PERSPECTIVE ON DEVELOPMENT

In this chapter, the objectives are to learn:

- learn the methods employed in studying  development

•  including longitudinal
•  cross-sectional and sequential designs.

- issues that are central to the study of development

•  including continuity vs. discontinuity of developmental processes
• generality vs. specificity in models of development
• the role of heredity and environment

- basic concepts of personality

- how personality development is regarded by

• the biological approach
• the behaviorist approach
• the cognitive approach
• the psycho dynamic approach
• the humanistic approach

-how the development of gender roles is viewed by each of the five approaches.

CHAPTER SUMMARY

• Developmental psychology is concerned with understanding the changes that occur over the course of human life, and the processes which govern the changes.
• In order to study changes over time, researchers tend to use longitudinal studies or cross- sequential studies involving groups of different ages; in some cases, researchers will use a sequential design, which combines elements of both of the other two.
• The origin of personality patterns and traits provides a useful focus for comparison of how the five approaches view development.
• The biological approach emphasizes the role of temperament is personality development, as being based on heredity.
• The behaviorist approach emphasizes the importance of environmental influences, particularly the role of environmental consistency and the person's history of reinforcement in accounting for the consistencies which are attributed to personality.
• The cognitive approach interprets development in terms of cognitive social learning theory, which emphasizes the role of imitation in learning and the importance of cognitive schemata in structuring behavior.
• The psycho dynamic approach, as represented by Freud's psychoanalytic theory, favours an interactionist interpretation of development
• The humanistic approach offers the least detailed analysis of development. Partly this is because emphasizes individual experience and subjective perceptions, which developmental researchers favour the search for common principles based on objective observation.
• The study of gender role development presents a clear example of the challenges of developmental research.
• Overall, developmental psychology represents the field of psychology in microcosm, since development involves virtually all aspects of behavior.

SUMMARY OF PSYCHODYNAMIC APPROACH

• The psychodynamic approach attempts to understand behaviour in terms of the workings of the mind, with an emphasis on motivation and the role of past experience. The approach was pioneered by Sigmund Freud, who developed psychoanalytic theory.
• Psychoanalytic theory emphasis the importance of psychic determinism and innate drives, the role of the unconscious mind, and the continuity of normal and abnormal behaviour.
• In discussing the contents of the mind, Freud distinguished between the conscious mind and the subconscious (compromised of the preconscious and unconscious).
• Freud's theory of personality accounts for behaviour in terms of the dynamic relationships of the id, ego and superego.
• Freud described development in terms of five psychosexual stages distinguished by shifts in the underlying mode of gratification:oral, anal, phallic, latency and genital. Each stage is marked by particular challenges and conflicts; of these, the Oedipal conflict (in the phallic stage) is probably the most significant in terms of later development.
• Psychoanalysis, by making the assumption of psychic determinism, views all behaviour as having meaning; consequently, Freud looked at everything from dreams to parapraxes (Freudian slips) to art as expression of the dynamics of the mind.
• Anxiety, which results from conflicts within the individual, is handled by the use of various defense mechanisms, such as displacement and repression, which reduce anxiety by distorting reality rather than resolving the conflict.
• While very comprehensive, Freud's theory has limitations (including problems of falsifiability), and even his lifetime competing theories were developed, including several by his former students.
• The best known of Freud's disciples are Carl Jung and Alfred Adler, who are considered neo-Freudian theorists; other psychodynamic theorists such as Karen Horney and Erik Erikson, are generally regarded as non-Freudian psychodynamic theorists.
• Carl Jung's theory expanded on the nature of the unsconsious, particularly by including a conception of a collective unconscious whose archetypes influence our interpretation of experiences. Jung rejected Freud's emphasis on sexual motivation, and instead emphasized the importance of individuation, the enhancing of awareness, as a motive for development.
• Alfred Adler was influential in the emphasis he gave to issue of esteem, and many of his terms, like inferiority complex and style of life, have become common usage.
• Psychodynamic theories provide a distinctive approach to the understanding of behaviour; the primary difficulty is finding an effective way to evaluate the various theories within the approach.

SUMMARY OF COGNITIVE APPROACH

• The cognitive approach emphasizes the role of mediating processes in human behaviour. The central assumption is that behaviour can best be understood by looking at the processes which come between an environmental stimulus and the behavioural response.
• Models based on the role of mediating processes, such as the information processing model, have increased our understanding of phenomena like memory and problem solving, and also offered practical insights on enhancing their effectiveness.
• Memory is regarded as having three separate stages- sensory memory, short-term memory and long-term memory. Each stage has distinctive characteristics, with transfer between stages dependent on attention, rehearsal and coding.
• Forgetting from LTM can be interpreted in terms of either interference on context-dependence, each interpretation has been productive though in recent years the concept of context-dependent forgetting seems to have attracted more attention.
• Problem solving involves a series of distinct stages. Problems can be described as either convergent or divergent, depending on the number of possible solutions and the process for reaching a solution.
• While Gestalt psychologists emphasized the importance of an appropriate mental set and insight, more recent research suggests that problem solving skills involve learning to learn.
• In terms of information processing theory, solving a problem requires defining the initial state, goal state and operators. With distinct stages generating solutions can involve the use of either algorithms or heuristics.
• Language is an open-ended system of symbolic communication, whose basis may be partially dependent on innate physiological capacities, and partly learned.

• Controversy exists concerning studies of language capacities in other species, particularly primates who have learned sign languages.
• There is an interactive relationship between thinking and language, with the language we use at ;east partially influencing the way we think.
• The cognitive approach has also been applied to issues of social cognition such as cognitive dissonance and attribution theory. Cognitive appraisal theory has been used to understand emotions.

MY LEARNING INSIGHTS ABOUT BEHAVIOURIST APPROACH

The behaviourist approach studies observed behavioural responses of humans and animals. The behaviourist approach believes we learn to behave in response to our environment, either by stimulus-response association, or as a result of reinforcement. Important contributors to the behaviourist approach are Ivan Pavlov, with his theory of classical conditioning, and BF Skinner, and his work into operant conditioning. Classical conditioning concerns learning by association. Operant conditioning concerns the use of environmental reinforcers in its explanation of why we learn to behave as we do. Classical conditioning emphasises conditioning, spontaneous recovery, stimulus generalisation, stimulus discrimination, and reinforcement in the learning process. Operant conditioning tells us that the type of reinforcer encountered by the organism can influence this process of reinforcement. Reward, or positive reinforcement tends to encourage the repetition of a learned behaviour. Avoidance of unpleasant consequence, or negative reinforcement, tends to discourage the repetition of a discomforting behaviour. Classical conditioning has been applied regards behaviour shaping and to behaviour therapies, such as systematic desensitisation, implosion therapy, andaversion therapy. Operant conditioning has been applied to behaviour modification regimes such as the token economy andprogrammed learning. Reinforcement techniques like fixed ratio and fixed interval schedules have been found to be of benefit in new learning situations. Behaviourist ideas, especially those of BF Skinner, have been particularly influential to education. However, the thoughts, feelings, and behaviours of higher-level species, such as human beings, are nowadays thought far more sophisticated than the behaviourist approach originally thought. 

SUMMARY OF BEHAVIORIST APPROACH

• The behaviourist approach emphasizes the study of observable responses, and rejects attempts to study internal processes like thinking.
• In doing so, behaviourist focus on learning as the primary factor in explaining changes in behaviour. Depending on the type of response, this involves either classical conditioning or operant conditioning.
• Classical conditioning is concerned with how conditioned stimuli come to elicit conditioned responses- reflex responses which are normally elicited by unconditioned stimuli.
• Classical conditioning can be applied to a number of aspects of human behaviour, including emotional responses like fears, and even activity of the immune system.
• Operant conditioning is concerned with how the probability of the voluntary 'operant' response changesas a function of the environmental consequences (reinforce) which follow the response.
• This process of reinforcement can be analyzed in terms of the type of reinforcer, the contingency of reinforcement and the schedule of reinforcement.
• The application of the operant conditioning to everyday behaviour is commonly called behaviour modification; related research includes the effects of aversive control and methods of altering behaviour by biofeedback, among others uses.
• Recent research has indicated that while conceptually distinct, classical and operant conditioning are interrelated in actual behaviour. In addition, research on biological constraints on learning has suggested that there are limits to the generality of conditioning principles, as illustrated by the concept of preparedness.

BEHAVIORIST APPROACH

1) What is Behaviorist Approach ?

 its including genetics and brain chemistry, are de-emphasized in favor of environmental factors.

2) What is learning ?

Learning psychology is the theory behind research-based strategies used to design teaching materials and deliver instruction to students of different ages, learning styles and other characteristics. Understanding how people learn provides the basic framework for creating teaching and learning practices.

3) what are the two kinds of learning ?

    

  and their differences ?  

4) What is Behaviorism ?

Behaviorism holds that only observable behaviors should be studied, as cognition and mood are too subjective. According to behaviorist theory, our responses to environmental stimuli shapes our behaviors. Important concepts such as classical.
5) What is parsimony ?
The principle of parsimony is defined as "a scientific rule that states that if there exists two answers to a problem or a question, and if, for one answer to be true, well-established laws of logic and science must be re-written, ignored, or suspended in order to allow it to be true, and for the other answer to be true no such accommodation need be made, then the simpler of the two answers is much more likely to be correct.
6) What is associationism ?
associationism, theory that all consciousness is the result of the combination, in accordance with the law of association, of certain simple and ultimate elements derived from sense experiences.
 7) Who is Edwin L. Thorndike ?
Edwin L.Thorndike, was an American psychologist, who’s thinking is thoroughly associationistic. He was a functionalist in his emphasis on the utilitarian aspect of psychology.
8) What is the law of effect ? 
The law of effect is a principle of the psychology of learning described by Edward Thorndike (1911): It holds that responses that produce a satisfying or pleasant state of affairs in a particular situation are more likely to occur again in a similar situation. 

9) what is response ?
 response is any reaction to stimulus, whether over or mental, for the behaviorist,a measurable change in behavior.
10) what is reflex ?
 reflex is an unlearned response that can be striggered by specific environmental stimuli.