Developmental Psychology Module 2 Flashcards
human language is species-specific
no animal besides humans has a language system that is complex and infinitely generative as the human language
language is also species- universal
all humans are born with the capacity to learn languages
nonhuman primate communicative systems
The Problem of Induction: Plato’s Problem
how is it that humans with very little and very improvised language input become so skilled at language use in such a short period of time?
Problem of mechanism: How does change occur?
Problem of Variation: How do contexts contribute to language learning?
Spoken and signed language learners
Sociocultural Context
the problem is this: we learn language in such an amazingly easy way without any real instruction. We induce language structure and semantics from diverse information and materials.
Problems of Origin
where does language come from?
Nurture
Experience
Infant (child) Directed Talk
Pitch, pause, intonation
nativist views in the problem of induction: plato’s problem
Is there something special in our DNA that lets us learn language
environmentalists view on the problem of induction: plato’s problem
they say that there is nothing special in our DNA and that we have basic skills that allow us to learn through environmental input
Universal Grammar
Chomsky and experience independent
brain-language lateralization
the specialization of language functions in one hemisphere of the brain, typically the left, although it’s not a complete separation, and the right hemisphere also plays a role.
Language functions such as grammar, vocabulary and literal meaning are typically lateralized to the left hemisphere, especially in right-handed individuals. While language production is left-lateralized in up to 90% of right-handers, it is more bilateral, or even right-lateralized, in approximately 50% of left-handers.
sensitive period
a considerable body of evidence suggests that the early years constitute a sensitive period during which languages are learned relatively easily. After this period (which ends sometime between age 5 and puberty), language acquisition outcomes become more variable and, on average, less successful.
what are domain-general capabilities
cognitive capabilities and statistical learning
the process of language acquisition
language is acquired by listening and speaking (or watching) statistical learning
development of phonology
how do children develop an understanding of sounds
prosody
the characteristic rhythm, tempo, cadence, melody, intonational patterns, ect. with which a language is spoken
categorical perception
the perception of speech sounds as belonging to discrete categories
voice onset time (VOT)
the length of time between when air passes
the length of time between when air passes through the lips and when the vocal cords start vibrating
Elimas (1971) (phonology)
1 and 4 month old infants
high amplitude sucking- an experimental method used to study infant speech perception, where infants hear a sound stimulus contingent on their strong or “high-amplitude” sucking on a pacifier
habituation and dishabituation important for language learning to distinguish sounds and to learn one; you have to know what category that language sound is in to be able to do anything with it
Werker & Tees (1984)
experiment 1:
12 6 months old infants
10 English-speaking adults
5 Thompson- speaking adults
experiment 2:
26 8-10 month old infants
20 10-12 month olds
experiment 3: 6 infants tested longitudinally
The argument is that children are perceptually narrowing because as the child goes on, they can’t distinguish from Thompson speech.
word segmentation
where do words begin and end?
distributional properties of speech
in any language, certain sounds are more likely to occur together than are others
word segmentation: distributional properties
Process of listening and understanding distributional properties
Saffran et al., (1997)
Saffran et al., (1997)
The problem of Mechanical Learning: Statistical LEarning
Procedure
Working on a coloring book while listening to a speech stream
Test: Forced choice
Identify “words” from “non-words”
Experiment 2:
12 adult college students
12 6 and 7 year old children
Procedure: 2 ch
Experiment 3:
24, 8-month-old infants
Exp 1 syllables
Exp 2 words
development of semantices
how do children develop an understanding of word meanings?
Words are symbols (referents)
Vocabulary Spurt
1-2 years of age- 300% increased in words
3-5 years, 5-10 words a day
Carey & Barlett (1978) (word semantics)
taught 3 year olds a new word
“Chromium”
“Bring me the chromium one, not the blue one”
Preschoolers- generalized the word to new green things
Fast mapping
Map a novel name to a novel object, they fact map it
fast mapping
mapping a novel name to a novel object and people start to associate it and name that object that
Vlach & Sandofer (2012)
54 3-year-olds
54 undergraduates
Instructions
Play a game to measure things
Learning Phase: 6 measuring activities, using a familiar object to measure an object
During one of the six activities, the experimenter labeled the unfamiliar object as a Koba
Testing phase: immediately, 1 week, 1 month later
10 objects and said, hand me the koba
We tried fast mapping, they didn’t fast map but they redid the experiment
Exp 2: 162 3 year olds
Learning Phase
Randomly Assigned
1. Memory support: salience -> “this toy is special”
2. Memory support: salience and repetition
3. Memory support: salience, repetition, and generation
hot cognition
refers to cognitive processes heavily influenced by emotions, making decisions or judgments based on feelings rather than logic; essentially, “hot” means thinking with emotions, while
cold cognition
describes cognitive processes that are largely independent of emotion, relying more on rational thinking and analysis; “cold” means thinking without them.
fast mapping -> mutual exclusivity
Expectations that each entity has 1 name
Białystok (2012)
Three and 4 year olds
37- Monolingual French Speaking
69- Monolingual English peaking
56- Bilingual English + Another Language
word order: syntax
First sentences
Most children combine words into simple sentences by the end of the second year
Telegraphic speech: short utterances that leave out non-essential words; generally two-word utterances
Syntactic Bootstrapping- strategy of using the grammatical structure to infer meaning
telegraphic speech
short utterances that leave out non-essential words; generally two-word utterances
Syntactic Bootstrapping
strategy of using the grammatical structure to infer meaning
Children also figure out the meanings of new words by using the grammatical structure of the sentences in which those words occur
Naigles (1990)
An early demonstration of this phenomenon involved showing 2-year-olds a video of a duck using its left hand to push a rabbit down into a squatting position while both animals waved their right arms in circles. As they watched, some children heard “The duck is kradding the rabbit”; others heard “The rabbit and the duck are kradding.” The children then saw two videos side by side, one showing the duck pushing on the rabbit and the other showing both animals waving their arms in circles. Instructed to “Find kradding,” the two groups looked at the event that matched the syntax they had heard while watching the initial video. Those who had heard the first sentence took kradding to mean what the duck had been doing to the rabbit, whereas those who had heard the second sentence thought it meant what both animals had been doing. Thus, the children had arrived at different interpretations for a novel verb based on the structure of the sentence in which it occurred.
grammar: putting words together
Mastery of regularities of language
Increasing ability to recognize patterns and generalize toward novel words
Overreregularization
Berko (1958)
speech errors in which children treat irregular forms of words as if they were regular
preschoolers were shown a picture of a made-up animal, which the experimenter referred to as “a wug.” Then the children saw a picture of two of the creatures, and the experimenter said, “Here are two of them; what are they?” Children as young as 4 readily answered “wugs.” Since the children had never heard the word wugs before, their ability to produce the correct plural form cannot be attributed to imitation. Instead, these results provide evidence that the participants had learned the English plural, generalizing beyond words they had previously heard.
development of pragmatic language use
how do children develop an understanding of how to use words to communicate?
pragmatics
refers to the understanding of how language is typically used in a specific cultural context
Jawal & Hansen (2006) (pragmatics)
Exp 1: “Can you give it to me?” + a point familiar= greater than chance
“Can you give me the blicket” point familiar far less than chance
Experiment 2: “Can you give me the one my sister found?” +gaze familiar = chance “Can you give me the blickety?” + gaze familiar= less than chance
emotional development
how do we develop the ability to feel and to regulate our emotions?
How do children and adults experience emotions in similar ways?
similar physiological experiences
How do children and adults experience emotion in different ways?
Regulations
When young infants are distressed, frustrated, or frightened, there is little they can do to fix the situation. Their parents typically try to help them regulate their emotional arousal by attempting to soothe or distract them (Gianino & Tronick, 1988). For example, caregivers tend to use caressing and other affectionate behavior to calm a crying 2-month-old. Over the next few months, they increasingly include vocalizations (e.g., talking, singing, shushing) in their calming efforts, as well as in their attempts to divert the infant’s attention. Holding or rocking upset young infants while talking soothingly to them seems to be the most reliable approach, and feeding them if they are not highly upset is also effective (Jahromi, Putnam, & Stifter, 2004). Thus, the emotional states of young infants are externally controlled by a process known as co-regulation, in which a caregiver provides the needed comfort or distraction to help the child reduce distress.
how are emotions structured?
Neural Foundation
Physiological Responses
Expressive Responses
Subjective Feeling States
Valence, Arousal
Categorial
Associated Conditions
Thought Action Tendencies
Emotional Structure
Discrete (Categorical: Are they categories of behaviors) or Dimensional
J.B. Watson (1919)
“An emotion is a hereditary pattern-reaction involving profound changes of the bodily mechanisms as a whole, but particularly of the visceral and glandular systems.”
what emotions are present at birth
Love
Fear
Rage
Cathleen Bridges (1932)
“… the course of development, emotional behavior becomes more and more specific, both as regards arousing stimuli and form of response.”
What kind of evidence could you use to determine whether early emotions were discrete (categorical) or undifferentiated (dimensional)?
Facial expressions, ect.
Theories on the Nature and Emergence of Emotion
Differential (or discrete) emotions theory- Tomkins (1962), Izard (2007)
theoretical assumptions
Emotions are evolutionarily determined
Emotions are discrete (categorical) from one another from very early in life
Each emotion is associated with a specific and distinctive set of bodily responses and facial reactions
Universal
Automatic
Subcortical
Motivate & Regulate Cognition and Action
Discrete emotions theory (Izard, 2007)
Basic (primary) emotions
Set of neural/bodily/expressive/feeling/motivational states
Generated rapidly and automatically in the presence of an ecologically valid stimulus
To enact an adaptive neural response -> behavioral response
Izard (1985, 1987+)
Identify a sequence of distinct discrete basic emotions
Studied facial expressions of infants in emotion-eliciting situations
- Birth
- Interest
- Contentment (Joy)
- Disgust
- Distress
2 months
- Anger
- Sadness
4 months
- Surprise
7 months
- Fear
Bennett et al. (2005)
151 infants
2 sessions- longitudinal
4 months
12 months
Eliciting Situation
Tickle
Sour taste
Arm restraint
Masked stranger
Facial expressions coded
Joy
Surprise
Anger
Disgust
Fear
Sadness
Interest
Theories on the Nature of Emergence of Emotion: Functional Perspective
(contrasts the previous things)
Basic function of emotions: to promote action toward achieving a goal
Emotions only become discr4ete from one another as children experience appropriate socially relevant interactions and cognitive appraisal is possible (ie., i see someone i recognize, i am happy)
functional (undifferentiated) emotions
Emotions begin undifferentaited -> emerge with cognition
The first expressions- are precursors
Wariness -> fear
Frustration -> anger
Pleasure -> joy
Campos (1994); Saarni (2006)
Theoretical Assumptions
Differentiated- require elementary cognition
Cognition organizes emotions into distinct meanings
Promoting active consequences
Response to the appraisal of threats to well-being
Require some sense of self and other
Functional (Undifferentiated)
Early in development
Absence of coordination between internal and external
6-9 months- begin socialization of feelings -> greater synchrony
Gradual- socialization of less synchrony
8-10 years- display rules
Self- Conscious Emotions (secondary emotions) (pride, shame, jealousy, etc.)
Require cognitive capacities
Objective self awareness
(sometimes) moral standards
Understanding of others (theory of mind)
theory of mind within secondary emotions
Primary emotions are happiness, anger, fear, surprise, sadness, and disgust
Don’t require a lot of subcortical energy
Secondary emotions are self-conscious emotions and have the ability to vary more through culture and context bc they vary more about the context their in and the social system
Lewis et al., (1992)
33-37 months
Interactions with Parents
Free-play task situations
Easy- 4-piece puzzle, ball toss 2 feet, copy a line
Difficult- 25-piece puzzle, ball toss 12 feet, copy a triangle
Code: Shame- body collapse, mouth corners down, eyes lowered, “I’m no good at this.”
Code: Pride: erect posture, smile, eye contact with parents, “I did it!”
Bear et al., (2009)
5th graders
130 USA
118 Japan
While playing around, you throw a ball and it hits your friends in the face.
How would you feel on 1-5 scale
You would feel inadequate because you can’t throw a ball. (shame)
You would apologize and make sure your friends feel better. (guilt)
You would think that maybe your friend needs more practice at catching. (blaming)
Test of Self Conscious Affect (TOSCA)
15 stories of real-life situations
How would you feel?
Significant Impact: Psychoanalytic Theories
Early Experience Matters
Self Development <-> Knowledge of Others
Importance of non-conscious processes
Emphasis on developmental goals
Significant Impact: Learning Theories
Focus on Environment
Learned Behaviors
Practical Applications (Behavior Modification)
Ethological Theories
the study of the evolutionary bases of behavior
imprinting
a form of learning in which the newborns of some species become attached to and follow adult members of the species
informed theory of attachment
Konrad Lorenz (1903-1989) (ethology)
Study of behavior within an evolutionary context
Behavior had adoptive, survival value
Imprinting
Learning to follow caregivers
Humans do not imprint
the biochemical model
The most encompassing model of the general context of development is Urie Bronfenbrenner’s bioecological model. This perspective treats the child’s environment as “a set of nested structures, each inside the next, like a set of Russian dolls”. Each structure represents a different level of influence on development. The child is at the center, with a particular constellation of characteristics (genes, gender, age, temperament, health, intelligence, and so on).
U. Bronfenbrenner’s (1917-2005) Bioecological Model
Microystem
Mesosystem
Exosystem
Macrosytem
Chronosystem
Person-Processes-Context-Time
Person
Processes
Proximal Processes
Systematic interactions of individual enviroment
microsystem
the immediate environment that an individual child experiences and participates in
mesosystem
the interconnections among immediate, or microsystem, settings
exosystem
environmental settings that a child does not directly experience but that can affect the child indirectly
macrosystem
the larger cultural and social context within which the other systems are embedded
chronosystem
historical changes that influence the other systems
person-processes-context-time
According to Bronfenbrenner’s bioecological model (see Chapter 9), children’s development is affected by a variety of contexts that are nested into a set of hierarchical systems. The family is the child’s most proximal context and thus the one that has the most direct influence on development. Yet the family itself is affected by the contexts in which it is embedded, including cultural contexts, economic contexts, and work contexts.
skinneras language proposal
The modern study of language development emerged from a theoretical debate. In the 1950s, B. F. Skinner proposed a behaviorist theory of language development (Skinner, 1957). Behaviorists believed that development is a function of learning through reinforcement and punishment of overt behavior. Skinner argued that parents teach children to speak by means of the same kinds of reinforcement techniques that are used to train animals to perform novel behaviors.
Noam Chomsky (1959) countered Skinner by pointing out some of the reasons why language cannot be learned via reinforcement and punishment. One key reason was noted earlier in this chapter: we can understand and produce sentences that we have never heard before (generativity). If language learning proceeds by means of reinforcement and punishment, how could we know that a sentence like “Colorless green ideas sleep furiously” is a grammatical English sentence, whereas “Green sleep colorless furiously ideas” is not (Chomsky, 1957)? Similarly, how could children produce words they have never heard before, like wented, or know that wugs is the plural of wug? Children appear to know details about the structure of their native language that they have not been taught — facts that are unobservable and thus impossible to reinforce — contrary to Skinner’s proposal.
chomskys alternative proposal
universal grammar- innate knowledge about the principles and rules that govern grammar in all languages.Chomsky’s account is consistent with the fact that, despite many surface differences, the world’s languages are fundamentally similar. His strongly nativist account also provides an explanation for why most children learn language with exceptional rapidity, while nonhumans (who presumably lack a Universal Grammar) do not. The Universal Grammar hypothesis is highly relevant to investigations of emerging languages like Nicaraguan Sign Language, discussed in Box 6.4.
how do we develop close relationships
attachment with other and emotional understanding
attachment theory
How do we form social relationships? How do we think about ourselves in relation to other people?
Attachment & Self (psychological constructs)
^ are defined by observed behaviors and reported thoughts
Define us of our understanding of ourselves
Define our understanding of others
Engage us in our social worlds
bonding and imprinting
don’t confuse bonding with imprinting
Klaus & Kennell (1976) Bonding
Suggested that immediate post-birth skin-to-skin contact between infant and mother would establish a life-long secure attachment relationship between the parent and child
And it didn’t work. WHat happened immediately after birth did not predict quality of relationship by parent and child by a year old
Peope are not like ducks or geese- we need a long period of time to develop warm emotional relationships
The Caregiver-Child Attachment Relationship
Attachment
An emotional relationship between two people that endures across space and time
Usually, attachments are discussed in regard to their relation between infants and specific caregivers
Attachemnts persits abd are developed into adulthood
foundational ideas about attachment
Freud (psychiatrist), Dollard and Miller (Behaviorists), Harlow, Bowlby, and Ainsworth
Sigmund Freud
Proposed early experience was important (if not critical) for later development
Early relationship quality creates a “prototype” for later rrelationships
Quality of early relationships was established through feeding and toilet training
Freud’s Theory of Psychosexual Development
Thought that even very young children have a sexual nature that motivates their behavior and influences their relationships.
Erogenous zones- in Freud’s theory, areas of the body that become erotically sensitive in successive stages of development
The Developmental Processes (Under Freud)
Id- in psychoanalytic theory, the earliest and most primitive personality structure. It is unconscious and operates with the goal of seeking pleasure
Id is ruled by the pleasure principle- goal of achieving maximal gratification as quickly as possible.
Oral Stage- the first stage in Freud’s theory, occurring in the first year, in which the primary source of satisfaction and pleasure is oral activity
Ego- in psychoanalytic theory, the second personality structure to develop. It is the rational, logical, problem-solving component of personality
Whereas “the id stands for the untamed passions,” the ego “stands for reason and good sense” (Freud, 1933/1964).
Anal stage- the second stage in Freud’s theory, lasting from the second year through the third year, in which the primary source of pleasure comes from defecation. In this stage, the child’s erotic interests focus on the pleasurable relief of tension derived from defecation. Conflict ensues when, for the first time, the parents begin to make specific demands on the infant, most notably their insistence on toilet training.
Phallic Stage- pans the ages of 3 to 6. In this stage, the focus of sexual pleasure again migrates as children become interested in their own genitalia and curious about those of caregivers and playmates. Freud believed that during the phallic stage, children identify with same-sex caregivers, giving rise to gender differences in attitudes and behavior. Freud also believed that young children experience intense sexual desires during the phallic stage, and he proposed that their efforts to cope with them leads to the emergence of the third personality structure, the superego.
Superego- in psychoanalytic theory, the third personality structure, consisting of internalized moral standards. The superego is essentially what we think of as conscience and is based on the child’s adoption of their caregivers’ standards for acceptable behavior. The superego guides the child to avoid actions that would result in guilt, which the child experiences when violating these internalized standards.
Latency period- lasts from about age 6 to age 12. It is, as its name implies, a time of relative calm, with sexual desires hidden away in the unconscious. The fifth and final stage, the genital stage.the fourth stage in Freud’s theory, lasting from age 6 to age 12, in which sexual energy gets channeled into socially acceptable activities.
Genital stage- begins with the advent of sexual maturation. The sexual energy that had been kept in check for several years reasserts itself with full force, directed toward peers. Sexual maturation is complete.
According to Freud, if fundamental needs are not met during any of the stages of psychosexual development, children may become fixated on those needs, continually attempting to satisfy them and to resolve associated conflicts.
Dollard and Miller
Also viewed feeding as important for the attachment relationship
Child-mother relationship
Principles of classical conditioning do you form a bond with mother because you like feedings
Proponents of behaviorism (see Chapter 9) argued that food, such as breast milk, is the basis for the bond. Infants link food to mothers through the process of classical conditioning, in which food is the unconditioned stimulus that causes the infant to experience pleasure and mothers are the conditioned stimulus linked with the food. From a behaviorist perspective, mothers evoke pleasure in the infant only because of this association (Dollard & Miller, 1950).
Harlow (1958)
Psychologist Harry Harlow proposed another idea, based on his work with rhesus monkeys. Harlow had seen firsthand that infant monkeys reared in a laboratory setting away from their mothers were physically healthy but developed emotional and behavioral problems unless they were given some form of affection and something soft to cling to. Harlow decided to test whether the pleasure of food or the pleasure of comfort was most important to infant monkeys.
Both groups of infants spent more time on the cloth mothers, though initially the group fed by the cloth mother spent more time with it than did the monkeys fed by the wire mother (see Figure 11.1). Interestingly, the monkeys fed by the wire mothers increased the amount of time spent on the cloth mothers as they got older, such that eventually they spent as much time on the cloth mother as did the monkeys who were fed by the cloth mother (Harlow, 1958). These results provided Harlow with evidence that infant monkeys strongly preferred, and thus likely needed, the comfort provided by the cloth mother.
Harlow’s experiments taught developmentalists about the importance of physical comfort for infant monkeys, but it did so at a severe cost. Many of the monkeys in Harlow’s experiments were extremely disturbed and had difficulties in their later lives. His research has been criticized as unnecessarily cruel and unethical, but he established without a doubt that infants require more than their physical needs being met to thrive in the world.
Bowlby
Studied under Freud
What ideas did he adopt from Freud?
Influenced by K. Loewnz (1935)- Ethology (behaviors have survival value for organisms)
What ideas did he adopt from Lorenz?
Babies and children come into the world predisposed to develop attachments
Increase the chances of their own survival
Adults are predisposed to respond to children
Signals and Responses
Initially, children signal their need by crying and smiling
The process of signaling and responding creates qukality of the attachment relaationsjip
Bowlby’s Attachment Theory
Secure Base=a trusted caregiver
Provides an infant or toddler with a sense of security
Makes it possible for children to explore the environment
Adaptation Value
Attachment relationships form because they promote survival
Promote survival by providing: emotional support and co-regulation
Emotional support and co-regulation
Primary (Freudian_ Attachment relationships are primarily as important as food and water for survival
Quality: Vary in quality of safety and security and is captured in an individual’s internal working model
what model is under the attachment theory
internal working model: A cognitive representation of the self and the other in relationships
the internal working model
The self is the child, and the other is the caregiver
Constructed as a result of experiences with caregivers
(Who talked about this) (Piagetian)
Internal Working Model (serves as prototype)
Guides children’s interactions with caregivers
Guides interaction with other people in infancy and older ages
Internal working Model represrtns the Quakity of you’re attachment relationship
Mary Ainsworth
Worked with Bowlby
Is credited with the development of attachment theory & the measurement of attachment quality
Initially studied children in Baltimore, MD, USA, and Kampala, Uganda
And developed measures of the quality of the relationship
Ainsworth’s Strange SItuation Procedure
Behaviors Measured
Exploration
Reunion Joy
Stranger Wariness
Separation Anxiety
Social Referencing
What are the patterns of infant attachment?
Insecure avoidant
Secure
Insecure resistant/ambivakent
Disorganized
Parental Sensitivity hypothesis- caregiving behavior that binvilves the expression of warmth and contingent responsive to children (has some relation ot the kind of classification the children will get)
Parental Sensitivity
Responsive caregiving
Coordinated palty
Parents of securely attached infants
Respons warmly
Sensitive to infant needs
Not completely on the caregivers. Some children are more susceptible
Genetics
Differential Susceptibility
Context
Cultural Variation
Attachment Relationships develop over a long period of time in outlined phases
Preattachembt (birth to 6 weeks)
Signal (crying)
To social and non-social to obtain comfort
Attachment-in-the-making (6 weeks to 6-8 months)
Indiscriminate to social to discriminant
Gradually respond to familiar people by smiling, laughing, and babbling
Social smile
Develop Cognitive Beliefs
Trust
Effectance
Reciprocity
Clear-cut attachment (6-8 months to 1 ½ years)
Actively seeks contact with caregivers
Exploration
Reunion joy
Separation distress
Stranger wariness
Social referencing
Reciprocal relationships (1 ½ to 2 years and older)
Increased understanding of parents’ feelings, allowing for a more mutual relationship
Attachment Theory: Internal Working Model
Internal Wokring Models: classified into 4 categories:
Secure
Insecure
Or resistant (often seek other people out but don’t feel conmfortaed, and this shows that they don’t have a positive representation of the self) (ambivalent, anxious, preoccupied)
Or avoidant (dismissing)
Disorganized
Internal Working model: Belsky et al., (1996)
69 children at 12 months of age were classified as having secure or insecure attachments
When children were 3 years old, they participated in an experiment where
Children paid attention to positive scenes more, but insecure children remembered negative more than positive, while secure children did the opposite.
Hyde et al. (2022)
(parents, neighborhoods, and the developing brain)
looking to see which proximal exposures affect which areas of the brain
- harsh parenting and harsh neighborhoods: These studies emphasize that where children live affects the developing brain over and above family-level resources, particularly in brain circuits that support executive function and emotion processing.
- Behavioral studies have identified social (e.g., crime, cohesion among neighbors), physical (e.g., toxicants), and resource-based (e.g., access to libraries, school quality)mechanisms that affect the qualities of where children live, learn, and play, which explains why neighbor-hood disadvantage affects children’s socioemotional and cognitive outcomes
- exposure to community violence appears to be an important, stressful experience that is related to corticolimbic structure and function
- For children with very involved parents, living in a disadvantaged neighborhood did not predict increased exposure to community violence, and for those who were exposed, involved parenting decreased the link between this type of exposure and amygdala reactivity.
- Beyond parenting, neighborhood social processes may also act as a buffer. Although in a study described, adolescents’ exposure to gun violence predicted differences in corticolimbic functional connectivity(Gard, Brooks-Gunn, et al., 2021), living in a neighborhood with high levels of collective efficacy where neighbors reported high levels of social cohesion and informal social control offset the neural implications of gun violence.
Evans (2021)
(the physical context of child development)
- Physical Context and Child Development
First-dimension- scale or proximity to child
Second-dimension- relates to the temporal dynamics of exposure
Third-dimension- consists of direct and indirect environmental effects
- Children experiencing crowding are more anxious and aroused, as indicated, for example, by elevated fidgeting or repetitive object play (e.g., playing with hair, tapping a pencil) as well as by self- or caregiver ratings. Children in noisy, crowded, or chaotic settings report more anxiety, stress, and annoyance. They also have greater difficulty focusing, more problems with distraction, and greater difficulty staying on task than their peers in settings without these environmental stressors present. All of these child outcomes have been shown in field studies and in laboratory work.
- Furthermore, many noise and reading investigations, including the noisy apartment study described above, prescreened children for hearing deficits. Noise exposure that causes no detectable auditory damage is nonetheless sufficient to produce reading deficits.
- Paradoxically, living with too many people in close quarters leads to social isolation.
- More recent work also implicates inadequate housing conditions with chronic stress biomarkers (e.g., neuroendocrine hormones, inflammation), and one neuroimaging study revealed alterations in cortical areas associated with decrements in executive functioning.
More than a third of American children attend school facilities suffering structural and climatic deficiencies that have been associated in a host of studies with lower standardized test scores.
- Finally, we need to be mindful that exposure to suboptimal environments can be cumulative in at least two respects. Some environmental characteristics tend to covary, such as high temperature and pollution or crowding and noise. In addition, effects of environmental exposure likely reflect both concurrent exposures as well as those that have accumulated over the child’s lifetime. Finally, exposures to cumulative environmental risks are endemic to childhood disadvantage. Disadvantaged families are more likely to reside in substandard housing that is crowded and noisy, attend substandard school and day-care facilities, confront chaotic and unstable physical and social conditions, and reside in neighborhoods with more pollution and decaying infrastructure that are often plagued by low social capital and disorder (Evans, 2004). The accumulation of exposure to cumulative risks greatly accentuates adverse outcomes throughout the life course.
Thomases et al. (2009)
(Reality Bites—or Does It?: Realistic Self-Views Buffer Negative Mood Following Social Threat)
- Positive illusion theory holds that unrealistically positive, inflated self-views promote emotional resilience
- First, participants rated how much they liked each of their classmates (0 = not at all, 3 = verymuch; mean received ratings = 1.75, SD = 0.49). Next, they predicted the ratings they would receive fromeach classmate (mean predicted ratings = 1.64, SD = 0.48). Distortion of selfview was operationalized as the difference in standardized scores between children’s perceived status and their actual status (Owens, Goldfine, Evangelista, Hoza, & Kaiser, 2007). The correlation between perceived and actual status was .52. Distortions of self-view ranged fromquite deflated (-2.73; absolute difference = -1.43) to quite inflated (3.13; absolute difference = 1.41).
- In fact, inflated self-views increased (rather than decreased) children’s emotional distress after threatening feedback; deflated self-views also increased emotional distress after threatening feedback. No such effect occurred after nonthreatening feedback, highlighting the specificity of our findings to conditions of social threat. These results support the view that distorted self-views promote emotional vulnerability and that realistic self-views promote emotional resilience.
Rodman et al. (2017)
- While adults have been shown to enact self-protective processes to buffer their self-views from evaluative threats like peer rejection, it is unclear whether adolescents avail themselves of the same defenses. The present study examines how social evaluation shapes views of the self and others differently across development
- This diverse dataset enabled analyses targeting age-related differences in how individuals process these evaluative feedback experiences on several levels. In the domain of self-views, we evaluated expectations of being liked or disliked across development using both explicit (i.e., participants’ predictions) and implicit (i.e., associated response time) measures. We also examined agerelated differences in the extent to which participants’ self-views were enhanced or diminished following the social evaluation task. Additionally, we aimed to identify developmental differences in the degree to which participants updated impressions of peers following social evaluation by having participants rate the likability of each peer before and after the task. Analyses examined whether participants’ ratings of peers changed in accordance with being accepted or rejected (i.e., liking an individual more after they had provided positive feedback; liking them less after they had provided negative feedback).Lastly, we examined participants’ performance on a surprise memory test following the social evaluation task to (i) ensure that participants remembered the feedback they received, which would allow us to interpret subsequent findings as task-induced; and (ii) determine memory equivalency across age, which would provide evidence that subsequent findings were not driven by developmental differences in learning.
- we found evidence that adolescents expected and internalized rejection, which negatively impacted their self-views, while adults expected acceptance and processed peer evaluation in a way that enhanced self-views. Furthermore, adolescents’ impressions of their peers were unaffected by the feedback they received, whereas adults deprecated the peers who rejected them. Together, these findings implicated codeveloping processes of reactivity to rejection and self-protective defenses that resulted in adolescents internalizing and adults externalizing negative social feedback.
. By contrast, adolescents exhibited lower, yet more accurate, rates of predicted acceptance. - Young adults showed relatively faster responses when predicting acceptance compared with rejection, which could reflect an internal schema more consistent with expecting acceptance. Similar tendencies have been demonstrated previously, wherein adults displayed faster response times when associating the self with positive attributes (34). Adolescents exhibited the reverse trend of longer response times to predict acceptance, which could reflect the fundamentality of biased expectancies of rejection in adolescence. In all, these findings demonstrated robust differences in social expectancies across development, with the transition from adolescence to adulthood characterized by a shift from rejection-congruent to acceptance-congruent expectations.
Late adolescents and young adults reported a boost in self-views, which is consistent with a long history of research demonstrating that adults activate compensatory self-enhancement mechanisms following negative feedback, including increases in explicit and implicit self-views (4, 35). By contrast, early adolescents experienced a drop in self-views following exposure to the same social feedback, suggesting that adolescents may not exhibit the selfprotective biases that buffer adults against negative self-views following rejection. These findings extend previous work underscoring the strong negative affective reaction adolescents show in response to peer rejection (15, 18). A
In contrast to adults, we found that adolescents did not enhance self-views or denigrate impressions of rejecting peers, suggesting that adolescents do not avail themselves of the self-protective biases that adults do.
Another possibility is that adolescents internalize peer rejection because their “self-concept” is still in its developing stages. The self-concept encompasses evaluative self-knowledge and self-worth, which are informed by status or competency across multiple domains (e.g., social, athletic, and appearance) (40)
The transition to adolescence is accompanied by a marked change in the complexity of the social environment (13). Adolescents spend more time with peers (42), experience more fluidity in social groups (43), and encounter more frequent feedback from peers (44).
Adolescents’ tendency to maintain impressions of peers after experiencing rejection is broadly consistent with their goal of social belongingness. While adults may be more firmly rooted in their social network and can afford to behave in antagonistic ways following the receipt of negative feedback in service of selfprotection (10, 35), this tactic may not be optimal for adolescents who place higher value on social belonging and are still experimenting and affiliating with various social groups. Thus, it may be more beneficial for adolescents to refrain from so readily derogating others following negative feedback.
The present study reveals a developmental framework of socioevaluative processing, which delineates age-specific changes in codeveloping processes that shape the integration of peer feedback across age. The resulting adolescent-specific internalization of social feedback may reflect a key challenge of this phase of development: growth in social competence and group affiliation along with progressive tuning of cognitive strategies that help individuals thrive in complex social worlds as adults.
