Psychoanalytic, Psychosocial, Behavioral, & Cognitive

Psychoanalytic Perspective

• Sigmund Freud—Children move through stages in which they confront conflicts between biological drives and social expectations. How these conflicts are resolved determines personality

  • • Psychosexual stages

      • Healthy personality development depends on how parents manage their child’s sexual and aggressive drives in their first few years

Psychoanalytic Perspective

• Three parts of the personality
  • Id—unconscious and largest portion of the mind
    • Children are born with it
    • Source of basic biological needs and desires
  • Ego—conscious part of the mind
    • Emerges in early childhood
    • Tries to balance the id’s demands
  • Superego—conscience
    • Develops between 3-6 years of age
    • Insists that children conform to the values of society

Erickson’s Psychosocial Perspective

• Psychosocial Development—development of individual’s interactions and understanding of each other and of their knowledge and understanding of themselves as members of society.
  • Views developmental changes in 8 stages (4 during childhood)
  • Each stage necessitates the resolution of a crisis or conflict
  • Each stage represents a pair of most negative and most positive aspect of the crisis for that period.
• Trust-versus-mistrust stage
  • Birth – 1½ years of age
  • Consistently meeting the physical and psychological needs of infants = infants developing feelings of trust.
    • Infant’s interactions with the world are generally positive

• Opposite care leads to mistrust
  • Leaves infant unable to meet the challenges required in the next stage of development.
• Autonomy-versus-shame-and-doubt stage
  • 1½ – 3 years of age
  • Toddlers develop independence and autonomy if exploration and freedom are encouraged
  • Experience shame, self-doubt, and unhappiness if overly restricted and protected.
  • Key to developing autonomy is in the amount of control
    • Too much control
      • Cannot assert themselves and develop their own sense of control over their environment
    • Too little control
      • Children become overly demanding and controlling.
      • Initiative-versus-guilt stage

        • 3 – 6 years of age

        • Children’s desire to act independently conflicts with the guilt that comes from unexpected consequences of such behavior.

        • Physical and emotional consequences

          • e.g. Falling and laughter from others

           

        • Children understand that they are persons in their own right

        • Children begin to make decisions about their behavior

        • To help children resolve the conflict of this stage, parents must react positively to children’s attempts to independence.

          • Don’t just impose everything. Consider them before making decisions that will affect them.

Industry-versus-Inferiority Stage

• 6 – 12 years of age
• Increasing competency in this area characterizes successful psychosocial development.
  • Social interactions
    • Can determine and carry on throughout rest of their life
  • Academic interactions
    • Can permanently affect their next school years and possibly life.
• Difficulties in this stage lead to feelings of failure and inadequacy.
  • e.g. when children stop trying and accept the notion that they are not smart enough.

Identity-versus-role-confusion stage

• Encompasses adolescence
• Time of testing to find their identity
  • Strengths, roles in society, what their capable of, etc
• If confused about their role in life, adolescent may lack stability
  • May struggle maintaining close personal relationships later in life

Intimacy-versus-Isolation Stage

• Early adulthood
• Focuses on developing close relationships with others
• Difficulties in this stage = feelings of loneliness and fear of relationships
• Successful crises resolution – possibility of forming relationships that are intimate on a physical, intellectual, and emotional level.

Generativity-versus-Stagnation Stage

• Middle adulthood
• Generativity—ability to contribute to one’s family, community, work, and society, and to assist the development of the younger generation
• Failure at this stage = feeling stuck in life and may still be trying to find an appropriate career.
• Success at this stage = feeling positive about what future years may bring

Ego-Integrity-versus-Despair Stage

• Later adulthood until death
• Failure at this stage = feeling of regret over what might have been achieved but was not
• Success at this stage = feeling a sense of accomplishment

Behaviorism and Social Learning

• Behaviorism—directly observable events (stimuli and responses) are the appropriate focus of study.
  • Classical Conditioning—reflexive responses
    • Ivan Pavlov
      • Dog salivation to bell
    • John B. Watson
      • “Little Albert” and rat
  • Operant Conditioning—voluntary behavior
    • Reinforcement (+ -)
    • Punishment (+ -)

Social Learning Theory

• Social Learning Theory—emphasizes modeling, imitation, or observational learning as a powerful source of development.
• Albert Bandura (1977)
  • Repeating behavior that was modeled by someone else.
  • Stresses importance of cognition
    • Children gradually become more selective in what they imitate

Piaget Cognitive Development Theory

Cognitive development—process by which a child’s understanding of the world changes as a function of age and experience.

• • Seek to explain the quantitative and qualitative intellectual advances that occur during development.
  • Piaget’s Theory of Cognitive Development (1970)
    • Suggests that children around the world proceed through a series of four stages in a fixed order.
    • Stages differ in quantity of information acquired at each stage and in the quality of knowledge and understanding as well.
    • Movement from one level to the next depends on a child reaching an appropriate level of maturation and being exposed to relevant types of experiences.

Sensorimotor stage (Birth to 2 years of age)

• Children base their understanding of the world primarily on touching, sucking, chewing, shaking, and manipulating objects.
• Initially, children have relatively little competence using language, images, or other kinds of symbols
• Object permanence—the awareness that objects and people continue to exist even when out of sight.
  • Infants at this stage lack Object permanence
  • Critical development during this stage
  • Developed after 9 months of age.
    • e.g. Children younger than 9 months don’t look for hidden toy. Children older than 9 months, do.

Preoperational stage (2 to 7 years of age)

• Use of language is most important development during stage
• Ability to use symbols
  • e.g. push book as if it were a car
• Egocentric thought—a way of thinking in which a child views the world entirely from his/her own perspective.
  • It’s all about the words “me” and “mine”
• Principle of conservation—knowledge that quantity is unrelated to the arrangement and physical appearance of objects
  • Not developed yet by children in this stage.
    • e.g. same amount of water on two different size glasses.

Concrete operational stage (7 to 12 years)

• Mastery of principle of conservation at beginning of stage
• Children begin to overcome some egocentrism
• Children begin to think more logically
• Children learn reversibility
  • Idea that some changes can be undone by reversing an earlier action
    • E.g. rolling a ball of clay into a sausage shape

Formal operational stage (12 years to adulthood)

• Abstract, formal, and logical thinking
• People in this stage approach problems systematically
  • Manipulate factors at will
  • Examine effects of changes in one variable at a time
  • Ability to rule out is unique to this stage
• Many individuals never reach this stage
  • 40-60% of college students and adults fully reach this stage.