CLASS # 3
HUMAN DEVELOPMENT
How psychologists think about development - the pattern of continuity and change
Development involves both growth and decline
Biological changes
Cognitive changes
Socioemotional…. Social/emotional
Nature and Nurture the ongoing controversy of which is more important #1 Nature - refers to a person’s biological inheritance
Nurture - refers to a person’s enviromental experience
Also referred to as H and E or heredity and environment
Development is the Interaction of heredity and environment or nature and nurture
Discussion: What do you think? Was your personality shaped more by your parents or your peers? Controversy #2
Research re Peers:
Preschoolers who dislike a certain food will often eat the food if put at a table of children who like it
Children will adopt the accent of their peers over their parents
Peers are important for learning cooperation, learning social interaction
Parents have an influence on education, responsibility, charitableness, and ways of interacting with authority figures and in making future plans…
Controversy # 3.….which is more important, early development or later?
...the Early experience doctrine ….. “the child is the father of the man”
Early experiences determine who we are in later life
And that if you don’t receive adequate nurturing during the first year of live, you won’t develop to your full potential
The later experience advocates say that children and people can respond and change as a result of later caregiving…..and that not enough attention has been paid to studying adult development
What do you think?
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INFANT DEVELOPMENT The word infant comes from the latin “in fans” which means unable to speak…so researching their abilites has some challenges
One of the techniques explained in the book is called the
Preferential looking techniqueWhen shown these two images, newborns spent nearly twice as many seconds looking at the facelike image…this was repeated with newborns only 1 hr. old…with the same result.
#2 - another technique for studying infant perception is to look at habituation
Habituation is a phenomenon in learning….when a novel stimulus is presented it will get attention…..but the more it is presented, in other words, the more familiar it is, the less attention it will receive
Show hybrid cat and dog imagesIn this study, 4 month old infants were shown a series of images of cats. They then were shown this picture of cat-dog hybrids. Which image do you think they looked at the most…….the one with the dog’s head
Also, when another group was shown pictures of dogs, they reacted to the one with the cat’s head as novel.
This suggests that infants focus first on the face, not the body.
PIAGET’S THEORY OF COGNITIVE DEVELOPMENT
Children actively construct their cognitive world.
Piaget’s studies led him to believe that a child’s mind develops through a series of STAGES - in an upward march from the newborn’s simple reflexes to the adult’s abstract reasoning powers.
Piaget’s core idea is that the driving force behind our intellectual growth is an unceasing struggle to make sense of our experiences.
Piaget coined the concept of SCHEMAS - a concept or framework that we have at a particular time, that organizes information and provides a structure to explain it - for example - categories
Piaget proposed two other concepts to explain how we use and adjust our schemas:
#1 - Assimilation - occurs when we take new experiences and interpret them in terms of our current understandings - schemas
And #2 - Accomodation - occurs when we adjust our schemas to incorporate information provided by new experiences….we make adaptations, or fine tuning
PIAGET’S THEORIES OF COGNITIVE DEVELOPMENT
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1. SENSORIMOTOR STAGE birth to 2
A. object permanenence - the awareness that objects continue to exist when hidden
Piaget believed that this awareness was acquired by 8 months, but studies have shown that it begins to develop much earlier and that he underestimated baby’s logical abilities
2. PREOPERATIONAL STAGE - 2-7
A. Egocentrism - they have trouble perceiving things from another’s point of view
Self - centered
A classic example of this is the 3 year old who makes himself invisible by putting his hands over his eyes. He believes that if he can’t see you, then you can’t see him.
It should be noted that the cognitive abilities described by Piaget are not completely absent in one stage and then show up miraculously in the next. Rather, they show up earlier and begin to gradually develop until mastered.
3. CONCRETE OPERATIONAL STAGE - 7 - 11
A. CONSERVATION - THE PRINCIPLE THAT QUANTITY REMAINS THE SAME DESPITE THE CHANGES IN SHAPE
4. FORMAL OPERATIONAL STAGE - 11 - through adulthood
People begin to think logically about abstract concepts
Hypothetical - deductive reasoning - the ability to develop hypotheses and systematically determine possible solutions to solving problems
THEORY OF MIND - Preschoolers…. Although they are still egocentric in some areas of thought …..like being invisible…..begin to develop what has been called a Theory of Mind…… the realization that other people have a mind of their own ..………..they begin to tease and persuade one another…more and more they begin to take another’s perspective ………… They begin to EMPATHIZE…….
The following video illustrates the development and the evolution of empathy.
Show video….
www.ted.comJeremy Rifkin…The Empathic Civilization
ERIKSON’S THEORY OF SOCIOEMOTIONAL DEVELOPMENT
ANOTHER ASPECTS OF DEVELOPMENT IN CHILDHOOD - Attachment - the close emotional bond between an infant and its caregiver
For many years, developmental psychologists reasoned that infants became attached to those who satisfied their need for nourishment. It made sense. But an accidental finding overturned this explanation.
During the 1950’s , a husband and wife team of psychologists, the Harlows were raising monkeys for their learning studies. They separated the infant monkeys from their mothers shortly after birth and put them in individual cages to be sure that the infants had the identical experiences since different experiences could have an effect on their research. When their blankets were taken to be laundered, the infant monkeys becamedistressed!
The Harlows recognized that this intense attachment to the blanket contradicted the idea that attachment derives from an association with nourishment.
This led them to construct their now classic experiments
Which showed that it is “contact comfort” , not feeding that is the crucial element in the attachment process.
This shows how contact is one key to attachment. Another is familiarity.
