Developmental Psychology PDF

Overview/outline: Genes, heritability and evolution: - Evolution and human development, Darwin - Individual heritability - Genetic and environmental influences - Heritability of different traits - Gene-environment interplay Brain, body, and prenatal development: - Prenatal development - Prenatal environment and foetal programming - Perinatal environment - Neonatal environment - Building blocks of growth and lifelong health - The infant - The child - The adolescent - The adult Perception, action, and systems models: - Perspectives on sensation, perception, and action - The infant - The child - The adolescent - The adult Cognition: - Piaget’s constructivist theory - Vygotsky’s sociocultural perspective - Modern approaches - The infant - The child - The adolescent - The adult Memory, learning, and language development: - Conceptualising memory and learning - The infant - The child - The adolescent - The adult Intelligence and creativity: - Understanding intelligence and creativity - The infant - The child - The adolescent - The adult - Factors that influence IQ scores over the life-span Self, education, work and motivation: - The system of language - The infant - The child - The adolescent - The adult - Conceptualising the self and personality - The infant - The child - The adolescent - The adult Developmental Psychology chapter 1: Microsystem: An immediate social group that influences behaviour reciprocally. An infants family and perhaps daycare. Mesosystem: Interactions between microsystems, such as home and school. If a parent has a negative relationship with a teacher, this could affect the child. Exosystem: An indirect influence on development, such as a parent’s work life can determine how much time is spent with the child. Macrosystem: Involves all previous systems. A society’s laws, culture, religion, and so on. Chronosystem: How humans and environments change over time. Sample selection is ideally a randomized sample of a population to evaluate a theory. Verbal reports: Interviews, questionnaires or surveys, etc. Cons of these include not being able to use them with certain ages or people with cognitive impairment. People may also make themselves look better by presenting in a different way than how they normally do to be seen as socially acceptable. Behavioral observations: Visually studying participants to observe natural behavior. Often used with children as they cannot as easily partake in verbal reports. Cons are that some behavior, such as saving a life, is not frequent enough to be observed. Moreover, it is difficult to know if behavior is normal or amped up since one is being observed. Physiological measurements: Such as electrodes to measure electrical activity in the brain or Functioning Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) machines to scan brains. Although these results are hard to fake, you may not always know what the results mean. Activity showing physiological arousal doesn’t have to mean anger, eg. Case studies: In depth study of an individual or small number of individuals by observing, testing and interviewing the person or people around them. Useful when studying unusual situations such as children being locked in a basement for years can affect development. The experimental method: Manipulating an aspect of the environment to see its effect on behavior of individuals studied. Independent variable: the variable manipulated. Dependent variable the one expected to be affected. Features of a true experiment include random assignment to conditions, manipulation of the independent variable, and experimental control. Limitations are that they often cannot be used due to ethical reasons. The correlational method: Determining whether two or more variables are related in a systematic way. The strength of a correlation is determined by calculating a correlation coefficient. This coefficient can range from values of -1.00 to 1.00. A positive correlation is stronger the closer it is to +1.00, and vice versa. A score near 0.00 would indicate no relationship between the variables. Directionality problem: We don’t know what the direction of a cause-effect relationship is. Third-variable problem: The association between the two variables may be caused by an uncontrolled third variable. Developmental research designs: Cross-sectional designs: Measures assessing people of different age groups or cohorts are compared. A cohort is a group of individuals born in the same year or specified span of years. Used to evaluate age differences. Age effects are relationships between age and an aspect of development. Cohort effects are the effects of being born as a member of a particular cohort or generation in a particular historical context. An issue with this is that cross sectional designs do not measure how people change with age. Longitudinal designs: One cohort of individuals are studied over a longer period of time. They can show how behavior and habits change over time. Time-of-measurement effect are the effects of events when the data is being collected, such as the pandemic or 9/11. In these studies, time-of-measurement and age effects are confounded. Sequential designs: To overcome the limitations of previous designs, a sequential approach was developed. They can tell which age related trends are truly developmental, which differ from cohort to cohort, and which trends suggest that events during a time affect all cohorts alive at a time. 1.4: What special challenges do developmental scientists face Culturally sensitive research is difficult to do. Most research participants are WEIRD: Western, educated, industrialized, rich, and democratic. A lot of research found that what may be true for Americans is not universal, even though many researchers define their research universally. Ethnocentrism: The belief that one’s group and culture is superior. Research ethics: The standards of conduct that investigators are ethically bound to honor and protect their research participants from physical or psychological harm. Guidelines to follow include informed consent, debriefing, protection from harm, and confidentiality. 2.1: Evolution and human development Darwin’s evolutionary theory: - There is genetic variation in a species since they cannot evolve without being able to vary. - Some genes aid adaptation more than others do, such as strength or intelligence. - Genes that aid their bearers in adapting to their environment will be passed to future generations more frequently than genes that do not. Natural selection is the idea that nature selects or aids those individual’s that are more adaptable due to their traits. Evolution is about the interaction between games and the environment. Kettlewell’s peppered moths. Modern evolutionary perspectives: Ethology is the field of understanding the evolved behavior of various species in their natural environment. Modern evolutionary psychology is the application of an evolutionary perspective to understanding why humans develop, think, and behave as they do. Slow life history strategy is likely to be adopted when life is secured and predictable. This means that parents invest more time in their children and their development. Fast life history strategy is the opposite, and children grow up faster and learn to work toward a more rewarding future. Cultural evolution: A faster process of adapting to the environment that operates in parallel to biological evolution. Biological evolution involves adapting to the environment slowly, whereas the cultural evolution involves learning and adapting from society and people around oneself. 2.2: Individual heredity Genetic code: The sperm and egg each contribute 23 chromosomes to the zygote to give it 46 in total. Chromosomes contain genes. Meiosis and mitosis are division processes. Meiosis splits cells so that the amount of chromosomes are 23. Through mitosis cell division starts, and each cell in the body contains 46 chromosomes. Human genes consist of DNA which is our genetic makeup. Humans are different from each other since genes and traits are based on chance from our parents. Crossing over can also occur. Siblings on average share 50% of DNA, but can be more and can be less. The father determines the child’s sex as he has the Y chromosome. Genotype is the genetic makeup a person inherits and phenotype is the presentation of these. Gene expression is the activation of particular genes. Expression of genes: RNA transcription, RNA is used to build proteins. Transcription of DNA can only happen when genes are turned on. Epigenetics tells us that different factors affect genes. Stress of the mother affects epigenetics of a foetus prenatally, in rats nurtured infants become stress resistant, and intergenerational transmission of fears can be passed on (rats). Mechanisms of inheritance: Single gene-pair inheritance: Each of thousands of characteristics are influenced by only one pair of genes. Dominant and recessive genes. Sex linked inheritance: Some genes are located on X and not Y chromosomes. If a recessive gene is on the X chromosome, women often have a dominating gene on the other one, but since males have fewer genes they may not be able to dominate these genes and causes things like red-green colorblindness or hemophilia. Polygenetic inheritance: Some traits like height or intelligence are influenced by many genes. This means that if you have many low-IQ genes and many high-IQ genes, you will average out. This can be studied using distribution curves. Mutations: Occurs when a gene appears out of nowhere, neither parent having it. It can be influenced by environmental factors, or spontaneity. Copy number variations (CNVs) are where a whole genome is deleted or duplicated, which can increase risk of polygenetic disorders such as autism and adhd. Chromosome abnormalities can cause disorders such as down syndrome, occuring with too few or too many chromosomes. 2.3: Studying genetic and environmental influences. Behavioral genetics: The study of the extent to which genetic and environmental differences among people are responsible for differences in their physical and psychological traits. Twin studies can be used to find heritability of fraternal and identical twins. Similarities between twins can be studied as there is a difference in how many genes are linked, percentage wise. Studying twins raised together and raised apart can show how the environment affects behaviour. There are limitations, such as the prenatal environment of identical twins and how identical twins are often treated more similarly. Adoption studies show if children adopted early are psychologically similar to their biological parents or their adoptive parents. Limitations include prenatal environment, adoption agencies tendencies, and the SEC of the adoptive homes. Family studies can measure similarities of different families, like stepfamilies and half siblings. Molecular genetics: The identification and analysis of particular genes and their effects. Lecture 3: Heritability: - Concordance rate: The percentage of pairs in which if one member displays a trait or habit, the other does too, g. 48% concordance schizophrenia. - Correlations: To what extent a trait is present in a pair, e.g angry emotionality. Heritability is not fixed and proportions depend on many factors such as age, environment, gene-environment interaction. Gene-environment: Effect of genes depends on the environment. Diathesis-stress model: Disorder only expressed when high risk predisposition is combined with stressful events. Nature and nurture combine. Effects of genes cannot be distinguished from three types of correlated processes: Passive- home environment, evocative- children evoke certain environments, active: children actively search for environments. Nature affects nurture. Prenatal development: Germinal period (first 2 weeks) Embryonic period (3-8 weeks)- Organogenesis, placenta forms, beginning of the brain at 3-4 weeks, neural plate which folds and becomes a neural tube. Heart begins to form and beat, eyes, ears, nose, mouth, testes and ovaries develop. Foetal period (9-40 weeks)- Brain development, creating neurons and myelination. Proliferation (a lot of new brain neurons are formed), migration (cells move), differentiation (take shape of where they end up). Prenatal environment: Sensitivity to conditions: - Fetal programming: epigenetic effects of the environment, aka the mother. - Teratogens such as tobacco, alcohol, drugs and diseases cause problems in newborns. These are most harmful during the embryonic period, since so much develops. - Environmental hazards such as radiation - Food - Emotional state of the mother. Neonatal: - Apgar test- neonatal test such as what colour is the baby. - Breastfeeding or bottle feeding - Risks: Postpartum depression, low birth weight. Physical health issues in childhood and adolescence: - Newborn: Congenital malformations, low birth weight. - Childhood: Accidents. Nutrition and physical activity - Adolescence: Weight, sleep, risk behaviour. How do we grow: - We grow quickly in infancy - Cephalocaudal principle: Grow from the head down. - Proximodistal principle: Grow from the inside out, organs develop first. - Growth hormones from the endocrine system - General growth hormones from pituitary gland - Sex specific hormones for growth spurt in adolescence. - From testes: androgens such as testosterone - From ovaries: oestrogen and progesterone. Puberty: - Growth spurt - Secondary sex characteristics, breasts, pubic hair, broader shoulders, etc. - Menarche, semenarche. - Timing can be affected by weight and stress at a young age. - Early puberty is bad for girls but good for boys. - Late puberty is bad for boys but ok for girls. Midlife changes: - Female menopause, often between 45-54. Sudden decline in oestrogen, ovulation and periods stop, temporary symptoms of hot flashes, vaginal dryness, etc. - Male andropause, gradual. Decline in testosterone, low libido, erection problems, fatigue. Synapses: - Connection points between neurons. Neurotransmitters. Increase a lot over the years (synaptogenesis), until synaptic pruning. Brain: - Infant: - Rapid growth and high plasticity. Sensitive to input and can form accordingly. Bad if there are drugs that can damage the neurons. - Responds strongly to rich environments - Vulnerable to damage but can easily recover. - Childhood: - Increased lateralization: - Left hemisphere, right side of the body, sequential processing, language and analytical reasoning. - Right hemisphere, left side of the body, simultaneous processing, spatial information and emotional content. - Communicate through corpus callosum. - At birth, newborns turn heads more often to the right than to the left. More left hemisphere response to speech. - Adolescent: - Limbic system (more emotional and sensitive to rewards) matures quicker than prefrontal areas (rational thinking, cognitive control) - Common risky behaviours in adolescence: smoking, drugs, drinking, unprotected sex. - Adulthood: - Neurogenesis (some evidence) and synaptogenesis across the lifespan. - The ageing brain: Beginning between 30-50 the brain slowly degenerates - Loss and damage of neurons - Less blood flow and neurotransmitters - Compensation is possible by - Maintenance of brain activity - Reserve of brain matter and cognitive structures, having extra brain matter at birth. - Compensation, using different brain areas to perform the same function. - Plasticity in brain development: Can recover from extreme injuries - Early experiences (stimulation) are beneficial - Brain plasticity is greatest in early development (sensitive period from infancy to childhood). - Neurogenesis continuous throughout life Lecture 4: Brain-environment interaction: - The brain is shaped by interaction with the environment and shapes this interaction. - A depressed brain looks darker than a non-depressed person. You can alter this by medication or interacting with the environment like therapy. Perception: - Sensation: input from senses - Perception: interpretation of senses - Inside brain - What does it mean, how we understand it, how we feel about it, etc. - Perception of what a situation or object offers us, how it may be used. A child might think sitting on a table is its purpose. - Action: motor activities prompted by the interpretation of senses - When we hear the doorbell this prompts us to open the door. - Constructivists argue that interpretation of the world is done through nurturing, and that understanding the input through our senses requires interacting with the environment. - Nativists argue that we do not need to do this as we are born with the capability of understanding these senses without interaction. - Gibson ecologists argue that objects have affordances that reveal themselves to us. “We must perceive in order to move, but we must also move in order to perceive. Hearing development: - Prenatally: recognize and prefer mother - Newborn: preference for speech sounds, language recognition Vision: - Prenatally: light perception, vision becomes fully developed at around a year. - Studying infant perception: habituation (offer stimulus repeatedly until baby turns away, then give another colour ball and see if they see the difference), preferential looking (eye tracking e.g, what does the infant like looking at more), evoked potentials (measuring electrical activity in different parts of the brain as it perceives), operant conditioning (the babies are encouraged to respond a certain way, e.g head turning, to a certain stimuli. If when changing the stimuli the child no longer turns its head, it can perceive a difference). - Infants prefer looking at things that have bold colours and are neither too simple nor too complex. - Depth perception: Infants turn their head or blink when something is too close to their face. By four months they understand size constancy, that the size of an object does not increase as it gets closer. - Visual cliff experiment: Babies go to their mothers when she is accessible, but refuse when there is a cliff on the road. Perception-action: - Perception and action interact in early motor development. - Perception is context specific. - What the child perceives it can do (affordance) depends on its current action. Karen Adolf about sitting and crawling babies. If they are sitting they have a specific perception of how far a gap is, but while crawling they have to learn it all over. - Affordances change and develop over time. - The affordances perceived depend on experience and action ability. - For an adolescent, a pen may be used to write with. For a child it may be used as a drumstick. Attention: - Infants: Attention is mostly caught at first, following an orienteering system that reacts to the environment, before becoming a focusing system. - Childhood: Longer attention spans, more focused, selective, and systematic attention. - Adolescence: - Longer attention spans, better selective attention, switch easier. - Increased demands on attention, multitasking and lure of the screens. - Adulthood: - Best attention around 43, - Then increasingly sensitive to distraction, more difficult to filter irrelevant information. Motor development: - First: survival and primitive reflexes like stepping, grasping, sucking. - Nature or nurture? Johnny does better on strength and agility due to learning things like roller skating. However, he does not do better on walking and crawling. - Stepping is built in, but legs need to learn for themselves how to balance and take far enough steps. - Then, deliberate actions like crawling, walking and grasping. - Children develop gross motor skills first, such as kicking the legs, and then fine motor skills, such as picking up cheerios, which requires precise movements. - It follows the cephalocaudal principle, neurons between the brain and muscles acquire myelin sheaths in a top-to-bottom direction. They can sit before they can walk. - Children use an ulnar grasp first, jerky movements with a locked elbow, before a pincer grasp, thumb and forefinger. Complex dynamic systems theory: Person-context interaction: - People develop within a context made of several layers, Bronfenbrenner. - Development emerges out of person-context interaction and is iterative. Eg, parent and child read together. - Iterativity: Anything you do. A choice affects your next choice, each word is affected by the previous one, etc. - If you repeat an interaction over time, you can get patterns of behaviour. - Attractor states: Having two states, walking and crawling, where both are tugging during a specific time, until walking takes over completely. Implications of complex dynamic systems theory: - Behaviour is context dependent - Determining causality is problematic - Naming one factor as the cause of (problem) behaviour is inaccurate - It is better to understand the process. - How do dysfunctional patterns arise from person-environment interaction? - Variability is necessary in order for systematic change to happen. Lecture 5: Motor development is iterative: - Each step literally builds on the previous step - Much experience is needed to acquire motor milestones. - As illustrated by the enculturated aspect of motor development - Exercise is essential for when motor milestones are achieved. - No automatic maturing. Motor development has periods of variability and stability: - During transitions, there is much variability in various forms, e.g new walkers - Switching between walking or crawling, unsteady gait, falling and getting up again. - After the transition, there is much stability, e.g experienced walkers: - Stable use of walking, stable gait in straight line, less falling. How is complex dynamic systems theory applied: - To help us understand how higher order patterns come to exist, from just a few simple interacting elements. - How development emerges out of persons interacting with their environment. - How thought emerges out of neurons interacting - How the behaviour of mobs result from people interacting with each other. - Practical applicability has proven difficult. Cognitive development: Cognition: The activity of knowing and the process through which knowledge is acquired and problems solved. Jean Piaget discovered: - Children don’t just know less, they think differently. - Children in similar age groups gave the same kinds of wrong answers. - Constructivism: - Children don’t passively receive knowledge through instruction, they actively construct their knowledge. How cognition develops according to Piaget: - Cognitive schemes: Cognitive structures, patterns of thought/action that people construct to interpret their experiences. - Forming these schemes: - Adaptation to achieve equilibrium: The process of achieving mental stability where our internal thoughts are consistent with outside evidence. - Disequilibrium: Cognitive conflict when an existing scheme is not adequate to make sense of the world. - Innate tendency for equilibrium: Create consistency between thoughts and experience by adaptation. - Assimilation- try to fit new info in existing scheme - Accommodation, adjust scheme. - Organisation: - Combining information in a new coherent whole. - Example: - A dog has four legs and fur. Looking at a picture of a cat, a child might assimilate this information and say it is a dog. However, when told it is a cat, the child will accommodate and add new attributes that fit a cat, such as a long tail. Seeing a cat and thinking it’s a dog is disequilibrium. - Piaget’s stages of cognitive development: - Sensorimotor: 0-2 - Preoperational: 2-7 - Concrete operations: 7-11 - Formal operations: 11-12+ Cognition in infancy: - Mainly in the form of perception-action processes: - Sensorimotor stage Piaget - Develop our five senses. - Curiosity stage - Primary circular reaction: Infants discover themselves, kicking legs. - Secondary circular reaction: Infants react to themselves and the environment. - Coordination of secondary schemes: infants combine secondary actions to achieve certain goals, pushing an object out of the way to grasp another. - Tertiary circular reaction: Exploring toys thoroughly and learning about all of their properties. - Symbolic capacity - Object permanence (4-8 months) - At first, they do not yet have a mental representation of objects- out of sight out of mind. But, impossible situation experiment. - A-not-B error (8-12 months) - They do have object permanence, but look for hidden objects only in the place where it was first hidden. - Hiding a lion video. - However: Focusing longer on the object helped them locate it, and simply looking instead of reaching for the hidden object showed that infants as young as 5 months could find the hidden object. - Cognition is intertwined with motor skills and context. - Demonstration of skill varies across different forms of behaviour. Using different gestures to explain concepts. - Looking - Grasping/gestures - Verbal - Simpler task or more support: Earlier demonstration of skill - In line with Fisher’s skill theory. Cognition in childhood preschoolers: - Preschool children start to use symbols in their thinking - Pre-operational stage Piaget (2-7 years) - Child has mental representations of concepts and words. - They can refer to things that are not in front of them, a cat back home for example. - Lots of imagination - Imaginary companions are good because children with ones engage more in private speech. - Logical errors - Lack of conservation - Due to centration- can only focus on one aspect of the situation, lack of reversibility, static thought. - Piaget’s conservation task. - Egocentrism - Preschoolers can only view the world from their own perspective - But reduce the task to the bare essentials and 3-year-olds can take another’s perspective. - Volcano experiment, cannot tell researcher what they are seeing on their side of the volcano. - Difficulty with classification - They can understand that a cat is an animal but have a harder time understanding that they are mammals, living organisms, etcetera. - Are there more dogs or animals? Cognition in childhood elementary school children: - Elementary school children start to use logic in their thinking - Concrete operational stage Piaget (7-11 years) - Has developed beyond the errors that preoperational children make - Conservation - Overcomes egocentrism - Better at classification - They can think logically in realistic situations but still have trouble with abstract thinking. - Seiration: Being able to mentally order things by length or weight without interacting with it. When asked to order a pile of sticks by length, they don’t have to go through each stick and compare it with the others physically. - Transitivity: Being able to understand the relations between elements, if John is taller than Mark and Mark is taller than Sam, who is taller John or Sam? Cognition in adolescents: - Start using abstraction in their thinking - Formal operational stage piaget - Abstract as in failure or success or love or hate. - First think about a problem before jumping in with trial and error - Scientific reasoning- systematic vary a variable to test a hypothesis - Piaget’s pendulum task - Think about non realistic hypothetical situations. - Where would you put your third eye? - Abstract thoughts are however domain specific, so depending on what you learn you will be more accurately able to reason in some subjects while not so much in others. - Contextual effects on abstract reasoning= schooling systems: depending on what you learn it teaches you abstract reasoning. - Adolescent egocentrism: - Imaginary audience phenomenon: the feeling that you are being observed or focused on things about your appearance that you are focused on. - Personal fable: the tendency to believe your feelings or experiences are unique. Formal operations as end stage: - This is about abstract thinking, about seeing different perspectives and world-views. - Not all adults reach formal operations - This is however often culture-specific. Adults in cultures that don’t receive schooling as long or as advanced almost all fail on Piaget's tasks. - Some adults go beyond formal operations - Relativistic thinking - One absolute truth versus truth depends on where you stand, on your set of assumptions - There are grey areas, not everything can be explained by logical reasoning. - Dialectical thinking - Accept and try to integrate contradicting information - Knowing that something is not a perfect solution, but it’s the best solution under current conditions. Nuances to Piaget: - Underestimating children - Basic scientific thinking is already present in infants and young children. - Clear stages may not exist - Cognition is variable: it depends on motor skill and context - Fischer’s skill theory: Skill development as a “web” - Formal operations may not be an end stage - E.g Post formal thought - Social influences are neglected. Piaget explains how children learn for themselves. - Parent and teacher have a large influence on generating understanding - Vygotsky’s cultural perspective. Vygotsky’s sociocultural perspective: - Understanding is generated in interaction with social environment - Understanding originates from social interaction and is increasingly internalised. - From social interaction to private speech to inner thought. - Culture influences learning, language is the root of culture, individuals learn and develop through their role in a community. - He did not believe in broad stages, instead he suggested that cognitive development varies due to culture values, norms, and language. - Vygotsky came up with the zone of proximal development. - Private speech: Where Piaget used this as evidence for egocentrism and did not see it as useful for cognitive development, Vygotsky viewed it as a critical step in development of mature thought, since adults guide children with speech, children use the same technique to learn and explore for themselves. Neuroconstructivism theory: New knowledge is constructed through changes in the neural structure of the brain in response to experiences. Scaffolding: Generating understanding by supporting a student in a skill until the student has mastered it and can perform it independently. This can only be done within the zone of proximal development, where the area of needing help to understand is, before it is too difficult even with help. Fischer’s skill theory: - Skill development as a web. - Knowledge and skills are context dependent. - While studying in your room for an exam you may feel very confident, but you might not know as much as you thought you did during the actual exam, due to new environment or under pressure. - Human performance is dynamic, it changes in response to changes in context. Cognition: - Cognition is constrained by the particular features of the body - Motor abilities like walking and crawling - Senses like vision and hearing - Brain like attention, memory - Cognitive capabilities are not fixed - Can vary from moment to moment and depend on context. - Children are not (only) independent explorers, but need the context to support their learning. - Specifically, they need mature thinkers to “scaffold” their learning and reach their highest potential. Lecture 6: Memory and language acquisition: Background of memory: - Descartes, bodily (sensory) memory vs intellectual memory - Locke, memory is a storehouse of our ideas. Self as extension of consciousness backward in time. Memory loss= no identity. - Hume, social theory of memory. Memories like pearls on a string, pull together individual lives into a coherent I-ness, the self. Memory structure: - Sensory register: 8 senses, unlimited, 200-500 millisecond. - Vision, auditory, olfactory, tactile, gustatory, vestibular, proprioception, interoception. - Short-term memory: Acoustically, 7 +-2 items. 18-30 seconds - Long-term memory: Semantical, unlimited, forever? - Implicit memory: info remembered unconsciously and effortlessly. Automatic, skills, procedures, habits, conditioning. - Explicit memory: Info you consciously work to remember. Deliberate recollection (noetic), facts (semantic), life events (episodic) - Seeing notre dame on fire while doing homework (episodic) and remembering that it’s in paris and was the inspiration for hunchback of notre dame (semantic). Processing information into memory: - Encode From sensory register to working memory - Consolidation to long term memory, processes that stabilise and organise new information. Can be synaptic, taking place in the minutes or hours after initial learning, or system, which takes place over a longer period of time. - Long term storage - Retrieval from long term memory - Recall: What does water become when frozen? Ice. - Cued recall: What does water become when frozen, it rhymes with lice. - Recognition: Multiple choice, seeing the answer makes you remember that it’s correct. Ice, gas, particles. Working memory model: Limbic system: - Hippocampus: - Limbic system- emotion, behaviour. - Memory consolidation - Spatial memory - Required for statistical learning- detecting patterns or regularities that help explain the outside world. - Orbitofrontal cortex - Fornix - Entorhinal cortex (Plays a critical role in connecting the hippocampus to the rest of the brain). - Septal nuclei (pleasure, reward and reinforcement) - Amygdala (fearful and anxious emotions) - Nucleus accumbens (reward, pleasure addiction) - Thalamus (memory processing) Memory in infants: - Tested using for example habituation, operant conditioning, object search (a-not-b experiments), imitation. - Habituation is the search for new and exciting stimuli, not the same face over and over but maybe a spinning ball for a while etc. This ties in with recognition memory. - Operant conditioning: trying a string from a baby’s foot to a mobile, so when it kicks it spins. - Imitation: Infants have been known to imitate a model when they e.g stick their tongue out. They also display deferred imitation, the ability to imitate a novel act after a delay. - Early memory is cue and context specific. - Mostly implicit memory Childhood amnesia: - Autobiographical memories: Our own memories. These are essential in understanding ourselves in the present and future. - Typically memories start from 4-5 years old. - We forget due to: - immature hippocampus: the brain is not yet fully developed so memories created are more susceptible to loss. Neurogenesis is also at its peak in infancy, suggesting that memories are forgotten due to death of old cells and births of new ones. - lack of language: memory in infancy may be forgotten as we lacked the ability to verbally connect to them. - few conversations about memories: in infant-mother conversations, those mothers who elaborated more when explaining a subject lead to, years later, their child remembering more autobiographical memories than others. - little sense of self: since infants cannot recognize themselves in a mirror, they have little sense of self, leading them to not understand the concept of a memory happening to them. - Verbatim versus gist: infants have an easier time storing the gist of an event than verbatim, as they store these versions separately but parallel. This is the fuzzy trace theory. - Problem with recall, highly suggestible to leading questions. Memory in childhood: - Children memorise information increasingly fast and in larger volume because of better - Capacity of working memory - Memory strategies: rehearsal, nested structures, elaboration - Metamemory: knowing how your own memory works, knowing its limitations and what strategies work or don’t work for you. Under the metacognition umbrella, knowing what and how you learn. - Knowledge base: An individual’s knowledge of a content area to be learned. Knowledge of what memory is and how to store it, as well as better knowledge of the world and how to relate new information to it. - The more you know about a subject, the quicker you can store information related to it. - Child chess experts perform better than adults when remembering things related to chess, but worse in number sequence tasks. - Increased performance relates to: - Cognitive capabilities, which foster memory performance - Variability, as memory strategies develop in a variable way (“waves”). - It’s easier to encode when you have good memory strategies, which develop naturally. Putting your bag by the door to remember to bring it or coming up with mnemonics. - Rehearsal, repeating items in order to remember. - Elaboration, if you need to remember a horse and an apple, you might think an apple fell on the horse. - Preservation error: Children have a harder time switching from ineffective to effective strategies when it comes to memory. If a toy was lost under the sofa, they might look under the sofa first each time the toy is lost after this. - Memory scripts or general event representation: a script that aids in understanding. A child who has been to a fast-food restaurant knows to wait in line, order, sit down, etcetera, and can use this script in similar situations. Memory in adolescence: - Adolescents have increased memory capacity due to more deliberate usage of memory strategies, as well as strategies from school, such as highlighting and underlining. - Adolescents have an easier time ignoring irrelevant information and focusing on relevant information. - If asked to focus on a monkey in a zoo, the adolescent will have better memory of the monkey, but less memory than children on what else was happening in the zoo. Memory in adulthood: - Large and increasing knowledge base - Declining processing capacities - We remember things that have - Personal significance, uniqueness, emotional intensity, life phase adolescence and emerging adulthood. - Recognition remains highly accurate while recall declines much more. - People can pick the correct names for classmates after 35 years, but when asked for their name they cannot retrieve it. - Forgetting is normal in old age - Particularly explicit memory is affected. - Can be prevented by reducing stress, increasing physical and mental exercise - Some cases forgetting is more serious, and may indicate Alzheimer's. - Older people have more negative and self-conscious views on memory. - When doing a memory test, people seeing the words memory loss or alzheimer’s perform worse than those seeing words like wise and sage. - People who had more negative beliefs about memory declined more than those who didn’t. Learning: - Classical conditioning: respondent, automatic. Pavlov (1897). - A stimulus which originally had no effect on an individual begins eliciting a response in connection with a known stimulus. The bells. - Operant conditioning: instrumental conditioning. Skinner (1953), reinforcement and punishment. - A learner’s behaviour becomes more or less probable depending on the consequences it produces. - Social cognitive theory: Observational learning. Bandura (1977-2006) - Bandura believed people are more affected thinking about a consequence than actually experiencing it. Observational learning is learning by observing the behaviour of others. Bobo doll experiment. ***memory cells*** Language learning: - Is essential to develop well in many areas, including cognition, social skills, memory, and intelligence. - Phonemes: basic unit of sound that can change the meaning of a word. Changing the P sound to a B sound. - Morphemes: basic unit of meaning that exists in a word. Some consist of just one, view, but we can add the morpheme re, to make review. - Syntax: the systematic rules for forming sentences. - Semantics: going beyond the literal meaning of each word. - Pragmatics: rules for specifying how language is used appropriately in different social contexts. - Prosody: the specific intonations or pitches to change how the sounds are produced. Forming a question. Language learning in infancy: - Optimal or sensitive period for language learning. - Cooing: Repeated vowel sounds +- 6-8 weeks - Babbling: Repeated consonant-vowel sounds +- 4-6 months - First words +- 1 year. - Language comprehension +- 10 months (50 words), holophrases, objects and people. - Two words +- 1.5 years - Vocab spurt, infants acquire a new word every two hours. telegraphic speech. - Language errors - Overextension- all animals are cats - Underextension- only my own pet is a cat. - Overregularization- applying rules where they become incorrect. Perspectives on language learning in infancy: - How is language learned? Nature nurture. - Nature: The environmental input is too limited to explain the novel sentences children produce and their use of grammar rules - Thus humans have inborn universal grammar - Pinker: language learning instinct declines with ageing brain (“critical period”) - LAD: Language acquisition device. An area of the brain that can apply universal language rules and sifts through language. - Nurture: Children learn language of their parents, lose sensitivity to other languages and improve language more if interacting frequently with parents - Statistical learning, detecting patterns in language - Children have environments and incentives for learning (motivation) - Interationists: Both nature and nurture are correct. Children’s biologically based competencies and their language environment interact to shape the course of language development. Infants learn language by: - Interacting with caregivers - Expansion - Child directed speech - Infants learn words that accompany the focus of attention - 10 months, only attention to personally relevant - 12 months, joint attention - Action/perception possibilities - Walking opens up a whole new world of things to look at and learn the words for Much variation in language learning: - Much variation in the rate of language learning: - At 2 years of age 10% of children know less than 50 words, while another 10% knows more than 500 words - Quantity and quality of caregiver speech seems to explain a lot of variation in child language development - Mastery motivation: The universal need or want for mastering something. Some infants have a higher sense of motivation. - If two infants get a red ball, one might be inclined to play with it, where the other doesn’t. This doesn’t necessarily mean a lack of motivation, it may just be because the other infant doesn’t deem it worthy of their attention. - A parent who encourages this inquisitiveness leads to the child having higher scores on tests about mental development. Intelligence: What is intelligence: - Piaget: thinking or behaviour that is adaptive to the demands of the environment - Many other experts define it as the ability to solve problems and think abstractly - Many older definitions of intelligence define it as genetically predisposition, but we have now learnt that it is very changeable and subjective to environmental influences. General mental capability: - Ability to reason, plan, solve problems, think abstractly, comprehend complex ideas, learn quickly, learn from experience. Solve problems by thinking: - Comprehend surroundings (ability to deal with complexity) - Not merely book learning, narrow academic skill, or test-taking smarts Main assumption, psychometric approach, or testing approach: - The belief that intelligence can be tested and evaluated. - Intelligence as a top-down process - Spearman's g factor. - The general intelligence is a top down process into the elements of overall intelligence, such as visio-spatial and knowledge. - Spearman’s s factor - Intelligence can be specific, those who score highest on one measure may score lower on other measures. Cattell-Horn-Carrol theory of intelligence: - General intelligence becomes Gf, Gc, Gy, etc. to explain the different factors of intelligence, such as fluid intelligence, crystallised intelligence, and memory. - Fluid intelligence: ability to use your mind to actively solve new problems and are not dependent on prior education or experience. Thought to represent a person’s raw information processing power. - Crystallized: abilities that rely on derived knowledge or acquired skills. At what temperature does water boil, etcetera. Measuring intelligence: - is complex, and many tests have been administered to do this, often faulty. - IQ tests were first developed by Stanford and Binet, who used them to see what students needed more help than others in class. They called the general intelligence g. - Measures a person’s mental age by calculating an intelligence quotient. - These tests are good when they do what they are set out to do, but can be very harmful when they aren’t. - Flynn effect: Intelligence scores on IQ tests have been shown to increase rapidly across generations, meaning that they are not only an inherited thing, but have a lot to do with the environment. - Reasons for this: Pre-scientific to post-scientific operational thinking. Not in the habit to reason beyond the concrete, and formal schooling and changes in the nature of leisure activities. Intelligence extremes: - Intellectual disability, IQ130. Other intelligence approaches: - Multiple intelligences theory: There are different types of intelligences, such as linguistic, bodily-kinesthetic, and musical, who like and need different things to function best. - Sternberg’s theory of successful intelligence: Triarchic approach: practical, creative, and analytic intelligence. - Practical intelligence: using your abilities to solve problems in everyday life. - What might be smart in one context isn’t in another. Street smart. - Creative intelligence: your response to novel experiences which requires active and conscious information processing. - Analytical intelligence: focuses on information processing skills that produce answers to questions on standard measures of IQ. Creativity: - The ability to come up with novel responses appropriate in the context and is valued by others. - Convergent thinking: involves converging on the best answer to a problem. The person who wants to know the correct answer. - Divergent thinking: coming up with a variety of ideas or solutions to a problem when there is no one correct answer. - Divergent thinking is large in creativity, where convergent is measured on IQ tests. - Ideation fluency: The number of different ideas, novel or otherwise, for a specific purpose. Asking what a pencil can do may lead to answers like writing a letter or taking notes, where a creative person could say a backscratcher or hair tie. IQ in infancy: - Bayley scales of infant development (0-3 years), subscales - Motor, measures the infant’s ability to do things such as grasp a cube or throw a ball. - Cognitive, assesses how the infant thinks and reacts to various typical events such as reaching for a desirable object or searching for a hidden toy. - Language, rates the infants preverbal communication and budding skills. - The Bayley scales are however not very accurate in predicting level of IQ later in childhood. Is intelligence malleable? - Yes, you can train for intelligence tests and score better. - IQ is affected by environmental influences - Education - Nurturing home environment (richer language, encouragement) - Older children from small families score on average higher than later-born children from larger families due to less parental attention in the first years. - Poverty - Culture - IQ is affected by genetics. - IQ is affected by other momentary aspects as well - Tiredness - Concentration - Strategy to approach task - Stereotype threat: People perform better or worse when they know that a specific aspect of them is being tested. An asian-american woman performs worse when a test is female and better when a test is asian-american. Criticism on IQ measures: - Arbitrary construct? - Measures concepts that are important in western educational systems - Limited to primary-secondary school, does not measure scientific thinking - Does it fully describe what it means to be intelligent - Are other conceptualizations of intelligence conceivable? National IQ scores: - Low scores on Raven’s progressive matrices, suboptimal living conditions. - Higher scores on IQ tests in healthier, wealthier, and more educated countries. Cognitive vs. social cognition: - Comprehensive battery of cognitive tests to chimpanzees, orangutans, and 2.5 year old human children (before literacy and schooling) - Very similar cognitive skills (general intelligence) for dealing with the physical world; human children are more sophisticated skills for dealing with the social world; specialised skills of social cognition. Lecture 8: Motivation: - Intrinsic motivation: Doing things because you want to rather than because you have to. - Is fostered by fulfilling basic psychological needs - Autonomy, competence, relatedness. - Is related to a mastery goal, doing things because you want to master a skill, to improve. - Extrinsic motivation: Doing things because you have to rather than because you want to. - Relates to performance goals, doing things because you want to prove you can do something. - Development of motivation: - Infancy: Curious active explorers, mastery motivation. - Childhood and adolescence: Development of performance goals and fixed mindset. - Adulthood: Some increase in intrinsic and mastery motivation. Mindset: Personal beliefs about skills. - How the learner and the more knowledgeable-other think about an ability, influences the learning process. - Fixed mindset: The belief that abilities such as intelligence are fixed. - Focused on outcome and looking smart. - Setback= discouraged= helpless. - Avoid challenges - Future development is limited. - Growth mindset: The belief that abilities such as intelligence are malleable. - Focused on learning process - Set back= opportunity to improve= change behaviour/context - Approach challenges - Future development is encouraged. Stress and education: - Out of 15-16 year olds in 72 countries, 66% report experiencing stress over poor grades, and 55% feel very anxious about school testing. - Academic stress is related to: - Decreased motivation, poor academic performance, burnout and dropout, lack of sleep, substance abuse, poor mental health. - Dropping out of educational systems: - Predictors of dropout are many, such as stress, low motivation, and lack of fitness. - Dropping out leads to risks of negative consequences for future development, such as having unfulfilled potential and poor mental health. - Prevention: - Study at-risk students in vocational education and their coaches, who help with both school and personal issues. - Support basic psychological needs by developing an authentic bond, helping achieve their goals, and encourage determining their own path. Effective educational strategies: - Classroom management: High standards, task oriented but comfortable atmosphere, manage problems on the spot, foster social cohesion. - Effective teaching: Takes place in the zone of proximal development, meaning the teacher must adapt to the level of individual students. Support students' intrinsic motivation. Support mastery goals and growth mindset. - Fostering a growth mindset: - Emphasis on outcome vs learning process. - Compliment skills vs learning process - Between-vs-within-person comparison. Alleviate student stress: - Effective time management: Plan ahead by breaking large projects into manageable steps with achievable deadlines. Plan plenty of free time and breaks. - Mindfulness approaches: Breathing exercises. - Cognitive behavioural approaches: Growth mindset, challenge negative thoughts, reframe and normalise setbacks. Self-concept: - Personality: traits and social learning theory, behavioural/emotional patterns. - Dispositional traits: Extraversion/introversion, independence/dependence - Characteristic adaptations: situation specific and changeable ways people change to adapt to their roles and environment as they develop. - Identity: - Self-concept: Your positive and negative views of your traits. What I am. - Self-esteem: Your overall view of your self worth as a person. How good I am. - identity commitments, narrative identity. Experience of self. Infancy: - Newborn, self as distinct from others, “that’s not my hand”. They can turn their cheek into the hand of a caregiver but not when they do it. - From +- 3 months self as a causal agent in the environment. The sense that they can cause things to happen in the world. - Late infancy/early childhood (from +-1.5 years): - Self recognition, categorical self and simple labels, autonomy vs shame and doubt, secondary emotions. - Categorical self. Mike is a boy like me, Mike is not a girl. - I am that person in the mirror. Rouge test. - Self recognition is also culture dependent. An individualistic culture infant will recognise themselves faster than a collectivist. - Early childhood (+-3 years): - More detailed and extensive, possessions connected to self, preferences and accomplishments, initiative vs guilt. - I like school, I have a cat and my house is big, I’m good at climbing. - Late childhood (+-8 years): - Describe concrete psychological and social qualities like abilities, attitudes, and preferences. Social comparison begins, industry vs inferiority. - I am good at school becomes I’m the best in my class, I wish I was liked more, I am nice. - Adolescence (+-12 years): - Describe psychological and subjective attributes, abstract, differentiation, integration. - I am honest becomes I am honest with my friends, not my family. Identity development and decision making: - Classic conceptualization of career choice: - Find an optimal person-environment fit - Rational weighting of factors - Self: Interests, capacities, values - The world: available options, requirements. - Nuances= The decision is messier in reality: - Time pressure - Evaluation of options is coloured by factors like emotions, how well it was presented, what you thought of it last time, incomplete information on options. - Unclear what one's own preferences are. - To make fitting career choices: - Adolescents need to develop their identity by actively exploring, having experience with future career paths, and connect them to their sense of self. - Identity development- Erikson’s theory: Confusion vs identity. Marcia’s statuses explain: - During adolescence, teens move from diffused and foreclosed senses of identity to achieved and moratorium. - Identity achievement, in which commitment is high and the person has gone through a period of exploring many options. - I have searched and found that I am atheist! - Identity moratorium is when a person is trying out roles or activities in order to find the most suitable one. - I’m figuring out what faith and beliefs I hold and work for me - Identity foreclosure is when a decision has been made without looking into alternatives. - My parents are baptist so I’ll be baptist - Identity diffusion is when a person has no strong opinions or convictions and has made no effort to learn about or experience various options. - I haven’t really thought about religion and don’t know what I believe. - Exploration of identity: - Broad exploration, many new options. - In-depth exploration, explore further whether an option fits you. - Ruminative exploration, repeated and unfruitful exploration of options. Lecture 9: Personality development: Personality theory: - Meta narrative conceptual tools - Applied wisdom regarding self-actualization, social systems, and public policy, health, and crime. - People problems, psychological diversity, culture, behavioural residue. - Individual personality: - Physical health, psychopathology, happiness, identity, happiness, identity, childbirth, divorce, financial problems. - Interpersonal: - Social networks, popularity, status, acceptance, romantic relationships. - Social/Institutional: - Educational attainment, occupational status and salary, performance, job/relationship satisfaction, criminality, political attitudes and values. - Psychoanalytic theory: - Personality as inner qualities that develop in a stage-like manner. Influenced by parents at a young age and continues developing in adulthood. - Five factor model (B5) - Neuroticism: Calm, anxious, depressed, irritable - Extraversion: Reserved, sociable, assertive, energetic - Conscientiousness: Reliable, organised, industrious - Agreeableness: Cold, antagonistic, kind, polite, trust - Open-mindedness: Adventurous, curious, creative - Social learning theory: - Rejects trait personality theories and emphasise the role of the environment and situations on influencing and shaping personality. Personality changes when we are in a bar vs when in a library Personality science: - Trait stability: Consistent and enduring dispositions. - Needs and motives, attitudes and beliefs, life narratives. - Personality test-retest over 15 years- 0.60 - Most decay 3-10 years. - r=0.2 after 50 years. - Generalisations: - Can be found across the full lifespan - Increases with age - Decreases with retest interval - Shows a similar magnitude - Genders and across measurement methods. - Life-cycle profiles: - Age: Maturation trajectories - Cohort: Birth cohort+socialisation+culture+events - Period: Changes at a particular time affect all cohorts Temperament: - Basic affect states: - Joy, anger, frustration, sadness, fear, disgust. - Typical variation in affect, activity, attention, self-regulation over time. - Anoetic: Primary process emotional systems - Homeostatic and sensory affects emotions - Basic wants and needs: emotional displays. - Dispositional traits: - Positive emotionality, negative emotionality, surgency, extraversion, neuroticism, conscientiousness. - Effortful control: - Focusing and shifting of attention, inhibitory control, perceptual sensitivity. Openness, preference for new complex ideas vs convention, is difficult to discern in young children. - “Simon says” is a good example of effortful control. Being able to restrain yourself from clapping hands when Simon doesn’t say to do so. - Goodness of fit: the extent to which the child’s temperament is fit to the environment and how they must adapt. Life history theory: - Forecasting childhood development into adulthood. Frustration, impulsivity, persistence. Age 3 to 35 years later 20%. Personality development: - 3-4 - 5-9: Reputation agenda will. - 6-12: Trait terms, scripts, peers. - 12-20+: Identity issues, autobiographical reasoning, retrospection, social construal personality myth. - Basic tendencies (temperament) - Characteristic adaptations: Full structure emerges close to adulthood. Experience and enculturation. - Social cognition and self-related conceptions. Social emotions. - Cognitive adaptations to the social world. - Cognitive content: Attitudes, beliefs, goals, morals, needs, values. - Coping strategies - Self-conceptions self/others. - Schema and life narratives. Personality stability and change: - Intra-individual development: Ways in which we change over time - Structural consistency: Changes in trait structure - Personality coherence: Change in outward manifestation of attributes within an individual over time (manifest vs. latent). - Normative: Maturation or historical processes - Biological phenomena - Experiences and social roles. Males and females: - Females show larger connectivity between the two hemispheres, which to some indicate the reason as to why females can combine analytical and intuitive thinking to come up with beneficial ideas. - Males show larger connectivity within each hemisphere, which to some indicate the reason as to why they can perceive a ball moving quickly toward them and swinging a bat. - Gender roles: The patterns of behaviour that males and females should adopt in a particular society. - Social-role theory: Differences in the roles that women and men play in society do a lot to create and maintain gender stereotypes. - Gender similarities hypothesis: Males and females are more similar than they are different. Developing genders: - Infants: - Already in the delivery room there are societal norms at play. Males are called big guy and tiger while females are called sweetheart or sugar. - At 3-4 months infants can distinguish between male and female faces based on what voice matches them. - Children: - Gender typing: Acquiring behavioural patterns or tendencies to favour gender-appropriate activities. - Rigidity about gender stereotypes is larger between ages 4-7 than older children who tend to adopt a more positive outlook on boys wanting to play with dolls or girls with footballs. - When they are older and their gender roles are more firmly established, they tend to be more flexible in what is for boys and girls. They still believe in stereotypes but they are not as set in stone. - Gender-segregation: Grouping into boys vs girls in regards to friends. - Biosocial theory: Early biological developments influence how people react to a child, and these reactions have to do with children’s assuming gender roles. If a boy would be treated as a girl, at age three he would adopt the gender identity of a girl. - Social learning theory: Children adopt gender roles by differential reinforcement, rewarded for sex-appropriate behaviours and punished for non-conforming behaviours, and observational learning. Lecture 10: Social cognition: Thinking about the perceptions, thoughts, emotions, motives, and behaviours of self, other people, groups, and even whole social systems. Theory of mind: - The understanding of other people’s mental states “mind reading skills”, and these mental states guide and help explain their behaviour. - Emerges at about 4 years old, but typically deficient in children with autism. - False belief tasks: Candles in a crayon box. Three year olds will say Snoopy thinks it’s candles, four year olds will say it’s crayons. - 85% of four year olds passed the task, 80% of children with autism failed. - Development of theory of mind: - Understanding intentions, 6 months: Infants prefer a helper puppet to a hinderer puppet, showing that they understand good and bad intentions when they see them. - Joint attention, 9 months: Both infants and their caregivers look at the same object at the same time. - Imitation, during first year: Shows an ability to mentally represent other’s actions and are likely to understand the goals and intentions behind them. - Pretend play, between 1-2 years: They understand the difference between a fake and a real tea party. - Emotional, desire understanding, after 2 years: Teasing a sibling or comforting a crying classmate shows an understanding that others have emotions that can be influenced, good or bad. - Desire psychology, age 2: - Toddlers talk about what they want and explain their own behaviour and that of others in terms of wants and desires. - Broccoli and crackers: toddlers prefer crackers, and so when seeing an experimenter express distaste for crackers but a like for broccoli, 14 month olds will give them crackers while the 18 month old will give them broccoli despite their own likings. - Belief-desire understanding, 3-4 years: - Children progress to this understanding that people do what they do because they desire certain things, and because they believe that doing these things will get them what they desire. - Nature vs nurture in theory of mind: - Nature: Evolutionary theorists argue that having a theory of mind and other social cognitive skills proved adaptive for our ancestors and became part of our biological endowment as a species through natural selection. - Mirror neurons are believed to be involved when we perform an action and when we observe someone else perform the same action. Observing someone grasp a ball activates the same neurons as when we grasp a ball. - Nurture: Acquiring a theory of mind and other social cognitive skills requires not only a brain but experience interacting with other humans. - A deaf kid to hearing parents can fail at false belief tasks at 8-10 years old. Trait perception: - Young children perceive others in terms of their physical appearance, possessions, and activities. - At seven or eight, children’s descriptions of people show that they think about others in terms of their enduring psychological traits. - Adolescents see people as unique individuals with distinctive personality traits, and often use “because” when describing people’s actions. Perspective taking: - Outgrowing egocentrism and developing perspective taking skills, ability to adopt another person’s perspective and understand her thoughts and feelings. - By age 8-10 children appreciate that two people can have different points of view - By age 12, they become capable of mentally juggling multiple perspectives. - Social cognitive skills continue to improve after adolescence - Elderly people continue to display sophisticated social cognitive skills. When they decline it’s due to declines in fluid intelligence, executive control processes, information processing speed, and memory. Moral development: - Three basic components of morality: - Emotional: feelings regarding right or wrong actions that motivate moral thoughts. - Cognitive: how we think about right and wrong and make decisions about how to behave - Behavioural: how we behave when we experience the temptation to cheat or are called upon to help a needy person. - Cognitive-developmental theory: Moral reasoning according to Kohlberg: - The theory is interested in how we decide to do something, not what we actually do. - Preconventional morality: - Stage 1, avoid punishment: The goodness or badness of an act depends on its consequences. - Stage 2, gain rewards, satisfy need: Conforms to the rules for personal beneficence. There is some regard for the perspective of others, but it is ultimately self-service. - Conventional morality: - Stage 3, seek approval, be good, reciprocity: What is right is what pleases, helps, or is approved by others. - Stage 4, conform, do good for society, preserve order: Now what is right is what conforms to the rules of legitimate authorities and is good for society as a whole. - Postconventional morality: - Stage 5, understand the underlying purpose of rules, democratic change of rules: A person at stage 5 might challenge laws that violate basic human rights. There is an understanding that laws should be based on democratic consensus. - Stage 6, define right-wrong based on own universal standards of respect for all: Ideal morality according to Kholberg. The stage 6 thinker embraces abstract principles of respect for fundamental human rights, principles that all religious and moral authorities would view as moral. Being able to take all perspectives of a decision and coming up with a solution for all. - Psychoanalytic theory: Moral emotion: - This theory highlights the role of emotion on moral standings. Feeling disgust when seeing children in cages or pride when you have done something good. - Empathy’s importance in morality, and can help us engage in prosocial behaviour and disengage in antisocial behaviour. - Social learning theory: Moral behaviour: - Moral behaviour is learned through observations of others and reinforcement and punishment principles. - Moral disengagement: Allowing ourselves to avoid condemning ourselves from immoral acts even though we know right from wrong. - Evolutionary theory: Roots of morality: - All three of the aforementioned views have become part of our human nature because they helped humans adapt to their environments over the course of evolution. Antisocial behaviour: - Phase of development - Late onset (adolescence) - Breaking social convention rules - Occasional aggression or breaking moral rules/laws - Disappears in adulthood - Persistent problematic behaviour - Early onset (childhood) persistently antisocial across lifespan - Conduct disorder - Frequent breaking moral rules/laws, hurting people and animals. - Persistence across life-span. Antisocial personality disorder, psychopathy. - Determinants of antisocial behaviour: - Preconventional moral reasoning - Theory of mind, moral disengagement, and empathy - Biassed information processing: The world as an unsafe, hostile place - Biological factors: Hormones, genes (explains 40% of variation) - Coercive parenting - Patterson: Highly antisocial children and adolescents often grow up in coercive family environments, family members are locked in power struggles, trying to control the others through negative, coercive tactics. Moral socialisation: - Approaches to discipline: - Love withdrawal: Withholding attention, affection, or approval after a child misbehaves. - Power assertion: Using power to threaten, chastise, administer spankings, etc. - Induction: Explaining to a child why the behaviour is wrong, emphasising the effect on others. - Hoffman (2000, 2008) - Newborns display a primitive form of empathy: distressed by other infant’s cries- might be empathy, might be a distressing sound. - By age one to two: become capable of truer form of empathy, such as comforting, but is often done in a egocentric way as they comfort the way they like to be comforted. - By age two: ability to take the perspective of the friend. A two year old brought their own teddy to comfort a friend, but when that didn’t work they brought the friend’s teddy. - Prosocial acts by toddlers: - Helping: 14 month-old infants spontaneously help adults, such as picking up a clothes pin that fell on the floor for them. - Cooperation: 14 month-old infants participate in cooperative games - Altruistic rather than selfish motivations: Toddlers show greater happiness when giving a cracker to a grateful puppet than when keeping it for themself. - A sense of fairness: At 15 months, infants are able to detect fair vs unfair treatment for others. - Kochanska’s research shows that children are likely to be easiest to socialise if they are: - By temperament fearful or inhibited: Likely to experience guilt when they do wrong and to avoid distress in the future - Capable of effortful control (marshmallow test): Are able to inhibit their urges to engage in wrongdoing. - How can parents help their children develop a strong conscience? - By establishing a mutually responsive orientation for caregiver and child: close, emotionally positive, and cooperative relationship in which child and caregiver care about each other - By forming a secure parent-infant attachment Morality in children: - Children can answer and reason in basic moral questions, and are able to judge and favour good intentions over bad ones. - Children can distinguish between moral rules, standards that focus on the welfare and basic rights of others, and social-conventional rules, standards determined by social consensus that tell us what is appropriate in a particular social setting. - They believe that moral rules are more unchangeable than social conventional rules, and judge hitting more harshly than not saying thank you to a teacher, even when hitting is allowed. - Children have a strong sense of fairness, and prefer democratic ways of deciding on games etc. - This is also culture based, where many western cultures prefer equity, and others prefer equality. - Children have a sense of upholding norms, where if two have decided to play together and one suddenly stops, the other might get mad and say you have to do this. Morality in adolescence: - Moral identity: For many, an integral part of who they are, and strive to be caring, fair, and honest. - Dodge’s social information processing model of aggression: Encoding of cues, interpretation of cues, clarification of goals, response search, response decision, behavioural enactment. - This model can show how aggressive adolescents have a hostile attribution bias, or the belief that the world is a hostile place and assume harm. - If one of these adolescents are tripped in class, they are more likely to assume ill-will and react aggressively than that it was a mistake. Lecture 11: Development of emotions: - Parent-child dynamics are the heart of emotional development: Habits of emotional responses are formed in interaction with parents - Continuously affect each other and result in beliefs about the world and emotional responses. - Primary emotions in infancy: joy, surprise, sadness, anger, fear, disgust. - Secondary emotions from +-2-2.5 years: Self-conscious emotions- embarrassment, envy, empathy, pride, shame, guilt - Nature and nurture of emotions: - Nature: innate to some extent - Primary emotions are present from infancy, but are varied from person to person and are influenced by environment and culture. - Nurture: also learned - Social referencing: infants use emotional cues from parents when uncertain - Reinforcing of emotions - Talking about emotions: emotional coaching or dismissal Learning to control emotions: emotion regulation: - Infancy: Sucking on pacifier, turning away, seek comfort from parent - Early childhood: rocking themselves, pushing nasty things away, distracting themselves, repeating words. - Childhood: learning emotional display rules - Adolescence: More emotions, including mixed, less emotional well-being, seem to want to experience more negative and mixed emotions. - Adulthood: More stability, among elderly increased emotional well-being and motivation to feel positive- positivity effect. - Socioemotional selectivity theory: As we age and become more aware of our end of life, we surround ourselves with people who make us happy and do activities that elicit positive emotions. - Positivity effect: The tendency of older adults to remember and pay more attention to positive information than negative information. - Emotional competence: Characteristic patterns of emotional expression, emotional understanding, and emotional regulation skills. - Emotional display rules: Children learn what to feel when based on their culture’s rules and norms. Like don’t laugh when someone falls or look sad at a funeral. Attachment theory: - Attachment: The strong affectionate tie between a person and and intimate companion. - Emotional: emotionally in sync, emotional security - Behavioural: proximity preference, behaviour co–regulated - Develops across a critical period through interactions - Sets the path for development of self, later relationships, psychopathology - Development of attachment- four phases - Undiscriminating (0-3 months): preference for faces and voices, any human. - Discriminating (3-6 months): preference for familiar faces - Proximity seeking (7 months): primary attachment - Goal-corrected partnership (3+ years): notice caregiver’s goals/plans and adapt behaviour accordingly to achieve proximity, possible separation anxiety. - Attachment styles as explained by caregiver leaving experiment: - Secure attachment: Actively explores and interacts with strangers when mother is present, but is upset by separation when she leaves. When she returns the infant is happy and calms down quickly. - Parents are sensitive and responsive to their needs and signals. - Resistant attachment: Infant is not actively exploring or interacting with the stranger. Is upset by separation when she leaves, often more so than secure. When she returns they don’t calm down easily, and often resent the mother for leaving. - Parents are inconsistent, react enthusiastically or indifferently depending on their moods, and are frequently unresponsive. - Avoidant attachment: May play alone but are not very adventurous. Don’t get affected when the mother leaves, nor when she comes back. Act indifferent and distant from caregivers. - Parents are rejecting, unresponsive, impatient, and can be resentful when the child interferes with their plans. - Disorganised-disoriented attachment: Don’t explore or interact with strangers. Sometimes show upset at mother leaving. Confused infants. When reunited with their mothers they may act dazed and freeze or lie on the floor immobilised. - Mainly evident in infants who have been abused or maltreated, and often with parents who are severely depressed or abuse alcohol or drugs. - Development of attachment- role of biology: - Evolutionarily predisposed - Harlow’s study: - Comfort vs physical needs: preference, reaction to general isolation - Sense of security: reaction to fear and novelty - Sensitive period of 1 year - Implications for parenting roles, regulations in orphanages. - Attachment in children - John Bowlby and Mary Ainsworth - Strange situation task: - Separation: leads to stress and attachment behaviour, seeking, crying, screaming, crawling, clinging - Reunion: restoration of proximity, prevention of separation. - Function: survival/stress reduction. - Attachment is a balance between: - Proximity, safety, and security - Exploration of the environment - Bowlby 1951 WHO report: - The complex rich and rewarding relationship with the mother or substitute in the early years underlie the development of character and mental health - The infant and young child should experience a warm, intimate, and continuous relationship with his mother in which both find satisfaction and enjoyment - Maternal deprivation hypothesis: lack of proximity and responsivity of caregiver leads to diathesis - Diathesis-stress: Interaction between predisposition and development within the environment determines pathology vs. normality - Attachment theory: - Integrative, multidisciplinary: - Psychoanalysis: Importance of childhood - Ethology: Proximity as a way to survive - Cognitive psychology: schemes - Systems theory: interactions parent-child - Attachment styles- as told by frozen: - Secure attachment: Kristoff - Secure attachment history, healthy balance of attachment and autonomy - Preoccupied attachment: Anna - Resistant attachment history, desperate for love to feel worthy as a person - Dismissing attachment: Elsa - Avoidant attachment history, shut out emotions, defend against hurt by avoiding intimacy - Fearful attachment: Hans - Disorganised-disoriented attachment history, need relationships but doubt own worth and fear intimacy. - Development of attachment- Role of environment, parenting style during infancy: - Sensitive and responsive = Healthy response style - Involves: Communicating through emotions, learning about the world and safety. Requires social referencing, joint attention. Synchrony: offering stimulation when needed, space when needed. Emotional coordination. - Child reaction: Trust, follows parent’s lead - Inconsistent = Indifference or enthusiasm, parental depression - Child reaction: Child left to regulate own emotions, extreme attempts to elicit responsiveness - Rejecting or overly stimulating = Extreme version of inconsistent, resentful/intrusive - Child reaction: Learn to take distance from parent - Frightened and frightening = Neglect/abuse, parental depression and alcohol/drug abuse - Child reaction: confused. - Parent-child attachment is special - Template for future relationships - And a two way street: Parent to child, a role for oxytocin, cuddle hormone - Oxytocin is released in response to relationships and during pregnancy. The higher oxytocin levels during pregnancy, the more attachment between mother and child. - Attachment later in life: Secure attachment in infancy=good peer relations in childhood=intimate friendships in adolescence= emotionally positive romantic relationships in early adulthood. - Bowlby studied mainly child-parent attachment, but: - Adult/romantic relations are also driven by attachment styles. - Resistance to this idea: - Adulthood considered to be characterised by independence and autonomy. Romantic love as an attachment process: - Hazan and Shafer (1987) - Parallels child-parent and partner relations: - Proximity seeking and responsivity, separation anxiety and stress, physical contact, eye contact, special communication (baby talk) - Hyperactivation/preoccupied (resistant): - Controlling and clinging, arguing when not enough attention/recognition by partner - Deactivation/dismissing (avoidant): - Little self-disclosure, little investment in relationship, ending of relationship in case of problems. - Myroniuk (2024) - Explored adult emotion dynamics after childhood maltreatment - Emotional neglect was associated with dynamics of positive emotions - Distinction between abuse and neglect, in how they were associated with variability and instability of affect - Sternberg triangular theory of love: - Passion: Sexual attraction, romantic feelings, and a sense of excitement - Intimacy: Feelings of warmth, caring, closeness, trust, and respect. - Commitment: First deciding that one loves the other person and then committing to a long-term relationship. Family: - Family systems theory: - Family is a whole, consisting of parts that work together and are affected by each other. - Immediate family and extended family households. - Bronfenbrenner’s bioecological model describes family as a microsystem that interacts with larger social systems. - Family life cycle: a sequence of changes in roles, positions, relationships and developments until they die. - Changes in environment lead to changes in family - More single adults, more postponed marriages, more cohabitation, more unmarried parents, fewer children, more working mothers, more divorce, more single-parent families, more remarriages, more empty nest years, more multigenerational families, fewer caregivers for ageing adults. - Parenting styles: - Authoritarian parenting: Restrictive parenting combining high demandingness and low acceptance-responsiveness. - Children are moody and unhappy, relatively aimless, and unpleasant to be around. - Authoritative: More flexible, quite demanding and exert control, but are also sensitive to their children. - Children are the most well-adjusted, cheerful, achievement oriented, and cooperative. - Permissive parenting: Child centred, few demands and encourages children to express their feelings and impulses. - Children are often impulsive and self-centred, aimless, and low in independence. - Neglectful parenting: Combine low demandingness and low acceptance. They are relatively uninvolved in their children’s upbringing. - Family stress model: Describes the negative effects of financial stressors on a parent's mental health. - Parent effects model: Influences run one way, from parent to child. Becomes a blame the parents model if the child did not turn out well. - Child effects model: highlights the influence of the child on the parent. - Interactional model: Combination of a particular kind of child with a particular kind of parent determines developmental outcomes. - Transactional model: The reciprocal influences of parent and child on one another over time, determines how the parent-child relationship and the child’s development unfold. Lecture 12: Developmental psychopathology: - The study of the origin and course of maladaptive behaviour. - Abnormal development is iterative - Each adaptation to environment or biology provides the foundation for the next adaptation. - Accumulation of problems (diathesis-stress model): Interaction between predisposition and development within the environment determines pathology vs. normality - Biological predisposition is activated by stress -> evokes stressful environmental reactions and experiences -> life stress aggravates disorder- brings about changes in biology -> disorder decreases ability to handle stress = abnormal developmental outcomes. - 3 criteria: - Behaviour falls outside “normal range” - Interferes with adaptation or poses threat to others (surrounding) - Causes personal distress (self or other) Depression: - Intergenerational diathesis: - Parental depression, learning: - Emotional regulation - Interpersonal interaction styles - Mental representation of self and relationships - Increased emotional and cognitive capacity for depressive symptoms. - Best predictor of depression: previous depression - Depression becomes a pattern which one falls into over and over again - With each depressive episode, the pattern is strengthened and is

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