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3.1 Themes and Methods in Developmental Psychology
Developmental Psychology - a branch of psychology that studies physical, cognitive, and social change through the life span. Developmental psychology focuses on the changes in people over the course of their lives. Much of those changes are biological and are generally referred to as maturation. The four primary researchers in developmental psychology are Piaget, Erikson, Freud, and Kohlberg.
3.1-1 Developmental Psychology's Major Themes
Cross-sectional study - research that compares people of different ages at the same point in time.
Longitudinal Study - Research that follows and retests the same people over time.
Nature and Nurture - How does our genetic inheritance interact with our experiences to influence our development? How have your nature and nurture influenced your life story?
Continuity and Stages - Which parts of development are gradual and continuous? Which parts change abruptly in separate stages, like climbing rungs on a ladder?
Stability and Change - Which of our traits persist through life? How do we change as we age?
3.2a Physical Development Across the Lifespan: Prenatal Development, Infancy, and Childhood
3.2 Physical Development and the Newborn
3.2-1 Prenatal Development and the Newborn
Conception - Process started inside your grandmother, - as an egg formed inside the developing female inside of her. Your biological mother was born with all the immature eggs she would ever have. We do not reproduce. We recombine.
Prenatal Development
Zygote - the fertilized egg, it enters a 2 week period of rapid cell division and develops into an embryo.
Germinal Stage - about 10 days after conception the zygote attaches to the uterine wall.
Embryo - the developing human organism from about 2 weeks after fertilization to the second month.
Fetus - the developing human organism from 9 weeks after conception to birth.
Teratogens - (literally "monster makers") agents, such as chemicals and viruses, that can reach the embryo or fetus during prenatal development and cause harm.
Fetal Alcohol Syndrome - (FAS) physical and cognitive abnormalities in children caused by a pregnant woman's heavy drinking. In severe cases, signs include a small, out of proportion head and abnormal facial features.
3.2-2 The Competent Newborn
Habituation - decreasing responsiveness with repeated simulation. As infants gain familiarity with repeated exposure to a stimulus, their interest wanes and they look away sooner.
Newborns preference for faces - when shown two stimuli with the same three elements, newborns spent twice a many seconds looking at the face-like image.
Prepared to feed and eat. Animals are predisposed to respond to their offspring's cries for nourishment.
3.2-3 Physical Development in Infancy and Childhood
Maturation - the biological growth processes that enable orderly changes in behavior, relatively uninfluenced by experience.
Brain Development
In your mother's womb, your developing brain formed nerve cells at the explosive rate of nearly one quarter million per minute. The developing brain cortex actually overproduces neurons, with the number peaking at 28 weeks.
In humans, the brain is immature at birth. As the child matures, the neural networks grow increasingly complex.
Critical Period - an optimal period early in the life of an organism when exposure to certain stimuli or experiences produces normal development.
Motor Development
The developing brain enables physical coordination. Skills emerge as infants exercise their maturing muscles and nervous system. With occasional exceptions, the motor development sequence is universal. Babies roll over before they sit unsupported, and they usually crawl before they walk.
Triumphant Toddlers - Sit, crawl, walk, run - the sequence of these motor development milestones is the same the world around, though babies reach them at varying ages.
3.2-4 Brain Maturation and Infant Memory
Studies suggest that we consciously recall little from before age 4. But as children mature, this infantile amnesia wanes and they become increasingly capable of remembering experiences, even for a year or more.
Infant at work - babies as young as three months old learned that kicking moves a mobile, and they retained that learning for a month in these languages that other English speakers could not learn.
Traces of forgotten childhood languages may also persist. Although no conscious memory of language they had spoken as a child, they could relearn subtle sound contrasts.
3.2b Physical Development Across the Lifespan: Adolescence and Adulthood
3.2-5 Physical Development in Adolescence
Adolescence - the transition period from childhood to adulthood, extending from puberty to independence.
Physical development
Puberty - the period of sexual maturation, during which a person becomes capable of reproducing.
Menarche - the first menstrual period.
Some girls may start their growth spurt at 9 while some boys start as late as 16.
The teenage brain - an adolescent's brain is still a work in progress.
Selective pruning of unused neurons and connections. As teens mature, their frontal lobes also continue to develop. The continuing growth of myelin, the fatty tissue that forms around axons and speeds neurotransmission.
3.2-6 Physical Development in Adulthood
Physical Development
Physical Changes in Middle Adulthood
Physical decline gradually accelerates. But diminished vigor sufficient for normal activities.
Menopause - the time of natural cessation of menstruation; also refers to the biological changes a woman experiences as her ability to reproduce declines.
Men experience a gradual decline in sperm count, testosterone level, speed of erection and ejaculation.
Physical Changes in Late Adulthood
Life Expectancy - From 1950 to 2015, life expectancy at birth increased worldwide from 46.5 years to 71 years and to 80 and beyond in 29 countries. Life expectancy combined with decreasing birth rates creates increasing demand for hearing aids, retirement villages and nursing homes.
Males are more prone to dying. During the first year, male infant death rates exceed that of female infant death rates. By age 100, women outnumber men 5 to 1. But few people live to 100. Tips of chromosomes called telomeres, wear down. Accelerated by obesity, smoking or stress. As telomeres shorten, aging cells may die without being replaced with perfect genetic replicas. Chronic anger and depression increase our risk of premature death.
Death deferral phenomenon - waiting to die until after the holidays, birthdays.
Sensory Abilities, Strength and Stamina - visual sharpness and distance perception diminishes, and adaptation to light changes. Muscle strength, reaction time, stamina, hearing, smell and touch all diminish.
Health - Disease fighting immune system weakens. But due to lifetime accumulation of antibodies, people over 65 suffer fewer short term ailments such as colds and flu.
The Aging Brain
Older people take more time to react, to solve perceptual puzzles and to remember names. Brain regions important to memory begin to atrophy during aging. The blood brain barrier also breaks down beginning in the hippocampus, which furthers cognitive decline. There is some plasticity left in the older brain.
Exercise and Aging - Exercise slows aging. Physical exercise enhances muscles, bones and energy and helps prevent obesity and heart disease. Also stimulates brain cell development and neural connections.
3.3a Gender and Sexual Orientation: Gender Development
3.3-1 Sex vs. Gender
Sex - in psychology, the biologically influenced characteristics by which people define male, female and intersex.
Gender - in psychology, the attitudes, feelings and behaviors that a given culture associates with a person's biological sex.
3.3-2 Similarities and Difference
Both male and female receive 23 chromosomes from mother and 23 from father. 45 of the 46 are unisex. Similar biology helped us face adaptive challenges. Males and females have comparable creativity and intelligence and feel same emotions and longings.
Intersex - possessing male and female biological characteristics at birth.
Differences
Self-esteem - difference modest.
Puberty - average girl enters two years earlier than average boy.
Female more likely to:
Live 4 years longer
Expresses emotion more freely
Detect fainter odors
Receives offers of help more often
Become sexually re-aroused sooner
Twice the risk of developing depression and anxiety
10 times the risk of developing eating disorder
Male more likely to:
Autistic Spectrum Disorder
Color-deficient vision
Attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD)
More at risk for anti-social personality disorder
4 times more likely to die by suicide or develop alcohol use disorder
The average male and female differ in aggression, social power and social connectedness.
Aggression
Aggression - any physical or verbal behavior intended to harm someone physically or emotionally.
Relational Aggression - an act of aggression (physical or verbal) intended to harm a person's relationship or social standing.
Lab experiments confirm a gender difference in aggression. Likewise, outside the lab and worldwide, men commit more acts of aggression.
Social Power - Males predominate.
Male answer syndrome - men are more likely than women to hazard answers than admit they don't know.
Mansplaining - explaining something to a women in a condescending and sometimes inaccurate manner.
Social Connectedness
Whatever our gender - we need to belong. Brain scans show no striking structural sex differences. Men tend to be independent. Women will tend and befriend.
Gender Bias in the Workplace
Differences in Perception - women seen as aggressive, men as assertive
Differences in Compensation - women in "traditional" male professions (law and medicine) receive less compensation.
Differences in Family Care Responsibility - US mothers still do almost twice as much as fathers.
Other factors that contribute to workplace gender bias?
Social Norms - in most societies, men place more importance on power and achievement and are socially dominant.
Leadership Styles - Men more likely to be directive and tell people what to do. Women are more democratic, welcoming others input.
Interaction Styles - Men offer opinions, women support.
Everyday Behavior - Men are more likely to talk assertively, interrupt initiate touches and stare. Women smile and apologize more than men.
But all of the above vary widely across time and place.
3.3-3 The Nature of Gender
The Nature of Gender: Our Biological Sex
Prenatal Sexual Development
X chromosome - the sex chromosome found in both males and females. Females typically have two X chromosomes; males typically have one. An X chromosome from each parent produces a female child.
Y chromosome - the sex chromosome typically found only in males. When paired with an X chromosome from the mother, it produces a male child.
Testosterone - the most important male sex hormone. Both males and females have it, but the additional testosterone in males stimulates the growth of the male sex organs during the fetal period, and the development of the male sex characteristics during puberty.
Estrogens - sex hormones, such as estradiol, that contribute to female sex characteristics and are secreted in greater amounts by females than by males.
Adolescent Sexual Development
Primary sex characteristics - the body structures (ovaries, testes, and external genitalia) that make sexual reproduction possible.
Secondary sex characteristics - nonreproductive sexual traits, such as female breasts and hips, male voice quality and body hair.
Sexual Development Variations
Intersex - a condition present at birth due to unusual combinations of male and female chromosomes, hormones and anatomy; possessing biological characteristics of both sexes.
Case study in gender: David Reimer - raised a girl after penis burnt off during circumcision. After being told what happened when he was 13, he rejected the assigned female identity.
The Nurture of Gender
3.3-4 Gender Roles
Role - a set of expectations (norms) about a social position, defining how those in the position ought to behave.
Gender Roles - a set of expected behaviors, attitudes and traits for men and women.
3.3-5 Gender Identity
How Do We Learn Gender
Gender Identity - our sense of being male, female, or some combination of the two.
Social Learning Theory - the theory that we learn social behavior by observing and imitating and by being rewarded or punished.
Gender Typing - the acquisition of traditional masculine or feminine roles.
Androgyny - displaying both traditional masculine and feminine characteristics.
Transgender - an umbrella term describing people whose gender identity or expression differs from that associated with their birth designated sex.
3.3b Gender and Sexual Orientation: The Biology and Psychology of Sex
3.3-6 Hormones and Sexual Behavior
Sex Hormones
During prenatal period, they direct our sexual development.
During puberty, a sex hormone surge ushers us into adolescence.
After puberty, and well into late adult years, sex hormones facilitate sexual behavior.
Large hormonal surges or declines affect sexual desire at two predictable points in the lifespan and sometimes at an unpredictable third point:
The pubertal surge in sex hormones triggers the development of sex characteristics and sexual interest. Sex characteristics and sexual desire did not develop normally in castrated boys.
In later life, sex hormone levels fall. As hormone levels decline, sexual activity declines as well.
For some people, surgery or drugs may cause hormonal shifts.
3.3-7 The Psychology of Sex
External Stimuli
Can exposure to sexually explicit material have other effects? Research indicates that in can in four ways:
Accelerating sexual activity
Believing rape is acceptable
Reducing satisfaction with a partner's appearance or relationship
Desensitization
3.3 - 8 Sexual Risk Taking and Pregnancy
Social Script - a culturally guided model for how to act in various situations.
Social factors that contribute to teenager's sexual behavior and use of contraceptives.
Communication about birth control
Impulsivity
Alcohol Use
Mass Media
Factors that predict sexual restraint:
High Intelligence (concerned about the risk)
Religious Engagement
Father Presence
Service Learning Participation
3.3-9 Reflections on the Nature and Nurture of Sex, Gender, and Sexuality
Women prefer partners that will offer their joint offspring support and protection.
Men prefer traits such as smooth skin and a youthful shape - increase chance of sending genes into the future.
But culture and experiences also shape us. Cultures can amplify the gender differences.
Gender differences persist. But in modern cultures, gender roles are merging.
Social Learning Theory - the social script, our culture's guide to how people should act in certain situations. Women may learn that sexual encounters with strange men can be dangerous.
3.3c Gender and Sexual Orientation: Sexual Orientation
3.3-10 Introduction to Sexual Orientation
Sexual Orientation - our enduring sexual attraction, usually toward members of our own sex (homosexual orientation) or the other sex (heterosexual orientation); variations include attraction toward both sexes (bisexual orientation).
Exclusively homosexual - about 3 or 4 percent of men and 2 percent of women. Larger percent of adults - 17 percent for women and 6 percent for men - report some same sex sexual contact in their lives. Less tolerant places - people more likely to hide their orientation.
Today's psychologists view sexual orientation as neither willfully chosen nor willfully changed. Sexual orientation is especially persistent for men. Women's sexual orientation tends to be less strongly felt, and for some women, is more fluid and changing.
3.3-11 Origins of Sexual Orientation
Environment and Sexual Orientation - Environment likely contributes to sexual orientation - nature and nature work together - but the inability to pin down specific environmental influences has led researchers to explore several lines of biological evidence. These include same-sex attraction on other species, brain differences, and genetic and prenatal influences.
Same Sex Attraction in other Species
Same sex attraction in other species - same sex sexual behaviors have been observed in several hundred species. Homosexuality seems to be a natural part of the animal world.
Brain Differences
Gay Straight Brain Differences - cluster of cells in hypothalamus larger in heterosexual men than women and homosexual men.
Genetic Influences
Genetic Influences - about a third of variation in sexual orientation is attributable to genetic influences. Theories: (1) Evolutionary - supportive ants/uncles that contribute to success of nieces/nephews. (2) Fertile Female Theory - homosexual men tend to have more homosexual relatives on the female side than male side. And the mother's side also produce more offspring than the maternal relatives of heterosexual men. Perhaps the genes that dispose some women to conceive more children with men also dispose some men to be attracted to men.
Prenatal Influences
Prenatal Influences - Second semester: exposure to hormone levels typically experienced by female fetuses during this time seems to predispose the person (whether female or male) to be attracted to males later in life.
Trait Differences and Sexual Orientation
3.4 Cognitive Development Across the Lifespan
3.4-1 Cognitive Development in Infancy and Childhood
Cognition - all the mental activities associated with thinking, knowing, remembering and communicating.
Schema - a concept or framework that organizes and interprets information.
Assimilation - interpreting our new experiences in terms of our existing schemas.
Accommodation - adapting our current understandings (schemas) to incorporate new information.
We use our existing schemas to assimilate new experiences. But sometimes we need to accommodate (adjust) our schemas to include new experiences.
Piaget -Cognitive Development Stages
Sensorimotor (0-2): these are little babies who think in terms of things they can touch and feel. It is during this stage that object permanence—the understanding that things that leave the visual field still exist (9 months)—develops along with stranger anxiety.
Preoperational (2 to 6 or 7): kids can’t think logically about abstractions, so fantasy is reality, imaginary friend and beliefs like Santa and the Easter bunny are real.
Egocentrism - the preoperational child's difficulty of taking another's point of view.
Concrete Operational (6-12): kids do think logically about concrete things, so how could Santa go to all those houses in one night. They also learn that relationships go two ways and reversibility (“I have a sister and so does my sister(me)”). They learn conservation— the principle that properties such as mass, volume and number remain the same despite change in the forms of objects. Example: liquid in a tall container is not necessarily more than liquid in a short, wide container.
Formal Operational (after 12): learn to think and reason abstractly about things like justice and to forecast the future based on the past. Mature moral reasoning also develops.
Criticisms: Piaget’s tools for assessing weren’t good enough and kids could do some things earlier, but just couldn’t demonstrate them. Also, some say that these stages are not that cut and dry and sometimes children can do some things in some areas but not in others.
Pretend Play - Symbolic thinking and pretend play appear at an earlier age than Piaget supposed. 2 1/2 year old could find model stuffed animal behind model sofa. By three, can find real stuffed animal behind real sofa using model.
Reflections on Piaget
Piaget identified significant cognitive milestones and stimulated worldwide interest in how the mind works. But today's researchers see development as more continuous than did Piaget who mostly focused on the discontinuous (occurring in distinct stages).
Implications for Parents and Teachers
Young children are incapable of adult logic. TV and seesaw examples.
3.4-2 An Alternative View: Lev Vygotsky and the Social Child
Zone of Proximal Development - the zone between what a child can and can't do - it's what a child can do with help. Bike riding - training wheels or adult steady hand. Children learn best when task is not too easy or too difficult.
Scaffold - a framework that offers children temporary support as they develop higher levels of thinking.
3.4-3 Theory of Mind
Theory of Mind - people's ideas about their own and others' mental states - about their feelings, perceptions and thoughts and the behavior these might predict.
3.4-4 Cognitive Development in Adolescence
During the early teen years, egocentrism endures, and reasoning is often self-focused. Teens also begin imagining what others are thinking about them and develop an intense awareness of this imaginary audience. (spotlight effect.) Tendency to develop a personal fable — believing that they are unique and special and what happens to “most people” would never happen to them. “My vaping is just for fun; I would never end up an addicted smoker like my uncle.”
Developing Reasoning Power
When adolescents achieve formal operations, they apply their new abstract reasoning tools to the world around them.
Compare Ideal v. Imperfect Reality of their society, their parents, and themselves.
Debate human nature, good and evil, truth and justice.
Fairness changes from equality to equity.
Search for spirituality and the deeper meaning of life.
Detect inconsistencies and spot hypocrisy in others’ reasoning.
Developing Morality
Two crucial tasks of childhood and adolescence are discerning right from wrong and developing character — the psychological muscles for controlling impulses. Children learn to empathize with others, an ability that continues to develop in adolescence. To be a moral person is to think morally and act accordingly. Jean Piaget proposed that moral reasoning guides moral actions. A newer view builds on psychology’s game-changing recognition that much of our functioning occurs not on the “high road” of deliberate, conscious thinking, but rather on the “low road” of unconscious, automatic thinking.
Moral Intuition
The mind makes moral judgments quickly and automatically. Feelings of disgust or of elation trigger moral reasoning.
Is human morality really be run by the moral emotions while moral reasoning struts about pretending to be in control?”
Consider the desire to punish. Laboratory games reveal that the desire to punish wrongdoing is mostly driven not by reason (such as an objective calculation that punishment deters crime), but rather by emotional reactions, such as moral outrage and the pleasure of revenge.
Moral Action
As political theorist Hannah Arendt (1963) observed, many Nazi concentration camp guards during World War II were ordinary “moral” people corrupted by a powerfully evil situation. Today’s character education programs focus on the whole moral package — thinking, feeling, and doing the right thing. In service learning programs, teens have tutored, cleaned up their neighborhoods, and assisted older adults. The result? The participating teens’ sense of competence and desire to serve have increased, their school absenteeism and dropout rates have fallen, and their violent behavior has diminished.
Cognitive Development in Adulthood
3.4-5 Aging and Memory
People continue to develop and change. Very gradually, our thinking, reaction speed, and sensory abilities begin to diminish, even while our impulse control and wisdom grow. Older adults also become prone to dementia, a cognitive disorder that impairs memory, cognition, and decision-making.
Teens and Twenties play a significant role in memory for older adults. Remember significant events from then just as current students will recall the pandemic and the war in Ukraine.
In our capacity to learn and remember, we show individual differences. 70 year olds vary much more than 20 year olds. If the information is nonsensical, then the older we are the more errors. If the information is meaningful, older adults' rich web of existing knowledge will help them to hold it. Older adults are also more often experience tip of the tongue forgetting.
Maintaining Mental Abilities
More education earlier in life predicts better cognitive ability late in life. Computer-based “brain fitness” training programs probably don't help based on current research.
Our brain remains plastic throughout life.
Age is less a predictor of memory and intelligence than is proximity to a natural death, which does give a clue to someone’s mental ability. In the last three or four years of life, and especially as death approaches, cognitive decline typically accelerates. Researchers call this near-death drop terminal decline. Our goals also shift: We’re driven less to learn and more to connect socially.
3.5 Communication and Language Development
Language - our spoken, written, or signed words and the way we combine them to create meaning.
Language Structure
Language Acquisition and Development
3.5-1 How do we learn language?
Noam Chomsky theorized that language is nature's gift - an unlearned human trait separate from other parts of human cognition. Humans have a built-in predisposition to learn grammar rules, which he called universal grammar. Agrees that we are not born with a specific language or specific set of grammar rules. But all 6,000 of them have nouns, verbs and adjectives as building blocks. We all start by speaking with nouns.
Phoneme - in a language, the smallest distinctive sound.
Morpheme - in a language, the smallest unit that carries meaning; may be a word or part of a word (such as a prefix).
Grammar - in a language, a system of rules that enable us to communicate with and understand others. Semantics is the language's set of rules for deriving meaning from sounds. Syntax is its set of rules for combining words into grammatically sensible sentences.
Universal Grammar (UG) - human's innate predisposition to understand the principles and rules that govern grammar in all languages.
3.5-2 Language Development: When do we learn language?
Between first birthday and high school graduation, learned 60,000 words although use 150 most frequently.
Receptive Language
Infants start without language but by 4 months of age, babies can recognize differences in speech sounds.
Receptive language - the ability to understand what is said to them and about them.
Productive Language
Babbling Stage - beginning around 4 months, the stage of speech development in which an infant spontaneously utters various sounds at first unrelated to the household language.
One-word stage - the stage in speech development, from about ages 1 to 2, during which a child speaks mostly in single words.
Two-word stage - beginning about age 2, the stage in speech development during which a child speaks mostly in two word statement.
Telegraphic Speech - early speech stage in which a child speaks like a - telegram - go car - using mostly nouns and verbs.
Critical Periods
Childhood represents a critical or sensitive period for mastering certain aspects of language before the language learning window closes. By about 7 years, those who have not been exposed to either a spoken or signed language lose their ability to master any language.
Deafness and Language Development
More than 90% of all deaf children are born to hearing parents. Most want their children to experience their world of sound and talk. Cochlear implants enable this by converting sounds into electrical signals and stimulating the auditory nerve by means of electrodes threaded into the child's cochlea. But must be done before the age of consent (parental consent substitutes for child consenting). Problematic in deaf community. Prefer vision enhancement to hearing impaired.
3.5-3 The Brain and Language
Aphasia - impairment of language, usually caused by left hemisphere damage either to Broca's area (impairing speaking) or to Wernicke's area (impairing understanding).
Broca's area - helps control language expression - an area of the frontal lobe, usually in the left hemisphere, that directs the muscle movements involved in speech.
Wernicke's area - a brain area involved in language comprehension and expression; usually in the left temporal lobe.
3.5-4 Thinking and Language
Linguistic Determinism - the strong form of Whorf's hypothesis - that language controls the way we think and interpret the world around us.
Linguistic Influence - the weaker form of linguistic relatively - the idea that language affects thought (thus our thinking and world view is relative to our cultural language).
Thinking in Images
Thinking affects our language which then affects our thoughts.
Thinking in images can increase our skills when we mentally practice upcoming events.
3.6a Social Emotional Development Across the Lifespan: Infancy and Childhood
3.6-1 Social-Emotional Development in Infancy and Childhood
Ecological Systems Theory - a theory of the social environment's influence on human development, using 5 nested systems (microsystem, mesosystem, exosystem, macrosystem, chronosystem) ranging from direct to indirect influences.
Origins of Attachment
Attachment - an emotional tie with another person, shown in young children by their seeking closeness to their caregiver and showing distress on separation.
Stranger Anxiety - the fear of strangers that infants commonly display beginning by about 8 months of age.
The Harlows' monkey mothers: Psychologists Harry Harlow and Margaret Harlow raised monkeys with two artificial monkeys - one a bare wire cylinder frame with a wooden head and an attached feeding bottle, the other with no bottle but covered with foam rubber and wrapped with terry cloth. The Harlows' discovery surprised many psychologists. The infants preferred contact with the comfortable cloth mother even when feeding from the wire nourishing mother.
Familiarity
Contact is one key element to attachment. Another is familiarity. In many animals, attachments based on familiarity form during a critical period (an optimal period early in the life of an organism when exposure to certain stimuli or experiences produces normal development).
Imprinting - the process by which certain animals form strong attachments during early life. Konrad Lorenz explored this phenomenon.
3.6-2 Attachment Differences: Temperament and Parenting
Strange Situation - a procedure for studying child-caregiver attachment: a child is placed in an unfamiliar environment while their caregiver leaves and then 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 when the caregiver leaves, and find comfort in the caregiver's return.
Insecure Attachment - demonstrated by infants who display either clinging , anxious attachment or an avoidant attachment that resists closeness.
Temperament - a person's characteristic emotional reactivity and intensity.
Social deprivation and fear - In the Harlows' experiments, monkeys raised with inanimate surrogate mothers were overwhelmed when placed in strange situations without that source of emotional security. (Today there is greater oversight and concern for animal welfare, which would regulate this type of study).
3.6b Social-Emotional Development Across the Lifespan: Adolescence, Emerging Adulthood and Adulthood
3.6-6 Social- Emotional Development in Adolescence
Forming an identity
Identity - our sense of self; according to Erickson, the adolescent's task is to solidify a sense of self by testing and integrating various roles.
Social Identity - the "we" aspect of our self-concept; the part of our answer to "who am I?" that comes from our group memberships.
Intimacy - the ability to form emotionally close relationships.
Erikson - Psychosocial Development Stages
Trust vs. Mistrust – infants; if needs are dependably met, infants develop a sense of basic trust (a sense that the world around them is predictable and trustworthy;) said to be formed during infancy by appropriate experiences with responsive caregivers.
Autonomy vs. Shame – toilet training; toddlers learn to exercise will and do things for themselves, or they doubt their abilities.
Initiative vs. Guilt – preschoolers learn to initiate tasks and carry out plans, or they feel guilty about efforts to be independent.
Industry vs. Inferiority – children learn the pleasure of applying themselves to tasks, or they feel inferior.
Identity vs. Confusion – teenagers work at refining a sense of self by testing roles and then integrating them to form a single identity, or they become confused about who they are.
Intimacy vs. Isolation – young adults struggle to form close relationships and to gain the capacity for intimate love, or they feel socially isolated.
Generativity vs. Stagnation – the middle-aged discover a sense of contributing to the world, usually through a family and work, or they may feel a lack of purpose.
Integrity vs. Despair – when reflecting on his or her life, the older adult may feel a sense of satisfaction or failure.
3.6-7 Parent and Peer Relationships
Transition from child who wants to hold mom's hand becomes 14 year old who won't. Gradual transition - parent child arguments occur more frequently and usually over mundane things. Positive parent -teen relations and positive peer relations often go hand in hand. Adolescence is typically a time of diminishing parental influence and growing peer influence. Heredity does much of the heavy lifting in forming individual temperament and personality influences and peer influences does much of the rest. Most teens are herd animals.
Peer Influence - children seek to fit in with groups:
Preschoolers who disdain a certain food often will eat that food if put at a table with a group of children who like it.
Children who hear English spoken at home with one accent and another in the neighborhood and school will invariably adopt the accent of their peers, not their parents. Accents (and slang) reflect culture and children get their culture from peers.
Teens who start smoking typically have friends who model smoking, suggest its pleasures and offer cigarettes. Part of this peer similarity may result from a selection effect, as kids seek out peers with similar attitudes and interests. Those who smoke (or don't) may select as friends those who smoke (or don't).
How Much Credit or Blame Do Parents Deserve?
Praise parents for success of children, blame them for failures.
Differences in parenting styles: Asian Americans and European Americans often differ in their parenting expectations. Having a supportive "Tiger Mom" - one who pushes her children and works alongside them- tends to motivate children to work harder. European Americans might see this as pushy parenting that undermines children's motivation.
3.6-8 Emerging Adulthood
Emerging Adulthood- a period from about 18 to the mid-twenties, when many in Western cultures are no longer adolescents but have not yet achieved full adulthood. US government recognizes gradual emerging adulthood, allows dependent children on parents' health insurance till age 26.
The transition to adulthood is being stretched from both ends In the 1890s, the average interval between a woman’s first menstrual period and marriage, which typically marked a transition to adulthood, was about 7 years; a century later in industrialized countries it was about 14 years (Finer & Philbin, 2014; Guttmacher, 1994). Although many adults are unmarried, later marriage combines with prolonged education and earlier menarche to help stretch out the transition to adulthood.
3.6-9 Social Emotional Development in Adulthood
Adulthood's Ages and Stages
The Social Clock - the culturally preferred timing of events such as marriage, parenthood and retirement.
Sandwich generation - supporting aging parents while simultaneously supporting their emerging adult children or grandchildren.
Adulthood's Commitments
Love
Adult bonds of love are most satisfying and enduring when marked by a similarity of interests and values, a sharing of emotional and material support, and intimate self-disclosure. Such bonds are likely to last if marrying after age 20 and well educated. Divorce rates soared in 1960s to 1980s but have now stabilized and even declined.
Those who lived together before marriage had higher rates of divorce and martial dysfunction than those who did not. Three factors: (1) tend to be initially less committed to the ideal of enduring marriage. (2) they may become less marriage supporting while living together. (3) it's more awkward to break up with cohabitating partner than with a dating partner leading some cohabitators to marry someone they might otherwise have left.
Work - have work that fits your interests and provides you with a sense of competence and accomplishment.
3.6-10 Well-Being Across the Life Span
Most people express regret at what they didn't do rather than what they did (I should have taken my education more seriously).
Most over 65 not unhappy. Positive feelings are enhanced and negative feeling subside. Oldest adults are happiest when not alone.
3.6-11 Death and Dying
Five stages of grief - Kubler-Ross - denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance. (More added).
Terminally ill and bereaved people do not go through identical predictable stages.
Those who express the strongest grief immediately do not purge their grief more quickly.
Bereavement therapy and self-help groups offer support, but similar healing with passage of time, support of friends and the act of giving support and help to others.
3.7a Classical Conditioning: Basic Concepts
3.71 How Do We Learn?
Learning - the process of acquiring through experience new and relatively enduring information or behaviors.
Habituation - decreasing responsiveness with repeated exposure to a stimulus.
Associative Learning - learning that certain events occur together. The events may be two stimuli (as in classical conditioning) or a response and its consequences (operant conditioning).
Stimulus - any event or situation the evokes a response.
Respondent Behavior - behavior that occurs as an automatic response to some stimulus.
Operant Behavior - behavior that operates on the environment, producing consequences.
Cognitive Learning - the acquisition of mental information, whether by observing events, by watching others, or through language.
3.7-2 Behaviorism's View of Learning
Behaviorism - the view that psychology (1) should be an objective science that (2) studies behavior without reference to mental processes. Most research psychologists agree with (1) but not (2).
Classical Conditioning - a type of learning in which we link two or more stimuli; as a result, to illustrate with Pavlov's classic experiment, the first stimulus (a tone) comes to elicit behavior (drooling) in anticipation of the second stimulus (food).
3.7-3 Pavlov's Experiments
Neutral Stimuli (NS) - in classical conditioning, a stimulus that elicits no response before conditioning.
Unconditioned Response (UR) - in classical conditioning, an unlearned, naturally occurring response (such as salivation) to an unconditioned stimulus (US) such as food in the mouth.
Unconditioned Stimulus (US) - in classical conditioning, a stimulus that unconditionally - naturally and automatically - triggers an unconditioned response (UR).
Conditioned Response (CR) - in classical conditioning, a learned response to a previously neutral (but now conditioned) stimulus (CS).
Conditioned Stimulus (CS) - in classical conditioning, an originally neutral stimulus that, after association with an unconditioned stimulus (US), comes to trigger a conditioned response (CR).
3.7-4 Acquisition
Acquisition - in classical conditioning, the initial stage, when one links a neutral stimulus so that the neural stimulus begins triggering the conditioned response. In operant conditioning, the strengthening of a reinforced response.
Higher Order Conditioning - a procedure in which the conditioned stimulus in one conditioning experience is paired with a new neutral stimulus, creating a second (often weaker) conditioned stimulus. For example, an animal that has learned a tone predicts food might then learn that a light predicts the tone and begin responding to the light alone. (Also called second-order conditioning).
Extinction - the diminishing of a conditioned response; occurs in classical conditioning when an unconditioned stimulus (US) does not follow a conditioned stimulus (CS); occurs in operant conditioning when a response is no longer reinforced.
Spontaneous Recovery - the reappearance, after a pause, of an extinguished conditioned response.
Generalization - the tendency, once a response has been conditioned, for stimuli similar to the conditioned stimulus to elicit similar responses. (In operant conditioning, generalization occurs when responses learned in one situation occur in other, similar situations).
Discrimination - in classical conditioning, the learned ability to distinguish between a conditioned stimulus and similar stimuli that do not signal an unconditioned stimulus. (In operant conditioning, the ability to distinguish responses that are reinforced from similar responses that are not reinforced).
3.7-5 Pavlov's Legacy
Many other responses to many other stimuli can be classically conditioned in many other organisms.
Showed us how a process such as learning can be studied.
3.7b Classical Conditioning: Applications and Biological Limits
3.7-6 Applications of Classical Conditioning
Pavlov's principles can influence human health and well-being. Three examples:
Drug Cravings - Former drug users often fell a craving when they are again in the drug-using context - with people or in places they associate with previous highs. Thus, drug counselors advise their clients to steer clear of people and settings that trigger these cravings.
Food cravings - Classical conditioning makes dieting difficult. We readily associate sugary substances with enjoyable sweet sensations. Researchers have conditioned healthy volunteers to experience cravings after only one instance of eating a sweet food. Eating one cookie can create hunger for another. People who struggle with their weight often have eaten unhealthy foods thousands of times leaving them with strongly conditioned responses to eat the very foods that will keep them in poor health.
Immune Responses - Classical conditioning even works on the body's disease fighting immune system. When a particular taste accompanies a drug that influences immune responses, the taste by itself may come to produce an immune response.
3.3-3 Biological Constraints on Classical Conditioning
Preparedness - a biological predisposition to learn associations, such as between taste and nausea that have survival value.
Taste Aversion - If you become violently ill after eating oysters, you would probably have a hard time eating them again. Their smell and taste would have become a CS for nausea. This learning occurs readily because our biology prepares us to learn taste aversions to toxic foods.
Instinctive Drift - the tendency of learned behavior to gradually revert to biologically predisposed patterns.
3.8a Operant Conditioning: Basic Concepts
Operant Conditioning - a type of learning in which a behavior becomes more likely to recur if followed by a reinforcer or less likely to occur if followed by a punisher.
3.8-2 Skinner's Experiments
Law of Effect - Edward Thorndike's principle that behaviors followed by favorable consequences become more likely, and that behaviors followed by unfavorable consequences becomes less likely.
Thorndike's cat puzzle box. Thorndike used a fish reward to entice cats to find their way out of a puzzle box through a series of maneuvers. The cats' performances tended to improve with successive trials, illustrating Thorndike's law of effect.
Operant Chamber - in operant conditioning research, a chamber (also known as the Skinner box) containing a bar or key that an animal can manipulate to obtain a food or water reinforcer, attached devices record the animal's rate of bar pressing or key pecking.
Reinforcement - in operant conditioning, any event that strengthens the behavior that follows it.
Shaping - an operant conditioning procedure in which reinforcers guide behavior toward closer and closer approximations of desired behavior.
Bird brains spot tumors. After being rewarded with food when correctly spotting breast tumors, pigeons became as skilled as humans at discriminating cancerous tissue from healthy tissue. Other animals have been shaped to sniff out land mines or locate people amid rubble.
Discriminative Stimulus - in operant conditioning, a stimulus that elicits a response after association with reinforcement (in contrast to related stimuli not associated with reinforcement).
3.8-3 Types of Reinforcers
Positive Reinforcement - increasing behaviors by presenting positive reinforcers. A positive reinforcer is any stimulus that, when presented after a response, strengthens the response.
Negative Reinforcement - increasing behaviors by stopping or reducing aversive stimuli. A negative reinforcer is any stimulus that, when removed after a response, strengthens the response. (Note: Negative reinforcement is not punishment).
Primary Reinforcer - an innately reinforcing stimulus, such as one that satisfies a biological need.
Conditioned Reinforcer - a stimulus that gains its reinforcing power through its association with a primary reinforcer, also known as a secondary reinforcer.
Reinforcement Schedule- a pattern that defines how often a desired response will be reinforced.
Continuous Reinforcement Schedule - reinforcing the desired response every time it occurs.
Partial (intermittent) Reinforcement Schedule- reinforcing a response only part of the time; results in slower acquisition of a response by much greater resistance to extinction than does continuous reinforcement.
Fixed Ratio Schedule - in operant conditioning, a reinforcement schedule that reinforces a response only after a specified number of responses.
Variable Ratio Schedule - in operant conditioning, a reinforcement schedule that reinforces a response after an unpredictable number of responses.
Fixed Interval Schedule - in operant conditioning, a reinforcement schedule that reinforces a response only after a specified time has elapsed.
Variable Interval Schedule - in operant conditioning, a reinforcement schedule that reinforces a response at unpredictable time intervals.
| Schedules of Partial Reinforcement |
|
| Fixed
| Variable |
Ratio | Every so many: reinforcement after every nth behavior, such as buy 10 coffees, get 1 free, or pay workers per unit produced | After an unpredictable number: reinforcement after a random number of behaviors, as when playing slot machines or fly fishing. |
Interval | Every so often: reinforcement for behavior after a fixed time, such as Tuesday discount prices | Unpredictably often: reinforcement for behavior after a random amount of time, as when studying for an unpredictable pop quiz. |
3.8-5 Punishment
Punishment - an event that tends to decrease the behavior that it follows.
Ways to decrease Behavior
Type of punisher | Description | Examples |
Positive Punishment | Administer an aversive stimulus | Spray water on a barking dog; give a traffic ticket for speeding. |
Negative Punishment | Withdraw a rewarding stimulus | Take away a misbehaving teen's driving privileges; revoke a rude person's chat room access. |
Four major drawbacks of physical punishment
Punished behavior is suppressed, not forgotten. This temporary state may (negatively) reinforce parents' punishing behavior.
Punishment teaches discrimination among situations.
Punishment can teach fear.
Physical punishment may increase aggression by modeling violence as a way to cope with problems.
3.8-6 Skinner's Legacy
B.F. Skinner - outspoken beliefs. Insisted external influences, not internal thoughts and feelings, shape behavior. Urged people to use operant conditioning principles to influence others' behavior at work , school and home.
Critics objected and saying he dehumanized people by neglecting their personal freedom and by seeking to control their actions.
3.8-7 Operant Conditioning's Applications, and Comparison to Classical Conditioning
Application of Operant Conditioning at:
School - online adaptive quizzes allow students to move at their own pace and provide immediate feedback.
Sports - reinforcing small successes then gradually increasing the challenge. But beware of superstitious behavior - the accidental timing of rewards (tapping home plate before hitting home run).
Work - Reward specific, achievable behaviors and not vaguely defined merit.
Parenting - Notice the child doing something right and affirm them for it. When child is misbehaving, explain the misbehavior and remove the object misused or give a time out.
Self-Improvement -
State a realistic goal in measurable terms and announce it.
Decide how, when and where you will work toward your goal.
Monitor how often you engage in your desired behavior.
Reinforce the desired behavior.
Reduce the rewards gradually.
Manage Stress - using Biofeedback
Biofeedback - a system for electronically recording, amplifying, and feeding back information regarding a subtle physiological state, such as blood pressure or muscle tension.
3.8-8 Biological Constraints on Operant Conditioning
Biological constraints predispose organisms to learn associations that are naturally adaptive.
Instinctive Drift - the tendency of learned behavior to gradually revert to biologically predisposed patterns.
3.8-9 Contrasting Classical and Operant Conditioning
3.9 Social, Cognitive and Neurological Factors in Learning
3.9-1 Cognition's Influence on Conditioning
Cognition and Operant Conditioning
Cognitive Map - a mental representation of the layout of one's environment. For example, after exploring a maze, rats act as if they have a cognitive map of it.
Latent Learning - learning that occurs but is not apparent until there is an incentive to demonstrate it.
Insight - a sudden realization of a problem's solution; contrasts with strategy-based solutions.
Biological and Cognitive Influences on Conditioning
| Classical Conditioning | Operant Conditioning |
Biological Influences | Natural Predispositions constrain what stimuli and response can be easily associated. | Organisms most easily learn behaviors similar to their natural behaviors unnatural behaviors instinctively drift back toward natural ones. |
Cognitive Influences | Organisms develop an expectation that the CS signals the arrival of a US. | Organisms develop and expectation that a response will be reinforced or punished; they also exhibit latent learning, without reinforcement. |
3.9-2 Observational Learning
Observational Learning - learning by observing others (also called social learning).
Modeling - the process of observing and imitating a specific behavior.
3.9-3 Mirrors and Imitation in the Brain
Mirror Neurons - frontal lobe neurons that some scientists believe fire when we perform certain actions or observe another doing so. The brain's mirroring of another's action may enable imitation and empathy.
Monkeys learn to prefer whatever color corn they observe other monkeys eating.
Imitation - This 12-month-old infant sees an adult look left, and immediately follows her gaze.
3.9-4 Applications of Observational Learning
Prosocial Effect - positive, constructive, helpful behavior. The opposite of antisocial behavior.
People who exemplify nonviolent, helpful behavior can also prompt similar behavior in others. Models are most effective when their words and actions are consistent.
Prosocial - positive, constructive, helpful behavior. The opposite of antisocial behavior.
Antisocial effects - Observational learning can have antisocial effects. This explains why abusive parents might have aggressive children.
Antisocial Behavior - negative, destructive, harmful behavior. The opposite of prosocial behavior.
People to Know
Ivan Pavlov - lay the foundation for many of John Watson's ideas. Pavlov and Watson shared a disdain for "mentalistic" concepts such as consciousness, and a belief that the basic laws of learning were the same for all animals - whether sea slugs or dogs or humans. Few researchers today agree that psychology should ignore mental processes but most agree that classical conditioning is a basic form of learning by which all organisms adapt to their environment.
Some have questioned if he used a bell - likely used various stimuli.
Why does Pavlov's work remain so important?
The finding that many other responses to many other stimuli can be classically conditioned in many other organisms.
Pavlov showed us how a process such as learning can be studied objectively.
John B. Watson - Little Albert experiment, making infant afraid of furry white things; conditioned phobias; applied CC to advertising
B.F. Skinner - Modern behaviorism's most influential and controversial figure. Expanding on Thorndike's Law of Effect, Skinner found that the behavior of rats or pigeons placed in an operant chamber can be shaped by using reinforcers to guide closer and closer approximations of the desired behavior.
Skinner insisted that external influences, not internal thoughts and feelings, shape behavior. Urged people to use operant conditioning principle to influence others' behavior at work, school, and home. Critics of Skinner say he dehumanizes people by neglecting their personal freedoms and by seeking to control their actions.
Albert Bandura -the father of social learning theory; observation- imitation and reinforcement
3.1 Themes and Methods in Developmental Psychology
Developmental Psychology - a branch of psychology that studies physical, cognitive, and social change through the life span. Developmental psychology focuses on the changes in people over the course of their lives. Much of those changes are biological and are generally referred to as maturation. The four primary researchers in developmental psychology are Piaget, Erikson, Freud, and Kohlberg.
3.1-1 Developmental Psychology's Major Themes
Cross-sectional study - research that compares people of different ages at the same point in time.
Longitudinal Study - Research that follows and retests the same people over time.
Nature and Nurture - How does our genetic inheritance interact with our experiences to influence our development? How have your nature and nurture influenced your life story?
Continuity and Stages - Which parts of development are gradual and continuous? Which parts change abruptly in separate stages, like climbing rungs on a ladder?
Stability and Change - Which of our traits persist through life? How do we change as we age?
3.2a Physical Development Across the Lifespan: Prenatal Development, Infancy, and Childhood
3.2 Physical Development and the Newborn
3.2-1 Prenatal Development and the Newborn
Conception - Process started inside your grandmother, - as an egg formed inside the developing female inside of her. Your biological mother was born with all the immature eggs she would ever have. We do not reproduce. We recombine.
Prenatal Development
Zygote - the fertilized egg, it enters a 2 week period of rapid cell division and develops into an embryo.
Germinal Stage - about 10 days after conception the zygote attaches to the uterine wall.
Embryo - the developing human organism from about 2 weeks after fertilization to the second month.
Fetus - the developing human organism from 9 weeks after conception to birth.
Teratogens - (literally "monster makers") agents, such as chemicals and viruses, that can reach the embryo or fetus during prenatal development and cause harm.
Fetal Alcohol Syndrome - (FAS) physical and cognitive abnormalities in children caused by a pregnant woman's heavy drinking. In severe cases, signs include a small, out of proportion head and abnormal facial features.
3.2-2 The Competent Newborn
Habituation - decreasing responsiveness with repeated simulation. As infants gain familiarity with repeated exposure to a stimulus, their interest wanes and they look away sooner.
Newborns preference for faces - when shown two stimuli with the same three elements, newborns spent twice a many seconds looking at the face-like image.
Prepared to feed and eat. Animals are predisposed to respond to their offspring's cries for nourishment.
3.2-3 Physical Development in Infancy and Childhood
Maturation - the biological growth processes that enable orderly changes in behavior, relatively uninfluenced by experience.
Brain Development
In your mother's womb, your developing brain formed nerve cells at the explosive rate of nearly one quarter million per minute. The developing brain cortex actually overproduces neurons, with the number peaking at 28 weeks.
In humans, the brain is immature at birth. As the child matures, the neural networks grow increasingly complex.
Critical Period - an optimal period early in the life of an organism when exposure to certain stimuli or experiences produces normal development.
Motor Development
The developing brain enables physical coordination. Skills emerge as infants exercise their maturing muscles and nervous system. With occasional exceptions, the motor development sequence is universal. Babies roll over before they sit unsupported, and they usually crawl before they walk.
Triumphant Toddlers - Sit, crawl, walk, run - the sequence of these motor development milestones is the same the world around, though babies reach them at varying ages.
3.2-4 Brain Maturation and Infant Memory
Studies suggest that we consciously recall little from before age 4. But as children mature, this infantile amnesia wanes and they become increasingly capable of remembering experiences, even for a year or more.
Infant at work - babies as young as three months old learned that kicking moves a mobile, and they retained that learning for a month in these languages that other English speakers could not learn.
Traces of forgotten childhood languages may also persist. Although no conscious memory of language they had spoken as a child, they could relearn subtle sound contrasts.
3.2b Physical Development Across the Lifespan: Adolescence and Adulthood
3.2-5 Physical Development in Adolescence
Adolescence - the transition period from childhood to adulthood, extending from puberty to independence.
Physical development
Puberty - the period of sexual maturation, during which a person becomes capable of reproducing.
Menarche - the first menstrual period.
Some girls may start their growth spurt at 9 while some boys start as late as 16.
The teenage brain - an adolescent's brain is still a work in progress.
Selective pruning of unused neurons and connections. As teens mature, their frontal lobes also continue to develop. The continuing growth of myelin, the fatty tissue that forms around axons and speeds neurotransmission.
3.2-6 Physical Development in Adulthood
Physical Development
Physical Changes in Middle Adulthood
Physical decline gradually accelerates. But diminished vigor sufficient for normal activities.
Menopause - the time of natural cessation of menstruation; also refers to the biological changes a woman experiences as her ability to reproduce declines.
Men experience a gradual decline in sperm count, testosterone level, speed of erection and ejaculation.
Physical Changes in Late Adulthood
Life Expectancy - From 1950 to 2015, life expectancy at birth increased worldwide from 46.5 years to 71 years and to 80 and beyond in 29 countries. Life expectancy combined with decreasing birth rates creates increasing demand for hearing aids, retirement villages and nursing homes.
Males are more prone to dying. During the first year, male infant death rates exceed that of female infant death rates. By age 100, women outnumber men 5 to 1. But few people live to 100. Tips of chromosomes called telomeres, wear down. Accelerated by obesity, smoking or stress. As telomeres shorten, aging cells may die without being replaced with perfect genetic replicas. Chronic anger and depression increase our risk of premature death.
Death deferral phenomenon - waiting to die until after the holidays, birthdays.
Sensory Abilities, Strength and Stamina - visual sharpness and distance perception diminishes, and adaptation to light changes. Muscle strength, reaction time, stamina, hearing, smell and touch all diminish.
Health - Disease fighting immune system weakens. But due to lifetime accumulation of antibodies, people over 65 suffer fewer short term ailments such as colds and flu.
The Aging Brain
Older people take more time to react, to solve perceptual puzzles and to remember names. Brain regions important to memory begin to atrophy during aging. The blood brain barrier also breaks down beginning in the hippocampus, which furthers cognitive decline. There is some plasticity left in the older brain.
Exercise and Aging - Exercise slows aging. Physical exercise enhances muscles, bones and energy and helps prevent obesity and heart disease. Also stimulates brain cell development and neural connections.
3.3a Gender and Sexual Orientation: Gender Development
3.3-1 Sex vs. Gender
Sex - in psychology, the biologically influenced characteristics by which people define male, female and intersex.
Gender - in psychology, the attitudes, feelings and behaviors that a given culture associates with a person's biological sex.
3.3-2 Similarities and Difference
Both male and female receive 23 chromosomes from mother and 23 from father. 45 of the 46 are unisex. Similar biology helped us face adaptive challenges. Males and females have comparable creativity and intelligence and feel same emotions and longings.
Intersex - possessing male and female biological characteristics at birth.
Differences
Self-esteem - difference modest.
Puberty - average girl enters two years earlier than average boy.
Female more likely to:
Live 4 years longer
Expresses emotion more freely
Detect fainter odors
Receives offers of help more often
Become sexually re-aroused sooner
Twice the risk of developing depression and anxiety
10 times the risk of developing eating disorder
Male more likely to:
Autistic Spectrum Disorder
Color-deficient vision
Attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD)
More at risk for anti-social personality disorder
4 times more likely to die by suicide or develop alcohol use disorder
The average male and female differ in aggression, social power and social connectedness.
Aggression
Aggression - any physical or verbal behavior intended to harm someone physically or emotionally.
Relational Aggression - an act of aggression (physical or verbal) intended to harm a person's relationship or social standing.
Lab experiments confirm a gender difference in aggression. Likewise, outside the lab and worldwide, men commit more acts of aggression.
Social Power - Males predominate.
Male answer syndrome - men are more likely than women to hazard answers than admit they don't know.
Mansplaining - explaining something to a women in a condescending and sometimes inaccurate manner.
Social Connectedness
Whatever our gender - we need to belong. Brain scans show no striking structural sex differences. Men tend to be independent. Women will tend and befriend.
Gender Bias in the Workplace
Differences in Perception - women seen as aggressive, men as assertive
Differences in Compensation - women in "traditional" male professions (law and medicine) receive less compensation.
Differences in Family Care Responsibility - US mothers still do almost twice as much as fathers.
Other factors that contribute to workplace gender bias?
Social Norms - in most societies, men place more importance on power and achievement and are socially dominant.
Leadership Styles - Men more likely to be directive and tell people what to do. Women are more democratic, welcoming others input.
Interaction Styles - Men offer opinions, women support.
Everyday Behavior - Men are more likely to talk assertively, interrupt initiate touches and stare. Women smile and apologize more than men.
But all of the above vary widely across time and place.
3.3-3 The Nature of Gender
The Nature of Gender: Our Biological Sex
Prenatal Sexual Development
X chromosome - the sex chromosome found in both males and females. Females typically have two X chromosomes; males typically have one. An X chromosome from each parent produces a female child.
Y chromosome - the sex chromosome typically found only in males. When paired with an X chromosome from the mother, it produces a male child.
Testosterone - the most important male sex hormone. Both males and females have it, but the additional testosterone in males stimulates the growth of the male sex organs during the fetal period, and the development of the male sex characteristics during puberty.
Estrogens - sex hormones, such as estradiol, that contribute to female sex characteristics and are secreted in greater amounts by females than by males.
Adolescent Sexual Development
Primary sex characteristics - the body structures (ovaries, testes, and external genitalia) that make sexual reproduction possible.
Secondary sex characteristics - nonreproductive sexual traits, such as female breasts and hips, male voice quality and body hair.
Sexual Development Variations
Intersex - a condition present at birth due to unusual combinations of male and female chromosomes, hormones and anatomy; possessing biological characteristics of both sexes.
Case study in gender: David Reimer - raised a girl after penis burnt off during circumcision. After being told what happened when he was 13, he rejected the assigned female identity.
The Nurture of Gender
3.3-4 Gender Roles
Role - a set of expectations (norms) about a social position, defining how those in the position ought to behave.
Gender Roles - a set of expected behaviors, attitudes and traits for men and women.
3.3-5 Gender Identity
How Do We Learn Gender
Gender Identity - our sense of being male, female, or some combination of the two.
Social Learning Theory - the theory that we learn social behavior by observing and imitating and by being rewarded or punished.
Gender Typing - the acquisition of traditional masculine or feminine roles.
Androgyny - displaying both traditional masculine and feminine characteristics.
Transgender - an umbrella term describing people whose gender identity or expression differs from that associated with their birth designated sex.
3.3b Gender and Sexual Orientation: The Biology and Psychology of Sex
3.3-6 Hormones and Sexual Behavior
Sex Hormones
During prenatal period, they direct our sexual development.
During puberty, a sex hormone surge ushers us into adolescence.
After puberty, and well into late adult years, sex hormones facilitate sexual behavior.
Large hormonal surges or declines affect sexual desire at two predictable points in the lifespan and sometimes at an unpredictable third point:
The pubertal surge in sex hormones triggers the development of sex characteristics and sexual interest. Sex characteristics and sexual desire did not develop normally in castrated boys.
In later life, sex hormone levels fall. As hormone levels decline, sexual activity declines as well.
For some people, surgery or drugs may cause hormonal shifts.
3.3-7 The Psychology of Sex
External Stimuli
Can exposure to sexually explicit material have other effects? Research indicates that in can in four ways:
Accelerating sexual activity
Believing rape is acceptable
Reducing satisfaction with a partner's appearance or relationship
Desensitization
3.3 - 8 Sexual Risk Taking and Pregnancy
Social Script - a culturally guided model for how to act in various situations.
Social factors that contribute to teenager's sexual behavior and use of contraceptives.
Communication about birth control
Impulsivity
Alcohol Use
Mass Media
Factors that predict sexual restraint:
High Intelligence (concerned about the risk)
Religious Engagement
Father Presence
Service Learning Participation
3.3-9 Reflections on the Nature and Nurture of Sex, Gender, and Sexuality
Women prefer partners that will offer their joint offspring support and protection.
Men prefer traits such as smooth skin and a youthful shape - increase chance of sending genes into the future.
But culture and experiences also shape us. Cultures can amplify the gender differences.
Gender differences persist. But in modern cultures, gender roles are merging.
Social Learning Theory - the social script, our culture's guide to how people should act in certain situations. Women may learn that sexual encounters with strange men can be dangerous.
3.3c Gender and Sexual Orientation: Sexual Orientation
3.3-10 Introduction to Sexual Orientation
Sexual Orientation - our enduring sexual attraction, usually toward members of our own sex (homosexual orientation) or the other sex (heterosexual orientation); variations include attraction toward both sexes (bisexual orientation).
Exclusively homosexual - about 3 or 4 percent of men and 2 percent of women. Larger percent of adults - 17 percent for women and 6 percent for men - report some same sex sexual contact in their lives. Less tolerant places - people more likely to hide their orientation.
Today's psychologists view sexual orientation as neither willfully chosen nor willfully changed. Sexual orientation is especially persistent for men. Women's sexual orientation tends to be less strongly felt, and for some women, is more fluid and changing.
3.3-11 Origins of Sexual Orientation
Environment and Sexual Orientation - Environment likely contributes to sexual orientation - nature and nature work together - but the inability to pin down specific environmental influences has led researchers to explore several lines of biological evidence. These include same-sex attraction on other species, brain differences, and genetic and prenatal influences.
Same Sex Attraction in other Species
Same sex attraction in other species - same sex sexual behaviors have been observed in several hundred species. Homosexuality seems to be a natural part of the animal world.
Brain Differences
Gay Straight Brain Differences - cluster of cells in hypothalamus larger in heterosexual men than women and homosexual men.
Genetic Influences
Genetic Influences - about a third of variation in sexual orientation is attributable to genetic influences. Theories: (1) Evolutionary - supportive ants/uncles that contribute to success of nieces/nephews. (2) Fertile Female Theory - homosexual men tend to have more homosexual relatives on the female side than male side. And the mother's side also produce more offspring than the maternal relatives of heterosexual men. Perhaps the genes that dispose some women to conceive more children with men also dispose some men to be attracted to men.
Prenatal Influences
Prenatal Influences - Second semester: exposure to hormone levels typically experienced by female fetuses during this time seems to predispose the person (whether female or male) to be attracted to males later in life.
Trait Differences and Sexual Orientation
3.4 Cognitive Development Across the Lifespan
3.4-1 Cognitive Development in Infancy and Childhood
Cognition - all the mental activities associated with thinking, knowing, remembering and communicating.
Schema - a concept or framework that organizes and interprets information.
Assimilation - interpreting our new experiences in terms of our existing schemas.
Accommodation - adapting our current understandings (schemas) to incorporate new information.
We use our existing schemas to assimilate new experiences. But sometimes we need to accommodate (adjust) our schemas to include new experiences.
Piaget -Cognitive Development Stages
Sensorimotor (0-2): these are little babies who think in terms of things they can touch and feel. It is during this stage that object permanence—the understanding that things that leave the visual field still exist (9 months)—develops along with stranger anxiety.
Preoperational (2 to 6 or 7): kids can’t think logically about abstractions, so fantasy is reality, imaginary friend and beliefs like Santa and the Easter bunny are real.
Egocentrism - the preoperational child's difficulty of taking another's point of view.
Concrete Operational (6-12): kids do think logically about concrete things, so how could Santa go to all those houses in one night. They also learn that relationships go two ways and reversibility (“I have a sister and so does my sister(me)”). They learn conservation— the principle that properties such as mass, volume and number remain the same despite change in the forms of objects. Example: liquid in a tall container is not necessarily more than liquid in a short, wide container.
Formal Operational (after 12): learn to think and reason abstractly about things like justice and to forecast the future based on the past. Mature moral reasoning also develops.
Criticisms: Piaget’s tools for assessing weren’t good enough and kids could do some things earlier, but just couldn’t demonstrate them. Also, some say that these stages are not that cut and dry and sometimes children can do some things in some areas but not in others.
Pretend Play - Symbolic thinking and pretend play appear at an earlier age than Piaget supposed. 2 1/2 year old could find model stuffed animal behind model sofa. By three, can find real stuffed animal behind real sofa using model.
Reflections on Piaget
Piaget identified significant cognitive milestones and stimulated worldwide interest in how the mind works. But today's researchers see development as more continuous than did Piaget who mostly focused on the discontinuous (occurring in distinct stages).
Implications for Parents and Teachers
Young children are incapable of adult logic. TV and seesaw examples.
3.4-2 An Alternative View: Lev Vygotsky and the Social Child
Zone of Proximal Development - the zone between what a child can and can't do - it's what a child can do with help. Bike riding - training wheels or adult steady hand. Children learn best when task is not too easy or too difficult.
Scaffold - a framework that offers children temporary support as they develop higher levels of thinking.
3.4-3 Theory of Mind
Theory of Mind - people's ideas about their own and others' mental states - about their feelings, perceptions and thoughts and the behavior these might predict.
3.4-4 Cognitive Development in Adolescence
During the early teen years, egocentrism endures, and reasoning is often self-focused. Teens also begin imagining what others are thinking about them and develop an intense awareness of this imaginary audience. (spotlight effect.) Tendency to develop a personal fable — believing that they are unique and special and what happens to “most people” would never happen to them. “My vaping is just for fun; I would never end up an addicted smoker like my uncle.”
Developing Reasoning Power
When adolescents achieve formal operations, they apply their new abstract reasoning tools to the world around them.
Compare Ideal v. Imperfect Reality of their society, their parents, and themselves.
Debate human nature, good and evil, truth and justice.
Fairness changes from equality to equity.
Search for spirituality and the deeper meaning of life.
Detect inconsistencies and spot hypocrisy in others’ reasoning.
Developing Morality
Two crucial tasks of childhood and adolescence are discerning right from wrong and developing character — the psychological muscles for controlling impulses. Children learn to empathize with others, an ability that continues to develop in adolescence. To be a moral person is to think morally and act accordingly. Jean Piaget proposed that moral reasoning guides moral actions. A newer view builds on psychology’s game-changing recognition that much of our functioning occurs not on the “high road” of deliberate, conscious thinking, but rather on the “low road” of unconscious, automatic thinking.
Moral Intuition
The mind makes moral judgments quickly and automatically. Feelings of disgust or of elation trigger moral reasoning.
Is human morality really be run by the moral emotions while moral reasoning struts about pretending to be in control?”
Consider the desire to punish. Laboratory games reveal that the desire to punish wrongdoing is mostly driven not by reason (such as an objective calculation that punishment deters crime), but rather by emotional reactions, such as moral outrage and the pleasure of revenge.
Moral Action
As political theorist Hannah Arendt (1963) observed, many Nazi concentration camp guards during World War II were ordinary “moral” people corrupted by a powerfully evil situation. Today’s character education programs focus on the whole moral package — thinking, feeling, and doing the right thing. In service learning programs, teens have tutored, cleaned up their neighborhoods, and assisted older adults. The result? The participating teens’ sense of competence and desire to serve have increased, their school absenteeism and dropout rates have fallen, and their violent behavior has diminished.
Cognitive Development in Adulthood
3.4-5 Aging and Memory
People continue to develop and change. Very gradually, our thinking, reaction speed, and sensory abilities begin to diminish, even while our impulse control and wisdom grow. Older adults also become prone to dementia, a cognitive disorder that impairs memory, cognition, and decision-making.
Teens and Twenties play a significant role in memory for older adults. Remember significant events from then just as current students will recall the pandemic and the war in Ukraine.
In our capacity to learn and remember, we show individual differences. 70 year olds vary much more than 20 year olds. If the information is nonsensical, then the older we are the more errors. If the information is meaningful, older adults' rich web of existing knowledge will help them to hold it. Older adults are also more often experience tip of the tongue forgetting.
Maintaining Mental Abilities
More education earlier in life predicts better cognitive ability late in life. Computer-based “brain fitness” training programs probably don't help based on current research.
Our brain remains plastic throughout life.
Age is less a predictor of memory and intelligence than is proximity to a natural death, which does give a clue to someone’s mental ability. In the last three or four years of life, and especially as death approaches, cognitive decline typically accelerates. Researchers call this near-death drop terminal decline. Our goals also shift: We’re driven less to learn and more to connect socially.
3.5 Communication and Language Development
Language - our spoken, written, or signed words and the way we combine them to create meaning.
Language Structure
Language Acquisition and Development
3.5-1 How do we learn language?
Noam Chomsky theorized that language is nature's gift - an unlearned human trait separate from other parts of human cognition. Humans have a built-in predisposition to learn grammar rules, which he called universal grammar. Agrees that we are not born with a specific language or specific set of grammar rules. But all 6,000 of them have nouns, verbs and adjectives as building blocks. We all start by speaking with nouns.
Phoneme - in a language, the smallest distinctive sound.
Morpheme - in a language, the smallest unit that carries meaning; may be a word or part of a word (such as a prefix).
Grammar - in a language, a system of rules that enable us to communicate with and understand others. Semantics is the language's set of rules for deriving meaning from sounds. Syntax is its set of rules for combining words into grammatically sensible sentences.
Universal Grammar (UG) - human's innate predisposition to understand the principles and rules that govern grammar in all languages.
3.5-2 Language Development: When do we learn language?
Between first birthday and high school graduation, learned 60,000 words although use 150 most frequently.
Receptive Language
Infants start without language but by 4 months of age, babies can recognize differences in speech sounds.
Receptive language - the ability to understand what is said to them and about them.
Productive Language
Babbling Stage - beginning around 4 months, the stage of speech development in which an infant spontaneously utters various sounds at first unrelated to the household language.
One-word stage - the stage in speech development, from about ages 1 to 2, during which a child speaks mostly in single words.
Two-word stage - beginning about age 2, the stage in speech development during which a child speaks mostly in two word statement.
Telegraphic Speech - early speech stage in which a child speaks like a - telegram - go car - using mostly nouns and verbs.
Critical Periods
Childhood represents a critical or sensitive period for mastering certain aspects of language before the language learning window closes. By about 7 years, those who have not been exposed to either a spoken or signed language lose their ability to master any language.
Deafness and Language Development
More than 90% of all deaf children are born to hearing parents. Most want their children to experience their world of sound and talk. Cochlear implants enable this by converting sounds into electrical signals and stimulating the auditory nerve by means of electrodes threaded into the child's cochlea. But must be done before the age of consent (parental consent substitutes for child consenting). Problematic in deaf community. Prefer vision enhancement to hearing impaired.
3.5-3 The Brain and Language
Aphasia - impairment of language, usually caused by left hemisphere damage either to Broca's area (impairing speaking) or to Wernicke's area (impairing understanding).
Broca's area - helps control language expression - an area of the frontal lobe, usually in the left hemisphere, that directs the muscle movements involved in speech.
Wernicke's area - a brain area involved in language comprehension and expression; usually in the left temporal lobe.
3.5-4 Thinking and Language
Linguistic Determinism - the strong form of Whorf's hypothesis - that language controls the way we think and interpret the world around us.
Linguistic Influence - the weaker form of linguistic relatively - the idea that language affects thought (thus our thinking and world view is relative to our cultural language).
Thinking in Images
Thinking affects our language which then affects our thoughts.
Thinking in images can increase our skills when we mentally practice upcoming events.
3.6a Social Emotional Development Across the Lifespan: Infancy and Childhood
3.6-1 Social-Emotional Development in Infancy and Childhood
Ecological Systems Theory - a theory of the social environment's influence on human development, using 5 nested systems (microsystem, mesosystem, exosystem, macrosystem, chronosystem) ranging from direct to indirect influences.
Origins of Attachment
Attachment - an emotional tie with another person, shown in young children by their seeking closeness to their caregiver and showing distress on separation.
Stranger Anxiety - the fear of strangers that infants commonly display beginning by about 8 months of age.
The Harlows' monkey mothers: Psychologists Harry Harlow and Margaret Harlow raised monkeys with two artificial monkeys - one a bare wire cylinder frame with a wooden head and an attached feeding bottle, the other with no bottle but covered with foam rubber and wrapped with terry cloth. The Harlows' discovery surprised many psychologists. The infants preferred contact with the comfortable cloth mother even when feeding from the wire nourishing mother.
Familiarity
Contact is one key element to attachment. Another is familiarity. In many animals, attachments based on familiarity form during a critical period (an optimal period early in the life of an organism when exposure to certain stimuli or experiences produces normal development).
Imprinting - the process by which certain animals form strong attachments during early life. Konrad Lorenz explored this phenomenon.
3.6-2 Attachment Differences: Temperament and Parenting
Strange Situation - a procedure for studying child-caregiver attachment: a child is placed in an unfamiliar environment while their caregiver leaves and then 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 when the caregiver leaves, and find comfort in the caregiver's return.
Insecure Attachment - demonstrated by infants who display either clinging , anxious attachment or an avoidant attachment that resists closeness.
Temperament - a person's characteristic emotional reactivity and intensity.
Social deprivation and fear - In the Harlows' experiments, monkeys raised with inanimate surrogate mothers were overwhelmed when placed in strange situations without that source of emotional security. (Today there is greater oversight and concern for animal welfare, which would regulate this type of study).
3.6b Social-Emotional Development Across the Lifespan: Adolescence, Emerging Adulthood and Adulthood
3.6-6 Social- Emotional Development in Adolescence
Forming an identity
Identity - our sense of self; according to Erickson, the adolescent's task is to solidify a sense of self by testing and integrating various roles.
Social Identity - the "we" aspect of our self-concept; the part of our answer to "who am I?" that comes from our group memberships.
Intimacy - the ability to form emotionally close relationships.
Erikson - Psychosocial Development Stages
Trust vs. Mistrust – infants; if needs are dependably met, infants develop a sense of basic trust (a sense that the world around them is predictable and trustworthy;) said to be formed during infancy by appropriate experiences with responsive caregivers.
Autonomy vs. Shame – toilet training; toddlers learn to exercise will and do things for themselves, or they doubt their abilities.
Initiative vs. Guilt – preschoolers learn to initiate tasks and carry out plans, or they feel guilty about efforts to be independent.
Industry vs. Inferiority – children learn the pleasure of applying themselves to tasks, or they feel inferior.
Identity vs. Confusion – teenagers work at refining a sense of self by testing roles and then integrating them to form a single identity, or they become confused about who they are.
Intimacy vs. Isolation – young adults struggle to form close relationships and to gain the capacity for intimate love, or they feel socially isolated.
Generativity vs. Stagnation – the middle-aged discover a sense of contributing to the world, usually through a family and work, or they may feel a lack of purpose.
Integrity vs. Despair – when reflecting on his or her life, the older adult may feel a sense of satisfaction or failure.
3.6-7 Parent and Peer Relationships
Transition from child who wants to hold mom's hand becomes 14 year old who won't. Gradual transition - parent child arguments occur more frequently and usually over mundane things. Positive parent -teen relations and positive peer relations often go hand in hand. Adolescence is typically a time of diminishing parental influence and growing peer influence. Heredity does much of the heavy lifting in forming individual temperament and personality influences and peer influences does much of the rest. Most teens are herd animals.
Peer Influence - children seek to fit in with groups:
Preschoolers who disdain a certain food often will eat that food if put at a table with a group of children who like it.
Children who hear English spoken at home with one accent and another in the neighborhood and school will invariably adopt the accent of their peers, not their parents. Accents (and slang) reflect culture and children get their culture from peers.
Teens who start smoking typically have friends who model smoking, suggest its pleasures and offer cigarettes. Part of this peer similarity may result from a selection effect, as kids seek out peers with similar attitudes and interests. Those who smoke (or don't) may select as friends those who smoke (or don't).
How Much Credit or Blame Do Parents Deserve?
Praise parents for success of children, blame them for failures.
Differences in parenting styles: Asian Americans and European Americans often differ in their parenting expectations. Having a supportive "Tiger Mom" - one who pushes her children and works alongside them- tends to motivate children to work harder. European Americans might see this as pushy parenting that undermines children's motivation.
3.6-8 Emerging Adulthood
Emerging Adulthood- a period from about 18 to the mid-twenties, when many in Western cultures are no longer adolescents but have not yet achieved full adulthood. US government recognizes gradual emerging adulthood, allows dependent children on parents' health insurance till age 26.
The transition to adulthood is being stretched from both ends In the 1890s, the average interval between a woman’s first menstrual period and marriage, which typically marked a transition to adulthood, was about 7 years; a century later in industrialized countries it was about 14 years (Finer & Philbin, 2014; Guttmacher, 1994). Although many adults are unmarried, later marriage combines with prolonged education and earlier menarche to help stretch out the transition to adulthood.
3.6-9 Social Emotional Development in Adulthood
Adulthood's Ages and Stages
The Social Clock - the culturally preferred timing of events such as marriage, parenthood and retirement.
Sandwich generation - supporting aging parents while simultaneously supporting their emerging adult children or grandchildren.
Adulthood's Commitments
Love
Adult bonds of love are most satisfying and enduring when marked by a similarity of interests and values, a sharing of emotional and material support, and intimate self-disclosure. Such bonds are likely to last if marrying after age 20 and well educated. Divorce rates soared in 1960s to 1980s but have now stabilized and even declined.
Those who lived together before marriage had higher rates of divorce and martial dysfunction than those who did not. Three factors: (1) tend to be initially less committed to the ideal of enduring marriage. (2) they may become less marriage supporting while living together. (3) it's more awkward to break up with cohabitating partner than with a dating partner leading some cohabitators to marry someone they might otherwise have left.
Work - have work that fits your interests and provides you with a sense of competence and accomplishment.
3.6-10 Well-Being Across the Life Span
Most people express regret at what they didn't do rather than what they did (I should have taken my education more seriously).
Most over 65 not unhappy. Positive feelings are enhanced and negative feeling subside. Oldest adults are happiest when not alone.
3.6-11 Death and Dying
Five stages of grief - Kubler-Ross - denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance. (More added).
Terminally ill and bereaved people do not go through identical predictable stages.
Those who express the strongest grief immediately do not purge their grief more quickly.
Bereavement therapy and self-help groups offer support, but similar healing with passage of time, support of friends and the act of giving support and help to others.
3.7a Classical Conditioning: Basic Concepts
3.71 How Do We Learn?
Learning - the process of acquiring through experience new and relatively enduring information or behaviors.
Habituation - decreasing responsiveness with repeated exposure to a stimulus.
Associative Learning - learning that certain events occur together. The events may be two stimuli (as in classical conditioning) or a response and its consequences (operant conditioning).
Stimulus - any event or situation the evokes a response.
Respondent Behavior - behavior that occurs as an automatic response to some stimulus.
Operant Behavior - behavior that operates on the environment, producing consequences.
Cognitive Learning - the acquisition of mental information, whether by observing events, by watching others, or through language.
3.7-2 Behaviorism's View of Learning
Behaviorism - the view that psychology (1) should be an objective science that (2) studies behavior without reference to mental processes. Most research psychologists agree with (1) but not (2).
Classical Conditioning - a type of learning in which we link two or more stimuli; as a result, to illustrate with Pavlov's classic experiment, the first stimulus (a tone) comes to elicit behavior (drooling) in anticipation of the second stimulus (food).
3.7-3 Pavlov's Experiments
Neutral Stimuli (NS) - in classical conditioning, a stimulus that elicits no response before conditioning.
Unconditioned Response (UR) - in classical conditioning, an unlearned, naturally occurring response (such as salivation) to an unconditioned stimulus (US) such as food in the mouth.
Unconditioned Stimulus (US) - in classical conditioning, a stimulus that unconditionally - naturally and automatically - triggers an unconditioned response (UR).
Conditioned Response (CR) - in classical conditioning, a learned response to a previously neutral (but now conditioned) stimulus (CS).
Conditioned Stimulus (CS) - in classical conditioning, an originally neutral stimulus that, after association with an unconditioned stimulus (US), comes to trigger a conditioned response (CR).
3.7-4 Acquisition
Acquisition - in classical conditioning, the initial stage, when one links a neutral stimulus so that the neural stimulus begins triggering the conditioned response. In operant conditioning, the strengthening of a reinforced response.
Higher Order Conditioning - a procedure in which the conditioned stimulus in one conditioning experience is paired with a new neutral stimulus, creating a second (often weaker) conditioned stimulus. For example, an animal that has learned a tone predicts food might then learn that a light predicts the tone and begin responding to the light alone. (Also called second-order conditioning).
Extinction - the diminishing of a conditioned response; occurs in classical conditioning when an unconditioned stimulus (US) does not follow a conditioned stimulus (CS); occurs in operant conditioning when a response is no longer reinforced.
Spontaneous Recovery - the reappearance, after a pause, of an extinguished conditioned response.
Generalization - the tendency, once a response has been conditioned, for stimuli similar to the conditioned stimulus to elicit similar responses. (In operant conditioning, generalization occurs when responses learned in one situation occur in other, similar situations).
Discrimination - in classical conditioning, the learned ability to distinguish between a conditioned stimulus and similar stimuli that do not signal an unconditioned stimulus. (In operant conditioning, the ability to distinguish responses that are reinforced from similar responses that are not reinforced).
3.7-5 Pavlov's Legacy
Many other responses to many other stimuli can be classically conditioned in many other organisms.
Showed us how a process such as learning can be studied.
3.7b Classical Conditioning: Applications and Biological Limits
3.7-6 Applications of Classical Conditioning
Pavlov's principles can influence human health and well-being. Three examples:
Drug Cravings - Former drug users often fell a craving when they are again in the drug-using context - with people or in places they associate with previous highs. Thus, drug counselors advise their clients to steer clear of people and settings that trigger these cravings.
Food cravings - Classical conditioning makes dieting difficult. We readily associate sugary substances with enjoyable sweet sensations. Researchers have conditioned healthy volunteers to experience cravings after only one instance of eating a sweet food. Eating one cookie can create hunger for another. People who struggle with their weight often have eaten unhealthy foods thousands of times leaving them with strongly conditioned responses to eat the very foods that will keep them in poor health.
Immune Responses - Classical conditioning even works on the body's disease fighting immune system. When a particular taste accompanies a drug that influences immune responses, the taste by itself may come to produce an immune response.
3.3-3 Biological Constraints on Classical Conditioning
Preparedness - a biological predisposition to learn associations, such as between taste and nausea that have survival value.
Taste Aversion - If you become violently ill after eating oysters, you would probably have a hard time eating them again. Their smell and taste would have become a CS for nausea. This learning occurs readily because our biology prepares us to learn taste aversions to toxic foods.
Instinctive Drift - the tendency of learned behavior to gradually revert to biologically predisposed patterns.
3.8a Operant Conditioning: Basic Concepts
Operant Conditioning - a type of learning in which a behavior becomes more likely to recur if followed by a reinforcer or less likely to occur if followed by a punisher.
3.8-2 Skinner's Experiments
Law of Effect - Edward Thorndike's principle that behaviors followed by favorable consequences become more likely, and that behaviors followed by unfavorable consequences becomes less likely.
Thorndike's cat puzzle box. Thorndike used a fish reward to entice cats to find their way out of a puzzle box through a series of maneuvers. The cats' performances tended to improve with successive trials, illustrating Thorndike's law of effect.
Operant Chamber - in operant conditioning research, a chamber (also known as the Skinner box) containing a bar or key that an animal can manipulate to obtain a food or water reinforcer, attached devices record the animal's rate of bar pressing or key pecking.
Reinforcement - in operant conditioning, any event that strengthens the behavior that follows it.
Shaping - an operant conditioning procedure in which reinforcers guide behavior toward closer and closer approximations of desired behavior.
Bird brains spot tumors. After being rewarded with food when correctly spotting breast tumors, pigeons became as skilled as humans at discriminating cancerous tissue from healthy tissue. Other animals have been shaped to sniff out land mines or locate people amid rubble.
Discriminative Stimulus - in operant conditioning, a stimulus that elicits a response after association with reinforcement (in contrast to related stimuli not associated with reinforcement).
3.8-3 Types of Reinforcers
Positive Reinforcement - increasing behaviors by presenting positive reinforcers. A positive reinforcer is any stimulus that, when presented after a response, strengthens the response.
Negative Reinforcement - increasing behaviors by stopping or reducing aversive stimuli. A negative reinforcer is any stimulus that, when removed after a response, strengthens the response. (Note: Negative reinforcement is not punishment).
Primary Reinforcer - an innately reinforcing stimulus, such as one that satisfies a biological need.
Conditioned Reinforcer - a stimulus that gains its reinforcing power through its association with a primary reinforcer, also known as a secondary reinforcer.
Reinforcement Schedule- a pattern that defines how often a desired response will be reinforced.
Continuous Reinforcement Schedule - reinforcing the desired response every time it occurs.
Partial (intermittent) Reinforcement Schedule- reinforcing a response only part of the time; results in slower acquisition of a response by much greater resistance to extinction than does continuous reinforcement.
Fixed Ratio Schedule - in operant conditioning, a reinforcement schedule that reinforces a response only after a specified number of responses.
Variable Ratio Schedule - in operant conditioning, a reinforcement schedule that reinforces a response after an unpredictable number of responses.
Fixed Interval Schedule - in operant conditioning, a reinforcement schedule that reinforces a response only after a specified time has elapsed.
Variable Interval Schedule - in operant conditioning, a reinforcement schedule that reinforces a response at unpredictable time intervals.
| Schedules of Partial Reinforcement |
|
| Fixed
| Variable |
Ratio | Every so many: reinforcement after every nth behavior, such as buy 10 coffees, get 1 free, or pay workers per unit produced | After an unpredictable number: reinforcement after a random number of behaviors, as when playing slot machines or fly fishing. |
Interval | Every so often: reinforcement for behavior after a fixed time, such as Tuesday discount prices | Unpredictably often: reinforcement for behavior after a random amount of time, as when studying for an unpredictable pop quiz. |
3.8-5 Punishment
Punishment - an event that tends to decrease the behavior that it follows.
Ways to decrease Behavior
Type of punisher | Description | Examples |
Positive Punishment | Administer an aversive stimulus | Spray water on a barking dog; give a traffic ticket for speeding. |
Negative Punishment | Withdraw a rewarding stimulus | Take away a misbehaving teen's driving privileges; revoke a rude person's chat room access. |
Four major drawbacks of physical punishment
Punished behavior is suppressed, not forgotten. This temporary state may (negatively) reinforce parents' punishing behavior.
Punishment teaches discrimination among situations.
Punishment can teach fear.
Physical punishment may increase aggression by modeling violence as a way to cope with problems.
3.8-6 Skinner's Legacy
B.F. Skinner - outspoken beliefs. Insisted external influences, not internal thoughts and feelings, shape behavior. Urged people to use operant conditioning principles to influence others' behavior at work , school and home.
Critics objected and saying he dehumanized people by neglecting their personal freedom and by seeking to control their actions.
3.8-7 Operant Conditioning's Applications, and Comparison to Classical Conditioning
Application of Operant Conditioning at:
School - online adaptive quizzes allow students to move at their own pace and provide immediate feedback.
Sports - reinforcing small successes then gradually increasing the challenge. But beware of superstitious behavior - the accidental timing of rewards (tapping home plate before hitting home run).
Work - Reward specific, achievable behaviors and not vaguely defined merit.
Parenting - Notice the child doing something right and affirm them for it. When child is misbehaving, explain the misbehavior and remove the object misused or give a time out.
Self-Improvement -
State a realistic goal in measurable terms and announce it.
Decide how, when and where you will work toward your goal.
Monitor how often you engage in your desired behavior.
Reinforce the desired behavior.
Reduce the rewards gradually.
Manage Stress - using Biofeedback
Biofeedback - a system for electronically recording, amplifying, and feeding back information regarding a subtle physiological state, such as blood pressure or muscle tension.
3.8-8 Biological Constraints on Operant Conditioning
Biological constraints predispose organisms to learn associations that are naturally adaptive.
Instinctive Drift - the tendency of learned behavior to gradually revert to biologically predisposed patterns.
3.8-9 Contrasting Classical and Operant Conditioning
3.9 Social, Cognitive and Neurological Factors in Learning
3.9-1 Cognition's Influence on Conditioning
Cognition and Operant Conditioning
Cognitive Map - a mental representation of the layout of one's environment. For example, after exploring a maze, rats act as if they have a cognitive map of it.
Latent Learning - learning that occurs but is not apparent until there is an incentive to demonstrate it.
Insight - a sudden realization of a problem's solution; contrasts with strategy-based solutions.
Biological and Cognitive Influences on Conditioning
| Classical Conditioning | Operant Conditioning |
Biological Influences | Natural Predispositions constrain what stimuli and response can be easily associated. | Organisms most easily learn behaviors similar to their natural behaviors unnatural behaviors instinctively drift back toward natural ones. |
Cognitive Influences | Organisms develop an expectation that the CS signals the arrival of a US. | Organisms develop and expectation that a response will be reinforced or punished; they also exhibit latent learning, without reinforcement. |
3.9-2 Observational Learning
Observational Learning - learning by observing others (also called social learning).
Modeling - the process of observing and imitating a specific behavior.
3.9-3 Mirrors and Imitation in the Brain
Mirror Neurons - frontal lobe neurons that some scientists believe fire when we perform certain actions or observe another doing so. The brain's mirroring of another's action may enable imitation and empathy.
Monkeys learn to prefer whatever color corn they observe other monkeys eating.
Imitation - This 12-month-old infant sees an adult look left, and immediately follows her gaze.
3.9-4 Applications of Observational Learning
Prosocial Effect - positive, constructive, helpful behavior. The opposite of antisocial behavior.
People who exemplify nonviolent, helpful behavior can also prompt similar behavior in others. Models are most effective when their words and actions are consistent.
Prosocial - positive, constructive, helpful behavior. The opposite of antisocial behavior.
Antisocial effects - Observational learning can have antisocial effects. This explains why abusive parents might have aggressive children.
Antisocial Behavior - negative, destructive, harmful behavior. The opposite of prosocial behavior.
People to Know
Ivan Pavlov - lay the foundation for many of John Watson's ideas. Pavlov and Watson shared a disdain for "mentalistic" concepts such as consciousness, and a belief that the basic laws of learning were the same for all animals - whether sea slugs or dogs or humans. Few researchers today agree that psychology should ignore mental processes but most agree that classical conditioning is a basic form of learning by which all organisms adapt to their environment.
Some have questioned if he used a bell - likely used various stimuli.
Why does Pavlov's work remain so important?
The finding that many other responses to many other stimuli can be classically conditioned in many other organisms.
Pavlov showed us how a process such as learning can be studied objectively.
John B. Watson - Little Albert experiment, making infant afraid of furry white things; conditioned phobias; applied CC to advertising
B.F. Skinner - Modern behaviorism's most influential and controversial figure. Expanding on Thorndike's Law of Effect, Skinner found that the behavior of rats or pigeons placed in an operant chamber can be shaped by using reinforcers to guide closer and closer approximations of the desired behavior.
Skinner insisted that external influences, not internal thoughts and feelings, shape behavior. Urged people to use operant conditioning principle to influence others' behavior at work, school, and home. Critics of Skinner say he dehumanizes people by neglecting their personal freedoms and by seeking to control their actions.
Albert Bandura -the father of social learning theory; observation- imitation and reinforcement
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