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Chapter Two
Theory & Research
Theory & Reseach
Two models:
Mechanistic: locke
Organismic: Rousseau
John Locke- English philosopher
• Tabula rasa: believed that the child’s mind is a
blank slate, experience is imprinted
• Children born with different temperaments and
propensities; but the child could be infinitely
improved and perfected through experience,
humane treatment, and education
• Adults mold children’s moral character and
intellect by conditioning them to have the “right”
habits
• Child as malleable
Key assumption: that children are mostly a product
of their environment; react to their environment
almost like a machine
Jean-Jacques Rosseau- Swiss-born philosopher
• Introduced a romantic conception of
children
• Born in a state of natural goodness
• Adults should not shape them forcibly but
protect them from the pressures of society
and allow them to develop naturally
• Each dimension of development (physical,
mental, social, and moral) followed a
particular schedule and should be respected
and protected
Jean-Jacques Rosseau- Swiss-born philosopher
• Children are incapable of true reasoning until age
12
• During early period of development, children
should be permitted to learn through discovery
and experience
• Key assumption: the curriculum must evolve from
the natural capacities and interests of the child,
and must foster the child’s progression toward
higher stage of development
• People are an active, growing organism that set
their development in motion; initiate events, not
just react; internal drive
Development continuous or stages
Continuous: Mechanist theorists; allows prediction
of earlier behaviors from later ones; quantitative
changes (frequency of response)
Stages: Organismic theorists; emphasis qualitative
changes; stages, building on previous problems
and developments.
Current theorists:
Active versus passive development
People change their world as it also changes them
Major developmental perspectives
1-Psychoanalytic Perspective
• Development shaped by unconscious forces that
motivate human behavior
• Psychoanalysis helps give patients insight into
unconscious emotional conflict
• The unconscious is the thoughts, wishes, feelings
and memories that we are largely unaware
• Dreams are the “royal road” to the unconscious
The Mind as an Iceberg
• Freud believed the mind is like an iceberg—
mostly hidden, with the unconscious
containing thoughts and memories of which
we are largely unaware. Some of these
thoughts we store temporarily in a
preconscious area.
• Our conscious awareness is the part of the
iceberg that floats above the water.
Figure 15.1 Freud’s idea of the mind’s structure
Myers: Psychology, Eighth Edition
Copyright © 2007 by Worth Publishers
• Initially, he thought hypnosis might unlock
the door to the unconscious. However,
recognizing patients’ uneven capacity for
hypnosis, Freud turned to free association,
which he believed produced a chain of
thoughts in the patient’s unconscious. He
called the process (as well as his theory of
personality) psychoanalysis.
• Freud believed that personality arises from our
efforts to resolve the conflict between our
biological impulses and the social restraints
against them.
• He theorized that the conflict centers on three
interacting systems:
– the id, which operates on the pleasure principle
Immediate gratification);
– the ego, which functions on the reality principle, and
– the superego, an internalized set of ideals. The
superego’s demands often oppose the id’s, and the ego,
as the “executive” part of personality, seeks to reconcile
the two.
Freud’s Psychosexual Stages of Development
• Freud maintained that children pass through a
series of psychosexual stages during which the
id’s pleasure-seeking energies focus on distinct
pleasure-sensitive areas of the body called
erogenous zones.
• During the oral stage (0–18 months), pleasure
centers on the mouth
• During the anal stage (18–36 months) on
bowel/bladder elimination. Also independence.
Freud’s Psychosexual Stages of Development
• During the critical phallic stage (3–6 years),
pleasure centers on the genitals. Boys
experience the Oedipus complex, with
unconscious sexual desires toward their
mother and hatred of their father. They cope
with these threatening feelings through
identification with their father, thereby
incorporating many of his values and
developing a sense of gender identity.
Electra Complex- female equivalent
Freud’s Psychosexual Stages of Development
• The latency stage (6 years to puberty), in
which sexuality is dormant
• The genital stage (puberty on) when youths
begin to experience sexual feelings toward
others.
• In Freud’s view, maladaptive adult
behavior results from conflicts unresolved
during the oral, anal, and phallic stages.
At any point, conflict can lock, or fixate, the
person’s pleasure-seeking energies in that
stage.
Erikson
Each stage is a crisis in the personality that
must be resolved
Erikson’s Eight Stages of Psychosocial
Development
• Erik Erikson theorized eight stages of life,
each with its own psychosocial task.
• In infancy (the first year), the issue is trust
versus mistrust.
• In toddlerhood (the second year), the
challenge is autonomy versus shame and
doubt.
• Preschoolers (age 3 to 5) learn initiative or
guilt.
• Elementary school children (age 6 to
puberty) develop competence or inferiority.
• A chief task of adolescence is to solidify
one’s sense of self—identity versus role
confusion.
• For young adults (twenties to early forties)
the issue is intimacy versus isolation.
• For middle-aged adults (forties to sixties),
generativity versus stagnation.
• Late adulthood’s (late sixties and older)
challenge is integrity versus despair.
Learning Perspective
1- Learning Theory
• development results from learning, a longlasting change in behavior based on
experience or adaptation to the environment
• Behaviorism: describes observed behavior
as a predictable response to experience
• React to environment when find it pleasing,
painful, or threatening
• Associative learning: link is made between
two stimuli/sensory events
Learning Perspective
Classical Conditioning
Classical conditioning is a natural form of
learning that occurs even without
intervention.
• Pavlov: taught dog to salivate
• A natural response to a stimulus is paired
with another stimulus through repeated
associations. Learning a new response to an
existing response.
• Conditioned response is a learned response
• Watson: little Albert
Learning Perspective
Operant Conditioning- Skinner
• Learning that behavior has consequences;
operates on environment
• Baby cries, someone soothers- will cry to
be soothed.
• Reinforce, extinguish, use successive
approximations, learning through
imitation of others
• Tend to repeat response that has desirable
consequences and suppress a response
that has a negative consequence
(punishment)
Punishment: process of weakening a
behavior, decreasing likelihood of
repetition. Suppresses a behavior
thought aversive consequence.
Withdrawing a positive (not using car)
or aversive (jail)
Reinforcement can be positive or negative
Positive: reward
Negative: taking away something the
person does not like (aversive event)
Extinguish: when no longer reinforce a
behavior
Behavior modification: behavioral
therapy; operant conditioning to instill
positive behavior.
2- Social Learning Theory (Social
Cognitive)- Bandura
• People learn
• Development comes from the person
• Learn appropriate social behavior mainly by
observing and imitating modelsObservational Learning
• Through feedback, gradually development
standards for judging own behavior
• Self-Efficacy: confidence that have what it
takes to succeed
3- Cognitive Perspective- Piaget
At each stage, child’s mind develops in a new
way from simple to complex
Organization: tendency to create increasingly
complex cognitive structures (system of
knowledge; ways of thinking that incorporate
more and more accurate images of reality
Schemas: organized patterns of behavior that a
person uses to think about and act in a
situation.
Adaptation: how children handle new
information in light of what they
already know
Assimilation: taking new information
and incorporating it into existing
cognitive structures (sucking on sippie
cup versus breats)
Accommodation: adjusting one’s
cognitive structures to fit new
information (sipping from cup/glass,
changes how uses tongue/mouth)
Equilibration: constant striving for a
stable balance/equilibrium, dictates shift
from assimilation to accommodation
Vygotsky
Sociocultural Theory of Cognitive Development
• Vygotsky argued that children’s efforts to
understand their world are embedded in a
social context. Value educative processes.
• They strive to understand their universe by
asking questions of others—
• The young child is an apprentice in thinking.
• Parents, child-care workers, and older
siblings act as mentors stimulating
intellectual growth
Vygotsky
• Children learn to think through guided
participation in social experiences that
explore their world- guided social
interactions
• Vygotsky argued that what children can do
with the help of others may be more
indicative of their mental development than
what they can do alone.
• Shared activities help internalize their
society’s modes of thinking and behaving.
Vygotsky
• The zone of proximal development, a range of
skills that the child can perform with assistance
but not quite independently.
• How and when children master important skills
is partly linked to the willingness of others to
provide scaffolding, or sensitive structuring of
children’s learning encounters.
• Cognitive accomplishment occurs in a social
context- through collaborative help/direction
from others
Information Processing Theory
• Explain cognitive development by analyzing the
processes involved in perceiving and handling
information.
• Compare brain to computer. Helps estimate later
intelligence from early efficacy of sensory
perception and processing.
4- Evolutionary/Sociobiological Perspectives
Wilson
• Concerned with evolutionary and biological
forces of social behavior
• Emphasis on function of behavior in
promoting survival of species.
• Darwin: survival of the fittest and natural
selection.
5- Contextual Perspective
Development understood from a social context
Individual inseparable from environment
Vygotsky also in this camp.
Research
Quantitative research: objectively measurable data
Qualitative research: interpretation of
nonnumerical data (subjective responses,
feelings, beliefs)
Sampling
Sample: cannot study entire population.
Adequately represents the population being
studied; has relevant characteristics in same
proportions as entire population; otherwise
cannot be adequately generalized
Research
Quantitative research: objectively measurable data
Qualitative research: interpretation of
nonnumerical data (subjective responses,
feelings, beliefs)
Sampling
Sample: cannot study entire population.
Adequately represents the population being
studied; has relevant characteristics in same
proportions as entire population; otherwise
cannot be adequately generalized
Random selection: each person has equal chance
of being chosen.
Scientific method: characterized by:
• Identifying a problem
• Formulation of hypothesis
• Collecting data
• Analyzing data
• Forming tentative conclusions
• Disseminating findings
Major Methods
• Self-report, diary, interview, questionnaire: asked
about some aspect of their lives; highly structured or
vague
• Naturalistic observation: observing in natural
environment with no interaction
• Laboratory observation: observed in laboratory with
no attempt to manipulate behavior
• Behavioral measures: tested on abilities, skills,
knowledge, competencies, physical responses
• Operational definition: stated clearly in terms of
operations and procedures used to measure a specific
phenomenon
Research Designs
Case Studies: single person studied Emotions,
beliefs, or life history of a single individual.
Ethnographic Studies: study of culture/subculture
Correlational study: attempt to find
positive/negative relationship between variables.
Correlations are reported as numbers from –1.0
(perfect negative correlation) to +1.0 (perfect
positive correlation)
Experiment: controlled procedure; controls
independent variable to determine effect on
the dependent variable.
Experimental group: exposed to the
treatment/item studied
Control group: do not receive the treatment
Independent variable: controls; wants to see if
effects the dependent variable
Dependent variable: may/may not change as
result of the independent variable
Longitudinal: involves repeated measurements
obtained from the same subject over time.
Cross-Sectional: requires that a number of subjects
of different ages be measured, tested, or observed
at one given time.
Ethics: rules and guidelines to follow
Informed consent, avoidance of deception when
possible; not cause undue pain, anxiety or harm;
debrief; share results; assess any harm/suffering.