C. Developmental Theories

• Ethnocentrism


  one's group is superior than the other groups
• Do not conduct studies that involves deception unless deceptive techniques are justified
• If ever, deception must be explained as early as feasible during the conclusion of the participation and participants have the right to withdraw if they want to do so
• Descriptive research design


  • Aims to observe and record behavior
• Case Study


  • Study of a certain individual or group
  • Useful in rare cases
  • Offers useful, in-depth information
  • Can explore sources of behavior, test treatments, and suggest directions for further research
  • Cannot be easily generalized to other population
  • Cannot make strong causal statements
  • Low external validity
• Ethnographic Studies


  • Seek to describe the pattern of relationships, customs, beliefs, technology, arts, and traditions that make up a society's way of life
  • Case study of the culture
  • Open to observer bias
  • Help overcome cultural biases in theory and research
  • Debunks the logic of western developed theories can be universally applied
• Correlational Study


  • Determine whether a correlation exist between variables, phenomena that change or vary among people or can be varied for purposes of research
  • Study of the relationship between one variable and another without manipulation
  • No random assignment
  • Lack of control over extraneous variables
  • Cannot establish causation
  • Used to study many important issues that cannot be studies experimentally for ethical reasons
  • Can study multiple influences operating in natural settings
  • High external validity
• Experiment


  • Controlled procedure which the experiment manipulated variables to learn how one affects another
  • Establish cause-and-effect
  • Permit replication
  • Manipulation
  • Could encounter ethical issues
  • Can be artificial
  • High internal validity
• Quasi-Experiment


  • Natural experiment; compares people who have been accidentally assigned to separate groups by circumstances of life
  • Actually, a correlational study
• Differentiating Cross-Sectional and Longitudinal Studies

  • Cross-Sectional: children of different ages are assessed at ONE point of time
  • Longitudinal: study the SAME GROUP or PERSON more than once, or even years apart
  • Sequential: data are collected on successive cross-sectional or longitudinal samples
• Cohort Effects: important because they can powerfully affect the dependent measures in a study ostensibly concerned with age
• Psychosexual Theory by Freud

  • Humans were born with a series of innate, biologically based drives such as hunger, sex, and aggression
  • Early experiences shaped later functioning
  • People are driven by motives and emotional conflicts of which they are largely unaware that they are shaped by their earliest experiences with the family
  • Viewed newborn as "seething cauldron", an inherently selfish creature driven by Instincts (inborn biological forces that motivate behavior)
  • Strongly believed in unconscious motivation – the power of instincts and other inner forces to influence our behavior without out awareness
  • Biological instincts provide unconscious motivation for actions
  • Selfish and aggressive = negative view of human nature
• Id


  Pleasure principle, impulsive, irrational, selfish, seeks immediate gratification
• Ego


  • Reality principle, rational, finds realistic way to gratify instincts
  • Emerge during infancy when psychic energy is diverted from the id to energize cognitive processes
• Superego


  • Morality principle, individual's internalized moral standards
  • Develops from the ego as 3-6 years old internalize the moral standards and values of their parents
• Healthy Personality


  Balance of the id, ego, and superego
• Fixation


  • Arrest in development that can show up in adult personality; libido remains tied to an earlier stage of development
  • Oral Fixation: may grow up to become nail-biters or smokers
  • Anal Fixation: may be obsessively clean, rigidly tied to schedules and routines, or defiantly messy
• Oral Stage


  • Experience anxiety and the need to defend against it if denied oral gratification by not being fed on demand or being weaned too early
  • Oral Fixation manifested in adults: alcoholic, smoking, overeating, Pica, nail biting, thumb sucking
• Anal Stage


  • Toilet training era
  • Anal-Retentive: perfectionist, orderly, tidy
  • Anal-Expulsive: lack of self-control, messy, careless
• Phallic Stage


  • Youngsters develop an incestuous desire for the parent of the other sex and must defend against it
  • Oedipus Complex: loves his mother, fears that his father will retaliate by castrating him, and resolves the conflicts through identification with his father
  • Electra Complex: a girl having desire with her father, seeing her mother as a rival
  • Castration Anxiety: son believes his father knows about his desire for his mother and fears that his father will castrate him
  • Penis Envy: a girl wants a penis as she desires her father
• Latency Stage


  Sexual urges sublimated into sports and hobbies
• Genital Stage


  • Physical sexual urges reawaken repressed needs
  • Direct sexual feelings towards others lead to sexual gratification
  • May have difficulty accepting their new sexuality, therefore, reexperiencing conflict towards their parents and distance themselves to defend against anxiety-producing feelings
• Psychosocial Theory by Erikson


  • Emphasized the influence of society on the developing personality
  • Crisis: major psychosocial challenge that is particularly important at that time and will remain an issue to some degree throughout the rest of life
  • Each stage requires balancing positive and negative tendency
  • Successful resolution of each crisis puts the person in a particularly good position to address the next crisis, a process that occurs iteratively across the life span
  • Social and cultural influences mattered
  • Social Clock: conventional, culturally preferred timing of important life events
  • Development is a lifelong process
• Erikson's Stages of Psychosocial Development


  • Infancy: Trust vs. Mistrust
  • Toddlerhood: Autonomy vs. Shame and Doubt
  • Early Childhood: Initiative vs. Guilt
  • Middle and late Childhood: Industry vs. Inferiority
  • Adolescence: Identity vs. Identity Confusion
  • Young Adulthood: Intimacy vs. Isolation
  • Middle Adulthood: Generativity vs. Stagnation
  • Late Adulthood: Integrity vs. Despair
• Cognitive Development by Piaget

  • Viewed intelligence as a process that helps an organism adapt to its environment
  • Children are not born with innate ideas of reality
  • Constructivism – children actively construct new understandings of the world based on their experiences
  • Development as the product of children's attempts to understand and act upon their world
  • Begins with an inborn ability to adapt to the environment
  • Cognitive Growth occurs through 3 related processes: Organization, Adaptation, and Equilibration
• Organization


  • Tendency to create categories
  • Schemes: ways of organizing information about the world that govern the way the child thinks and behaves in a particular situation
• Adaptation

  • How children handle new information in light of what they already know
  • Assimilation: incorporating it into existing cognitive structures
  • Accommodation: adjusting one's cognitive structures to fit the new info
• Equilibration

  Children want what they understand of the world to match what they observe around them
• Piaget provided rough benchmarks for what to expect of children at various ages and has helped educators design curricula appropriate to varying levels of development
• Piaget underestimated Children and overestimated adults (not all people develop formal operations)
• Sensorimotor Stage


  • The first stage of Jean Piaget's cognitive development
  • Approx. from birth to 2 years old
  • Circular Reactions – an infant learns to reproduce events originally discovered by chance
  • Schemes – actions or mental representations that can be performed on objects
  • Assimilation – occurs when children use their existing schemes to deal with new information
  • Accommodation – occurs when children adjust their schemes to take new information and experiences into account
  • Organization – grouping of isolated behaviors and thoughts into higher-order system
  • Disequilibrium – cognitive conflict
  • Children constantly assimilate and accommodate as they seek equilibrium
  • Equilibration – children shift from one stage of thought to the next
• Sensorimotor Substages


  • Use of Reflexes (Birth to 1 Month)
  • Primary Circular Reactions (1-4 months)
  • Secondary Circular Reactions (4-8 months)
  • Coordination of Secondary Schemes (8-12 months)
  • Tertiary Circular Reactions (12-18 months)
  • Mental Combinations
• Representational Ability


  The ability to mentally represent objects and actions in memory, largely through symbols such as words, numbers, and mental picture
• Object Permanence


  The realization that something continues to exist when out of sight
• Dual Representation Hypothesis


  Proposal that children under age of 3 have difficulty grasping spatial relationships because of the need to keep more than one mental representation in mind at the same time
• Pre-operational Stage

  • Jean Piaget's second stage of cognitive development
  • Lasting from ages 2 to 7, characterized by the expansion in the use of symbolic thought
  • Children begin to represent the world with words, images, and drawings
  • Dominated by egocentrism and magical beliefs
  • Does not yet perform Operations (which are reversible mental actions that allow children to do mentally what before they could do only physically)
• Preoperational Thought


  Beginning of the ability to reconstruct in thought what has been established in behavior
• Symbolic Function


  • Being able to think about something in the absence of sensory or motor cues
  • Can use symbols, or mental representations such as words, numbers, or images to which a person has attached meaning
  • Deferred Imitation: children imitate an action at some point after observing it
  • Pretend Play: fantasy play, dramatic play, or imaginary play; children use an object to represent something else
  • The most extensive use of symbolic function is language
  • Occurs between ages of 2 and 4
• Intuitive Thought


  Occurs between ages of 4 and 7
• Symbolic thought


  Children begin to represent the world with words, images, and drawings