Developmental Flashcards
Why study child development?
Education:
- Help parents/educators raise/ contribute to raising children more effectively
Social Policy:
- Lead society as a whole to adopt wiser policies (political, medical) that promote children’s well-being
- Children’s rights
What is development
- Refers to systematic changes and continuities that individuals display over the course of their lives
- Is a continuous and cumulative process
- Is a holistic process (looks at the whole individual instead of one thing)
- Shows plasticity (can be moulded and changed with experience)
- Is dependent on historical and cultural context
Chronology of development
Prenatal period - conception to birth Infancy - birth to 18 months Toddlerhood - 18 months to 3 years Preschool period - 3 to 5 years of age Middle childhood - 6 to 12 years Adolescence - 12 or so to 20 or so (hard to define)
What are the two major processes in development?
Maturation:
- Development changes in the body
- Behaviour that results from the aging process (developmental milestones)
- Species typical
Learning:
- Developmental change in behaviour that results from one’s experience or practice
- E.g. learning to play the piano
- Not a biological change
What is normative development?
- Refers to typical patterns of development that are seen across most or all individuals
What does individual changes/development refer to
- An individual’s variations in the rate, extent, or direction of development that is unique to the individual
Issues in developmental psychology
- Nature/nurture debate (impact)
- Active versus passive (are the processes active or passive)
- Stability versus change (do we stay thee same throughout life)
- Is this a continuous process, or do we develop through a series of leaps (quantitative or qualitative differences)
Founders of developmental psych (1800s)
Baby biographies (e.g. Darwin):
- Inexact, but served to put child development on scientists’ agenda
- Parents writing diaries for babies
G.S. Hall:
- In order to obtain more reliable data he distributed questionnaires to larger samples of children (aim of studying children’s minds)
Psychoanalytic perspective to developmental psych
Seeks to understand human behaviour in terms of unconscious drives and motive that stems from early life experiences
Psychoanalytic theories: Freud (Psychosexual)
- Basic unconscious (sexual) drives, maturation
- 5 stages of development (oral, anal, phallic, latency, genital)
- Use of defense mechanisms
Psychoanalytic theories: Erikson (Psychosocial)
- Cultural demands on the individual
- More active
- 8 stages of major conflicts/crises that must be resolved (trust, autonomy, initiative, industry, identity, intimacy, generativity, ego integrity)
Behaviourist approach to developmental psych
Argues that human behaviour is learned through experience with the environment
Cognitive developmental approach to developmental psych
Attempts to understand developments in children’s thinking in terms of the acquisition of new mental operations
Cognitive theories: Piaget (cognitive development)
- Active explorer, construct schemes
Four stages: Sensorimotor (0-2) Pre-operational (2-7) Concrete-operational (7-11) Formal operational (11/12+)
Only when you gain all the skills from one can you move onto another
Cognitive theories: Vygotsky (sociocultural)
- Cognitive growth as a social mediated process
- Heavily influenced by culture
Cognitive theories: Information-processing
- Computer model of cognitive development and thinking
- No one theory
Theoretical Orientations: Ethological (Evolutionary) perspective
- Concerned with the contribution of human evolution to human psychology
- Assumes that behaviour and development depend on inborn motives that are species-specific due to natural selection
Theoretical Orientations: Ecology/contextual approach
- A newer approach
- Considers the context of how an individual grows up
- Bronfenbrenner’s (1979) ecological systems approach considers a detailed analysis of environmental influences
How can we tell that babies feel emotions?
- Psychological measures
- Adults asked to label emotions apparently shown by babies’ facial expressions
- There is a reporting bias: parents want their children to do well
- If adults can discriminate reliably and agree on a range of emotions, this is our best evidence for a range of emotions in babies
- Izard, 2007
What are primary emotions?
- Basic emotions
- At birth: contentment, interest, distress, disgust, neonate smile (don’t know whether it is true emotion or not)
- 4-8 weeks: Pleasure/social smile
- 2-7 months: anger, sadness, joy, surprise, fear
- Biological influence: invariant sequence of emergence across cultures
What are secondary emotions?
- Complex emotions
- End of second year and beyond
- Embarrassment
- Shame
- Guilt
- Envy
- Pride
- Emotions are linked to how you perceive yourself
- Once you’re around school age you start to show emotions when by yourself
How children understand emotion
- Emotional words used as young as 18 months, with an increase in the third year
- How children process emotions could be a learnt script for how to behave/react
- Emotional conflicts (mixed emotions) are not understood at 6 years of age
What are emotional display rules?
- Learnt rules
- Acceptable vs unacceptable
- Change over time
How do emotional display rules develop?
- Social training
- Mothers display positive emotions in play
- Adults respond selectively to babies’ emotional displays
- Social training differs among cultures
What are the results of social training for emotional display rules?
- Socially acceptable emotional displays shaped from early on
- Takes time to learn emotion display rules
- 3 year olds some limited ability to disguise true feelings
- As they get older they get better at lying/masking
- Learning to express or surppress emotions at will
- Key to following emotional display rules is emotional self-regulation and the ability to lie about our mask our emotions
Regulating emotions
Babies and children develop strategies:
- Six month olds turn away from aversive stimuli
- 1 year olds may use rocking, moving away, chewing on objects
- Toddlers may distract themselves (e.g. if forced to wait) but can’t suppress strong emotions (e.g. fear)
- 2-6 years: parental guidance and verbal help that becomes internalised
Also taught to maintain or intensify some emotions (e.g. self-evaluative emotions)
Recognition and interpretation: First few months of life
- Babies can discriminate between adult facial expressions of primary emotions
- May be perceptual only: not evidence for interpretation
Recognition and interpretation: 2-3 months
- Smile more to human faces than inanimate objects
- Nelson, de Hann and Thomas, 2006
Recognition and interpretation: Infants
- Able to recognise emotional changes in adults’ expressions and vocalisations in their first year of life
Recognition and interpretation: social referencing
- Late in first year
- Approx 7-10 months
- First look to adults if uncertain, later look after reacting
Recognition and interpretation: Toddlers and older children
- Adults initiate conversations about emotions
- Children show more developed/earlier secondary emotions if brought up by parents who discuss emotions with them
- Same for understanding mixed emotions
Recognition and interpretation: overall
- Importance for social development
- Emotional competence = social acceptance
- Nursery children who use more emotion related words are more popular
- Early competence continues into the later school years
Recognition and interpretation: Tests
- Still face experiments
- Infants and young children expect adults to synchronise emotions with them in play and are sensitive to emotionless displays
What is temperament?
- Tendency to respond in a certain way across situations
- Considered a precursor of personality
Five major temperament attributes in babies
- Activity level
- Irritability
- Soothability
- Fearfulness
- Sociability
What are the techniques to study perceptual abilities in infancy?
- Preference looking
- Habituation
- High-amplitude sucking
- Operant conditioning
What are the perceptual abilities in infancy?
- Vision
- Taste and smell
- Audition
- Touch
- Depth and face perception
What are newborn survival reflexes?
- Adaptive value
- Satisfy needs
E.g. breathing, sucking, swallowing
What are newborn primitive reflexes?
- Not as useful as survival
- Disappears in first year
E.g. Babinski reflex (foot thing), swimming, grasping
What is sensation?
The detection of sensory stimulation
What is perception?
The interpretation of sensory input
Preference technique
Fantz, 1956
- Baby shown two pictures or two objects
- Researcher keeps track of how long baby looks at each one
Picture baby looks at longest:
- Baby indicates that he/she sees some difference between thee two
- Reveals something about the kinds of objects that capture thee baby’s attention
What is habituation?
- Researchers first present a baby with a particular sight or sound over and over until they habituate
- Then the researchers present another sight, sound or object that is slightly different to see if thee baby shows renewed interest (dishabituation)
Habituation study
Baillargeon and DeVos (1991)
- Used 3 month old babies
- Habituated on small or tall carrot passing behind a tall screen
- 3 month olds look longest at the impossible event
What is high amplitude sucking?
- Rate of sucking on na pacifier control the presentation of a stimuli, shows preference and discrimination
Vision at infancy
- Least mature sense
- Poor acuity (see as well as adults by 2 years)
- Detect changes in brightness
- Detect colours (newborn infant has only a limited ability, discrimination is goof by 2/3 months)
- Tracking improves rapidly
Audition at infancy
- Discriminate sounds based on loudness, duration, direction, and frequency
- Turn to sound location
- Prefer mother’s voice to other women
- Prefer sounds heard prenatally in third trimester
- Can recognise sound patterns (including their own name) at 5 months
- At 6 months, sensitive to phonemes, even better than adults (if sounds are not part of the adult’s spoken language)
What is infant phoneme discrimination?
Losing the ability too discriminate between sounds that are not part of the native language in the first year
Taste and smell at infancy
- Prefer sweet over sour, bitter, or salty
- Avoid unpleasant odours
- At 1 week can discriminate mother by smell
Touch at infancy
- Touch enhances development, allows exploration of environment
- Sensitive to touch
- Sensitive to temperature
- Sensitive to pain - even at 1 day
- May be best developed sense
What is intermodal perception?
- Integration of information from two or more senses
- Piaget believed this ability developed late in the first year of life
- James and Eleanor Gibson believed that some intermodal abilities are present at birth, these skills are then developed based on experience
