfolded, you could easily navigate through your home. You never studied the blueprints, but you know the layout of your house.
Insight learning: a sudden realization of a problem’s solution

What is Observational Learning? ↓↓↓

Observational learning: the acquisition of knowledge through watching others.

Modeling: the process of observing and imitating a specific behavior.

mirror neurons: fire when we observe an action and/or attempt to perform it

This is how we learn to perform certain tasks, but also how we learn things like empathy.

Albert Bandura ↓↓↓

devised an experiment in which children watched adults play with various toys in a room, one of which was an inflatable clown doll named Bobo.

If the children witnessed the adults playing nicely with Bobo, they would do so when they entered the toy room.
If the children witnessed the adults beating, kicking, and mistreating Bobo, they would mimic those actions as well.

Bandura’s studies proved that much of the behavior we learn, good and bad, is learned through observation and imitation

Prosocial & Antisocial Effects ↓↓↓

The good news is that people’s modeling of prosocial (positive, helpful) behaviors can have prosocial effects. (positive, helpful)

Many business organizations effectively use behavior modeling to help new employees learn communications, sales, and customer service skills. Trainees gain these skills faster when they are able to observe the skills being modeled effectively by experienced workers (or actors simulating them).

The bad news is that observational learning may also have antisocial effects.

This helps us understand why abusive parents might have aggressive children, why children who are lied to become more likely to cheat and lie, and why many men who beat their wives had wife-battering fathers. Critics note that such aggressiveness could be genetic. But with monkeys, we know it can be environmental.