Chapter Two: Theories of Development

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Chapter Two Theories of Development

• A developmental theory is a systematic
  statement of principles and generalizations
  that provides a coherent framework for studying
  and explaining development.
• Theories offer insight and guidance for
  everyday concerns by providing a broad and
  coherent view of human development.
• Theories form the basis for hypothesis that can
  be tested by research studies.
• Theories are constantly modified by new
  research and thus enable comprehensive
  communication of current knowledge in a way that
  makes sense.
• The Grand Theories. Comprehensive theories that
  have inspired and directed thinking about
  development for decades but no longer seem as
  adequate as they one did.

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Psychoanalytic Perspective

• Sigmund Freud  Psychosexual Theory
• Stages of psychosexual development
• The Oral Stage
• The Anal Stage
• The Phallic Stage
• The Latency Stage
• The Genital Stage
• Stages of Personality Development
• Id
• Ego
• Superego
• Defense mechanisms
• Repression Projection 
• Rationalization  Regression 
• Displacement  Sublimation 
• Reaction Formation 

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Erik Erikson  Psychosocial Theory

• Erikson's theory consists of eight stages of
  development. Each stage is characterized by a
  different conflict that must be resolved by the
  individual. When the environment makes new
  demands on people, the conflicts arise. "The
  person is faced with a choice between two ways of
  coping with each crisis, an adaptive, or
  maladaptive way. Only when each crisis is
  resolved, which involves a change in the
  personality, does the person have sufficient
  strength to deal with the next stages of
  development" (Schultz and Schultz, 1987). If a
  person is unable to resolve a conflict at a
  particular stage, they will confront and struggle
  with it later in life.

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Eriksons Psychosocial Stages

• Birth to 12 to 18 months Trust vs. Mistrust
• The infant must form a first loving, trusting
  relationship with the caregiver, or develop a
  sense of mistrust.
• 18 months to 3 years Autonomy vs. Shame/Doubt
• The child's energies are directed toward the
  development of physical skills, including
  walking, grasping, and rectal sphincter control.
  The child learns control but may develop shame
  and doubt if not handled well.
• 3 to 6 years Initiative vs.Guilt
• The child continues to become more assertive and
  to take more initiative, but may be too forceful,
  leading to guilt feelings.
• 6 to 12 years Industry vs.Inferiority
• The child must deal with demands to learn new
  skills or risk a sense of inferiority, failure
  and incompetence.
• 12 to 18 years Identity vs. Role ConfusionThe
  teenager must achieve a sense of identity in
  occupation, sex roles, politics, and religion.

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Eriksons Psychosocial Stages - cont

• 19 to 40 years Intimacy vs.Isolation
• The young adult must develop intimate
  relationships or suffer feelings of isolation.
• 40 to 65 years Generativity vs.Stagnation
• Each adult must find some way to satisfy and
  support the next generation.
• 65 to death Ego Integrity vs. Despair
• The culmination is a sense of oneself as one is
  and of feeling fulfilled.

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Learning Perspective

• Behaviorism. Behaviorism is a theory of animal
  and human learning that only focuses on
  objectively observable behaviors and discounts
  mental activities. Behavior theorists define
  learning as nothing more than the acquisition of
  new behavior. There are two different types of
  conditioning, each yielding a different
  behavioral pattern
• Classic conditioning occurs when a natural reflex
  responds to a stimulus. The most popular example
  is Pavlov's observation that dogs salivate when
  they eat or even see food. Essentially, animals
  and people are biologically "wired" so that a
  certain stimulus will produce a specific
  response.
• Behavioral or operant conditioning occurs when a
  response to a stimulus is reinforced. Basically,
  operant conditioning is a simple feedback system
  If a reward or reinforcement follows the response
  to a stimulus, then the response becomes more
  probable in the future. For example, leading
  behaviorist B.F. Skinner used reinforcement
  techniques to teach pigeons to dance and bowl a
  ball in a mini-alley.

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Learning Perspective - cont

• Social Learning
• Bandura's major premise is that we can learn by
  observing others. He considers vicarious
  experience to be the typical way that human
  beings change. He uses the term modeling to
  describe Campbell's two midrange processes of
  response acquisition (observation of another's
  response and modeling), and he claims that
  modeling can have as much impact as direct
  experience.
• Albert Bandura Biographical Sketch
• Abraham Maslow

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The Humanistic Perspective

• The physiological needs.  These include the needs
  we have for oxygen, water, protein, salt, sugar,
  calcium, and other minerals and vitamins.  They
  also include the need to maintain a pH balance
  (getting too acidic or base will kill you) and
  temperature (98.6 or near to it).  Also, theres
  the needs to be active, to rest, to sleep, to get
  rid of wastes (CO2,  sweat, urine, and feces), to
  avoid pain, and to have sex.  Quite a collection!
  
• The safety and security needs.  When the
  physiological needs are largely taken care of,
  this second layer of needs comes into play.  You
  will become increasingly interested in finding
  safe circumstances, stability, protection.  You
  might develop a need for structure, for order,
  some limits.
• The love and belonging needs.  When physiological
  needs and safety needs are, by and large, taken
  care of, a third layer starts to show up.  You
  begin to feel the need for friends, a sweetheart,
  children, affectionate relationships in general,
  even a sense of community.  Looked at negatively,
  you become increasing susceptible to loneliness
  and social anxieties.

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Maternal Deprivation

• 35 years ago or so, a well known psychologist
  named John Bowlby claimed through in depth
  research, that a child who didn't have a close
  and loving relationship with it's mother, would
  suffer serious personality disturbances later on
  in life. For example, Bowlby claimed that if a
  mother died shortly after giving birth, the child
  would be affected by anxieties that would have a
  long-term impact on his or her later character.
  This became widely known as the theory of
  maternal deprivation. Bowlby's research and
  claims opened the floodgates for further research
  in the area of child behavior.
• To explore Bowlby's ideas, Harry Harlow carried
  out some enlightening and important experiments.
  Harlow's experiments involved the rearing of
  Rhesus monkeys away from their mothers. The
  monkeys were also isolated from others. Harlow
  very carefully provided for the material needs of
  the monkeys. The results were fascinating.
• The isolated monkeys showed an extreme level of
  behavior disturbance, and if introduced to other
  normal adult monkeys, they showed fear or
  hostility and refused to interact with them. They
  spent much of their time sitting in the corner of
  the cage and were unable to mate with other
  monkeys, and in most cases they couldn't be
  taught to do so. Interestingly, females who were
  artificially impregnated showed little or no
  attention to their young.

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The Humanistic Perspective

• The esteem needs.  Maslow noted two versions of
  esteem needs, a lower one and a higher one.  The
  lower one is the need for the respect of others,
  the need for status, fame, glory, recognition,
  attention, reputation, appreciation, dignity,
  even dominance.  The higher form involves the
  need for self-respect, including such feelings as
  confidence, competence, achievement, mastery,
  independence, and freedom.  Note that this is the
  higher form because, unlike the respect of
  others, once you have self-respect, its a lot
  harder to lose!
• He also talks about these levels in terms of
  homeostasis. Homeostasis is the principle by
  which your furnace thermostat operates  When it
  gets too cold, it switches the heat on  When it
  gets too hot, it switches the heat off.  In the
  same way, your body, when it lacks a certain
  substance, develops a hunger for it  When it
  gets enough of it, then the hunger stops.  Maslow
  simply extends the homeostatic principle to
  needs, such as safety, belonging, and esteem,
  that we dont ordinarily think of in these terms.
  
• Maslow sees all these needs as essentially
  survival needs.  Even love and esteem are needed
  for the maintenance of health.  He says we all
  have these needs built in to us genetically, like
  instincts.  In fact, he calls them instinctoid --
  instinct-like -- needs.

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Cognitive Theory

• Jean Piaget proposed the idea that cognitive
  development consisted of the development of
  logical competence, and that the development of
  this competence consists of four major stages
• The Sensorimotor Period (birth to 2 years).
  During this time, Piaget said that a child's
  cognitive system is limited to motor reflexes at
  birth, but the child builds on these reflexes to
  develop more sophisticated procedures. They learn
  to generalize their activities to a wider range
  of situations and coordinate them into
  increasingly lengthy chains of behavior.
• Preoperational Thought (2 to 6/7 years). At this
  age, according to Piaget, children acquire
  representational skills in the areas mental
  imagery, and especially language. They are very
  self-oriented, and have an egocentric view that
  is, preoperational children can use these
  representational skills only to view the world
  from their own perspective.

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Cognitive Theory cont

• Concrete Operations (6/7 to 11/12 years). As
  opposed to Preoperational children, children in
  the concrete operations stage are able to take
  another's point of view and take into account
  more than one perspective simultaneously. They
  can also represent transformations as well as
  static situations. Although they can understand
  concrete problems, Piaget would argue that they
  cannot yet perform on abstract problems, and that
  they do not consider all of the logically
  possible outcomes.
• Formal Operations (11/12 to adult). Children who
  attain the formal operation stage are capable of
  thinking logically and abstractly. They can also
  reason theoretically. Piaget considered this the
  ultimate stage of development, and stated that
  although the children would still have to revise
  their knowledge base, their way of thinking was
  as powerful as it would get.

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Information-Processing Model

• How the Brain Stores Memories
• The primary focus of The Information Processing
  Approach is on memory (the storage and retrieval
  of information). The model proposes that
  information is processed and stored in 3 stages.
• Sensory memory (STSS),
• Short-term memory is also called working memory,
  and
• Organization (types) of knowledge
• The brain records an event by strengthening the
  connections between groups of neurons that
  participate in encoding the experience. This
  pattern of connections constitutes the brain's
  record of the event known as the engram. Engrams
  will lie dormant unless they are brought to
  conscious awareness with cues, to evoke, or
  retrieve them back into memory. Psychologists
  refer to storing memories as an encoding
  process--a procedure for transforming something a
  person sees hears, thinks, or feels into a
  memory. Scientists have determined there are
  different methods in how we lay down our
  memories.
• Shallow Encoding
• Short-term memory
• Elaborative Encoding
• Mnemonics

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Socialcultural Theory

• The major theme of Vygotsky's theoretical
  framework is that social interaction plays a
  fundamental role in the development of cognition.
  Vygotsky (1978) states "Every function in the
  child's cultural development appears twice
  first, on the social level, and later, on the
  individual level first, between people
  (interpsychological) and then inside the child
  (intrapsychological). This applies equally to
  voluntary attention, to logical memory, and to
  the formation of concepts. All the higher
  functions originate as actual relationships
  between individuals."
• A second aspects of Vygotsky's theory is the idea
  that the potential for cognitive development is
  limited to a certain time span which he calls the
  "Zone of Proximal Development" (ZPD).
  Furthermore, full development during the ZPD
  depends upon full social interaction. The range
  of skill that can be developed with adult
  guidance or peer collaboration exceeds what can
  be attained alone.
• Epigenetic Systems Theory. Emphasis in on the
  interaction between genes and the environment.

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Systems that Support Development

• Species genotype
• ??
• Selective adaptation
• ??
• Individual genotype
• ??
• Parental interactions
• ??
• Care during infancy
• ??
• Individual phenotype