Reporty Psycho.

THE NEWBORN
LEARNING OBJECTIVE Summarize the reflexes and perceptual abilities of newborns. Describe the four basic temperaments that are visible at birth, the extent to which those inborn temperaments remain stable over time, and the reasons for both stability and change.
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Reflexes
Neonates (newborns) have many reflexes that help them to survive
Rooting reflex Sucking reflex Swallowing reflex Stepping reflex Grasping reflex
Temperament
Temperament refers to characteristic patterns of emotional reactions and emotional selfregulation. Temperament is influenced significantly by heredity and often remains stable into adulthood. However, environmental factors such as parents response to childs temperament can also be an influence.
Thomas & Chess (1977) identified three types of babies: Easy babies are good natured and adaptable, easy to care for and to please. Difficult babies are moody and intense, with strong, negative reactions to new people and situations. Slow to warm up babies are relatively inactive and slow to respond to new things; when they do react, their reactions are mild.
Kagan and his associates (1988, 1991, 1993, 1994) have added a fourth: the shy child. Shy children are timid and inhibited, fearful of anything new or strange.
Perceptual Abilities
Vision At birth, babies can see faces or objects 8 to 10 inches away. By 8 months they are able to see as well as the average young adult, although their visual system takes another 3 or 4 years to develop fully.
Depth Perception The ability to see the world in three dimensions is well developed by the time a baby learns to crawl, between 6 and 12 months of age. Demonstrated in a classic experiment using the visual cliff (Walk & Gibson, 1961).
Other Senses Fetuses can hear sounds in utero, and after birth babies show signs that they remember sounds they heard in the womb. Newborns have clear preferences regarding taste and smell.
INFANCY AND CHILDHOOD

LEARNING OBJECTIVES Describe how the human brain changes during infancy and early childhood. Summarize the course of physical and motor development in childhood. Describe Piagets stages of cognitive development and Kohlbergs stages of moral development and summarize the criticisms of each. Describe the course of language development in childhood. Compare and contrast the views of Skinner, Chomsky, and Pinker regarding language development.
LEARNING OBJECTIVES (cont) Distinguish imprinting from attachment. Describe the nature of parentchild relationships in the first 12 years of life with specific reference to Eriksons stages of development. Describe how peer relationships develop during childhood and the importance of non-shared environments.
LEARNING OBJECTIVES (cont) Distinguish gender identity, gender constancy, gender-role awareness, and gender stereotypes. Describe sex-typed behavior including the extent to which biology and experience shape sex-typed behavior. Summarize the research on the effects of television and video games on children.
Neurological Development
The human brain changes dramatically during infancy and early childhood: Dendrites begin to bloom and branch out. The number of interconnections between neurons in the brain increases dramatically.
There is rapid growth of myelin sheaths, which provides insulation and increases speed of conduction. In infancy, synaptic growth is prominent in the prefrontal cortex and in visual and auditory areas of the cortex. A lack of external stimulation can have a negative impact on brain development.
Physical Development
On average babies grow 10 inches and gain 15 pounds in the first year. Birth weight is doubled by 4 months and tripled by the first birthday. Rapid increases in height and weight will not occur again until early adolescence.
Young children are top heavy: They have large heads and small bodies. As they get older, the body and legs become longer, and the head is proportionately smaller.
Motor Development
Motor development refers to the acquisition of skills involving movement, such as grasping, crawling, and walking. The average ages at which motor skills are achieved are referred to as developmental norms. Motor development proceeds in a proximodistal fashionthat is, from nearest the center of the body (proximal) to farthest from the center (distal). Maturation - an automatic biological unfolding of development in an organism as a function of the passage of time.
Cognitive Development
Jean Piaget (18961980) observed and studied children. As a result of his observations, Piaget believed that cognitive development is a way of adapting to the environment. In Piagets view, children are intrinsically motivated to explore and understand things.
Piaget proposed a 4-stage theory of cognitive development:

Sensory-motor 0-2 yrs Preoperational 2-7 yrs Concrete-operational 7-11 yrs Formal-operational 11-adulthood
In the sensory-motor stage (birth to 2 years of age), the individual develops object permanence and acquires the ability to form mental representations. object permanence - an awareness that things continue to exist even when they are out of sight. mental representations - mental images or symbols (such as words) used to think about or remember an object, a person, or an event.
Between the ages of 2 and 7, children are in the preoperational stage. During the preoperational stage individuals are able to use mental representations and language to describe, remember, and reason about the world. These abilities are limited because children are egocentric--limited in their ability to see things from anothers point of view.
The concrete-operational stage, in which the individuals can attend to more than one thing at a time and understand someone elses point of view, occurs between the ages of 7 and 11 years. They are able to understand the principle of conservation, the concept that the quantity of a substance is not altered by reversible changes in its appearance. This way of thinking is limited to concrete matters.
Beginning at 11 years old, individuals become capable of abstract thought. Piaget referred to this stage as the formaloperational stage of cognitive development.
Criticisms of Piagets theory Some see cognitive development as a more gradual process, resulting from slow acquisition of experience. Piaget underestimated what young infants could understand about the world. Piaget underplayed the importance of social interaction in cognitive development.
Noam Chomsky (1965, 1986) argued that children are born with a language acquisition device, an internal mechanism that is wired into the human brain, facilitating language learning and making it universal. This language acquisition device enables young children to detect general patterns of grammar in adult speech, permitting them to quickly learn the words and rules of any language to which they are exposed.
Moral Development
Kolhberg (1979, 1981) proposed a 3-level theory of moral development: Preconventional level Conventional level Postconventional level
Preconventional level:
Preadolescent children tend to interpret behavior in terms of its concrete consequences.
Conventional level:
Arrival of adolescence (formal-operational thought): right behavior defined as that which pleases others. Mid-adolescence: a shift toward considering abstract social virtues and respecting authority.
Postconventional level:
Marked by an emphasis on abstract principles such as justice, liberty, and equality. For the first time, people become aware of discrepancies between what they judge as moral and what society has determined to be legal.
Language Development
2 months of age - infant begins to coo. 3-4 months of age - babbling - repeating meaningless sounds that are the building blocks for later language development. 4-6 months - babbling takes on certain features of adult language (intonation, basic sounds of native language). 6 months - recognize commonly used words such as their own names and Mommy and Daddy.
By 1 year, vocalization becomes increasingly communicative and socially directed. Caregivers facilitate this process by using infantdirected speech. During the next 6-8 months children build a vocabulary of one-word sentences called holophrases. In the 2nd year of life, children begin to distinguish between themselves and others, and possessive words become part of their vocabulary. Feedback from parents enhances vocabulary.
B.F. Skinner believed that parents and other people listen to the infants cooing and babbling and reinforce those sounds that most resemble adult speech. However, most psychologists and linguists now believe that learning alone cannot explain the speed, accuracy, and originality with which children learn to use language.
A more recent theory of language acquisition, advanced by Steven Pinker (1994, 2007; Pinker and Jackendoff, 2005), holds that, to a large extent, evolutionary forces may have shaped language, providing humans with what he calls a language instinct. Young children learn a second language more quickly and speak it more fluently than adults, supporting the idea of a critical period during which a second language is most readily acquired. Research has shown that learning a second language has long-term effects on the brain, including increased neuroplasticity and greater neural density in language centers (Song, Skoe, Wong, & Kraus, 2008).
Learning to interact with others is an important aspect of childhood development. Early in life, childrens most important relationships are with their parents and other caregivers. Some young animals have a tendency in certain species to follow the first moving thing (usually its mother) it sees after it is born or hatched. This is referred to as imprinting.
Human newborns do not imprint. They gradually form an attachment, an emotional bond that makes human infants cling to their caregivers for safety and comfort. In humans, this attachment is built on many hours of interaction, during which baby and parent come to form a close relationship. Signs of attachment are evident by the age of 6 months or even earlier. Infants demonstrate attachment through stranger anxiety, a fear of unfamiliar people, which usually emerges around 7 months, reaching its peak at 12 months and declining during the second year.
Erik Erikson (19021994) proposed a theory of eight psychosocial stages of development: Trust vs. mistrust Autonomy vs. shame and doubt Initiative vs. guilt Industry vs. inferiority Identity vs. role confusion Intimacy vs. isolation Generativity vs. stagnation Ego identity vs. despair
Developing a secure attachment early in life has implications for later cognitive and social development. As infants develop basic trust, they begin to venture away from the caregiver to investigate objects and other people around them. This exploration is a first indication of childrens developing autonomy, or a sense of independence.
This autonomy is a first step in socialization, the process by which children learn the behaviors and attitudes appropriate to their family and culture. Toddlers who fail to acquire a sense of independence and separateness from others tend to have more shame and doubt.
According to Erikson, independence increases between the ages of 3 and 6. Children become increasingly involved in independent efforts to accomplish goalsmaking plans, undertaking projects, mastering new skills. Parental encouragement of these initiatives lead to a sense of joy in taking on new tasks. If children are repeatedly criticized and scolded for things they do wrong, they may develop strong feelings of unworthiness, resentment, and guilt.
Diana Baumrind (1972, 1991, 1996) identified four basic parenting styles: Authoritarian parents control their childrens behavior rigidly and insist on unquestioning obedience. Permissive-indifferent parents exert too little control, failing to set limits on their childrens behavior. They are also neglectful and inattentive. Permissive-indulgent parents are very supportive of their children, but fail to set appropriate limits on their behavior. Authoritative parents provide firm structure and guidance without being overly controlling. They listen to their childrens opinions and give explanations for their decisions, but it is clear that they are the ones who make and enforce the rules.
At a very early age, infants begin to show an interest in other children, but the social skills required to play with them develop only gradually. Sibling relationships can have a major impact, especially on how children learn to relate to other peers. Peer groups, networks of same-aged friends and acquaintances who give one another emotional and social support, teach children many valuable things, such as how to engage in cooperative activities and how to negotiate the social roles of leader and follower.
Most developmental psychologists believe that nonshared environments have a major impact on development. Non-shared environments are unique aspects of the environment that are experienced differently by siblings, even though they are reared in the same family. Although family experiences are important, the crucial environmental influences that shape personality development are specific to each child, rather than general to an entire family (Plomin & Rende, 1991, p. 180).
Insert Summary Table p. 308
Sex-Role Development
By about age 3, both boys and girls have developed a gender identity, that is, a little girl knows that she is a girl, and a little boy knows that he is a boy. Gender constancy, the realization that gender does not change with age, does not develop until age 4 or 5.
At a young age, children also start to acquire genderrole awareness, knowledge of what behaviors are expected of males and females in their society As a result, they develop gender stereotypes, or oversimplified beliefs about what the typical male and female are like. At the same time that children acquire gender-role awareness and gender stereotypes, they also develop their own sex-typed behavior, which are socially prescribed ways of behaving that differ for boys and girls.
Television, Video Games, and Children

On average, American children spend about 4 hours a day watching television (American Academy of Pediatrics, 2006) and 9 hours a week playing video games (C. A.Anderson, Gentile, & Buckley, 2007). The American Academy of Pediatrics (1999, 2007) recommends that children under the age of 2 should not watch television at all and that parents limit their childrens TV and video-game time to no more than 1 or 2 hours a day. A major concern is the impact of witnessing aggressive behavior on television
Two comprehensive reviews of the research (C. A. Anderson et al., 2003; Huesmann, 2007) found that the effects of media violence can extend well into adulthood, even for people who are not highly aggressive. Short-term exposure was found to increase the incidence of physically and verbally aggressive thoughts, emotions, and behaviors, whereas longitudinal studies linked exposure to media violence in childhood with aggression later in life, including physical assaults and spousal abuse. Despite this, children can learn worthwhile things from watching television and playing educational video games.

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THE NEWBORN

Copyright 2010 Pearson Education, Inc. All rights reserved

Copyright 2010 Pearson Education, Inc. All rights reserved

Copyright 2010 Pearson Education, Inc. All rights reserved

Copyright 2010 Pearson Education, Inc. All rights reserved

Copyright 2010 Pearson Education, Inc. All rights reserved

Copyright 2010 Pearson Education, Inc. All rights reserved

Copyright 2010 Pearson Education, Inc. All rights reserved

INFANCY AND CHILDHOOD

Copyright 2010 Pearson Education, Inc. All rights reserved

Copyright 2010 Pearson Education, Inc. All rights reserved

Copyright 2010 Pearson Education, Inc. All rights reserved

Copyright 2010 Pearson Education, Inc. All rights reserved

Copyright 2010 Pearson Education, Inc. All rights reserved

Copyright 2010 Pearson Education, Inc. All rights reserved

Copyright 2010 Pearson Education, Inc. All rights reserved

Piaget proposed a 4-stage theory of cognitive development:

Copyright 2010 Pearson Education, Inc. All rights reserved

Copyright 2010 Pearson Education, Inc. All rights reserved

Copyright 2010 Pearson Education, Inc. All rights reserved

Copyright 2010 Pearson Education, Inc. All rights reserved

Copyright 2010 Pearson Education, Inc. All rights reserved

Copyright 2010 Pearson Education, Inc. All rights reserved

Copyright 2010 Pearson Education, Inc. All rights reserved

Copyright 2010 Pearson Education, Inc. All rights reserved

Copyright 2010 Pearson Education, Inc. All rights reserved

Copyright 2010 Pearson Education, Inc. All rights reserved

Copyright 2010 Pearson Education, Inc. All rights reserved

Copyright 2010 Pearson Education, Inc. All rights reserved

Copyright 2010 Pearson Education, Inc. All rights reserved

Copyright 2010 Pearson Education, Inc. All rights reserved

Insert Summary Table p. 308

Copyright 2010 Pearson Education, Inc. All rights reserved

Copyright 2010 Pearson Education, Inc. All rights reserved

Television, Video Games, and Children

Copyright 2010 Pearson Education, Inc. All rights reserved

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