CHYS 2P10 lecture 8 Flashcards
Selman’s Role-Taking Theory
- – Ability to understand other person’s perspective develops
- – Presented interpersonal dilemmas with multiple characters to children
Selman’s Stages
- Egocentric or undifferentiated
- Social-informational role taking
- Self-reflective role taking
- Mutual role taking
- Societal role taking
- Theory of mind
Selmon draws Understanding that human action is motivated by underlying mental states that are:
– Intentions, beliefs, emotions, desires – Social development – Moral judgments, empathy, conduct disorder – Cognitive development – Reasoning about representations
Animacy
-IQ and Animacy
-Based on an evolutionary perspective
-Theory-of-mind reasoning is “domain-specific”
• Relies on special neuro-cognitive computations
-Can be impaired by injury or abnormal development.
-Autistic children do well on false photograph, terrible false belief. Can’t imagine minds - what other people are thinking
Bear/Dragon Test
• Methods • Participants – 95 Children (ages 3;2 to 4;11, M = 4;0) • Representation Tasks: – 2 False belief tasks – 2 False photo tasks • Executive function (inhibitory control): – whisper, gift delay, bear-dragon
Chinese preschoolers, possible advanced emergence of frontal function?
– AD/HD, Frontal Functioning, & DRD4 7-repeat allele
– DRD4 7-repeat very rare in Asian populations (never been seen in Han Chinese).
Chinese/ American children experiment
Chinese outperform U.S. preschoolers on Executive functioning
No cross-cultural differences in theory-of-mind
Executive functioning and theory-of-mind relation is robust across cultures
So why don’t Chinese outperform U.S. on theory-of-mind?
Theory of mind?
-you understand that other people have different thoughts than you do)
False Beliefs
can’t follow others perspectives
Dissociation in Development
- Shape game/ color game- mind can’t get used to rules, first one is remembered
- Children follow logic, last step they get lost – who took the muffins
- Sticker, mean monkey takes sticker the kid wants. Around 6 they figure out that people are thinking different than them, and thus try to think how others are thinking so they can trick them
Why do Chinese not have theory of mind?
1• Siblings
– Number of older siblings predicts emergence of theory-of-mind reasoning (Perner et al., 1996)
– Clear differences with Chinese
2• Parent-child Conversations
– Talk about mental states promotes theory-of-mind development (Ruffman, Slade & Crowe, 2002).
– Possible differences with Chinese
• High theory of mind equates to better inabition
General summary:
- Reasoning about beliefs is associated with “special” neuro-cognitive requirements
- maturation and experience play a role in development of theory of mind
- Performance on marker tasks of frontal lobe functioning correlate with theory-of-mind development
- Seems likely that maturation and experience each play a crucial role in theory-of-mind development
Six Basic Emotions in Infancy
- They are all rooted in our evolutionary heritage, make their appearance early in infancy, and have a rapid, automatic onset
- They have distinct, universally-recognized facial patterns
- They are believed to be innate and hardwired into the subcortical motor areas of the brain
the six emotions are:
- joy
- suprse
- anger
- sadness
- disgust
- fear
Joy?
- Endogenous smiles appear in newborns
• Typically during sleep, associated with low levels of brain activity (asocial)
• Duchenne smiles are the first genuine social smiles, occur at 1 month
• Smiles become increasingly selective (informed) with age
• Smiling is a very powerful emotional signal that may serve to initiate and maintain social interactions with adults
• Laughter plays a similar role, and also becomes increasingly social & selective with age (at around 8 months)
Surprise (Interest)
• Surprise and interest represent two different emotions
• Surprise is dependent on, and helps further develop, cognitive development
• Not observable until infants begin to form cognitive expectations (book says 5-7, I say 3 or fewer months)
• Surprise is accompanied by regular physiological responses such as:
– Heightened sensory sensitivity
– Orienting towards stimulus
– Rapid inhibition of unrelated behaviors
– General fight or flight response
Anger
- Initial emotion is distress/upset
- During early months, anger is secondary to pain/distress signals
- This changes with age, with anger becoming the dominant signal
- Appears to be due to a shift in self-reliance
- Anger appears to be directed more towards events that the infant can potentially control/influence, particularly in goal-oriented actions (frustration)
- Anger can serve as an adaptive motivational tool for overcoming obstacles
Sadness
- Also appears to be derived from distress/upset
- Emerges at around 3 months
- Infants display sadness and distress to the Still-Face Paradigm
- Sadness is often a response towards a particular social interaction
- Sadness appears to both motivate a withdrawal from the situation, as well as solicit care
- Self-soothing and crying are both observed in displays of sadness – I need care
- Unlike anger, sadness shuts down the fight or flight response, appears to reduce bodily activity (adaptive?)
- Body function shut down- not hungry/no energy
Disgust
- Disgust is originally a food-oriented behavior where the individual rejects an unpalatable item from the mouth
- Later (2-3 years of age), disgust is also associated with undesirable social behaviors
Fear
- Like anger and sadness, fear originates from the general distress display
- Fear begins to emerge at around 3 months
- Fear can be triggered by: intense, novel, social, conditioned, or evolutionarily-relevant stimuli
- Fear provokes a withdrawal response that is associated with fight or flight
Self-Conscious Emotions
- Embarrassment
- Envy
- Empathy
- Pride
- Shame
- Guilt
Temperament
he term that developmental psychologists use to refer to “personality” in infants and young children
- Best example are siblings - raised in a similar way, by similar parents, in similar environments, but develop differently
- Temperament is thus believed to have a strong biological/genetic component
Thomas & Chess
- Initiated the New York Longitudinal Study where 141 children were studied in a longitudinal experiment that started at birth and continued through to adulthood
- Goal was to determine if there were basic, stable underlying behavioral and emotional patterns amongst individuals
Temperament Types
- Easy: generally positive mood, quick to adapt, regular routines
- Difficult: reacts more negatively, irregular routines, slow to adapt
- Slow-To-Warm-Up: reacts mildly negative, low activity level, slow to adapt
- None Classified: blends of the above
Rothbart & Bates Dimensions
- Fearful distress
- Irritable distress
- Positive Affect
- Activity level
- Attention span/persistence
- Rhythmicity
Temperament is difficult to assess for several reasons:
– Different markers exist at different ages (e.g., crying in infancy vs. teen yelling)
– Markers often rely on reports from non-trained, potentially-biased observers (e.g., parents)
– Different scales use different measures (including physiological)
Consistency vs. Stability
- Traditionally, temperament was viewed as being both consistent and stable over time
- not proven
- Thus the new concept of consistency includes predictable changes in temperament - still a serious issue
- How to summarize personality variation?
- Hundreds of personality traits, but each overlaps partly with many others.
HEXACO
- H = Honesty-Humility
- E = Emotionality
- X = eXtraversion
- A = Agreeableness
- C = Conscientiousness
- O = Openness to Experience
Honesty-Humility (H)
- Sincere, fair, modest vs.
* greedy, deceitful, conceited
Emotionality (E)
- Sentimental, anxious, sensitive vs.
* Tough, fearless, independent
eXtraversion (X)
- Outgoing, lively, sociable vs.
* Shy, quiet, passive
Agreeableness (A)
- Patient, calm, forgiving vs.
* Quick-tempered, stubborn, argumentative
Conscientiousness (C)
- Organized, thorough, disciplined vs.
* Lazy, sloppy, careless
Openness to experience (O)
- Philosophical, creative, inquisitive vs.
* Conventional, simple, closed-minded
HEXACO vs. Big FIve
- H as separate factor
- E and A somewhat different from five-factor counterparts
- Better cross-cultural validity
- Better theoretical validity
Altruism and endeavor dimension
- H, A, E as altruism-related dimensions
* X, C, O as endeavour-related dimension
H and reciprocal altruism?
- Honesty-Humility: cooperate despite opportunity to exploit.
- Benefits: gains from cooperation
- Costs: missed gains from exploiting others
A and reciprocal altruism
- Agreeableness: cooperate despite (perhaps) being exploited.
- Benefits: gains from cooperation
- Costs: losses from being exploited by others
E and kin altruism
- Emotionality as kin investment:
- Direct link sentimentality (feelings of empathy, attachment promote kin altruism).
- Indirect link fearfulness/dependence (protection
- E (continued)
- Benefits: better survival chances for self and kin
- Costs: missed gains from risky opportunities
X as social endeavour
- Extraversion as engagement in social endeavour (leading, entertaining, socializing).
- Benefits: social gains (mates, friends, allies)
- Costs: time, energy, social risks
C as task-related endeavour
- Conscientiousness as engagement in task-related endeavour (working, planning, organizing)
- Benefits: material gains (incl. food), safety
- Costs: time, energy
O as idea-related endeavour
- Openness to Experience as engagement in idea-related endeavour (learning, imagining, thinking)
- Benefits: material and social gains (from discovery)
- Costs: time, energy, risks (social, natural
Heritability of Traits
- Identical twins who were reared apart having heritability scores of around 0.5 and higher for The Big Five traits – but 4/6 factors
- HEXACO loads cleanly onto 6 separate genetic clusters
- Already, two genes have been isolated that alter the level of serotonin manufactured in the brain, thereby influencing emotionality
Traits as Biological Adaptations
- Given that traits are influenced by genes, why are there different degrees of traits?
- Having diverse/unique traits may allow individuals to cope with diverse/unique environmental contexts and situations
- Fish alter their personalities (even against genetic predispositions) to suit their environmental conditions – children probably do something similar
