Psychoanalytic Theories

Freud’s Theory of Psychosexual Development

• Freud thought very young children have a sexual nature that motivates their behaviour and influences their relationships.

• He proposed children go through a series of developmental stages and in each stage they encounter conflicts related to a particular erogenous zone (areas of the body that are erotically sensitive), in particularl, the mouth, anus, and genitals.

  • He said that children’s success or failure in resolving these conflicts affects development.

The Developmental Process

• The instinctual drives the infant is born with constitude the unconscious id which is ruled by the pleasure principle where the goal is to achieve maximal gratification as quickly as possible.

  • Ex. eating, drinking, eliminating, physical comfort (and nursing which is a source of intense pleasure for hte infant according to freud).

  • Id is apparent in selfish or impulsive behaviour where immediate gratification is sought with little regard for consequences.

• In first year of life, infant is in oral stage because primary source of gratification and pleasure is oral activity like sucking and eating.

• Later in year 1, the rational ego arises out of need to resolve conflicts between id’s demands and external restrains.

  • Id → untamed passions, ego → reason and good sense.

  • Ego eventually develops into individual’s sense of self.

• At age 2, the infant enters the anal stage (where the child’s erotic interests focus on the pleasurable relief of tension from defecation) until 3 years old.

• The phallic stage spans the ages of 3-6, and children become interested in their own genitalia and that of their parents and their friends. Freud believed children identify with same-sex caregivers at this time leading to gender differences in attitude and behaviour.

  • He also believed young children experience intense sexual desires at this time and proposed efforts to cope with them , which eads to the superego, which consists of internalized moral standards to prevent children from acting in ways that would result in guilt.

• The four stage is the latency period which lasts from ages 6-12. At this time, sexual desires are hidden away in the unconscious.

• The 5th and final stage is the genital stage and in this time sexual energy is reawakened and directed towards peers with full force.

• Freud believed that if fundamental needs are not met during these stages, children may become fixated on them, always trying to satisfy them and resolve conflicts.

  • Ex. if not given oral gratification, adults may engage in oral activities like smoking, excessive eating, nail-biting…

• Essentially, Freud believed that the child’s passage through these stages shapes the individual’s personality for life.

Erikson’s Theory of Psychosocial Development

• Erikson accepted the basic elements of Freud’s theory but incorporate social factors like cultural influeces and contemporary issues into it.

The Developmental Process

• 8 age-related stages from infancy to old age, each characterized by a specific crisis the individual must resolve (only discussing first 5 stages).

1. Basic Trust vs Mistrust (1st year)

   • If the ability to trust others when it is appropriate to do so does not develop, the person will have trouble forming intimate relationships later in life.

2. Autonomy vs Shame & Doubt (ages 1-3.5)

   • Children can explore the environment on their own, which changes family dynamics. In a supportive atmosphere where children achieve self-control without the loss of self-esteem, they gain a sense of autonomy, but if they are punished/ridiculed for their efforts, they may doubt their abilities.

3. Initiative vs Guilt (ages 4-6)

   • In this period, children identify with and learn from their parents. Attachment is crucial in the development of conscience.

4. Industry vs Inferiority (age 6-puberty)

   • Ego development.

   • Successful experiences give child a sense of comptence and failure can lead to excessive feelings of inferiority.

5. Identity versus Role Confusion (adolescence to early adulthood)

   • Critical for achivement of a core sense of identity.

   • In this stage, children are caught between the past identity of a child and uncertainities of future, adolescents question who they really are and what roles to play as adults.

Current Perspectives

• Freud’s emphasis on early experience and relationships has been influential in setting the foundation for modern-day attachment theory and research.

  • Research in this area strongly suggests that the nature of infant’s relationships with parents affects behaviour in infancy and creates long-term effects on close relationship throughout life.

• Freud’s insight that much of our mental life occurs in our unconscious is fundamental to modern cognitive science and neuroscience.

• Erikson’s emphasis on quest for identitity in adolescence was so important for modern research on this aspect of adolescence.

• The weakness of both theories is that they are too vague to be testable and many of their specific elements are highly questionable, but their essence has been enormously influential.

Learning Theories

• Learning theorists focus on the role of specific mechanisms of change which involve learning principles like reinforcement and observational learning.

Watson’s Behaviourism

• Watson believed development is determined by the child’s environment through learning by conditioning.

• He believed psychologists should study visible behaviour not the mind.

• Watson showed how effective classial conditioning is in an experiment where he introduced an infant to a rat, when the infant reacted positively to it. However, during later exposures, the researchers paired the presentation with a loud noise which scared the infant, leading to the infant eventaully becoming afraid of the rat itself.

• Watson released a manual teaching parents how to care for children, advising parents to set strict feeding times (to condition them to feed at specific times and not make a fuss in between) and to be distant towards their kids, which fell out of favour when Benjamin Spock’s less-strict manual came out.

Skinner’s Operant Conditioning

• Skinner strongly believed behaviour is under environmental control.

• Skinner believed that we tend to repeat behaviours that lead to favourable outcomes (reinforcement) and suppress those that result in unfavourable outcomes (punishment).

• Skinner discovered that attention itself can serve as a powerful reinforcer.

  • Children do things “just to get attention”, and time-outs are punishments where attention is withdrawed for inappropriate behaviour.

• Another discovery was the difficulty of stopping behaviour that has been intermittenly reinforced (sometimes rewarded, sometimes not).

• Intermittent reinforcement makes it harder for behaviours to stop as if it is occasionally rewarded, an animal will believe that they will eventually be rewarded if they keep producing the behaviour.

  • Giving into whiny children sometimes → giving children hope that adults will eventually give in again if they don’t.

• Behaviour modification is a form of therapy where reinforcement is used to encourage adapative behaviour.

  • Teacher paying attention to a boy when he joined a group but ignored him when he didn’t, causing him to play with his classmates more.

Social-Learning Theory

• Social-learning theory attempts to account for social development in terms of learning mechanisms.

• It emphasizes observation and imitation.

• It argues that most human learning is inherently social in nature and based on observation of behaviour of others.

• In a series of studies conducted by Alberta Bandura, investigators had preschool children watch a short film by themselves where an adult model is acting agressively towards an inflatable toy that pops back up once it’s knocked down (Bobo doll).

  • One group saw the model recieve praise and the other saw it punished, and the question was whether seeing someone else recieve a reward or punishment (vicarious reinforcement) would affect the child’s subsequent behaviour.

  • Children were put in a room with Bobo and told to repeat actions they remembered. those who saw the model punished abused less than those who saw it praised, but when offered an incentive for repeating the actions they saw, they all repeated what they saw.

  • Gender differences: boys were more aggressive than girls were, showing that boys and girls inhibit behaviours they believe to be inappropriate for their own gender.

  • This experiemnt shows that children acquire new behaviours simply from observing others and their tendency to imitate what they learned depends on whether the actions of the person they observed were rewarded or punished, and that what children learn from observing behaviour is not necessarily shown in their behaviour.

• Observational learning depends on attention to others’ behaviour, encoding what is observed, storing info in memory, and retrieving it later to reproduce it.

• Bandura emphasized the active role of children in their own development and described development as reciprocal determinism between children and their social environment where children are both affected by and influence aspects of their environment.

Current Perspectives

• Learning theories are based on principles derived from experiments.

• They allow explicit predictions that can be empirically tested, and they have inspired a lot of research about parental practices and how children learn social behaviours.

• They have let to important practical applications like behaviour modification as well.

• The primary weakness is that it is focused on behaviour so it lacks attention to biological influences and minimized the impact of internal development (perceptual, motor, cognitive and language).

Theories of Social Cognition

• Social cognitive theories emphasize self-socialization which is the idea that children play a very active role in their own socialization through their preferences and choices.

Selman’s Stage Theory of Role Taking

• This theory is focused on the development of role taking (ability to think about something from another perspective).

• Selman said young children’s social cognition is limited by their inability to understand perspectives other than their own. Selman thought that before 6 years, children are unaware there are any other perspectives, but evidence shows otherwise.

• He proposed children go through 4 stages in thinking about others.

  • Stage 1 (ages 6-8): Children learn someone else can have a perspective different from their own but they think it’s only because that person doesn’t know what they know.

  • Stage 2 (ages 8-10): Children can think about the other person’s perspective.

  • Stage 3 (ages 10-12): Children can compare their own perspective with another.

  • Stage 4 (ages 12+): Teenagers try to understand other perspectives by comparing them to a “generalized other”, trying to figure out whether that person’s view is the same of others in their group.

Basically, in these stages, children become less egocentric and more capable of thinking of multiple perspectives in the same time.

Dodge’s Information-Processing Theory of Social Problem Saving

• Dodge’s theory talks about children’s use of aggression as a problem-solving strategy.

• According to this theory, some children have a hostile attributional bias which is a general expectation that others are antagonistic to them.

• This leads children to search for evidence of hostile intent to let them think the peer wants to harm them, leading them to think retaliation is the appropriate response to the peer’s behaviour.

• Children attribute hostile intent to those around them because of physical abuse which heightens children’s sensitivity to anger cues & makes it more difficult for them to reason about negative emotions.

• School systems put children with hostile attributional biases in special classrooms where they can be more closely supervised, but grouping these children together makes it more likely for them to react in a hostile fashion & eliminates the opportunity for them to learn from more well-adjusted peers.

Dweck’s Theory of Self-Attributions and Achievement Motivation

• Achievement motivation refers to whether children are motivated by mastering skills or by others’ views of their success.

• Children with an entity/helpless orientation base their self-worth on other people’s views of their personal qualities.

• Children with an incremental/mastery orientation base their worth on their own effort and learning instead of what others think about them.

• Older children’s views of themselves are more complex, without some having an entity theory of intelligence and others having an incremental theory of intelligence.

  • Entity theory of intelligence is a theory that a person’s level of intelligence is fixed.

  • Incremental theory is that a person’s intelligence can grow as a function of experience.

• Those with an incremental theory of intelligence scored better over the years than those with an entity theory of intelligence.

• Internal theories about traits reflect whether those traits change into more positive ones or not.

Current Perspectives

• Children who make different attributions about a social event will respond differently to that event.

• Most social cognitive theories have very little to say about biological factors in social development.

Ecological Theories

Ethological and Evolutionary Theories

Ethology

• Ethology is the study of the evolutionary bases of behaviour, and it attempts to understand behaviour in terms of its adaptive/survival value.

• Imprinting is a process where newborns of some species become attached to and follow adult members of the species, and while humans don’t imprint, they do have strong tendencies that draw themt o members of the same species.

• According to Bowlby, attachment is an emotional version of imprinting which is an adaptive relationship that increases the infant’s chances of survival by creating reciprocal emotional ties between caregiver and infant.

Evolutionary Psychology

• Evolutionary psychology applies the concepts of natural selection and adaption to human behaviour.

• Many of the ways we behave today are a legacy of the demands on our prehistorical ancestors

• Extended immaturity is essential for the intellectual advancement of humans as slow development allows for flexible intelligence.

• Evolutionary psychology theorists suggest play is an evolved platform for learning as children develop motor skills and practice many social roles with minimal consequences through them.

• The parental investment theory is a theory that emphasizes that parents are motivated by the need to pass on their genes so they take care of their children so the children can grow and continue to carry on the genes.

The Bioecological Model

• Urie Bronfenbrenner’s bioecological model treats the child’s environment as a set of nested structures where each structure represents a different level of influence on development.

• Over the course of development, the child’s characteristics interact with the environmental forces, and ever level impacts the child’s development.

• The first level is the microsystem, which is the immediate environment a child experiences and participates in.

  • Children have some influences on this through their choices of peers and activities.

• The second level is the mesosystem which is about the interconnections among settings.

• The exosystem is the next one which comprises of environmental settings a child does not experience directly but they can affect it indirectly (ex. parental workplace policies regarding child care).

  • Mass media, especially electronic media, has a major influence on child development.

• The outer level is the macrosystem which consists of larger cultural and social context within which the other systems are embedded (general beliefs, values, customs and laws of society).

• The last level is the chronosystem which consists of historical changes that influence the other systems (beliefs, values, customs… that change over time).

• The chronosystem can be a factor in developmental disorders like ADHD as well.

Children and the Media: The Good, the Bad, and the Awful

• Media is in the exosystem, but it is subject to influences from the chronosystem (what media is available over time) the macrosystem, (cultural values and government policies), other elements in the exosystem, (economic pressures) and from the microsystem (parental monitoring).

• Depending on many factors, media can have positive effects on development or negative ones.

• Children’s exposure to media have aroused a variety of concerns including the effects of media violence and pornography and isolation and inactivity.

• There is a link between high screen time and low achievement.

Current Perspectives

• The primary contribution of ethology and evolutionary psychology comes from the emphasis on children’s biological nature.

• Like psychonanalytic theories, many of the claims of evolutionary psychologists are impossible to test.

  • These theories tend to overlook our capacity to transform our environments and ourselves.

• The main criticism of Bronfenbrenner’s model is the lack of emphasis on biological factors.