Social development - a summary of chapter 12 of Psychology by Gray and Bjorklund (7th edition)

Psychology
Chapter 12
Social development

The natural human environment is a social environment.

Social development: the changing nature of our relationships with others over the course of life.

Infancy: using caregivers as a base for growth

Human infants are completely dependent on caregivers for survival. But they are not passively dependent.
They enter the world biologically prepared to learn who their caregivers are and to elicit from them the help they need. By the time they are born, babies already prefer the voices of their own mother over other voices (and the smell of their own mother). Newborns signal distress through fussing and crying.
By the time they are three months old, they express clearly and effectively their emotions through their facial expressions. And they respond differentially to such expressions in others.

Though such actions, infants help build emotional bonds between themselves and those on whom they most directly depend, and then they use those caregivers as a base from which to explore the world.
Attachment: such emotional bonds.

Attachment to caregivers

Harlow’s monkeys raised with surrogate mothers

Providing adequate nutrition and other physical necessities is not enough. Infants also need close contact with comforting caregivers.

The form and functions of human infants’ attachment

Bowlby observed attachment behaviors in young humans, from 8 months to 3 years of age.
Children show distress when their mothers left them. Especially in an unfamiliar environment. They showed pleasure when reunited with their mothers, showed distress when approached by a stranger unless reassured or comforted by their mothers and where likely to explore an unfamiliar environment when in the presence of their mothers than when alone.

Bowlby contended that attachment is a universal human phenomenon with a biological foundation that derives from natural selection. Infants are potentially in danger when out of sight of caregivers, especially in a novel environment.

Attachment is strengthen at about the age 6 to 8 months, when infants begin to move around on their own.

The strange-situation measure of attachment quality

Mary Ainsworth developed the strange-situation test.

Infants in this test are:

• Securely attached if they explore the room and toys confidently when their mother is present, become upset and explore less when their mother is absent, and show pleasure when the mother returns.
• Avoidant attached if they avoid the mother, acts indifferent to the mother when she leaves, and seems the act coldly toward her.
• Anxious attached if they do not avoid the mother, but continues to cry and fret despite her attempts to comfort

Sensitive care correlates with secure attachment and positive later adjustment

Sensitive care: infants become securely attached to mothers who provide regular contact comfort, respond promptly and helpfully to the infants’ signals of distress, and interact with the infant in an emotionally synchronous manner.

There are positive correlations between the ratings of the mother’s sensitive care and security of the infant’s attachment to the mother.

Children judged to be securely attached in infancy, found, on average, to be more confident, better at solving problems, emotionally healthier and more sociable later in childhood than those who had been found to be insecurely attached.

Some children are more susceptible to parental effect than are others.

The relationship between parental care and infant’s attachment depends, at least partly, on the genetic make of the child.
The gene at issue (5-HTTLLPR gene) comes in two forms (or alleles) a short s form and a long l form.
The l allele results in grater uptake of serotonin into brain neurons.
Children who are homozygous for the l allele are less affected by negative environmental experiences than are other children.
Attachment security increased significantly and rather sharply with increased maternal sensitivity so the ss/sl group, but was not significantly affected by maternal sensitivity for the ll group. The ll infant’s showed highly secure attachment regardless of the level of maternal sensitivity.

High-quality day care also correlates with positive adjustment

Infants can also develop secure attachments with fathers, grandparents, older siblings and day-care providers.

High-quality day care correlates with positive development just as high-quality home care does.
The higher the quality of day care during infancy and toddlerhood, the better is the social and academic adjustment of children in early school years.
Day care generally does not interfere with the abilities of infants and toddlers to maintain secure attachments with their mothers and fathers.
Parental attachments are better predictors of positive adjustments than are attachments with day-care providers, regardless of the amount of time spent in day care.

Cross-cultural differences in infant care

Caregiving in Hunter-gatherer societies

! Kung infants spend most of their time during their first year in direct contact with their mothers’ bodies. The infants nurse at will. The infant is never left alone, when the mother does not held the infant, the infant is passed around among others. The! Kung never leave an infant to cry alone, and usually they detect the distress and begin to comfort the infant before the crying even begins.

Studies of other hunter-gatherer cultures have shown a similarly high degree of indulgence toward infants.
But the people who provide can vary.

Among the Efe, infants are in physical contact with their mothers for only about half the day. During the rest of the day, Efe infants nurse at will, not just from their mothers but also form other lactating women in the group. But at 8 to 12 months Efe infants begin to show increased preference for their own mothers.

In general, parental involvements appears to be greater in hunter-gatherer cultures than in agricultural or industrial cultures.

Issues of indulgence, dependence and interdependence

There is a direct correlation between the degree of indulgence and the number of adults who live communally with the infant. Indulgence is greatest for infants who live in large extended families or close-knit village groups, and least for those who live just with one or both parents.

Helping, comforting and learning from others in childhood

As children grow from infancy into toddlerhood and beyond, they become increasingly mobile and capable of a wide variety of actions in their physical and social worlds.
Erikson divided the years from age 1 to 12 into three successive stages.

• Autonomy (self-control)
• Initiative (willingness to initiate actions)
• Industry (competence in completing tasks).

These characteristics are all closely related to one another. They have to do with the child’s ability to control his or her own actions.

Children’s actions frequently bring them into conflict with caregivers and others around them.
Caregiver’s responses to children’s actions influence children's social behavior.

The development of prosocial behaviors

The early emergence of empathy and empathic comforting

Newborn babies reflexively cry and show other signs of distress in response to another baby’s crying. This tendency to feel discomfort in response to another’s expressed discomfort is a foundation for the development of empathy.
Over time, the response becomes less reflective and more accompanied by thought.

Until 15 months of age, the child’s distress when others are distressed is best referred to as egocentric empathy.
The distressed child seeks comfort for him- or herself rather than for the other distressed person.
At about 15 months, children begin to respond to another’s discomfort by attempting to comfort that person. By age 2 then begin to succeed at such comforting.

The young child’s natural tendency to give and help

Around 12 months of age, infants routinely begin to give objects to their caregivers and to delight in games of give and take, in which the child and caregiver pass and object back and forth to each other.
They do this without any special encouragement.

In addition to give, young children enjoy helping with adult tasks.

The fact that helping actions seem to stem from the child’s own wishes is evidence that our species has evolved prosocial drives, which motivate us, with no feeling of sacrifice, to involve ourselves in positive ways with other people.

In their relationships with caregivers, young children are most often on the receiving end of acts of giving, helping and comforting. They therefore have ample opportunity not only to witness such behaviors, but also to feel their pleasurable and comforting consequences.

Children who have received the most sensitive care, and who are most securely attached to their caregivers, also demonstrate the most comforting and giving to others.

Sharing

Closely related to giving is sharing.
Young children are notoriously poor sharers. It is more common with older children, with the amount that children share of any commodity increasing with age.
However, just as young children will offer to help and give things to others on some occasions, they also will share in many context. Young children seem especially likely to share in situations in which they need to collaborate to achieve a goal.
As they get older, children are increasingly likely to see fairness in terms of equitable distributions. This is also related to theory of mind.

Social learning

Much of what children learn is accomplished by a social context.

• Vicarious reinforcement: the ability to learn from the consequences of others’ actions.
• Imitation: the ability to understand a model’s goal and to reproduce those behaviors in order to achieve those goals
• Emulation: involves observing another individual achieve some goal, then attaining that same goal by one’s own means.

Over imitation

Children of about 2 years of age and younger frequently engage in emulation.
Things begin to change around age 3. Beginning about this time most children faithfully repeat the actions of a model, even if many of those actions are irrelevant and if there is a more efficient way to solve the problem.
This is over imitation.
Not only children in Western cultures do this.

Although older children and adults should know better, even they engage in over imitation.
Copying irrelevant actions increased with age.

But children are not necessary blind mimics. Children are less apt to mimic when actions where accidental than when cued as intentional.
Yet over imitation seems to be the rule. But why?

• Humans age 3 and older generally believe that models are trustworthy and that they are performing all the actions for a purpose.
• Children seem to think that modeled actions are normative.

Learning from other children

Children can learn from other children.
Preschool children do not often deliberately teach a skill to another child. More common is that one child is performing some task while classmates happen to see the outcome.
Young children have a number of social-learning abilities at their disposal. A skill learned by one child will be transmitted to other children, sometimes with fidelity and sometimes with modifications.

Parenting styles

Two dimensions in parenting styles.

• Warmth. Reflected by being loving and attentive
• Control.

Correlations between disciplinary styles and children’s behavior

Four styles of parenting.

• Authorian
  Strongly value obedience for its own sake and use a high degree of power assertion to control their children. Low warmth, high control
• Authorative
  Less concerned with obedience for its own sake and more concerned that their children learn and abide by basic principles of right and wrong. High warmth, high control.
• Permissive
  Most tolerant of their children’s disruptive actions and least likely to discipline them at all. The responses they do show to their children’s behavior seem to be manifestations of their own frustration more than reasoned attempts at correction. High warmth, low control
• Uninvolved (neglectful)
  Disengaged from their children, emotionally cold, and demand little from their offspring. Low warmth, low control.

Children of authoriative parents exhibit the most positive qualities. They are friendlier, happier, more cooperative and less likely to disrupt other’s activities.
Children of authoritarian parents often perform poorly in school, have low self-esteem, and are more apt to be rejected by their school peers.
Children of permissive parents tend to be impulsive and aggressive, often acting out of control.
Children of uninvolved parents typically fare the worst. In adolescence they often show a broad range of problem behaviors.

The cause-effect problem in relating parenting style to children’s behavior

Children with different temperaments do elicit different disciplinary styles from their parents.

The roles of play and gender in development

Children have a strong orientation to members of their own generation.
It is the peer group that will provide the child’s most direct future collaborators in life-sustaining work and reproduction.
Children beyond age 4 or 5 years spend more of the daytime hours with other children than with adults. Mostly they are playing. Their play takes universal forms. In every culture studied, children tend to segregate themselves by sex when they play. Through playing with others of their own sex, children develop the gender-specific skills and attitudes of their culture.

Developmental functions of play

Play is a vehicle for acquiring skills

Children all over the world play chase games. These promote:
Physical stamina, agility and the development of strategies to avoid getting caught.
Children all over the world also play nurturing and fighting. Everywhere the former is more prevalent among girls and the latter is more prevalent among boys.

Other universal forms of human play are specific to our species.

• Children everywhere become good at making things with their hands through constructive play
• Exercise their imaginations and planning abilities through social fantasy play
• Become skilled at language through word play

In cultures where children can directly observe the sustenance activities of adults, children focus much of their play on those activities.
Children’s play reflects and may help transmit a culture’s values and skills.
Children’s play can help create an advance culture as well as reflect it.

Play as a vehicle for learning about rules and acquiring self-control

Play may enable children to acquire more advanced understanding of rules and social roles and greater self-control.

Unsupervised play with peers is crucial to moral development.
Adults use their superior power to settle children’s disputes, but when adults are not present, children argue out their disagreements and acquire a new understanding of rules based on reason rather than authority.

Children learn trough play how to control their own impulses and to abide by socially agreed-upon rules and roles, an ability that is crucial in social life. There are rules in play.
Play has this paradoxical quality. Children freely enter into it, but in doing so they give up some of their freedom. Play in humans evolved at least partly as a means of practicing self-discipline of the sort that is needed to follow social conventions and rules.
There is a positive correlation between the amount of social fantasy play that children engage in and subsequent ratings of their social competence and self-control.

The special value of age-mixed play

Age-mixed play is often qualitatively different from play among age mates.

• It is less competitive
• Young children acquire more advanced interests and skills by observing and interacting with older children. Older children develop skills at nurturing and consolidate some of their own knowledge by helping younger children.

Gender differences in social development

Gender differences in interactions with caregivers

Even in early infancy, boys and girls, on average, behave somewhat differently from each other.

• Newborn boys are more irritable and less responsive to caregivers’ voices and faces than are newborn girls.
• By 6 months of age, boys squirm more and show more facial expressions of anger than do girls when confined in an infant seat. Girls show more facial expressions of interest and less of fussing than do boys when interacting with their mothers.
• By 13 to 15 months of age, girls are more likely than are boys to comply with their mothers’ requests.
• By 17 months, boys show significantly more physical aggression than do girls.

Parents and other caregivers behave differently toward girls and boys, beginning at birth.
They, on average, are gentler with girls than with boys and are more likely to talk to girls and to jostle with boys.
Adults offer help and comfort more often to girls than to boys and more often expect boys to solve problems on their own. This treatment may lead girls to become more affectionate and sociable and boys to become more self-reliant than they otherwise would.

Adult’s assumptions about the different interests and abilities of girls and boys may play a role in the types of careers that the two sexes eventually choose.

Gender identity and its effects on children’s behavior

Children actively mold themselves to behave according to their culture’s gender conceptions.
By age 4 or 5, most children have learned quite clearly their culture’s stereotypes of male and female roles. They also recognize that they themselves are one gender or the other and always will be. This understanding is gender identify.
Once they have this understanding, children of all cultures seem to become concerned about projecting themselves as clearly male or female.

From a biological perspective, gender is not an arbitrary concept but is linked to sex, which is linked to reproduction.

Children’s self-imposed gender segregation

In all cultures studied, boys and girls play primarily with others of their own sex. Such segregation is more common in activities structured by children themselves than in activities structured by adults.
The peak of gender segregation occurs on age 8 to 11 years. In their separate playgroups, boys practice to be the masculine activities of their culture, and girls practice what they perceive to be the feminine activities of their culture.

Gender differences in styles of playgroup

Girls and boys tend to play differently as well as separately, and the differences are in some ways consistent from culture to culture.
Some social scientists consider boy’s and girls’ peer groups to be so distinct that they constitute separate subcultures. Each with its own values, directing its members along different developmental lines.

• The world of boys has been characterized as consisting of relatively large, hierarchically organized groups in which individuals or coalitions attempt to prove their superiority through competitive games, teasing and boasting.
• The world of girls has been characterized as consisting of smaller, more intimate groups, in which cooperative forms of play predominate and competition, although not absent, is more subtle.

In their free time, children often play in age-mixed groups. Boys and girls play together more often in age-mixed groups than in age-segregated groups.

Whether or not they play together, boys and girls are interested in each other. That interest begins to peak as children enter adolescence.

Adolescence: breaking out of the cocoon

Adolescence is the transition period from childhood to adulthood.
It begins with the first signs of puberty, and it ends when the person is viewed by him- or herself and, and by others, as a full member of the adult community.

Adolescence is a stage of identity crisis. The goal of which is to give up one’s childhood identity and establish a new identity appropriate for entry into adulthood.
It is a period in which young people either consciously or unconsciously act in ways to move themselves from childhood toward adulthood.

Shifting from parents to peers for intimacy and guidance

Breaking away from parental control

Adolescence is often characterized as a time of rebellion against parents, but is rarely involves out-and-out rejection.
The typical rebellion, if one occurs at all, is aimed specifically at some of the immediate controls that parents hold over the child’s behavior.
At the same time that adolescents are asking to be treated more like adults, parents may fear new dangers that can accompany this period of life, and try to tighten controls instead of loosening them.

For both sons and daughters, increased conflict with parents is linked more closely to the physical changes of puberty than to chronological age.

Establishing closer relationships with peers

As adolescents gain more independence from their parents, they look increasingly to their peers of emotional support.

Conforming to peers

As children approach and enter their teenage years, they become increasingly concerned about looking and behaving like their peers.
People tend to choose friends who have interest and behaviors similar to their own. Over time, friends become more similar to one another in frequency of risky or unhealthful behaviors than they were originally.

Increased rates of recklessness and delinquency

On a statistical basis, all over the world, people are much more likely to engage in disruptive or dangerous actions during adolescence than at other times in life. Especially in males.

Why? Adolescence:

• Myth of invulnerability
  A false sense that they are protected from the mishaps and diseases that can happen to other people.
• Sensation seekers
• Have heightened irritability or aggressiveness
• Have immature inhibitory control centers in the prefrontal lobes of their brains.

Explanations that focus on adolescents’ segregation from adults

Relatively unique to modern, Western cultures.
Adolescent recklessness is largely an aberration of modern times, not a product of natural selection.

Our cultures segregation of adolescents from adult society contributes to adolescents’ risky and sometimes delinquent behavior.
Perhaps adolescents seek adult-like status while, at the same time, identifying with the behaviors and values of their adolescent subculture.

The neurological basis of risk-taking in adolescence

Risk-taking behavior is governed by underlying changes in adolescents’ brains.
Adolescent risk taking behaviors reflects a competition between two developing brain systems.

• The cognitive-control network (involved with planning and regulating behavior and located primarily in the frontal lobes).
• Socioemotional network (located primarily in the limbic system)

Although adolescents are able to make logical decisions as well as young adults under ‘neutral’ conditions, the socioemotional brain network becomes dominant under conditions of emotional or social arousal or when the presence of peers.

An evolutionary explanation of the ‘young-male’ syndrome

Risky and delinquent activities are much more readily pursued by young males than by young females.

Among mammals in general, the number of potential offspring a male can produce is more variable than the number of a female can produce and is more closely tied to status.
In our species’ history, males who took risks to achieve higher status among their peers may well have produced more offspring, on average. So genes promoting that tendency may have been passed along.

Females also exhibit a peak in violence during adolescence and youth, although it is a much smaller peak than men’s.

An expanded moral vision and moral sense of self

Adolescence is a period of rapid growth in the sophistication of moral reasoning and a time in which many people develop moral self-images that guide their actions.

Advancement on Kohlberg’s scale of moral reasoning

Moral reasoning develops through a series of stages.

1. Obedience and punishment orientation
2. Self-interested exchanges
3. Interpersonal accord and conformity
4. Law and order morality
5. Human rights and social welfare morality

Each successive stage takes into account a broader portion of the social world.

Sexual explanations

Adolescence is first and foremost the time of sexual blooming.

The developmental of sexuality and sexual behavior in adolescence

Sexual attraction
Sexual behavior follows a typical pattern for adolescents in developed countries.

Evolutionary explanation of sex differences in sexual eagerness

Young men are more eager than young women to have sexual intercourse without a long-term commitment.
The standard explanation is parental investment.

How teenage sexuality may depend on conditions of rearing

Great variation on the dimension of sexual restraint versus promiscuity exist within each sex, both across cultures and within any given culture.
Promiscuity prevails among both men and women in cultures where men devote little care for young, and sexual restraint prevails in cultures where men devote much care.

Natural selection may have predisposed humans to be sensitive to cues in childhood that predict whether one or the other sexual strategy will be more successful.

Adulthood: finding satisfaction in love and work

Establishing intimate, caring relationships and finding fulfillment in work are the main tasks of early and middle adulthood.

Love

Romantic love viewed as adult attachment

Romantic love is similar in form to the attachment that infants develop with their parents.
The emotional bond is not simply a by-product of shared pleasures.
Adults form with romantic partners can be classified as: secure and anxious or avoidant. People form mental models of close relationships based on their early experiences with their primary caregivers and then carry those models into their adult relationships.

Ingredients of marital success

Happily married couples argue as often as unhappily married couples, but they argue more constructively.
In happily married couples, both partners are sensitive to the unstated feelings and needs of the other.

Employment

Work occupies an enormous portion of adult life. At best, work is for adults what play is for children.

The value of occupational self-direction

In surveys of workers, people most often say they enjoy their work if it is:

• Complex rather than simple
• Varied rather than routine
• Not closely supervised by someone else

This constellation of job characteristics is occupational self-direction. These jobs are less stressful. They also promote certain positive personality changes.
The job affect the psychology not just of the workers but also of the workers’ children.

Balancing out-of-home and at-home work

Women, more often than men, hold two jobs. One outside the home and the other inside.
Wives enjoy their out-of-home work more than their at-home work, while the opposite is true for husbands.
The differences derived from the men’s and women’s differing perceptions of their choices and obligations.

Growing old

Older adults, on average, report greater current enjoyment of life than do middle-age people. And middle-age people report greater enjoyment than do young adults.

A shift toward focus on the present and the positive

The socioemotional selectivity theory.
As people grow older, they become gradually more concerned with enjoying the present and less concerned with activities that function primarily to prepare for the future.
The older one is, the less sense it makes to sacrifice present comforts and pleasures for possible future gain.

As people grow older, they devote less attention and energy to casual acquaintances and strangers and more to people with whom they already have close emotional ties. They do show less anger than do younger adults.

Selective attention to and memory for the positive

Older people attend more to emotional positive stimuli than to emotionally negative stimuli and show better memory for the former than the latter.
Selective memory is one means by which older people regulate their emotions in a positive direction.  This is a positivity bias. And extends beyond memory.

Approaching death

The one certainty of life is death.
Fear of death typically peaks in the person’s fifties, which is when people often begin to see some of their peers dying. Older people have less fear of death. They are likely to accept it as inevitable.