“Annabel Lee” by Edgar Allan Poe

by   •   Academics, What I'm Reading
 

This post is over 13 years old and may contain information that is incorrect, outdated, or no longer relevant.
My views and opinions can change, and those that are expressed in this post may not necessarily reflect the ones I hold today.
 

This is my response paper for my literature class for this week. We shifted our focus from prose to poems. We were assigned ten poems to read; for the assignment, we had to summarize all ten poems, then select one about which to write, elaborating on our impressions of the work and critically analyzing a particular topic. This week, we had to focus on symbolism.

Summary:

“Sonnet 116” by William Shakespeare is about how love is not affected by obstacles and persists throughout all challenges it may face.

“A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning” by John Donne tells about a man who has to leave his lover, but does not believe the event is one that should prompt mourning. He instead thinks that the separation will be an expansion to their love and will make the bond firmer.

“To His Coy Mistress” by Andrew Marvell is told by a man who is attempting to acquire the love of a woman by elaborating on, emphasizing, and complimenting the positive aspects of the woman.

“Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard” by Thomas Gray takes place in a churchyard that is described in great visual detail. The narrator then shifts focus over to a poet by telling about his separated life and describing his grave in the churchyard.

“The Tyger” by William Blake tells of the Tyger, a being that is described as being aesthetically appealing. The poem goes on to ask what other being is powerful enough to be able to construct the Tyger with such excellence.

“A Red, Red Rose” by Robert Burns is a poem about the narrator’s love; it is compared to various pleasant things. Towards the end, he is separated by his love, but he assures that he will once again be reunited.

“I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud” by William Wordsworth is about the narrator who wandered around like a cloud when he encountered a field of flowers, where he enjoyed the scenery. Now, when he is lonely, he thinks back to this scene and is happy again.

“Ozymandias” by Percy Byssche Shelley tells of an interaction with someone who traveled to an ancient land and came across a stone sculpted to resemble a king, which, according to the corresponding inscription, was powerful. There was nothing else around the sculpture.

“Ode on a Grecian Urn” by John Keats tells of various things that have happened, including a group of people being pursued, someone playing melodies on a pipe, some people being sacrificed, the lesson that “Beauty is truth, truth beauty.”

“Annabel Lee” by Edgar Allan Poe is told by a narrator who was the lover of Annabel Lee. One day, the angels got jealous of the love between the narrator and Annabel Lee and sent a wind that chilled Annabel to death. She was taken away by her family members. However, the narrator says that because their love was so strong, there is no way that even death can separate him from Annabel.

Impressions:

While reading through the first nine poems listed, I generally had a difficult time understanding the implied meanings of the poems, as I generally have a hard time interpreting syntax that is changed from conventional standards to add artistic value. However, when I got to the last poem, “Annabel Lee” by Edgar Allan Poe, I felt like all the literary beauty was still intact and the rhythm was pleasant, but it still flowed nicely and was easy to understand and visualize what was happening. Thus, it was my favorite poem out of the set for this week.

One thing that I particularly liked about the poem was how it was organized well as what one would expect from a conventional story. The poem starts with a description of the context and setting, which allowed me to visualize a fundamental structure upon which I could illustrate more details in my mind as the poem progressed. By the end of the poem, I was able to produce a short video in my mind and be able to really experience the poem’s message, which was difficult for many of the other poems.

Critical Analysis:

There are a handful of symbolic items in Edgar Allan Poe’s “Annabel Lee” which form a gestalt that gives a deeper meaning to the poem.

One of the most redundant forms of symbolism found throughout the poem is the sea. It is mentioned in many different contexts: “kingdom by the sea,” “demons down under the sea,” “sepulcher there by the sea,” and “tomb by the side of the sea.” In all of these situations, the sea is present when there is a connection between the narrator and Annabel, which leads me to conclude that the sea is symbolic of their love and union. The kingdom is near the sea because they both live in the same area, and are connected by area of residence. The demons are down under the sea, weighted down by the water, because no evil force can disrupt the link between the narrator and Annabel. After Annabel dies, her dead body is placed next to the sea because, as the narrator states, even death is not enough to pull them apart.

Another point of symbolism is the age of the narrator and Annabel. This is also a recurring item of interest – the narrator admits that “She was a child and I was a child,” but later clarifies that “… our love it was stronger by far than the love / Of those who were older than we– / Of many far wiser than we–.” At first, one might think that this love is just adolescent or teenage infatuation, but, as evidenced by the dedication shown by the narrator to Annabel, even after she dies, their age is not symbolic of foolishness, but actually of the true power and dedication of their love. Even when covered by the cloak of immaturity, their love still shines brightly through.

Finally, one last symbolic object that I thought was interesting was the wind. The wind is mentioned twice, once during the recount of what happened (“A wind blew out of a cloud by night / Chilling my Annabel Lee), and once when justifying Annabel being taken away (“… the wind came out of the cloud, chilling / And killing my Annabel Lee”). The wind here seems symbolic of an omen of evil; although it was sent from the heavens, it still inflicted Annabel with an illness (most likely a common cold) that went out of hand and ended up taking her life.

Overall, the symbols in Poe’s poem helps link together the different sections of the poem. They act as threads that allow us to tie together the different parts of the plot and find a theme that integrates one segment to the next.

Works Cited

Blake, William. “The Tyger.” 250 Poems: A Portable Anthology. Ed. Peter Schakel and Jack Ridl. Boston, MA: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2009. 35. Print.

Burns, Robert. “A Red, Red Rose.” 250 Poems: A Portable Anthology. Ed. Peter Schakel and Jack Ridl. Boston, MA: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2009. 36. Print.

Donne, John. “A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning.” 250 Poems: A Portable Anthology. Ed. Peter Schakel and Jack Ridl. Boston, MA: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2009. 9. Print.

Gray, Thomas. “Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard.” 250 Poems: A Portable Anthology. Ed. Peter Schakel and Jack Ridl. Boston, MA: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2009. 28. Print.

Keats, John. “Ode on a Grecian Urn.” 250 Poems: A Portable Anthology. Ed. Peter Schakel and Jack Ridl. Boston, MA: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2009. 57. Print.

Marvell, Andrew. “To His Coy Mistress.” 250 Poems: A Portable Anthology. Ed. Peter Schakel and Jack Ridl. Boston, MA: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2009. 23. Print.

Poe, Edgar Allan. “Annabel Lee.” 250 Poems: A Portable Anthology. Ed. Peter Schakel and Jack Ridl. Boston, MA: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2009. 61. Print.

Shakespeare, William. “Sonnet 116.” 250 Poems: A Portable Anthology. Ed. Peter Schakel and Jack Ridl. Boston, MA: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2009. 8. Print.

Shelley, Percy Bysshe. “Ozymandias.” 250 Poems: A Portable Anthology. Ed. Peter Schakel and Jack Ridl. Boston, MA: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2009. 51. Print.

Wordsworth, William. “I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud.” 250 Poems: A Portable Anthology. Ed. Peter Schakel and Jack Ridl. Boston, MA: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2009. 37. Print.

 

—§—

 

“The Horse Dealer’s Daughter” by D.H. Lawrence

by   •   Academics, What I'm Reading
 

This post is over 13 years old and may contain information that is incorrect, outdated, or no longer relevant.
My views and opinions can change, and those that are expressed in this post may not necessarily reflect the ones I hold today.
 

Here is this week’s paper I wrote for my literature course. We had to read five designated short stories from Short Story Masterpieces and summarize all of them, then select one story to discuss further through our impressions and a critical analysis on a topic of our choice.

Summary:

“The Horse Dealer’s Daughter” by D.H. Lawrence tells the story of Mabel, the horse dealer’s daughter, who is currently struggling to make ends meet after the death of her mother. When visiting her mother to tidy up her grave, she gets overwhelmed by her feelings and almost commits suicide by drowning. Nearby, Jack, a doctor, comes to save her life by extracting her from the water and nursing her back to health. From Mabel’s perspective, Jack did this because he loved her; from his perspective, Jack did this because he is a doctor. As the story comes to a close, Mabel realizes that Jack doesn’t actually love her, but Jack decides to marry her anyway and proposes to her before he returns to his senses.

“Flowering Judas” by Katherine Anne Porter is about Laura, a young woman living near Xochimilco. She works for Braggioni, a large man who sings to Laura when she returns home. He is a man with great self-esteem who is not told of how bad he is at singing because of people’s fear of his retaliation. He is dissatisfied with his wife and chooses to go away for an extended period of time. During this leave, Laura meets a prisoner named Eugenio. When Braggioni returns home, his wife apologizes; that night, Laura dreams of Eugenio.

“A Country Love Story” by Jean Stafford tells the story of Daniel and May, husband and wife, who choose to purchase a house in the country. The particular house they select happens to have an antique sleigh in the front lawn; at first, they have a strange impression of it, but eventually, they just let it be and decide not to get rid of it. As the story progresses, Daniel and May have a conflict, the first of its kind in their five years of marriage, after Daniel has a hallucination indicating that May has been unfaithful. Daniel remains in his room working, while May is lonely. The sleigh begins to take a symbolic role, as it represents May’s loneliness, as well as acts as the residing place of May’s hallucinations. Eventually, Daniel realizes that his hallucinations were what was fueling the arguments, and Daniel and May proclaim their love for each other again.

“Flight” by John Steinbeck features Pepé, a boy who lives with his mother and siblings in Mexico. Pepé’s mother always berates him for not being a man, but one day, still sends him off to get some medicine, which is a man’s job. During the trip, Pepé acquires the medicine, but also gets in a physical confrontation while he and others are consuming wine. When he returns home, the fact that he stabbed a man initiates another journey where he heads off into the mountains. During his trip, his horse gets injured by some people who are pursuing Pepé; eventually, he dies after being buried by an avalanche.

“Why I Live at the P.O.” by Eudora Welty is narrated by Sister, a woman whose sister, Stella-Rondo, recently moved back into her house with her adopted daughter to live with family after she got a divorce. Upon Stella-Rondo’s arrival, Sister suspects that her daughter is not adopted, but biological. This insults Stella-Rondo and motivates her to turn the entire family against Sister. Stella-Rondo spreads rumors about Sister to Papa-Daddy and Uncle Rondo to make them believe that Sister has been bad-mouthing them. Eventually, Sister becomes fed up with Stella-Rondo and decides to move out to live at the post office.

Impressions:

When reading “The Horse Dealer’s Daughter,” although it is somewhat apparent that it was supposed to be a sad story at first due to the sully setting and the poor situation in which Mabel is, I sort of thought it was partially a comedy in disguise. I thought the plot revolved around a perfect example of different perspectives gone wrong. Most of us have experienced a situation where two different people with two different backgrounds or levels of experience see the same scenario differently, and end up having some sort of humorous misunderstanding. I felt Lawrence integrated this concept well into this story, and twisting a developing love relationship into the confusion made it even more compelling.

Critical Analysis:

I decided to expand upon my initial interest with the idea of differing perspectives and take a closer look at the primary conflict present in the story by extracting and analyzing the motivation and implications behind each character’s actions and connecting it to the conclusion of the story. The primary conflict of perspectives is how Mabel and Jack perceived the fact that Jack rescued Mabel from drowning, as illustrated by, “… the small black figure walked slowly and deliberately towards the cent[er] of the pond … gradually moving deeper into the motionless water.”

From Jack’s perspective, he identified a figure that was intentionally walking into the water to commit suicide. As a doctor, he sensed someone in danger and felt the urge to help them – his intuition is noted when it says “the doctor’s quick eye detected a figure in black passing through the gate of the field, down towards the pond,” and later, “When he rescued her and restored her, he was a doctor, and she was a patient. He had had no single personal thought of her.” It can thus be concluded that, for Jack, this was just his normal work outside of regular working hours, and he was helping a person in need.

To Mabel, however, the fact that Jack saved her was something completely else. She was told of this novel experience unfolding from Jack’s perspective because her inquiry of “‘What did I do?’” implies she does not remember what happened. However, rather than seeing it from a perspective paralleling Jack’s, she applied her own opinions and emotions to the recount. From a normal person’s point of view, it is understandable to interpret someone risking their own life to save yours as an act of altruism so powerful that only love could motivate someone to do such a thing. To make the situation more intense, Jack undressed Mabel so she would cease to lose body heat from the cold, drenched clothing; to Jack, this was standard doctoral procedure, but to Mabel, she interpreted this as an act of intimacy.

So what made Jack cave in and decide to propose to Mabel? In Mabel’s flurry of confusion, she overwhelmed Jack with actions symbolic of love, such as forcing him to admit his love through words and kiss her. As a result, Jack’s own personal emotions took over and made him just as confused as Mabel, causing him to change his position from a professional doctor to a dutiful man. In essence, the conflict of perspectives was “resolved” when Jack took on the same perspective to the rescue as Mabel.

 

—§—

 

“The Egg” by Sherwood Anderson (and other short stories)

by   •   Academics, What I'm Reading
 

This post is over 13 years old and may contain information that is incorrect, outdated, or no longer relevant.
My views and opinions can change, and those that are expressed in this post may not necessarily reflect the ones I hold today.
 

This week my literature class made a temporary transition from novels to short stories. We were instructed to read five different short stories, then select one on which we would write the remainder of our response paper. All of these short stories are found in Short Story Masterpieces, edited by Robert Penn Warren and Albert Erskine.

Summary:

“The Egg” by Sherwood Anderson is a story narrated by a young boy about the influence of eggs on his father. From before the narrator was born, his father worked at a chicken farm where he raised chickens from birth to death; he goes on to describe the depressing cycle of life and death that raising chickens involves. The narrator’s father seems to be an emotional, detail-oriented, and materialistic person, as he had the idiosyncrasy of saving the bodies of mutated chicks. The bulk of the story has a recount of an event where his father, unable to overcome his social awkwardness, made a fool of himself in front of a guest by trying too hard to impress him, and instead, failing all his egg-related tricks.

“The Boarding House” by James Joyce features Mrs. Mooney, the former daughter of a butch­er who was abused by her husband and left him to start a board­ing house. While at the board­ing house, she noticed a middle-aged man who was building a relationship with her daughter Polly. She did not intervene at first, but when the time came, she decided to speak with the man and demand that he follows through with marriage. At first, Polly is frightened, but eventually, has positive visions of her future.

“Marriage a la Mode” by Katherine Mansfield tells a story of the couple William and Isabel. Isabel is dissatisfied with William because they lived in a small, stuffed-up house and had a nanny that was ruining their children. Isabel begins to think of William as dull, and says bad things about him with her friends. The following day, Isabel receives a letter from William that she shares with her friends, but then feels ashamed for doing so and decides to write a letter back to William later.

“Cruel and Barbarous Treatment”€ by Mary McCarthy tells the story of a married woman who decides to engage in extramarital affairs. She demonstrates her skill of manipulating her hus­band, lover, and friends by calculating how others will perceive her. She also considers all the positive and negative consequences of each of her potential decisions. Eventually, she has a divorce with her hus­band and pursues a relation­ship with the Young Man to enhance her life.

“€œA Spinster’s Tale”€ by Peter Taylor is narrated by Elizabeth, a woman who tells of the relation­ship she had with her brother and drunkard Mr. Speed. For Elizabeth, Mr. Speed was a curious and frightening character that she claimed she would eventually build the courage to confront. Later on in the recount, she explains that she has gotten more used to Mr. Speed with the encouragement of her father, but is still fearful. One day, Mr. Speed is accidently let into Elizabeth’s house due to a case of mistaken identity, and Elizabeth reacts by calling the police.

Impressions:

When I first read through “The Egg” by Sherwood Anderson, I went through a series of emo­tions of confusion, depression, sympathy, and understanding – confusion as to the nar­ra­tor’s father’s actions, depression as to the fact that he would choose to do such things, sympathy for his failures, and understanding after possibly identifying a reason for why everything happened as it did.

This story reminded me about how someone’s emotions can severely affect how someone performs actions, and I drew the conclusion that this was most likely from what the narrator’s father was suffering. The narrator notes, “‘I have handled thousands of eggs,’ father said. ‘€˜No one knows more about eggs than I do.'” This is a valid claim, as he spent his entire life working with chickens and eggs; however, his expertise in the field was severely impaired when he was trying too hard to what he was good at. I made a connection between this and the “golfer’s error” story that I’ve heard frequently before, which says that even professional golfers will make elementary mistakes if they overanalyze their swinging technique, and should instead rely on muscle memory.

Critical Analysis:

When thinking about the narrator’€™s father throughout the piece, I was able to make con­sis­tent connections between him and individuals with autistic intelligence about whom I have learned in the past. (Note that autistic intelligence is not the equivalent of having autism; possessing autistic intelligence does not mean someone has autism, and not all types of autism are characterized by strong levels of autistic intelligence.)

In the beginning of the story, the narrator’s father is illustrated as being satisfied as to how his life had turned out: “[He] himself went to bed, quite happy in his position in life. He had at that time no notion of trying to rise in the world.”€ This can be seen as the control or baseline situation, where he was able to decide what to do with his life, and stop when he felt he reached the edge of his comfort zone. Upon meeting his wife, this changed, as, “€œfor father and [the narrator] she was incurably ambitious,”€ which implies that she pushed them to achieve more with their lives. Those with autistic intelligence have a tendency to become uncomfortable when being pushed out of their comfort zones by an outside force; as a result, they show other peculiar and unique traits, which were also seen by the narrator’s father.

One of them is an extreme attention to details that may seem irrelevant or unimportant to most people. A common example used to describe this concept is to compare normal and autistic intelligence with flashlight use in a cave -€“ normal intelligence shines the light on the entire cave to get the big picture, while autistic intelligence shines the light on a single stalagmite to pick out all the details. The narrator’s father did a similar thing when he fo­cused excessively on grotesque chicks and preserved them in alcohol-filled jars.

Another defining characteristic of those with autistic intelligence is having difficulty em­pa­thizing and mirroring the emotions of others. When the narrator’s father was trying to impress Joe Kane with his egg tricks, he was so engulfed in his own emotions that he was not able to pick up on Kane’€™s attempts at disengaging from the conversation.

Keeping these connections in mind, it is likely that the author attempted to characterize the narrator’s father as someone with a relatively high level of autistic intelligence. He is some­one who a majority of people would perceive as strange and different, as said by his visitor: “Joe Kane decided that the man who confronted him was mildly insane but harmless.” However, those with autistic intelligence are still fully capable humans in their own ways, as demonstrated by the father’€™s ability to work like others, and receive comfort from his family.

To read more papers I wrote as homework for my classes, check out the “Academics / Homework” cat­e­go­ry index.

 

—§—

 

“As I Lay Dying” by William Faulkner

by   •   Academics, What I'm Reading
 

This post is over 13 years old and may contain information that is incorrect, outdated, or no longer relevant.
My views and opinions can change, and those that are expressed in this post may not necessarily reflect the ones I hold today.
 

This is once again another response paper that I wrote for my literature course this past week. The topic was on the setting of As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner. If you want more information about what response papers are supposed to be, check out last week’s blog post about The Awakening by Kate Chopin for a description.

Summary:

William Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying tells a story of the Bundren family’s journey from their home town to Jefferson, a distant village. This trip spurs into action upon the death of Addie Bundren, the mother of the family, as her last dying wish was to be buried in Jefferson near the rest of her relatives; she is placed in a coffin and carried to her destination via wagon. During the journey, we learn more about each member of the family and get a better sense of their relationships with their mother and each other. While traveling, the Bundrens face a series of obstacles, both related to the health of the coffin and to the needs of the family members. These unfortunate events include a flood that nearly washes Addie’s coffin and dead body away; the complete replacement of the team of mules due to a drowning; and a secret plot by one of Addie’s sons, Darl, to incinerate her body by lighting an entire barn on fire. Eventually, the family arrives at Jefferson and successfully buries Addie’s body. In the conclusion, we find that Darl has been tagged as insane, and Addie’s former husband, Anse, has already found a new wife.

Impressions:

Although this might not be one of the best books I’ve read, it will definitely be one of the most memorable because of the premise of the story – a family carrying their dead mother to a different location for burial is quite a distinct and original plotline for a novel. One thing that stuck out to me was the meaning and power of presence of Addie’s body. She states that throughout her life, she has found the love and intimate relationships between herself and her family members (husband and children) to be meaningless and empty. From her family’s perspective, she was probably seen more as a liability than as a loving wife and mother, and it seems like this continued on after she died, but to a greater extent. I also felt the sense that Addie’s dead body was powerful enough that it was as if she was still alive, but equally empty as before. She was able to create a scene multiple times, forcing people to risk their lives to save her, and emitting a stench that brought together crowds; there were also air holes drilled into her coffin, as if she needed to breathe.

Critical Analysis:

The literal setting of As I Lay Dying occurs on a trip to Jefferson, a village where Addie wishes to be buried, and where her husband Anse can finally acquire a set of false teeth for which he has been longing. However, the central point of the mental struggles and obstacles of the Bundren family seems to be the coffin, which is why I believe a secondary and more implicit setting of the book is within and in the environment surrounding the coffin.

The conflict of the book seems to begin when the coffin is being constructed and prepared. To begin, the coffin is built in front of Addie’s bedroom, which gives off the impression that her family is waiting for her to die, and is eager to see her fall. When she does finally pass away, she is not even placed in her coffin in the proper orientation, and she gets holes accidentally drilled through her head. These dysfunctional changes to the coffin seem to set off the dysfunctional events that are soon to affect the Bundren family.

The coffin then becomes a brooding ground for even more problems for the family. The first problem they encounter is almost having the coffin swept away by the flood waters. The near loss of the coffin signifies the near loss of the family – it’s as if the slipping away of the coffin resulted in the slipping away of the Bundrens mules, and if the coffin had not been saved, they would have lost more. Later in their journey, when Darl attempts to incinerate the coffin, it was as if he had identified the coffin as the source of their troubles and wanted to eliminate it. However, Jewel risks his life and saves the coffin, as he understands the simple destruction of the coffin would not bring all these problems to a proper resolution, and their troubles would not come full circle.

The burial of the coffin, as a result, represents the proper end to the Bundrens’ dysfunction, and a return back to the setting of normalcy before the construction of the coffin. Although questionable as to whether it is considered “back to normal” or not, Anse has fulfilled his wish of acquiring his false teeth and has found a new wife, so things seem to be going better, at least for him.

Works Cited:

Faulkner, William. As I Lay Dying. New York, NY: Jonathan Cape and Harrison Smith, 1930. Print.

If you want to take a look at last week’s paper, you can click on the “Academics / Homework” category to be taken to an index page of all blog posts that include papers I have written for homework.

 

—§—

 

“The Awakening” by Kate Chopin

by   •   Academics, What I'm Reading
 

This post is over 13 years old and may contain information that is incorrect, outdated, or no longer relevant.
My views and opinions can change, and those that are expressed in this post may not necessarily reflect the ones I hold today.
 

As I stated in a previous blog post, I’m going to start posting my homework from my summer classes like I used to for my regular classes from previous semesters. The only class for which I’m consistently writing papers and essays is my literature class. Unfortunately, the books that we need to read aren’t exactly that exciting, so the resulting homework most likely will not that exciting either, but it’s still more content that I can put up on my website.

This assignment is called a response paper – we write a summary of the book, our impressions on a particular aspect, and a critical analysis of the week’s topic. This week’s topic was theme, or the overarching idea that is present throughout the entire work.

Summary:

Kate Chopin’s The Awakening features Edna Pontellier as the main character, a Victorian woman who adventures through concepts forbidden to females and conflicting against ideals at the time – self-exploration, freedom, and independence. Edna has a husband and children for whom she must care, but instead, chooses to rebel against what society expects of her and pursues her own emotions and desires, a process referred to as “awakening.” Edna begins to ignore her family responsibilities and develops a relationship with Robert, a man with whom she falls in love; he gives her a feeling of liberation from the constraints placed upon her by the idea of her husband possessing her. As her awakening develops further, she begins to acknowledge her internal desires for creativity, and begins to satisfy her primal needs. Unfortunately, at the end of the book, Robert leaves her, as he respects societal ideals more than his relationship with Edna. Her feelings of solitude become so overwhelming that she eventually commits suicide.

Impressions:

I felt Chopin was able to take the concept of the lack of women’s freedom and portray it well into a fictional story that incorporated the many different consequences of the societal norm. Not only did she give an example of the ideal woman of the time through Adèle Ratignolle, she also created an understandable metaphor of what was the opposite extreme would look like by connecting the ocean to freedom and independence. The struggles Edna Pontellier faces throughout her awakening are realistic and believable; it is likely that many Victorian women who questioned societal ideals went through very similar thoughts as she did. The consequences of Edna’s actions are also not farfetched, and appear to be what one would expect from someone in the process of rebelling against the accepted norms of society.

Critical Analysis:

A primary theme of The Awakening is the solitude that comes along with the lifestyle of Victorian women, both those who comply with the ideals like Adèle Ratignolle, and those who go against ideals like Edna Pontellier.

Those who are in compliance with the idea that husbands possess their wives and their wives are responsible for tending to their family feel solitude because they are distant from their true selves. They are oppressed from expressing who they really are, and are told to fulfill their duties without tending to their own emotional desires. Failure to fulfill these urges keeps them distant from self-discovery, and they feel alone and separated from reality because they are unable to express themselves.

Those who rebel, like Edna, still feel solitude because they are rejected by the rest of society for pursuing what is considered taboo and unacceptable. Although she was able to feel a sense of accomplishment by achieving her own sense of self, she no longer had others to be with her along the way. Although she developed a strong relationship with Robert Lebrun, Robert was still in tune with the norms of society and did not want to establish a further relationship with Edna, even though the love was mutual. He continued to acknowledge that Edna belonged to her husband, and he was to not breach that relationship by interfering with Edna. His ultimate compliance was clearly demonstrated when he left Edna to her own at the end of the story, and Edna was left to achieve her own awakening by herself.

Works Cited:

Chopin, Kate. The Awakening. New York, NY: Bantam Classic, 1981. Print.

I finished this last week and my instructor already scored it as 50/50, so if you’re looking at this to actually learn something about The Awakening, the stuff I included is accurate and written well enough to meet my instructor’s standards.

 

—§—

 

Course Notes for PSYCH 560: Child Psychology

by   •   Academics
 

This post is over 14 years old and may contain information that is incorrect, outdated, or no longer relevant.
My views and opinions can change, and those that are expressed in this post may not necessarily reflect the ones I hold today.
 

Spring 2012, University of Wisconsin-Madison

Supplemental notes from the textbook are included in navy blue.

January 26, 2012

  • What is development?
    • A pattern of change
    • Conception → life span
    • Logical pattern
    • Greater complexity
    • Development always moves forward
    • Regression is change, but is not development
  • What are some of the things that are changing?
    • Biological processes (cannot control, determined by genetics – growth, size increase, puberty)
    • Cognitive processes (problem-solving, thinking)
    • Socioemotional processes (emotional, urge/impulse control, inhibitory responses)
  • Roles of nature vs. nurture
    • Both genetic and environmental factors work together to determine the likelihood of a child’s success; these factors interact and sometimes one can mitigate the other’s negativity
    • Nature: innate stuff
      • Rousseau (18th century): nativism. Everyone has the innate ability to be great.
    • Nurture: experience
      • Locke (17th century): empiricism. Child as tabula rasa, written on by experience
      • 20th century behaviorism
    • What counts as “nature”?
      1. Genetic factors: chromosomal abnormalities (e.g., Down Syndrome), eye color, temperament
      2. Maturational timetables: growing teeth, learning to walk, timing of language development
      3. Hormonal changes: menstruation (mostly), bird-song acquisition
      4. Reflexes: newborn humans and non-humans
      5. Instincts: spider’s web, imprinting, amazing species-specific talents (in ants, vector calculation)
    • What counts as “nurture”?
      1. Environmental factors: native language, effects of child abuse and neglect, nutrition, prenatal toxins, malnourishment, mercury (birth defects)
      2. Learning: conditioned responses, playing the piano, your mother’s voice. Learned behaviors: finding a seat in a lecture hall, stop talking when instructor is talking
      3. Effects of experience: food preferences, development of prejudice
    • How do we disentangle the interaction of nature and nurture?
      1. Interaction #1: Language
        • Nature: humans learn it, not our pets
        • Nurture: we learn languages in our environment
        • We come into the world with the ability to learn what is in the environment
      2. Interaction #2: Food Aversions
        • Conditioned response: nurture
        • Eat X, get sick, avoid X
        • Garcia experiment: “bright, noisy, tasty water.” Receive radiation to get sick. Next time, rats avoid the taste to avoid getting sick (because they are taste/smell hunters). Same with quails, but they avoid what looks similar (because they are visual hunters).
        • Nature: species-specific effects
      3. Interaction #3: Duckling Imprinting
        • Duck decoy moving around a track. Do ducks follow it?
        • Decoy must be moving
        • Timing is critical: critical period
        • Must occur within 9-24 hours of hatching
        • After 24 hours, it produces a fear/avoidance response
        • Shape preference: best stimulus is a real duck, then a sphere
        • Primary effects: attach to first moving thing seen during critical period
  • How do children shape their own development?
    • Infants observe things in their surroundings and get accustomed to familiar sights (like their mother’s face)
    • Children normally talk to themselves when alone; this shows an internal desire to learn language by practicing
    • By playing and doing different actions, the child learns about reactions and consequences
    • Children affect their own development more as they get older because they have more control over their choices and environment
  • Is change continuous or discontinuous
    • Stage theories are discontinuous (e.g., tadpole → frog) (qualitative differences)
    • Stages can be split up into stages of cognitive development / comprehension of the world, such as understanding conservation of volume and the concept behind how a TV works
    • Continuous theories (e.g., changes in weight and height) have a smoother pattern and are more measurable
    • Continuous theories can be looked at in a stage theory manner, and vice versa (ex. height vs. amount of growth)
  • Sociocultural context
    • A set of physical, social, cultural, economic, and historical factors in the environment
    • Influencers include parents, family members, daycare center, school, neighborhood, and institutions/organizations
    • Children facing negative sociocultural contexts can face disadvantages
  • Individual differences
    • Individual differences in children are caused by genetic differences, differences in treatment by parents and others (parents’ reactions to their children are different depending on the nature of the child), differences in reactions to similar experiences (children interpreting their parents’ reactions to their siblings), and different choices of environments (niches and fulfilling labels).
  • Competence vs. performance (knowing vs. doing)
  • Why study child development?
    • Help raise children by understanding them and being able to better determine how to react to their actions (ex: helping manage children’s anger).
    • Allow better allocation of resources to optimize benefits received by children, and improved social policies (ex: policy of child testimony, children are extremely receptive to pursuasion).
    • Understand human nature (ex: although children are affected by care in childhood, lack of care during infancy can harm them for the rset of their lives; timing of events is important).
  • Why should we care?
    • Scientific curiosity
    • Caregiving
    • Teaching
    • Reaching children at risk: mental illness, developmental disabilities, poverty
      • Studying children helps us identify defects early on and help tend to them while they are still young.
    • Madison school district (2010)
      • Elementary schools: 51% low income
      • Middle schools: 51% low income
      • High schools: 41% low income
    • Changing conceptions of childhood
      • Today: separate, critical phase
      • Very different, not just miniature adults
      • This is a recent phenomenon
      • Child development is a relatively new field
  • History of childhood
    • Early philosophical views of children’s development: classical philosophers were interested in children’s nature and nurture. Plato thought children were born with innate knowledge, while Aristotle thought they were born with a clean slate (tabula rasa).
    • Classical: military upbringing. If defected, left to die
    • Medieval: 10-year-olds hanged like adults, no juvenile justice
    • Reformation: children needed salvation
    • 17th, 18th century: renewed interest
      • Locke believed parents should strictly discipline children, while Rousseau believed children should be given immediate maximum freedom.
    • 18th century debates
      • Kids are inherently selfish and evil, requiring control. We must exert control to turn them good
      • Innately pure and good. They have been corrupted by society
      • Tabula rasa: malleable by society. We mold kids
    • Industrial age (19th century)
      • Social reform movements: research focused on child welfare
      • Children’s small size was useful for machinery work to make things unstuck. Children were then required to school
      • The first child labor laws prohibited children under 10 years of age from working
    • Charles Darwin
      • Theory of evolution inspired research in child development in order to gain insights into the nature of the human species
      • First “baby biographer”: emotions and language, similarities to other species
      • Darwin documented his son’s motor, sensory, and emotional day-to-day development
      • Instincts: unlearned behavioral patterns
      • Survival of the fittest
      • Selection: the best survive, and the weak/unneeded are removed. In terms of the brain, areas dedicated to processing sight is not needed for a blind person, so those areas are instead used to process other sensory information (such as sound). Also applies to useful/unhelpful behavior
    • 19th, 20th century
      • Child development emerges as a field of study
      • Freud and Watson were some of the first child development researchers, and they tried to discover what drove a child’s development

January 31, 2012: Research Methods in Developmental Psychology

  • How do we study developmental processes?
  • What do you want to know?
    • Research question
    • Is your question testable? Does it have any ethical issues (will someone get damaged, ex. child abuse → emotional development)?
    • Which method is best (for answering your question)?
    • Design your study
      • Can other factors explain my results (confounds, contaminants)?
      • Example: Are changes in reading scores caused by amount of TV watched or parents?
  • Challenges
    • How will I get my data? What’s the best method? (Hard with kids! Unpredictable, less knowledgeable.)
    • What’s the best research design? (Hard to study change! Difficult to identify the “ah-ha!” moment.)
  • Acquiring data
    1. Naturalistic observation
      • Observe child in natural environment (home, school)
      • Do not intervene/interfere
      • Illuminates ecology of a child’s life
      • Naturalistic study example: Bell & Ainsworth (1972). Mother’s responses to young infants’ crying → more or less crying later? Best place to do this is at the mother/infant’s home. Results: more response = less crying.
      • Strengths: good for questions about natural interactions, generalizable (children are not put into lab settings, so it better reflects what happens in real life)
      • Weaknesses: objectivity (define “mother’s rseponse” – pick up? talk?), bias (external factors, ex. bad phone call affecting mother’s mood), use second observer for reliability
      • Reactivity: observation (being observed) affects people (hyperawareness)
      • Lack of control (no manipulation or directing subjects’ behavior)
      • Example: naturalistic observation of a family eating dinner revealed that aggression occurs in a positive feedback loop – the child disobeys, the parents yell, and the child gets more frustrated.
    2. Interview method
      • Systematic interview (Piaget)
      • One at a time
      • Strength: measure individual differences
      • Weaknesses: bias (follow-up questions). Remedy: standardized, structured interview (participants answer the same questions)
      • Clinical interview: allows someone to acquire in-depth information about a child by asking relevant follow-up questions
      • Weakness: those being interviewed may recall past information incorrectly
    3. Structured observation
      • Researchers set up specific scenarios and observe children reacting in the artificial environment
      • Strengths: all subjects encounter the same situation and external variables can be better controlled
      • Weaknesses: things that take place in the laboratory do not necessarily reflect what will happen in real life

February 02, 2012

  • Experimental methods
    • Independent variable (IV): Manipulated by experimenter
    • Dependent variable (DV): Behavior measured by experimenter
    • Hold other factors constant
  • “Mean Monkey”
    • Research question: When does the child believe that others can have different thoughts than they do?
    • IV (manipulated by experimenter): child’s age. Hold other factors constant
    • DV (response): sticker shown to Mean Monkey. Do they lie?
    • Good design?
      • Did the child forget the instructions / the description of what the monkey will do?
      • Who were they responding to, the woman or the monkey?
      • Her instructions were constant throughout trials
  • Assigning kids to experimental conditions
    • Random assignment
      • IV random = ideal!
    • Non-random assignment
      • IV fixed
      • e.g., autism vs. Down Syndrome
      • e.g., older vs. younger
      • In the mean money experiment, age was fixed
    • Strengths:
      • Allows causal conclusions
      • Allows tests of specific hypotheses
    • Weakness:
      • Lab situations are artificial
      • Just because you don’t deceive Mean Monkey doesn’t mean you won’t deceive other people in other situations
  1. Correlations
    • Used to predict one variable after knowing another variable that is correlated with the variable in question
    • Positive correlation: high values are associated with high values. Negative correlation: high values are associated with low values. The strength of the correlation is determined by the correlation coefficient.
    • Galton (1900s): family resemblance
    • Question: is height genetic?
    • Method: Heights of many dads and adult sons
    • There is a positive correlation
    • Did the father’s height cause the son’s height?
    • Other factors: mom’s height, child’s nutrition, father’s nutrition
    • There are lots of things that can cause this relationship
    • Famous correlation/causation tales
      • Kid shoe size correlated with reading skills
        • Does shoe size cause reading skills?
        • What is the latent variable? Age.
  2. Longitudinal design
    • Same subjects at different ages over time
  3. Cross-sectional design
    • Compare different subjects at different ages
    • Example: measure the effect of 9/11 on children. Take a group of pre-schoolers, kindergarteners, elementary schoolers, middle schoolers, and high schoolers. Is there a different impact of 9/11 depending on the child’s age?
    • Example: interest in science increases for males but not for females. We can use a cross-sectional design to see where the difference occurs
    • Strengths and weaknesses
      • Best capturing change and stability: longitudinal
      • Most practical? Cross-sectional (less attrition and cost)
      • Longitudinal is costly and it is easy to lose people over time
      • Problem: repetition can affect DVs
  4. Microgenetic design
    • Study children during critical periods about changes as they are happening
    • Example: when children are nearing the age at which they discover the counting-on additon method, they are exposed to lots of addition problems so the moment when they understand the counting-on method can be captured
  5. Ethical issues in child-development research
    • No physical/psychological harm
    • Informed consent
    • Anonymous
    • Counteract any negative consequences
    • Debrief with child and parents/guardians

February 02, 2012 (cont.): Prenatal development

  • Genetic Foundations and Genetic Diversity
    • Dup. of Genes/Chromosomes
      • Meiosis (pre): Genetic diversity
      • Mitosis (post): Each chromosome in a cell’s nucleus duplicates itself and divides
    • Fertilization: fusion of egg and sperm (conception)
      • Zygote: the single cell formed through fertilization
      • Growth of the zygote: mitosis (cell copy/division)
  • Developmental process
    • At the cellular level:
      • Division
      • Migration: Cells start to move away from their origin
      • Differentiation: As cells start moving, they become different from each other (why stem cell research is important)
      • Apoptosis: cell death, facilitates prenatal development, necessary to get rid of extra cells that we don’t need
  • Prenatal development
    • Germinal period (conception-implantation)
    • Embryonic period (2-8 weeks)
      • Neural tube – week 4
        • One end will swell and become the brain, while the remainder becomes the spinal cord
      • Placenta, umbilical cord (connection to belly button) and amniotic sac (filled with fluid)
        • Placenta is selectively permeable, protects the baby from wastes, and prevents the baby’s and mother’s blood from mixing
      • Three distinctive layers
        1. Ectoderm (central nervous system, skin, teeth)
        2. Mesoderm (organs, circulatory system)
        3. Endoderm (digestive tract, glands)
      • Organogenisis (see development of organs in the body)
    • Cephalocaudal development
      • Four weeks
      • Top-down
      • Head is huge while the bottom of the body is small
      • Areas nearer the head develop earlier than those farther away
    • Proximodistal development
      • Inside-out
      • Internal organs are developing at a much higher rate
    • Fetal period (9 weeks until birth)
      • Circadian rhythms become apparent, with less activity in the early morning and more during the evening
      • Fetuses are able to move around and touch things, distinguish between tastes and prefer sweet amniotic fluid, smell amniotic fluid, and hear things that are going on in the outside environment
      • At 20 weeks, they are moving to a head-down position to prepare for birth

February 07, 2012: Fetal Learning

  • Salk (1973): Heartbeat study with newborns – placed headphones on babies
    • Fetuses hear their mothers’ heartbeats all the time, and they become familiar with the sound
    • Experiment
      • Group 1: Heard normal maternal heartbeat
      • Group 2: Heard fast heartbeat
      • Group 3: Control group
    • Results
      • Group 2 (fast and abnormal heartbeat): very upset, terminated study due to ethical considerations
      • Group 1: normal weight gain increases and normal growth, cried less than control group
      • Being exposed to something familiar caused the babies to thrive better than babies who heard nothing
    • Implications
      • Crying babies can be subdued faster if the baby is held over the mother’s left shoulder because they are closer to the heart
  • DeCasper and Spence (1986)
    • Pregnant moms read The Cat in the Hat two times a day for six weeks
    • After birth, tested babies using sucking rate
    • Changes in sucking rate turned on the familiar story or a novel story
      • If infants suck faster, they get to hear The Cat in the Hat; if they suck slower, they hear a new story
    • Results: infants sucked faster to hear the familiar story
  • Conclusion
    • Recognize rhymes and stories presented before birth
    • Prefer smells, tastes, and sound patterns that are familiar because of prenatal exposure
    • More on fetal learning with language development …
    • To identify if something is familiar to a baby, we look for a deceleration in heart rate (in adults, we look for an acceleration)
    • Habituation, or a reduced response to something familiar, shows that things are remembered

Feb. 07, 2012 (cont.): Intro to the Biological Foundations of Development (Guest Lecture)

Genetics/Epigenetics

  • Genes: sections of chromosomes (basic unit of heredity)
  • Genome: complete set of genes for a species (human genome sequencing completed in 2003, humans have 23 pairs of chromosomes)
  • Genotype: actual genetic makeup
  • Phenotype: Observed traits
  • Fundamental relationships
    • Parents’ genetic contribution to the child’s genotype: transmission of genetic material from parent to offspring
    • Contribution of the child’s genotype to his/her own phenotype: not every gene is expressed
    • Contribution of the child’s environment to his/her phenotype: genotypes develop differently in different environments
    • Influence of the child’s phenotype on his/her environment: children evoke certain kinds of responses and actively select their surroundings
  • Mutations (slight changes or errors while copying) add additional variance to genome
  • Regulator genes turn genes on or off
    • Example of gene regulation: work in mice indicate that early experience can cause genes to turn on or off
    • Specifically, maternal care can change certain gene transcription factors, which are important for stress reactivity
  • Genetic abnormalities
    • A number of disorders have very clear genetic influences:
      • Dominant-recessive patterns: PKU
      • Chromosomal anomalies: Down Syndrome (Trisomy-21)
      • Sex-lined disorders: Fragile-X
  • Sex Chromosomes
    • Sex is determined by presence of X or Y chromosome (Males = XY, Females = XX)
    • There are a number of disorders that are sex-linked, meaning they are carried on the 23rd chromosome (i.e., Fragile-X, color blindness)
    • Tends to affect males more than females
  • The Simpsons video example
    • There appears to be a genetic contribution to cognitive difficulties in the Simpson family
    • This genetic contribution is likely caused by regulatory genes that begin to turn on after the first/second grade
    • Homer and Bart show the phenotype; however, lucky for Lisa, it is a sex-linked genetic disorder (it only affects males)
  • Behavioral Genetics Research
    • Many researchers have focused on how variation in behavior results from the interaction of genetic and environmental factors
    • Common strategies to understand this variation has been to compare (1) closely related individuals to less closely related people (e.g., twin studies comparing MZ and DZ twins); & (2) individuals who share the same environment (i.e., adoption studies)
  • When you compare closely vs. not closely related people, you can get a measure of “heritability” of a trait
    • Heritability: “Statistical estimate of the variance on a trait among individuals that is attributed to genetic differences among those individuals”
    • Important to note: few behaviors or mental illness have incredibly high heritability scores (i.e., schizophrenia)
  • Example of Behavioral Genetics Research
    • Some investigators have been interested in the genetic contribution of IQ (and this is an example of a behavior genetics study)
    • Correlations are higher for MZ twins (r = 0.86) v. DZ twins (r = 0.60) v. siblings (r = 0.47) reared together
    • Since MZ twins are more genetic similar and have their IQs are more correlated, many have argued that there must be a genetic basis to IQ

Basics of the Brain

  • The brain is made of two types of tissue
    • Gray matter: unmyelinated neurons (“what fires”)
    • White matter: myelinated neurons (“the wires”)
  • The brain has four major lobes
    • Occipital lobe
      • Located in the posterior of the brain
      • Contains the primary and supplementary visual corticies
    • Parietal lobe
      • Involved with sensation and perception
      • Sensory information is processed and integrated here, then moves on
      • Damage to this region often results in left-right conrfusion
    • Temporal lobe
      • Contains structures important for memory and emotion (what is called “the limbic system”)
      • Important for auditory processing (contains the primary auditory cortext
    • Frontal lobe
      • The brain’s “central executive”
      • Involved in organizing behavior, problem solving, judgment, impulse control, personality, etc.
  • The brain is divided into two hemispheres
    • The brain is divided into two separate halves called hemispheres
    • Each hemisphere is (kind of) specialized for processing different information
    • Language processing and production is localized almost entirely in the left hemisphere
    • The right hemisphere is more specialized at spatial processing
    • But both sides still work together to complete tasks
    • The hemispheres communicate through a dense bundle of white matter fibers, called the corpus callosum

Brain Development

  • Brain changes across development
    • By age 5, the brain is approximately 90% of its adult size
    • The change that occurs in later development are more subtle in nature (rather than amount gross changes in size or shape)
  • What changes?
    • Changes will occur mainly in the properties of neurons and the amount of myelin
    • In infancy and childhood, neurons tend to grow; the numbers of synapses and the amount of dendritic branching increases greatly
    • More brain tissue = more behavioral flexibility
    • During adolescence, these brain components tend to get “refined”
    • Unused and unneeded parts of neurons are eliminated during adolescence – this process is called “pruning”
    • Most people tend to think these changes are driven by experience (“use it or lose it”)
  • Brain changes across development
    • The amount of white matter (or myelin) increases across development
    • This facilitates greater connectivity between various brain regions
    • Corpus callosum (white matter bundle between hemispheres) develops massively between 7 and 10
    • Alterations in myelin have been implicated in ADHD
  • Plastic Brains
    • Even though some brain regions specialize to process certain information (i.e., language in the left hemisphere), the brain is still capable of massive reorganization
    • This plasticity appears to decrease as development progresses

February 09 & 14, 2012: Physical Development / Motor Development

  • General Trajectories
    • Cephalo-Caudal Development: top-down
    • Proximal-Distal Development: inside-out (able to move their torsos before their fingers)
  • Reflex (e.g. cough, sneeze, blink, yawn, gag)
  • Neonatal (primitive) reflexes
    • Transient (they don’t stick around) set of reflexes
    • We see them early in infancy, then they go away
    • Medulla and midbrain
  • Biological History
    • Gesell & Thompson (1934, 1938)
      • 500+ children
      • Measured changes in posture, balance, reach, locomotion based on their ages
      • Biological development influenced motor development
      • Same sequence of milestones cross-culturally (they accomplish things in order regardless of where they live)
    • Myrtle McGraw (1930s)
      • Johnny and Jimmy (monozygotic twins, share 100% of their genes)
      • Can we introduce activities to babies to improve motor development skills?
      • ID swimming reflex – babies as young as six months can learn to swim because they make swimming motions when put in water
      • Babies on skates
      • Focus on interaction between biology and experience
  • Experiential hypothesis
    • Lack of experience = motor delay
    • Children adopted from E. European orphanages
    • 5-year-olds: poor standing, balance (even after 3-4 years in USA)
    • Children in urban China: about 3.3-month delay in onset of locomotion
  • Self-generated experience
    • If you give a child an opportunity to explore different forms of movement, they begin to discover cause-and-effect relationships
  • Enhancement in motor development
    • Some cultures encourage motor development
      • Mothers in Mali:
      • They believe that babies are well developed with their “pulling in” muscles because of their position in their mother’s uterus, so they focus on enhancing their “pulling out” muscles by stretching them out
      • Babies skip the crawling stage and go straight to walking at about nine months of age, about three months earlier than US babies
      • We culturally think crawling is a necessary prerequisite to walking, but that is not true
  • Reflexes becoming coordinated movements – Esther Thelen: developmental change in the “stepping reflex”
    • Why does the stepping reflex go away?
    • Walking at about 1 year
    • Some possibilities:
      • Developmental anomaly: no later relationship to walking
      • An early phase in motor development (precursor), elaborated gradually
      • Hidden?
    • Competence vs. performance issue? Are they not able to do it, or is something stopping them from doing it?
    • Studied motion of the four major muscle groups of the leg to analyze the stepping reflex and ppontaneous (voluntary) kicking while laying down
    • The leg movements in both were identical
    • So “stepping reflex” is part of a general pattern of motor activity
    • Why does the “reflex” go away, but spontaneous kicking does not? Kicking increases as reflexive stepping decreases
    • Hypothesis: relationship between the mass of the infants’ legs and the disappearance of the reflex
    • Two tests: plunge legs in water, attach weights to infants’ legs
    • Competence vs. performance
      • Babies who did not show the stepping reflex showed the reflex again when their legs were put under water
      • Babies who showed the stepping reflex did not show the reflex when weights were attached to their legs
      • There is something about the mass of their legs that is stopping them from displaying the stepping reflex
    • 7-month-olds supported on treadmill: when stationary, 50% movements alternate; when moving, 85%. The treadmill helps movement.
  • Milestones in motor development
    • Newly acquired skills fundamental to skilled performance and the acquisition of each skill is a landmark in the individual’s motor development:
      • Postural changes
      • Reach and grasp
      • Locomotion
  • Types of motor skills
    • Gross motor skills
      • Head, body, legs, arms, and large muscles
      • Self-locomotion
      • As age increases, muscles increase and physical coordination increases. Example: can throw a ball without losing balance (video clip)
    • Fine motor skills
      • Small body movements
      • First: reaching and grasping
      • Move to using the thumb and index fingers, “pincer” grasp (6-12 months)
      • Develop skills for painting, holding crayons, writing, manipulating buttons, zippers, etc.
  • Does change in motor ability affect other aspects of development? Studies of Children with Different Early Experiences
    • Joseph Campos: examined the effect of self-locomotion on social, cognitive, and attentional development
    • Groups: pre-locomotor (could not move), self-locomotor infants (crawl), walker-experienced infants
    • Groups later changed to pre-locomotor (could not move) and locomotor (able to move)
    • Controlled for age (all babies were the same age)
    • Tested on a variety of cognitive, affective, and attention tasks
    • Results: locomotion caused…
      • Increased expression of anger in infant: expressed more anger
      • Increased sensitivity to primary caregiver’s departure: cried more
      • Intense forms of affection: more intense hugging, kissing, and holding
      • Increased attention to people/objects outside of reach
      • Increased checking back in previously prohibited contexts: they look back more to places that are off-limits
      • Increased engagement in interactive play
    • Self-locomotion gives people a sense of control over their lives and their environment

February 16, 2012: Sensation and Perception

  • Sensation
    • Processing of basic information from the sense
  • Perception
    • Interpretation of sensations
    • Gives order and meaning
  • William James: “blooming, buzzing, confusion”
  • Gibson’s Theory of Perceptual Development
    • Active Perceivers
      • We have a natural motivation and curiosity to explore and learn by goals
    • Stresses Affordances
      • What we do with things
      • Motor skills lead to discovery of new affordances
  • Perceptual Development
    • Auditory Perception
      • Well-developed at birth, but not fully developed until elementary school
      • Prefer familiar sounds (usually their mother’s voice)
      • Infants prefer child-directed speech
  • How do we know what babies see? Methods
    • Habituation (boring them)
      • Sucking
      • Looking
    • Preferential responses
      • Looking
      • Listening. Example: Cat in the Hat reading
    • Psychophysiology
      • Heart rate
      • EEG & ERP
  • Newborn visual system
    • Acuity: Sharpness of vision
      • Very low at birth
      • But quickly developing
      • By 8 months, 20/30
      • Test acuity using preferential looking: babies look at high-contrast circles rather than the ultra-contrast circle because all they see is gray
    • What do babies look at?
      • Newborns focus on one point
      • Sticky perception: trouble disengaging
      • As motor control improves, eyes move together (around 3-4 months) and they transition into a smooth pursuit of moving objects
    • Color vision
      • 1 month: high contrast
      • 2-3 months: color vision similar to adults
    • Faces: focus on contrast
      • 1 month scan outermost parts of face
      • 2 months: increased scanning, internal features
    • Newborns prefer mom’s face: preferential looking
      • But not if mom wears a scarf – it is taking away contrast
      • Langlois: young infants prefer attractive faces
  • What counts as an object?
    • Kellman & Spelke (1983): 4-month (p. 177-178)
    • Habituation (extended exposure) stimuli: rod partially hidden by a block, moving (rod moving behind the block) or still (motionless rod behind the block)
    • Test stimuli: whole rod, broken rod (dishabituation phase)
    • Results
      • Habituated to moving rod: prefer broken rod (if this thing was broken, why is it moving together?)
      • Habituated to still rod: no preference
      • Moving together = one object
  • Depth perception
    • 3 to 4 weeks: blink to looming objects
    • Maturational? Preterm infants blink to looming objects later
    • Testing depth perception: the visual cliff (Gibson & Walk)
      • 6-14 months won’t cross deep side – they are perceiving the depth and responding accordingly
      • 1.5 months detect depth, but unafraid (heart-rate deceleration)
      • Experience dependent?
      • Animals that walk after birth avoid deep end at one day
      • Experience in walker = increased wariness
      • Experience with clear objects: cross (babies participating in another experiment with glass would cross)
  • Visual/motor matching
    • Pacifier study: Meltzoff
      • 2 pacifiers: 1 smooth, 1 knobby
      • 0-1 month habituated to the sucking
      • Then conducted visual preference test
    • Looked longer at photo of the familiar pacifier
    • Confound: prior experience? Control: breast-fed infants.
    • Link between vision and motor system
    • Spelke: 4 month saw 2 films, on 2 screens
      • Bouncing kangaroo, bouncing donkey at different speed, played soundtrack from one or the other
      • Infants preferred matching film
    • More auditory/visual matching: emotions: 7 month match happy and sad voices with the right face

February 23, 2012: What Drives Cognitive Development?

  • What does a 1- or 2-year-old know about a ball?
    • It’s a distinct object, it’s round, it bounces when it hits a surface
  • Who is Jean Piaget?
    • Forefather of Stage Theory of Cognitive Development
    • Earned a PhD in biological sciences
    • Originally worked with mollusks
    • Worked with children to identify problem-solving skills, and noticed that there were consistent errors in reasoning across ages
    • Piaget had a child, and started researching children, starting with his own child
  • Can you be in Madison, Wisconsin, and the United States at the same time?
    • Yes – Wisconsin contains Madison and the United States contains Wisconsin
    • A child in Stockholm would probably answer No because they do not understand the geography of the United States
    • As adults, the things we think are simple are not necessarily different for children
    • We think qualitatively differently during different stages of life (discontinuous)
  • Influences on Development
    • Biological maturation
      • Determined by genetic make-up
      • We must ensure children are biologically maturing in a safe and healthy place
    • Social experiences
      • We learn from social interactions
      • Example: we watch what others are doing and imitate them
    • Activity
      • Children are not passive; from an early age, children act on their environment
      • Example: babies know by experience that if they want someone to come, they cry
  • Axioms of Piaget’s Theory
    • Organize what we know into coherent systems (schema)
      • Physical action: what do I to grab this pen?
      • Example: in McDonalds, you can drive through and get food, but in Chipotle, you walk in and order (fast food schema vs. restaurant schema)
    • Development is an adaptation to reality
    • Adapt through scientific problem solving
    • Active construction of reality
      • When new information comes into our world, we decide how it fits in to our reality
    • Cognitive development is organismic
      • We morph into more cognitively-developed people
  • Mechanisms of Development
    • Thinking progresses by our ability to organize info and adapt new info into our existing schemes
      • What happens to new information?
        • Assimilation: fitting new information into current schemes
        • Accommodation: when new info comes in, altering our existing schemes of creating new ones
    • Mentally, we strive for cognitive equilibration
      • Disequlibration is the mental state of needing to figure out what to do (ex. being exposed to a different kind of restaurant)
  • Final thoughts
    • The process of cognitive development is like a pendulum
    • We are in a constant state of taking in new information and adapting that information into our cognitive systems

February 28, 2012 & March 01, 2012

March 06, 2012: Sociocultural Approaches to Cognitive Development

  • Focus on the contribution of other people/culture to development
  • Emphasizes:
    • Intersubjectivity: mutual understanding and interaction as a way of learning
      • Joint attention: reference something at which we want a child to look (“look, a puppy!”)
      • Social referencing: we look to others to help us understand how we behave in a particular situation
    • Scaffolding: support others in their learning
  • Lev Vygotsky
    • 1896-1934
    • Russian psychologist
    • 1924-1934: worked at the Institute of Psychology in Moscow
    • Forefather of Sociocultural Theories of Cognitive Development
  • Cultural Tools
    • Tools created and passed down by members of a cultural group
    • Technical tools: tools for acting on the environment (hammers, pencils, computers)
    • Psychological tools: tools for thinking (numbers, language, symbols)
    • Include both artifacts and symbolic systems
    • Other examples: Linnaean classification system, Dewey Decimal system, abacus, calculus, maps, rosary beads, spreadsheet software (Excel), Powerpoint, Facebook
  • Vygotsky’s Connection between Language and Thought
    • Language is the most important tool!
      • Social speech (conversation)
        • “How are you today?”
      • Private/egocentric speech: in order for you to learn something, you need to say it out loud; verbalize thought actions as a way of mastery
        • Example: bunny song that explains how to tie your shoes
      • Inner speech (verbal thought): thinking in your head
        • Example: when thinking of the 17th letter of the alphabet, most people say the alphabet in their head and not outloud
    • Application: Meichenbaum’s Cognitive behavior Modification
      • “I can’t” -> “it may be difficult, but I can”
      • New self-statements guide new behaviors
      • Saying things out loud facilitates behavior
    • The Zone of Proximal Development
      • Comfort zone: learned tasks
      • ZPD: distance between independent performance and level of assisted performance
      • Panic zone: unlearned tasks not yet within learner’s ability and cultural tools for learning
  • Sociocultural Theory
    • Scaffolding: adults create supported situations in which children can extend current skills and knowledge to a higher level of competence
      • Adults are erecting learning supports for children
    • Scaffolding process
      • Recruitment: set up a situation where the child wants to engage in the act
      • Demonstrating solutions: don’t just tell people what the end result is, you show them how to do it
      • Simplify the task
      • Maintaining participation: keep the child engaged
      • Providing feedback: how is the child doing?
      • Controlling frustration: if the child is in the panic zone and they’re getting too frustrated, they’re just going to give up

March 13, 2012: How do kids learn word meanings? (Guest lecture)

  • Map words onto the world
    • The Gavagai Problem (Quine, 1960)
      • If a man points at a rabbit and says “gavagai,” is he saying “rabbit,” “hopping,” “dinner,” or something else?
      • Each word has infinite possible meanings
      • How do kids find the right meaning?
      • Constraints on word meanings: kids are more likely to choose some meanings over others
      • Whole object constraint: children assume a label to refer to the object as a whole, and not specifically to any of its parts
      • However, we also need to label parts of objects
    • Mutual exclusivity constraint: each object has only one label
      • When does the mutual exclusivity constraint emerge?
      • Experiment where there was one familiar object and one novel object, then used preferential looking paradigm to see which item at which the baby looked
      • 14 months had familiarity preference (always looked at interesting object), 16 months looked around randomly, 18 months used mutual exclusivity (always looked at novel object when they heard an unfamiliar word)
      • Do babies who hear multiple languages develop mutual exclusivity at the same age? Monoliguals showed M.E., bilinguals had marginal M.E. use, trilinguals showed no M.E. use – all trilinguals had a different developmental trajectory
    • Fast mapping
      • Map novel word to novel item
      • Experimenters said, “could you bring me the ‘chromium’ tray, not the red one?”
      • Children were able to identify which tray was “chromium,” and remembered the meaning one week later
    • Cross-Situational Statistics
      • Keep track of what words occur with what objects across different situations
      • Alternative way to map words to world
      • If you hear ball and bat together, and ball and dog together, children will notice that in both instances, there was a round object present, and correspond it with the word ball
      • Can infants track statistics about word-world mapping across time?
      • Both age groups (12 and 14 months) showed evidence of having learned the words at test (preferential looking paradigm)
    • What can parents do to help? Joint attention and other pragmatic cues
      • Children watch adults’ reactions to words to find out what words mean
      • When a psychologist was looking for “gasser” and looked happy after finding an object, the children picked up that it was the object
  • Generalize to new situations
    • Meaning errors
      • Overextension: use a word too broadly (e.g., “doggie” = 4-legged creatures)
      • Underextension: word too specific (e.g., “doggie” = only their dog at home and not any other dogs
    • Shape Bias
      • Do young children use shape to generalize?
      • Taught a novel word; test in yes/no categorization task to see how they would extend the word
      • 2- and 3-year-olds extended to different size and texture, but did not extend to different shape
      • If “dax” was a U-shaped, blue, wooden object, children wouldn’t call something that doesn’t look like a U a “dax”
      • Is the shape bias learned?
      • Training conditions: shape categories, color/texture categories, no names (control group, not taught any new words)
      • Shape category condition: generalized based on shape when tested with a new novel word, bigger increase in object name vocabulary
      • Can learn the shape bias – learning how to learn
  • Use grammatical cues
    • Grammar
      • Morphology: combining morphemes (smallest units of meaning) (ex: walk, walk-ed, walk-ing, walk-s; help, help-ed, help-ing, help-s)
      • Syntax: combing words (ex: “dog bites man” vs. “man bites dog” – the words are the same, but the order is different, so they have different meanings
    • Brown (1957)
      • 3-year-olds heard the word “sib,” and were tested on how they interpreted it – “sibbing,” “a sib,” “some sib”
      • They were able to find out what “sib” meant based off the grammatical cues of “ing,” “a,” and “some”
    • How do kids learn verbs?
      • Map from world to word?
      • Problems: hear verb without action, many verbs fit any action (chase vs. flee)
      • Syntactic bootstrapping: use syntax to determine a verb’s meaning
      • Naigles (1990): 2-year-olds heard either “the duck is gorping the bunny” or “the duck and the bunny are gorping” and looked longer at the matching video
      • Children use syntax to learn verb meaning
    • Morphology
      • Morphemes: smallest units of meaning
      • Rules, e.g., add –ed to make the past tense in regular forms, but there are lots of irregular exceptions (went, came, saw, was, ate…)
      • Hard for second-language learners
      • What about kids?
      • Can kids apply morphology to new words?
      • Preschoolers pass! Early awareness and use of morphology
      • Can’t be due to imitation (they haven’t heard the nonsense word “wug” before)
      • Similar results for verb morphology
      • Errors in morphology: use of regular forms for irregulars (“we wented swimming yesterday”)
      • Evidence against imitation, because they don’t hear adults saying “wented” a lot – shows knowledge of rule
    • Correction?
      • The child wasn’t able to pick up on what the mother was trying to correct (ex: “nobody don’t like me,” correct to “nobody likes me,” becomes “nobody don’t likes me”)
      • Pre-emption: when you expect the regular form, but you hear an irregular form
      • Kids go through a phase where they get it right, then start adding “-ed” to everything, then start using correct forms

March 15, 2012: Genie Video

  • Genie was kept inside a room with a bed and a potty training device
  • Genie showed inhuman characteristics
  • She was not very vocal, and it was likely that she was beaten for making noise so she had adapted to be silent
  • Solitary confinement is considered one of the worst punishments and people start feeling the effects in short periods of time
  • At birth, Genie’s father determined that she was retarded, and he kept her isolated for that reason
  • She demonstrated a capacity to make attachments when she showed sadness that someone was leaving
  • Genie showed progress, which gave doctors hope that she might fully recover
  • Genie was somewhat of a repeat of Victor, the wild child
  • We are born for an ability to learn language; however, if a first language isn’t learned by puberty, one could end up not being learned
  • Genie showed an internal desire to learn language; she became frustrated when someone was unable to provide her with a relevant new word
  • There have been reports of hoarding liquids in cases where children were raised in extreme isolation
  • Butler wanted to treat Genie herself, citing the reason that she didn’t want Genie to be treated like a scientific experiment
  • Genie was disconnected with some bodily senses, such as temperature perception; her bath water would be cold
  • She was able to remember what her childhood was like; she was able to use words to describe events that happened before she learned language
  • Genie was not mentally deficient; her mental age increased by one year per year after she was found
  • The project was stopped because it was seen as a failure to collect data in a scientific manner
  • Genie wasn’t able to form sentences, but instead, would randomly string relevant words together
  • Genie’s mother filed a lawsuit for extreme and excessive testing; she claimed researchers put testing at a higher priority than treating Genie

Chapter 6: Development of Language and Symbol Use

  • Introduction
    • Symbols are for representing and communicating our thoughts, feelings, and knowledge
    • Language consists of comprehension and production; comprehension occurs before productions
    • Generativity: we can combine the components of our language to form bigger concepts/ideas infinitely
  • Components
    • Phoenemes (sounds) → morphemes (unit of meaning) → syntax (usage rules) → pragmatics (how it’s used) → metalinguistics (what language is)
  • Requirements
    • It appears as if only humans have the brain capability to learn language of such an advanced level
    • Other primmates were taught sign language and were able to communicate with humans, but this wasn’t considered to be language bedcause the utterances had no syntax
    • The left hemisphere of the brain is associated with language; damage to this area usually results in speech impairment
    • Language must be learned during its critical period, or else its development will be difficult and less successful
    • Generally, the earlier someone learns a language, the better they are at it
    • Infants learning a language must be exposed to an environment where they hear the language
    • Infant-directed has exaggerated emotions, intonation, pauses, and expressions; it is common in many languages, but not universeal
  • Process of Language Acquisition
    • Perception
      • Early learning is done through prosody, or the audible characteristics of language (rhythm, tempo, etc.)
      • Babies are able to make distinctions among sounds based on voice onset time, or the time between when air passes through the lips and the vocal cords start vibrating
      • As babies become older, they lose their ability to distinguish between novel differences in sounds of unfamiliar languages; instead, they specialize to their own language
    • Preparing for Production
      • At first, babies are only able to make noises like crying, sneezing, coughing, and burping, but soon begin to make elongated vowel sounds and bable
      • Babies show an intent to communicate with others by taking turns, joint attention (following what an adult is looking at, or getting them to follow you)
    • First Words
      • Infants recognize words before comprehending them
      • Words are simplified and rearranged to make them easier to say
      • Holophrastic period: phrases expressed with single words
      • Overextension: using a word for a broader context than appropriate
      • Vocabulary explosion made possible by help/clarification from parents and using their own logical methods, such as fast mapping, whole-object assumption, mutual exclusivity, pragmatic cues, linguistic context (syntax)
    • Putting Words Together
      • Telegraphic speech: two-word utterances
      • Overregularization: treating irregular words as if they were regular – shows the child knows the grammar rules
      • Asking questions is done by adding who/what/when/where/why/how in front of a statement
    • Conversational Skills
      • Private speech is used to organize thoughts, and is eventually internalized
      • Collective monologues: children are not responding to each other, but just saying what they want to say
      • Narratives (stories of past) produced by 5-year-olds
    • Later Development
      • Analyze language, understand multiple meanings of words, expand vocabulary
  • Theoretical Issues in Language Development
    • Nativist: language is too complicated to be just nurture; there is an innate, nature component to it
    • Interactionist: language development is influenced entirely by communication
    • Connectionist: simultaneous activity of numerous, interconnected processing units
  • Nonlinguistic Symbols and Development
    • Using Symbols as Information
      • Dual representation: a model representing something real
      • 2.5-year-old children fail scale model task because they can’t see that the dollhouse symbolizes the real room
      • Shrinking machine: 2.5-year-olds think the model is the room
    • Drawing
      • Young children’s scribbes actually have significant and meaningful components to them

March 20, 2012: Emotional Development

  • Emotions
    • Physiological reactions
    • Require cognition
    • Communicate internal states to others
    • Move us to action
  • Foundations of relationships
    • The parent and infant are exchanging emotions
    • Still-face: it changes the baby’s response very quickly; it doesn’t know how to respond to its father’s blank expression
  • Emotional intelligence
    • Charles Darwin: Emotional social intelligence
    • E. Thorndike: Social intelligence
    • Leon Payne: Emotional intelligence (philosophical perspective)
    • Salovey & Mayer: Research on emotional intelligence (psychological perspective)
      • Ability to understand emotions of self and others, and act appropriately based on this understanding
      • Example: if someone is crying, it’s not appropriate to laugh; instead, you should get them Kleenex
  • Emotional IQ: Beasley
    • Abilities that contribute to increased social functioning
      • Motivate oneself and persist; ex: if someone says you can’t do something and you want to prove them wrong, you are motivated
      • Control impulses and delay gratification, ex: studying for an exam instead of sitting outside in the nice weather
      • Identify and understand own and others’ feelings
      • Mood regulation
      • Regulate emotional expression; ex: not ruining a friend’s good moment with bad news
      • Empathize with others
  • Emotional intelligence
    • A better predictor than IQ of how well people will do in life
    • W. Mischel: preschoolers’ ability to delay gratification leads to increased social, emotional, and academic competence
    • Experiment: put hands on placemat and wait for the bell before eating an M&M under a cup
  • Components of Emotional Development
    • Expression
    • Recognition: how/when do we know when others are expressing particular emtions?
    • Regulation: what do we do when it’s inappropriate to express what we’re feeling?
  • Expression: faces
    • Darwin (1872): Innate facial expressions (Nativist theory)
    • “… the young and the old of widely different races, both with man and animals, express the same state of mind by the same movements.”
    • Looking across cultures and animal species, we see consistency in how our facial expressions are formed
    • Ekman: cross-cultural research – adults agree on which faces are happiness, anger, sadness, and disgust (even if no word)
    • People criticized the experiment to be too heavily influenced by media; the experimenter repeated in New Guinea and found the same results
    • Nativist theory: universal set of expressions
  • Body language
    • Blind and sighted athletes – comparing body language for victory and defeat (raising hands, lowering head)
    • Nativist theory: universal expressions of pride and shame
    • People perform the same action, even if they are blind and have never seen other athletes do it before, so it is not learned behavior
  • Are emotions present at birth?
    • Evidence for emotion expression
    • Moms: one-month-old faces express joy, fear, anger, surprise, interest
    • Izard: videos of infants, emotion-arousing events – raters agreed on interest, joy, surprise, sadness; did not agree on anger, disgust, contempt
    • Can we know what infants are really feeling?
  • Positive emotions
    • Newborns: smile in REM sleep – bursts of brain stem activity
    • Second week: smile when awake – uncorrelated with environment, same brain stem activity
    • Endogenous smiles: attributed to some internal state (not affected by external states)
    • 3-8 weeks: increased smiles due to environment (exogenous smiles) – not really social
    • Social smiling: reciprocally related to others’ smiles – 2.5-3 months, positive feedback loop of smiling
    • 7 months or so: smile more to familiar faces
    • Smiling and Nature vs. Nurture
      • Nature: blind children smile
      • Nurture: blind children may not shift to social smiles – need reciprocal reactions (What can parents do here?)
      • Nature: premature infants smile late – at the appropriate gestational age
    • Laughter
      • 3-4 mo.: laugh when happy
      • 1 yr.: laugh at the unexpected – they find things that they haven’t experienced before funny
      • 2 yrs.: enjoy making others laugh
  • Negative emotions
    • Initially, undifferentiated distress
    • Separation anxiety
      • Distress experience when separated from caregivers
      • Increases from 8 to 13-15 months, then declines
      • Observed across many cultures
      • Adaptive behavior: if I don’t know that you (new person) are going to take care of me, I’m going to cry to show distress
    • Stranger wariness/anxiety
      • Often first evidence of fear
      • Emerges at around 6-7 months
      • Intensifies and lasts until about age 2 – variable across individuals and contexts
    • Why does stranger anxiety start?
      • Better recall memory (new vs. old events)
      • Better categorization (trustable vs. not trustable)
      • Greater needs
      • Increased ability to signal needs – prefer responders
  • Control/predictability
    • Noisy monkey
      • 12-13 months old
      • Control: press button
      • No control: random – increased distress
      • Fixed interval of noise – predictable, decreased distress
      • Babies were less distressed if they had control over the situation

March 22, 2012: The Role of Cognition in Emotions

  • Bonus question on exam 2: Melanie’s highest bowling score is 145, her handicap is 82
  • Secondary emotions (self-conscious emotions)
    • Unlike primary emotions (direct responses to events)
    • Must think about self and others
    • 18-24 mo.: embarrassment, pride, shame, guilt, envy
    • Someone becomes embarrassed because they are perceiving how others will perceive them
    • Depending on the context, the same action can produce different kinds of secondary emotions
  • Pride and Shame
    • Cognition and emotion
      • Must distinguish between easy and hard, success and failure
    • Lewis, Allesandri, and Sullivan (1992)
      • Put puzzle together (4 vs. 20 pieces), copying (straight line vs. triangle), shoot hoops (2 ft. vs. 12 ft.)
      • 3 yrs.: increased pride after success on hard tasks, increased shame if failed easy tasks
  • Emotions in Middle Childhood (School age, 6-7 years)
    • Acceptance by peers; achieving goals – sources of happiness and pride (in school situation more)
    • Fears related to real-life important issues (afraid of not doing well in school, rather than monsters in the closet)
    • Perceptions of others’ motives and intentions
    • Less intensity and less emotionally negative as they get older
  • Emotions in Adolescence
    • Increase in negative emotions
    • Clinical depression in the United States
      • 3% before
      • 15% or higher for age 15-18
      • 11% have less-serious depression
      • 21% for girls (self-image, coping strategies, timing of onset of puberty (sexual pressure), peer acceptance
  • Emotion Recognition
    • Infant studies
      • Categorization: 4-7 mo. habituated to slides of different women with same expression; dishabituate to new expressions
      • Inter-modal matching by 7 mo.: angry and happy soundtracks with films, look more at matching face
    • Understanding emotions: Labeling emotional expressions
      • 2 yrs.: happiness
      • 3-4 yrs.: anger, sadness
      • Pre-K: fear, surprise, disgust
      • Grade school: pride, shame, guilt
  • Patterns in Developing Self-Regulation
    • Transition from Regulation by Others to Self-Regulation
      • For very young kids, parents and other adults help them regulate their emotions, ex. through use of a pacifier or blanket
    • Use of Cognitive Strategies to Control Negative Emotions
    • Ability to Select Strategies Appropriate for the Situation
  • Emotion Regulation
    • Infants: help from parents
    • Young babies: sucking (relaxes muscles, induces sleep)
    • 2-6 yrs.: avoidance (if they’re mad at you, they’ll walk away from you), distraction (by use of soothing object, like a blanket)
    • Emotional display rules: learning to be appropriate
      • Until age 3, kids have trouble hiding feelings
      • Even 7-9 yrs., hiding feelings is unreliable
    • Display rules (video examples)
      • 5 yrs.: would cry, even though it would make the gifter sad
      • 7 yrs.: conflicted as to what he should do, says “thanks”
      • 11 yrs.: says “thanks,” and that it’s the thought that counts
  • Internal Factors: Individual Differences in Temperament
    • Measuring Temperament
      • Thomas & Ghess: 1950s sample
      • Parental questionnaires, longitudinal
      • Identified behavioral traits
      • Three types of temperaments: easy – predictable, positive, adaptable (40%); difficult – physically active, irritable, unpredictable (10%); slow-to-warm-up – inactive, moody, slow to adapt (15%); unclassifiable (35%)
      • Goldsmith et al.: behavioral observations
      • Also: EEG, cortisol levels; less biased than questionnaires?
    • Attributes
      • Fearful distress: adjustement to new situations
      • Irritable distress
      • Attention span and persistence
      • Activity level
      • Positive affect
      • Rhythmicity
    • Stability of Temperament
      • NZ study: negativity stable from 3-21
      • Behavioral inhibition: high in fearful distress
      • Kagan: 4 mo. (fussing, arousal); extreme cases still shy at 7.5 years
      • We tend to see more stability with negative types of traits
      • This doesn’t mean positive traits are not stable; they’re just not as stable
    • Genetic influences
      • T seen very young
      • Behavior genetics: MZ twins more similar than DZ, adoptees dissimilar
    • Problems with temperament
      • How many types? 3, 5?
      • Stability only modest – influenced by stability of environment
      • You might choose environments that fit your temperament type
      • Temperament alters environment, and vice versa: self-fulfilling prophesies, nature and nurture interaction
    • Stress and Coping
      • Stress is the response to things that threaten and tax coping abilities
    • Lazarus’ (1996) Cognitive Appraisal
      • Primary and secondary appraisal
      • Determine if something is a threat, challenging, or difficult on a relative level and your ability to deal with it
      • If you’re able to deal with the threat and you’re prepared, you’ll experience less stress
      • Increased harm, challenge, and threat = more stress; decreased harm, challenge, threat = less stress

March 27, 2012: Social Development

  • Erik Erikson – Psychosocial Development
    • Overview
      • 8 age-related stages
      • Each stage is a crisis to resolve
      • Lack of resolution may lead to later struggles
    • Trust vs. mistrust (Birth to 1)
      • Who are the people in my life who are here to take care of me?
    • Autonomy vs. shame and doubt (1-3)
      • Do things related to oneself independently
      • Controlling one’s body
      • We need to let babies do things on their own so they are able to master these skills (like eating spaghetti)
    • Initiative vs. guilt (3-5)
      • Interacting with the environment
      • Allowing children to set and meet goals
      • Learning about acceptable ways to behave in the world – what are rules of society and how do I meet them?
    • Industry vs. inferiority (6-12)
      • Children discover that their job is being a good student
    • Identity vs. role confusion (12-20)
      • We want children to engage in a search for identity and find one that fits him/her the best
    • Intimacy vs. isolation (Early adulthood)
      • Engaging in intimate relationships is a way to not feel lonely
    • Generativity vs. stagnation (middle adulthood)
      • Adults think about how they’re contributing to a productive society
    • Integrity vs. despair (late adulthood)
      • Did I lead a fulfilling life? Did I do all the things I wanted to do? Did I contribute productively to my family/society?
  • Contributions
    • Freud: importance of early experiences and emotional relationships
    • Erickson: emphasis on the search for identity in adolescence
  • Social Learning Theory
    • Emphasizes observation and imitation
    • Bandura: children’s tendency to reproduce what they learned depended on vicarious reinforcement (do you do something if you see someone else get reinforced?)
      • Preschool children watched an adult model with a Bobo doll
      • Group 1: no consequences, group 2: model rewarded, group 3: model punished
      • Results: increased aggression if model not punished
      • Children came up with new ways to be aggressive with the Bobo doll that they didn’t see the model do
      • Observed learning is not dependent on personal reward or punishment
    • Offering incentives
      • With no incentive, boys are always more likely to be aggressive
      • Providing a positive incentive increases behavior
  • Social Learning Theory
    • Bandura placed more emphasis on the cognitive aspects of observational earning
      • Attention: be aware of things going on that we are able to imitate
      • Memory
      • Motor control: be able to imitate that behavior physically
      • Motivation: we don’t imitate everything we see, so we have to want to do something
  • Social Cognitive Theories
    • Focus on ability to think/reason about own and other people’s thoughts, feelings, motives, and behaviors (others’ perspectives)
    • Emphasize the process of self-socialization
    • Selman’s Theory
      • Focuses on role taking
      • Preschoolers: limited social cognition – Piaget’s egocentrism?
    • Selman’s four stages of role-taking
      1. 6-8 years: attribute different perspectives to other person’s not having the same information they do
      2. 8-10 years: able to think about the other person’s point of view
      3. 10-12 years: systematically compare their own and the other’s points of view
      4. 12+ years years: adolescents can compare another person’s perspective to that of a generalized other
    • Holly and climbing trees example – Will Holly get punished?
      1. Social informational perspective-taking: different perspective because people have access to different information – “If he didn’t know anything about the kitten, he would be angry, but if Holly shows him the kitten, he might change his mind”
      2. Self-reflective perspective-taking: children can step in another person’s shoes and view their own thoughts, feelings, and behavior from the other person’s perspective. They also recognize that others can do the same – “No. Holly knows that her father will understand why she climbed the tree.”
      3. Third-party perspective-taking: children can step outside a two-person situation and imagine how the self and other are viewed from the point of view of a third, impartial party. “No, because Holly thought it was important to save the kitten. But she also knows that her father told her not to climb the tree. So she’d only think she shouldn’t be punished if she could get her father to understand why she had to climb the tree.” The response steps outside the immediate situation to view both Holly’s and her father’s perspectives simultaneously.
      4. Societal perspective-taking: third-party perspective-taking can be influenced by one or more systems of larger societal values – “No. The value of humane treatment of animals justifies Holly’s action. Her father’s appreciation of this value will lead him not to punish her.”
  • Ecological Systems Theory
    • Bronfenbrenner (1979): Development is shaped by a set of nested environmental systems
      • The child is at the center of the system, and there are other systems around the child that influence the child’s life/development directly or indirectly
      • The systems interact bidirectionally – the child can interact with the systems too
      • But, different systems have different effects on the child’s development
      • You → microsystems → mesosystem → exosystem → macrosystem → chronosystem
      • Microsystem: family, school, peers, religious affiliation, workplace, neighborhood
      • Mesosystem: how do these direct influences relate and interact with each other / one another?
      • Exosystem: educational system, government, political system, economy, different kinds of religious systems (not directly touching you)
      • Macrosystem: overarching beliefs and values of your culture that change over time
      • Chronosystem: dimension of time

Tuesday, April 10, 2012: Attachment

  • Overview
    • Children were becoming selfish, inconsiderate, and agressive because they lacked social interaction with guardians and caregivers
    • This disproved that physical care was all that is needed to raise a healthy child, and showed that emotions were important too
    • Attachments rae close emotional bonds between infants and caregivers, and its development can be affected by context and environment
  • Attachment
    • Reciprocal ties between infant and parents/caregivers
    • Developed by interactions with caregivers over time – repeated interactions with someone over a consistent basis
    • Determined by a pattern of relating
    • Major individual differences in attachment
  • Attachment Perspectives
    • Sigmund Freud: oral satisfaction
    • Harry Harlow: contact comfort
    • Erik Erikson: physical comfort and sensitivity
    • John Bowlby: attachment develops in phases
  • Bowlby
    • Naturalistic Observations
      • WWII orphans, infants in orphanages, hospitalized toddlers
      • 1940s institution: 1/10-20 ratio of caregiver to infant (a 1:1 ratio is hard enough because infants are needy, so a 1:10 ratio is not good)
      • First 3-6 mo.: typical development (no negative effects); they smile, bable, cry normally
      • Second 6 mo. (6-12 mo.): behavior changes; quiet, insensitive to others, higher mortality rate
      • Lack of opportunity to interact with somebody has a very quick negative effect on the baby
    • Evolutionary Perspective
      • Safety mechanism for exploring (imprinting?) so perhaps attachment is adaptive
      • Separation = danger: separation increases distress, closeness decreases distress; the parent is a secure base with good relationship encourages exploring
    • Development of Attachment
      • Primary caregiver is the secure base
      • Development sequence: pre-attachment (birth – 6 wks.) → attachment in the making w/ familiar people (6 wks. – 6 mos.) → clear-cut attachment w/ specific preference for someone (6 mos. – 2-3 yrs.) → reciprocal relationships w/ an understanding of the give-and-take aspect of a relationship (2-3 yrs.)
    • The Strange Situation: Measuring young children’s attachments, developed by Mary Ainsworth
      • When the mother leaves, the baby becomes inscure, but when the mother returns, the baby becomes secure again so she starts responding to her environment again and pays attention to the toys
      • An insecure or ambivalent baby will get distressed when the mother leaves, but will not become calmed or comforted when she returns
      • Secure (65%): mom is able to soothe her quickly after her return
      • Resistant (10%): don’t explore, upset when mom leaves, ambivalent after return (mad?), anxious
      • Avoidant (20%): little distress when mom leaves, ignore after return
      • Disorganized (Type D) (5-10%): more insecure, confused, absence of attachment pattern
      • Non-secure patterns: all show some avoidant/resistant behaviors; key is pattern of relating; Type D behaviors are not seen in other babies
    • Stability of Attachment
      • For at least several months
      • Stability of child’s life: family stress, parenting changed, stay-at-home parent goes to work, more siblings
      • Security of attachment can be affected by parental sensitivity and children’s temperament
    • Consequences of Attachment
      • 2 y.o.: group problem solving, cooperate more
      • 3.5 y.o.: more curious, better teacher relationships
      • 10-15 y.o.: improved social skills, better relationships with adults, less dependent
      • More likely to develop positive and constructive internal working models of attachment; learn proper times and ways to express and inhibit emotions; have closer, competent, and better relationships with peers; less aggressive/antisocial
      • Good attachment can lead to better relationships as adolescents; could be that good parents remain good and bad parents remain bad
    • What Leads to Different Attachment Styles?
      • Kagan argues that the Strange Situation doesn’t measure attachment, but temperament
      • Easy temperament = securely attached, difficult temperament = resistant attachment, slow-to-warm-up = avoidant attachment
      • What about disorganized attachment?
      • Limitations: different attachment styles with each parent; temperament interacts with parenting
      • If someone’s an easy baby, it would be easy with both mom and dad if it was temperament; but if dad was close and mom was absent, it would be more attached to dad, which is attachment
  • Harlow
    • Atypical Variations in Parenting: Isolation
      • Harlow’s Animal Model: 1950s
      • This took place during a time when people were concerned about spoiling their babies by responding to them all the time
      • What is important in early attachment? Food or comfort?
      • Infant monkeys in isolation
      • Surrogate mothers: wire mom or terry cloth mom
      • Manipulated which surrogate mom provided nutrition
      • Who would the infant monkey prefer?
      • Measured amount of time spent on the wire and terry cloth mothers
      • When babies were fed on the cloth mother, they spent over 15 hours to up to 20 hours a day on the cloth mother; by 21-25 days of age, they spent no time on the wire mother because they saw no point
      • When babies were fed on the wire mother, they spent only about 3 hours a day on the wire mother, just for feeding; by 21-25 days of age, they were going over to the wire mother enough to be fed, and spent about 17 hours on the cloth mother
      • The baby monkey runs to the cloth mother when it’s placed in a frightened situation
      • Central findings: cloth mother was preferred even when the wire mother provided nutrition; when scared, ran to cloth mother; most secure with cloth mother close by; contact comfort is key
    • Other Findings: Poor Outcomes
      • Monkeys raised with only surrogate moms could not develop normal social interactions, cower in fear, abnormally aggressive, female monkeys made very poor monthers
      • Interaction with other monkeys during the first six months of life is critical for social development
      • Observation of humans in orphanages confirmed these results
    • Attachment Bonds in Human Infants
      • Similar in humans: security needed to explore environment; basis for interpersonal relationships in later years
      • Poor attachment bond: can lead to inability to form close personal relationsihps as an adult
    • Human Social Deprivation
      • Romanian Adoption Studies (Pollak)
      • Negative effects of early institutionalization: brain development (stress hormones); emotion understanding; emotion hormones; some recovery possible, but not complete

April 12, 2012: The Development of Self and Identity

  • Bonus question: put distance for first birdie is 30 feet
  • Self-Recognition Test
    • Gallup (1970): chimp mirror test
    • When they first see themselves in the mirror, they feel threatened
    • Overtime, they will explore themselves
    • Test: mark face with dye
    • By the age of two, half of all children tested can recognize themselves; soon, they all do
      • 7 mo.: no self-recognition
      • 12 mo.: none, but will reach for objects reflecting in mirror
      • 18 mo.: will reach for rouge/mark (focus more on self)
    • All primates are able to pass the mark test by a certain age
  • How does self-recognition develop?
    • Children’s conception of self
      • Thoughts and feelings about self and in relation to others
      • How would you describe yourself?
    • Self in Infancy and Childhood
      • 2-4 mo.: control object outside of self, become angry when they no longer have control
      • 8 mo.: distress when separated from mother, self and mother are different entities
      • 1 yr.: joint attention
      • 18-20 mo.: recognize self in mirror, reach for mark on face
      • 20-25 mo.: 63% pick self out in photograph
      • 30 mo.: 97% pick self out in photograph
      • 2 yr.: use pronouns referring to self
    • Self-Concept in Middle School
      • Shift from external to internal attributes
      • Categorical (4-7 yrs.): I have brown eyes, I’m a ballerina
      • Comparative (8-11 yrs.): I’m the best person in math in my class, I’m a better soccer player than everyone else, I’m not that good at dodgeball
      • At about this age, people spend more time with peers than parents, so they don’t have someone to tell them that they are great
      • Interpersonal (12-15 yrs.): I’m very patient, I’m very good with kids
      • Issues with personal fable/imaginary audience
      • Personal fable: a story an adolescent tells about his/herself involving unique beliefs and feelings
      • Imaginary audience: adolescents think everyone is focused on their appearance/behavior
    • Social Comparisons
      • Change in ability to socially compare
      • Increases about 8-9 years (because they are spending more time with peers than with parents)
      • How can we measure how much kids engage in social comparison
      • Ruble measured athletic ability of 5-9 yrs. Throw ball into hidden hoop. 3 groups: relative success (you got 9, others got 7), relative failure (you got 5, others got 7), control group (you got 9, or, you got 5, not relative to anything)
      • Results: 9 yrs. rated themselves relative to others; 5-7 yrs. did not; control group all did not because they had no source of comparison
  • Self-Esteem and Self-Concept
    • Self-concept: beliefs, attitudes, knowledge, and ideas people have about themselves (“I am a good soccer player”)
    • Self-esteem: cognitive judgments of abilities (“How good of a soccer player are you?”)
    • Assessment is not easy
    • Harter’s (1985) Self-Perception Profile for Children (for 3-6 gr. children) taps general self-worth and by category
      • Correlations between Global Self-Esteem and …
      • Physical appearance (0.65), scholastic competence (0.48), social acceptance (0.46), behavioral conduct (0.45), athletic competence (0.33)
      • Your physical apperance is most influential on how you determine your self esteem
      • Girls are more concerned about their appearance and social acceptance; boys are more concerned about athletic competence and behavioral conduct (staying out of trouble)
  • Identity
    • Identity is a self-portrait composed of many bits and pieces developed over a lengthy period, including: vocational/career, political, religious, relationship, achievement/intellectual, sexual, cultural/ethnic, interest/personality, physical
    • Erikson’s Influence on Identity Development
      • Identity versus role confusion: Who am I? What am I about? What do I want to do in life?
      • Psychosocial moratorium: the gap between childhood security and adult autonomy when you’re free to try out different identities
      • Successful identity development is refreshing and acceptable new sense of self
      • Those who do not resolve the identity crisis face identity confusion
    • Crisis: exploration
    • Adolescent is exploring alternatives
    • Lewis (2006)
      • Can exploring identity status assist students in making healthier behavioral choices?
      • Heavy- vs. light-drinking college students
    • Commitment: personal investment in identity
    • Marcia’s Four Statuses of Identity
      • Has the person explored meaningful alternatives regarding some identity question? / Has the person made a commitment?
      • Yes/Yes: Identity Achievement
      • Yes/No: Identity Moratorium (“I want to be a nurse, but I also want to be a dancer” – questioning a lot of things)
      • No/Yes: Identity Foreclosure (They accept that “you’re a republican because I am”)
      • No/No: Identity Diffusion (I don’t know what I am and I’m not interested in finding out)
      • In Marcia’s terms, young adolescents are primarily in the status of diffusion, moratorium, or foreclosure
    • Ethnic Identity
      • Enduring aspect of the self that includes a sense of membership in an ethnic group and the attitudes and feelings related to that membership (Phinney, 1996)
      • Jourdan (2006): a secure attachment results in increased self-esteem and decreased inferiority/anxiety
    • Components of Ethnic Identity
      1. Ethnic knowledge: what do you know about that culture? what is the music, food, values?
      2. Ethnic self-identification: calling yourself that ethnicity (“I’m Filipino”)
      3. Ethnic constancy: have an understanding that your ethnicity is not going to change (understand that scrubbing your skin in the shower is not going to make you less brown)
      4. Ethnic-role behavior: more consistently engaging in kinds of behavior of your ethnicity
      5. Ethnic feelings and preferences: we really identify with that ethnic group and that’s who we know and feel we are; we seek out others who are similar
    • Ethnic Identity in Adolescence
      • As adolescents get older, they become more aware of discrimination
      • Peers might criticize racial minorities for trying to be too similar to the racial majority (Blacks acting too white, being called “Oreo”)
      • Racial minorities have higher rates of identity foreclosure because other cultures value conformity to parents more than identity exploration
      • Ethnic-identity diffusion/foreclosure (have not examined ethnicity, not interested) → ethnic-identity search/moratorium (interest in learning about ethnicity) → ethinic-identity achievement (conscious awareness and commitment to ethnicity)
    • Sexual Identity in Sexual-Minority Youth

April 17 & 19, 2012: Moral Development

  • What would you do if…
  • Focus:
    • Right vs. wrong
    • Acting on moral beliefs
    • Pride/shame in actions
    • Video example: pouring liquid on a toy or on a table is not the right thing to do, so the child does not do it; he felt uncomfortable when his mom told him to do it; we begin to understand what is right and wrong at a very young age
  • Core Concepts
    • Is a behavior moral? Reasoning is critical
    • Moral development = Changes in moral reasoning
  • Piaget’s Theory of Moral Judgment
    • The Moral Judgment of the Child
    • Focus on moral reasoning
    • Observing children’s ames: What are the rules?
    • Moral Dilemmas: Which child is naughtier?
    • Morality of Constraint → Transition Period → Autonomous Morality
      • Morality of Constraint: kids are focused on what is right and what is wrong; they do not see a gray area. If we do not abide by the rules, we should be punished
      • Transition Period: kids begin to understand that rules can be negotiated; if the group agrees, we can change rules
      • Autonomous Morality: kids (11+ yrs.) understand that rules are a function of what the society wants them to be, and take into consideration the intentions of the rules
  • Kohlberg’s Theory of Moral Judgment
    • Strongly influenced by Piaget
    • Assessed moral judgment by using hypothetical moral dliemmas
    • What is right?
    • Proposed three levels of moral judgment
      1. Preconventional: self-centered, focusing on getting rewards and avoiding punishment
      2. Conventional: centered on social relationships
      3. Postconventional: involved with ideals, focusing on moral principles
    • Preconventional Stage 1: Punishment and Obedience
      • What is right? Obedience to authorities
      • Child wants to avoid punishment
      • Needs of others are not considered
      • Pro: Louise should tell on Judy because she will get blamed if Judy gets caught and she knew about it
      • Con: Louise should not tell because she will get in trouble with her sister if she does
    • Preconventional Stage 2: Individualism, Instrumental Purpose & Exchange
      • What is right? Actions are those that satisfy one’s needs
      • Needs of others are considered for what it can do for you in return
      • Pro: Louise should tell on Judy because she will win favor with her parents for informing them
      • Con: Louise should not tell on Judy because Judy might tell on her one day
    • Conventional Stage 3: Mutual Interpersonal Expectations, Relationships and Interpersonal Conformity – Good Girl, Nice Boy
      • Living up to the expectations of others
      • Gaining approval from others by being nice or good
      • Pro: Louise should tell about Judy’s dangerous lying because her family would see her as a bad sister if she did not
      • Con: She should not tell because others will view her as a rat
    • Conventional Stage 4: Social System and Conscience (Law and Order)
      • Right behavior involves fulfilling one’s duties, uphoding laws, and contributing to society
      • The individual is motivated to keep the social system going
      • Pro: Louise should tell because she has a duty to protect her sister and the well-being of her family
      • Con: Louise should not tell because her little sister told her the truth in confidence, and if everyone went around betraying confidences, then nobody would be able to trust anyone else
    • Postconventional Stage 5: Social Contract
      • Right behavior involves upholding rules that are in the best interest of the group
      • When laws conflict, then a person and society must weigh relative value
      • Pro: Louise shoudl tell on Judy because her little sister places herself at risk by lying, and we should value the safety of family members even if it means betraying a confidence
      • Con: Louise should not tell on Judy because Judy spoke to her in confidence, and the social harm of lightly betraying a confidence is greater than the harm it does to their parents to not know the truth about where Judy went that night
      • “How do you weigh what will be in the best interest? If I betray Judy’s confidence, things could spiral in the family.” “I can’t even trust my own sister.”
    • Postconventional Stage 6: Universal Ethical Principles
      • Right behavior is commitment to self-chosen ethical principles that reflect universal principles of justice
      • When laws violate these principles, the individual should act in accordance with these universal principles rather
      • Pro: Louise should tell her parents what Judy did because her sister’s safety is a moral imperative that goes beyond the issue of betraying a confidence
    • Critics
      • Gender and Care Perspective
        • Justice perspective (Kohlberg): individual rights; individuals independently make moral decisions
        • Care perspective (Gilligan): interpersonal communication, relationships, and concern for others
    • Gilligan’s Theory
      • A Feminist Perspective
      • Sex Differences in Adolescents’ Moral Reasoning
      • Can adolescents apply their interpersonal moral reasoning skills equally effectively to real life situations?
      • 25 girls / 25 boys
      • Teenager’s Moral Reasoning with Sexual Dilemmas: Parents do not allow girl to have boyfriend over, but he comes over anyway
        1. Is this right or wrong? Are there circumstances that would make it right or wrong?
        2. What if they had sexual intercourse? Is that right or wrong? Why?
        3. Are there any circumstances that would make sexual intercourse right?
        4. The girls’ parents return and find out that the couple had sexual intercourse. What should the parents do?
      • Results: most girls were in stage 3, most boys were in stage 4; in sexual dilemmas, both girls and boys were in stage 3. Boys had lower scores in realistic situations
      • Boys can say that you “should” do things, but when it comes down to really putting yourself in the situation, boys do worse
      • As predicted, the level of Moral Maturity Scores (MMS) on Kolberg’s standard dilemmas was significantly higher
      • Boys obtained greater differences which means in a situation involving sexual temptations, these kinds of pressures can influence practical decisions
      • 13 boys fell 2 stages, and 6 fell 3 stages
      • None of the girls declined more than one stage
    • Gilligan vs. Kohlberg: In the end, as Kohlberg’s scale was tested and refined, there are nos ignificant differences between males and females
  • Prosocial Moral Judgment
    • Voluntary behavior toward others; helping, sharing, comfort
    • Eisenberg’s vignettes: helping another or focusing on own needs
    • Set up a scenario where there was a lost American tourist in France – the French helped Americans more frequently than expected
    • As children, we are told to do this all the time because we are learning about prosocial moral judgment
    • One day, a boy named Eric was going to a friend’s birthday party. On his way he saw a boy who had fallen down and hurt his leg. The boy asked Eric to go to his house and get his parents so the parents could come out and take him to a doctor. But if Eric did run and get the child’s parents, he would be late to the birthday party and miss the ice cream, cake, and all the games. What should Eric do, and why?
    • Eisenberg’s Stages of Prosocial Behavior
      1. Hedonistic: focus on own interests. Eric should go to the party because he wants to.
      2. Needs of others: concern for the physical, material, and psychological needs of others. Eric should help because the boy is hurt.
      3. Approval and/or stereotyped: based on what is good and bad people/behavior. Eric should help to be “good” and he should act in a manner that adheres to being good for social approval.
      4. Empathic: focus on self-reflective sympathetic responding or role taking, concern with the other’s humanness, and/or guilt or positive emotion related to the consequences of one’s actions. Eric should think about how he would feel in that situation.
      5. Strongly internalized values: internalized values, norms, or responsibilities. Eric should help because it’s important to help people who are hurt; engaging in helpful behavior is good for society.
    • The higher the stage, the more sympathetic and prosocial in their behavior
    • Altruistic Prosocial Behavior
      • Rooted in empathy and sympathy
      • Mother’s Reports of the Proportion of Times Children Responded to Others’ Distress During the Second Year of Life
      • If a baby cries, another baby is likely to cry; showing helping behavior comes later
      • About two years of age, about half of the time, kids respond to other kids in distress – it doesn’t take us that long to understand when other people are hurting
      • Often deeply rooted in parenting and the examples parents set for their children, as well as their ability to recognize emotions
    • Individual Differences in Prosocial Behavior
      • Genetic factors: MZ more similar than DZ
      • Indirect effects of temperament?
      • Cultural differences: more prosocial behavior when there is a focus on society and community
      • Values from parents: participating in prosocial activities, supportive parenting
      • You want to enforce this enough to the point that the actions become voluntary, rather than a response to the parents
    • Nature/Nurture Interaction
      • Biology and socialization jointly influence prosocial and antisocial behavior
      • Example: Easier temperaments may elicit warmer parenting
      • Example: Parents with genetic vulnerability to aggression may be more likely to use harsh discipline
      • Example: Gene-environment interactions (Moffit & Caspi New Zealand study; MAOA)

April 24 & 26, 2012: Gender Development

  • Introduction
    • Draw a boy and a girl
    • How do you define yourself as a male or female, without speaking about anything biological?
  • Some Definitions
    • Gender: psychological and sociocultural dimensions of being female or male
    • Gender identity: sense of self as female or male, acquired at around 2-3 years old
    • Gender role: expectations that prescribes how females and males should think, act, and feel
    • Sex typing: acquisition of behaviors, attitudes, and characteristics that a culture considers sex-appropriate
  • Gender Stereotypes
    • Stereotypes: characteristics society commonly associates with groups
    • Stereotypes in video clip: girl has dress on, is surrounded by nature and chirping birds and butterflies, has bow in hair, patting kid on head showing friendliness towards children, the person who wants the most beautiful girl has skill
    • Stereotypes of men: aggressive, dominant, confident, independent, self-reliant, nonemotional
    • Stereotpyes of females: warm, submissive, weak, emotional, passive, nurturing, sensitive
    • Across cultures, males are more instrumental than females (more active, competitive, independent, aggressive, and self-assertive); females are more expressive than males (more emotional, gentle, empathetic, cooperative, and concerned with others’ needs
  • Gender Designation
    • Culture begins at birth (and before)
    • Expectations of personality traits, interests, capabilities
    • Boys and girls are treated to very different socialization experiences
  • Stereotyped Expectations and Sex-Typing
    • Nospital Nursery Study (Rubin et al.)
      • Differences in ratings of boys and girls within 24 hours of birth
      • Girls: smaller, softer, finer featured, more inattentive
      • Boys: strong, smart
      • Different expectations for boys and girls
      • Daughters: focused on interpersonal success
      • Sons: focused on career or occupational success
      • If these expectations are violated, people are either confused or disappointed
    • Jack-in-the-box Study (Condry & Condry, 1976)
      • Evaluate child’s emotional reaction
      • All saw same baby
      • Child cried loudly when Jack jumped out of the box – why?
      • Girls were crying because they were afraid; boys were crying because they were angry
    • Gender linked selection of toys for playing with infant (Pomerleau et al., 1990)
      • Boys: encouraged activity and choose male type toys (e.g. a hammer)
      • Girls: interacted in amore personal and nurturant way, and used feminine toys (e.g., a doll)
      • If the child was violating gender expectations, the adult gave negative feedback and discouraged them
  • Gender Learning in Infancy
    • By 6 mo.: distinguish between female and male voices
    • By 9 mo.: distinguish between female and male faces; develop gender categories
    • Test of gender distinguishment by having a voice talking, then showing two faces of a man and a woman; if the baby looks at the correct image, he knows what faces produce what voices
    • Similarities? Smiling behaviors (through changes in adulthood)
  • Early Gender Development
    • Research by Diane Poulin-Dubois and Lisa Serbin
      • Study of infant gender development
  • Gender Learning Pre-School
    • So about 2.5-year-olds know typical female/male object/action assocations
    • About age of 2, children have established a gender identity of self
    • About age of 4, produce gender stability – “I am a boy today and I will still be a boy tomorrow”
    • About age of 5-6, gender constancy – looking at gender of other people and how that is constant
    • Behavior becomes gender-differentiated
    • Associate occupation with men and women
    • Gender differences in
      • Aggressive behavior
      • Toy and game preference
      • Gender socialization
      • Over 50% of boys said dad would think it was bad to play with a doll (Raag & Ratcliff, 1998)
      • Moms talk more and use more supportive speech with daughters (Leaper et al, 1998)
  • Development
    • Preschool period, sex-typed play increases more
    • Spend more of playtime with same-sex
    • Pattern is cross-cultural
    • Avoid peers who violate gender-typical behavior
  • Maccoby’s Gender Segregation
    • Increase in gender segregation by 5-6 years of age
    • Promotes further self-socialization of gender differences
  • Middle Childhood: Gender socialization
    • Increasing influence from others
    • Peers can be even more forceful than our parents – we become more concerned about what our peers think about us and what we’re hearing/seeing
    • Schools: differential treatment from teachers
    • Teachers treat boys and girls differently. Why?
    • Media: lots of gender stereotyping
    • New media (e.g. video games) are more stereotyped than old media (e.g. picture books)
    • TV viewing possibly correlated with acecptance of gender stereotypes
    • Siblings? Mixed families (e.g. boys and girls), stereotyped
  • Adolescence
    • Gender intesification: 11-12 years
      • Boys try to look more active; girls try to look more pretty and feminine
    • Dating and heterosexual interests
      • Partially reverses segregation
      • Emphasizes gender roles
    • Peer sexual harassment
      • Forced kissing
      • Sexual touching
      • Spreading sexual rumor
      • For 8-11th graders: 79% boys, 83% girls
      • Impact more detrimental for girls
      • When boys report sexual harassment, they perceive it with a sense of pride – “she totally wanted me”; girls perceive it as more threatening
  • Social Learning Theory: Gender Development
    • Sex-typing is learned
      • Rewards and punishments
      • Observational learning and imitation
  • For boys compared to girls
    • Demand more independence
    • Set more expectations
    • Less focus on interpersonal aspects of a task
    • Punished more (verbally and physically)
    • Dads more concerned with sex-typing than moms
    • Peers enforce sex-typing
    • Double standard: sissy vs. tomboy
  • Gender Flexibility
    • At all ages, boys have been found to be more rigidly sex-typed than girls
    • Why?
      • Males’ avoidance of “feminine” activities
      • Negative response to boys who choose activities typical of girls
      • Fathers play a particularly active role
  • Gender Schema Theory
    • Gender schema: things associated with a particular gender
    • Cognition is key!
    • Gender self-socialization: bias to behave based on gender
    • Foster bias in memory – “these are things that boys do, these are things that girls do”
  • Memory Distortions
    • Martin & Halverson
    • 5-6 year old
    • Show pics of kids in stereotypically consistent or inconsistent activities
    • Tested one week later – what do they remember?
    • They form better memories with actions that are gender stereotypical; they misremember stereotypically inconsistenet activities

Tuesday, May 01, 2012: Developmental Psychopathology

  • Case studies
    1. The Frantic Mother
      • A mother phones your office frantic because of a sudden personality change in her child. “He used to be a calm child, but now he’s moody.”
    2. The Worried Father
      • At a party, after learning you are a clinical child psychologist, a worried father pulls you aside to ask about his son’s behavior. “Last week my son told my wife that when he got older he wanted to be a girl.”
    3. The Crazy Child
      • A mother comes to see you very concerned about her daughter. She says giant crab creatures are living under her bed.
  • What is the first question you ask? “How old is your child”
  • “Abnormal” depends upon developmental expectations
  • In developmental psychopathology, we are looking at:
    • Change (or lack thereof) over time: children should be getting more sophisticated; stopping or going backwards is a warning sign
    • Context: what kind of environment does the child live in, what are its environmental surroundings
    • Patterns of adaptation: kids develop certain kinds of coping strategies as they grow older
    • We must look at typical and atypical development together
  • Three big problems in looking at developmental psychopathology
    1. Development
      • Are there really childhood psychological disorders?
      • Are they different from adult disorders?
      • Children are so unstable that we cannot determine from a photo of a child if he is shy or depressed
      • Who seeks treatment? The “quiet” disorders get noticed less
    2. Development
      • Freud’s Problem
      • Looks back into childhood to find an explanation for adult behavior
      • Children haven’t been alive very long, so we can’t go far back into their lives like we can for adults
      • Equifinality: many different causes can lead to the same outcome. Example: A, B, C, and D can all lead to Depression
      • Multifinality: one cause can lead to many different outcomes. Example: Abusive parenting can lead to A, B, C, and D
      • Is “self-esteem” a dependent or an independent variable?
      • Hierarchic motility: later stages of development build upon previous successes
    3. Development
      • How do we determine when development has gone awry?
      • What do we measure? Who do we ask?
      • Classification of childhood disorders: narrow band and broad band
      • Narrow band: narrowing in on a specific disorder. Example: depression, school phobia, aggression
      • Broad band: two broad categories. Example: internalizing behavior (affect chlid personally [sadness, belly ache]), externalizing behavior (affect others in their environment, failing to control behavior [noticeable])
  • Why do we use a separate system for research in children?
    1. Children do not interpret and experience events the same way adults do
    2. Interpreting children’s behavior depends heavily on developmental norms (that vary widely) and context
    3. High comorbidity: there are 63 million children in the US; 12% suffer from a mental disorder; 60% of them have more than one disorder
  • Agreement level for assessing children’s behavior
    • Mother and father: r = 0.72
    • Mother and teacher: r = 0.41
    • Mother and child: r = 0.37
  • When kids are older, they have much more reliability engaging their own behavior than when they are younger; parents have much more reliability when their kids oare younger than when they are older
  • ADHD: “By the time I think about what I’m going to do, I already did it”
    • What exactly do we mean when we say that someone cannot pay attention?
    • When we diagnose ADHD, the behavior must be present in all contexts (i.e. home and school)
    • Three main symptoms: inattention, impulsivity, overactivity
    • Inattention: not being able to listen and complete tasks; rapid shifts between activities, short attention span; easily distracted
    • Impulsivity: problems organizing schoolwork; blurt out answers quickly; acting without thinking
    • Overactivity: fidgety, restless; cannot shift from structured to unstructured activities
  • Conduct disorder: repetitive and persistent pattern of behavior, violation of the basic rights of others
    • Keep in mind, many kids engage in “bad” behaviors
    • But, for most kids, these behaviors decreases with age and do not constitute a pervasive pattern
    • Tag cloud: cruel to animals, assault, blames others, vandalism, fights, steals, lies, bullies, firesetting, annoys, swears, temper, breaks rules, defies, argues, runaway, truancy, stubborn, substance use, touchy
    • Activities can be destructive and nondestructive, covert and overt; property violations, aggression, status violations, oppositional
    • Common features in early childhood
      • High impulsivity
      • High need for stimulation
      • Low empathy
      • Immature moral/cognitive development
      • Troubled interpersonal relationships
      • Coercive parenting patterns in family become automatic (without cognitive control)
    • Coercion
      • Parent scolds → child tantrums → homework not done → parent scolds more → child tantrums more → homework still not done → parent bargains (no games for a week) → child tantrums less (child sees that parent is trying to negotiate) → homework still not done → parent submits (fine, don’t do your homework) → child stops tantruming → homework still not done
      • Coercion not often recognized by family: “child is stubborn,” “just like his father,” “marriage is bad,” “school is unfair”
      • Parents frustration and negative affect undermines problem solving: the more parents get upset, the less efficiently they can manage the family

Thursday, May 03, 2012: The Influence of Parents and Peers

  • Parenting Styles
    • Dimension of warmth, support, and acceptance
      • High parental warmth/support: accepting, responsive, compassionate, child-centered (child first); children have increased social and academic skills, increased love and respect for parents
      • Opposite end of continuum is cold: rejecting, unresponsive, parent-centered (parent first); children tend to be more aggressive physically and emotionally to others, less popular and less well-liked, lower academic achievement
    • Dimension of control and demandingness – extent to which parents will set limits on their children and enforce rules
      • When parental control is high, there are firm limits and they consistently enforce rules; involved in kid’s lives and discipline provide a form of structure in kids’ lives
      • When parental control is low, they are lax, permissive, and uninvolved
      • Nelson and colleagues (2006): physical and psychological control
      • Dads with physical-control: boys were more aggressive
      • Moms with psychological-control: girls were more physical and emotionally aggressive
    • Diana Baumrind’s Parenting Styles
      • Supportive: parent is accepting and child-centered; Unsupportive: parent is rejecting and parent-centered
      • Demanding: parent expects much of child; Undemanding: parent expects little of child
      • Supportive + Demanding = Authoritative: relationship is reciprocal, responsive, high in bidirectional communication
      • Supportive + Undemanding = Permissive: relationship is indulgent; low in control attempts
      • Unsupportive + Demanding = Authoritarian: relationship is controlling, power-assertive, high in unidirectional communication
      • Unsupportive + Undemanding = Rejecting/Neglecting: relationship is rejecting or neglecting, uninvolved
    • Consider the following…
      • A mother witnesses her child, Dalia, taking away another child’s toy. How might each style of parenting respond to this scenario?
      • Rejecting/neglecting: parent pays no attention
  • Peer Relationships
    • Peer Groups
      • A dominance hierarchy occurs by preschool – there is a person who makes the most decisions and guides others
      • In elementary school, peer group status becomes important – what do other people think of your peer group? if others don’t like your peer group, they’ll likely not like you either because they judge you based off your group
    • B. Brad Brown: Adolescent Crowds
      • Membership is based on reputation
      • May or may not spend much time together
      • Many crowds are defined by their activities
      • What are some examples of crowds?
    • Adolescent Crowds
      • Jocks, populars, normals, druggies/toughies, nobodies, bandies, independents, brains, nerds, loners, losers, coasties
    • Measurement of Peer Status
      • Rate like/dislike of peer
      • Peer nominations
      • Calculate children’s sociometric status
      • What impacts status? Attractiveness, social skills, athletic abilities, intellectual abilities, status of friends
    • Common Sociometric Categories
      • Popular: many positive nominations and few negative nominations
      • Rejected (25-30%): many negative nominations and few positive nominations
      • Neglected (10-20%): children who are low in social impact (i.e., they receive few positive or negative nominations), not really noticed or mentioned
      • Average: average number of positive and negative nominations
      • Controversial: receive many positive and negative nominations

Tuesday, May 08, 2012: Putting It All Together

  • Goals for this course
    • Thinking about where behavior comes from
    • Convincing you that you should care
    • The most important point: we do develop!
    • Kids are very different from us
    • What makes us who we are? Our innate uniqueness, peers, parents?
  • Broad themes
    • Nature vs. nurture
    • Continuous vs. discontinuous change
    • Competence vs. performance
    • Development is multi-determined
  • Narrow themes
    • Predictiveness matters: parenting, language learning, social development, others
    • Variability: typical vs. atypical, what is normal, cultural differences (even within “our” culture)
    • Cascading effects of development (or, chicken vs. egg problems, what causes what): parenting, T vs. A, self-esteem and survival of challenging events
  • Discussion
    • What did you find interesting or tell your friends/parents about?
    • What topics do you wish we had focused on more?
  • Basic Research Questions
    • Leads to answers and applications, and yet more questions
  • Educational Issues
    • Schools and…
      • kids who learn differently
      • learning second languages
      • tailoring education to cognitive development
      • fostering social and moral development
  • Mental Health Issues
    • When should we intervene?
    • When should we treat, and if so, how?
    • Identifying protective factors
  • Legal Issues
    • When should kids be charged as adults?
    • Who should get custody in divorce?
    • Weighting biological parents vs. non-biological parents
  • Sociopolitical Issues
    • Film/TV ratings for different ages
    • Violent computer and video games
    • The web (bullying, predators, etc.)
  • Medical Issues
    • How can we help parents to have healthy babies?
    • How can we best treat kids in medical settings?
    • How can doctors and nurses be kids’ advocates?
  • Modern complexities
    • Genetic testing and Down syndrome (trisomy-21)
    • Psychiatric drugs and kids
  • Family Issues
    • How do I explain the Clinton-Lewinsky (c. 1999) affair to my child?
    • How do I explain Columbine (c. 2000) to my child?
    • How do I explain Sept. 11, 2001 to my child?
  • Parenting issues
    • You need a license to fish, and you need to learn stuff to get a driver’s license, but anyone can have and raise a baby!
    • The only “rule” is that you can’t take a baby home from the hospital without a car seat
    • Should some education be mandated?
      • Basic information about crying, punishment, etc.
      • Akin to training for foster or adoptive parents
      • Personal liberty vs. preventing child abuse
  • Humanitarian issues
    • Why do people who care for children get paid less than almost anybody else? Full-time wage at outstanding child care centers close to poverty line
    • How can we better understand and respect people who are different from us? Autism spectrum disorders, Williams syndrome, poverty/homelessness, the kid with a difficult temperament at risk for abuse
    • How can we support families and kids?
  • How can we make this child’s life as happy and healthy as possible? Whatever you do in life, never forget how important kids are

 

—§—