An Introduction to Developmental psychology by A. Slater and G. Bremner (third edition) - Chapter 16
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Moral dilemmas are situations in which people must choose and justify a course of action or reasoning with respect to a moral issue. Piaget concluded that younger children’s moral judgement was governed by unilateral respect for adults and adults’ rules, with little understanding of reciprocity or the intentions of others. Kohlberg defined five stages of moral development:
Kohlberg claimed that development across childhood and adolescence is characterised by sequential passage through stages. Stage 1 and 2 are most common in children with stage 3 emerging in adolescents. Stage 5 appears in adulthood, even though it remains fairly rare. Individuals generally move up one stage at a time. Regression over time Is rare. There is a strong positive linear relationship between educational attainment and moral stage.
A very common criticism of Kohlberg is that the sorts of justifications offered for moral dilemmas are not associated with action. Those who reason at higher stages are more likely to act pro-socially than those who reason at lower stages. Moral stages represent ways of thinking about moral issues, not specific behavioural tendencies. Individuals at different stages can choose the same action, but for different reasons.
There is some sort of moral cognition, a set of heuristics, which is shown by the fact that most moral judgements are made fairly quick with essentially no conscious deliberation of using certain rules.
Children make sharp distinctions between moral and non-moral domains. Moral domains are unlikely to be used in reasoning about all social issues. Aggression can perhaps be understood in terms of the attributions children make rather than moral stages. Attributions refer to the belief one holds as to why people carry out a particular action or behaviour.
There is evidence for the existence of the moral stages 2, 3 and 4 in non-western cultures, although stage 5 is not present in non-western cultures.
Increasing age, by itself, contributes nothing to development. The maturation and changes resulting from experience that intervene between different ages and stages of childhood are important. Maturation aspects are aspects of development that are largely under genetic control and hence largely uninfluenced by environmental factors.
Folk theories of development are ideas held about development that is not based upon scientific investigation There are two main folk theories:
A paradigm is a world view or a world hypothesis. There are two main paradigms in many developmental theories:
There are three main ways of studying age-related changes:
Design | Definition | Strong aspects | Weak aspects |
Cross-sectional designs | Children of different ages are observed at a single point in time. | It is not expensive and not that time-consuming. | It only describes age differences and there is no estimate of continuity. |
Longitudinal designs | Children are observed multiple times in their development. | It is possible to assess within-person and between-person differences in age changes. An estimate of continuity is possible. |
A theory of development is a scheme or system of ideas that is based on evidence and attempts to explain, describe and predict behaviour and development. Motor development relates to the development of motor skills and consists of motor milestones, the basic motor skills acquired in infancy and early childhood (e.g: sitting, crawling). Motor development gives an individual the ability to act on the world.
The maturational theories by Gesell state that motor development proceeds from the global to the specific in two directions:
This theory states that maturation alone shapes motor development. Development is controlled by a maturational timetable linked to the central nervous system and to muscular development. This theory does not account for considerable individual differences in the acquisition of various motor skills.
The dynamic systems theory views the individual as interacting dynamically in a complex system in which all parts interact. This theory states that all new motor development is the result of a dynamic and continual interaction of three major factors, the nervous system development, the capabilities and biomechanics of the body and environmental constraints and support.
A study on infant kicking showed that infants are able to change their pattern of interlimb coordination. A study on infant reaching showed that before infants start to reach they will stabilize their heads because this gives the infants a base to reach from. This shows that motor skills are learned through a process of modifying and developing their already existing abilities. A study on infant walking showed that infants do not have a fixed and rigid understanding of their own abilities and have the dynamic flexibility to adjust their abilities as they approach each novel motor problem.
Piaget stated that children are active agents in shaping their own development and that they learn to adapt to their environment as a result of their cognitive adaptations. There are two important processes necessary in order to adapt to the world:
These processes are functional invariants, processes that do not change during development. Cognitive structures (schemas) do change. According to Piaget, there are four broad stages of development:
In precocial species, the young are physically mobile and able from the moment of birth and in altricial species the young are helpless. Nativism is the view that many skills or abilities are native or hard-wired into the brain at birth. Empiricism is the view that humans are a blank slate at birth. Cognition is mental activity.
Binet introduced the term mental age, which can be defined as an individual’s level of mental ability relative to others. Chronological age is a person’s actual age. The intelligence quotient is a measure of a person’s level of intelligence compared to a population of individuals of approximately the same age. There are four important things to note about IQ tests and IQ scores:
Some people argue that a general intelligence underlies the scores of an intelligence test and some people argue that intelligence is made up of several individual components. Many intelligence tests divide intelligence into verbal and performance subscales.
Heritability is a statistical measure that describes how much of the variation of a trait in a population is due to genetic differences rather than environmental differences in a population. Heritability estimates refer to a population and tell us nothing about individuals. Genetic determinism is the hypothesis that people become who they are as a consequence of their genetic inheritance. Environmentalism is the hypothesis that people become who they are as a consequence of the learning and experiences they have had throughout life.
The familial resemblance is the resemblance between relatives whose genetic relationship to each other is known. The familial resemblance is a type of evidence concerning genetic influences to cognitive development. Missing heritability refers to the failure to find any of the genes associated with cognitive abilities. A gene and environment interaction are when different genotypes respond to similar environmental factors in different ways to create an individual’s phenotype. There are several environmental factors that create different phenotypes, depending on the individual, because the genotype of the person differs. An example of this is phenylketonuria, a disease which can cause severe mental retardation, unless on a phenylketonuria free diet, which shows that the same environmental factor (diet) can have different phenotypes as an outcome (mental retardation or not).
Studies on adoptees have shown that an early deprived upbringing can have serious detrimental effects on children’s development and that these detrimental effects can be partially reversed by placement into good quality adoptive homes. Environmental drift refers to changes in
.....read morePrenatal development is the development of human individuals before they are born. The foetus is the organism 12 weeks after conception until birth. The embryo is the developing organism during the period when organs are forming. A neonate is an infant less than a month old. Postnatal development is the development of a human individual after he is born. It is now possible to study foetuses using ultrasound and fMRI.
The ectoderm is the outermost of three primary germ layers of an embryo. The central nervous system develops from the ectoderm. The other two layers are the endoderm and the mesoderm. The endoderm develops into the neural plate, a thickening of cells that will give rise to the brain. The neural plate folds into a neural tube, which is a hollow structure in the embryo that gives rise to the brain and spinal column. The first movements of the foetus are reflexes that occur using the spinal cord, without the use of the brain.
The cerebral cortex is the area of the brain that is associated with complex tasks, such as memory and language. In the first two or three months of pregnancy, there is relatively little development in this area. The cerebral hemispheres develop from the forebrain at about 9 weeks and rapidly increase in size and will later become highly specialised areas in the brain. After 6 months, sulci (deep narrow grooves of the outer surface of the brain) and gyri (ridges on the outer surface of the brain) have appeared. This shows that the brain has developed a lot since infolding is necessary to accommodate for the total brain area. At around 15 weeks, there is a lull in movement, because inhibition has appeared in the brain and this leads to a period of reorganisation of behaviour. After 27 weeks, the cerebral cortex is mature, but the brain continues to grow in size until adulthood, mostly because of myelination, the process by which myelin is formed around neurons. Myelin causes faster neurotransmission. Foetuses at about 24 weeks have the ability to learn and have a very basic form of memory.
Foetuses’ behaviour becomes progressively more organised as the pregnancy proceeds. At 34 weeks, they don’t continuously move but have distinct patterns of rest and activity. There are now two dominant patterns of activity: quiet sleep or active sleep. In the active sleep, the foetuses will be responsive to sensory stimuli. Early neuronal networks are being stimulated during active sleep. Foetuses at the end of pregnancy no longer spend a lot of time in active sleep, because their brain has matured and more inhibitory pathways have developed. Term foetuses are more active when the mother is not, for example, when she is asleep.
The emergence of the senses follows a set mammalian pattern of development. The rooting reflex is the reflex that causes new-borns to respond to one of their cheeks being touched by turning their heads in that direction.
Visual acuity is the ability to make fine discriminations between the elements in the visual array. Infants’ vision is poorer than that of an adult. Visual accommodation is the ability to focus on objects irrespective of their distance from the eye. Infants are not good at this either. There are several ways to test infants their vision:
Infants are able to discriminate between simple shapes. This even occurred in new-borns, showing that new-born infants perceive simple shapes as a whole and not just as a collection of parts.
Size constancy is the understanding that an object remains the same size despite its retinal image size changing as it moves closer to or away from us. Shape constancy is the understanding that an object remains the same shape even though the retinal image shape changes when it is viewed from different angles. New-borns already understand the principle of size constancy and shape constancy. Object unity is the understanding that an object is whole or complete even though part of it may be hidden. 4-month-olds perceive object unity already. It is likely that infants use common motion to perceive object unity. New-borns do not perceive object unity. 6-month-olds perceive trajectory-continuity, whereas 4-month-olds only do so when the occlude is narrow. Subjective contour is when only parts of an object are presented, the remaining contours are filled in, in order that the complete shape can be perceived. 4-month-olds perceive subjective contour, especially when the object is in motion. They also perceive this as an occlude.
Face perception emerges at around 2 months, although evidence suggests that a form of facial perception is present at birth. The two-process account of newborn face perception states that new-born preference for faces stems from an innate subcortical mechanism that leads new-borns to attend preferentially to faces of the same species. After the second month of life, this is replaced or supplemented by an experientially based mechanism that involves a diffuse network of cortical areas and allows for continues cortical specialisation and tuning to specific faces. An alternative view is that new-borns prefer certain properties of stimuli that are not face specific.
Infants have a preference for the face of their mother and can discriminate between their mother and other faces. 2-month-old infants and even new-borns will look longer at a face rated attractive by adults than non-attractive faces. The preference for attractiveness may stem from the preference for prototype faces. General abilities become more narrowly tuned as a result of experience. Infants are able to imitate already and this might play an important role in language development.
Very young infants
.....read moreEmotional development can be divided into three areas: recognising emotions, understanding emotions and regulating emotions.
Darwin argued that the ability to communicate emotions is innate. Evidence for this comes from cross-cultural understanding of emotions and new-borns that portray certain emotions. There is a distinction between basic emotions (happiness, sadness, fear, anger, interest, surprise and disgust) and complex emotions (pride, shyness, jealousy, guilt, shame, embarrassment). Adults are skilful in reading infants’ expressions and infants show the basic emotions from birth. Infants are able to discriminate between different emotions, although this does not mean that they understand the emotions. Evidence suggests that infants do have an emotional understanding, but this does not necessarily mean that they know that expressions are linked to emotional feeling.
Social referencing occurs when infants and young children look to their caregiver for advice when faced with a difficult or uncertain situation and seek social cues to guide their actions. This is shown in the visual cliff paradigm. Children begin to use emotion words from 18 months with a rapid increase in emotional vocabulary from the third year. Young children showed, using language, that they understand the causal relation between behaviour and emotional response.
Children scored above change on an emotion understanding task, although there was a lot of variation between the tasks. The better children performed on this task, the more pro-social behaviour they showed. Happy emotional responses during play is also associated with better understanding on the emotion understanding task. More negative emotional response during play is associated with poorer understanding on the emotional understanding task.
False belief is incorrectly believing something to be the case when it is not. This has an influence on emotional development, because it is possible that children then belief that others have the same beliefs as them, including emotions. Children that can pass the false belief test are not able to use this capacity to predict the likely emotional response, but they are able to by age 6. There are three main developmental phases of emotion understanding:
Emotion understanding might facilitate children’s acquisition of theory of mind abilities. The quality of family interaction is also important for emotional understanding. Caregivers’ behaviour early in the child’s life is a predictor for children’s later emotion understanding. Mind-mindedness refers to caregivers who are able to ‘read’ their infant’s signals appropriately. Maternal mind-mindedness is a good predictor of attachment security. Callous-unemotional traits include general poverty of affect, a lack of remorse and a disregard for accepted values.
Emotion regulation refers to adjusting one’s emotional state to a suitable
.....read morePiaget proposed that the basic unit of understanding was a scheme, which is a mental representation of actions and knowledge. Infants start out with three basic schemes, sucking, looking and grasping. Operations are internal mental representations. Mental representations not based on physical activity.
Children modify their schemes using two processes: organisation and adaptation. Organisation is organising several schemes into a bigger scheme. Adaptation consists of assimilation and accommodation. Assimilation is incorporating new information into a pre-existing scheme. Accommodation is modifying the pre-existing schemes (or generating a new one) in order to fit new information.
Equilibration is the state in which children’s schemes are in balance and are undisturbed by conflict. When there are too many conflicts that cannot be solved by either assimilation or accommodation, a change of thinking is required and this is a stage shift. A stage shift is a qualitative shift in a child’s way of thinking.
The sensorimotor stage is characterised by thinking is doing and it lasts from birth to approximately two years. It consists of several substages:
The main criticism for these stages is that object permanence and deferred imitation occur much earlier in the development than Piaget suggested. The preoperational stage is a stage that is characterised by an increase in mental representations and it subdivides into two different substages:
The human language is characterised by the following things:
Language consists of several systems, the pragmatic system, the phonological system, the syntactic system and the semantic system.
The pragmatic system refers to the abilities that enable us to communicate effectively and appropriately in a social context. It involves a variety of cognitive and social skills. Turn-taking is important in language because the speaker needs to become the listener and vice-versa after a while. Turn-taking is already present in infants, as is shown by proto-conversations, interactions between adults and infants in which the adults tend to vocalise when the infants are not vocalising or when the infant has finished vocalising. Proto-imperative occurs when infants point to an object and then alternate their gaze between the object and the adult until they obtain the desired object. Proto-declarative occurs when infants use pointing or looking to direct an adult’s attention towards an object. The pragmatic system consists of several parts:
Phonology is the aspect of language about the perception and production of sounds that are used in language. In order for effective communication to occur, children must learn which sounds are important in the language that they hear.
Children must learn to separate the speech stream into individual sounds and sound combinations. This is facilitated by infant-directed speech. Children prefer to listen to human speech than other environmental sounds. Adult speakers can discriminate between
.....read moreIntuitive psychology refers to the awareness some people have regarding others’ motives and beliefs. The unexpected transfer test is the classic false-belief test. The false belief test helps us differentiate between those who do and those who do not understand that minds hold beliefs.
Children below the age of 7 are egocentric, according to Piaget. A conceptual shift is a large qualitative change in an individual’s cognitive processes. Representational ability is the ability to form a mental representation of an event or an object. Metacognition refers to knowledge of one’s state of mind, reflective access to one’s cognitive abilities, thinking about how one is feeling or thinking. The deceptive box task shows false beliefs in young children, as well as difficulties with accessing one’s own beliefs. Children who were unable to acknowledge another person’s false belief were not even attuned to their own prior beliefs. If children do not know their own mind, they cannot know anything about another mind. Children around the age of 4 sometimes answer correctly on the false belief test.
There is evidence for a gradual change between not passing the false belief test and passing the test. The false belief test is incapable of detecting degrees of performance that fall between passing and failing the test. This test makes it appear as if the theory of mind development occurred in stages. There are instances of children passing one false belief test and failing another. The number of false belief tests a child is likely to pass increases gradually with age. There is a difference between performance limitations and competence. Performance refers to limitations that are associated with the challenges presented by the task being asked. Competence refers to the child’s underlying ability which is often not reflected in their performance on tasks. The time it took children to reply to the question of false beliefs compared to the time it took them to answer questions about the current state of reality shows the processing required to answer these questions and that the task not always reflects competence. The wording of a question is of influence with the performance on the false belief task.
Research has shown that children as young as 15 months showed signs of understanding false belief in a preferential looking procedure involving a violation of expectation. A child’s competence can often be underestimated by measures of their performance.
The hindsight bias refers to the inclination to see events that have already happened as being more predictable than they were before they took place. Adults have difficulties with false belief tests as well. They are heavily influenced by the information provided, even if this information is only available to them. Adults sometimes have difficulties with perspective-taking and there is a possibility that people do not automatically attune to other people’s beliefs.
Age is a major influence, as well as a social experience, although age is more important. There are subtle differences in how people understand others’ minds between cultures.
.....read moreCultural tools refer to any tools that help us calculate, produce models, make predictions and understand the world more fully. Orthographies, writing systems, differ greatly. Alphabetic scripts are a writing system in which written symbols correspond to spoken sounds. In Chinese, each letter corresponds to a morpheme. Children find it difficult to realize that letters represent phonemes. Children get better at phonemes as they get older. Instruction is necessary for learning how to read and write. The environment plays a key role. The more children have learned about phonemes, the better they read and write.
Phonemic awareness is the idea that words consist of a sequence of phonemes. This idea does not come easily to young children. Phonological skills refer to the ability to detect and manipulate sounds at the phonetic, syllabic and intra-syllabic levels. Intrasyllabic units are units of speech that are smaller than syllables but larger than phonemes. An example of intrasyllabic units is rime (the unit that rhymes). Most children are aware of rimes from an early age. There is a positive relationship between sensitivity to rhyme and success in reading.
Conditional spelling rules are rules which determine that a letter or a group of letters represent one sound in one context and another sound in a different context. At first, children stick to a letter-sound association and don’t pay a lot of attention to conditional rules. Children only pass the pseudo-word test at the age of 10. In this test, children show that they understand the rule of the ‘silent-e’. Children’s success in reading determines how well they learn this particular spelling rule. In morpho-phonemic script, spelling rules are based on phonemes and on morphemes. Inflectional morphemes tell you something about the grammatical status of the word (e.g: tells you something about whether the word is plural or not). Derivational morphemes change the meaning of the word.
The difficulty in morphemic spelling rules could arise because of the fact that children are not at first aware of the morphemic structure of the words that they are trying to write. Young children may fail to use the conventional spellings for morphemes because they do not know enough about morphemes. The phenomenon of children’s spelling getting worse with some words at the same time as it gets better with others is widespread.
The overgeneralization of newly learned spelling patterns may be an essential part of learning and there may be an underlying three-step sequence:
They use the rule first and learn about it later. It could also be that children write words correctly by rote and later infer the underlying rule for spelling inflexions on the basis of specific knowledge. Children’s word-specific knowledge is
.....read moreMoral dilemmas are situations in which people must choose and justify a course of action or reasoning with respect to a moral issue. Piaget concluded that younger children’s moral judgement was governed by unilateral respect for adults and adults’ rules, with little understanding of reciprocity or the intentions of others. Kohlberg defined five stages of moral development:
Kohlberg claimed that development across childhood and adolescence is characterised by sequential passage through stages. Stage 1 and 2 are most common in children with stage 3 emerging in adolescents. Stage 5 appears in adulthood, even though it remains fairly rare. Individuals generally move up one stage at a time. Regression over time Is rare. There is a strong positive linear relationship between educational attainment and moral stage.
A very common criticism of Kohlberg is that the sorts of justifications offered for moral dilemmas are not associated with action. Those who reason at higher stages are more likely to act pro-socially than those who reason at lower stages. Moral stages represent ways of thinking about moral issues, not specific behavioural tendencies. Individuals at different stages can choose the same action, but for different reasons.
There is some sort of moral cognition, a set of heuristics, which is shown by the fact that most moral judgements are made fairly quick with essentially no conscious deliberation of using certain rules.
Children make sharp distinctions between moral and non-moral domains. Moral domains are unlikely to be used in reasoning about all social issues. Aggression can perhaps be understood in terms of the attributions children make rather than moral stages. Attributions refer to the belief one holds as to why people carry out a particular action or behaviour.
There is evidence for the existence of the moral stages 2, 3 and 4 in non-western cultures, although stage 5 is not present in non-western cultures.
Adolescents can see both figures in ambiguous figures, while young children can only see one, or take longer to see the other. This suggests increased flexibility of perception. Adolescents have a superior ability to allocate attentional resources. Selective attention is the ability to allocate attentional resources and focus on a specific topic. Adolescents have superior selective attention. Young children divide their attention, while adolescents selectively focus their attention.
Speed of processing refers to the amount of time needed to carry out any given mental calculation. Speed of processing develops rapidly during childhood and continues to develop during the adolescent years. This development is partially driven by the maturation of white matter in the brain.
There is rapid development in face processing abilities during childhood and adolescence. The encoding switch hypothesis claims that different information about faces is represented in memory by children of different ages. Children prior to the age of 10 primarily use information about individual features and adolescents use information about the configuration of features. Featural processing is a tendency to process the separate features of the face, as opposed to perceiving the relationship between the parts. Configural processing is processing that pays attention to the overall spatial layout of individual features. Adolescents only encode the essential information of faces. Hormonal changes during puberty might account for a poorer facial recognition between the age of 11 and 14.
Adolescents may have a better memory, because they use different memory strategies to remember things, where young children only use basic mnemonics, such as the rehearsal strategy. Adolescents can make use of the organisation strategy, clustering groups of items in memory when they are to be remembered.
There are three important characteristics of adolescents’ general intellectual ability.
Children’s general intellectual abilities are more unstable at a younger age than in later years. There are two types of intelligence:
The Flynn-effect is the increase in IQ in generations. There are generational IQ gains.
Reasoning is the set of mental processes by which we draw conclusions on the basis of information known to us. There are three types of reasoning:
Pedagogy refers to any aspect of theory or practice related to teaching. In the 1960s, there was a shift toward a child-centred education. Piaget emphasised the role of the teacher for providing the best physical environment for children to overcome their egocentrism and start to understand conservation. Discovery learning is encouraging children to learn by discovering information for themselves. Based on constructivism, many learning activities involve discovery learning. The most efficient way of learning is guided discovery, where children are the centre of their learning, but a teacher provides feedback as they develop their understanding.
Piaget argued that egocentrism could be overcome via interaction with peers because this shows the child different perspectives. Peers are more important than adults because they are more proximate and credible than adult helper. Peers provide the ideal source of socio-cognitive conflict, where two opposing egocentric views result in a cognitive conflict. Through these conflicts, children question their own understanding, leading to a resolution of the conflict and cognitive advance. Peers are an important influence on the child’s own construction of knowledge and their cognitive development.
There are strong peer facilitation effects. The pairing of two children can have a positive impact on children’s later individual performance. Children perform better on classic Piagetian tasks in pairs than alone. The social interaction required to reach a common understanding forces the child to examine their own understanding and compare it to that of the other child, helping the child overcome their own egocentrism. Peer effects are relatively long-lasting. The benefits of peer interaction are sometimes only observed after a delay. This could happen because the changes in thinking promoted by sociocognitive conflicts help children benefit from subsequent learning experiences. Besides these cognitive effects of peer interaction, there is also an increase in cooperation and social skills, which could also benefit the child later in life.
Positive peer interaction effects are not restricted to very young children on Piagetian-based tasks. It also occurs on more complex problem solving and positive peer interaction-effects are not bound to the physical environment, but can also occur while working together on a computer.
There is strong evidence for the efficacy of peer collaboration, but the positive effects are not certain to arise. Conflict resolution will take place in peer collaboration, but this is not necessarily in the direction of cognitive advancement. There is an effect of children’s popularity on the outcomes of peer collaboration. The pairing of two peers is important. Social skills are important and superior social skills can be useful in resolving the cognitive conflict. Same-sex peer pairings are also more efficient at a younger age than mixed-sex pairings because there is more tension and antagonism in mixed-sex pairings. Mixed-sex pairings can work out well if positive collaboration is actively promoted and encouraged. Cognitive advancement is more likely to occur if the more developed peer is the girl.
According to Vygotsky, knowledge exists intermentally between individuals before it can exist intramentally,
.....read moreResilience occurs when children experience positive outcomes despite experiencing significant risk. Risk is defined as those stressors that have proven or presumed effects on increasing the likelihood of maladjustment in children (e.g: poverty, maltreatment). Risk factors are catastrophic events. Risk factors pose a pervasive threat through deprivation of children’s basic needs. A protective factor is anything that prevents or reduces vulnerability for the development of a disorder. Vulnerability factors refer to those attributes of the individual that contribute to maladjustment under conditions of adversity. Children’s exposure to risk varies according to age. Infants are more vulnerable, yet less likely to suffer from difficulties involving their social environment, because of their lack of understanding of the situation.
There are several major risk factors:
Bullying is the term used to define an individual’s repeated exposure to negative actions by one or more other people. There is a lot of social pressure in the classroom. A key factor is the process of social comparison, where the child compares his performance with his classmates. This comparison is mostly upward and can raise the child’s level of academic performance, but can also result in negative self-perception. Self-worth protection is the tendency of some students to reduce their levels of effort so that any subsequent poor academic performance will be attributed to low motivation rather than a lack of ability.
There is also peer pressure to either work hard or to not work hard. The visible demonstration of a student’s attempt to excel academically has social risks. These social risks can result in reduced striving. Stress levels in relation to academic performance can often be high.
Bullying is a subset of aggressive behaviour characterised by repetition and an imbalance of power. It is systematic abuse of power. The following methods can be used in order to find out about bullying: teacher and parent reports, self-reports, peer nominations, direct observations, interviews.
There are different types of bullying. The traditional forms of bullying include physical, verbal and indirect aggression. Indirect aggression includes spreading rumours and systematic social exclusion. Bias bullying is bullying in which the victim is a member of a particular group. Cyberbullying is a type of bullying which uses electronic devices. Cyberbullying is more difficult to escape from. The bullies also have more anonymity when cyberbullying. Traditional bullying appears to be on the decline while cyberbullying is stable or increasing.
There are four roles in bullying: bully, victim, non-involved, bully-victim. There are passive victims and provocative victims. There are also six participant roles: ringleader bullies, follower bullies, reinforcers, defenders and bystanders.
Many victims of bullying refuse to tell someone that they’re being bullied. The proportion that doesn’t tell anyone increases with age. Boy victims are less likely to tell it anyone than girl victims.
Victims of bullying often experience anxiety, depression, low self-esteem, physical and psychosomatic complaints, greater risk of self-harm and suicidal ideation and some might even commit suicide. It is not sure whether victimisation causes depression and low self-esteem, or that depression and low self-esteem make people more susceptible to bullying.
There are several causes of bullying. Society factors (tolerance of violence), school climate and quality of teacher and pupil relationships are potential causes of bullying, although there are many more. Some children bully others in order to be more popular and show their dominance. School bullying may be an early stage in the development of later antisocial behaviour. A harsh physical discipline at home and an insecure attachment can be predictors for involvement in bullying. Parental-maltreatment and abuse is a likely risk factor in the bully-victim or aggressive victim group. Having poor social skills and little friendship support is a risk factor for
.....read moreDevelopmental delay refers to a delayed, but normal path of development. A developmental difference refers to a qualitatively different path of development. Whether the development is delayed or different depends on the area of development. One approach to quantifying a delay includes looking at the extent to which individual children perform relative to a level expected for their chronological age on standardised assessment tests. Spotting atypical development can also be done by checking the scores of a test of children and comparing them with the population. This makes use of standard deviations. Concluding that one aspect of development is delayed doesn’t tell us anything about what underlies the delay.
The study of atypically developing children provides a profile of the main behaviours associated with a condition within the context of development across the human lifespan. Atypical trajectory refers to a sequence of development that departs from the typical sequence. The study of atypical development can result in effective interventions and it can also teach us something about typical development.
A conventional methodological method is making a comparison between the performance of the atypical sample and the performance of the relevant control group sample. It is common to compare a clinical group with two control groups, using a standardised test. By checking the difference of the clinical group to the mental age group and the chronological age group, it is possible to determine whether the clinical group has a delay or a qualitatively different development.
The human genome project found that there were fewer genes than previously thought and this is a strong indicator that there was more to specifying humanity than the action of individual genes in isolation (e.g: not one gene causes disease because there aren’t enough genes for that). The study showed that there is no one-to-one mapping between a DNA gene to a specific protein and an associated inherited trait. The complex interaction between genes leads to traits and not a single gene. This project changed the way we look at atypical development.
Neuroimaging tools aid localisation of brain activity that enables the developmental psychologist to understand more about the pathways associated with atypical development. Neuroimaging tools that are typically used in order to research development are PET, ERP and MEG. These tools make sure that we know more about the brain areas and processing speeds related to atypical development compared to typical development.
Eye-tracking technology allows precise measures of visual behaviour. One advantage of eye-tracking measurements is that it takes no explicit verbal instructions and can thus also be used for infants.
Atypical conditions of childhood can be characterised according to the type of causal pathways involved. There are specific genetic conditions, but there are also conditions that don’t have a known specific genetic defect (e.g: ADHD).
Williams Syndrome is an extremely rare condition. This makes it difficult to conduct research about this syndrome. People with Williams syndrome have low non-verbal IQ, difficulties in planning, problem-solving and spatial
.....read moreThe most notable cognitive declines as a result of aging are: difficulty paying attention to relevant information and ignoring irrelevant information, word-finding difficulties, problems remembering the context in which information was learned.
Aging affects a range of cognitive functions, but there is one core deficit, according to domain-general theories of aging. There are three possible core deficits:
It is possible to explain the effects of cognitive aging by changes that have a larger impact on one area of cognition than another, according to the domain-general theories of aging. There are two main domain-general theories of cognitive aging:
There are two cognitive functions that remain stable or improve with age:
A defining feature of adolescence is newfound importance of peer and romantic relationships. A shifting motivation toward social relatedness is thought to intensify the attention, salience and emotion relegated to processing information concerning social evaluations and social standing, referred to as social sensitivity.
The rise in peer interaction of adolescents is not unique to humans. The quality of peer interactions changes from friends as activity partners to peers as intimate partners on a platonic and romantic level. The socio-affective circuitry includes the amygdala, striatum and the medial prefrontal cortex. Brain areas involved in the social context are highly influenced by pubertal hormones.
Information about one’s social standing is laden with emotion. Adolescents report a greater mood change and a change in anxiety after either positive or negative social feedback. Adolescents have heightened activity in the striatum and the subgenual anterior cingulate cortex. Adolescents also recruit medial prefrontal cortex more strongly compared to adults. There is a greater release of cortisol (a stress hormone) when under social scrutiny in adolescents. Social evaluative situations induce self-consciousness and engage stress systems of the body in adolescents.
Adolescents have a tendency to speculate about the thoughts and feelings of peers. This ability is called mentalizing. Mentalizing abilities continue to mature through adolescence. The social brain includes the temporoparietal junction, superior temporal sulcus and the medial prefrontal cortex.
Social competence is the ability to achieve personal goals from interactions with others while maintaining a positive relationship with the other. Psychopathy is characterised by the lack of empathy and emotional depth, intelligence charm and eloquence and antisocial behaviour and boldness.
There are four networks of the social brain:
Network | Brain areas | Function |
Mirror/simulation/action-perception network | Inferior frontal gyrus, lateral parietal cortex | Recognition of other people’s actions, planning one’s own actions |
Amygdala network | Amygdala, ventral striatum, orbitofrontal cortex | Recognition and evaluation of emotional and social stimuli |
Mentalizing network | Medial prefrontal cortex, posterior cingulate gyrus, temporal pole, superior temporal sulcus, temporal-parietal junction |
Until recently, it was thought that drug-abusers keep using drugs because they like the benefits more than the disadvantages, but most drug-abusers are well aware of the disadvantages of abusing drugs. The problem is that most drug-abusers cannot resist the automatically triggered impulses. If there is little room for conscious control in a situation, the action tendency (using drugs or substances) might be stronger than the conscious control.
There are two semi-independent systems:
The brain changes as a result of continued substance abuse. Some of these changes involve neural substrates related to emotion and motivation. The impulsive system becomes sensitised to the drug and other cues that predict use following prolonged drug abuse. The result is that drug-related cues automatically capture their attention. This may result in automatic action tendencies (use the substance or drug). This action tendency can still be inhibited if the person has enough motivation or ability to do so. Impulsive people are more likely to develop addictions.
Implicit cognition is measured by testing the attention bias and memory associations. The best attentional-bias task is the drug Stroop task. The visual probe test is also used for testing attentional bias. Memory associations can be tested by providing participants with cues and to see which they associate with and another way is presenting participants with affective phrases that can be alcohol or drug-related. Spontaneous associations reflect impulsive, automatic processes in addictive behaviours, assess unique information beyond more explicit expected outcomes.
Cognitive interventions are better suited to change explicit cognitive processes than to change implicit ones. New interventions are being developed focussed on the two semi-independent systems and substance abuse is being predicted by the results on the attentional bias and memory association tasks. This focusses on changing implicit associations and attention towards more neutral stimuli, rather than drug-related stimuli. The newly developed interventions are proper supplements to already existing interventions, rather than a good alternative.
Implicit measures may better reflect deeper affective mechanisms that operate outside awareness than may explicit measures and thus may provide a unique window on these processes in the development of human addiction. Long-term effects of alcohol and drugs on systems of emotion and motivation are particularly pronounced during adolescence.
Increasing age, by itself, contributes nothing to development. The maturation and changes resulting from experience that intervene between different ages and stages of childhood are important. Maturation aspects are aspects of development that are largely under genetic control and hence largely uninfluenced by environmental factors.
Folk theories of development are ideas held about development that is not based upon scientific investigation There are two main folk theories:
A paradigm is a world view or a world hypothesis. There are two main paradigms in many developmental theories:
There are three main ways of studying age-related changes:
Design | Definition | Strong aspects | Weak aspects |
Cross-sectional designs | Children of different ages are observed at a single point in time. | It is not expensive and not that time-consuming. | It only describes age differences and there is no estimate of continuity. |
Longitudinal designs | Children are observed multiple times in their development. | It is possible to assess within-person and between-person differences in age changes. An estimate of continuity is possible. |
A theory of development is a scheme or system of ideas that is based on evidence and attempts to explain, describe and predict behaviour and development. Motor development relates to the development of motor skills and consists of motor milestones, the basic motor skills acquired in infancy and early childhood (e.g: sitting, crawling). Motor development gives an individual the ability to act on the world.
The maturational theories by Gesell state that motor development proceeds from the global to the specific in two directions:
This theory states that maturation alone shapes motor development. Development is controlled by a maturational timetable linked to the central nervous system and to muscular development. This theory does not account for considerable individual differences in the acquisition of various motor skills.
The dynamic systems theory views the individual as interacting dynamically in a complex system in which all parts interact. This theory states that all new motor development is the result of a dynamic and continual interaction of three major factors, the nervous system development, the capabilities and biomechanics of the body and environmental constraints and support.
A study on infant kicking showed that infants are able to change their pattern of interlimb coordination. A study on infant reaching showed that before infants start to reach they will stabilize their heads because this gives the infants a base to reach from. This shows that motor skills are learned through a process of modifying and developing their already existing abilities. A study on infant walking showed that infants do not have a fixed and rigid understanding of their own abilities and have the dynamic flexibility to adjust their abilities as they approach each novel motor problem.
Piaget stated that children are active agents in shaping their own development and that they learn to adapt to their environment as a result of their cognitive adaptations. There are two important processes necessary in order to adapt to the world:
These processes are functional invariants, processes that do not change during development. Cognitive structures (schemas) do change. According to Piaget, there are four broad stages of development:
In precocial species, the young are physically mobile and able from the moment of birth and in altricial species the young are helpless. Nativism is the view that many skills or abilities are native or hard-wired into the brain at birth. Empiricism is the view that humans are a blank slate at birth. Cognition is mental activity.
Binet introduced the term mental age, which can be defined as an individual’s level of mental ability relative to others. Chronological age is a person’s actual age. The intelligence quotient is a measure of a person’s level of intelligence compared to a population of individuals of approximately the same age. There are four important things to note about IQ tests and IQ scores:
Some people argue that a general intelligence underlies the scores of an intelligence test and some people argue that intelligence is made up of several individual components. Many intelligence tests divide intelligence into verbal and performance subscales.
Heritability is a statistical measure that describes how much of the variation of a trait in a population is due to genetic differences rather than environmental differences in a population. Heritability estimates refer to a population and tell us nothing about individuals. Genetic determinism is the hypothesis that people become who they are as a consequence of their genetic inheritance. Environmentalism is the hypothesis that people become who they are as a consequence of the learning and experiences they have had throughout life.
The familial resemblance is the resemblance between relatives whose genetic relationship to each other is known. The familial resemblance is a type of evidence concerning genetic influences to cognitive development. Missing heritability refers to the failure to find any of the genes associated with cognitive abilities. A gene and environment interaction are when different genotypes respond to similar environmental factors in different ways to create an individual’s phenotype. There are several environmental factors that create different phenotypes, depending on the individual, because the genotype of the person differs. An example of this is phenylketonuria, a disease which can cause severe mental retardation, unless on a phenylketonuria free diet, which shows that the same environmental factor (diet) can have different phenotypes as an outcome (mental retardation or not).
Studies on adoptees have shown that an early deprived upbringing can have serious detrimental effects on children’s development and that these detrimental effects can be partially reversed by placement into good quality adoptive homes. Environmental drift refers to changes in
.....read morePrenatal development is the development of human individuals before they are born. The foetus is the organism 12 weeks after conception until birth. The embryo is the developing organism during the period when organs are forming. A neonate is an infant less than a month old. Postnatal development is the development of a human individual after he is born. It is now possible to study foetuses using ultrasound and fMRI.
The ectoderm is the outermost of three primary germ layers of an embryo. The central nervous system develops from the ectoderm. The other two layers are the endoderm and the mesoderm. The endoderm develops into the neural plate, a thickening of cells that will give rise to the brain. The neural plate folds into a neural tube, which is a hollow structure in the embryo that gives rise to the brain and spinal column. The first movements of the foetus are reflexes that occur using the spinal cord, without the use of the brain.
The cerebral cortex is the area of the brain that is associated with complex tasks, such as memory and language. In the first two or three months of pregnancy, there is relatively little development in this area. The cerebral hemispheres develop from the forebrain at about 9 weeks and rapidly increase in size and will later become highly specialised areas in the brain. After 6 months, sulci (deep narrow grooves of the outer surface of the brain) and gyri (ridges on the outer surface of the brain) have appeared. This shows that the brain has developed a lot since infolding is necessary to accommodate for the total brain area. At around 15 weeks, there is a lull in movement, because inhibition has appeared in the brain and this leads to a period of reorganisation of behaviour. After 27 weeks, the cerebral cortex is mature, but the brain continues to grow in size until adulthood, mostly because of myelination, the process by which myelin is formed around neurons. Myelin causes faster neurotransmission. Foetuses at about 24 weeks have the ability to learn and have a very basic form of memory.
Foetuses’ behaviour becomes progressively more organised as the pregnancy proceeds. At 34 weeks, they don’t continuously move but have distinct patterns of rest and activity. There are now two dominant patterns of activity: quiet sleep or active sleep. In the active sleep, the foetuses will be responsive to sensory stimuli. Early neuronal networks are being stimulated during active sleep. Foetuses at the end of pregnancy no longer spend a lot of time in active sleep, because their brain has matured and more inhibitory pathways have developed. Term foetuses are more active when the mother is not, for example, when she is asleep.
The emergence of the senses follows a set mammalian pattern of development. The rooting reflex is the reflex that causes new-borns to respond to one of their cheeks being touched by turning their heads in that direction.
Visual acuity is the ability to make fine discriminations between the elements in the visual array. Infants’ vision is poorer than that of an adult. Visual accommodation is the ability to focus on objects irrespective of their distance from the eye. Infants are not good at this either. There are several ways to test infants their vision:
Infants are able to discriminate between simple shapes. This even occurred in new-borns, showing that new-born infants perceive simple shapes as a whole and not just as a collection of parts.
Size constancy is the understanding that an object remains the same size despite its retinal image size changing as it moves closer to or away from us. Shape constancy is the understanding that an object remains the same shape even though the retinal image shape changes when it is viewed from different angles. New-borns already understand the principle of size constancy and shape constancy. Object unity is the understanding that an object is whole or complete even though part of it may be hidden. 4-month-olds perceive object unity already. It is likely that infants use common motion to perceive object unity. New-borns do not perceive object unity. 6-month-olds perceive trajectory-continuity, whereas 4-month-olds only do so when the occlude is narrow. Subjective contour is when only parts of an object are presented, the remaining contours are filled in, in order that the complete shape can be perceived. 4-month-olds perceive subjective contour, especially when the object is in motion. They also perceive this as an occlude.
Face perception emerges at around 2 months, although evidence suggests that a form of facial perception is present at birth. The two-process account of newborn face perception states that new-born preference for faces stems from an innate subcortical mechanism that leads new-borns to attend preferentially to faces of the same species. After the second month of life, this is replaced or supplemented by an experientially based mechanism that involves a diffuse network of cortical areas and allows for continues cortical specialisation and tuning to specific faces. An alternative view is that new-borns prefer certain properties of stimuli that are not face specific.
Infants have a preference for the face of their mother and can discriminate between their mother and other faces. 2-month-old infants and even new-borns will look longer at a face rated attractive by adults than non-attractive faces. The preference for attractiveness may stem from the preference for prototype faces. General abilities become more narrowly tuned as a result of experience. Infants are able to imitate already and this might play an important role in language development.
Very young infants
.....read moreEmotional development can be divided into three areas: recognising emotions, understanding emotions and regulating emotions.
Darwin argued that the ability to communicate emotions is innate. Evidence for this comes from cross-cultural understanding of emotions and new-borns that portray certain emotions. There is a distinction between basic emotions (happiness, sadness, fear, anger, interest, surprise and disgust) and complex emotions (pride, shyness, jealousy, guilt, shame, embarrassment). Adults are skilful in reading infants’ expressions and infants show the basic emotions from birth. Infants are able to discriminate between different emotions, although this does not mean that they understand the emotions. Evidence suggests that infants do have an emotional understanding, but this does not necessarily mean that they know that expressions are linked to emotional feeling.
Social referencing occurs when infants and young children look to their caregiver for advice when faced with a difficult or uncertain situation and seek social cues to guide their actions. This is shown in the visual cliff paradigm. Children begin to use emotion words from 18 months with a rapid increase in emotional vocabulary from the third year. Young children showed, using language, that they understand the causal relation between behaviour and emotional response.
Children scored above change on an emotion understanding task, although there was a lot of variation between the tasks. The better children performed on this task, the more pro-social behaviour they showed. Happy emotional responses during play is also associated with better understanding on the emotion understanding task. More negative emotional response during play is associated with poorer understanding on the emotional understanding task.
False belief is incorrectly believing something to be the case when it is not. This has an influence on emotional development, because it is possible that children then belief that others have the same beliefs as them, including emotions. Children that can pass the false belief test are not able to use this capacity to predict the likely emotional response, but they are able to by age 6. There are three main developmental phases of emotion understanding:
Emotion understanding might facilitate children’s acquisition of theory of mind abilities. The quality of family interaction is also important for emotional understanding. Caregivers’ behaviour early in the child’s life is a predictor for children’s later emotion understanding. Mind-mindedness refers to caregivers who are able to ‘read’ their infant’s signals appropriately. Maternal mind-mindedness is a good predictor of attachment security. Callous-unemotional traits include general poverty of affect, a lack of remorse and a disregard for accepted values.
Emotion regulation refers to adjusting one’s emotional state to a suitable
.....read morePiaget proposed that the basic unit of understanding was a scheme, which is a mental representation of actions and knowledge. Infants start out with three basic schemes, sucking, looking and grasping. Operations are internal mental representations. Mental representations not based on physical activity.
Children modify their schemes using two processes: organisation and adaptation. Organisation is organising several schemes into a bigger scheme. Adaptation consists of assimilation and accommodation. Assimilation is incorporating new information into a pre-existing scheme. Accommodation is modifying the pre-existing schemes (or generating a new one) in order to fit new information.
Equilibration is the state in which children’s schemes are in balance and are undisturbed by conflict. When there are too many conflicts that cannot be solved by either assimilation or accommodation, a change of thinking is required and this is a stage shift. A stage shift is a qualitative shift in a child’s way of thinking.
The sensorimotor stage is characterised by thinking is doing and it lasts from birth to approximately two years. It consists of several substages:
The main criticism for these stages is that object permanence and deferred imitation occur much earlier in the development than Piaget suggested. The preoperational stage is a stage that is characterised by an increase in mental representations and it subdivides into two different substages:
The human language is characterised by the following things:
Language consists of several systems, the pragmatic system, the phonological system, the syntactic system and the semantic system.
The pragmatic system refers to the abilities that enable us to communicate effectively and appropriately in a social context. It involves a variety of cognitive and social skills. Turn-taking is important in language because the speaker needs to become the listener and vice-versa after a while. Turn-taking is already present in infants, as is shown by proto-conversations, interactions between adults and infants in which the adults tend to vocalise when the infants are not vocalising or when the infant has finished vocalising. Proto-imperative occurs when infants point to an object and then alternate their gaze between the object and the adult until they obtain the desired object. Proto-declarative occurs when infants use pointing or looking to direct an adult’s attention towards an object. The pragmatic system consists of several parts:
Phonology is the aspect of language about the perception and production of sounds that are used in language. In order for effective communication to occur, children must learn which sounds are important in the language that they hear.
Children must learn to separate the speech stream into individual sounds and sound combinations. This is facilitated by infant-directed speech. Children prefer to listen to human speech than other environmental sounds. Adult speakers can discriminate between
.....read moreIntuitive psychology refers to the awareness some people have regarding others’ motives and beliefs. The unexpected transfer test is the classic false-belief test. The false belief test helps us differentiate between those who do and those who do not understand that minds hold beliefs.
Children below the age of 7 are egocentric, according to Piaget. A conceptual shift is a large qualitative change in an individual’s cognitive processes. Representational ability is the ability to form a mental representation of an event or an object. Metacognition refers to knowledge of one’s state of mind, reflective access to one’s cognitive abilities, thinking about how one is feeling or thinking. The deceptive box task shows false beliefs in young children, as well as difficulties with accessing one’s own beliefs. Children who were unable to acknowledge another person’s false belief were not even attuned to their own prior beliefs. If children do not know their own mind, they cannot know anything about another mind. Children around the age of 4 sometimes answer correctly on the false belief test.
There is evidence for a gradual change between not passing the false belief test and passing the test. The false belief test is incapable of detecting degrees of performance that fall between passing and failing the test. This test makes it appear as if the theory of mind development occurred in stages. There are instances of children passing one false belief test and failing another. The number of false belief tests a child is likely to pass increases gradually with age. There is a difference between performance limitations and competence. Performance refers to limitations that are associated with the challenges presented by the task being asked. Competence refers to the child’s underlying ability which is often not reflected in their performance on tasks. The time it took children to reply to the question of false beliefs compared to the time it took them to answer questions about the current state of reality shows the processing required to answer these questions and that the task not always reflects competence. The wording of a question is of influence with the performance on the false belief task.
Research has shown that children as young as 15 months showed signs of understanding false belief in a preferential looking procedure involving a violation of expectation. A child’s competence can often be underestimated by measures of their performance.
The hindsight bias refers to the inclination to see events that have already happened as being more predictable than they were before they took place. Adults have difficulties with false belief tests as well. They are heavily influenced by the information provided, even if this information is only available to them. Adults sometimes have difficulties with perspective-taking and there is a possibility that people do not automatically attune to other people’s beliefs.
Age is a major influence, as well as a social experience, although age is more important. There are subtle differences in how people understand others’ minds between cultures.
.....read moreCultural tools refer to any tools that help us calculate, produce models, make predictions and understand the world more fully. Orthographies, writing systems, differ greatly. Alphabetic scripts are a writing system in which written symbols correspond to spoken sounds. In Chinese, each letter corresponds to a morpheme. Children find it difficult to realize that letters represent phonemes. Children get better at phonemes as they get older. Instruction is necessary for learning how to read and write. The environment plays a key role. The more children have learned about phonemes, the better they read and write.
Phonemic awareness is the idea that words consist of a sequence of phonemes. This idea does not come easily to young children. Phonological skills refer to the ability to detect and manipulate sounds at the phonetic, syllabic and intra-syllabic levels. Intrasyllabic units are units of speech that are smaller than syllables but larger than phonemes. An example of intrasyllabic units is rime (the unit that rhymes). Most children are aware of rimes from an early age. There is a positive relationship between sensitivity to rhyme and success in reading.
Conditional spelling rules are rules which determine that a letter or a group of letters represent one sound in one context and another sound in a different context. At first, children stick to a letter-sound association and don’t pay a lot of attention to conditional rules. Children only pass the pseudo-word test at the age of 10. In this test, children show that they understand the rule of the ‘silent-e’. Children’s success in reading determines how well they learn this particular spelling rule. In morpho-phonemic script, spelling rules are based on phonemes and on morphemes. Inflectional morphemes tell you something about the grammatical status of the word (e.g: tells you something about whether the word is plural or not). Derivational morphemes change the meaning of the word.
The difficulty in morphemic spelling rules could arise because of the fact that children are not at first aware of the morphemic structure of the words that they are trying to write. Young children may fail to use the conventional spellings for morphemes because they do not know enough about morphemes. The phenomenon of children’s spelling getting worse with some words at the same time as it gets better with others is widespread.
The overgeneralization of newly learned spelling patterns may be an essential part of learning and there may be an underlying three-step sequence:
They use the rule first and learn about it later. It could also be that children write words correctly by rote and later infer the underlying rule for spelling inflexions on the basis of specific knowledge. Children’s word-specific knowledge is
.....read moreMoral dilemmas are situations in which people must choose and justify a course of action or reasoning with respect to a moral issue. Piaget concluded that younger children’s moral judgement was governed by unilateral respect for adults and adults’ rules, with little understanding of reciprocity or the intentions of others. Kohlberg defined five stages of moral development:
Kohlberg claimed that development across childhood and adolescence is characterised by sequential passage through stages. Stage 1 and 2 are most common in children with stage 3 emerging in adolescents. Stage 5 appears in adulthood, even though it remains fairly rare. Individuals generally move up one stage at a time. Regression over time Is rare. There is a strong positive linear relationship between educational attainment and moral stage.
A very common criticism of Kohlberg is that the sorts of justifications offered for moral dilemmas are not associated with action. Those who reason at higher stages are more likely to act pro-socially than those who reason at lower stages. Moral stages represent ways of thinking about moral issues, not specific behavioural tendencies. Individuals at different stages can choose the same action, but for different reasons.
There is some sort of moral cognition, a set of heuristics, which is shown by the fact that most moral judgements are made fairly quick with essentially no conscious deliberation of using certain rules.
Children make sharp distinctions between moral and non-moral domains. Moral domains are unlikely to be used in reasoning about all social issues. Aggression can perhaps be understood in terms of the attributions children make rather than moral stages. Attributions refer to the belief one holds as to why people carry out a particular action or behaviour.
There is evidence for the existence of the moral stages 2, 3 and 4 in non-western cultures, although stage 5 is not present in non-western cultures.
Adolescents can see both figures in ambiguous figures, while young children can only see one, or take longer to see the other. This suggests increased flexibility of perception. Adolescents have a superior ability to allocate attentional resources. Selective attention is the ability to allocate attentional resources and focus on a specific topic. Adolescents have superior selective attention. Young children divide their attention, while adolescents selectively focus their attention.
Speed of processing refers to the amount of time needed to carry out any given mental calculation. Speed of processing develops rapidly during childhood and continues to develop during the adolescent years. This development is partially driven by the maturation of white matter in the brain.
There is rapid development in face processing abilities during childhood and adolescence. The encoding switch hypothesis claims that different information about faces is represented in memory by children of different ages. Children prior to the age of 10 primarily use information about individual features and adolescents use information about the configuration of features. Featural processing is a tendency to process the separate features of the face, as opposed to perceiving the relationship between the parts. Configural processing is processing that pays attention to the overall spatial layout of individual features. Adolescents only encode the essential information of faces. Hormonal changes during puberty might account for a poorer facial recognition between the age of 11 and 14.
Adolescents may have a better memory, because they use different memory strategies to remember things, where young children only use basic mnemonics, such as the rehearsal strategy. Adolescents can make use of the organisation strategy, clustering groups of items in memory when they are to be remembered.
There are three important characteristics of adolescents’ general intellectual ability.
Children’s general intellectual abilities are more unstable at a younger age than in later years. There are two types of intelligence:
The Flynn-effect is the increase in IQ in generations. There are generational IQ gains.
Reasoning is the set of mental processes by which we draw conclusions on the basis of information known to us. There are three types of reasoning:
Pedagogy refers to any aspect of theory or practice related to teaching. In the 1960s, there was a shift toward a child-centred education. Piaget emphasised the role of the teacher for providing the best physical environment for children to overcome their egocentrism and start to understand conservation. Discovery learning is encouraging children to learn by discovering information for themselves. Based on constructivism, many learning activities involve discovery learning. The most efficient way of learning is guided discovery, where children are the centre of their learning, but a teacher provides feedback as they develop their understanding.
Piaget argued that egocentrism could be overcome via interaction with peers because this shows the child different perspectives. Peers are more important than adults because they are more proximate and credible than adult helper. Peers provide the ideal source of socio-cognitive conflict, where two opposing egocentric views result in a cognitive conflict. Through these conflicts, children question their own understanding, leading to a resolution of the conflict and cognitive advance. Peers are an important influence on the child’s own construction of knowledge and their cognitive development.
There are strong peer facilitation effects. The pairing of two children can have a positive impact on children’s later individual performance. Children perform better on classic Piagetian tasks in pairs than alone. The social interaction required to reach a common understanding forces the child to examine their own understanding and compare it to that of the other child, helping the child overcome their own egocentrism. Peer effects are relatively long-lasting. The benefits of peer interaction are sometimes only observed after a delay. This could happen because the changes in thinking promoted by sociocognitive conflicts help children benefit from subsequent learning experiences. Besides these cognitive effects of peer interaction, there is also an increase in cooperation and social skills, which could also benefit the child later in life.
Positive peer interaction effects are not restricted to very young children on Piagetian-based tasks. It also occurs on more complex problem solving and positive peer interaction-effects are not bound to the physical environment, but can also occur while working together on a computer.
There is strong evidence for the efficacy of peer collaboration, but the positive effects are not certain to arise. Conflict resolution will take place in peer collaboration, but this is not necessarily in the direction of cognitive advancement. There is an effect of children’s popularity on the outcomes of peer collaboration. The pairing of two peers is important. Social skills are important and superior social skills can be useful in resolving the cognitive conflict. Same-sex peer pairings are also more efficient at a younger age than mixed-sex pairings because there is more tension and antagonism in mixed-sex pairings. Mixed-sex pairings can work out well if positive collaboration is actively promoted and encouraged. Cognitive advancement is more likely to occur if the more developed peer is the girl.
According to Vygotsky, knowledge exists intermentally between individuals before it can exist intramentally,
.....read moreResilience occurs when children experience positive outcomes despite experiencing significant risk. Risk is defined as those stressors that have proven or presumed effects on increasing the likelihood of maladjustment in children (e.g: poverty, maltreatment). Risk factors are catastrophic events. Risk factors pose a pervasive threat through deprivation of children’s basic needs. A protective factor is anything that prevents or reduces vulnerability for the development of a disorder. Vulnerability factors refer to those attributes of the individual that contribute to maladjustment under conditions of adversity. Children’s exposure to risk varies according to age. Infants are more vulnerable, yet less likely to suffer from difficulties involving their social environment, because of their lack of understanding of the situation.
There are several major risk factors:
Bullying is the term used to define an individual’s repeated exposure to negative actions by one or more other people. There is a lot of social pressure in the classroom. A key factor is the process of social comparison, where the child compares his performance with his classmates. This comparison is mostly upward and can raise the child’s level of academic performance, but can also result in negative self-perception. Self-worth protection is the tendency of some students to reduce their levels of effort so that any subsequent poor academic performance will be attributed to low motivation rather than a lack of ability.
There is also peer pressure to either work hard or to not work hard. The visible demonstration of a student’s attempt to excel academically has social risks. These social risks can result in reduced striving. Stress levels in relation to academic performance can often be high.
Bullying is a subset of aggressive behaviour characterised by repetition and an imbalance of power. It is systematic abuse of power. The following methods can be used in order to find out about bullying: teacher and parent reports, self-reports, peer nominations, direct observations, interviews.
There are different types of bullying. The traditional forms of bullying include physical, verbal and indirect aggression. Indirect aggression includes spreading rumours and systematic social exclusion. Bias bullying is bullying in which the victim is a member of a particular group. Cyberbullying is a type of bullying which uses electronic devices. Cyberbullying is more difficult to escape from. The bullies also have more anonymity when cyberbullying. Traditional bullying appears to be on the decline while cyberbullying is stable or increasing.
There are four roles in bullying: bully, victim, non-involved, bully-victim. There are passive victims and provocative victims. There are also six participant roles: ringleader bullies, follower bullies, reinforcers, defenders and bystanders.
Many victims of bullying refuse to tell someone that they’re being bullied. The proportion that doesn’t tell anyone increases with age. Boy victims are less likely to tell it anyone than girl victims.
Victims of bullying often experience anxiety, depression, low self-esteem, physical and psychosomatic complaints, greater risk of self-harm and suicidal ideation and some might even commit suicide. It is not sure whether victimisation causes depression and low self-esteem, or that depression and low self-esteem make people more susceptible to bullying.
There are several causes of bullying. Society factors (tolerance of violence), school climate and quality of teacher and pupil relationships are potential causes of bullying, although there are many more. Some children bully others in order to be more popular and show their dominance. School bullying may be an early stage in the development of later antisocial behaviour. A harsh physical discipline at home and an insecure attachment can be predictors for involvement in bullying. Parental-maltreatment and abuse is a likely risk factor in the bully-victim or aggressive victim group. Having poor social skills and little friendship support is a risk factor for
.....read moreDevelopmental delay refers to a delayed, but normal path of development. A developmental difference refers to a qualitatively different path of development. Whether the development is delayed or different depends on the area of development. One approach to quantifying a delay includes looking at the extent to which individual children perform relative to a level expected for their chronological age on standardised assessment tests. Spotting atypical development can also be done by checking the scores of a test of children and comparing them with the population. This makes use of standard deviations. Concluding that one aspect of development is delayed doesn’t tell us anything about what underlies the delay.
The study of atypically developing children provides a profile of the main behaviours associated with a condition within the context of development across the human lifespan. Atypical trajectory refers to a sequence of development that departs from the typical sequence. The study of atypical development can result in effective interventions and it can also teach us something about typical development.
A conventional methodological method is making a comparison between the performance of the atypical sample and the performance of the relevant control group sample. It is common to compare a clinical group with two control groups, using a standardised test. By checking the difference of the clinical group to the mental age group and the chronological age group, it is possible to determine whether the clinical group has a delay or a qualitatively different development.
The human genome project found that there were fewer genes than previously thought and this is a strong indicator that there was more to specifying humanity than the action of individual genes in isolation (e.g: not one gene causes disease because there aren’t enough genes for that). The study showed that there is no one-to-one mapping between a DNA gene to a specific protein and an associated inherited trait. The complex interaction between genes leads to traits and not a single gene. This project changed the way we look at atypical development.
Neuroimaging tools aid localisation of brain activity that enables the developmental psychologist to understand more about the pathways associated with atypical development. Neuroimaging tools that are typically used in order to research development are PET, ERP and MEG. These tools make sure that we know more about the brain areas and processing speeds related to atypical development compared to typical development.
Eye-tracking technology allows precise measures of visual behaviour. One advantage of eye-tracking measurements is that it takes no explicit verbal instructions and can thus also be used for infants.
Atypical conditions of childhood can be characterised according to the type of causal pathways involved. There are specific genetic conditions, but there are also conditions that don’t have a known specific genetic defect (e.g: ADHD).
Williams Syndrome is an extremely rare condition. This makes it difficult to conduct research about this syndrome. People with Williams syndrome have low non-verbal IQ, difficulties in planning, problem-solving and spatial
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