Reading 2 Study Guide for Chapter 2 of Introduction to Developmental Theories

Modified: 2024-05-08 3:50 AM CDST

Psychologists and other scientists do not just collect data willy nilly. Instead, they use theories to guide their research and to point the way for further exploration. Theories help make sense of the data collected from research. Theories are provisional because new data may cause a theory to be revised or even discarded.

• What is a Theory
  • Theories help us understand the why and how questions surrounding behavior
  • Developmental theories help explain questions about development's changes and the influences of the environment
  • Think of theories as akin to a blueprint, a guideline, or a model
  • Theories should be tested by research and modified as necessary
  • Good theories are constructed in such a way as to be testable and refutable
• Psychodynamic Theory
  • Freud's Biography
    • Sigmund Freud was born in Freiburg, Moravia (modern Pribor, Czech Republic), the first child of Jewish parents. His father, Jacob, worked in the wool business, but economic circumstances three years after Sigmund’s birth forced him and his family to move to Vienna. Sigmund Freud lived there from that time until his forced exile to London in 1938 to escape the Nazis.
    • In his writings Freud often alluded to his happy childhood in Freiburg, especially his early close relationship with his mother, Amalia. The birth of his sister, Anna, altered young Sigmund’s relationship with his mother, he later recalled. That, along with the unusual family structure he lived in—his father was 20 years older than his mother and had two sons from an earlier marriage living with the family—may have contributed to some of Freud’s later theorizing about the effects of early experience on personality.
    • After the family arrived in Vienna, they lived thriftily. His mother gave birth to four more sisters followed by a brother, Alexander. Anna Freud later wrote that ten year-old Sigmund suggested that name at a family council in honor of Alexander the Great (Gay, 1988). Freud held the role of first child tightly even to the extent of having his own room despite the family’s bleak economic circumstances. He was first in his class at the gymnasium, read widely in German, English, French, and Spanish, and developed a lifelong interest in the classics and archeology.
    • Despite his humanist inclinations, he enrolled in the medical school of the University of Vienna although he never felt any strong inclination to become a physician. During his eight years of medical training, he took a wide variety of courses including some from Franz Brentano. He also tried his hand at research in biology.
    • His first publication followed his dissection of hundreds of eels in an attempt to assess whether they were hermaphroditic. After he received his medical degree, he went to work for several years in the lab of Ernst Brücke, an eminent physiologist. There, Freud developed his scientific skills and came to possess a positivist attitude toward science. Brücke, citing the better economic prospects in medicine, urged him to leave the lab and open his own medical practice. That meant obtaining clinical training in the medical specialties at a hospital. Freud did so and developed an interest in neurology. He won a travel grant to Paris to study with one of the most prominent neurologists of his era, Jean-Martin Charcot.
  • Freud's Theory
    • Freud’s main ideas can be summarized into three separate categories: the structure of mental life, the development of the personality, and the defense mechanisms.
    • Freud wished to put the roots of personality in biology so he first posited the id as the home of the libido or the instinctual sex drive. Later, he felt forced to add another instinct to explain human aggression. He called that thanatos or the death instinct. The id and thanatos were present at birth and only gradually brought under control by the two other parts of the personality, the ego and the super-ego.
    • The ego developed in childhood through experience and was under control of the reality principle. Thus, one difference between infants and children was that the latter could begin to control their ids because of their stronger egos.
    • The super-ego developed with social experience and was composed of two parts: the conscience and the ego-ideal. From the conscience came knowledge of right and wrong or morality. The ego-ideal, on the other hand, was a kind of inner model of oneself created from experience with others. For instance, statements by adults such as: “Good boys do not hit their sisters” or “Nice girls keep their clothes clean” could, over time, contribute to the construction of individual ego-ideals.
    • The personality, then, consisted of those three components: id, ego, and super-ego. Only the ego was visible to others; it was on the surface. Freud (1923/1960, p. 15) wrote, “It is easy to see that the ego is part of the id which has been modified by the direct influence of the external world.” The id and the super-ego operated internally, with the id pressuring the personality to satisfy its innate urges. At the same time, the super-ego acted as a brake on the system, resisting much of the id’s pressure.
    • The picture above is complicated, however, by which parts of the mind are conscious or unconscious. To Freud, the unconscious parts were the largest and included all of the id and parts of the ego. The conscious part was the smallest and lay at the top of the ego near the surface in Freud’s topological model. In between the conscious and unconscious parts was the preconscious. According to his model, some parts of the unconscious were repressed and could not be brought into the preconscious. Other parts of the unconscious, though, could be moved into the preconscious. Once an item was in the preconscious it was readily accessible to the conscious. Thus, mental life was an amalgam of unconscious, preconscious, and conscious ideas. The id, the ego, and the super-ego completed the complex picture.
    • Although Freud never worked with children, he nevertheless created psychoanalysis as a developmental stage theory. The stages developed in conjunction with the id, ego, and super-ego and children’s personalities and behaviors changed accordingly as they passed through the four stages.
    • The stages were associated with the pleasures derived from the control over various parts of the body as children matured and grew. Imagine two hungry children one older than the other. The younger one, a two-year old wants a cookie and asks her mother for one while she is speaking on the phone. Instead of receiving a cookie, her mom puts her in time out. Now imagine the other child, a five-year old. She waits until her mother finishes speaking on the phone before asking for a cookie. She gets a cookie.
    • Freud might have argued that each child possessed the same level of hunger or the same amount of id energy. But, the younger child was unable to suppress her id and consequently ended up not getting a cookie. The older child, however, realized from experience that if she asked her mother for a cookie while she was speaking on the phone, then no cookie would be forthcoming. That child, Freud might say, already possessed the reality principle, knowing that interrupting her mother while she was on the phone would not get her a cookie.
    • Stages
      • The first stage was the Oral Stage. It lasted from birth through the first year of life. Freud called it the oral stage because children used their mouths to derive pleasure. The evolutionary implications of the Oral Stage were obvious. Human children, being mammals, had to find, latch onto, and suck from their mother’s nipples.
      • The second stage was the Anal Stage. It lasted from ages 1 to 3 and involved the control of elimination of urine and feces.
      • The next stage was the Phallic Stage. It lasted from ages 3 to 6 and was the most important of the stages because, according to Freud, it included the Oedipus Complex for boys and the Electra Complex for girls.
      • From ages 6 until puberty, Freud posited his Latency Stage, where there was no clear indicator as in the earlier stages. During the Latency Stage, boys and girls avoided each other, played in same sex groups, and saw the other gender as alien.
      • Freud’s last stage, the Genital Stage, emerged after puberty and marked the successful end of normal psychosexual development. In this stage, boys and girls quickly developed an interest in each other. Biologically, this stage was key toward the maintenance of the human species over time.
    • Anxiety
    • Anxiety and its resolution was a major part of Freudian theory. Freud linked anxiety to the ego, id, and super-ego.
    • Reality anxiety was not imagined; it came from threats to life and limb from external events. So, facing a mugger pointing a gun is a good example of reality anxiety. The mugger is real, the gun is real, and death or injury may be imminent.
    • Neurotic anxiety came from the id and was the fear of doing something sexual or violent at the wrong time or place. So, striking a boss after being fired is a good example of neurotic anxiety. There, the id broke through the ego’s defenses and caused even more trouble than simply being fired.
    • Moral anxiety came from the super-ego. There, a forbidden action occurred, having extramarital sex with a neighbor, for example. The super-ego was insufficiently strong to hold back the id’s pressure. But, guilt now followed (instead of pleasure) and feelings of worthlessness and shame might arise.
    • Freud believed that patients did not realize exactly how they coped with their problems. He proposed that they did so via defense mechanisms, or unconscious methods they employed unknowingly that helped them allay or disguise their anxieties. Although it was Freud’s daughter Anna who formalized the definitions shown below (Freud, 1946).
    • Defense Mechanisms
    • Defense mechanisms operate unconsciously and they distort reality in a way that reduces anxiety. Repression does so by putting the anxiety-arousing item into the unconscious, thus hiding it from the ego. But in Freudian theory, simply placing the item in the unconscious does not mean that it is gone. It can still slip into consciousness during dreams, slips of the tongue, or in humor. One goal of psychoanalysis was to uncover those repressed items and confront them.
    • Denial is another defense mechanism in which reality is distorted in order to reduce anxiety. Denial is refusing to see or admit the truth of a situation. Parents, often, are in denial about their children. They may, unconsciously, believe that their children are smarter, better behaved, or more moral than they actually are. For parents to think otherwise might raise their levels of anxiety to a point too high for them to handle.
    • Projection is another common defense mechanism. It consists of blaming others or blaming things instead of blaming oneself. People who project reduce their anxiety because they hardly ever blame themselves for anything. Imagine playing doubles tennis with a poor partner. But, that partner refuses to admit a lack of tennis skill. Instead, missed shots or net balls are blamed on the wind, falling leaves, or distractions from other players or spectators.
    • Rationalization reduces anxiety by substituting a socially acceptable reason for one that is socially unacceptable. So, failing a class because of being lazy might arouse high levels of anxiety. But, failing the class because of exhaustion is less anxiety arousing.
    • Intellectualization is a defense mechanism where emotion is actively suppressed and knowledge is sought instead. It is as if cold hard facts are substituted for an emotional reaction. So, faced with a life-threatening illness a patient may turn to the Internet and devour all of the information available online about the disease. Doing that may prove to be less anxiety arousing than facing the reality of imminent death.
    • Regression is retreating developmentally to an earlier way of coping with anxiety. Typical expressions of regression might include crying, throwing a tantrum, or refusing to continue an activity. The volatile professional tennis player Ilie Nastase regressed once during a match following what he thought was a bad call by the chair umpire. His opponent was serving, so Nastase stood to receive serve but held his racquet under his arm and allowed the serves to come in without returning them. Regression is often childish.
    • Reaction formation is one of the better-known defense mechanisms. In reaction formation people unconsciously express the exact opposite of their true feelings. Doing otherwise would arouse too much anxiety. Consider the young teacher whose first job might be at a tough, inner city school where students are violent and gang activity is rife. He might say, “I love my job” and really mean it. Because to admit to himself that he wasted four years in college to take a dangerous and low-paying job might be too anxiety provoking. Also think of all of the movies where the stars first “hate” each other. It’s almost cliché to realize that they will marry by the end of the film.
    • Displacement is another well-known defense mechanism. Here, the super-ego prevails, warning off (again unconsciously) the ego from engaging in some forbidden activity such as having an affair or beating up the boss. Instead, that energy is redirected into a more socially acceptable behavior. Engaging in hobbies or playing musical instruments being classic examples.
    • Compensation is another defense mechanism in which a substitution takes place unconsciously. Here the issue is a perceived deficit, perhaps physical or intellectual, and is compensated for by becoming skilled in another area. The most famous example (and most likely highly exaggerated) was Napoleon’s lack of stature. The punch line being that he compensated by attempting to conquer the whole of Europe!
      
• Psychosocial Theory
  • Erik Erikson, the father of developmental psychology, extended Freud's stages beyond childhood and rolled culture into his eight psychosocial stages:
    • Trust vs Mistrust (birth to 1)
      • Are your caretakers responsible?
    • Autonomy vs Shame and Doubt (1 to 2)
      • Can you explore the world?
    • Initiative vs Guilt (3-5)
      • Can you initiate activity?
    • Industry vs Inferiority (6-11)
      • How do you compare to others?
    • Identity vs Role Confusion (adolescence)
      • Who am I? What do I want to become?
    • Intimacy vs Isolation (young adulthood)
      • Can I find a partner?
    • Generativity vs Stagnation (middle adulthood)
      • Am I in a career or stuck in a deadend job?
    • Integrity vs Despair (late adulthood)
      • Did I live the life I wanted?
  • Erikson's theory may be culture bound (e.g., to Western ideals)
  • It may be to focused on the stages
• Exploring Behavior
  • Pavlov's Biography
    • Ivan Pavlov, the son of a Russian Orthodox priest, was born and raised in the small peasant village of Ryazan. As a youngster, Pavlov expected to follow his father into the priesthood.
    • Pavlov was forced to enter school later than normal because of a bad fall.
    • Pavlov attended the local church school, which was relatively immune from Count Tolstoy’s campaign against science education in the state supported schools. Thus, he received a well-rounded education.
    • Pavlov matriculated at St. Peterburg University the same year that Sechenov resigned. Ilya Cyon was Sechenov’s successor and he quickly established a reputation as tough teacher. Pavlov, however, prospered under him and stayed an additional year in order to complete a research project on the pancreas, one that won him a gold medal and a scholarship.
    • Pavlov had long been interested in the physiology of digestion
    • Soon after, Pavlov met Sergei Botkin, he had revolutionized the study of physiology in Russia and because he was so busy needed someone to supervise the graduate students in his animal laboratory. Pavlov got that job and, thanks to Count Tolstoy’s policies, had many graduate students to supervise.
    • Pavlov successfully managed the laboratory and its students, gaining valuable experience in supervising research in the process.
    • In order to improve his surgical skills, he took leave from his work in Russia to spend two years in Germany studying with Carl Ludwig. After he returned, he won another gold medal for his own research and completed his medical training.
    • An appointment at the Military Medical School in St. Petersburg followed which finally took him and his family out of the near-poverty conditions under which they had been living. He also was named director of the Physiology Department of the newly founded Institute of Behavioral Medicine, modeled after the Pasteur Institute in France and funded by a rich Russian patron. Pavlov now held two appointments, one at the Military Medical School and one at the new Institute. Finally, he possessed all of the facilities and funds required to conduct his research in digestion.
  • Classical Conditioning
    • Ivan Tolochinov, one of Pavlov's students, first noticed that dogs began to salivate to non-food cues; that they were learning to anticipate food when it was paired with a neutral stimulus. The evidence was that the dogs began to salivate to stimuli such as color and odor alone. All that was required was the close pairing in time of such neutral stimuli followed by a food stimulus.
    • UCS--UCR: The unconditioned stimulus (UCS) is biologically paired to the unconditioned response (UCR)
      • Examples: drink and drinking, food and eating. Note that no learning is required.
    • CS--CR: At first the conditioned stimulus (CS) has no effect. But, when it is repeatedly paired with the UCS the CS produces a similar response to the UCS
    • CS-->UCS
      • This is the formula for classical conditioning
      • Eventually, the CS will produce the CR (which is very similar to the UCR)
      • In other words, the CS is a signal that the UCS is coming
      • In response, the organism anticipates the coming of the UCS and produces the CR
        • Example: Jaws movie. There, the CS was the eerie music that preceded a shark attack. Eventually, the audience anticipated seeing an attack or the shark after hearing the music several times.
  • Watson's Biography
    • John B. Watson was born into a large family in the tiny town of Traveler’s Rest, South Carolina.
    • His mother was deeply religious and gave him his middle name in honor of a famous Baptist minister from nearby Greenville, John Albert Broadus.
    • Brewer (1991, p. 171) wrote, “As a youngster, Watson was called Broadus and not John B.” Watson’s father did not share his wife’s religious faith; he was a brawler and a heavy drinker.
    • Watson matured early and easily learned and enjoyed working with his hands. He went to several country schools before his mother moved the family to nearby Greenville because of its better schools. Watson was never an outstanding student even while attending Furman University, the local Baptist college.
    • He spent five years there, graduating with a master’s degree.
    • After graduating from Furman, Watson taught school in South Carolina for a year before enrolling at the University of Chicago in 1900. Three years later, he received his PhD in psychology, Chicago’s first doctorate in the new discipline (Benjamin, 2009). James Rowland Angell and H. H. Donaldson, a neurologist, jointly supervised his thesis on the learning ability of albino rats at various ages. Following the style of animal research at the time, Watson inferred what his rats might have been thinking while he subjected them to his experimental manipulations. Soon, he would cease to analyze his experiments in that introspective manner.
  • Behaviorism
    • Watson sought to eliminate the study of consciousness from early psychology
    • He claimed that neither Structuralism nor Functionalism had made much progress in advancing psychology because both were wedded to consciousness, albeit in different ways, and neither could provide a coherent scientific account of the discipline.
    • In their place he proposed the study of behaviors only.
    • Watson's career in psychology was cut short because of a scandal so he never fleshed out the details of his theory.
  • Skinner's Biography
    • Fred Skinner, as his friends called him, was born in Susquehanna, Pennsylvania. His father was a lawyer. His mother was a homemaker who kept close watch on her two sons. (Skinner’s brother died of an accident at the age of 16.)
    • Early on, Skinner exhibited a knack for solving problems using mechanical devices, a skill that would play a crucial role in his later research.
    • He was a good student and attended Hamilton College where he majored in English. His goal then was to be a writer. After he graduated, he attempted to write short fiction, but was unsuccessful. In his autobiography (1970, p. 7), he wrote, “I had failed as a writer, because I had nothing important to say, but I could not accept that explanation.”
    • After reading Russell’s (1927) Philosophy along with Watson’s and Pavlov’s works, he became a behaviorist, although the Radical Behaviorism he created later would be much different than anything he had learned at school.
    • He went to Harvard to study psychology and received his PhD in 1931; he remained there five more years as a fellow.
    • Following his years as a fellow, Skinner first worked at the University of Minnesota for nine years followed by three years as chair at the University of Indiana.
    • In 1948, he returned to Harvard where he remained an active faculty member until his retirement in 1974.
  • Skinner's Radical Behaviorism
    • Radical Behaviorism preserved Watson’s definition of psychology, the prediction and control of behavior, but it rejected other neobehaviorist theories because of their use of intervening variables; those were rejected because they were mentalistic and because they assumed dualism (which is mentalistic as well).
    • At the same time, Radical Behaviorism was not S-R psychology either. Instead, it explained learned behavior through selection by consequences. Thus, operant conditioning occurs when a response is followed by a reinforcer causing that response to be emitted more often. Organisms also learn the environmental occasions when reinforcement is likely. Skinner diagrammed the relationship as follows:
      S^D → R → S^R
      where the S^D is the discriminative stimulus, R is the emitted response, and S^R is the reinforcer.
    • In the laboratory, specifying the three terms above is relatively easy.
    • Outside of the laboratory, the search for discriminative stimuli and reinforcers is more difficult, but still quite possible.
    • The standard traffic light makes a good example of the two types of discriminative stimuli. The green light serves as an S^D  because it signals that continuing to drive through the intersection is OK (or, more technically, a long history exists between the green light, pressing the accelerator, and the reinforcement of continuing to move). The red light, however, is an S^D or a discriminative stimulus that signals that proceeding through the intersection is not OK. Running that red light might lead to any number of negative consequences up to and including death.
    • Positive reinforcement: increases operant level after RECEIVING a stimulus
      • Example: Rat bar presses more when food follows bar press
    • Negative reinforcement: increases operant level after REMOVING a stimulus
      • Example: person takes out the trash (the operant) in order to stop partner's nagging (the stimulus)
  • Social Learning Theory
    • Associated with Albert Bandura
    • Children and adults alho learn by imitating others and by viewing the media
    • His concept of reciprocal determinism argues that we are shaped by the environment AND we shape our environment as well
    • Bobo Doll: children followed an aggressive model and even added aggressive behaviors not previously seen
    • The media are a pervasive influence on human behavior
• Exploring Cognition
  • Piaget
    • Began by observing his children
    • Developed the schema
      • an existing cognitive framework (e.g., "liquids extinguish flame")
    • Schemas are either kept (assimilation) or modified (accommodation)
      • Assimilation example: unsupervised child douses candle with water, creates schema: liquids extinguish flame. Then, douses another candle with a soft drink; the candle goes out. The schema is kept.
      • Accommodation example: still unsupervised child now douses yet another candle with Bacardi 151 rum. OOOPS! The candle does not go out. Instead, a bigger flame ensues. The schema must be modified. SOME liquids extinguish flame, OTHER liquids make the flame bigger.
    • Notice how now the child has learned something. The child's schema had to change because of experience.
    • Cognitive Stages
      • Sensorimotor
      • Pre-operational
      • Concrete operational
      • Formal operational
  • Vygotsky
    • Sociocultural theory
    • Scaffolding: providing hints or structure to aid learning
      • Example: crossword puzzle with every first letter already showing. Easier to solve and first letter is the most important cue.
    • Successful coaching
      • Successful coaches help learners achieve goals they thought impossible by encouraging small steps toward improvement
  • Ecological Systems Model
    • Examines the systems that affect people during their lives:
    • Focuses on variety of influences on individuals and how they affect development:
    • Microsystem: the family individuals are usually the first (e.g., caretaker-child)
    • Mesosystem: schools and religions
    • Exosystem: Community values
    • Macrosystem: the economy, wars and conflicts, technology
    • Chronosystem: Development in historical context
• Research Designs
  • Psychologists use a wide variety of research designs
    • Observational
    • Experimental
  • In research methods text (Spatz & Kardas, 2007) we broke design down as follows:
    • RESEARCH Type
      
      • Experiment
      • Quasi-experiment
      • Field Study
      • Naturalistic Observation
      • Participant Observation
      • Case Study
      • Interview
      • Focus Group
      • Oral History
      • Archival Study
      • Small N Study
      • Other
        
      NUMBER of Groups (N)
      
      • One
      • Two
      • Three
      • Four
      • More
      
      GROUPS
      
      • Between Subjects
      • Within Subjects
      • Mixed
      
      VARIABLES
      
      • Independent (number, levels)
      • Dependent (number, quantitative or qualitative, continuous or discrete)
      • Extraneous (how controlled or not)
      
      EXPLORATORY DATA ANALYSIS & STATISTICS
      
      • Graphs
      • Descriptive Statistics
      • Correlations
        
      • Confidence Intervals
      • NHST Tests and Significance (e.g., t-test, ANOVA, chi-square)
        
      • Nonparametric Tests (e.g., Mann-Whitney, Wilcoxon Matched-Pairs Signed Ranks, Spearman correlation coefficient)
        
      • Effect Sizes
      
      CONTROLLING EXTRANEOUS VARIABLES
      
      • Via design
      • Via procedures
• Lecture Transcript: Developmental Theories
  • Watch the lecture
• Slide Show
  • View the slide show

Back to Module 1