Week 9: Developmental psychology 1

• Developmental Psychology is the branch of psychology that studies the psychological growth of individuals.
• Developmental Psychology deals with the psychological responses and changes in behaviour that characterise stages of life as infancy, adolescence, and old age.
• Learning Outcomes are a key aspect of Social Learning Theory.
• Ethical Implications are a crucial part of any study, including developmental studies.
• Six different learning types which infants profit from are: Habituation, Perceptual Learning, Statistical Learning, Classical Conditioning, Operant Conditioning, and Observational Learning/Imitation.
• Social Learning Theory was proposed by Bandura in 1961.
• Different learning techniques used by infants include six different techniques.
• Pick a classic developmental study and bring the information to the seminar on Friday.
• Habituation is the ability to recognise something which has been experienced before, with less response to stimuli experienced and novel response to new stimuli.
• Infants form a mental representation of old stimuli, which enables them to pay more attention to, and learn about, what is new.
• The speed of habituation reflects the efficiency of an infant’s processing of information.
• Infants who habituate faster, look shorter at visual stimuli and who also have a greater preference for novel stimuli tend to have higher IQs at 18 years.
• Perceptual Learning is when infants learn a lot from simply paying close attention to the objects and events they perceive.
• Perceptual Learning involves differentiating between stable events, such as tone of voice and expressions, and affordances, or the possibilities of actions offered by objects and situations.
• Statistical Learning is learning from the environment, forming associations among stimuli that occur in a statistically predictable pattern.
• Infants are sensitive to the regularity in which one event follows another, as evidenced in the Visual shape task (Kirkham et al., 2002).
• Classical Conditioning involves associating a previously neutral stimulus (NS) with an unconditioned stimulus (US), resulting in an unconditioned response (UR).
• Operant Conditioning is a method of learning through rewards and punishments, with reinforcement being any event that strengthens or increases the behavior it follows.
• Carolyn Rovee-Collier (1997) conducted a mobile study on Operant Conditioning.
• Bandura (1961) suggests that there has been an increase in levels of violence in society.
• Hypothesis 4 states that boys are more likely to imitate aggression than girls.
• Nobel (1975) suggests that even young children in lab experiments understand that they are expected to play a role.
• The study involved 8 experimental groups and one control group, with 4 groups aggressive models, 2 groups same sex, 2 groups opposite sex, and 4 groups non-aggressive models, 2 groups same sex, 2 groups opposite sex.
• Hypothesis 3 states that participants will imitate behaviour of same-sex models to a greater degree.
• Sex-model interaction suggests that boys engaged in more imitative aggressive acts when they had a male model, while girls displayed more imitative verbal aggression and more non-imitative aggression than the boys.
• The balance between the need to protect individuals against the need to conduct beneficial and relevant research is a key ethical issue in the study.
• Hypothesis 2 states that participants exposed to non-aggressive models will display less aggression than the control group, suggesting that good modelling does not reduce aggression.
• The main ethical issues with the study are the deliberate exposure to an aggressive model, teaching children to act in a socially undesirable way, and mild aggression arousal.
• Bandura (1961) highlights the transmission of aggression through imitation of aggressive models, with a crucial test of observational learning involving the generalisation of imitative responses to new settings.
• Kniveton and Stephenson (1970) suggest that children not familiar with the doll imitated five times more than children who had been exposed previously.
• Bandura and Bobo (1961) highlight that boys imitated more physical aggression than girls but no more verbal aggression.
• Social Learning Theory emphasises the role of observation and imitation in learning, with Bandura (1977) stating that learning takes place rapidly when watching what other people do.
• Hypothesis 1 states that participants exposed to aggressive models will reproduce aggressive acts.
• The participants in the study were 36 boys and 36 girls with a mean age of 52 months, matched for aggression levels.
• Infants imitate novel or even strange behaviours done on objects, not just limited to actions they have seen done in “real life”.
• All participants in the study were subjected to mild aggression arousal.
• Observational Learning/Imitation involves learning through observation, with 6 months-infant imitation being quite robust.