Psychology 1
PREVIOUS: Triology of the Mind
Developmental psychology talks about the growth of your knowledge from prenatal to teen until you die. There was a time where everything was new knowledge, but we’ve developed where we can infer things and know things. So what about as we’re developing?
Cognitive development entails the development of our thoughts, feelings, emotions. Jean Piaget is pretty much a big deal in this aspect of psychology. He believed that people go through specific stages of cognitive and intellectual development. People create schemas, mental frameworks that help us interpret information–they are like concepts. When we first see something new, we assimilate, or try to group this new thing into our schemas. But when we realize the differences, we accommodate and adjust our schemas.
Studying Developmental Psychology
Cross-sectional studies compare groups of individuals of different ages at the same time. Several groups of subjects of various ages at one time. This is quick and you get more of a representative sample. For example, you could compare the memory abilities of 3, 5, nd 7 year olds. On the other hand, Longitudinal studies only follow a single group of individuals as they develop. Studying just the abilities of 3 year olds, 2 year olds, THEN 4 year olds takes away the risks of sampling differences, and keeps the sample consistent.
Doing different studies can handle different cohort effects, the kind of culture that you had growing up vs these gosh darn millenials.
From Fetus to Old Fart
Everyone starts at a zygote, a fertilized egg cell, and then you become a fetus about 8 weeks after conception. If your mama drinks alcohol during pregnancy, you could develop fetal alcohol syndrome, a condition marked by malformations of the face, heart, and ears, etc. Don’t drink and baby.
Infants don’t have the same ability to recognize faces as we do. Studies about eye movement and attention show that babies will stare at normal faces for just as long as distorted and upside down faces. In terms for hearing, infants will develop habituation by listening to the same sounds over and over again and then decreasing their response to that repeated stimulus. But once there’s a difference in the habituated response, the stimulus is the dishabituated. This is how infants differentiate the sounds ba and pa. This is also how infants learn and memorize (nursery rhymes).
Piaget’s Stages of development
- Sensorimotor: From brith to about 2. Babies will learn from their senses–touching, grabbing, etc. When an object is out of sight, it doesn’t exist.
- Preoperational: From 2 to 7. It’s all about me! Egocentricism–it’s hard to consider other’s point of view. Do you have a brother? Yes. Does your brother have a brother? No. Children tend to fixate on just one problem or object. Here, children begin to develop a theory of mind, an understanding that other people also have a mind, and that each person knows things that other people don’t know.
- Concrete Operational: From 7 to 12. Kids being to think logically and experiences. They experience decentration and being looking at things in different perspectives.
- Formal Operational: 12 until die. Reasoning is expanding to include problem solving, logic, etc.
The problem with these stages is that Piaget thought that this development was distinct–that you needed to undergo some kind of large transition/caterpillar metamorphosis to jump between stages. This is not true–if a child were in the preoperational stage, they should perform consistently at that level. But they don’t.
Vygotsky argued against Piaget’s claim that children are the main protagonist in their learning. Vyg believed otherwise, that educators should not wait for children to learn new ideas. He said that children have a zone of proximal development, the distance between what a child can do alone and what is possible with help. These are the same ideas about scaffolding as in all your CalTeach classes.
Erikson’s Stages of Development
Erikson believed that failing to master the task of any of the following stage creates unfortunate consequences that carries over.
- Infant::Basic trust vs mistrust::Is my social world predictable and supportive?
- Toddler (1-3)::Autonomy vs shame and doubt::Can I do things by myself or must I always rely on others?
- Preschool child (3-6)::Initiative vs guilt:: Am I good or bad?
- Preadolescent (6-12)::Industry vs inferiority:: Am I successful or worthless?
- Adolescent(Early teens)::Identity vs role confusion::Who am I?
- Young Adult (Late teens, early 20s)::Intimacy vs isolation::Shall I share my life with another person or live alone?
- Middle Adult (Late 20s to retirement)::Generativity vs stagnation::will I succeed in my life, both as a parent and as a worker?
- Older Adult (after retirement)::Ego Integrity vs despair::Have I lived a full life or have I failed?
Other Important Ideas
People long for attachment, which begins in infancy. The Strange Situation is a procedure where a mother and her infant come into a room with many toys. A stranger enters the room, and then the mother leaves and then returns. Later, both the stranger and the mother leaves. The stranger returns, and then the mother returns. These are the infants’ responses. Different countries/cultures lead to different attachment styles.
- Securely attached: Clings to mother, plays with toys with her.
- Anxious: Resistant, clings if she leaves
- Avoidant: Seldom interacts with mother
- Disorganized: Infant might not notice the mother.