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Chapter 2: Developmental Theories



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Chapter Outline

Chapter 2: Developmental Theories

  1. Theory: A Definition
  1. A theory is a set of interrelated statements that provides an explanation for a class of events.
  2. Functions
    1. To organize observations and to deal meaningfully with information that would otherwise be chaotic and useless
    2. To show relationships among facts and uncover implications that would not otherwise be evident in isolated bits of data
    3. To stimulate inquiry as we search for knowledge about many different and often puzzling aspects of behavior
  1. Psychoanalytic Theories
    Personality is fashioned progressively as the individual passes through various stages and resolves conflicts that are unique to each stage.
  1. Sigmund Freud: Psychosexual Stages of Development
    1. Five stages, each dominated by the development of sensitivity in a particular erogenous or pleasure-giving zone of the body
    2. Each stage presents a unique conflict that must be resolved before passing on to the next stage.
    3. Unsuccessful resolution of the conflict leads to fixation—the tendency to stay at a particular stage
    4. Criticisms:
    1. Few predictions can be tested using the scientific method.
    2. Based on the biases of the male-dominated culture of the Victorian era
    3. Poor guide to healthy personality development because Freud's patients were suffering from emotional difficulties
    1. Generally regarded as a revolutionary milestone in the history of human thought
  1. Erik Erikson: Psychosocial Stages of Development
    1. Eight stages, each of which confronts the individual with a major conflict that must be successfully resolved if healthy development is to occur
    2. Development follows the epigenetic principle.
    3. Unlike Freud, Erikson emphasizes that the continual process of personality development takes place throughout a person's life span.
  1. Behavioral Theory
    Concerned with the behavior of people—what they actually do and say.
  1. Behavior divided into units called responses and the environment into units called stimuli
  2. Emphasizes two types of learning: classical conditioning and operant conditioning
  3. Reinforcement is a key concept in operant conditioning.
  4. Many of the principles of learning have found use in behavior modification.
  1. Humanistic Theory
    Arose in reaction to psychoanalysis and behaviorism
  1. Holistic approach: views each person as more than a collection of physical, social, and psychological components.
  2. Maslow described a hierarchy of needs, ranging from physiological needs and safety needs at the bottom of the hierarchy to self-actualization at the top.
    1. People who are self-actualized share a number of characteristics, including susceptibility to peak experiences.
  1. Cognitive Theory
    Takes issue with a number of behaviorist tenets, and encompasses such phenomena as sensation, perception, imagery, retention, recall, problem solving, reasoning, and thinking
  1. Jean Piaget: Cognitive Stages in Development
    1. Sequential periods in the growth or maturing of an individual's ability to think—to gain knowledge and awareness of one's self and the environment
    2. Schema is the term Piaget used for a cognitive structure that people evolve for dealing with specific kinds of situations in their environment.
    3. Development is a process of adaptation, involving alternating processes of assimilation and accommodation. Balance between the two is equilibrium.
    4. Recent empirical evidence suggests that Piaget underestimated the cognitive abilities of infants and young children.
    5. Piaget's emphasis on the active nature of the child has had a powerful impact on psychological theory and research.
  1. Cognitive Learning and Information Processing
    1. Views the contents of conscious experience and their subjective qualities as dynamic, emergent properties of brain activity
    2. Mental schemas function as selective mechanisms that influence the information individuals attend to, how they structure it, how much importance they attach to it, and what they do with it.
    3. The cognitive learning theory of Bandura places heavy reliance on notions of information processing.
    1. Emphasizes how children and adults operate mentally on their social experiences and how these mental operations in turn influence their behavior
    1. Cognitive learning is also referred to as observational learning, social learning, and modeling.
  1. Evolutionary Adaptation Theory
  1. Derived from Darwin's notion of natural selection
  2. Ethology: study of the behavior patterns of organisms from a biological perspective.
    1. Ethologists view behavior as part of the adaptational package of an organism.
    1. Example: Ethologists regard infants' preadapted behavioral systems and characteristics as releasing stimuli which elicit parenting behavior.
    1. Bowlby incorporated ethological notions such as imprinting into his theory of infant-caregiver attachment in humans.
    2. Some developmental psychologists who have applied ethological notions to human development use the concept of a sensitive period rather than a critical period.
  1. Ecological Theory
  1. Bronfenbrenner centers this theory on the relationship between an individual and their changing environment.
    1. D = f(PE): Development is the result of the interaction between the person and the environment.
  1. Sociocultural Theory
  1. Vygotsky's theory
    1. Development occurs during social interaction.
    2. Culture is assimilated by interactions with other people.
  1. Controversies
    Each of the seven major types of theory dealing with human development has its proponents and its critics. Examining controversies in the study of human development helps further illuminate differences between the theories.
  1. Mechanistic and Organismic Models
    1. Mechanistic model
    1. Analogy of an intrinsically passive machine
    2. Focuses on the parts of machine
    3. Development is viewed as a gradual, uninterrupted adding, subtracting, or altering of the machine's parts.
    1. Organismic model
    1. Focuses on an inherently active organism and describes the whole organism's development as a series of discrete, step-like levels or states
    1. Most psychologists prefer an eclectic approach to the study of development.
  1. Continuity and Discontinuity in Development
    1. Continuity emphasizes focus on smooth, gradual, and incremental change.
    2. Discontinuity emphasizes describing development as a series of steps with clear-cut, even abrupt, changes occurring from one phase to the next.
    3. Recent studies have shown that development demonstrates some stage-like properties and some consistency across domains, "either-or" debates are increasingly regarded as misconceived.
  1. Nature Versus Nurture
    1. Debate over "which" factor, heredity or environment, is responsible for a given trait
    2. The "which" question was replaced with the "how much" question. How much of each are required to produce a given trait?
    1. Identical (monozygotic) twins and fraternal (dizygotic) twins reared in either similar or different environments are often studied.
    1. New question: "How" do hereditary and environmental factors work together to produce behavior?
    1. Continuum of indirectness (Anastasi)
direct contributions

indirect contributions
of heredity
of heredity
    1. Behavioral genetics revealing full complexity of interactions between heredity and environment
  1. Behavioral Genetics
    1. The pendulum seems to be swinging away from the environmentalists toward the side of the biologists who study heredity's contribution to the variation we observe in people's behavior.
    1. Kagan: Timidness seems to be a biological predisposition.
    2. Good parenting and other nurturing experiences can often help children learn to cope with their inherent shyness.
    1. Results of the Minnesota Twin Project emphasize that each personality trait is determined by polygenic inheritance rather than a single gene acting alone.
  1. Boxes
  1. Information You Can Use: Freudian Analysis of Hansel and Gretel
    1. Classic tale is retold as a symbolic representation of oral fixation
  1. Further Developments: Theories of Emotions
    1. Overview of theories of emotion from Aristotle through modern research methods
  1. Human Diversity: Jerome Kagan on the Early Years
    1. Longitudinal studies suggest that children are biologically preprogrammed with basic mental competencies—an inherent blueprint that equips them with the essentials for perceptual and intellectual functioning.
    2. Poor test performance of economically impoverished and minority-group children should not be taken as evidence of permanent or irreversible defects in intellectual ability.

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