Developmental Psychology

Developmental Psychology

Prenatal Influences on Development

Genetics: Many of a person’s physical traits are obviously known to come from the parents. Researchers often use identical twins to compare and figure out which of a person’s traits are most dictated by genetics

Teratogens: These chemicals can have drastic effects on an unborn baby if the mother ingests or contracts them. The placenta often filters most teratogens. Alcohol is a very common example of a teratogen harming a fetus’ development. Babies with fetal alcohol syndrome are common to have small, malformed skulls and mental retardation. Many other substances have teratogens, such as bacteria, viruses, chemical pollutants, and many types of drugs. Psychoactive drugs such as cocaine and heroin can be especially dangerous, as the baby has a high chance of being born addicted to the substance if it’s used by the mother.

Motor/Sensory Development

Reflexes: All babies are born with a set of specific automatic reflexes to certain stimuli. These include the rooting reflex (being touched on the cheek causes the baby to turn its head and put the object in its mouth), Sucking reflex (baby will suck on an object in its mouth), grasping reflex (putting an object in a baby’s palm will cause it to grasp the object), moro reflex (when startled, the baby will extend and then contract its limbs to become as small as possible), and the Babinski reflex (when baby’s foot is stroked, it will spread its toes).

The Newborn’s Senses: At birth, a baby’s main sense is hearing. A baby is born almost legally blind. Taste preferences are similar to a grown human’s, especially favoring sugar. Babies favor images such as faces or pretty much anything that looks like a face. This favor of images combined with close range vision keep the baby ready to see its mother almost as soon as it’s born.

Motor Development: All healthy people develop motor skills in the same order around the same ages. Babies can roll over when they’re about 5 ½ months, stand at around 8-9 months, and walk themselves around 15 months. Environment and parental encouragement has shown to have slight effect on motor development.
Parenting

Attachment Theory: attachment and relationships with parents are believed to be the most important is a child’s development. There are two major researchers that demonstrated some of the basic findings regarding attachment:

Harry Harlow: In Harlow's initial experiments infant monkeys were separated from their mothers at six to twelve hours after birth and were raised instead with substitute or 'surrogate' mothers made either of heavy wire or of wood covered with soft terry cloth. In one experiment both types of surrogates were present in the cage, but only one was equipped with a nipple from which the infant could nurse. Some infants received nourishment from the wire mother, and others were fed from the cloth mother. Even when the wire mother was the source of nourishment, the infant monkey spent a greater amount of time clinging to the cloth surrogate.

Mary Ainsworth: Researched attachment by placing mothers and babies into strange, foreign environments and situations. She studied the baby’s reactions and created the following three main categories of attachments.

Secure Attachment: A child who is securely attached to its caregiver will explore freely while the caregiver is present, will engage with strangers, will be visibly upset when the caregiver departs, and happy to see the caregiver return. The child will not engage with the stranger if the caregiver is not in the room.

Anxious-Ambivalent Insecure Attachment: A child with an anxious-resistant attachment style is anxious of exploration and of strangers, even when the caregiver is present. When the caregiver departs, the child is extremely distressed. The child will be ambivalent when she returns and will seek to remain close to the caregiver, but will be resentful and also resistant when the caregiver initiates attention.

Anxious-Avoidant Insecure Attachment: A child with an anxious-avoidant attachment style will avoid or ignore the caregiver and show little emotion when the caregiver departs or returns. The child will not explore very much, regardless of who is there. Strangers will not be treated very differently from the caregiver. There is not much emotional range displayed regardless of who is in the room or if it is empty.

Parenting Styles: The parent’s behavior and treatment have a huge impact on their child’s development. There are three major styles of parenting. Authoritarian parents set strict standards for their children. Punishment is often severe and unbending. Permissive parents do not set clear guidelines. Family rules are not enforced and often change. Authoritative parents have consistent, logical, and reasonable standards. Their rationale is discussed with the children and is open to criticism. The parents want their children to be independent, but under control.

Moral Development:

o Lawrence Kohlberg: his stage theory studied a different aspect of human development, morality.

o Wanted to describe how a person’s ability to reason about certain ethical situations changes over our lives.

The Experiment:
Kohlberg asked a subject group of kids to think about a certain moral situation. One of the situations was a man named Heinz, who has to decide whether or not to steal a drug he cannot afford in order to save his wife’s life.
After collecting all of the responses, he categorized them into three different levels of morality:
Preconventional
The youngest kids in the experiment make their decisions to avoid being punished. They make this decision based on how it will affect themselves. The kids in this group might say that, he shouldn’t steal the drug because he might get caught and sent to prison.
Conventional
The kids in this group will often make decisions based on how they will be viewed by others. They learn what is right and wrong from their parents and others around them. They make the decisions they do so that the others around them will view them as a good person. Children in this stage would often say that Heinz should steal the drug because it could save his wife’s life and people would think of him as a hero.
Postconventional
A person in this stage of moral development examines the rights and values involved in the choice. It is said that people will generally make their decisions based on certain ethical principles what rights outweigh the others. Someone in this stage might say that Heinz should steal the drug because his wife’s right to live outweighs the store owner’s right to personal property.
Gender and Development
This topic mainly focuses on how males and females develop the ideas on what it means to be a certain gender and the differences between the two. For different cultures there are different gender roles, which are behaviors that cultures expect to see out of each gender. There are a few different theories to help explain how certain gender roles develop:
Biopsychological Theory
This theory mainly focuses on the nature element of the naturel nurture combination that produces our gender roles. Biopsychologists look for the subtle gender differences rather than the obvious ones that make us different from one another.
Psychodynamic Theory
The Freudian approach to development says that young boys, unconsciously, compete with their fathers for their mothers attention. Girls, compete with their mothers for their father’s love. Development occurs when the child realizes that they cannot beat the parent of the same sex for the attention of the other and instead, starts to look up to that parent and learn gender roles from them.

Social-Cognitive Theory

This theory suggests that the effects of the society around us and our own thoughts about gender influence our development on gender roles. Social psychologists look at how we react to boys and girls differently. For example, boys playing more rough and physically than girls do.

Harlow Monkey Studies:
"In Harlow's initial experiments infant monkeys were separated from their mothers at six to twelve hours after birth and were raised instead with substitute or 'surrogate' mothers made either of heavy wire or of wood covered with soft terry cloth. In one experiment both types of surrogates were present in the cage, but only one was equipped with a nipple from which the infant could nurse. Some infants received nourishment from the wire mother, and others were fed from the cloth mother. Even when the wire mother was the source of nourishment, the infant monkey spent a greater amount of time clinging to the cloth surrogate."
Unfortunately:
"...the actions of surrogate-raised monkeys became bizarre later in life. They engaged in stereotyped behavior patterns such as clutching themselves and rocking constantly back and forth; they exhibited excessive and misdirected aggression..."
Mary Ainsworth:
Assessment
During the 1970's, psychologist Mary Ainsworth further expanded upon Bowlby's groundbreaking work in her now-famous "Strange Situation" study. The study involved observing children between the ages of 12 to 18 months responding to a situation in which they were briefly left alone and then reunited with their mother (Ainsworth, 1978).
Based on these observations, Ainsworth concluded that there were three major styles of attachment: secure attachment, ambivalent-insecure attachment, and avoidant-insecure attachment. Researchers Main and Solomon (1986) added a fourth attachment style known as disorganized-insecure attachment. Numerous studies have supported Ainsworth's conclusions and additional research has revealed that these early attachment styles can help predict behaviors later in life.
Nature vs. Nurture:
This debate within psychology is concerned with the extent to which particular aspects of behavior are a product of either inherited (genetic) or acquired (learned) characteristics.

· Those who adopt an extreme heredity position are known as nativists. Their basic assumption is that the characteristics of the human species as a whole are a product of evolution and that individual differences are due to each person’s unique genetic code. Characteristics and differences that are not observable at birth, but which emerge later in life, are regarded as the product of maturation. That is to say we all have an inner “biological clock” which switches on (or off) types of behavior in a pre programmed way. The classic example of the way this affects our physical development are the bodily changes that occur in early adolescence at puberty. However nativists also argue that maturation governs the emergence of attachment in infancy, language acquisition and even cognitive development as a whole.

· At the other end of the spectrum are the environmentalists – also known as empiricists (not to be confused with the other empirical / scientific approach). Their basic assumption is that at birth the human mind is a tabula rasa (a blank slate) and that this is gradually “filled” as a result of experience From this point of view psychological characteristics and behavioral differences that emerge through infancy and childhood are the result of learning. It is how you are brought up (nurture) that governs the psychologically significant aspects of child development and the concept of maturation applies only to the biological.

Conception and Gestation:

1. The Germinal Stage The germinal stage begins with conception, when the sperm and egg cell unite in one of the two fallopian tubes. The fertilized egg, known as a zygote, then moves toward the uterus

2. The Embryonic Stage The mass of cells is now know as and embryo. The beginning of the third week after conception marks the start of the embryonic period, a time when the mass of cells becomes a distinct human being.

3. The Fetal Stage Once cell differentiation is mostly complete, the embryo enters the next stage and becomes known as a fetus. This period of develop begins during the ninth week and lasts until birth.

Jean Piaget:

Piaget believed that children are not less intelligent than adults, they simply think differently. He also proposed a number of concepts to explain how children process information.
Key Concepts
Schemas- Schemas are categories of knowledge that help us to interpret and understand the world. A schema includes both a category of knowledge and the process of obtaining that knowledge.
For example, a child may have a schema about a type of animal, such as a dog. If the child's sole experience has been with small dogs, a child might believe that all dogs are small, furry, and have four legs. Suppose then that the child encounters a very large dog. The child will take in this new information, modifying the previously existing schema to include this new information.

Assimilation- The process of taking in new information into our previously existing schemas is known as assimilation. In the example above, seeing a dog and labeling it "dog" is an example of assimilating the animal into the child's dog schema.

Accommodation- involves altering existing schemas, or ideas, as a result of new information or new experiences. New schemas may also be developed during this process.

Piagets’s Cognitive Developmental Stages

Sensorimotor Stage
Birth-2 Years
Knowledge of the world is limited to sensory perceptions and motor activities. Children utilize skills and abilities they were born with, such as looking, sucking, grasping, and listening, to learn more about the environment.

Object Permanence-a child's understanding that objects continue to exist even though

they cannot be seen or heard.

Preoperational Stage
2years-6years
Language development is one of the hallmarks of this period. Children do not yet understand concrete logic, cannot mentally manipulate information. Children also become increasingly adept at using symbols
Egocentrism-unable to take the point of view of other people, which he termed

egocentrism.

Concrete Operational
7years-11years
Children gain a better understanding of mental operations. Children begin thinking logically about concrete events, but have difficulty understanding abstract or hypothetical concepts. They understand reversibility.
Reversibility-For example, a child might be able to recognize that his or her dog is a Labrador, that a Labrador is a dog, and that a dog is an animal.

Formal Operational
12years-adulthood
People develop the ability to think about abstract concepts. Skills such as logical thought, deductive reasoning, and systematic planning also emerge during this stage.

Work:

Lucas Thomas: Prenatal influences, motor/sensory dev, and parenting

Miranda Anderson: Conception and Gestation and Nature vs. Nuture.

Sam Stokes: Moral Development and Gender and Development

Paige Schaffan: Jean Piaget, Cognitive Developmental Sages

Cory Rossini: Mary Ainesworth-strange situation, Harlow Monkey studies