Which theories of social development exist? - Chapter 9

What are psychoanalytic theories?

Psychoanalytic theories have had the greatest impact on western cultures. These theories have had a major influence on the way of thinking about personality and social developments. This is mainly due to Sigmund Freud. Erik Erikson later accounted on the ideas of Sigmund Freud. Both theories are based on biological ripening. According to Freud, the behavior is motivated by the need to satisfy basic drifts. The resulting instincts and motives usually arise unconsciously. According to Erikson, development is motivated by crises in the development related to age and biological maturation. The individual must successfully complete all crises in order to achieve healthy development. The theories of Freud and Erikson are stage theories.

How does Freud see the development?

Freud is the founder of the psychoanalytic theory. His theory about the development of children is also called the theory of psychosexual development. He thought that even very young children have a sexual nature that motivates their behavior and influences their relationships with other people. Children go through five phases of universal developments. According to Freud, psychic energy focuses on different erogenous zones. Psychic energy consists of the biological urges that feed the behavior, the thoughts and the feelings. The erogenous zones are areas of the body that are erotically sensitive, such as the mouth, the anus, and the genitals. According to Freud, every child encounters conflict with his erogenous zones. He states that their success or failure of this conflict, influences the development in their lives.

The psychic energy consists of the id, the ego, and the superego. The id is the first and the most primitive of the three personality structures. The id is unconscious and is driven by the gratification principle, the goal of finding maximum satisfaction as quickly as possible. During the first year of life, the baby is in the first phase of psychosexual development, the oral stage, in which the primary source of satisfaction and pleasure comes from oral activities. Later in the first year of life develops the second personality structure, the ego. The ego is the rational, logical, problem-solving component of the personality. During the second year of life, the child gains more control over body processes such as urination and at that point the child enters the second phase: the anal stage, in which the primary source of satisfaction and pleasure comes from defacation. The third phase is the phallic stage, which is present from the age of 3 to 6 years. In the phallic stage sexual pleasure is focused on the genitals. This is how the superego develops, the third personality structure driven by the consciousness and internalization of moral standards. Internalization is the adoption the rules, beliefs, and standards of the parents for acceptable and unacceptable behavior as one's own.     

Boys and Girls experience the development of the superego in different ways. The boys experience the so-called Oedipus Complex. This is a term by Freud, which describes a period in which boys have a sexual desire for their mother and see their father as a threat. This occurs in the phallic phase. The girls experience a so-called Electra Complex. This is a term set up by Freud, for the period in which girls create romantic feelings for the father and see the mother as a threat. This also occurs in the phallic phase in girls. 

The fourth phase of the development is the latency period, which takes place from the age of 6 to 12 years. This is mainly a time of relative calm. Sexual desires are hidden away in the subconscious, and children start to focus more on their social and intellectual development. The genital phase starts with puberty. A central theme is sexual maturation. The sexual energy has been stored away for a few years, but now that it is coming out again, it directs toward peers.      

If a phase is not successfully completed and fundamental needs are not met, the child may suffer from it later in life and may become fixated on these needs. For example, if the child has not successfully completed the oral phase, it is more common that it engages in certain oral habits, such as nail biting or smoking.

How does Erikson see the development?

Erikson is the successor of Freud. Erikson has added social factors to Freud's theory. That is why Erikson's theory of child development is called the theory of psychosocial development. His theory consists of eight phases of development. Only the first five stages of development will be discussed: they run from birth to adulthood.

Trust versus mistrust: this phase occurs in the first year of life. In this phase, the child must develop an idea of ​​trust, facilitated by a good relationship with the mother. If during this phase the child does not develop the ability to trust others appropriately, the child might experience troubles forming intimate relationships later in life.

Autonomy versus shame and doubt: this phase happens from the first to 3.5 years of life. At this stage, the child develops an idea of ​​autonomy. It has the skills and desires to explore the environment. If parents provide a supportive atmosphere, the child will develop autonomy. However, if children are punished or mocked, they will start to doubt their skills.   

Initiative versus guilt: this phase takes place from the fourth to sixth year of life. This is a period in which the child identifies with and learns from the parents. The challenge is that the child develops a balance between initiative and feelings of guilt.

Industry versus inferiority: this phase occurs from the sixth year of age until puberty. The child acquires cognitive and social skills. The phase is crucial for the development of the ego. 

Identity versus role confusion: this phase takes place from adolescence to early adulthood. The phase is crucial for the development of the sense of identity.  

What's the current perspectives?

Freud's most important contributions are his emphasis on the importance of early emotional relationships and his recognition of the role of subjective experiences and unconscious mental activity. Erikson's emphasis on the search of identity also has a lasting impact.  

 The focus of learning theories?

Freud focuses on internal forces and subjective experiences. The learning theories focus on the external factors in forming a personality and social behavior. Current learning theoreticians emphasize the theme of the active child, the role children play in their own development.

How does Watson see the development? 

Watson is the founder of behaviorism. He focuses on the development determined by the social environment through conditioning. He showed the power of conditioning through a study with a child named 'Little Albert' as a test subject. Little Albert got a rat in front of him that he reacted positively to. Then a loud noise was made during the presentation of the rat. Little Albert reacted negatively to the sound. After many repetitions, Little Albert became afraid of the rat.

With classical conditioning, Watson laid the foundation for a treatment based on the opposite process, namely: deconditioning, or eliminating anxiety. In order to decondition fear, the researcher gave a favorite snack to Peter (the participating child in the study), who was very afraid of white rabbits. Then the researcher slowly and gradually moved the rabbit closer to Peter. After many repetitions and exposure to the fear in combination with the absence of negative consequences, the fear of the rabbit disappeared. This approach became known as systematic desensitization. It was used worldwide for the elimination of all kinds of fears and phobias, like dogs and dentists. 

How does Skinner see the development?

Skinner was the founder operant conditioning. The behavior could be influenced by means of rewards and punishments. Desired behavior was repeatedly rewarded, and undesirable behavior was repeatedly punished. The intention of rewarding the desired behavior is to reinforce it. The intention of punishing the unwanted behavior is to reduce or eliminate it. Also, two discoveries were made: first, the fact that attention is an important amplifier for the behavior of children and that the best strategy for a child's taming therefore is to ignore the behavior. Intermittent reinforcement is an inconsistent rewarding or punishing of a person's behavior, only sometimes it comes to rewarding or punishing when the target behavior is shown. This leads to learned behavior remaining longer, because no constant reward is needed. Operant conditioning led to a form of therapy: behavioral modification. The therapy focuses on encouraging a more adapted and useful behavior through operant conditioning.

What is social learning theory?

Bandura is the founder of social learning theory. Bandura focuses on learning behavior through observations and imitations instead of reinforcement. The theory has a different name: social cognitive theory, because of the cognitive processes involved. Namely: the attention is focused on the behavior of another person, encoding what is observed, storing the information in the memory and retrieving it at a later time in order to be able to reproduce the behavior. Bandura also found the active role of children in their own development very important. This development was described as reciprocal determinism. This is a concept conceived by Bandura saying that the interaction between child and environment works in two directions. Children are influenced by aspects of their own environment, but they also influence the environment itself.

In a series of studies by Bandura and colleagues, school-age children were shown videos showing an adult portraying unusual aggressive behavior towards a Bobo doll. There were three conditions: group 1 was shown how the adult received a reward after the aggressive behavior, group 2 was shown that the adult was being punished for the behavior and in group 3 there were no consequences associated with the behavior. The question was whether vicarious reinforcement, observing someone else receiving a reward or punishment, would influence the behavior of the children. The children who had seen the adult being punished imitated the behavior less than the other two groups. However, all children learned from the observed behavior. Boys were more physically aggressive than girls

What are the current perspectives?

Learning theories have inspired a lot of research because of the possibility to test these theories empirically. Learning theories have important practical applications, such as systematic desensitization and behavioral modification. However, there is a lack of attention to biological influences and (with the exception of Bandura's theory) to cognitive influences.

What is the core of social cognition theories?

Social-cognitive theories differ from psychoanalytic theories and learning theories emphasizing external forces as the main source of development. The social-cognitive theories mainly focus on the process of self-socialization. Self-socialization is the idea that children play a very active role in their own socialization through their preferences for activities, choice of friendships, and so on. 

What is the theory of roll taking?

Selman focused on the development of role taking. Role taking means that one is aware of the other person's perspective, and is able to understand someone else's behavior, thoughts, and feelings in a better way. Selman states that the social cognition of children is limited because of their inability of role taking. He suggests that children younger than six are unaware of other perspectives except their own. According to Selman, a child goes through four stages increasing in complexity of thinking about other people. In the first phase (ages 6 to 8 years) children accept that other people can have a different perspective, because they possess different information than themselves. In the second phase (age 8 to 10 years) children also realize that you can think about other people's perspectives. In the third phase (age 10 to 12) children can compare their own perspective with someone else's perspective. In this phase they can even understand a third perspective. In the fourth phase (age 12 years and older), adolescents can make an attempt to compare other people's perspectives with a general perspective, and whether they are the same as those of most others in their social group. By going through these stages, children become less self-centered and more capable of considering other and multiple perspectives at the same time.

What is the information processing theory of social problem solving? 

Dodge's information processing theory focuses on social problem solving. He found that children have a hostile attribution bias. A hostile attribution bias, according to Dodge's theory, is a tendency to assume that other people's ambiguous actions have hostile intentions. This leads to children seeking evidence for hostile intentions, which in turn leads to self-fulfilling prophecies: an aggressive reaction of a child to an assumed hostile act of another, causes the same effect on the other which can respond a aggressive or rejective, confirming the child that others have hostile intentions. Rough upbringing or physical abuse leads to a greater chance of information processing biases. Directly addressing children's thoughts about social behavior can reduce antisocial behavior.

What does Dweck's theory say?

Dweck's social cognition perspective shows that different ways of responding to a particular situation depend on a person's achievement motivation. Achievement motivation refers to whether children are motivated by learning objectives, seeking to improve their competencies and mastering new material or performance goal, seeking to receive positive assessment of their competences or avoiding negative assessments. Differences in attributions are the root of these two different patterns, mainly with respect to self-esteem. Children with an entity/ helpless orientation tend to base their self-esteem on approvals they receive (or not) from other people about their intelligence, talents, and personal qualities. These children give up if they fail. Children with an incremental or mastery orientation tend to not base their own efforts and learning processes on how other people evaluate them. Either they think success or failure is based on aspects of the efforts they made themselves and they continue when they have failed.

The cognition of older children about themselves and others contain more complex concepts and explanations than those of younger children. Some show an entity theory of intelligence. This means the way of thinking about themselves is rooted in the idea that intelligence is fixed and unchangeable. These children often feel helpless and are more inclined to the hostile attribution bias. Others show an incremental theory of intelligence, it is rooted in the idea that intelligence can grow as a function of experience. These children feel hopeful. Parents and teachers can influence these internal theories. It is good to be aware which prices are indeed helpful and which are not. For example, it is better to reward the effort of a child than saying a child is good at something. This can undermine the motivation for improvement.

What is the current perspective?

Social-cognitive theories have made important contributions to the study of social development. It is important to emphasize that children are active information seekers of the social world. It also contributed the insight that the effect of children's social experiences is dependent on their interpretation of these experiences. Still, social cognitive theories have little to say about biological factors. However, this seems to change.   

The emerging field of social development neuroscience deals with questions such as how the social environment influences the developing brain and which neural mechanisms underlie the development of social behavior. Based on animal studies, certain experiments are carried out 'in nature' in which human children are exposed to different conditions. For example, it appears that children who do not experience emotional and physical contact with their caregivers during their first years of life show abnormal hormonal responses in social situations, which was also proven earlier in animal research. Other research has shown that children who grow up as orphans and still live in orphanages have less white matter in the brain than children who had left the orphanage. Current research shows the beneficial effects of mindfulness meditation on the brain. Neuroimaging studies suggest that this effect happens mainly in the prefrontal cortex, in areas responsible for, among other things, emotion regulation.

What is the focus of ecological theories?

Ecological theories of development focus on behavior as an adaptive function. The role of the environment is central to the development of the child. Etiology and evolutionary psychology focus on the development of the child, in relation to the context of the evolutionary history of our species. The bio-ecological model focuses on the multiple levels of environmental influences that simultaneously influence development.

Which ethological and evolutionary theories exist?

Ethology focuses on the evolutionary basis of behavior. Imprinting is a form of learning in which newborns of certain species of birds and mammals become attached to an adult member of their species (which they usually see first) and follow them. Often this is the mother. Imprinting mainly occurs during a critical period very early in life. An application of the ethological perspective on human behavior is that many boys prefer to play with objects that require action and that many girls prefer dolls, for example. It is argued that it happens because parents give their children toys that 'fit' with their gender. However, other studies show that this preference already exists very early, which indicates genetic preferences depending on a child's gender rather than on learned gender norms.

Evolutionary psychology is based on the ideas of natural selection and adaptations to human behavior from Darwin. Certain genes predispose individuals to behave in a certain way, which makes them more likely to survive. Many evolutionary psychologists suggest that playing is one of the most striking forms of behavior and an evolved platform for learning. 

Parents have to spend an enormous amount of time and energy on their children in parenting. According to parental investment theory, the primary source of their motivation is the perpetuation of their own genes, which is only achieved if their children survive long enough to pass these genes on to the next generation.       

What is the bioecological model?

The bio-ecological model is based on the idea that the environment consists of a set of structures. Each structure represents a different level of development. The bio-ecological model of Bronfenbrenner looks like the following:

The first level is the micro system: consisting of the immediate environment a child personally experiences and in which it participates directly.  

The second level is the meso system: including the interconnections between the microsystem, such as the family, peers, and schools.

The third level is the exosystem: it consists of circumstances the child does not participate directly, for example the dismissal of a parent. However, these circumstances indirectly influence the development of the child.

The fourth level is the macro system: including culture, subcultures, and/ or social groups embedding the other systems.

The fifth level is the chronosystem: this consists of convictions of society, society itself, norms and values, etc. influencing the development of the child.

One of the biggest threats to the development of a child is abuse, intentional abuse or neglect, risking the well-being of any person under the age of 18. At the microsystem level of certain parental characteristic can increase the risk of abuse, such as a weak impulse control. In addition, it is associated with additional factors in the meso- and exosystem increasing stress in parents, such as unemployment. An important exosystem contributor is social isolation of the family. Maltreatment has several negative consequences, which can be seen at a very young age. Abused children are at a greater risk of unusual attachment patterns, psychological disorders, physical health problems. 

Media belongs to the exosystem, but is influenced by the chronosystem, the macro system, the micro system and other elements in the exosystem. Screens have recently been found everywhere. Statistics show that children and adolescents spend many hours on media. Even very young children are already active in the media immersion.  

There are many concerns about the media use, from violence to pornography. One concern is that children show more violent behavior by regularly watching violent television shows or listening to violent music. The exposure can have an effect in four ways: (1) impersonation behavior of the actors, (2) if aggression is observed, one's own aggression is activated, with repeated exposure this may result in it becoming part of the normal internal state of a person.  (3) it provides physiological arousal, which increases the risk of violent reactions to provocation and (4) frequent, long-term exposure to media violence slowly leads to emotional desensitization. The second concern is that children who are stuck to screens do not proceed in physical activity. There appears to be a negative relationship between the time that children sit behind a screen and the time of physical activities. Children are more likely to get obese if they watch a lot of television. In addition, children seem to spend less time on school-related issues when they spend more time on media, which has a negative impact on school performance. Pornography is another concern of both parents and children themselves. Porn can lead to more aggression towards women and more acceptance of sex before marriage and extramarital sex. Pornography is also a concern of both parents and children themselves. Porn can lead to more aggression towards women and more acceptance of sex before marriage and extramarital sex.

The SES of the family has profound effects on the development of a child. These effects are based on many different factors, such as low parental education and wrong food and drinks, but also factors of the meso system, such as the quality of the school. It is important to remember that it is often the sum of several factors. In addition, children differ in how susceptible they are to environmental influences. Growing up in very well-off families can also have negative effects on development. These children show more substance use than less well-off peers. In addition, more jealousy occurs. This may be because well-off parents put pressure on their children to be excellent in both academic and extracurricular activities but give their children less emotional support. 

What is the current perspectives?

The contribution of etiology and evolutionary psychology comes from the emphasis on the biological nature of children, with the genetic tendencies that are grounded in evolution. Ideas of evolutionary psychology, however, are not testable and often have a relationship with social learning or a different perspective. Evolutionary psychology also seems to overlook the capacity to change our environment and ourselves. The bio-ecological model has made important contributions to the idea about development and how many factors contribute and interact in development. However, this model lacks biological factors.

Attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) is a syndrome characterized by difficulty inattention focusing. Children have a normal intelligence and show no emotional disturbances. They have difficulty holding on to plans and following rules. Many are hyperactive. They have difficulty acquiring certain skills, such as reading, because it requires focused attention for a longer period of time. The symptoms are based on the difficulty of inhibiting impulses. ADHD has several causes. Genetic factors play a role, but all sorts of environmental factors also appear to have an influence, such as prenatal exposure to alcohol. Social factors also have an influence, such as the SES of the parents. It is difficult to determine which factors are causal. The current treatment of ADHD focuses on resources in the environment, such as the family doctor (microsystem), the drug industry (exosystem) and the government (macro system). The most commonly used treatment is the prescription of medication such as Ritalin, a stimulant that stimulates neurotransmitter systems. Unfortunately, there are also side effects, such as loss of appetite. A combination of medication and psychosocial interventions also appears to be effective.

Because of the large number of factors that influence ADHD, it is difficult to prevent abuse. However, a promising program has been developed. Research has shown that parents often find themselves involved in a power conflict with their child, in which they see themselves as victims. The aim of the program was to help parents to obtain more realistic interpretations of their difficulties in caring for their children. While parents developed a better understanding of their child's needs, their investment in their children improved, and they later showed significant health benefits.