Introduction to Psychology

Class 7: Developmental PsychologyMyers: 104-114, 117-123, 129-132, 134-

135 June 21, 2006

Overview Physical development Cognitive development - Stages - Morality - Language Psychosocial development - Attachment - Parenting - Love

Piaget’s stages

Sensorimotor stage

Preoperational stage

Concrete Operational stage

Formal Operational stage

Sensorimotor stage (0-2 years) Sensations (sensori) and actions (motor)

Object permanence at 8 months

Preoperational stage (2-6 years)

Represent things with words, symbols, images

Lack logical reasoning, more intuitive

Egocentrism Language

development Theory of Mind “Cut it up into a LOT of slices, Mom. I’m really hungry!”

Concrete operational stage (7-11 years)

Conservation Think logically Classify into sets

and subsets Do simple math

Formal operational stage (12+ years)

Abstract reasoning Higher order math If-then thought Idealistic thought Young scientists

Morality

A woman was near death from a special kind of cancer. There was one drug that the doctors thought might save her. It was a form of radium that a druggist in town had recently discovered.

The drug was expensive to make, but the druggist was charging ten times what the drug cost him to make. He paid $200 for the radium and charged $2,000 for the drug. The sick woman's husband, Heinz, went to everyone he knew to borrow the money, but he could only get together about $ 1,000.

He told the druggist that his wife was dying and asked him to sell it cheaper or let him pay later. But the druggist said: "No, I discovered the drug and I'm going to make money from it." Heinz got desperate and broke into the man's store to steal the drug-for his wife.

Should Heinz have done that?

Language Development Babbling stage (4 months) One-word stage (1 year) Two-word stage, telegraphic

speech (2 years) Rapid development into complete

sentences (2+ years)

What is over-regularization?

Attachment

Secure Anxious-Ambivalent

Dismissing-Avoidant

Fearful-Avoidant

Infants in a “Strange Situation” (Ainsworth)

Attachment styles in adults (Hazan & Shaver)

SECURE "I find it relatively easy to get close to others and am comfortable depending on them and having them depend on me. I don't worry about being abandoned or about someone getting too close to me."

AVOIDANT "I am somewhat uncomfortable being close to others; I find it difficult to trust them completely, difficult to allow myself to depend on them. I am nervous when anyone gets too close, and often, others want me to be more intimate than I feel comfortable being."

ANXIOUS-AMBIVALENT "I find that others are reluctant to get as close as I would like. I often worry that my partner doesn't really love me or won't want to stay with me. I want to get very close to my partner, and this sometimes scares people away."

Parenting

Four basic styles (Baumrind)

RESPONSIVE

Low High

D

EM

AN

DIN

G

Low

H

igh

AUTHORITARIAN

AUTHORITATIVE

DISENGAGED PERMISSIVE

Love

Triangular Theory of Love (Sternberg)