Chapter 2 Guideposts 1-3

Psych 30
NWRC
 Gp1 What purposes do theories
serve, and what are the 2 basic
theoretical issues on which dev.
Scientists differ?
• A theory is a well-established principle
that has been developed to explain some
aspect of the natural word. A theory
arises from repeated observation and
testing and incorporates facts, laws,
predictions, and tested hypotheses that
are widely accepted.
 Gp1 What purposes do theories
serve?
• A theory predicts events in general terms,
while a hypothesis makes a specific
prediction about a specified set of
circumstances.

• A theory is has been extensively tested

and is generally accepted, while a
hypothesis is a speculative guess that has
yet to be tested.
Gp1 What purposes do theories
serve, and what are the 2 basic
theoretical issues on which dev.
Scientists differ?

• A hypothesis is a
specific, testable
prediction about
what you expect to
happen in your
study or experiment
Nature vs Nurture (Heredity vs
environment) – pg. 23
• Some scientists think that
people behave as they do
according to genetic
predispositions." This is known
as the "nature" theory of
human behavior. Other
scientists believe that people
think and behave in certain
ways because they are taught
to do so. This is known as the
"nurture" theory of human
behavior.
Is development active or passive–
pg. 23
• Mechanistic model –
(passive)- that people
passively react to
environmental influences-
if we understand the
influences we will
understand the behaviour
Is development active or passive–
pg. 23
• Organismic Model –
(active) We cannot
necessarily predict
individual’s responses to
their environment.
• People make choices and
that are not always
predictable
 What are the 3 basic theoretical
issues on which developmental
scientists differ?

• Nature vs Nurture (Heredity vs

environment
• Is development active or passive
• Is development continuous or does it occur
in stages?
 GP 2 What are the 5 theoretical
perspectives and what are some
theories representational of each
• There are 6 major perspective covered in your
text (see Table 2-1, page 24 for a summary),
these include:
– Psychoanalytical
– Learning or behaviourism
– Humanistic
– Cognitive or information-processing
– Contextual
– Evolutionary/sociobiological
 Psychoanalytic Perspective
• The psychoanalytic approach focuses on
the importance of the unconscious mind
(not the conscious mind). In other words,
psychoanalytic perspective dictates that
behavior is determined by your past
experiences that are left in the
unconscious mind (people are unaware of
them). Page 25-28
 Psychoanalytic Perspective
• Freud's Id, Ego, &
Superego (pg 31)
 Psychoanalytic Perspective
• Freud's Id
• The id is the only
component of
personality that is
present from birth. This
aspect of personality is
entirely unconscious
and includes of the
instinctive and primitive
behaviors.
 Psychoanalytic Perspective
• Freud's Id
• The id is driven by the
pleasure principle, which
strives for immediate
gratification of all desires,
wants, and needs. If
these needs are not
satisfied immediately, the
result is a state anxiety or
tension.
 Psychoanalytic Perspective
• Freud's EGO
• The ego is the component of
personality that is responsible
for dealing with reality.
According to Freud, the ego
develops from the id and
ensures that the impulses of
the id can be expressed in a
manner acceptable in the real
world. The ego functions in
both the conscious,
preconscious, and
unconscious mind.
 Psychoanalytic Perspective
• Freud's SUPER EGO
• he superego is the aspect of
personality that holds all of our
internalized moral standards
and ideals that we acquire
from both parents and
society--our sense of right and
wrong. The superego provides
guidelines for making
judgments. According to
Freud, the superego begins to
emerge at around age five.
The Id the Ego and the SuperEgo
 Freud –Psychosexual Stages
• Oral, Anal, Latent Phallic,
Genital

• If you have had problems

during any of the
psychosexual stages which
are not effectively resolved,
then you will become fixated
at one of the earlier stages
and when under stress will
regress more and more to
characteristics of that stage.
 Freud –Psychosexual Stages
• Oral
• Oral stage: Birth - 18 months
(approx.)
• Physical focus: mouth, lips tongue
(sucking). Sucking is the primary
source of pleasure for a newborn.
Everything goes in the mouth. Sucking
= food.
• Psychological theme: dependency. A
baby is very dependent and can do
little for itself. If babies needs properly
fulfilled can move onto the next stage.
But if not fulfilled baby will be
mistrustful or over-fulfilled baby will find
it hard to cope with a world that doesn’t
meet all of his/her demands.
 Freud –Psychosexual Stages
• Oral
• Oral stage: Birth - 18 months
(approx.)
• Adult character: highly
dependent/highly independent.
If baby becomes fixated at this
stage Freud felt that he or she
would grow to be an oral
character. Mostly these people
are extremely dependent and
passive people who want
everything done for them
 Freud –Psychosexual Stages
• Anal Stage: 18 months - 3 years
(approx.)
• Physical focus: anus (elimination).
Until now the baby has had it pretty
easy. Now baby is supposed to
control bowels.
• Psychological theme: self-
control/obedience. These things are
not just related to toilet training but
also the baby must learn to control
urges and behaviours (terrible
twos). What goes wrong here is
either parents being too controlling
or not controlling enough
 Freud –Psychosexual Stages
• Adult character: anally
retentive (rigid, overly
organized, subservient to
authority) vs. anally expulsive
(little self-control,
disorganized, defiant, hostile).
 Freud –Psychosexual Stages
• Phallic
• Phallic Stage: 3.5 - 6 years (approx.)
• Physical focus: penis. Freud believed
that boys and girls both focused on the
penis. Child becomes attached to
opposite sex parent
• Psychological theme: morality and
sexuality identification and figuring out
what it means to be a girl/boy.
According to Freud boys experience
castration anxiety and girls suffer penis
envy. During this time emotional
conflicts are resolved by eventually
identifying with the same sex parent
 Freud –Psychosexual Stages
• Phallic
• Adult character: promiscuous
and amoral/ asexual and
puritanical
 Freud –Psychosexual Stages
• Latency ages 6- puberty
• A time of relative calm
 Freud –Psychosexual Stages
• Genital stage: post puberty
• Physical focus: genitals
• Psychological theme: maturity
and creation and enhancement
of life. So this is not just about
creating new life (reproduction)
but also about intellectual and
artistic creativity. The task is to
learn how to add something
constructive to life and society.
 Freud –Psychosexual Stages
• Genital stage: post puberty
• Adult character: The genital
character is not fixed at an
earlier stage. This is the person
who has worked it all out. This
person is psychologically well-
adjusted and balanced.
According to Freud to achieve
this state you need to have a
balance of both love and work.
 ERIK ERIKSON – Psychosocial
Development
• See handout also stages are described on
page 32
Learning- Classical Conditioning
• Classical conditioning:
• is the process of reflex learning—investigated by
Pavlov—through which an unconditioned
stimulus (e.g. food) which produces an
unconditioned response (salivation) is
presented together with a conditioned stimulus
(a bell), such that the salivation is eventually
produced on the presentation of the conditioned
stimulus alone, thus becoming a conditioned
response.
Learning- Classical Conditioning
Operant Conditioning
Classical Conditioning

• Classical Conditioning is
the type of learning made
famous by Pavlov's
experiments with dogs.
The gist of the
experiment is this: Pavlov
presented dogs with food,
and measured their
salivary response (how
much they drooled). Then
he began ringing a bell
just before presenting the
food.
Classical Conditioning

• At first, the dogs did not begin

salivating until the food was
presented. After a while,
however, the dogs began to
salivate when the sound of the
bell was presented. They
learned to associate the sound
of the bell with the
presentation of the food. As far
as their immediate
physiological responses were
concerned, the sound of the
bell became equivalent to the
presentation of the food.
 Classical Conditioning in
Everyday Life
• The way that advertisers try to use
classical conditioning is to pair their
product with other positive stimuli, such as
sex, pleasant music, humour, and
attractive colours. These positive stimuli
can be used in any number of
combinations or on their own.
The approach is to link an
attractive US with a CS (the
product being sold) so the
consumer will feel positively
toward the product just like
they do with the US.
 Classical Conditioning - Example
• For Example - "fear of bridges" - fear of bridges
can develop from many different sources. For
example, while a child rides in a car over a
dilapidated bridge, his father makes jokes about
the bridge collapsing and all of them falling into
the river below. The father finds this funny and
so decides to do it whenever they cross the
bridge. Years later, the child has grown up and
now is afraid to drive over any bridge. In this
case, the fear of one bridge generalized to all
bridges which now evoke fear.
 Operant Conditioning

• Classical conditioning forms an association

between two stimuli. Operant conditioning
forms an association between a behavior and
a consequence. (It is also called response-
stimulus or RS conditioning because it forms an
association between the animal's response
[behavior] and the stimulus that follows
[consequence])
 Operant Conditioning

• There are four types of Operant

Conditioning: Positive Reinforcement,
Negative Reinforcement, Punishment,
and Extinction. Both Positive and
Negative Reinforcement strengthen
behavior while both Punishment and
Extinction weaken behavior.
 Operant Conditioning

• Four Possible Consequences

• There are four possible consequences to any
behaviour. They are:
• Something Good can start or be presented;
Something Good can end or be taken away;
Something Bad can start or be presented;
Something Bad can end or be taken away.
 Operant Conditioning

• Applying these terms to the Four Possible

Consequences, you get:
• Something Good can start or be presented, so behavior
increases = Positive Reinforcement (R+)
• Something Good can end or be taken away, so behavior
decreases = Negative Punishment (P-)
• Something Bad can start or be presented, so behavior
decreases = Positive Punishment (P+)
• Something Bad can end or be taken away, so behavior
increases = Negative Reinforcement (R-)
 Operant Conditioning
• An everyday illustration of operant conditioning
involves training your dog to "shake" on
command. Using the operant conditioning
technique of shaping, you speak the command
to "shake" (the discriminative stimulus) and then
wait until your dog moves one of his forepaws a
bit (operant response). Following this behavior,
you give your dog a treat (positive reinforcer).
After demanding ever closer approximations to
shaking your hand, your dog finally comes to
perform the desired response to the verbal
command "shake."
 Operant Conditioning
• Behavior modification is the application
of operant conditioning techniques to
modify behavior. It is being used to help
people with a wide variety of everyday
behavior problems, including obesity,
smoking, alcoholism, delinquency, and
aggression.
Operant Conditioning
• One example of a
therapeutic use of
behavior modification
is the token economy
method.
 Classical Conditioning in
Everyday Life
• The way that advertisers try to use
classical conditioning is to pair their
product with other positive stimuli, such as
sex, pleasant music, humour, and
attractive colours. These positive stimuli
can be used in any number of
combinations or on their own.
The approach is to link an
attractive US with a CS (the
product being sold) so the
consumer will feel positively
toward the product just like
they do with the US.
 Classical Conditioning - Example
• For Example - "fear of bridges" - fear of bridges
can develop from many different sources. For
example, while a child rides in a car over a
dilapidated bridge, his father makes jokes about
the bridge collapsing and all of them falling into
the river below. The father finds this funny and
so decides to do it whenever they cross the
bridge. Years later, the child has grown up and
now is afraid to drive over any bridge. In this
case, the fear of one bridge generalized to all
bridges which now evoke fear.
 Operant Conditioning

• Classical conditioning forms an association

between two stimuli. Operant conditioning
forms an association between a behavior and
a consequence. (It is also called response-
stimulus or RS conditioning because it forms an
association between the animal's response
[behavior] and the stimulus that follows
[consequence])
 Operant Conditioning

• There are
four types of Operant Conditioning:
Positive Reinforcement, Negative
Reinforcement, Punishment, and
Extinction. Both Positive and Negative
Reinforcement strengthen behavior while
both Punishment and Extinction weaken
behavior.
 Operant Conditioning

• Four Possible Consequences

• There are four possible consequences to any
behaviour. They are:
• Something Good can start or be presented;
Something Good can end or be taken away;
Something Bad can start or be presented;
Something Bad can end or be taken away.
 Operant Conditioning

• Applying these terms to the Four Possible

Consequences, you get:
• Something Good can start or be presented, so behavior
increases = Positive Reinforcement (R+)
• Something Good can end or be taken away, so behavior
decreases = Negative Punishment (P-)
• Something Bad can start or be presented, so behavior
decreases = Positive Punishment (P+)
• Something Bad can end or be taken away, so behavior
increases = Negative Reinforcement (R-)
 Operant Conditioning
• An everyday illustration of operant conditioning
involves training your dog to "shake" on
command. Using the operant conditioning
technique of shaping, you speak the command
to "shake" (the discriminative stimulus) and then
wait until your dog moves one of his forepaws a
bit (operant response). Following this behavior,
you give your dog a treat (positive reinforcer).
After demanding ever closer approximations to
shaking your hand, your dog finally comes to
perform the desired response to the verbal
command "shake."
 Operant Conditioning
• Behavior modification is the application
of operant conditioning techniques to
modify behavior. It is being used to help
people with a wide variety of everyday
behavior problems, including obesity,
smoking, alcoholism, delinquency, and
aggression.
Operant Conditioning
• One example of a
therapeutic use of
behavior modification
is the token economy
method.
Maslow Hierarchy of Needs
Bronfenbrenner-pg 34 (Contextual)
 Jean Piaget
Cognitive Stage Theory
• The Sensorimotor Period (birth to 2 years)
• During this time, Piaget said that a child's
cognitive system is limited to motor reflexes at
birth, but the child builds on these reflexes to
develop more sophisticated procedures. They
learn to generalize their activities to a wider
range of situations and coordinate them into
increasingly lengthy chains of behaviour.
 Jean Piaget
Cognitive Stage Theory
• PreOperational Thought (2 to 6 or 7 years)
• At this age, according to Piaget, children acquire
representational skills in the areas mental
imagery, and especially language. They are very
self-oriented, and have an egocentric view; that
is, preoperational children can use these
representational skills only to view the world
from their own perspective.
 Jean Piaget
Cognitive Stage Theory
• Concrete Operations (6/7 to 11/12)
• As opposed to Preoperational children, children
in the concrete operations stage are able to take
another's point of view and take into account
more than one perspective simultaneously. They
can also represent transformations as well as
static situations. Although they can understand
concrete problems, Piaget would argue that they
cannot yet perform on abstract problems, and
that they do not consider all of the logically
possible outcomes.
 Jean Piaget
Cognitive Stage Theory
• Formal Operations (11/12 to adult)
• Children who attain the formal operation stage
are capable of thinking logically and
abstractly. They can also reason
theoretically. Piaget considered this the
ultimate stage of development, and stated that
although the children would still have to revise
their knowledge base, their way of thinking was
as powerful as it would get
• The end.
How do developmental scientists study
people and what are some advantages
and disadvantages of each research
method?
• The scientific method is also the model of choice
when studying developmental processes.
• To review, the scientific method is a system of
inquiry that uses very conservative rules and
deliberate procedures to collect, analyze, and
disseminate data.
 How do developmental scientists study
people and what are some advantages and
disadvantages of each research method?

• The scientific method is

also the model of choice
when studying
developmental
processes.
• To review, the scientific
method is a system of
inquiry that uses very
conservative rules and
deliberate procedures to
collect, analyze, and
disseminate data.
 How do developmental scientists study
people and what are some advantages and
disadvantages of each research method?

• The main steps involved in carrying out the

scientific method are:
– Identifying a problem and developing a theory
– Forming a specific hypothesis about your
variables
– Collecting data
– Analyzing data to seek support for your
hypothesis
– Reporting your findings to others, so they can be
checked and confirmed if necessary.
Random Sampling
• Random sampling is
the purest form of
probability sampling.
Each member of the
population has an
equal and known
chance of being
selected.
Random Sampling
• Simple random sampling is
the basic sampling technique
where we select a group of
subjects (a sample) for study
from a larger group (a
population). Each individual is
chosen entirely by chance and
each member of the population
has an equal chance of being
included in the sample. Every
possible sample of a given
size has the same chance of
selection.
Random Sampling
• Published
information from
Mars Inc States that
plain m&m s are
• 30% brown
• 20% red 20% yellow
• 10% orange
• 10% blue
• 10% green
Random Sampling
• Therefore any
random sample you
test should
conceivably have
the same results
Research Designs – see table 2-4
pg 41
• Within the bounds of the scientific
method, developmental psychologists can
utilize a variety of research designs. The
most common include:
– Experimental Design
– Correlational Design
– Observational and/or Ethnographic Designs
– Case Study Designs
 Designs see table 2-5 pg 47
• Longitudinal Designs
• Longitudinal designs collect data (usually only one or a
few characteristics) on the same people over an
extended period of time.
• For example, let's say your class in grade 1 was given an
IQ test. If you and all your classmates were again tested
for IQ in grade 3, 5, 7, 9, 11 and so on, this would be
considered a longitudinal design.
• The data gathered from longitudinal studies are
invaluable as they assess developmental changes that
occur over time as a result of aging. They also avoid
some of the confounding cohort effects observed in other
developmental designs.
 Cross-Sectional Study
• In cross-sectional studies, different cohorts are
assessed at the same time on one or a few
characteristics.
• For example, all the grade 1s, 2s, 3s, 4s, etc.
from a school district are given personality tests
at the same time and developmental changes in
personality are derived by looking at changes
between the different groups.
• Cross-sectional designs are good at showing
similarities and differences among different age
groups of people, are fast, easy and inexpensive
to run, and don't have the problem of attrition and
repeated testing.
Cross-Sectional Study

• These studies
however do not really
establish true age-
related changes since
the background or
cohort experiences of
the groups may be
very different and
individual differences
over time are not
taken into account.
Cross-Sequential pg.

• Cross-Sequential
• This is a very powerful
method that combines
the methods of
longitudinal and cross-
sectional designs.
 GP4. What ethical problems may
arise in research on human beings
and how can they best be
resolved?
• Right to informed consent
• Right to Self-Esteem
• Right to Privacy and Confidentiality

• (discuss each)