Hello everybody, it's 11 o'clock. Class will now begin. Okay, I want to start off by mentioning or reminding you all of what the Moreau reflex and the Babinski reflex are.
reflex are just because I realized that I explained that while the videos were up so they got deleted from the YouTube video so just to remind you all the Babinski is the one where you stroke the baby's foot and its toes spread in the particular pattern. The moreau is when the baby is dropped backwards, not like this, but drops backwards and the arms fling out. So for those of you who didn't make it last time, that's what those two refer to. I'll start with where we left off, which is Piaget's Escapes. Sensory motor, which is 02, according to the PGA.
Pre-operational, which is 27. Great. Operational, which is 7-12, and the formal operational. So during the sensory motor stage, the baby's primary, and these are years, so 0-2 years, 2-7 years, etc. During the sensory-motor stage, so sensory means having to do with the senses, motor means having to do with movement, so they're not really having or developing rich concepts. They're mainly interacting with the world by observing it and by moving with it, grabbing things, putting them in their mouth, and stuff like that.
As we saw, Piaget argued that during that stage, object permanence develops, which is the understanding that objects continue to exist even when you do not see them. We got part way through the pre-operational stage, so that is marked by the beginning of simple language capacities, which round two is when we start to learn that. Kids in this stage are marked by egocentrism, which is the same thing as saying they have no theory of mind. Someone wants to know what the difference is between these, and one is essentially defined in terms of the other. Egocentrism is the inability to understand that other people have different minds from yours, meaning they have different beliefs, different desires, etc.
So theory of mind is not like a scientific theory, it's an everyday folk theory. We all, at least most of us when we grow up, have theory of mind, which just means we have the understanding that other people know things that we don't know, and that we know things that they don't know. When you have tests that measure theory of mind capacities, kids in the first half of the pre-operational stage tend to not do very well.
Theory of mind is usually developed in the latter half of the pre-operational stage. The concept that marks the boundary between the pre-operational and the concrete operational stage is conservation. So, potentially confusing, so object permanence and theory of line develop in the middle of these two stages. The boundary between this one and this one is language. The boundary between this one and this one is conservation.
So conservation is like, conservation is the concrete operational stage. What early language capacity is the pre-operational stage? It's the border.
So what is conservation? Conservation is the understanding that amount stays the same Even if shape or distribution changes. So classic example, I'm going to show a video in a second with some more examples. Take two short fat glasses that are half full of water and with the same amount, same shape of glass. You show the kid.
If he's, let's say, five to seven, still in the pre-operational stage, and you say, do these have the same amount of water? The kid will say yes. You take one of them, you pour it into a tall, skinny glass, and now the water's higher. And you ask which one has more water, and they'll say the tall, skinny one.
And that's really a dot, right? Obviously it's the same amount of water. But the kid doesn't understand that amount doesn't change just when the shape is higher and skinnier. So that's an example of a failure of tonner sand conservation, which develops around seven.
So to illustrate, I'm going to show a video with a kid who's probably partway through the pre-operational stage failing to understand conservation. Okay, so those are the examples of failure to understand conservation. So once they understand conservation, they move to the concrete operational. Around the age of 12 is when Piaget thought that kids became more fully little scientists. They are now able to engage in what we talked about in 9, hypothetical deductive thinking.
So they can think in terms of hypotheticals, guesses, and derive what would be true based on that guess and test them. You can give kids little tasks, little games where they have to do this, and kids at this stage are able to do that. So they're able to think more logically, more formally than kids in earlier stages.
Okay, so those are Piaget's stages. Any questions about Enneagram? Yes?
Is hypothetical deductive? Yes. So she asked, is hypothetical deductive the barrier?
And yes, in that case, once you can do hypothetical deductive thinking, then you're said to be in the fourth stage. Other questions? Yes? Does this take us back to the early 80s? It's a great question.
So that's the next thing I'll talk about is some of the criticisms of PSJA, and that is one that's been brought up. So I'll come right back to that. Other questions before I move on to criticisms? Okay, so...
Piaget's basic findings have held up fairly well, but there are some areas of criticism. One, which relates to what this person asked, is Piaget underestimated how variable kids are in terms of when they hit various stages. It could have to do with genetic factors or environmental factors, but it's not quite as clean as Piaget thought. Another thing that Piaget underestimated is the role of culture. He sort of assumed this was just like the natural, universal way that kids would develop.
But if you make this the standard for what counts as becoming fully developed, probably... kid in Papua New Guinea who was raised by hunter-gatherers will never achieve this and that's not because they're not developing normally it's just because they're not presented with those kinds of problems they're learning how to hunt and gather so no reason why they'd learn how to think like that And lastly, particularly with regard to the sensory motor stage, it's widely argued that Piaget underestimated how much kids know at the beginning. So, like I said last time, Piaget thought that the concept of object permanence Emerge started at around 18 months, sorry, 8 months.
But there's some interesting studies finding it's probably earlier than that, on average. And the reason for thinking this is some very clever studies involving looking time. So you present babies with simple situations, and you measure how long they look at it. And at least in these experiments, it's assumed that If the situation is more surprising, the baby will look longer. So one example is, you know, you have someone put a doll behind a screen, and then put another doll behind the screen.
If the screen goes down and there's two there, you do that over and over again, they kind of stop looking. They get bored. If you do it where you put two in behind a screen, you pull it down and there's just one, they look longer.
And some have argued that's an indication of surprise. They expect it to be if you put two behind the screen. the screen and move the screen down, there should still be two there.
You can do this with simple physics cases too, right? If someone lets go of a ball and it goes up, something like that, the babies are more surprised. They look longer than if you let go and it goes down.
And according to the book, you get these effects as early as four to five months, so significantly earlier than Piaget thought. Okay, that's all I have to say about Piaget. Any last questions about him? Yeah.
Okay, the next character is Vygotsky. Le-le-Vygotsky? Vygotsky was a Russian psychologist. He was also interested in the development of cognitive skills, and he conceptualized it sort of in spatial terms. So if you think about this as a kid growing up in a...
gaining new cognitive skills. Let's say this is when the baby's born, and he or she knows almost nothing, and then here is when they're around 18 or whatever, and they've accumulated lots of skills. Let's say the baby's around two, and underneath the line is every skill that he or she has learned.
So let's say we're specifically talking about puzzles. Let's say that the kid can solve, I don't know what the problem is. Let's say they can solve puzzles involving up to ten pieces.
Ten pieces they can figure out. Everything else, all the words they know, whatever. Piaget was interested in this region just above what they can do.
So the tasks that the kid can't quite do on their own, but they can with a little bit of help from a parent or some other adult. And that was called by Vygotsky the zone of proximal development. So it's all the tasks that the kid can't quite do, but can with a little bit of help.
And the term he used for the help is scaffolding. Kind of like a ladder, it's a very spatial kind of form. So the job of an adult is to provide little hints to help him or her solve these problems that are just out of reach.
So let's say it's puzzles that involve 15 or 20 pieces. Okay, they can't quite do it on their own. The parent has to guide them through it so they can learn the skills to do that next step in their development. I won't go into as much detail about the information processing theories, but one thing that they have in common with Vygotsky, and one thing that makes them different from Piaget, is information processing approaches and Vygotsky's approach view learning as more continuous.
So Piaget emphasized these stages, which are nice first approximations. You can think of it as like this. You know, if this is moving up through development, there's, you know, stage one, stage two, etc. But when you think about that, it's a little bit silly, because it's not as if a kid is six years and 364 days, and then they wake up the next day and they're like, oh, all of a sudden understand a bunch of new stuff.
Obviously it's continuous and information processing models tend to emphasize that. Skills are learned continuously and not in these clean stages. The clean stages might be nice first approximations but in reality it's going to be continuous.
Okay, there's a section on theory of mind, which I've already talked about. Theory of mind is the understanding that other people have different minds than you. And the various tasks that are used to see if a kid has a theory of mind are called false belief tasks. It's like that example I gave with the two boxes. So there's two boxes.
And one doll puts it in this box, that doll leaves. While that doll's not looking, another doll puts it in the other box. This doll comes back, where will it look?
And to give the right answer, you have to be able to understand that that doll can have a false belief. It doesn't know everything that you know, it may be missing some information and therefore have a false belief. And the book says these capacities tend to emerge around four to six, depending on how strict you make the criteria. However, for people with autism, this tends to not develop fully.
One of the main symptoms of autism is lifelong difficulty with theory of mind, with the ability to understand other people's states of mind. Another capacity that requires theory of mind is lying. So around the time that kids start to develop theory of mind they also start to lie. Because lying requires the understanding that I can know some things that you don't know and I can use that to my advantage and give you false beliefs.
If you don't understand that the other person doesn't have a different mind then there's no reason why you lie. There's a brief discussion of early emotions in kids. This is sort of review from 104, but in emotion theory it's commonly argued that there are six emotions for which the facial expressions are universal. This goes back to the work of Paul Ekman, who did studies in isolated societies that had very little contact with the West, and looked at whether they showed the same types of facial expressions.
And there were six for which the evidence was quite good that the types of facial expressions were universal. Those being happiness, sadness, disgust, anger. Surprise and fear. Now for the kid pictures it has interest instead of surprise.
I'm not going to test you on the difference there but for at least five of the six there's clear evidence that kids show facial expressions consistent with those universal emotions that Eckhart talked about and they show them quite early. Additionally, around 18 months, kids show evidence of having self-awareness. The standard operational definition of self-awareness in psychology is something called the mirror test. You show the human or the animal a mirror, and you put some kind of mark on its face, like lipstick or something, and you show it the mirror, and the question is, does it respond to the mirror as if that's another animal, or does it know, oh wait, that's me, there's some...
crap on my face i should try to get it off and kids pass this test at around 18 months some of our primate relatives can pass the test but only as adults some evidence that elephants can do it And with regard to sea mammals, it's harder to test. Some have argued that dolphins and orcas pass this test as well. But anyways, you don't need to know that. But for developmental psychologists, the important date is 18 months.
That's around the time that kids start to pass the test. Okay, another term that you should know is temperament. There are three types of temperament.
Easy, difficult, and slow to warm up. A temperament is a kind of emotional personality style, you could say, or emotional tendency that kids have. And these appear to be kind of genetic and built in.
Right when the kid's born, they seem to have one of these three tendencies. This is why my mom always used to say, don't write the parenting book until you've had more than one kid. You may have the first kid and have found that a certain set of techniques work, and the second kid comes along and it's not the same. So the easy temperament babies... sleep very easily.
They're very compliant, don't cry a lot, they have a pleasant disposition. Difficult babies are very irritable, wake up a lot, cry a lot, and are more difficult to please. The slow to warm up babies are more mildly negative.
They're not as irritable and not as likely to cry as the difficult ones, but they're not as pleasant as the easy ones either. They take more time to become pleasant. Okay, next is Erickson's psychosocial stages. And these are kind of a pain in the ass to memorize. So the way these stages work, these go from zero all the way to death.
So Erickson was very, tried to be very complete. And there are eight stages in this theory, and each of them has two possible outcomes, or two conflicting possible outcomes. So that's 16 total terms. And of those 16 terms, 7 of them start with the letter I, which makes it very easy to mix them up. It's not my fault, it's Erickson's fault.
And for some of them, there were much better words that didn't start with I. I think he did it on purpose, that's my theory. Yeah, it was very influential, so we'll go through all 16 of them. So from 0 to 2, or actually sorry, 0 to 1, the basic conflict is between trust and mistrust.
This is when breastfeeding, of course, is occurring. And Erickson, I forgot to note, was very influenced by Freud. Very strongly influenced by Sigmund Freud. Freud had his own stages of development, which were pretty crazy.
This is where, like, the mom stuff comes in and all that. And so what Erickson basically was trying to do was to take the insights of Freud and get rid of all the crazy sex stuff. So Freud thought that breastfeeding, the reason it was psychologically significant, is because all of psychosexual energy was focused on the mouth. He called it the oral stage.
So that's pretty crazy. But Erickson said that what's really going on is... The psychological crisis is about, can I trust the world or not? Is the world going to be responsive to my needs or not?
So if you go through breastfeeding well and the mother is responsive, then you become more of a trusting person. You've gone through the stage properly. The next stage is from one to two, and it's autonomy versus shame and doubt.
So the psychologically significant problem in this stage is potty training. This is again taken from Freud. So the dilemma or the crisis is, can I be a self-governing person and be independent? Or do I fail at doing that and am I really kind of embarrassed and shameful about that?
And the parents have a role here too. If they're too harsh about failures to potty train properly, that can also lead, of course, to shame. For three to five, it's initiative versus guilt. So the kid can start to explore the environment more now.
They are more mobile. Is their curiosity rewarded? Are they allowed to explore and be curious and check out the world? Or are they punished for doing so and overly restricted? In which case, they'll have more problems.
6 to 12 is industry versus inferiority, so now we're going to get a lot of the I's. This is when kids start going to school, of course. They might start trying sports and other potentially competitive tasks. And here the crisis is, can I become competent?
Do I do reasonably well in school? Can I be competitive in sports and other tasks like that? Or do I develop a kind of inferiority complex? Am I continually obsessed with not doing as well? 12 versus 20 is identity versus role confusion.
We'll talk more about this later when we talk about adolescent development, but the basic idea here is this is when kids, or I guess teenagers now, start to think about who they are. Are they going to accept the values and beliefs that have been given to them by their parents or by their society, or are they going to develop some different kind of identity? What group of people do you affiliate with?
What's your belief system? Those kinds of identity questions. And if you end that state without having a clear sense of who you are and what your values are, that's kind of a bad trajectory. Next, about 20 to 40 is intimacy versus isolation.
So you start to get more on the dating market, right? Maybe you dated in high school, but now it's getting a bit more serious. Are you able to find a partner?
Are you able to... maintain your friendships from high school you know those kinds of things or develop new friends or do you start to become isolated as you become an adult do you struggle in that in finding a partner or in maintaining friendships then that would be the the isolation trajectory 40 to 65 is generativity versus stagnation so Hopefully if you're on the generativity path you get a job, you become more advanced in that job, you're a productive member of the community, maybe you have some kids, you know you're respected and valued in various zones including the family and the workplace. You know, but if you stay in mom's house too long, maybe you bounce from dead-end job to dead-end job, don't start a family, those kinds of things.
According to Erickson, that would be the stagnation kind of trajectory. And then lastly, 65 plus is integrity versus despair. So 65 plus, your life's kind of ending, you retire.
Do you look back on your life with pride and think, yeah, you know, I wasn't perfect, but I had a productive life. I'm proud of what I accomplished and I'm, you know, happy to be finishing the race. Or do you think, wow, I really blew it.
I didn't really accomplish anything. Now my life's over and my chance is up. Any questions about those eight stages? Can you just repeat the last one for me?
Yep. Integrity versus despair. Integrity means you're satisfied with the end of your life, you think you've accomplished a lot.
Despair would be, eh, I kind of blew it, and I feel a lot of regret for the things I didn't do. Other questions? Yes.
What was our 12th to 20th? 12 to 20 is identity versus role confusion. So figuring out who you are, what your values are, and things like that.
It's a good question. I'm not familiar with the research into it. I mean, just personally, anecdotally, it seems like a lot of these, maybe this means I didn't go through the stages properly, but I don't know, some of these I still think about now. I don't think I stopped thinking about whether I'm competent when I was 12. And I think that's pretty normal, but I don't know what the research says.
I feel like outcomes of the stages connected, like for example, if the... This is a role confusion state. The individual goes through the role confusion one. How they're more likely to be, to go through the isolation state. What stage would you be going back to?
That's a great question. I believe so. I believe Erickson would say so, but I'm not confident enough in that answer to say that that's testable. So if you didn't hear what he asked was if you go through the bad trajectory on let's say the stage 3, like the bad outcome does that make you more likely to do the bad outcome on the next one?
And I think Erickson would say yes, but I'm not sure enough to say that that's testable. Is this taken into account when you did the participatory conference? Say again?
Was this taken into account when you did the participatory conference? Oh, I don't know. I'm not sure if Erickson did cross-cultural research. Oh yeah, at the back? You say the...
Okay, you want me to repeat what the identity one is? Just the ages. Oh, the ages.
Identity is 12 to 20, I think. Yes, 12 to 20. The PowerPoint says that. Oh, interesting. There's different estimates in different books.
The book says that, but I was probably using the AP Psych book for that. Here's what I will promise. There will be no questions on the test that require you to know the difference, as long as you have a general sense of what they are. Thanks for breaking that up.
So intimacy and isolation is 20 to 40 here, but probably in the PowerPoint it's 25 to something. Like I said, I won't ask a question on the test that requires you to know which is correct, because there's conflicting estimates in that case. Okay, people like this section.
Any other questions about their answer? Okay, next we're going to talk about imprinting and attaching. This is a very interesting area. So there's a lot of work into attachment, attachment in particular to parental figures. Some of the early work was done on bird species, because bird species have a particularly intense form of attachment called imprinting.
Species in which there is imprinting, that means that there's a set window, a very short window. For example, in the case of ducklings, it's about one to two and a half days. Whatever moving thing they see the most of in that short window, they will assume that's their mother or their parent. And the person who had been working for this was Conrad Lorenz.
And he took, I think it was geese. some young bird species, took them away from their mother, and spent time with these geese for the first few days. And for the rest of those animals'lives, they thought Lorenz was their mother.
And I have a cute video of this, of them following him even when they're fully grown. Even years later the ducks would follow Lorenz around upon hearing his voice, go for a swim with him and follow him. The cuteness is somewhat taken away by the fact that Lorenz was a member of the Nazi party. So, that kind of goes without saying. Sorry about that.
I just want you all to be well on your arms. Not like, oh, that guy's a Nazi. No, he was a literal Nazi.
Is it frequently seen in nature that ducks respond to a lot of their parents? Say again, sorry? Their natural parents, do they respond to all of their own parents like that? Yes, yes, and then presumably it's more obvious that they would.
But what this shows is that it's not because they can smell that there's a genetic relation. It's very simple. Just whatever moving thing they see the most of in the first two days or so, that's what they will assume is there. Yeah, so Could this moving thing also be something that is in nature inanimate?
But it could be like, let's say someone dangles something in front of this bird for a really long time Well that's a good question, I don't know if they've tried that It's a good question And you can do an honors thesis on it. I have another clip on imprinting. This is a light, well I guess the Lorenz is a lighter one too, but the philosopher Dwight Schrute, giving his thoughts on imprinting. Now, despite what Dwight says there, imprinting does not appear to be something that happens in humans. It's not quite that specific, that whatever you see for the first two days you will bond with.
But there is work into attachment. And the distinction is similar to one that we made back in Chapter 9. There's a distinction between a critical period and a sensitive period for attachment. So a critical period is what the birds have. There's a set period where if you do not form an attachment in that period, you will never form an attachment. Whereas a sensitive period is what humans have, where in the early days of early weeks and early years, you are more sensitive and more able to form attachments.
But it's not absolutely necessary that it happens in the first two weeks or the first month or something like that. Another study that involved animals, and some students find this kind of disturbing for some reason, but it's just the picture, so if you're a little easily weirded out, they took rhesus monkeys away from their mothers and gave them two fake mothers. And they were interested in what is most important for... forming attachment. So the metal cage-looking thing had milk.
The other one didn't have milk, but it was kind of soft and cut. And a certain naive kind of behaviorist, say, who thinks that reinforcement is all that matters, might say that the... The milk mother is the one that they are going to bond to, but in fact it's the cloth, cuddly mother. They spent most of their time with that mother, then they would run over to the other one when they were hungry, and then right back to the cuddly mother. This was done by Harry Harlow, and he argued that this showed that contact comfort was very important, meaning physical touch and physical bonding, not just being fed.
Another name that's important here, I don't think I have them in the key terms, and if I don't, then don't worry about the name, but John Bowlby, who was a psychoanalyst, who was very strongly influenced by Freud. Here I get that. in the early stages there are three steps of development or steps of attachment I should say at first there is indiscriminate attachment where babies are sort of responsive to everything every adult figure around they'll be warm and happy with and could potentially form an attachment Around three months there is discriminant attachment, which is slightly more narrow. They don't start hating other people yet, but there's a bit more focus on the people they see most, like their parents and other family members. And then specific attachment, which is even more narrow.
And furthermore, when they have specific attachment, something else happens, which is they feel comfortable exploring the environment if the caregiver is around. They view the caregiver or the attachment figure as kind of a home base. As long as mom is around, I can kind of explore the environment on my own.
And that begins around seven or eight months. Two other things that develop around the time that specific attachment begins. I'm not going to be too picky about exact dates here, but you should know what these terms mean.
Stranger anxiety. So remember, in the early stages, like before three months, babies just kind of love everybody. But around six to 18 months, they start to become nervous if a stranger is around that they don't have an attachment with. A bit further along, around 12 to 24 months, or you could say 1 to 2 years. There is separation anxiety, which is what it sounds like if you're separated from your mom or dad or other attachment figures, you become very distressed.
So during that first year, or second year, first to second year, when they're one, this provides the basis for a very commonly used test of attachment, which is the strange situation test. And I believe I do have the name of the person who came up with this. She's very important, and that's Mary Ainsworth.
The test is very simple. The parent, usually the mother, brings the kid into a new room. The room is in a lab.
And there's toys to play with, a few chairs. the mother sits down and lets the kid explore another person comes into the room and the mother leaves for like a minute and then comes back and there's two key things that the scientists are looking at when they watch the kid's response How does the baby react when the mother leaves? And how does the baby react when the mother comes back?
Those are the two key tests. And how they react to those two things is how you determine what the attachment style of the baby is. So watch a video of secure attachment, which is the most common type and which is generally thought to be the most healthy.
Secure attachment means the baby is sad when the mother leaves and happy when she comes back. That's the healthy response at this particular age. So watch a video of this.
Okay, so as I say, that will be an example of a secure attachment. There are four different attachment styles for babies, and I'll go through how each of them respond. So like I said, there's two things.
Is the baby sad when the mother leaves, and is the baby happy or comforted when the mother comes back? So for secure, they are sad when the mother leaves, and they are happy when the mother comes back. Resistant attachment, they are very sad when the mother leaves. In the book it calls it anxious-resistant.
But they are not comforted when the mother comes back. It's like, how could you abandon me? They're still very upset.
Next is avoidant attachment, or as the book calls it, anxious avoidant. These babies don't really give a shit when the mom leaves, and don't really care when she comes back. They can take it or leave. That's their reaction. And then the last one, disorganized, which is what it sounds like, kind of difficult to interpret, and inconsistent.
So those are the four main attachment styles for infants, and this is a test that's still sometimes used. Any questions about these four? Yeah, so it could be sometimes they're happy, sometimes they're sad, or it could mean that it's difficult to interpret.
Just kind of random in a mess. Oh, sometimes they don't. So the whole point of these attachment styles is that they are often, and here there is definitely work on this, they are thought to be predictive of how the kids will interact with people in the future.
Not 100%, that's what I'm actually going to talk about. next. So the book doesn't mention this, but I'm sure many of you are interested to see how these relate to adult attachment.
I'm actually going to add some stuff to that. But to answer your question, yes, sometimes they don't grow. That's the other thing. I saw a hand over here somewhere.
Other questions about these four? That's a good question. So she asked, do they measure how long the mother leaves, or do they vary how long the mother leaves and whether that changes it? The answer is I don't know. That's interesting.
Yeah? These attachments reflect how the mother treats the baby at home. So it's controversial.
So one thing that's kind of interesting is, like most human traits, these actually do show some degree of heritability, which might be surprising, but there's evidence for that. Certainly Ainsworth and Bowlby thought that they were largely influenced by how the mother treats the baby, but that's controversial. I won't answer that. That's a very niche thing to worry about. So this is how attachment is characterized in kids.
There's a two-dimensional model, this is in the key terms, it's not in the book, but you guys might find this interesting. So for adults... Attachment is conceptualized as existing on two dimensions. And there are four attachment styles that correspond pretty well to these, but they are defined in terms of their place in these two dimensions.
And the two dimensions are anxiety and avoidance. And both of those can be high or low. So I'll make the word like the high part. So anxiety is about how worried you are about your relationships, how afraid you are of rejection, how paranoid you are about the status of the relationships, or how worried you are about your lack of close relationships, all of the above.
Avoidance is about how much you avoid getting close to people. Each of these can be high or low. So secure, in this case has the same name as it does in Ainsworth's model, is being low in both.
So you're low in... Oh, sorry. Secure means low in both. You are not anxious about your relationships and you don't avoid closeness, meaning you are close to people.
So in your romantic relationships or friendships, you get close to people and you're not constantly worried about them. Preoccupied. I don't know how to write it, but that's one of the key terms.
Preoccupied means you are high in anxiety but low in avoidance. This first one is more to resistant. So you are very clingy. You get very close to people, but you're constantly worried about it.
Constantly worried about rejection or constantly worried about the status of the relationship. If you are high in anxiety and avoidance, that's fearful. Which of course, when some of us, well this one's probably the weakest association with disorganized. These are people who are so worried about rejection, so high in anxiety, that they just don't form relationships. They just avoid it because it's too stressful or too path-inducing.
The last one is dismissive. Sometimes called dismissive avoidance. These are low anxiety but high in avoidance.
So they don't get close to people, and they're not worried about that. They're like, ah, I don't need people, you know, whatever. So that would correspond to the avoidant one here.
There is some evidence that this last one corresponds to a kind of defense mechanism. My supervisor and I were actually working on a paper about dismissive avoidance attachment style. There's different lines of evidence that they actually do care about relationships despite what they say, but there are claims that, no, I'm a good girl, I don't need people, is a kind of way of coping. You won't be tested on that detail, but that's one.
ongoing area of research. So these are two different ways of carving out the attachment pie or whatever. This is how you do it with adults, this is how you do it with kids. Any questions about... Is mystic, so I was just wondering if like, is mystic trait or?
Oh definitely, a lot of these would be highly correlated with them. So, preoccupied is very similar to certain personality disorders. Um, and um, secure attachment is associated with lower rates of mental illness. And with lower, and better well-being, sadly. So, there definitely are correlations between these and different types of mental illness.
It's a good question. We'll talk more about that in chapter 60. Okay, other questions about... So again, this one's not in the book, but I'll say it's tested. It's a good modern thing to talk about. Modern application of things with this stuff.
So what are some other ways that attachment can go wrong? So one big one is forget about bad attachment. What about no attachment? What about kids who are completely isolated from any serious adult interaction? And tragically, there are some real-world cases of this.
Probably the most widely studied is Romanian orphanages. So during the reign of a Romanian dictator whose name I can't remember, pronounced there were I'll help you out with that that so he was he oversaw a very broken childcare system and kids were essentially thrown in these very underfunded orphanages when they were given up to the state and they were basically treated like animals food was thrown at them and not much else so they had no attachment in the early months of their life After the Romanian dictatorship fell, Western governments came in to help and looked at what was going on in these orphanages. Now, as a little historical aside, I can't help but, even though I can't pronounce this guy's name, I do know how he lost power. It's kind of a cool little story. So, yes, he died on Christmas Day.
So, a rebellion had already begun in Romania, and he gave a speech to try to inspire calm and order. And he... And he gave a speech to what he thought were loyal followers on live TV, and they started booing.
And as soon as that was on live TV, chaos ensued, and he was dead in four days, which was Christmas. So I'll show you a clip of this, just because it's very interesting. He was dead. He had a fire in his life.
It's a good shot. So like I say, dead in four days after that, so that's how the regime fell. But I also have a video of orphanages. So this is where the psychology comes in.
So they went in to help out and they found these really underfunded orphanages. So you'll watch a video of that as well. Okay, so mostly depressing case.
So the book has a discussion of studies where they compared kids who were adopted after having spent time in these institutions and kids who just were adopted. through ordinary circumstances. And unsurprisingly, growing up in an orphanage did, in these orphanages, did predict poorer attachment, various behavioral problems, and lower IQ scores, because they didn't develop as well. Although, as you can see, can see from that guy, still a remarkable degree of resilience because remember like I said earlier development for humans is a sensitive period not a critical period so they still, not totally without help, many of them did show great resilience.
I'm not going to go through all the details with the next two sections there's a section on whether daycare has negative effects on attachment and If any effects there are of divorce. Just to briefly summarize, it looks like in general for daycare, there is not a negative effect, so long as the daycares are well-rounded and stuff like that. If there are any differences, they tend to peter.
out by the time the kid is in middle childhood. For divorce, there do seem to be some, there does seem to be some correlation of various behavioral problems, although interestingly enough, the... The effects are not as bad as living in a home with a contentious marriage. So sometimes divorce might be the better option. Now those studies, of course, are all correlational, which raises some concerns because you have to wonder whether it's...
because the divorce itself leads to problems, or if it's because many traits, including behavioral problems, are heritable, and it could be that the types of parents who tend to get divorced also pass on traits to kids that make them more likely to have behavioral problems. But leaving aside the issue of explanation, there is a correlation between divorce and at least some difficulties. Okay, probably the last thing we'll have time for today, which still leaves quite a bit left. So probably most, or certainly a good chunk of Tuesday's class will be spent finishing Chapter 12. So maybe not as much time for review.
So feel free to avail yourself of course questions and office hours. Hopefully we still have some time, though, for review. But lastly we'll have time to talk about today's parenting style.
This is Diana Balmeren's work. I believe her name is in the keychart as well. This is another model with two dimensions, emotional style and discipline style.
So emotional style can either be warm or hostile. And discipline style can either be permissive or risk-free. So these are basically what they sound like.
Restrictive means rules are strictly enforced. There are clear expectations that the parents have and that they are willing to ensure that the kids follow. And emotional style has to do with how loving and accepting are the parents. So according to Gwamrit and according to subsequent research, authoritative...
is the best style. So that's where there's high restrictiveness but high warmth. So there are clear expectations and clear rules, but there is also a loving and supporting environment. A consequence of this is that the rules are clear and strict, but reasons are given. If a kid asks, why is this the rule?
The answer is not because I said so, slap. That's the next one. The next one, and it's a shame they gave him such similar names, but he's authoritarian.
I think of an authoritarian government. So this is a parenting style that is highly strict, but also hostile. Not very loving. And then the last two, the other two, are indulgent, which is very permissive and loving, and neglectful.
It's hot style and not strict. So as I say, authoritative parenting is associated with the best outcomes. Authoritarian kids with authoritarian parents tend to have lower self-esteem and be less popular.
Kids with indulgent parents are less mature, even though they may be loving. And kids with neglectful parents have the worst outcomes on average. I was thinking now about Gen Alpha and the fact that...
Gen Alpha? Yes, which is like, you know, people who were pretty much like born after like 2012 or something like that. Oh, okay. But basically with those children, we now see that they are mostly raised with like devices and iPads and hands. They're not really given much attention from their parents.
In that situation, would you say that would be closer to their neglect? side and do you think that this will actually have a problem? That's an interesting question.
I'd be inclined to say indulgent just because if it's not associated with low love or hostility you would classify it as indulgent. There are studies into the effects of time on devices but I'm not familiar with the limited frequencies. People are starting to pack up. I'll stick around if there are more questions but I think we'll stop there. So we'll probably spend most of Tuesday finishing chapter 12 and then of course next Thursday is testing.
See you all in here.