Human Development, Personality and Individual Differences

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Human Development, Personality and Individual
Differences
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Human Development, Personality and Individual
Differences

• Timetable
• 24 weeks
• 12 weeks Developmental Psychology
• 12 weeks Personality Individual Differences
• Assessment
• Assignment 1 Essay (2,500 words)
• Assignment 2 Case Study (2,500 words)
• Assignment 3 Exam (2 hours)

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Reading List

• Key Texts
• Bee, H., Boyd, D (2004). The Developing Child.
  New York Pearson.
• Friedman, H. S and Schustack, M. W. (2006).
  Personality Classic theories and modern
  research. Pearson Education.

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Semester 1 Exploring the Journey of Life

• Dr. Neil Ferguson

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Content

• This module covers human development as opposed
  to child development which means that it is
  concerned with the changes which take place
  during a lifetime from conception to old age.
  The changes which occur in humans can be
  discussed at different levels, for example
  biological (physical), cognitive and social.
  Other changes take place developmentally such as
  in language and moral reasoning ability. All of
  these changes take place throughout life,
  occurring at the same time and interacting with
  one another for example it could be argued that
  as a person's cognitive ability develops then
  their capacity for moral reasoning and social
  interaction should also develop. This module is
  not only interested in the different changes
  which occur but also in the ways in these
  interact with one another

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Major Periods of Human Development
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Major Domains of Study in Developmental
Psychology
         Physical Development CChanges in body
size, proportions, appearance, functioning of
body system. Perceptual and motor capacities,
physical health. Cognitive
Development CChanges in intellectual abilities,
attention, memory, academic and everyday
knowledge, problem solving, imagination,
creativity, and language.      Emotional and
Social Development CChanges in emotional
communication, self-understanding, knowledge
about other people, interpersonal skills,
friendships, intimate relationships, and moral
reasoning and behaviour.
        
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What we study this Semester

• Autism Developmental Disorders
• Causes of autism
• Developmental neuropathology
• Causes (eg. genes, toxins, MMR triple vaccine)
• Cognitive Development
• Nervous system develops children undergo new
  experiences
• Children as explorers
• Application to educational practice, dyslexia

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What else we Study this Semester

• Moral Development
• What is a moral person?
• How do we develop our morals?
• Moral development under stress (war, prison)
• Psychology of Ageing
• Ageing is associated with decline
• Yet we are developing as well (to cope, wisdom)
• New developmental opportunities
• New area of study

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Further General Reading

• Bee, H. Bjorklund, B. R. (2004). The Journey of
  Adulthood. NJ. Prentice Hall.
• Berk, L. E. (2001). Development Through the Life
  Span. Boston Allyn Bacon.
• Berger, K, S. (2001). The Developing Person
  Through the Life. New York Worth.
• Bryant, P. (1996). Developmental Psychology.
  Longman
• Feldman, R. S. (2006). Development Across the
  Life Span. NJ Prentice Hall.
• Miller, P, H. (1997). Theories of Developmental
  Psychology. New York Freeman.
• Slater, A. Muir, D. (1999). Developmental
  Psychology. Oxford Blackwell.
• Independent Study You will have gathered by now
  that achieving a good grade for this module is
  going to require a considerable amount of
  independent study. This is a third year module
  and so we will be expecting you to be turning to
  journal articles more than books to support your
  studies.

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Classic Studies The most important, studies in
Child Development

• Dixon (2003) conducted a study with 1,500 members
  of the Society for Research in Child Development
  to design a list the 20 most important studies in
  child development and we are going to get a
  flavour of Developmental Psychology by exploring
  a few.

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Piaget, J. (1936, 1952). The Origins of
intelligence in Children. New York International
University Press.

• Studied his 3 children over 3,000 days during the
  1920s and 30s, he even employed his wife to
  help out, in an attempt to understand
  intellectual development from birth to 2 years.
• He created dozens of methodologies to study their
  thinking abilities from the first week of their
  birth. Such as
• The Means-End Task, eg. you perform one action to
  achieve a desired second action.
• Object Permanence Task, tests the assumption that
  things continue to exist even when we can no
  longer see them.

• He describes the Sensorimotor Period of child
  development in 6 substages.
• The research illustrates that development
  followed an evolutionary route, with invariant
  development based on the adaptive processes of
  assimilation and accommodation of schema.
• This book led to a boom of Piagetian research in
  the 1960s and 70s , while since his death in
  1980 he has received considerable criticism.
• However, the majority of the criticism is based
  on when the observed cognitive abilities emerge
  rather than whether they exist

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Vygotsky, L. S. (1978). Mind in Society The
Development of Higher Psychological Processes.
Cambridge, MA Harvard University Press.

• Born in 1896 and died in 1934 after publishing
  180 books and papers.
• He was Russian and influenced by Marx. It is
  important to note that the 1978 book was heavily
  edited and some argue due to the Cold War a
  little misrepresented.
• His work emphasizes the social environment and he
  believed laboratory research led to artificial
  psychology
• He studied speech and tool use amongst children,
  believing that true human behaviour was when tool
  and speech use converge.
• Vygotsky studied children and adults from 5 yrs
  to 27yrs. By playing a game like taboo.

• Thus the development of higher psychological
  processes is a result of progressive
  internalization of external words and symbols
  through social communication.
• Vygotsky illustrates the importance of the social
  interaction between child and adult mentor in
  solving problems. The child is an apprentice
  learning cognitive strategies from adults and
  peer mentors, who not only teach the child how to
  solve problems, but motivate and assist.
• Further, by emphasizing particular tasks, culture
  shapes the nature of cognitive development.

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Bowlby, J. (1969). Attachment and Loss. Vol 1.
Attachment. New York Basic Books.

• A Freudian psychoanalyst who was frustrated with
  the psychoanalytical approach which focused on
  parent child relationships retrospectively. So we
  wanted to design a prospective psychoanalytical
  approach to improve scientific credibility.
• To achieve this he planned to observe children
  when they were separated from their mothers and
  generate a theory based on the observations.
• His colleague filmed 2-3 yr old children while
  they were staying in hospitals and residential
  nurseries for limited periods of time.
• Their observation revealed 3 phases of separation
  behaviour
• Protest
• Despair
• Detachment

• Bowlby looked to Ethology for answers and argued
  that these behaviours were based on survival in a
  primeval environment and they involved
• Imprinting
• Maternal Instincts
• However for a successful attachment both baby and
  mother have to be mutually responsive to each
  other, and if a child is denied contact with an
  attachment figure emotional trauma may result.

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Chomsky, N. (1957). Syntactic Structures. The
Hague Mouton.

• Chomsky has revolutionised child psychology,
  anthropology, artificial intelligence, cognitive
  science, linguistics, neuroscience, philosophy
  and political theory.
• Through Syntactic Structures, Chomsky outlines
  his nativist theory of language development.
• This approach argues that there is a genetically
  determined innate mechanism that directs the
  development of language, thus people have an
  innate ability to use language, which develops
  automatically through maturation.

• Therefore everyone, across all cultures share a
  similar underlying universal grammar and that
  people are genetically hardwired to learn
  language via an Language-Acquisition Device (LAD)
• This caused a stir to say the very least and
  research has been conducted with apes and CT
  scans to prove and disprove Chomskys ideas which
  has led to a much greater understanding of child
  language acquisition.

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Harlow, H. F., Harlow, M. K (1965). The
Affectional Systems. In A. Schrier et al (eds.),
Behavior of nonhuman primates Modern research
trends. New York Academic Press.

• Explored the emotional development of infant
  rhesus monkeys and found 4 normal stages of the
  infant-mother emotional system
• Reflex Stage
• The Comfort Attachment Stage
• The Security Stage
• The Separation Stage
• Harlow Harlow then moved their research to
  explore emotional development with (n 60)
  monkeys who were intentionally separated from
  their mothers.
• He created 2 surrogate mothers, a cloth and a
  wire mother and the monkeys were provide with a
  combination of lactating and non- lactating
  surrogate mothers. He also induced fear into some
  of the infant monkeys or placed them in strange
  rooms.

• The infants preferred the cloth mother even if
  it didnt lactate,
• Infants raised by cloth mother behaved like a
  normal monkey when faced with a strange or
  fearful situation. However, those with wire
  monkeys behaved like deprived on
  institutionalized children
• Impacted on both the behavioural and Freudian
  approaches prevalent at the time.

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Things to Think About

• The interaction between fields of study.
• The variety of methodology.
• The range of participants.
• Comparisons with other primates.
• The role of our genes.
• The role of the environment.
• The interaction between the nature and nurture.