Exploring Lifespan Developmental Psychology

This lecture is entitled Changing Through Life Development. If you haven't already done so, please open the accompanying PowerPoint for this lecture. One of the things I want you to remember about developmental psychology is that it embraces many other areas of psychology because we can easily take any area of psychology and apply a developmental lens to it. For instance, we can study the development of social behavior, we can study the development of cognition, we can study the development of how we learn, and of course we can study the development of psychological disorders. So that's represented on the first slide that you see. So I want you to remember first that developmental psychology can be applied to any other area of psychology simply by looking at how we change over time to those specialty areas of study. The other thing I want you to remember is that developmental psychology studies the entire lifespan. Some developmental psychologists may focus simply on infant behavior. Some may focus through the childhood and teen years, some through early adulthood, but there are developmental psychologists who focus exclusively on the aging population. One thing in developmental psychology is constant. That is... We are always changing. Our mental and cognitive abilities are always changing. Our behavior is always changing based on our life influences and our physical and intellectual age. So those are a couple of important things I want you to remember as we talk about psychology through a developmental perspective. Probably one more thing I want to remind you of is how rapidly we change. through the childhood and into the adult years. If you've seen a child and then you don't see that child again for a couple of years, the difference in development can be astounding in just a few years. So it's important to remember that different kinds of development can also happen very rapidly. For this lecture, I'm going to be talking about different kinds of attachment. I'm going to be talking about emotional... Sorry, not attachment, development. I'm going to be talking about emotional development, cognitive development, personality development, and then moral development. These are certainly not the only kinds of development that we study in psychology, but I think these are four of the most important and the most well-known. As we talk about the different stages in each of these types of development, it is important to remember that even though a graphic on a slide might show these stages of development as very rigid and step-like and happening over a course of certain years, there is a great deal of individual difference. So if you see a certain stage that tends to occur, let's say, between two and seven years, it's important to remember that some children might get to that stage earlier, some children might finish that stage earlier or later. So there are a lot of individual differences with respect to how children and adults go through the different stages. The ages that are given are just meant to be guidelines. If you go ahead and advance to the next slide, the first type of development that I want to talk about is emotional development. Emotional development was first studied in the 60s. There were a couple of prominent researchers who studied how we form and maintain our emotional relationship with others. They were convinced that emotional development began literally at birth in the kinds of bonds that we form with others. The first bond, obviously, is that between mother and child. And in the absence of the mother, it is between caregiver and child. So some of the early studies on emotional development were done using infants. And there was a classic series of studies that were known as attachment studies. Attachment is how we form bonds with other people, how we trust them, welcome them into our lives, and give them responsibility to help take care of us. In the original series of attachment studies, there was a setup known as the strange situation paradigm. The Strange Situation Paradigm. In this study, caregivers, and at the time this was primarily mothers, would bring their infants to an artificial laboratory setting and they would bring their child into a room that had some toys and interesting things to look at. The first phase of the study is recording what the child would do when the caregiver leaves the room. Babies usually respond in one of two ways. Either they will cry when the primary caregiver leaves the room, or they will seem oblivious to the fact that the caregiver has left the room. So that was part one. How does the child respond when the caregiver leaves the child alone, leaves the room? The second part of the study was... What happens when the caregiver comes back into the room? That is, when the caregiver and the child are reunited again. And we can observe several different responses. The child can appear happy. The child can still be crying or upset, or the child can still seem oblivious toward the caregiver. So from the combination of behaviors between the caregiver leaving and the caregiver returning, attachment psychologists develop these three different types of attachment styles. These are noted in infancy and may persist throughout a person's life. So I want to take a moment to go over these three attachment styles. The first one is called secure attachment. In the attachment studies, this was noted when the child would be upset when the caregiver left the room, but would then be happy when the caregiver returned. So again, a secure attachment means the child is upset when the caregiver leaves the room, but is happy and comforted when the caregiver returns. What this suggests is that the child understands that this person is responsible for the child's needs. The child can trust that caregiver to provide for them. So just out of almost instinct, he or she is going to be upset when the caregiver leaves because he or she realizes that it is that caregiver that is providing care for them. But by the same token, because he or she understands that the caregiver is responsible and does take care of the child, he or she is comforted when the caregiver returns. This is the ideal form of attachment. Psychologists believe that infants who have a secure attachment are better able to explore and become more independent later in childhood because the child recognizes that he or she has a stable, responsible base of care. So that enables that child to venture out a little bit more knowing that he or she can always fall back on that stable caregiver. The second type of attachment is known as anxious ambivalent. These are children who would show signs of distress, who would cry and be upset when the caregiver left the room. But when the caregiver returned, it didn't necessarily comfort the child. The child may still be upset, may still not be able to be consoled. What this suggests is that the caregiver is providing inconsistent care to the child. The child never knows when that person is going to provide stable support or when that child is essentially going to be abandoned. So the child may be upset when the caregiver leaves because he or she is losing the possibility of caregiving. But when the caregiver returns, it's not necessarily comforting because the child isn't sure that he or she is going to get the care and attention that he or she needs. This produces a child who is anxious, who is fussy, who is not able to be consoled. Not for biological reasons, not for something like colic or just a poor temperament. This is a child who shows signs of anxiousness because he or she has not learned to trust his or her caregiver. His or her caregiver may frequently be absent. You know. may not feed the child, may leave the child with a messy diaper, or in a cold room, or in a car, or somewhere where the child at some level recognizes that he or she is not getting the comfort that he or she should be getting. So, this is a child who is perpetually anxious, but is hopeful of receiving proper care, proper support, and proper love. The last type of child that the attachment researchers observed is called the avoidant child. The avoidant child appeared oblivious when the parent left the room, or caregiver left the room. He or she really didn't show any signs of distress when the caregiver left the room, and by the same token, did not show any signs of being comforted when the caregiver returned to the room. This is a child who has learned that this caregiver is not a source of support or care or love. In other words, the child is always cold and distant. because at some level he or she learned very early on that this person is not truly a caregiver, so it shouldn't matter if the caregiver is present or not. So to review, securely attached infants are ideal because they understand that the caregiver is a consistent source of support and love in caregiving. The anxious ambivalent child is usually fussy and harder to console because the child is never sure if he or she is going to receive care and love. The avoidant child is consistently cold and distant because he or she has learned very early on that the caregiver is not going to provide the care and attention that he or she needs. This happens during the first year of life, very early on, so we may think that there's not a lot going on cognitively during the first year of life that most development is physical. But even at that early age, we start to see a laying down of emotional development. Subsequent researchers followed the logic of emotional development into adult romantic relationships. So for instance, if you were an anxious, ambivalent child, because you received inconsistent care, how would that affect your own interpersonal relationships as an adult? If you take a look at the next slide, you're going to see some of the results. In the first column, you see the parent's caregiving style. This is particularly during childhood. Warm and responsive, cold and rejecting, ambivalent inconsistent. So these represent the three main types. of parental behavior that results in the second column, infant attachment. A warm and responsive parent is going to produce a securely attached infant. A cold and rejecting parent is going to produce an avoidant infant. And an ambivalent or inconsistent caregiver is going to produce an anxious or ambivalent child. I want you to focus on the third column, that is what happens in the adult attachment style. If you are securely attached as an infant, you probably have the best success with respect to interpersonal, intimate relationships later on in life. As you can see, as an adult, you find it relatively easy to get close to others and are comfortable depending on them. This is critical. You realize that that other person is a source of support, someone you can depend on, much like your caregiver was early in life. If you had a cold and rejecting caregiver, as an adult, you may tend to be avoidant in romantic and significant interpersonal relationships. You do not like getting close to others. You do not tend to trust others. You do not open yourself to others. or come to depend on others because you never learned that that could happen from your primary caregiver. You were never given a reason to trust others, so why would you trust others in your own adult relationships? And then in the third category, the anxious ambivalent babies. As adults, because there was the opportunity for the attention and the love and the caregiving. Sometimes it was provided by the caregiver. You tend to reach out for it. You like to get close. closer to others than they may want to be to you. So as you can read, I worry that my partner doesn't really love me or won't want to stay with me. In other words, an anxious ambivalent baby as an adult may have issues with possible rejection, abandonment, and jealousy. Because care early on was inconsistent, the assumption is the love, And the bond that you have with your partner will also be inconsistent as well, so you tend to reach out for more. Now obviously these are not set in stone, and what happens to you during childhood does not necessarily predict how you will handle adult romantic relationships. But what is important is to realize that there may be a connection. And if you do have problems in your intimate adult relationships, to think back... as to the emotional attachment that you had as an infant as a possible reason for that. If you take a look at the next slide there's a little bit more on emotional development that I'd like for you to know. And this is actually the effect of physical contact on emotional development. The effect of physical contact on emotional development was first studied not in people but in primates. by a researcher named Harry Harlow. And if you've taken a psychology class before, you may have heard of Harlow's studies. Harlow wanted to determine what happened when actual physical contact between the mother and the infant was removed. He called that contact comfort. So he had monkeys who were born to mothers and removed the mother from the scene. leaving the infant monkey with a choice between two surrogate mothers. The first one is represented by the image you see on the left of this slide. It is essentially a cylindrical wire cage. This was called the wire mother, and the wire mother would have a bottle of milk attached to it. The second type of surrogate mother was called the cloth mother, and you see an example of that in the second picture. This, again, was not a real monkey, but it had a face that looked similar and was covered in a very soft, furry cloth. So it felt softer. It felt more like the monkey's actual mother. So given the choice between the wire mother that had milk and a cloth mother who did not have milk, monkeys overwhelmingly preferred the cloth mother. even if it didn't provide any food for them. So that speaks to the importance of contact comfort. Monkeys who have the opportunity for contact comfort tend to choose that over the opportunity for food. And in the third picture, you see another example of a monkey with a cloth mother. In either case, monkeys who did not have access to their real moms displayed many, many negative consequences in their temperament. When they were put in general housing with other monkeys of the same age, they were very reclusive and they showed signs of anxiety. So no surrogate is a good surrogate for the real thing, for real contact comfort. Now, there has been research on a phenomenon called attachment parenting. And people who are attachment parenting advocates believe that a mother and child should be in almost constant contact. There is debate about the potential benefits of that and the potential safety risks, but the idea that you should have consistent physical contact with your child is an important one. As a result, children tend to be less anxious and more easily consoled, when you have physical touch. If you go ahead to the next slide, the next kind of development I want to talk about is cognitive development. This is development in our cognitive or thinking processes. Probably the psychologist best associated with cognitive development is a Swiss psychologist by the name of Jean Piaget. Jean is spelled like Jean. But in Swiss, Piaget was a Swiss neurologist who was interested in how Now, biological development of the brain was represented in cognitive development in children of different ages. In other words, as the brain developed, what did that support us being able to do cognitively? Obviously, a two-year-old cannot do the same things that an eight-year-old can do cognitively. A three-year-old cannot do the same things that an adult can do. Cognitively, we have different abilities because structurally our brains are different. During childhood, our brains are still rapidly developing to be able to support the kind of higher order, abstract, hypothetical, and logical thinking we associate with adult capabilities. Young children simply don't have it yet. So what I want to do is take a few minutes to walk through Piaget's cognitive abilities. cognitive stages. The first stage, also known as stage one, is called the sensory motor stage. If you look at the slide, this is approximately birth to age two, although again, as I've mentioned before, this can vary between children. Birth to two is just average. During the sensory motor period, children are beginning to explore their world through their senses. They begin to move around. They want to touch everything, put everything in their nose, in their mouth, in their ears, and look at everything and feel everything. This is critical. This is how children learn about their world. So we see coordination of sensory and motor skills as a way for children to learn about their world. If they can't readily think about an object, at least if they can put it in their hands and smell it and touch it and look at it and see if it makes a noise, they can learn about the object. They can file that into their brains. During this stage, we see one important cognitive milestone. That is known as object permanence, and you see that in the description of the stage. Object permanence is the understanding that objects continue to exist even if you cannot see them. Again, object permanence is the understanding that objects continue to exist even if you can't see them. For instance, right now I can't see my car. However, I know that it still exists. And if I go outside to look at it, I know that it will be there. Very young children don't understand this concept. If you want to try and experiment on a young child to see whether or not he or she has object permanence, it's very easy to do. Take a favorite object or toy, put it on a table in front of the child, let the child look at it, recognize that it's there, and then just put a sheet of paper or... something else to hide it. A very young child is probably going to look away and start to look around because as far as he or she is concerned cognitively, the object has disappeared. The object no longer exists because he or she can't see it. As children get older, they don't fall for that trick anymore. They know that you have simply hidden the object. The object is still behind you. the sheet or the towel or whatever you put between the baby and the object. When the child shows signs of understanding that the object is still there, even if it's hidden from sight, that child is said to have object permanence. That is the cognitive marker that advances a child to the next stage of cognitive development. So once a child has object permanence, Here she moves to the next cognitive stage, which is called the preoperational period. The preoperational period is approximately between the ages of two and seven. Piaget used the word operations to mean specific logic or rules that we apply to our world to better understand it, how the world works. If we have something with wheels and we put it on a downhill slope, we know it is going to roll downhill. So we have an actual set of rules or logic as to how things should behave. So a preoperational child is starting to understand how things in the world work, but isn't quite there yet. There are a couple of important cognitive markers during this stage. The ones I want you to know are symbolic thought, irreversibility, and egocentrism. So I'm going to go through each of those three. During the pre-operational stage, children are beginning to have symbolic thought. This is where imaginative and creative play really starts to develop. A child at this age can build a fort out of a box. This is symbolic. The box represents the fort. He or she can build a city out of twigs and sticks and... little army men and matchbox cars, and that is a town. That is a village. So these are all examples of symbolic thought. Something is used to represent something else. This is an important cognitive milestone. Irreversibility is the general inability for children at this age to retrace their steps or to go backwards. So if you have a progression of events that happens from the time the child gets up to the time the child goes to kindergarten, let's say, the child may not be able to say what happened from the time he or she got up to the time you walked out the door in reverse. May be able to say it forward, but not be able to go backwards. So to retrace or undo steps. might be difficult for a pre-operational child to understand that the sequence of events can go forward and backward mentally. The representation may not be there yet. The last key term that you see under stage 2 is egocentrism. This is not to say that children during this stage are self-centered or narcissistic. What we mean by this as a cognitive view is that children during the pre-operational stage tend to only understand things from their perspective. If something is done to them, they understand it. If they watch something happen to others, they may or may not understand it. So in other words, if a five-year-old hits her sister and mom says, Don't you know how much that hurt your little sister? The child may rightfully say, no, because she doesn't understand. She only knows what it feels like when things happen to her. She cannot take the perspective of somebody else and how something might affect that other person. So for a young child, that probably isn't the most effective form of scolding because the child may legitimately say, no, I don't understand. how that feels. I can't take someone else's point of view. I'm too young cognitively to be able to do that. So that's egocentrism, the inability to take someone else's point of view or to see the world through someone else's point of view. Stage three is known as the concrete operational period. This is approximately between age seven to eleven. And this is when we begin to see the foundations for logical thought, even a little bit of abstract or hypothetical thinking. You know, if I'm good, then I will get this. And really understanding consequences. Now, it may happen sooner, but usually we associate concrete operational thought with being in stage three. The biggest cognitive milestone that I want you to know during this stage is what's called conservation. Conservation is a key cognitive concept. When a child has mastered conservation, he or she is considered to be concrete operational. If not, he or she is still in pre-operational. So the mastery of conservation is the cutoff between pre-operational and concrete operational. Conservation is the understanding that matter is conserved regardless of what shape or size it comes in. That is, the amount of something stays the same. So let me give you a concrete example for this concrete period. If you have the same amount of juice in two glasses, both of the glasses are kind of short and wide. Then you take one of those glasses and pour it into a tall skinny glass. Imagine that scene for a minute. The level of juice appears higher in the tall skinny glass. A pre-operational child, when asked which of these glasses has more juice, the tall one or the short one, will say the tall one. tall one because he or she is focused simply on the level or the height of the juice in the glass. It doesn't matter that that glass is much skinnier than the other one. He or she is focused on just the height of the juice, the juice line. The concrete operational child would know because he or she watched you take the juice from an identical glass and pour it into the tall skinny glass, that the amount of juice in those two glasses are the same. So that's the difference between a pre-operational child and a concrete operational child. The concrete operational child knows that the matter has neither been lost or gained. The amount is the same no matter what kind of vesicle it's held in. The same thing is true If you take two identical sandwiches and you cut one sandwich into, let's say, three pieces and the other sandwich into eight pieces and spread them around a little bit, the preoperational child would say there is more sandwich in the eight pieces than in the three because it appears that there is more, there are more pieces. The concrete operational child would know that because they started the same, It doesn't matter how many pieces you cut each sandwich into, you have the same amount in both. The last stage in Piaget's theory of cognitive development is called the formal operational period. This is approximately age 11 through adulthood. This is when we begin to have formal logical thoughts. This is the stage in which children are really able to begin thinking abstractly and hypothetically. And they truly begin to understand abstract concepts like justice and altruism and courage that a smaller child may not understand. So obviously, at this age, we can apply those cognitive skills. to more difficult hypothetical problems. We can synthesize ideas together, evaluate, critique ideas, things that smaller children would not be able to do. So this represents the final culmination of cognitive development. According to Piaget, not everyone will get to the formal operational period. This is not a universal. Some people will remain essentially in the concrete operational stage. But the fact that you're taking a college-level course makes me assume that all of you are in the formal operational period because you've done a lot of this kind of thinking ever since middle school or junior high at least. And now you're just doing more of it in college. The last thing I want to mention with respect to Piaget is what you see at the bottom of this slide. Something called schemas. Piaget defined schemas as our mental representation of things in the world, our mental representation of objects and ideas. So we have essentially in our minds an endless set of folders and files in which we file away information. And when we are presented with a new piece of information, We have to decide what to do with that information. Piaget said with new information, we can engage in one of two processes, either assimilation, or accommodation. Assimilation is when we take a new piece of information and assimilate it into a schema that we already know. For instance, if you see a new car on the street that you've never seen before, once you understand that it has a steering wheel and four tires and an engine and a transmission system and some seats, you say, okay, this is a new example of a car, but I already have an understanding of what car is. So I'm going to assimilate this new prototype, this new object, into my existing understanding of cars. That would be assimilation. Accommodation is when you are presented with a new object that doesn't fit into any of your recognizable schemas. It doesn't quite fit and we need to accommodate our schemas for this new information. For instance, if a young child goes to the zoo or the circus, he or she may see something that looks like a horse except it has stripes. And he or she may say, Daddy, Daddy, look! It's a horse with stripes. To which daddy would say, no, that is a zebra. And the child says, oh, a zebra. So the child has to accommodate this information. This does not fit into the existing schema of horse. A new, quote, cognitive folder has to be created for zebra. That's the process of accommodation. Now we as adults take it for granted that we sort of have an understanding of all the objects in our world and the schemas in which they fit. But you have to take a child's perspective, where children are seeing and interacting with new objects every day as they're learning about their world. So these two processes of assimilation and accommodation are happening very, very rapidly because so much of the world is new to them. So what may seem like old hat to us, I've got a schema for this, I've got a schema for that, for young children that's not the case. This is a very active cognitive process that occurs throughout development. The next type of development that I want to talk about is personality development. There are two prominent psychologists who are credited with laying the foundation for studying the development of personality. One is Sigmund Freud. and the other is Eric Erickson. So I want to first spend some time talking about Freud. You may have heard of Freud, because Freud is a very notorious character in the history of psychology. He was actually trained, as most early psychologists were, not in psychology, but in medicine. Freud was not a psychologist. He was a medical doctor. So were many early psychologists, because a psychology program did not exist. He had some very interesting theories. We'll talk more about some of Freud's theories when we talk about actual personality later on. But for right now, I'd like to talk about Freud's ideas with respect to the development of personality. If you take a look at the slide, you're going to see some words that might not necessarily automatically fit into your schema of psychology. anal phallic genital. These seem very odd. Freud's theories were kind of out there and they are not necessarily universally accepted in psychology but they laid such a strong foundation in psychology that pretty much every introductory textbook that you read is going to talk about these. Every developmental textbook that you read is going to talk about these. So it's important that you know what they are and then you can draw your own conclusions and as to the validity of these stages. According to Freud, most of our personality development occurs through what he called psychosexual stages. That is, at some level, we have some underlying conflict of a sexual nature. Successful resolution of those conflicts will produce An emotionally healthy person with a healthy personality. Unsuccessful resolution of any of these stages may produce someone who has issues with his or her personality. So let's go through each of these. According to Freud, during the first year of life, we go through what's called the oral stage. We learn about the world by putting things in our mouth. If you've spent time with young children, you know he really was on to something. There are lots of nerve endings around a child's mouth. Of course, Of course, it's necessary for feeding. It serves an evolutionary function as well. But not only do children feed using their mouth, but they use it to explore and understand objects in their world. According to Freud, if you have enough exploration and stimulation of your mouth during the first year, you will have a healthy personality later on. If you do not receive enough oral stimulation or an opportunity to engage in oral exploration, you may experience anxiety as an adult due to this crisis. More specifically, Freud believed that young children who were denied the opportunity for exploration and stimulation through the mouth during this first year may later in life have a chance to experience anxiety. have what he called an oral fixation. That is almost an unconscious desire to put things in your mouth. Now this may sound ludicrous, but stop and think about yourself and those who you know. Are you or someone you know a nail biter, a pen cap chewer, an eraser chewer? a gum chewer, a hard candy eater, or a smoker. According to Freud, if you do at least one of these things, or many of these things, you may have an oral fixation that was the result of unsuccessful resolution of the oral stage. So that is, even to this day, you find comfort and stress relief by putting things in your mouth. You did not successfully learn, because of lack of stimulation and exploration, that you can move beyond stimulation and exploration from your mouth. You only residually have the understanding that you can get comfort from putting things in your mouth, instead of by other means. So like I said, it's out there, but there may be a nugget of truth to it. There may be a kernel of truth. Okay, so successful resolution leads to healthy personality. Unsuccessful resolution leads to anxiety, and anxiety may be, quote, cured or remedied by putting things in your mouth. The second stage is called the anal stage, and this was between the first and second year. According to Freud, conflict occurs during this period due to the phenomenon of potty training. Controlling the bowels and controlling urination are the only real sources of control that a child has over his or her body. He is being told when to eat. He is being told when to sleep. He is being told when to do this or that or the other thing. The only thing that he or she really maintains control over is when and where he goes to the bathroom. So for Freud, this stage was twofold. He did believe. that just like in the oral stage with the mouth, children did derive pleasure, sexual pleasure, from bowel movements. That part of the idea is pretty out there, and I don't think many people would agree with that. But the idea of having control over your environment is characteristic of this stage, because this is when children really begin to assert themselves in their environment. They want some autonomy. In Victorian times, When Freud was writing and speaking about his theories, almost all children were potty trained by the age of two. It was just a given. It was going to happen. That is not as true anymore. It may linger a little bit longer. So during this stage, successful resolution during his time came from successful potty training, which in society was acceptable by age two. Beyond that, it was less acceptable. So that showed. The child had control and autonomy over his or her environment through successful potty training. Unsuccessful resolution of this stage, that is a child who lingered on potty training, would have control issues throughout his or her life that produces anxiety. The way that control is regained then later in life is for that child to become what we call Anal retentive. Someone who has complete control over his or her environment, is very tidy, very systematic, and very organized, tends to be considered anal retentive. But that is the way for a person to remedy the anxiety that he or she felt from unsuccessful attempts at potty training early in life. Again, it's out there, but the idea of a child not having any control or any autonomy in his or her life, and that subsequently leading to overcompensation in his or her adult life, does ring true. Again, there can be a kernel or a nugget of truth in that idea. During the third psychosexual stage, which Freud called the phallic stage, we begin to see the shift focus from the mouth to the anus to the genitals. This is around age four. Again, these are approximate ages. And this is when children begin to understand that they can receive and derive pleasure from their genital areas, a different kind of pleasure than from eating or a bowel movement, according to Freud. So during this stage, their focus of pleasure, their focus of their attention tends to be on their genitals because they learn it, quote, feels good. During this stage, there are a lot of potential conflicts happening. The first one is called penis envy. Freud believed that little girls are envious of little boys because boys have a penis. And girls do not. To the point that girls will begin to harbor a resentment toward their mother because they believe it is the mother's fault that they do not have a penis. I'm going to let that sink in for a minute. I know that's out there. But Freud observed that even at this young age, there was conflict between mothers and daughters, and he chalked this up to penis envy. So the idea of penis envy is that little girls are jealous of little boys because they do not have a penis. So that's one conflict. This is a conflict faced by girls. Another conflict during this time... is called the Oedipus Conflict, or I'm sorry, Oedipus Complex. Freud believed that boys around this age developed a desire to essentially want to marry their mothers. In the classic story of Oedipus, he killed his father and married his mother. So during this inner conflict, boys initially resent their fathers because they want all of the mother's attention and love and affection. And obviously, at least some of it, is going toward the father. In order to resolve this complex, Freud believed that little boys decide to take a different approach. Instead of fighting for mom's attention with the father, The little boy decides to emulate or model his father's behavior. You know, wearing the little tool belt, pushing the little toy lawnmower, thereby winning mom's affection that way. So as the little boy begins to model his father's behavior, he can win the attention and affection of the mother. Kind of a subversive way to get mom's attention and affection. So the Oedipus complex is resolved in little boys by beginning to model and emulate the behaviors and attitudes of their fathers. That's a lot for a four-year-old. The next psychosexual stage, according to Freud, is called the latent stage. We call it latent because, according to Freud, there is no overt sexuality. Pleasure is not directed at the mouth, the anus, or the genitals. During this stage, and he said it was ages six through puberty, children will begin to focus on their social relationships with other children. During this time, they may claim to, you know, girls may claim to hate boys, boys may claim to hate girls, someone has cooties. So in other words, they're forming bonds primarily with their same-sex peers. Now it appears in modern society, if you watch the news and you watch TV shows, that this period is shrinking. Because Freud believed that boys had no interest in girls and girls had no interest in boys until puberty, which we usually associate with teenage years. But it seems like that window is shrinking a little bit. Children are beginning to engage in sexual exploration at a much earlier age now. They're beginning to show an interest in the opposite sex much sooner. But the hallmark of the latent stage is simply that any kind of sexual focus or pleasure-derived focus is latent. It is sleeping, it is in hibernation, and social relationships for a healthy personality are what is emphasized. So during this period, a child who successfully forms same-sex relationships will have a healthy personality. Children who do not. may have problems with aspects of their personality later on. The last psychosexual stage, Freud called the genital stage, this is from puberty onward, on through adulthood. This is when our focus goes back to the genitals as a source of pleasure, potentially a source of conflict and anxiety. So this is when we begin to seek physical contact and physical relationships with other people. And again, like I said before, it appears that the threshold age is dropping in modern society. So again, successful resolution means you will have successful physical relationships with others. That leads to the development of a healthy personality. I don't think Freud was specific about the age in which that should happen, especially the age of first time. just as long as they do happen at some point. Unsuccessful resolution of that complex or that conflict means that a person may have anxiety issues relating to his or her sexuality. If you advance to the next slide, I want to spend a few minutes going over the next researcher in personality development, which is Eric Erickson. Now these stages may look a little daunting because Erickson proposed that there are eight stages of personality development. Freud only proposed that there were really five. Erickson's view of personality development differed because he called these stages psychosocial stages. That is, personality was not the result of a series of sexual crises, but a series of Social crises that rely on our relationships with others and our interpersonal interactions. Although you see eight stages, I don't want you to know all eight. I want you to focus on stage one and then stage five, six, seven, and eight. So stage one, and then five, six, seven, and eight. Stages two through four are primarily through childhood. And while they are all important, they do have kind of a common thread, the assertion of oneself and independence. So I'm just going to skip most of those and move into adolescence and through adulthood. But I do want you to know stage one. The first psychosocial stage, according to Erickson, is called trust versus mistrust. And you will see that all of these are laid out as a conflict. So this one is trust versus mistrust. This goes back to what I touched on when I was talking about attachment studies. During the first year of life, it is essential for a child to realize that he or she has a caregiver who is dependable. Because that will lead to an environment that is predictable, fairly routine, with some exceptions, obviously, life happens, but predictable, fairly routine, and supportive. So at the end of the first year of life, a child will fundamentally, at his or her core, have either a trust or mistrust of others. depending on how he or she was cared for. And again, unless that is addressed later in life, if there is mistrust, that may carry into that person's adult interpersonal relationships. So trust versus mistrust lays the foundation for how you perceive other people throughout the rest of your life. Okay, the next stage that I want you to know is stage 5, identity versus confusion. This is also known as identity versus role confusion. This is approximately age 12 to 18, 12 through 20, depending on who you ask. Essentially, your adolescent years. During this stage, Erickson believed the critical crisis was developing your sense of identity. Now even at the end of adolescence, we may not truly know who we are going to become, but at least we move in a systematic way toward one direction. That's the successful resolution. Are you able to establish at least a consistent identity for yourself? So the question, who am I and where am I going? So if at the end of this stage, Usually as you're going into your college or other training years, preparing for a career, that you have a sense of your identity, who you are, who you want to be, what steps do you need to take in order to fulfill those goals. Or you don't have a strong sense of identity. You don't know who it is you are supposed to become. You don't really have a good sense of what your interests are. Of course, unsuccessful resolution. is going to lead to some personal and professional drifting as you try to realize more about who you are. We'll be talking about identity status in just a minute. But let's move on for now to stage six in Erickson's psychosocial stages. And that is the stage that we experience during early adulthood. This is approximately age 20. 20 to 35, 20 to 40, around that age range. Erickson called this stage intimacy versus isolation. This is the stage in which the significant social crisis is establishing an intimate relationship with someone else. This does not have to be any kind of lifelong bond, but it has to be a successful Long-term relationship with someone else. It reflects your ability to depend on and share your life with somebody else. To open yourself to another person and spend quality time with that person. To be intimate with that person. To share your life with that person. So that's intimacy versus isolation. According to Erickson, people who successfully resolve this crisis will be able to have healthy, intimate relationships. throughout their life. Obviously, people who do not successfully resolve this stage will have problems being able to form and maintain successful interpersonal intimate relationships and may jump from one relationship to the next. As we move into middle adulthood, approximately age 40 to 65, thereabouts, we enter middle adulthood. According to Erickson, the crisis here is called generativity versus self-absorption. This is also called generativity versus stagnation, and I think either of those terms really hits on the crisis that Erickson believed happened during this time. During middle adulthood, most people are at the peak their financial status they are set financially they are probably at the peak in their career so they are stable at least from a professional standpoint they should be stable in home life should have stable possessions so the question now becomes if you are in a stable life position Are you able to give back to others? Are you able to set an example to others and give back to others? That's called generativity. The most obvious way to do this is to help the younger generation. Help out your own children or other people who are just starting out because you are in a stable position. So will you produce something of real value? Will you help others? Will you be generative toward the next generation? Successful resolution of this crisis will lead to someone who later on will be able to look back on his or her life with peace and contentment. You helped others as you were able to. The flip side of this stage is called stagnation. or self-absorption. When some people reach middle adulthood and they are at a stable point in their lives and are probably at a financial and professional peak, they tend to become self-absorbed in that they begin to spend money on themselves, buy themselves lavish gifts, things like boats and sports cars, and they don't give back to others. They focus solely on themselves with the mentality of, well, I deserve this and I'm number one. According to Erickson, people who become stagnant and self-absorbed during middle adulthood, later in life are going to look back with despair and guilt and remorse. Because when they had an opportunity to help someone else, they did not do so and instead focused solely on themselves. The last stage in late adulthood is called integrity versus despair, and Erickson defined this loosely as ages 65 and upward. People who successfully resolved generativity versus self-absorption will have what Erickson calls ego integrity. They will look back on their lives with a sense of fulfillment, and contentment. They will be happy that they lived a good life and that they helped others. And when the time comes to pass on, people who have ego integrity will not be fearful of death because they are confident and believe that they have led a good, successful, productive, generative life. People who were self-absorbed during middle adulthood, people who were isolated, people who had role confusion, all of the negatives of Erickson's crises will look back on their lives with despair. They will be angry. They will feel that they have been cheated. They may feel guilty, remorseful, shameful, hurt, all of these negative emotions. So that when the time comes for death, instead of accepting death with dignity and with grace, people who are experiencing despair will be negative. They may be afraid of death. Again, they may feel shame or guilt, so they are not able to be at peace with themselves when that inevitable time comes. So that is unsuccessful resolution of this last stage. Facing death. with anger or fear due to those unresolved issues from earlier stages in their lives. If you advance to the next slide, I want to focus a little bit more on Erickson's stage five, which is identity versus role confusion. Some developmental theorists have focused on identity because it is such an important part of who we are as we mature throughout life. So they have actually identified four different categories of what we would call identity status. There are two elements of identity status. Is there a crisis of identity present? And is there a successful resolution of that crisis? So as I go through each of these four possible statuses, I want you to recognize whether or not a conflict is present and whether or not it has been resolved. The first one is called identity diffusion. Now remember, keep in mind that we usually associate identity formation with adolescent years. So you have to have in your mind, you know, someone who is approximately 18 years old. What are they doing with their identity status? In identity diffusion, the person has no crisis. In other words, he or she is not worried about establishing an identity, and there is no resolution. This person may just continue working at the same job they worked at in high school, not really worried about making plans for the future, no real investment in his or her identity. So there is no resolution, but then again there is also no crisis. The person is not ready to deal with the issue of identity formation yet. The second status is called identity foreclosure. This is also a case in which there is no crisis. There is no crisis because there is a simple resolution. A person simply adopts the identity of someone else, not in a clandestine way and not identity theft, but simply adopting the values and ideals and maybe even profession of someone else, usually a parent. So someone who is in identity foreclosure would say, You know, I've really enjoyed my college years, but you know what? My dad's a lawyer. He seems pretty happy being a lawyer. He's conservative-minded. I'm going to be conservative-minded because that seems to work for him. So that's who I'm going to be as well. So when someone essentially adopts the values and beliefs of other people, he or she has entered what's called identity foreclosure. He has essentially foreclosed on his own potential for his own unique identity, and simply adopted the identity of somebody else. So again, there's no real crisis here, but there is a resolution. The resolution is not an ideal one, but it is there. The next identity status is called identity moratorium. In this case, there is a crisis present. A person is actively trying to figure out who he or she is. But there is no resolution. The person jumps from idea to idea, profession to profession, training to training, job to job, and there is no resolution in sight. In other words, this person cannot pinpoint what it is that she or she wants to be. But there is some worry and there is some anxiety surrounding that. This person may wish that someone could just wave a wand and figure it out for them. So the crisis of identity is there. There just has been no resolution as of yet. The last type of identity status is the ideal one. This is called identity achievement. This is where there is a crisis. A person goes through a lot of soul-searching, a lot of research, maybe talking to other people to find out who it is that he or she wants to become and what it is that he or she wants to do in life. It is resolved successfully by taking steps toward that goal, by enrolling in college, enrolling in a trade school, getting some training in a particular profession, finding out more about a career of interest, finding out more about volunteering, whatever the case may be. So in identity achievement, There is a crisis, but it is resolved by being proactive about it and making sure that this is the right choice for that person. The last type of development that I want you to know about, if you advance to the next slide, is moral development. Moral development was studied by a man named Lawrence Kohlberg. And what he would do... posed questions of morality in the form of a story to children of different ages. And what he tended to find is that children of different ages were in different moral stages. He was more interested in why children gave the answers that they gave instead of the actual answers. Before we get into the stages, I want you to advance to the next slide and read the story of Hines. This is a classic story. Presented to children by Kohlberg. In the story of Heinz, the question posed to children is essentially, should Heinz have broken into the man's store to steal the drug for his wife? So of course he was interested in hearing if the children answered yes or no. But what Kohlberg was more interested in is the reason why the children said yes or no. Based on the answers given, Kohlberg came up with three moral stages. The first one is called pre-conventional. This is also known as the selfish orientation. Answers to ethical dilemmas are given based on selfish or personal reasons. In other words, what's in it for me? So a pre-conventional child might say, yes. Heinz was right to break in to steal the drug to save his wife's life so the wife can cook him dinner. So you see this selfish orientation. What's in it for Heinz? What's Heinz going to gain by doing this? Conventional morality is also known as a social orientation. That is, our ethical decisions about ethical dilemmas are based on What would society say? Or what would the law say? In other words, society and the law are the highest authority. So a conventional child might answer no. Hines should not have broken into the man's store to steal the drug for his wife because it's illegal to steal. So again, reflecting the social morality where society... or the law is the highest authority figure. The last stage is called post-conventional, or ethical morality. In this stage, a person's decision is based on a person's personal code of morals and values. So a post-conventional child might answer yes. It was right for Heinz to break into the store to steal the drug for his wife because you cannot put a price on human life. A person's life is worth more than money, and that would be based on the child's own personal set of values. So again, pre-conventional morality is based on what's in it for me. It's a very selfish orientation. Conventional morality is based on society, the law, or some other recognized authority figure. Post-conventional morality is based on one own set of personal morals or personal values. That's the end of this lecture.

So I want you to remember first that developmental psychology can be applied to any other area of psychology simply by looking at how we change over time to those specialty areas of study. The other thing I want you to remember is that developmental psychology studies the entire lifespan. Some developmental psychologists may focus simply on infant behavior. Some may focus through the childhood and teen years, some through early adulthood, but there are developmental psychologists who focus exclusively on the aging population.

One thing in developmental psychology is constant. That is... We are always changing.

Our mental and cognitive abilities are always changing. Our behavior is always changing based on our life influences and our physical and intellectual age. So those are a couple of important things I want you to remember as we talk about psychology through a developmental perspective. Probably one more thing I want to remind you of is how rapidly we change. through the childhood and into the adult years.

If you've seen a child and then you don't see that child again for a couple of years, the difference in development can be astounding in just a few years. So it's important to remember that different kinds of development can also happen very rapidly. For this lecture, I'm going to be talking about different kinds of attachment.

I'm going to be talking about emotional... Sorry, not attachment, development. I'm going to be talking about emotional development, cognitive development, personality development, and then moral development.

These are certainly not the only kinds of development that we study in psychology, but I think these are four of the most important and the most well-known. As we talk about the different stages in each of these types of development, it is important to remember that even though a graphic on a slide might show these stages of development as very rigid and step-like and happening over a course of certain years, there is a great deal of individual difference. So if you see a certain stage that tends to occur, let's say, between two and seven years, it's important to remember that some children might get to that stage earlier, some children might finish that stage earlier or later.

So there are a lot of individual differences with respect to how children and adults go through the different stages. The ages that are given are just meant to be guidelines. If you go ahead and advance to the next slide, the first type of development that I want to talk about is emotional development.

Emotional development was first studied in the 60s. There were a couple of prominent researchers who studied how we form and maintain our emotional relationship with others. They were convinced that emotional development began literally at birth in the kinds of bonds that we form with others.

The first bond, obviously, is that between mother and child. And in the absence of the mother, it is between caregiver and child. So some of the early studies on emotional development were done using infants.

And there was a classic series of studies that were known as attachment studies. Attachment is how we form bonds with other people, how we trust them, welcome them into our lives, and give them responsibility to help take care of us. In the original series of attachment studies, there was a setup known as the strange situation paradigm.

The Strange Situation Paradigm. In this study, caregivers, and at the time this was primarily mothers, would bring their infants to an artificial laboratory setting and they would bring their child into a room that had some toys and interesting things to look at. The first phase of the study is recording what the child would do when the caregiver leaves the room.

Babies usually respond in one of two ways. Either they will cry when the primary caregiver leaves the room, or they will seem oblivious to the fact that the caregiver has left the room. So that was part one. How does the child respond when the caregiver leaves the child alone, leaves the room?

The second part of the study was... What happens when the caregiver comes back into the room? That is, when the caregiver and the child are reunited again. And we can observe several different responses. The child can appear happy.

The child can still be crying or upset, or the child can still seem oblivious toward the caregiver. So from the combination of behaviors between the caregiver leaving and the caregiver returning, attachment psychologists develop these three different types of attachment styles. These are noted in infancy and may persist throughout a person's life.

So I want to take a moment to go over these three attachment styles. The first one is called secure attachment. In the attachment studies, this was noted when the child would be upset when the caregiver left the room, but would then be happy when the caregiver returned. So again, a secure attachment means the child is upset when the caregiver leaves the room, but is happy and comforted when the caregiver returns.

What this suggests is that the child understands that this person is responsible for the child's needs. The child can trust that caregiver to provide for them. So just out of almost instinct, he or she is going to be upset when the caregiver leaves because he or she realizes that it is that caregiver that is providing care for them.

But by the same token, because he or she understands that the caregiver is responsible and does take care of the child, he or she is comforted when the caregiver returns. This is the ideal form of attachment. Psychologists believe that infants who have a secure attachment are better able to explore and become more independent later in childhood because the child recognizes that he or she has a stable, responsible base of care. So that enables that child to venture out a little bit more knowing that he or she can always fall back on that stable caregiver.

The second type of attachment is known as anxious ambivalent. These are children who would show signs of distress, who would cry and be upset when the caregiver left the room. But when the caregiver returned, it didn't necessarily comfort the child.

The child may still be upset, may still not be able to be consoled. What this suggests is that the caregiver is providing inconsistent care to the child. The child never knows when that person is going to provide stable support or when that child is essentially going to be abandoned. So the child may be upset when the caregiver leaves because he or she is losing the possibility of caregiving. But when the caregiver returns, it's not necessarily comforting because the child isn't sure that he or she is going to get the care and attention that he or she needs.

This produces a child who is anxious, who is fussy, who is not able to be consoled. Not for biological reasons, not for something like colic or just a poor temperament. This is a child who shows signs of anxiousness because he or she has not learned to trust his or her caregiver.

His or her caregiver may frequently be absent. You know. may not feed the child, may leave the child with a messy diaper, or in a cold room, or in a car, or somewhere where the child at some level recognizes that he or she is not getting the comfort that he or she should be getting. So, this is a child who is perpetually anxious, but is hopeful of receiving proper care, proper support, and proper love.

The last type of child that the attachment researchers observed is called the avoidant child. The avoidant child appeared oblivious when the parent left the room, or caregiver left the room. He or she really didn't show any signs of distress when the caregiver left the room, and by the same token, did not show any signs of being comforted when the caregiver returned to the room. This is a child who has learned that this caregiver is not a source of support or care or love. In other words, the child is always cold and distant.

because at some level he or she learned very early on that this person is not truly a caregiver, so it shouldn't matter if the caregiver is present or not. So to review, securely attached infants are ideal because they understand that the caregiver is a consistent source of support and love in caregiving. The anxious ambivalent child is usually fussy and harder to console because the child is never sure if he or she is going to receive care and love.

The avoidant child is consistently cold and distant because he or she has learned very early on that the caregiver is not going to provide the care and attention that he or she needs. This happens during the first year of life, very early on, so we may think that there's not a lot going on cognitively during the first year of life that most development is physical. But even at that early age, we start to see a laying down of emotional development. Subsequent researchers followed the logic of emotional development into adult romantic relationships.

So for instance, if you were an anxious, ambivalent child, because you received inconsistent care, how would that affect your own interpersonal relationships as an adult? If you take a look at the next slide, you're going to see some of the results. In the first column, you see the parent's caregiving style. This is particularly during childhood. Warm and responsive, cold and rejecting, ambivalent inconsistent.

So these represent the three main types. of parental behavior that results in the second column, infant attachment. A warm and responsive parent is going to produce a securely attached infant.

A cold and rejecting parent is going to produce an avoidant infant. And an ambivalent or inconsistent caregiver is going to produce an anxious or ambivalent child. I want you to focus on the third column, that is what happens in the adult attachment style. If you are securely attached as an infant, you probably have the best success with respect to interpersonal, intimate relationships later on in life.

As you can see, as an adult, you find it relatively easy to get close to others and are comfortable depending on them. This is critical. You realize that that other person is a source of support, someone you can depend on, much like your caregiver was early in life.

If you had a cold and rejecting caregiver, as an adult, you may tend to be avoidant in romantic and significant interpersonal relationships. You do not like getting close to others. You do not tend to trust others. You do not open yourself to others.

or come to depend on others because you never learned that that could happen from your primary caregiver. You were never given a reason to trust others, so why would you trust others in your own adult relationships? And then in the third category, the anxious ambivalent babies. As adults, because there was the opportunity for the attention and the love and the caregiving. Sometimes it was provided by the caregiver.

You tend to reach out for it. You like to get close. closer to others than they may want to be to you.

So as you can read, I worry that my partner doesn't really love me or won't want to stay with me. In other words, an anxious ambivalent baby as an adult may have issues with possible rejection, abandonment, and jealousy. Because care early on was inconsistent, the assumption is the love, And the bond that you have with your partner will also be inconsistent as well, so you tend to reach out for more. Now obviously these are not set in stone, and what happens to you during childhood does not necessarily predict how you will handle adult romantic relationships. But what is important is to realize that there may be a connection.

And if you do have problems in your intimate adult relationships, to think back... as to the emotional attachment that you had as an infant as a possible reason for that. If you take a look at the next slide there's a little bit more on emotional development that I'd like for you to know.

And this is actually the effect of physical contact on emotional development. The effect of physical contact on emotional development was first studied not in people but in primates. by a researcher named Harry Harlow.

And if you've taken a psychology class before, you may have heard of Harlow's studies. Harlow wanted to determine what happened when actual physical contact between the mother and the infant was removed. He called that contact comfort. So he had monkeys who were born to mothers and removed the mother from the scene.

leaving the infant monkey with a choice between two surrogate mothers. The first one is represented by the image you see on the left of this slide. It is essentially a cylindrical wire cage. This was called the wire mother, and the wire mother would have a bottle of milk attached to it.

The second type of surrogate mother was called the cloth mother, and you see an example of that in the second picture. This, again, was not a real monkey, but it had a face that looked similar and was covered in a very soft, furry cloth. So it felt softer. It felt more like the monkey's actual mother.

So given the choice between the wire mother that had milk and a cloth mother who did not have milk, monkeys overwhelmingly preferred the cloth mother. even if it didn't provide any food for them. So that speaks to the importance of contact comfort. Monkeys who have the opportunity for contact comfort tend to choose that over the opportunity for food. And in the third picture, you see another example of a monkey with a cloth mother.

In either case, monkeys who did not have access to their real moms displayed many, many negative consequences in their temperament. When they were put in general housing with other monkeys of the same age, they were very reclusive and they showed signs of anxiety. So no surrogate is a good surrogate for the real thing, for real contact comfort.

Now, there has been research on a phenomenon called attachment parenting. And people who are attachment parenting advocates believe that a mother and child should be in almost constant contact. There is debate about the potential benefits of that and the potential safety risks, but the idea that you should have consistent physical contact with your child is an important one. As a result, children tend to be less anxious and more easily consoled, when you have physical touch.

If you go ahead to the next slide, the next kind of development I want to talk about is cognitive development. This is development in our cognitive or thinking processes. Probably the psychologist best associated with cognitive development is a Swiss psychologist by the name of Jean Piaget. Jean is spelled like Jean.

But in Swiss, Piaget was a Swiss neurologist who was interested in how Now, biological development of the brain was represented in cognitive development in children of different ages. In other words, as the brain developed, what did that support us being able to do cognitively? Obviously, a two-year-old cannot do the same things that an eight-year-old can do cognitively. A three-year-old cannot do the same things that an adult can do. Cognitively, we have different abilities because structurally our brains are different.

During childhood, our brains are still rapidly developing to be able to support the kind of higher order, abstract, hypothetical, and logical thinking we associate with adult capabilities. Young children simply don't have it yet. So what I want to do is take a few minutes to walk through Piaget's cognitive abilities. cognitive stages.

The first stage, also known as stage one, is called the sensory motor stage. If you look at the slide, this is approximately birth to age two, although again, as I've mentioned before, this can vary between children. Birth to two is just average. During the sensory motor period, children are beginning to explore their world through their senses. They begin to move around.

They want to touch everything, put everything in their nose, in their mouth, in their ears, and look at everything and feel everything. This is critical. This is how children learn about their world. So we see coordination of sensory and motor skills as a way for children to learn about their world.

If they can't readily think about an object, at least if they can put it in their hands and smell it and touch it and look at it and see if it makes a noise, they can learn about the object. They can file that into their brains. During this stage, we see one important cognitive milestone.

That is known as object permanence, and you see that in the description of the stage. Object permanence is the understanding that objects continue to exist even if you cannot see them. Again, object permanence is the understanding that objects continue to exist even if you can't see them.

For instance, right now I can't see my car. However, I know that it still exists. And if I go outside to look at it, I know that it will be there. Very young children don't understand this concept.

If you want to try and experiment on a young child to see whether or not he or she has object permanence, it's very easy to do. Take a favorite object or toy, put it on a table in front of the child, let the child look at it, recognize that it's there, and then just put a sheet of paper or... something else to hide it.

A very young child is probably going to look away and start to look around because as far as he or she is concerned cognitively, the object has disappeared. The object no longer exists because he or she can't see it. As children get older, they don't fall for that trick anymore. They know that you have simply hidden the object.

The object is still behind you. the sheet or the towel or whatever you put between the baby and the object. When the child shows signs of understanding that the object is still there, even if it's hidden from sight, that child is said to have object permanence. That is the cognitive marker that advances a child to the next stage of cognitive development.

So once a child has object permanence, Here she moves to the next cognitive stage, which is called the preoperational period. The preoperational period is approximately between the ages of two and seven. Piaget used the word operations to mean specific logic or rules that we apply to our world to better understand it, how the world works. If we have something with wheels and we put it on a downhill slope, we know it is going to roll downhill. So we have an actual set of rules or logic as to how things should behave.

So a preoperational child is starting to understand how things in the world work, but isn't quite there yet. There are a couple of important cognitive markers during this stage. The ones I want you to know are symbolic thought, irreversibility, and egocentrism.

So I'm going to go through each of those three. During the pre-operational stage, children are beginning to have symbolic thought. This is where imaginative and creative play really starts to develop. A child at this age can build a fort out of a box. This is symbolic.

The box represents the fort. He or she can build a city out of twigs and sticks and... little army men and matchbox cars, and that is a town. That is a village.

So these are all examples of symbolic thought. Something is used to represent something else. This is an important cognitive milestone. Irreversibility is the general inability for children at this age to retrace their steps or to go backwards.

So if you have a progression of events that happens from the time the child gets up to the time the child goes to kindergarten, let's say, the child may not be able to say what happened from the time he or she got up to the time you walked out the door in reverse. May be able to say it forward, but not be able to go backwards. So to retrace or undo steps. might be difficult for a pre-operational child to understand that the sequence of events can go forward and backward mentally. The representation may not be there yet.

The last key term that you see under stage 2 is egocentrism. This is not to say that children during this stage are self-centered or narcissistic. What we mean by this as a cognitive view is that children during the pre-operational stage tend to only understand things from their perspective. If something is done to them, they understand it.

If they watch something happen to others, they may or may not understand it. So in other words, if a five-year-old hits her sister and mom says, Don't you know how much that hurt your little sister? The child may rightfully say, no, because she doesn't understand.

She only knows what it feels like when things happen to her. She cannot take the perspective of somebody else and how something might affect that other person. So for a young child, that probably isn't the most effective form of scolding because the child may legitimately say, no, I don't understand. how that feels. I can't take someone else's point of view.

I'm too young cognitively to be able to do that. So that's egocentrism, the inability to take someone else's point of view or to see the world through someone else's point of view. Stage three is known as the concrete operational period. This is approximately between age seven to eleven. And this is when we begin to see the foundations for logical thought, even a little bit of abstract or hypothetical thinking.

You know, if I'm good, then I will get this. And really understanding consequences. Now, it may happen sooner, but usually we associate concrete operational thought with being in stage three. The biggest cognitive milestone that I want you to know during this stage is what's called conservation. Conservation is a key cognitive concept.

When a child has mastered conservation, he or she is considered to be concrete operational. If not, he or she is still in pre-operational. So the mastery of conservation is the cutoff between pre-operational and concrete operational. Conservation is the understanding that matter is conserved regardless of what shape or size it comes in. That is, the amount of something stays the same.

So let me give you a concrete example for this concrete period. If you have the same amount of juice in two glasses, both of the glasses are kind of short and wide. Then you take one of those glasses and pour it into a tall skinny glass. Imagine that scene for a minute. The level of juice appears higher in the tall skinny glass.

A pre-operational child, when asked which of these glasses has more juice, the tall one or the short one, will say the tall one. tall one because he or she is focused simply on the level or the height of the juice in the glass. It doesn't matter that that glass is much skinnier than the other one.

He or she is focused on just the height of the juice, the juice line. The concrete operational child would know because he or she watched you take the juice from an identical glass and pour it into the tall skinny glass, that the amount of juice in those two glasses are the same. So that's the difference between a pre-operational child and a concrete operational child. The concrete operational child knows that the matter has neither been lost or gained.

The amount is the same no matter what kind of vesicle it's held in. The same thing is true If you take two identical sandwiches and you cut one sandwich into, let's say, three pieces and the other sandwich into eight pieces and spread them around a little bit, the preoperational child would say there is more sandwich in the eight pieces than in the three because it appears that there is more, there are more pieces. The concrete operational child would know that because they started the same, It doesn't matter how many pieces you cut each sandwich into, you have the same amount in both.

The last stage in Piaget's theory of cognitive development is called the formal operational period. This is approximately age 11 through adulthood. This is when we begin to have formal logical thoughts. This is the stage in which children are really able to begin thinking abstractly and hypothetically. And they truly begin to understand abstract concepts like justice and altruism and courage that a smaller child may not understand.

So obviously, at this age, we can apply those cognitive skills. to more difficult hypothetical problems. We can synthesize ideas together, evaluate, critique ideas, things that smaller children would not be able to do. So this represents the final culmination of cognitive development.

According to Piaget, not everyone will get to the formal operational period. This is not a universal. Some people will remain essentially in the concrete operational stage. But the fact that you're taking a college-level course makes me assume that all of you are in the formal operational period because you've done a lot of this kind of thinking ever since middle school or junior high at least.

And now you're just doing more of it in college. The last thing I want to mention with respect to Piaget is what you see at the bottom of this slide. Something called schemas. Piaget defined schemas as our mental representation of things in the world, our mental representation of objects and ideas.

So we have essentially in our minds an endless set of folders and files in which we file away information. And when we are presented with a new piece of information, We have to decide what to do with that information. Piaget said with new information, we can engage in one of two processes, either assimilation, or accommodation. Assimilation is when we take a new piece of information and assimilate it into a schema that we already know. For instance, if you see a new car on the street that you've never seen before, once you understand that it has a steering wheel and four tires and an engine and a transmission system and some seats, you say, okay, this is a new example of a car, but I already have an understanding of what car is.

So I'm going to assimilate this new prototype, this new object, into my existing understanding of cars. That would be assimilation. Accommodation is when you are presented with a new object that doesn't fit into any of your recognizable schemas.

It doesn't quite fit and we need to accommodate our schemas for this new information. For instance, if a young child goes to the zoo or the circus, he or she may see something that looks like a horse except it has stripes. And he or she may say, Daddy, Daddy, look!

It's a horse with stripes. To which daddy would say, no, that is a zebra. And the child says, oh, a zebra.

So the child has to accommodate this information. This does not fit into the existing schema of horse. A new, quote, cognitive folder has to be created for zebra. That's the process of accommodation. Now we as adults take it for granted that we sort of have an understanding of all the objects in our world and the schemas in which they fit.

But you have to take a child's perspective, where children are seeing and interacting with new objects every day as they're learning about their world. So these two processes of assimilation and accommodation are happening very, very rapidly because so much of the world is new to them. So what may seem like old hat to us, I've got a schema for this, I've got a schema for that, for young children that's not the case.

This is a very active cognitive process that occurs throughout development. The next type of development that I want to talk about is personality development. There are two prominent psychologists who are credited with laying the foundation for studying the development of personality. One is Sigmund Freud. and the other is Eric Erickson.

So I want to first spend some time talking about Freud. You may have heard of Freud, because Freud is a very notorious character in the history of psychology. He was actually trained, as most early psychologists were, not in psychology, but in medicine.

Freud was not a psychologist. He was a medical doctor. So were many early psychologists, because a psychology program did not exist. He had some very interesting theories.

We'll talk more about some of Freud's theories when we talk about actual personality later on. But for right now, I'd like to talk about Freud's ideas with respect to the development of personality. If you take a look at the slide, you're going to see some words that might not necessarily automatically fit into your schema of psychology. anal phallic genital.

These seem very odd. Freud's theories were kind of out there and they are not necessarily universally accepted in psychology but they laid such a strong foundation in psychology that pretty much every introductory textbook that you read is going to talk about these. Every developmental textbook that you read is going to talk about these. So it's important that you know what they are and then you can draw your own conclusions and as to the validity of these stages.

According to Freud, most of our personality development occurs through what he called psychosexual stages. That is, at some level, we have some underlying conflict of a sexual nature. Successful resolution of those conflicts will produce An emotionally healthy person with a healthy personality. Unsuccessful resolution of any of these stages may produce someone who has issues with his or her personality.

So let's go through each of these. According to Freud, during the first year of life, we go through what's called the oral stage. We learn about the world by putting things in our mouth. If you've spent time with young children, you know he really was on to something. There are lots of nerve endings around a child's mouth.

Of course, Of course, it's necessary for feeding. It serves an evolutionary function as well. But not only do children feed using their mouth, but they use it to explore and understand objects in their world. According to Freud, if you have enough exploration and stimulation of your mouth during the first year, you will have a healthy personality later on.

If you do not receive enough oral stimulation or an opportunity to engage in oral exploration, you may experience anxiety as an adult due to this crisis. More specifically, Freud believed that young children who were denied the opportunity for exploration and stimulation through the mouth during this first year may later in life have a chance to experience anxiety. have what he called an oral fixation.

That is almost an unconscious desire to put things in your mouth. Now this may sound ludicrous, but stop and think about yourself and those who you know. Are you or someone you know a nail biter, a pen cap chewer, an eraser chewer?

a gum chewer, a hard candy eater, or a smoker. According to Freud, if you do at least one of these things, or many of these things, you may have an oral fixation that was the result of unsuccessful resolution of the oral stage. So that is, even to this day, you find comfort and stress relief by putting things in your mouth.

You did not successfully learn, because of lack of stimulation and exploration, that you can move beyond stimulation and exploration from your mouth. You only residually have the understanding that you can get comfort from putting things in your mouth, instead of by other means. So like I said, it's out there, but there may be a nugget of truth to it. There may be a kernel of truth. Okay, so successful resolution leads to healthy personality.

Unsuccessful resolution leads to anxiety, and anxiety may be, quote, cured or remedied by putting things in your mouth. The second stage is called the anal stage, and this was between the first and second year. According to Freud, conflict occurs during this period due to the phenomenon of potty training.

Controlling the bowels and controlling urination are the only real sources of control that a child has over his or her body. He is being told when to eat. He is being told when to sleep. He is being told when to do this or that or the other thing. The only thing that he or she really maintains control over is when and where he goes to the bathroom.

So for Freud, this stage was twofold. He did believe. that just like in the oral stage with the mouth, children did derive pleasure, sexual pleasure, from bowel movements. That part of the idea is pretty out there, and I don't think many people would agree with that. But the idea of having control over your environment is characteristic of this stage, because this is when children really begin to assert themselves in their environment.

They want some autonomy. In Victorian times, When Freud was writing and speaking about his theories, almost all children were potty trained by the age of two. It was just a given.

It was going to happen. That is not as true anymore. It may linger a little bit longer. So during this stage, successful resolution during his time came from successful potty training, which in society was acceptable by age two.

Beyond that, it was less acceptable. So that showed. The child had control and autonomy over his or her environment through successful potty training. Unsuccessful resolution of this stage, that is a child who lingered on potty training, would have control issues throughout his or her life that produces anxiety.

The way that control is regained then later in life is for that child to become what we call Anal retentive. Someone who has complete control over his or her environment, is very tidy, very systematic, and very organized, tends to be considered anal retentive. But that is the way for a person to remedy the anxiety that he or she felt from unsuccessful attempts at potty training early in life. Again, it's out there, but the idea of a child not having any control or any autonomy in his or her life, and that subsequently leading to overcompensation in his or her adult life, does ring true.

Again, there can be a kernel or a nugget of truth in that idea. During the third psychosexual stage, which Freud called the phallic stage, we begin to see the shift focus from the mouth to the anus to the genitals. This is around age four.

Again, these are approximate ages. And this is when children begin to understand that they can receive and derive pleasure from their genital areas, a different kind of pleasure than from eating or a bowel movement, according to Freud. So during this stage, their focus of pleasure, their focus of their attention tends to be on their genitals because they learn it, quote, feels good.

During this stage, there are a lot of potential conflicts happening. The first one is called penis envy. Freud believed that little girls are envious of little boys because boys have a penis.

And girls do not. To the point that girls will begin to harbor a resentment toward their mother because they believe it is the mother's fault that they do not have a penis. I'm going to let that sink in for a minute.

I know that's out there. But Freud observed that even at this young age, there was conflict between mothers and daughters, and he chalked this up to penis envy. So the idea of penis envy is that little girls are jealous of little boys because they do not have a penis. So that's one conflict. This is a conflict faced by girls.

Another conflict during this time... is called the Oedipus Conflict, or I'm sorry, Oedipus Complex. Freud believed that boys around this age developed a desire to essentially want to marry their mothers. In the classic story of Oedipus, he killed his father and married his mother. So during this inner conflict, boys initially resent their fathers because they want all of the mother's attention and love and affection.

And obviously, at least some of it, is going toward the father. In order to resolve this complex, Freud believed that little boys decide to take a different approach. Instead of fighting for mom's attention with the father, The little boy decides to emulate or model his father's behavior. You know, wearing the little tool belt, pushing the little toy lawnmower, thereby winning mom's affection that way.

So as the little boy begins to model his father's behavior, he can win the attention and affection of the mother. Kind of a subversive way to get mom's attention and affection. So the Oedipus complex is resolved in little boys by beginning to model and emulate the behaviors and attitudes of their fathers. That's a lot for a four-year-old. The next psychosexual stage, according to Freud, is called the latent stage.

We call it latent because, according to Freud, there is no overt sexuality. Pleasure is not directed at the mouth, the anus, or the genitals. During this stage, and he said it was ages six through puberty, children will begin to focus on their social relationships with other children. During this time, they may claim to, you know, girls may claim to hate boys, boys may claim to hate girls, someone has cooties.

So in other words, they're forming bonds primarily with their same-sex peers. Now it appears in modern society, if you watch the news and you watch TV shows, that this period is shrinking. Because Freud believed that boys had no interest in girls and girls had no interest in boys until puberty, which we usually associate with teenage years. But it seems like that window is shrinking a little bit. Children are beginning to engage in sexual exploration at a much earlier age now.

They're beginning to show an interest in the opposite sex much sooner. But the hallmark of the latent stage is simply that any kind of sexual focus or pleasure-derived focus is latent. It is sleeping, it is in hibernation, and social relationships for a healthy personality are what is emphasized.

So during this period, a child who successfully forms same-sex relationships will have a healthy personality. Children who do not. may have problems with aspects of their personality later on. The last psychosexual stage, Freud called the genital stage, this is from puberty onward, on through adulthood. This is when our focus goes back to the genitals as a source of pleasure, potentially a source of conflict and anxiety.

So this is when we begin to seek physical contact and physical relationships with other people. And again, like I said before, it appears that the threshold age is dropping in modern society. So again, successful resolution means you will have successful physical relationships with others. That leads to the development of a healthy personality.

I don't think Freud was specific about the age in which that should happen, especially the age of first time. just as long as they do happen at some point. Unsuccessful resolution of that complex or that conflict means that a person may have anxiety issues relating to his or her sexuality.

If you advance to the next slide, I want to spend a few minutes going over the next researcher in personality development, which is Eric Erickson. Now these stages may look a little daunting because Erickson proposed that there are eight stages of personality development. Freud only proposed that there were really five.

Erickson's view of personality development differed because he called these stages psychosocial stages. That is, personality was not the result of a series of sexual crises, but a series of Social crises that rely on our relationships with others and our interpersonal interactions. Although you see eight stages, I don't want you to know all eight. I want you to focus on stage one and then stage five, six, seven, and eight. So stage one, and then five, six, seven, and eight.

Stages two through four are primarily through childhood. And while they are all important, they do have kind of a common thread, the assertion of oneself and independence. So I'm just going to skip most of those and move into adolescence and through adulthood.

But I do want you to know stage one. The first psychosocial stage, according to Erickson, is called trust versus mistrust. And you will see that all of these are laid out as a conflict. So this one is trust versus mistrust. This goes back to what I touched on when I was talking about attachment studies.

During the first year of life, it is essential for a child to realize that he or she has a caregiver who is dependable. Because that will lead to an environment that is predictable, fairly routine, with some exceptions, obviously, life happens, but predictable, fairly routine, and supportive. So at the end of the first year of life, a child will fundamentally, at his or her core, have either a trust or mistrust of others.

depending on how he or she was cared for. And again, unless that is addressed later in life, if there is mistrust, that may carry into that person's adult interpersonal relationships. So trust versus mistrust lays the foundation for how you perceive other people throughout the rest of your life.

Okay, the next stage that I want you to know is stage 5, identity versus confusion. This is also known as identity versus role confusion. This is approximately age 12 to 18, 12 through 20, depending on who you ask. Essentially, your adolescent years. During this stage, Erickson believed the critical crisis was developing your sense of identity.

Now even at the end of adolescence, we may not truly know who we are going to become, but at least we move in a systematic way toward one direction. That's the successful resolution. Are you able to establish at least a consistent identity for yourself?

So the question, who am I and where am I going? So if at the end of this stage, Usually as you're going into your college or other training years, preparing for a career, that you have a sense of your identity, who you are, who you want to be, what steps do you need to take in order to fulfill those goals. Or you don't have a strong sense of identity. You don't know who it is you are supposed to become.

You don't really have a good sense of what your interests are. Of course, unsuccessful resolution. is going to lead to some personal and professional drifting as you try to realize more about who you are.

We'll be talking about identity status in just a minute. But let's move on for now to stage six in Erickson's psychosocial stages. And that is the stage that we experience during early adulthood. This is approximately age 20. 20 to 35, 20 to 40, around that age range.

Erickson called this stage intimacy versus isolation. This is the stage in which the significant social crisis is establishing an intimate relationship with someone else. This does not have to be any kind of lifelong bond, but it has to be a successful Long-term relationship with someone else.

It reflects your ability to depend on and share your life with somebody else. To open yourself to another person and spend quality time with that person. To be intimate with that person.

To share your life with that person. So that's intimacy versus isolation. According to Erickson, people who successfully resolve this crisis will be able to have healthy, intimate relationships.

throughout their life. Obviously, people who do not successfully resolve this stage will have problems being able to form and maintain successful interpersonal intimate relationships and may jump from one relationship to the next. As we move into middle adulthood, approximately age 40 to 65, thereabouts, we enter middle adulthood.

According to Erickson, the crisis here is called generativity versus self-absorption. This is also called generativity versus stagnation, and I think either of those terms really hits on the crisis that Erickson believed happened during this time. During middle adulthood, most people are at the peak their financial status they are set financially they are probably at the peak in their career so they are stable at least from a professional standpoint they should be stable in home life should have stable possessions so the question now becomes if you are in a stable life position Are you able to give back to others? Are you able to set an example to others and give back to others? That's called generativity.

The most obvious way to do this is to help the younger generation. Help out your own children or other people who are just starting out because you are in a stable position. So will you produce something of real value? Will you help others?

Will you be generative toward the next generation? Successful resolution of this crisis will lead to someone who later on will be able to look back on his or her life with peace and contentment. You helped others as you were able to.

The flip side of this stage is called stagnation. or self-absorption. When some people reach middle adulthood and they are at a stable point in their lives and are probably at a financial and professional peak, they tend to become self-absorbed in that they begin to spend money on themselves, buy themselves lavish gifts, things like boats and sports cars, and they don't give back to others. They focus solely on themselves with the mentality of, well, I deserve this and I'm number one.

According to Erickson, people who become stagnant and self-absorbed during middle adulthood, later in life are going to look back with despair and guilt and remorse. Because when they had an opportunity to help someone else, they did not do so and instead focused solely on themselves. The last stage in late adulthood is called integrity versus despair, and Erickson defined this loosely as ages 65 and upward.

People who successfully resolved generativity versus self-absorption will have what Erickson calls ego integrity. They will look back on their lives with a sense of fulfillment, and contentment. They will be happy that they lived a good life and that they helped others.

And when the time comes to pass on, people who have ego integrity will not be fearful of death because they are confident and believe that they have led a good, successful, productive, generative life. People who were self-absorbed during middle adulthood, people who were isolated, people who had role confusion, all of the negatives of Erickson's crises will look back on their lives with despair. They will be angry. They will feel that they have been cheated. They may feel guilty, remorseful, shameful, hurt, all of these negative emotions.

So that when the time comes for death, instead of accepting death with dignity and with grace, people who are experiencing despair will be negative. They may be afraid of death. Again, they may feel shame or guilt, so they are not able to be at peace with themselves when that inevitable time comes.

So that is unsuccessful resolution of this last stage. Facing death. with anger or fear due to those unresolved issues from earlier stages in their lives.

If you advance to the next slide, I want to focus a little bit more on Erickson's stage five, which is identity versus role confusion. Some developmental theorists have focused on identity because it is such an important part of who we are as we mature throughout life. So they have actually identified four different categories of what we would call identity status.

There are two elements of identity status. Is there a crisis of identity present? And is there a successful resolution of that crisis? So as I go through each of these four possible statuses, I want you to recognize whether or not a conflict is present and whether or not it has been resolved.

The first one is called identity diffusion. Now remember, keep in mind that we usually associate identity formation with adolescent years. So you have to have in your mind, you know, someone who is approximately 18 years old. What are they doing with their identity status?

In identity diffusion, the person has no crisis. In other words, he or she is not worried about establishing an identity, and there is no resolution. This person may just continue working at the same job they worked at in high school, not really worried about making plans for the future, no real investment in his or her identity. So there is no resolution, but then again there is also no crisis. The person is not ready to deal with the issue of identity formation yet.

The second status is called identity foreclosure. This is also a case in which there is no crisis. There is no crisis because there is a simple resolution.

A person simply adopts the identity of someone else, not in a clandestine way and not identity theft, but simply adopting the values and ideals and maybe even profession of someone else, usually a parent. So someone who is in identity foreclosure would say, You know, I've really enjoyed my college years, but you know what? My dad's a lawyer. He seems pretty happy being a lawyer. He's conservative-minded.

I'm going to be conservative-minded because that seems to work for him. So that's who I'm going to be as well. So when someone essentially adopts the values and beliefs of other people, he or she has entered what's called identity foreclosure.

He has essentially foreclosed on his own potential for his own unique identity, and simply adopted the identity of somebody else. So again, there's no real crisis here, but there is a resolution. The resolution is not an ideal one, but it is there. The next identity status is called identity moratorium.

In this case, there is a crisis present. A person is actively trying to figure out who he or she is. But there is no resolution. The person jumps from idea to idea, profession to profession, training to training, job to job, and there is no resolution in sight. In other words, this person cannot pinpoint what it is that she or she wants to be.

But there is some worry and there is some anxiety surrounding that. This person may wish that someone could just wave a wand and figure it out for them. So the crisis of identity is there.

There just has been no resolution as of yet. The last type of identity status is the ideal one. This is called identity achievement.

This is where there is a crisis. A person goes through a lot of soul-searching, a lot of research, maybe talking to other people to find out who it is that he or she wants to become and what it is that he or she wants to do in life. It is resolved successfully by taking steps toward that goal, by enrolling in college, enrolling in a trade school, getting some training in a particular profession, finding out more about a career of interest, finding out more about volunteering, whatever the case may be. So in identity achievement, There is a crisis, but it is resolved by being proactive about it and making sure that this is the right choice for that person.

The last type of development that I want you to know about, if you advance to the next slide, is moral development. Moral development was studied by a man named Lawrence Kohlberg. And what he would do...

posed questions of morality in the form of a story to children of different ages. And what he tended to find is that children of different ages were in different moral stages. He was more interested in why children gave the answers that they gave instead of the actual answers. Before we get into the stages, I want you to advance to the next slide and read the story of Hines.

This is a classic story. Presented to children by Kohlberg. In the story of Heinz, the question posed to children is essentially, should Heinz have broken into the man's store to steal the drug for his wife? So of course he was interested in hearing if the children answered yes or no.

But what Kohlberg was more interested in is the reason why the children said yes or no. Based on the answers given, Kohlberg came up with three moral stages. The first one is called pre-conventional. This is also known as the selfish orientation.

Answers to ethical dilemmas are given based on selfish or personal reasons. In other words, what's in it for me? So a pre-conventional child might say, yes. Heinz was right to break in to steal the drug to save his wife's life so the wife can cook him dinner. So you see this selfish orientation.

What's in it for Heinz? What's Heinz going to gain by doing this? Conventional morality is also known as a social orientation.

That is, our ethical decisions about ethical dilemmas are based on What would society say? Or what would the law say? In other words, society and the law are the highest authority.

So a conventional child might answer no. Hines should not have broken into the man's store to steal the drug for his wife because it's illegal to steal. So again, reflecting the social morality where society...

or the law is the highest authority figure. The last stage is called post-conventional, or ethical morality. In this stage, a person's decision is based on a person's personal code of morals and values. So a post-conventional child might answer yes. It was right for Heinz to break into the store to steal the drug for his wife because you cannot put a price on human life.

A person's life is worth more than money, and that would be based on the child's own personal set of values. So again, pre-conventional morality is based on what's in it for me. It's a very selfish orientation. Conventional morality is based on society, the law, or some other recognized authority figure.

Post-conventional morality is based on one own set of personal morals or personal values. That's the end of this lecture.

Transcript for:Exploring Lifespan Developmental Psychology

Transcript for:
Exploring Lifespan Developmental Psychology