Week 3 Reading Flashcards
Who is John Locke?
Empiricist philosopher
What does John Locke believe?
Experience shapes the nature of the human mind
Also considers learning to be the primary factor in social personality and personality development
What process of development do learning theorists believe in?
Continuity
Mechanisms of change
Why do learning theorists think children are different from one another?
Due to different histories of reinforcement and learning opportunities
What is the theme of research and children’s welfare?
Approaches based on learning principles have been widely applied to a range of issues in child rearing
Who is John B Watson?
The founder of behaviourism
What does Watson believe?
Development is determined by the child’s environment, by learning through conditioning
Psychologists should study visible behaviour
Who said this:
Give me a dozen healthy infants, well-formed, and my own specified world to bring them up in, and I’ll guarantee to take any one at random and train him to become any type of specialist I might select — doctor, lawyer, artist, merchant-chief, and yes, even beggar man and thief, regardless of his talents, penchants, tendencies, abilities, vocations, and race of his ancestors.
John B Watson
What type of condition did Watson demonstrate?
Classical conditioning
What was Watson’s famous classical conditioning experiment?
Little Albert Study:
Exposed the 9 month old to a nice white rat to which Albert responded positively
Then he accompanied the rat with a loud noise to scare Albert
After the pairing Albert became scared of the rat itself
How did Watson try to apply the power of learning to parenthood?
It was the parents responsibility to guide development
In North America he advised to put infants on a strict feeding schedule so they would be conditioned to expect food at regular intervals and hence not cry in between
Treat babies as though they are young adults
Who claimed that:
a person does not act upon the world, the world acts upon him?
B. F. Skinner
What is the major belief of Skinner’s operant conditioning theory?
We tend to repeat behaviours that lead to favourable outcomes (reinforcement) and suppress those that result in unfavourable outcomes (punishment)
What does Skinner believe?
Everything we do in life is an operant response influenced by the outcomes of past behaviour
What are the two discoveries from Skinner that are of particular interest to parents and teachers?
1: Attention can by itself serve as a powerful reinforcer
2: The difficulty of extinguishing behaviour that has been intermittently reinforced (sometimes been followed by reward and sometimes not)
Define intermittent reinforcement
Inconsistent response to a behaviour; for example, sometimes punishing unacceptable behaviours, and other times ignoring it
What form of therapy evolved from Skinner’s work?
Behaviour modification
What is behaviour modification therapy?
A form of therapy based on principles of operant conditioning in which reinforcement contingencies are changed to encourage more adaptive behaviour
Example: if a child is alone and you want them to engage in a group yet you only approach them while alone, you need to start approaching them in the group instead
What is social learning theory?
Attempts to account for social development in terms of learning mechanism while also emphasizing observation and imitation
Who is Albert Bandura?
Social-learning theorist
What does Bandura believe?
Most human learning is inherently social in nature and is based on observation of the behaviour of other people
What is Bandura’s Bobo doll study?
Had preschool children watch a short film where an adult performed highly aggressive actions (e.g., hitting with a mallet and throwing balls at) on a Bobo doll
They then had 3 groups where children then watched the adult be praised, scolded or no consequences
Test to see if vicarious reinforcement would affect the children’s behaviour
And after being left in a room with the Bobo doll they were offered incentive to reproduce as many of the models action’s as they could remember
Define vicarious reinforcement
Observing someone else receive a reward or punishment
What are the results of Bandura’s Bobo doll study?
Children who saw the model being punished imitated less than the other two groups but in all conditions the children learned from observing the models behaviour
Additionally boys exhibited more aggressive behaviours than girls
What are the main findings from Bandura’s Bobo doll experiment?
Children can quickly acquire new behaviours simply as a result of observing others, their tendency to reproduce what they have learned depends on whether the persons actions were rewarded or punished, and that what children learn from observation is not necessarily evident in their behaviour
What did Bandura rename his view to?
Social cognitive theory
What does observational learning depend on?
Basic cognitive processes of;
1. Attention to others behaviours
2. Encoding what is observed
3. Storing information in memory
4. Retrieving it at some time
What does Bandura emphasis that Skinner and Watson do not?
The active role of children in their development as reciprocal determinism between children and their environment
Define reciprocal determinism
Child-environment influences in both directions; children are both affected by and influence aspects of their environment
What is the basic idea of reciprocal determinism?
Children have characteristics that lead them to seek particular kinds of interactions with the external world that influence children’s future environements
What do ecological theories emphasize?
Role of the environment in the development of individual children
Where the environment in many is narrowly construed as immediate contexts (e.g., family, peers, schools)
What do ethological and evolutionary psychology views relate?
Relate children’s development tot he context of the evolutionary history of our species
View children as inheritors of gentically based abilities and predispositions and focus on aspects of behaviour that serve, or once served an adaptive function
What does the bioecological model consider?
Considers how multiple levels of environmental influence simultaneously affect development
Stress the effect of context but also emphasize the child’s active role
Similar to Bandura’s concept of reciprocal determinism
What is the developmental issue of ecological theories?
The interaction of nature and nurture
What is emphasized in ecological theories?
Importance of sociocultural context and continuity of development
The active role children play in their own developmentW
What is of particular interest for ethology and evolutionary theories?
Understanding development in terms of evolutionary heritage
Species-specific behaviour - behaviours that are common to members of a particular species but not typically observed in other species
What is ethology psychology?
The study of behaviour within an evolutionary context, which attempts to understand behaviour in terms of its adaptive or survival value
What is the best-known example of ethological approach to a development topic?
Imprinting: a form of learning in which newborns of some species become attach to and follow adult members of the species
How does imprinting relate to humans?
Humans do not imprint although they do have strong tendencies that draw them to members of their own species
Also orient to sounds, tastes, and smells that are familiar from the womb, which inclines them towards their mother
What is Bowlby’s theory?
Believes attachment is essentially an emotional version of imprinting, an adaptive relationship that increases the helpless infant’s chances of survival
When attachment is positive, the infant has a secure base from which to begin exploring the world
What is evolutionary psychology related to?
Closely related to ethology, applies the Darwinian concepts of natural selection and adaptation to human behaviour
What is the basic idea of evolutionary theory?
Certain genes predisposed individuals to behave in ways that solved the adaptive challenges they faced which made them more likely to survive and mate, passing their genes to offspring
What is one of the most important adaptive feature of the human species?
The large size of our brains relative to our body size
The tradeoff is humans experience a prolonged period of immaturity and dependence (slow developing, big brain) and high level of neural plasticity
Define parental-investment theory
Parents are motivated by the drive to perpetuate their genes, which can only happen if their offspring survive ling enough to pass those genes on
What is the Cinderella effect?
Potential dark side to parental-investment theory
Child maltreatment is considerably higher for stepparents than for biological parents
Diminishes after the age of 4
More likely with younger stepfathers
What is Bronfenbrenner’s bioecological model?
Treats the child’s environment as a set of nested structures, each inside the nest (thing Russian dolls)
The child is at the centre with a particular constellation of characteristics
How does Bronfenbrenner’s model relate to development?
Child’s characteristics interact with the environmental forces at each level
Every level impacts the child’s development
What is the first level of Bronfenbrenner’s bioecological model?
Microsystem - the immediate environment that an individual child personally experiences and participates in
What are the crucial components of the microsystem?
Predominant in infancy and early childhood
Becomes richer as the child grows (interacts with peers and with other settings)
Children have some influence on their microsystem but it is heavily influenced by family expectations and resources
What is the second level of Bronfenbrenner’s bioecological model?
Mesosystem - the interconnections among immediate, or microsystem, settings
What is an example of a mesosystem?
A parent interacting with a school teacher
What is the third level of Bronfenbrenner’s bioecological model?
Exosystem - environmental settings that a child does not directly experience but can affect the child indirectly
What is an example of an exosystem?
Parental workplaces which influence work hours and wages
What is the final level of Bronfenbrenner’s bioecological model?
Macrosystem - the larger cultural and social context within which the other systems are embedded
What are some components of the macrosystem?
General beliefs, values, customs, laws of the larger society
What is an example of a macrosystem?
Paid parental leave duration which is determined at the national level
What is the temporal dimension of Bronfenbrenner’s bioecological model?
Chronosystem - historical changes that influence other systems
What are some components of the chronosystem?
Beliefs, values, customs change over time (e.g., increase of technology)
Children become more active in their own life as they get older
What was the purpose of the Pew survey?
To provide a better sense of how the contextual levels in the bioecological model influence children’s development using a survey
