Socio-Emotional Development - ECE PDF

Socio-Emotional Development Theories of Social Development  Psychoanalytic Theories  In both Freud’s and Erikson’s theories, development is largely driven by biological maturation.  For Freud, behavior is motivated by the need to satisfy basic drives.  These drives, and the motive...

Socio-Emotional Development Theories of Social Development  Psychoanalytic Theories  In both Freud’s and Erikson’s theories, development is largely driven by biological maturation.  For Freud, behavior is motivated by the need to satisfy basic drives.  These drives, and the motives that arise from them, are mostly unconscious, and individuals often have only the dimmest understanding of why hey do what they do.  Erikson’s theory, development is driven by a series of developmental crises related to age and biological maturation.  To achieve healthy development, the individual must successfully resolve these crises.  Freud’s Theory  Freud’s theory of development is referred to as “theory of psychosexual development” because he thought that even very young children have a sexual nature that motivates their behavior and influences their relationships with other people.  In each successive stage, Psychic energy - the biologically based, instinctual drives that fuel behavior, thought, and feelings - becomes focuses in different erougenous zones, that is, areas of the body that are erotically sensitive.  Freud believed that in each stage, children encounter conficts related to a particular erogenous zone and that their success or failure in resolving these conflicts affects their development throughout life.  Erikson’s Theory  Erikson accepted the basic elements of Freud’s theory but incorporated social factors into it, including cultural influences and contemporary issues such as juvenile delinquency, changing suxuall roles, and the generation gap.  Each of Erikson’s stages is characterized by a specific crisis, or set of developmental issues, that the individual must resolve.  If the dominant issue of a given stage is not successfully resolved before maturation and social pressures usher in the next stage, the person will continue to struggle with it.  Learning Theories  In contrast to Freud’s emphasis on the role of internal forces and subjective experiences, most learning theorists have emphasized the role of external factors in shaping personality and social behavior.  The primary developmental question on which learning theories take a unanimous stand is that of continuity/discontinuity: they all emphasize continuity, proposing that the same principles control learning and behavior throughout life and that therefore there are no qualitatively different stages in development.  Watson’s Behaviorism  Watson believed that children’s development is determined by their social environment and that learning through conditioning is the primary mechanism of development.  He also believed that psychologists should study only objectively verifiable behavior, not the “mind”.  Believing he had established the power of learning in development, Watson placed the responsibility for guiding children’s development squarely on the shoulders of their parents.  Skinner’s Operant Conditioning  Skinner believed that children’s development is primarily a matter of their reinforcement history.  Skinner’s work on reinforcement has proven quite useful for changing undesirable behaviors which has led him to form the therapy known as behavior modification.  Behavior modification is a form of therapy based on principles of operant conditioning in which reinforcement contingencies are changed to encourage more adaptive behavior  Bandura’s Social Learning Theory  Like other learning theories, social learning theory attempts to account for personality and other aspects of social development in terms of learning mechanisms.  Social learning theory emphasized observation and imitation, rather than reinforcement, as the primary mechanisms of development.  Bandura argued that most human learning is inherently social in nature.  He emphasized the active role of children in their own development, describing development as a reciprocal determinism – Bandura’s concept that child – environment influences operate on both directions; children are affected by aspects of their environment, but they also influence the environment.  Theories of Social Cognition  These theories have to do with children’s ability to think and reason about their own and other people’s thoughts, feelings, motives and behaviors.  Like adults, children are active processors of social information.  Social cognitive theories emphasize the process of self-socialization – the idea that children play a very active role in their own socialization through their activity preferences, friendship choices and so on.  Selman’s Stage Theory of Role Taking  Robert Selman focused on the development of role taking – the ability to adopt the perspective of another person, to think about something from another’s point of view.  He proposed that such role taking is essential to understanding another person’s thoughts, feelings or motives.  Young children’s social cognition is quite limited because they lack the ability to role take.  Dodge’s Information-Processing Theory of Social Problem Solving  This approach to social cognition emphasizes the crucial role of cognitive processes in social behavior.  Studies on the use of aggression as a problem-solving strategy found that some children have a hostile attributional bias – which in Dodge’s theory is the tendency to assume that other people’s ambiguous actions stem from a hostile intent.  Dweck’s Theory of Self-Attributions and Achievement Motivation  According Carol Dweck, some children have an incremental view of intelligence, the belief that intelligence can be developed through effort.  These children focus on mastery – on meeting challenges and overcoming failures, and generally expects her efforts to be successful.  Other children have an entity view of intelligence, the belief that their intelligence is fixed.  These children’s goal is to be successful, and as long as they are succeeding, all is well. However, when they fail, they feel “helpless”.  Dweck’s Theory of Self-Attributions and Achievement Motivation  Underlying these two patterns of achievement motivation are differences in what attributions children make about themselves.  Children with entity/helpless orientation tend to base their sense of self-worth on the approval they receive (or do not receive) from other people about their intelligence, talents and personal qualities.  In contrast, the self-esteem of children with an incremental/mastery orientation is based more on their own effort and learning and not on how others evaluate them. Because they do not equate failure on a task with a personal flaw, they can enjoy the challenge of a hard problem and persist in the attempt to solve i.  Ecological Theories of Development  Ethological and evolutionary theories view children as inheritors of genetically based abilities and predispositions that underlie most aspects of their behavior. The focus of these theories is largely on aspects of behavior that serve, or once served, as adaptive function.  The bioecological model stresses the effects of context on development, but it also emphasizes the child’s active role in selecting and influencing those contexts.  Children’s personal characteristics such as temperament, intellectual ability, and athletic skill lead them to choose certain environments and also influence the people around them.  The developmental issue that is front and center in ecological theories is the interaction of nature and nurture.  The importance of sociocultural context and the continuity of development are other implicit emphases in all these theories. The active role of children in their own development is another central focus.  Bronfenbrenner’s Ecological Systems Theory  Bronfenbrenner conceptualizes the environment as “a set of nested structures, each inside the next, like a set of Russian dolls”.  Each structure represents a different level of influence on development.  Embedded in the center of the multiple levels of influences is the individual child, with his or her particular constellation of characteristics (genes, gender, age, temperament, health, intelligence, physical attractiveness etc.)  Over the course of development, these individual characteristics interact with the environmental forces present at each level.  The different levels vary in how immediate their effects are, but Bronfenbrenner emphasizes that every level, has an impact on the child’s development  The development of emotions in childhood  Developmentalists view emotions in terms of several components  (1) physiological factors including heart and breath rate, hormone levels and the like;  (2) subjective feelings;  (3) the cognitions that may elicit or accompany subjective feelings;  (4) the desire to take action, including the desire to escape, approach, or change people or things in the environment Theories on the Nature and Emergence of Emotion  Charles Darwin argued that the facial expressions for certain basic emotional states are innate to the species – and therefore similar across all peoples – and are found even in very young babies.  Silvan Tomkins and Carroll Izard proposed the discrete emotions theory, which argues that each emotion is innately packaged with a specific set of physiological bodily, and facial reactions and that distinct emotions are evident from very early in life.  Other researchers maintain that emotions are not distinct from one another at the beginning of life and that environmental factors play an important role in the emergence and expression of emotion.  Some argue that infants experience only excitement and distress in the first weeks of life, and that other emotions emerge at later ages as a function of experience.  According to Alan Sroufe there are three basic affect systems – joy/pleasure, anger/frustration, and wariness/fear – and these systems undergo developmental change from primitive to more advanced forms during the early years of life.  The role of the environment is also emphasized by theorists who take a functionalist approach to understanding emotional development.  They propose that the basic function of emotions is to promote action toward achieving a goal in a given context.  Functionalist like Joseph Campos have also argued that emotional reactions are affected by social goals and the influence of significant others.