Concept Development in Children

Concept Development

• Children develop basic understandings and representations of the world through understanding self, others, objects, living things, and abstract concepts.

Understanding Self and Others

• Infants are naturally attuned to people's faces.
• Infants look longer at people's faces than objects.

Naive Psychology

• Common sense understanding of others consists of:
  • Mental states, desires, beliefs, and emotions are invisible.
  • Mental states are linked in a cause-and-effect relationship.
  • Children develop this understanding early in life.

Goal-Directed Behavior

• Infants at 6 months can understand it.
• Infants shown a hand repeatedly reaching for a ball.
• When the hand reached for a different object, infants looked longer, understanding goal shift.

Naive Psychology Beyond Infancy

• As infants grow into toddlers (2 years), understanding improves through:
  • Sense of self: recognizing themselves.
  • Joint attention: sharing attention.
  • Intersubjectivity: sharing experiences with others.

Theory of Mind

• Organized understanding of how mental processes like intentions, desires, and beliefs influence behavior.

False Belief Problem

• Tests a child's understanding of others' minds.
• A child sees Sally put a toy in a basket, then Sally leaves, and the child moves the toy to a box.
• Asked where Sally will look upon return.
  • A 3-year-old answers the box.
  • A 5-year-old answers the basket.
• By age 5, children understand others' beliefs differ from reality.

Growth of Play

• Play are activities for enjoyment.
• At 18 months pretend play emerges with make-believe activities.
• Sociodramatic play involves children enacting mini-dramas with others.

Understanding Living vs. Nonliving Things

• By ages 3-4, children can:
  • Distinguish between living and nonliving things.
  • Understand living things grow, eat, heal, and reproduce.
  • Some do not know humans are living until ages 5-6.
• Between ages 7-9, they understand plants are living things.

Understanding Cause and Effect

• Children's ability to understand improves over time.
  • At 6 months, understanding that one event can cause another.
  • At 2 years, they can predict what will happen next.

Psychoanalytic Theories

• Have significantly impacted Western culture and theories related to personality and social development.
• Freud: behavior is motivated by unconscious drives.
• Erikson: development comes from age and maturation.

Freud's Psychosexual Theory

• Oral (0-1 years): pleasure from sucking/biting; fixation leads to smoking, nail-biting.
• Anal (1-3 years): pleasure from controlling bowel movements; fixation leads to tidy or messy personality.
• Phallic (3-6 years): awareness of gender differences; fixation leads to sexual identity issues, pride, and vanity.
• Latency (6-11 years): focus on school and friendships (development of superego).
• Genital (adolescence): sexual maturity and relationships.

Erikson's Psychosocial Theory

• Social and cultural factors:
  • Trust vs. Mistrust (0-1 year): Can I trust the world?
  • Autonomy vs. Shame and Doubt (1-3 years): Can I be independent?
  • Initiative vs. Guilt (3-6 years): Can I take initiative?
  • Industry vs. Inferiority: Am I competent?
  • Identity vs. Role Confusion: Who am I?
  • Intimacy vs. Isolation: Close relationships.
  • Generativity vs. Stagnation: Contributed to society.
  • Integrity vs. Despair: Have I lived a meaningful life?

Behaviorism

• Watson: behavior is shaped by the environment.
• Skinner: operant conditioning shapes behavior.

Bandura's Social Learning Theory

• Learning occurs by observing others.
• Bobo doll experiment: children imitate aggressive behavior they see.

Bronfenbrenner's Bioecological Model

• Microsystem: family, school.
• Mesosystem: interactions between microsystems.
• Exosystem: indirect influences.
• Macrosystem: cultural beliefs and laws.
• Chronosystem: time and social context, how things change over time.

Selman's Stage Theory of Role Taking

• As children grow, they can consider multiple perspectives simultaneously.
  • Stage 1: another child can have different perspectives due to lacking the same information.
  • Stage 2: ability to think from others' viewpoints.
  • Stage 3: comparing own viewpoints to others' viewpoints.
  • Stage 4: comparing others' perspectives to a "generalized other," the majority perspective.

Dodge's Information Processing Theory

• Importance of cognitive processing in social behavior.
• Hostile attribution bias: the expectation that others are hostile.
• Children may interpret ambiguous stimuli as intentionally harmful behavior.

Self-Attribution Theory (Dweck)

• Learning goals: to improve or master new material.
• Performance goals: seek positive assessments of competence.

Etiology Theories

• Etiology: study of behavior with evolutionary context.
• Imprinting: infant emotional attachment during a sensitive period.

Effects of Institutionalization & Foster Care

• Early institutional care negatively affects children's social skills.
• Study comparing institutionalized children:
  • Foster Care Group (FCG): Placed in foster homes.
  • Care as Usual Group (CAUG): Remained in institutions, non-institutionalized children observed for comparison.
• Foster care (FCG) helped improve social skills.
• CAUG children:
  • More speech reticence (shy, hesitant to talk).
  • Lower social engagement.
  • Negative influence on non-institutionalized peers (made them less engaged).
• Longer time in institutions = worse social skills.
• Timing of foster care placement did not significantly affect social outcomes.
• Boys were more socially withdrawn in competitive tasks.
• Institutional care hinders social development.
• Foster care helps children become more socially competent.
• Lack of social skills leads to future problems.

Effortful Control & Reactions to Undesirable Gifts

• Children are taught to regulate emotions and conform to social expectations.
• Examining how effortful control influences reactions to desirable and undesirable gifts.
• Children with high effortful control:
  • Showed similar positive reactions to both good and bad gifts.
  • Better at masking disappointment and maintaining social norms.
• Children with low effortful control:
  • Showed more happiness with desirable gifts.
  • Showed more negative emotions with undesirable gifts.
• Age predicted effortful control.
• Girls show slightly better emotional regulation than boys, but not significantly different.
• Effortful control helps children regulate emotional expressions.
• Children with better control respond appropriately when disappointed.
• Teaching emotional regulation helps children develop social skills.
• Future research is needed to explore better ways of strengthening effortful control in young children.

Discrete Emotions Theory (Evolutionary Theory)

• Emotions are innate and distinct from one another in early life.
• Each emotion has specific facial and body reactions.

Functional Perspective (Goal-Driven Theory)

• Emotions help us respond in survival-promoting ways.
• Promotes actions towards achieving goals.
• Emotions guide interactions with the environment and relationships.

6 Basic Emotions

• Smiling: infants smile in their sleep and at 3 months, social smiles emerge, laughter begins around 3-4 months.
• Fear: of strangers develops around 7-8 months.
• Anger: first appears in infancy as a response to frustration.
• Sadness: signals caregivers when a baby needs comfort.
• Disgust: evolutionary response to harmful substances.
• Self-conscious emotions develop around age 2 as children understanding social expectations.

Understanding Emotions

• Children recognize and control emotions as they grow.
• By age 2, children can identify emotions in others.
• Social referencing: babies look at caregivers to decide how to react.
• By age 5, children understand people can hide emotions.

Display Rules

• Social norms about when to show and suppress emotion.

Emotional Regulation

• The ability to manage emotional responses.
  • Stage 1 (Co-regulation): parents help soothe the baby.
  • Stage 2 (Self-regulation): children use self-comforting or distracting strategies.
  • Stage 3 (Advanced regulation): older children use cognitive strategies to think differently about problems.

Temperament

• A child's natural tendencies, partly genetic, partly environmental

Thomas and Chess: 3 Temperament Styles

• Easy babies: adapt well, happy, establish routines.
• Difficult babies: struggle with change, react intensely.
• Slow-to-warm-up babies: hesitant at first, but adjust over time.

Measuring Temperament

• Between-person approach: understand development (Thomas and Chess).
• Within-person approach: characterizes every child across dimensions of temperament.
• Measured using parental questionnaires, lab tests, and brain/heart activity measurements.

Goodness of Fit

• Does temperament = environment?
• The success of a child's emotional development depends on temperament matching environment.
• Ex: a difficult baby with patient parents will develop better emotional regulation than if they had strict parents.

Role of Family in Emotional Development

• Parental emotional expectations: children learn by watching parents.
• Parental reactions to emotions: supportive parents help children regulate emotions.
• Emotion coaching: leads to better emotional intelligence.

Still-Face Experiment

• When mothers instructed to keep blank expression, babies became distressed.
• Demonstrates how parental responsiveness is crucial for a child's security.
• Mild (helpful) stress: helps with motivation.
• Toxic (harmful) stress: leads to anxiety and depression.
• Traumatic stress: results from a single, severe event.

Mental Health

• Depression: persistent sad and irritable mood for >2 weeks.
• Anxiety: persistent fear and worry, separation anxiety being most common.

Treatments

• SSRIs.
• Cognitive-based therapy.

Delaying Gratification

• Delaying gratification (resisting immediate rewards for later benefits) is a skill linked to success in life.
• The ability to resist temptations predicts:
  • Academic Success
  • Social Skills
  • Health outcomes
• Self-control and executive function help children resist immediate rewards.
• Social norms influence delaying gratification.
  • Japan: Children wait longer for food (due to customs of waiting before meals).
  • USA: Children wait longer for gifts.
• Repeated cultural practices form habits that make delaying gratification easier.
• Japanese children waited 3x longer for food than gifts.
• U.S. children waited 4x longer for gifts than food.
• Developing consistent habits can improve self-control.
• Cultural traditions shape children's ability to resist temptations.
• Teaching children habits of waiting can lead to long-term success.

Biology and Shyness

• Examine how biological responses predict shyness in young children.
  • Shyness is a stable personality trait with fear and caution in social situations.
  • Linked to biological factors like heart rate variability.
  • Some children are naturally more reactive to new people.
• Stronger biological responses to strangers at age 3 correlated with shyness at age 4.
• Shyness context: shyness is not just a stress response, but a specific reaction to social novelty.
• Shyness influenced by both biology and experience and depends on experiences.

Cultural Differences in Emotional Reactions

• Study examining Brahman, Tamang, and U.S. children on emotions like anger and shame.
  • Emotions help people understand situations and act appropriately.
  • Cultures teach children when and how to express emotions.
• Tamang children:
  • More likely to feel shame than anger.
  • Less likely to try to change a situation.
  • Emotions should be expressed naturally.
  • Focus on harmony and selflessness.
• Brahman children:
  • Felt anger but chose not to express it.
  • They value self-control and did not reveal emotions openly.
  • Maintaining respect for authority was most important.
• U.S. children:
  • More likely to express anger and take action.
  • Valued self-assertion and problem-solving.
  • Changing situation > acceptance.
  • Less likely to feel shame > (lowers self-esteem).
• Tamang culture focuses on calmness, submission, and group harmony.
• Brahman culture focuses on social rank and emotional control.
• U.S. culture focuses on expressing emotions and standing up for oneself.
• emotional reactions are influenced by societal expectations.

Attachment

• Attachment: emotional bond between a child and caregiver that persists overtime.
• Theories of attachment: Behaviorism (classical conditioning): infants associate caregivers with food, leading to attachment.
• Harlow's research shows that comfort and security (cloth Mother) are crucial for attachment, not just food(Wire Mother).
• Attachment is biological and enhances survival.
• Secure base concept: a trusted caregiver provides safety and security, allowing the child to explore the world.
• Internal working model: early experiences shape a child's expectations about relationships.

Ainsworth's "Strange Situation"

• Designed to assess infant-caregiver attachment styles through structured separation and reunion.
• 4 attachment styles:
  • Secure: uses caregiver as a secure base, seeks comfort.
  • Insecure-avoidant: avoids caregiver, does not seek comfort.
  • Insecure-resistant: clingy, distressed when separated and not easily comforted.
  • Disorganized: comes from maltreatment.
• "Strange situation" positive: similar across cultures, similar behavior in lab and home, attachment measurement.
• "Strange situation" negative: requires subcortical resources, multiple continuous dimensions.

Development of the Self

• Self: physical, personality, relationships, cultural identity.
  • Self-concept: knowledge and beliefs about oneself.
  • Self-esteem: emotional evaluation of self-worth.
  • Self-identity: sense of self shaped by social and cultural factors.

Self-Concept

• Infancy: develops self-recognition.
• Childhood: complex self-awareness from social comparisons.
• Adolescence: abstract self-concept.
• Personal fable: belief in one's uniqueness.
• Imaginary audience: assumption others are always watching.
• Egocentric tendencies: adolescence do not have cognitive skills to take in others perspectives.

Self-Esteem

• Western cultures focuses more on individual achievement.
• Asian cultures focuses more on group harmony.
• Sources of self-esteem: age, gender differences, appearance, and support from others.

Identity

• Erikson: adolescence experiences an identity crisis as they from their new identity.
• Marcia: Adolescence falls on dimensions of identity exploration and commitment.
  • Identity achievement: explored options, made a commitment.
  • Identity foreclosure: no exploration, adopts identity from society/parents.
  • Moratorium: exploring options, no commitment yet.
  • Identity diffusion: no exploration, no commitment.

Ethnic and Racial Identity

• Preschool: no understanding of ethnicity and race.
• Early school years: knowledge of common characteristics/feelings about group membership.
• Adolescence: ethnic/racial identity more central.

Family

• Group of people who are biologically related.
• Changes in family structure:
  • More single parents.
  • More living with grandparents.
  • Families are smaller.
  • Older first-time parents.
  • More same-sex parents.

Divorce Impact on Children

• Emotional and academic struggles.
• Stepfamilies may pose challenges but provide new support systems.

Parenting Styles

• Authoritative: high warmth, high control.
• Authoritarian: low warmth, high control.
• Permissive: high warmth, low control.
• Neglectful: low warmth, low control.

Types of Maltreatment

• Neglectful: failure to provide basic needs.
• Physical abuse: intentional harm.
• Emotional abuse: damaging verbal/psychological treatment.
• Sexual abuse: exploitation of a child.

Socioeconomic Status (SES)

• High SES: more resources, better education, parental involvement.
• Low SES: increased stress, financial stability, and few learning resources.