Developmental Theories

The Psychoanalitic Viewpoint

Freud’s Psychosexual Theory

■ The psychoanalytic perspective:

■ originated with Sigmund Freud’s psychosexual theory, with basic tenets:

■ People are driven by inborn sexual and aggressive instincts that must be controlled.

■ People’s behavior was said to reﬂect unconscious motives that people repress.

■ Freud proposed ﬁve stages of psychosexual development:

oral, anal, phallic, latency, and genital

■ During development, three components of personality, the id, ego, and superego, become integrated.

Oral Stage (Birth to 1 year)
Anal Stage (1 to 3 years)
Phallic Stage (3 to 6 years)
Latency Stage (6 years to puberty)
….

Ericson’s Theory of Psychosocial Development

Eric Erikson’s psychosocial theory extended Freud’s theory by:

■ concentrating less on the sex instinct;

■ concentrating more on sociocultural determinants of development; and

■ arguing that people progress through a series of eight psychosocial conﬂ icts.

■ The conﬂicts begin with “trust versus mistrust” in infancy and conclude with “integrity versus despair” in old age.

■ Each conﬂict must be resolved in favor of the positive trait (trust, for example) for healthy development.

Erik Erikson’s Stages of Psychosocial Development

Stage	Psychosocial Crisis	Basic Virtue	Age
1.	Trust vs. Mistrust	Hope	0 – 1½
2.	Autonomy vs. Shame	Will	1½ – 3
3.	Initiative vs. Guilt	Purpose	3 – 5
4.	Industry vs. Inferiority	Competency	5 – 12
5.	Identity vs. Role Confusion	Fidelity	12 – 18
6.	Intimacy vs. Isolation	Love	18 – 40
7.	Generativity vs. Stagnation	Care	40 – 65
8.	Ego Integrity vs. Despair	Wisdom	65+

Erik Erikson’s Stages of Psychosocial Development

The Learning Viewpoint

Behaviorism

Watson’s Behaviorism

The learning viewpoint, or behaviorism, originated with John B. Watson:

■ viewed infants as tabulae rasae who develop habits from learning experiences;

■ viewed development as a continuous process; and

■ viewed the environment as responsible for the direction of individuals’ development.

“Give me a dozen healthy infants, well-formed, and my own specified world to bring them up in and I’ll guarantee to take any one at random and train him to become any type of specialist I might select – doctor, lawyer, artist, merchant-chief and, yes, even beggar-man and thief, regardless of his talents, penchants, tendencies, abilities, vocations, and race of his ancestors. I am going beyond my facts and I admit it, but so have the advocates of the contrary and they have been doing it for many thousands of years”.

Little Albert Experiment (Phobias) –

Skinner’s Operant Learning Theory

B. F. Skinner proposed operant learning theory:

■ claimed that development reﬂects the operant conditioning of children who are passively shaped by the reinforcers and punishments that accompany their behaviors

Operant Conditioning: Operant conditioning involves learning through the consequences of behavior.
Positive Reinforcement: Presenting the subject with something that it likes. e.g., Skinner rewarded his rats with food pellets.
Negative Reinforcement: Reward – in the sense of removing or avoiding some aversive (painful) stimulus. E.g., Skinner’s rats learned to press the lever in order to switch off the electric current in the cage.
Punishment: Imposing an aversive or painful stimulus. e.g., Skinner’s rats were given electric shocks.
Primary Reinforcers: These are stimuli which are naturally reinforcing because they directly satisfy a need. E.g., food, water.
Secondary Reinforcers: These are stimuli, which are reinforcing through their association with a primary reinforcer. i.e., they do not directly satisfy a need but may be the means to do so. E.g., Money! You cannot eat it or drink it, but if you have it, you can buy whatever you want. So a secondary reinforcer can be just as powerful a motivator as a primary reinforcer.
Shaping: In shaping, the form of an existing response is gradually changed across successive trials towards a desired target behavior by rewarding exact segments of behavior.

“Reinforcement and Punishment”

• Neutral operants: responses from the environment that neither increase nor decrease the probability of a behavior being repeated.

• Reinforcers: Responses from the environment that increase the probability of a behavior being repeated. Reinforcers can be either positive or negative.

• Punishers: Responses from the environment that decrease the likelihood of a behavior being repeated. Punishment weakens behavior.

Pavlov’s Dog
- Classical conditioning (also known as Pavlovian conditioning) is learning through association and was discovered by Pavlov, a Russian physiologist. In simple terms, two stimuli are linked together to produce a new learned response in a person or animal.

Bandura’s Social Cognitive Theory

Albert Bandura proposed social cognitive theory:

■ viewed children as active information processors;

■ viewed observational learning as the source of children’s learning;

■ rejected Watson’s environmental determinism; and

■ proposed reciprocal determinism, in which children have a hand in creating the environments that inﬂuence their development.

Bobo doll experiment

The Cognitive Developmental

Piaget’s View of Intelligence

Jean Piaget pioneered the cognitive-developmental viewpoint:

■ This theory views children as active explorers who construct cognitive schemes.

■ The processes of assimilation and accommodation enable children to resolve disequilibriums and adapt to their environments.

■ Piaget described cognitive development as an invariant sequence of four stages:

■ sensorimotor;

■ preoperational;

■ concrete-operational; and

■ formal-operational.

The child’s stage of development determines how she will interpret various events and what she learns from her experiences.

Lev Vygotsky’s Viewpoint

Lev Vygotsky proposed the sociocultural theory:

■ views cognitive growth as a socially mediated activity; and

■ views cognitive growth as heavily inﬂuenced by culture.

The Information Processing Viewpoint

Information-processing perspectives were adapted to explain cognitive development:

■ view the mind as a complex symbol-manipulating system:

■ Information ﬂows into the system, is operated on, and is converted to output (answers, inferences, and solutions).

■ view cognitive development as continuous:

■ Children and adolescents gradually become better at:

■ attending to information;

■ remembering and retrieving information; and

■ formulating strategies to solve problems.

The Ecological Systems Viewpoint

Bronfenbrenner’s Ecological Theory

Urie Bronfenbrenner proposed the ecological systems theory:

■ views development as the product of transactions between an ever-changing person and an ever-changing environment.

■ Bronfenbrenner proposes that the natural environment actually consists of interacting contexts or systems:

■ microsystem

■ mesosystem

■ exosystem

■ macrosystem

■ chronosystem

■ This detailed analysis of person–environment interactions has stimulated many new interpretations of development.

Attachment Theories

Bowlby

Bowlby’s evolutionary theory of attachment suggests that children come into the world biologically pre-programmed to form attachments with others, because this will help them to survive.
Bowlby suggested that a child would initially form only one attachment and that the attachment figure acted as a secure base for exploring the world.
The attachment relationship acts as a prototype for all future social relationships so disrupting it can have severe consequences.

Ainsworth

John Bowlby (1969) believed that attachment was an all or nothing process. However, research has shown that there are individual differences in attachment quality. Indeed, one of the primary paradigms in attachment theory is that of the security of an individual’s attachment (Ainsworth & Bell, 1970).
Ainsworth (1970) identified three main attachment styles, secure (type B), insecure avoidant (type A) and insecure ambivalent/resistant (type C). She concluded that these attachment styles were the result of early interactions with the mother. A fourth attachment style known as disorganized was later identified (Main, & Solomon, 1990).

	Secure	Resistant	Avoidant
Separation Anxiety	Distressed when mother leaves	Intense distress when the mother leaves	No sign of distress when the the mother leaves
Stranger Anxiety	Avoidant of stranger when alone, but friendly when the mother is present	The infant avoids the stranger – shows fear of the stranger	The infant is okay with the stranger and plays normally when the stranger is present
Reunion behavior	Positive and happy when mother returns	The infant approaches the mother, but resists contact, may even push her away	The Infant shows little interest when the mother returns
Other	Uses the mother as a safe base to explore their environment	The infant cries more and explores less than the other two types	The mother and stranger are able to comfort the infant equally well
% of infants	70%	15%	15%

Maslow’s hierarchy of needs

Maslow’s hierarchy of needs is a theory of motivation which states that five categories of human needs dictate an individual’s behavior.

Bloom’s taxonomy

Bloom’s taxonomy is a set of three hierarchical models used to classify educational learning objectives into levels of complexity and specificity.

Moral Development

Kohlberg’s Stages of Moral Development

Kohlberg

He talks about Moral reasoning! Not Moral Behavior!

Level 1 – Pre-conventional morality

• Stage 1. Obedience and Punishment Orientation. The child/individual is good in order to avoid being punished. If a person is punished, they must have done wrong.

• Stage 2. Individualism and Exchange. At this stage, children recognize that there is not just one right view that is handed down by the authorities. Different individuals have different viewpoints.

Level 2 – Conventional morality

• Stage 3. Good Interpersonal Relationships. The child/individual is good in order to be seen as being a good person by others. Therefore, answers relate to the approval of others.

• Stage 4. Maintaining the Social Order. The child/individual becomes aware of the wider rules of society, so judgments concern obeying the rules in order to uphold the law and to avoid guilt.

Level 3 – Post-conventional morality

• Stage 5. Social Contract and Individual Rights. The child/individual becomes aware that while rules/laws might exist for the good of the greatest number, there are times when they will work against the interest of particular individuals.

The issues are not always clear-cut. For example, in Heinz’s dilemma, the protection of life is more important than breaking the law against stealing.

• Stage 6. Universal Principles. People at this stage have developed their own set of moral guidelines which may or may not fit the law. The principles apply to everyone.

E.g., human rights, justice, and equality. The person will be prepared to act to defend these principles even if it means going against the rest of society in the process and having to pay the consequences of disapproval and or imprisonment. Kohlberg doubted few people reached this stage.

Intervention Theories

Family Systems Model

The family systems theory is a theory introduced by Dr. Murray Bowen that suggests that individuals cannot be understood in isolation from one another, but rather as a part of their family, as the family is an emotional unit. Families are systems of interconnected and interdependent individuals, none of whom can be understood in isolation from the system.

3 Nesil öncesi incelenmeli

Triangles: The smallest stable relationship system. Triangles usually have one side in conflict and two sides in harmony, contributing to the development of clinical problems.

Differentiation of self: The variance in individuals in their susceptibility to depend on others for acceptance and approval.

Nuclear family emotional system: The four relationship patterns that define where problems may develop in a family.

– Marital conflict

– Dysfunction in one spouse

– Impairment of one or more children

– Emotional distance

Family projection process: The transmission of emotional problems from a parent to a child.

Multigenerational transmission process: The transmission of small differences in the levels of differentiation between parents and their children.

Emotional cutoff: The act of reducing or cutting off emotional contact with family as a way managing unresolved emotional issues.

Sibling position: The impact of sibling position on development and behavior.

Societal emotional process: The emotional system governs behavior on a societal level, promoting both progressive and regressive periods in a society.

Guralnick

Developmental Systems Model