Week 9 - Psychosocial Theories Flashcards
What is social development?
The gradual acquisition of certain skills e.g., language, interpersonal skills, attitudes, relationships, and behaviour that enable the individual to interact with others and to function as a member of society
Theories of social development
Attempt to account for
Emotion, personality, attachment, self, peer relationships, morality
Sigmund Freud
Austrian neurologist and founder of psychoanalysis
Sigmund Freud’s Theory of Psychosexual Development
- Freud believed that many of his patients’ emotional problems originated
in their early childhood relationships - “Psychosexual” because he believed that even young children have a sexual
nature that motives their behaviour
In each successive stage, children encounter conflicts in a erogenous zone - if needs aren’t met children may become fixated on those needs
Basic Features of Freud’s Theory
Freud’s theory posits a series of universal developmental
stages in which psychic energy becomes focused in
different erogenous zones
Consciousness levels
Conscious - achievable information
Preconscious - easily accessible
Unconscious - drives behaviour and personalities
ID, ego, superego
ID - Pleasure principle: seek pleasure, avoid pain, Acts on impulses and desires - Infant-like
Ego - Reality principle: rational thought and problem solving - mediates between ID and superego - later first year
Superego - Break on the id (Suppresses the id) largely unconscious, develops in childhood, societal conduct, structure, morality
Psychosexual theory
Early childhood experiences have a major impact on personality, Go through psychosexual stages across life in pursuit of satisfaction, How children navigate these stages influences their personality
Psychosexual stages
Oral - 0-18 months - if not resolved, may engage in oral activities like nail biting or smoking later on
Anal stage - 2-3 years - may lead to preoccupation with cleanliness, being rigid, or very sloppy
Phallic stage - 3-6 years - obsessed with genitals - Efforts to cope with strong sexual desires leads to emergence of superego
Latency stage - 6-12 years - Superego takes control of impulses - Sexual desires hidden away in the unconscious
Genital stage - adolescence to adulthood - mature attitudes, want to start family - sexual energy redirects itself towards peers
Erik Erikson’s Psychosocial theory
Accepted basic tenants of Freud’s theory, but emphasized the role of social factors - cultural influences, contemporary issues, juvenile delinquency
Emphasized development over the lifespan (birth to late life)
Trust vs. Mistrust
First year - Developing trust in other people is the crucial issue
if not solved, difficulty forming intimate relationships later in life
Autonomy vs Shame and Doubt
1–3½ years
The challenge is to achieve a strong sense of autonomy while adjusting to increased social demands.
Am i a free agent acting on my world?
if children are subjected to punishment or ridicule, may come to doubt their abilities
Initiative vs Guilt
4-6 years
Resolved when the child develops high standards and
the initiative to meet them without being crushed by
worry about not being able to measure up.
challenge is balancing initiative and guilt
Industry vs Inferiority
6 - puberty
The child must master cognitive and social skills, learn
to work industriously, and play well with others.
learn to work and to cooperate with peers
failure can lead to feelings of inadequacy or inferiority
Identity vs Role Confusion
Adolescence
Adolescents must resolve the question of who they
really are or live in confusion about what roles they
should play as adults.
must resolve questions of who you are or live in confusion about roles played as adults
Intimacy vs Isolation
Early adulthood
Attempt to form affectionate relationship(s), typically
romantic relationships.
Generativity vs Stagnation
Middle adulthood
Adults attempt to keep contributing to the world
through work, child-rearing, or other productive work.
Integrity vs Despair
Late life
Elderly need to decide whether they are satisfied with
how they lived their lives.
John Watson’s Behaviourism
Development determined by child’s environment through (classical) conditioning (pairing of stimuli) - top-down - Little Albert - when a rat was paired with frightening noises, the child become scared of the rat itself
Parents solely responsible for raising children
What did John Watson argue for?
Feeding schedule (feed infants at the same time each day and the baby wouldn’t cry in between)
How? Via distance and objectivity
❖ “treat children as if they are young adults”
❖ “if you must, kiss them once on the forehead”
current perspecticves on psychoanalytic theories
- Freuds - mental life occurs outside of the realm of consciousness - fundamental to modern cognitive science and neuroscience
- Erikson’s - quest for identity in adolescence provides foundation for lots of research on adolescence
- Weakness of both theories - major theories too vague to be testable, many specific elements are regarded as questionable
BF Skinners Operant Conditioning
Development determined by child’s environment through (operant)
conditioning
Reinforcement
Punishment
Repeat behaviours that lead to favourable outcomes - reinforcement - suppress those that result in unfavourable outcomes - punishment
Parental attention can be reinforcement
Time-out takes away attention and extinguishes behaviour
Behaviour modification therapy - ignoring a child playing alone will reinforcement them to play with their classmates
Time-Out for Children
No empirical evidence to show that time-out is ineffective or harmful
The analysis of child discipline from a mental health perspective is important because we know that the quality and effectiveness of parental socialization, especially parental discipline, are associated with lifelong mental and social health (Kessler et al., 2010).
How to employ time-out effectively
- Use time-out for deliberate behaviour (e.g., mistakes or accidents shouldn’t
be disciplined) - Parent-child attachment should not be threatened
- Time-out should end when the child has achieved self-regulation (teaches
them an important self-regulation skill that improves mental health over
time) - Time-out should have an explicit goal for correcting a behaviour
- Explanation should accompany the time-out
- Should not be arbitrary—should follow behaviour that is wrong within a
child’s family or within society (“do it because I said so”) - Time-out should be applied equally and fairly across siblings in the family
Intermittent reinforcement
Sometimes reinforcing, sometimes not
Makes behaviours resistant to change
Behaviour modification
Reinforcing certain behaviours that you want the child to engage in
Applied behavior analysis (ABA) to manage various symptoms of autism spectrum disorder
Highly effective in teaching basic communication, games, sports, social interaction, daily living and self-help skills
Bandura’s Social Learning Theory
Emphasizes observation and imitation as the primary mechanisms of development
Vicarious reinforcement - bobo doll - children who had seen the model punished imitated the behaviour less than those in the other groups
Reciprocal determinism - active role of children in their own development - interaction between children and their environment
social learning theory weakness
Weakness - not focused on brains or minds - lacks attention to biological influences, minimizes impact of perceptual, motor, cognitive, and language development
Bobo Doll Experiment
Preschool children initially watched a short film in which an adult model performed highly aggressive actions on an inflatable Bobo doll
Children across conditions learned via observation and vicarious reinforcement influenced their behaviour
When the model was rewarded, children showed more aggressive behaviour toward the doll than when the model was punished.
Across all conditions, boys behaved more aggressively than girls did
Reciprocal Determinism
The acknowledgement that the child plays an active role in
their own development, whereby their own interests and desires influence their social environment and vise versa.
learning theories
- Emphasize continuity - no qualitatively different stages in development
- Focus on mechanisms of change - learning principles, such as reinforcement and observational learning
Selman’s Stage Theory of Role Taking
Role taking: thinking from another’s perspective
Role taking (or perspective-taking) is really important for forming social relationships and solving problems in society
Children’s social cognition is limited by their role taking
Stages of role taking that build upon one another
Selman’s Theory - Stages
0 - 3-6 - Egocentric - Understand people had different opinions but confuse others’ opinions with their own
1 - 6-8 - Social-Informational - Recognize that others can have differing perspectives, but they think this is because they don’t have the same information as they do.
2 - 8-10 - Self-reflective - Begin to think from another person’s viewpoint
3 - 10-12 - Third-party perspective - Systematically compare own viewpoints to others’
4 - 12+ - Societal role taking - Compare another’s viewpoint to that of “generalized other”
mirrors changes identified by Piaget
Dodge’s Social Information Processing Theory
Information processing→ taking social information and interpreting it in some way
Focus on children’s aggressive behaviour
Presents stories, kids say if it was hostile or an accident
Hostile attribution bias
Tendency to interpret other people’s ambiguous behaviours as
antagonistic or hostile
Cyclical effects
Interpret hostility → React with aggression → Face more rejection → interpret more hostility
Dweck’s Theory of Self-Attributions and Achievement Motivations
How children respond to challenges (focused on the academic domain) is due to their divergent achievement motivations.
Underlying achievement motivations are attributions children make about their self-worth
Performance goals - Seek assessment, want rewards, externally motivated, influences thoughts on self-worth
Learning goals - Growth mindset, seek improvement in competence, focus on process
views of intelligence - dweck’s theory
- Incremental view of intelligence - belief that intelligence can be developed through effort - motivated by a desire for mastery - generally expects her efforts to be successful
- Entity view of intelligence - belief that intelligence is fixed - not succeeding leads her to feel bad and doubt her abilities and self worth
Orientation Phase
Incremental/mastery orientation - based on effort and learning - not on how others evaluate - enjoy challenge of a hard task - “You put in great effort!” “Keep trying!” - praising effort
Entity/helpless orientation - base their sense of self worth on the approval they receive - or do not receive - from other people about their personal qualities - “You’re so smart!” - praising them
theories of intelligence
Entity theory of intelligence - thinking about oneself in the idea that intelligence is fixed an unchangeable - success or failure in academic situation on how smart one is - focus on outcomes, not learning from mistakes
Incremental theory of intelligence - intelligence can grow as a function of experience - academic success achievable through effort and persistence - believe they can do better in the future by trying harder
Contributions of Social Cognitive Theories
Children are active seekers of information about the world
Social experiences affect how they interpret information BUT Not much emphasis on biology (but beginning to change)
ecological theories
- themes of nature and nurture interaction, the importance of sociocultural context, continuity of development, active role of child
ethology
- study of behaviour from an evolutionary context - understand behaviour in terms of its survival value
- Imprinting - when baby becomes attached to mother at first sight - requires baby encounters it’s mother during a specific sensitive period
- Newborns orient to face shapes, sounds, tastes, and smells familiar to their womb experience
evolutionary psychology
- applies Darwinian concept
- Certain genes predispose us to behave in ways that solved adaptive challenges
- These individuals were more likely to survive and pass on their genes
- Play is an evolved platform of learning - motor and social skills
- Parental investment theory - parents are motivated to perpetuate their genes, which can happen only if their offspring survive long enough to pass those genes to the next generation - Cinderella effect is when maltreatment rates are higher from stepparents
Bronfenbrenner’s Bioecological Model
Childs environment is a set of structures - each structure represents a different level of influence on development - child at centre - interacts with environmental forces - levels vary in immediacy of effects but every level impacts development
Microsystem - Child directly participates- parents, technology, peers, school
Mesosystem - Interconnection of microsystem entities
Exosystem - Settings the child doesn’t interact with directly - legal system, neighborhood, mass media, school board
Macrosystem - abstract ideologies, culture, class, laws
Chronosystem - time
How much TV do children watch?
Children less than 2 years should watch no TV
By age 2, children watch about 2.4 hours of TV per day (17 hours per week)
60% rate of touchscreen device use in children younger than 3
What about “background television”?
Recommendations for TV amounts
American Academy of Pediatrics and Canadian Pediatric Society
Children 2–5 years should watch no more than 1 hours/day
On average, spend 4.6 hours/day
Children 6 to 16 years should watch no more than 2 hrs/day
On average, spend 6- to 11-year-olds spend 4 hours/day
Why is media a problem for children?
More screen time = Less time interacting with others, Miss out on important social opportunities (e.g., less able to self regulate), Lower quality learning (language) [babies cannot learn from screens! Do not have symbolic representation]
Digital media socializes kids when you cannot control what they watch (e.g., YouTube)
Decreasing physical activity
Lower quality sleep
When can screen time be beneficial?
When parents and babies/toddlers engage in digital content together (e.g.,
sing along song, exploring apps together)
When media has limits (Family Media Plan)
When exposure to advertising is limited
When parents pay attention to messages (e.g., gender, body image, violence, diversity) and limit negative or inappropriate content
When kids watch high quality educational programming at the right age
Slow paced programs
Slow-paced realistic educational shows (e.g., Sesame Street, Blue’s clues)
Goals to, Promote thinking skills Characterized by, Few scene changes,
clear transitions, Repetition, focus on education, Audience participation
Sesame Street related to Better school readiness Particularly for low SES children
Blue’s Clues related to
Better problem solving, story comprehension, pattern recognition
Fast paced and fantastical shows
Fast-paced and fantastical (e.g., SpongeBob)
Focus on Entertainment, not education, Findings (Lillard and Peterson, series of studies)
Compared children watching fast-paced, educational, realistic shows to play activities
Tested executive function after watching the show.
Children who watched SpongeBob did worse than those who watched other shows.
Why? Fantasy material = difficult to process and taxes children on subsequent tasks
Does violent media increase aggression?
Small-to-medium?
Small and insignificant?
Most recent, less controversial meta-analysis:
Used longitudinal studies, lag = ~1 year
Effect still small, but meaningful
Strongest effect in early to mid adolescence
How might violent media promote violent behaviour?
Increasing aggressive thoughts
Dampening of empathic concern (desensitization)
reasons that media violence might have an impact
- Seeing actors engage in aggression teaches aggressive behaviour and inspires imitation, viewing aggression activates the viewers own aggressive thoughts, feelings and tendencies, media violence is exciting and arousing for youth, frequent long term exposure leads to emotional desensitization - reasons it may have an impact
Benefits of social media
○ Perceived increases in social capital
○ Opportunities for personal disclosure
○ Greater feelings of connectedness to friends
○ Identity development
Costs of social media
Unwelcome interactions
Cyberbullying (victims and perpetrators)
Increase in depressive symptoms. Why?
■ Particularly when night time use reduces sleep
Worse self-esteem, body image
■ Clearest among those who already seek others’ approval and reassurance
developmental social neuroscience
- HPA axis is impacted by adverse rearing conditions
- Children show atypical response in social situations if they received abherrent care
- Leaving orphanage settings has a resilient effect on children’s brains - more white matter
effects of pornography
- exposure to porn makes children and teens more tolerant of aggression in women and more accepting of premarital and extramarital sex
- Most effective weapons against various negative effects of media - microsystem - parental control
