Hello, I'm Amy Rice and welcome to video number two or part two of our intro to developmental psychology notes where we're going to talk about environmental influences. So make sure that if you haven't seen part one where we talked about genetic influences that you watch that first and those do accompany both of the genetic and these environmental influence notes accompany the notes that you can find at the link if you scroll down on my Teachers Pay Teachers store. So let's go ahead and get started talking about environmental influences on our behavior.
So it's easy to say that how the environment, which is anything except your genetics, impacts behavior is all based on quote the way you're raised, right? It's easy to say well kids these days it's all about the parents and the way they were raised. It's all about and it's all the parents fault. Well I included this little Note up here, a few years back, my students created and then voted on an AP Psychology t-shirt for the year, where it said essentially this, nature versus nurture.
Either way, it's your parents' fault. Well, I mean, maybe, but nurture is so much more than just how you're raised. And we are going to look at these five categories, and on your notes, that's exactly what you have, is five categories.
And you need to take thorough notes in each of those. So we'll look at prenatal environment, experience and brain development, peer influence, culture, and gender. Okay, so let's talk about prenatal influences. Oftentimes when we talk about nurture, we say that it begins at birth, right?
When you enter the world. That's actually totally not true. It doesn't begin at birth.
It begins in the womb before that. And you're like, what? No, that's totally wrong.
Well, here's the thing. What if the mother were to take drugs, has an illness like influenza, right, contracts the flu, and even excessive amounts of stress can all influence the developing fetus. And here's the thing, these chemicals like drugs or viruses that the fetus might come into contact with because of the mother are called teratogens and you need to make sure that you write that down.
So just for fun, I included some pictures of myself when I was pregnant with each of our three kids in years past, obviously. But yeah, we've had all three of our babies and just kind of showing you like, oh, prenatal influences, right? And that the mother and what she does very much has an impact on the developing fetus.
Experience and brain development is a big one. So experience helps develop brain's neural connections. And you're like. duh, experience makes your brain better.
Yeah, but it's a little more science-y than that. It's the neural connections. And this is found through lots of research, particularly with rats.
So if they lived in an enriched environment, rats developed a heavier and thicker brain cortex, right? Their cerebral cortex was much thicker. And if you look at this image down below, you kind of see what a neuron looks like.
And that there's more branches that develop in the neural networks and the synapses even become stronger. This seems to hold true for children as well. With infants who were handled more, meaning picked up and talked to, it's called face time, funny enough, were actually gained more weight, which is good, and developed faster neurologically. So the idea being that if not stimulated, the maturing brain operates on a use it or lose it principle.
which should be a reminder for you from back in the biological basis unit. So we've talked about two categories. Let's talk about the third one with peer influence.
There's something called the selection effect. And I want you to think back to like your elementary and even more particularly your middle school days. This is the effect where kids choose friends similar to themselves, at least similar in the quote important ways. And you'll oftentimes find that friends will even. look alike.
They have a lot of things in common, whether it's the sports that they participate in or clubs, how they achieve in school even, right? If they're more of a top performing student or a middle or even low performing student, all of those things they kind of have in common. Well, nature does seem to play a role in influencing, in the influence of peers. It's with our peers that we spend most of our time playing, working, and even mating, right?
So nature predisposes us to be sensitive to their styles and opinions. Obviously, if we have things in common with them, right, and our personality being very biologically determined, if we have things in common with them, we're going to be attracted to that because it's things that we like. Parental and peer influence seem to be complemented. in shaping one's life, right? Like the parents and the peers kind of complement each other.
Parents influence our ideas on our sense of education, discipline, responsibility. So discipline being more things like work ethic, right? And how committed we are to achieving our goals, orderliness, charitableness, and giving ways of interacting with authority.
And that are we more are. Are we followers? Are we going to do what they say?
Or are we kind of against authority and future plans? Whereas peers influence our ideas on a sense of cooperation, popularity, interaction among others our age. So they kind of complement each other.
So culture, let's define that first. So behaviors, ideas, attitudes, and traditions shared by a large group. It seems kind of silly to define something that you seem to know so well, but it is important. Cultures differ. They're different.
And you're like, oh, duh. Thanks for putting that in a video. But here's the thing that then in turn causes us as individuals to be different.
So in psychology, we don't study culture. We can study how culture influences the individual and their mental mind games. Right.
And their behaviors. And that happens through things called norms. These are the rules for accepted and expected. behavior of people within a culture and different norms often confuse us and that we don't understand why that's different because it's so ingrained in us, right? We don't understand why other cultures do things differently because it's so ingrained in the way that we do it that doing it differently just seems so odd.
Hence why there's some like cultural baggage, I guess you could say. between different countries and areas and regions. A big one is personal space and that zone we like to maintain around our bodies, and that some cultures are very up close and personal. They kiss each other on the cheek when they meet almost total strangers, whether as others are like, I'm going to shake your hand or even bow, and that they have that distance. Levels of expressiveness is one.
A lot of cultures will be very expressive with their hands, kind of like me. And even in their facial features, whereas others are very, I don't want to say mute, but very, you could say stiff-lipped, right? In that they are not as expressive in their facial features and in their hands. And then our pace of life. We Americans, we are very much about timeliness, right?
A meeting starts at a certain time, it better start at that certain time. If you're late, that's on you. And that looks bad. Whereas a lot of other cultures, meeting times don't really, like... they're not really set in stone and if people show up late it's like it's all right hey you got a life so it's just kind of a different way to look at things and i want you to look at these two terms individualism and collectivism that they do influence child rearing but these are bigger than just child rearing okay so individualism or individualistic cultures this is super important for you to get down by the way the um you This kind of perspective or viewpoint on life is more in Western cultures, where they want kids to think for themselves, want them to be independent, be true to themselves, set your own personal goals.
And a good way to remember this is that oftentimes in Western cultures, your first name, right, is your individual name, whereas your surname, the name of your family, comes last. Whereas a collectivism or collectivistic culture... are more Asian and African cultures. They're more communal cultures that emphasize family honor and dignity. If you shame yourself, you shame your family, and so there's more pressure there, greater concern for social harmony.
And these people tend to be a little more shy with strangers, right, because it's not just about you. You are representing your family, and oftentimes, not all the time, in these cultures you'll see the surname, their family name, come first. Here's the thing.
Although these differences exist, there are a lot of similarities within culture. And that's because we are all human beings, right? We are all impacted by the people around us.
We all need basic things to survive and thrive. And that human element makes us very much the same. Let's talk quickly about the last one, which is gender. And we're going to talk about both nature and nurture. With nature, the genders differ genetically.
right? Like it's just a fact. They have different chromosomes.
Then the X versus Y chromosomes, they signal production of different hormones. So a female, right? When a female zygote, fertilized egg, when the Parents, right, give their the sperm and the egg, their chromosomes. If it's a female, it's two X's.
You want to get this down. If it's a male, it's an X and a Y. So mom, every single time, no matter what, the egg always gives an X. But dad can give an X or a Y. So gender, right, biologically, the sex is determined by the father.
But nurture, gender is also socially determined. very much. So things with something that's called gender roles, these are the expectations from a culture, you could say, about the way men and women behave. And this varies across cultures as well as over time, right? The expectations for a woman in the 1920s, 30s, 40s, 50s, it's very different from then the 70s, very different from now, right?
Very different. And then there's gender identity. identity. So gender roles is what the culture expects, which very much impacts how you then fulfill those roles or not. But gender identity is your sense of being male or female, how you identify yourself.
And there's kind of a continuum there in that how feminine do you feel? How masculine do you feel? And then there's this term called gender typed. This is the acquisition or acquiring, right? Getting.
of masculine or feminine roles and traits. So how you acquire your gender identity. So people are gender typed throughout their lives and it's how they acquire their gender identity. So it's what you do or learn in order to be masculine or feminine.
And yes these are things that can happen through yourself and your own cognitive processes but oftentimes it's through the observation of others in the genders and what they do. Just wanted to briefly talk about traditional gender roles. I'm going to let you pause and kind of look through these because to me, I feel like people probably have a rather firm grasp on this and the quote traditional gender roles and that the woman stays home, right?
And her job is to raise the kids, support the husband, right? This is, I'm talking real traditional, not that this is what Maitreya believes. No, no.
Traditional roles, right? And they are, as far as when it comes to their sex lives, expected to be naive and passive. Whereas males are expected to be more of the leaders, the breadwinners, and to take initiative in relationships with women.
And this just comes to impact things, even like how mom and dad act in the house. Not that that's a negative thing that, you know, mom might clean the house while dad goes outside and does the outside work. But then it starts to impact occupations and the outlook that a girl or a boy has on what jobs they can fulfill. Let's quickly wrap up by talking about the theories about gender and how we are gender typed, right?
How we acquire those gender roles or gender identity. So there's the social learning theory and that we learn. through social interaction.
So children learn gender linked behaviors by observing and imitating, as well as through rewards and punishment, right? Observational learning, operant conditioning. It's through learning that we learn how to be feminine or masculine.
And it's not necessarily all based on the messages that children get from their parents, as research has shown that even if parents discourage traditional gender roles, as much as I tell my boys, boys, you're going to clean the house, you're going to do that laundry. Children often organize themselves into girls and boy roles. So my boys already talk about and think, I want to grow long hair like a girl.
Or they say, no, I'm going to keep my hair short like a boy. I guess that's just because I have longer hair. I don't know. I don't try to say that to them explicitly.
It just happens. And then there's gender schema theory. This is the social learning theory that we just talked about.
plus cognition. And when you think cognition, think thinking. Children learn from their cultures, that's the social learning theory, a concept of what it means to be male or female, and then they think about it, right? They think about what they are seeing and they adjust their behavior accordingly.
So you compare yourself with your concept of gender and what boys and girls normally do, and then you normally will then follow in step. So boys might not do a sewing project at summer camp because they perceive that as a girly thing. Or they might keep their hair cut short because long hair is a girly thing. And vice versa for girls. Girls at summer camp might feel pressure or even to themselves not prefer to go play flag football.
They want to go do the arts and crafts. Just the influence of them thinking about it as well. So a test question about this theory, just a quick tip.
It will include in a scenario, like if you're given an example about how Joe or Sally are acting and it's about the acquiring of gender roles or typing, it includes the child thinking about what she or he is observing of genders and then making a decision to act from there. If there is no thinking, if the child never stops and thinks about what they are doing, It's just social learning theory. So I really hope you find these notes helpful.
Again, make sure that you find the accompanying notes in my Teachers Pay Teachers store. The link is down below. And I would love it if you'd follow my channel here. I'd also love it if you'd leave some reviews on my TPT store.
Everybody have a great day.