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Developmental Psychology Test #4

Terms in this set (110)

Social Cognition
- thinking about the perceptions, thoughts, emotions, motives, and behaviors of self, other people, groups, and social systems
A Theory of Mind
- the understanding that people have mental states such as desires, beliefs, and intentions and that these mental states guide their behaviors
False Belief Task
- used to assess children's development of a theory of mind
- can you understand an outsider's view?
Important early signs of a theory of mind
- infant's ability to get involved in bouts of joint attention
- infant's understanding from their own actions on the world that other people have intentions and goals, and act to achieve them
- pretend play (b/w 1 and 2 years) exhibits the difference between pretense and reality
- imitation of other people (age 1) reveals mental representation of actions and goals behind them
- emotional understanding
Wellman's children's theories of mind
- around age 2, children develop a desire psychology
- by age 4, children progress to a belief-desire psychology
Desire Psychology
- children explain their behavior and that of others in terms of wants or desires
Belief-Desire Psychology
- children's understanding that people do what they do because they desire certain things and because they believe that certain actions can help them fulfill their desires
What are the roles of nature and nurture in the development of a theory of mind?
- in support of the role of nature
- theory of mind was adaptive for the evolution of human species
- development of TOM requires biological maturation
- mirror neuron activity
Mirror Neurons
- involved in theory of mind understandings
- activated both when we perform an action and when we observe someone else perform the same action
Factors that influence children's development of a theory of mind
- social interaction involving language
- parental sensitivity to children's needs and perspectives
- formation of secure attachments
- parental "mind-mindedness"
- cultural perspectives on beliefs and thoughts
Parental "mind-mindedness"
- involves talking in elaborated and appropriate ways about children's mental states
Children's Mastery of theory of mind tasks
- tend to have more advanced social skills
- better social adjustment
- better understanding of differing emotional responses of others
- more mature thinking about moral issues
Inappropriate uses of theory of mind skills
- can be used by bullies and liars
- they are often adept at "mind reading"
Describing and Evaluating Other People
- children younger than 7 or 8 use physical descriptions for themselves (physical appearance, possessions, and activities)
- around age 7 or 8, children begin to think about people in terms of enduring physical traits (funny, nice, bossy)
- around age 11 or 12, children use more psychological descriptors to explain people's behavior
Adolescent's Description and Evaluation of Others
- adolescents describe others in psychological terms (traits, interests, values, and feelings)
- can incorporate seeming inconsistencies into their understanding of others
Important aspect of social cognitive development
- involves outgrowing childhood egocentrism and developing social perspective taking
Social perspective taking
- ability to adopt another person's perspective and understand their thoughts and feelings in relation to your own
- essential in thinking about moral issues from different points of view, predicting the consequences of a person's actions for others, and empathizing with others
Selman's stage of social perspective taking development
- children 3-6 years old are egocentric
- children 8-10 can appreciate different POV's due to development of concrete operational cognitive abillities
- children age 12 become capable of mentally juggling multiple perspectives (reached formal operational stage)
Advances in social cognition
- more likely if parents are good models of social perspective taking, consider their children's feelings and thoughts, and rely on explanations rather than punishment for discipline
Advanced social perspective skills
- help make children more sensitive and desirable as companions
- also makes children more likely to be sociable and popular and enjoy close relationships with their peers
Maintenance of social cognitive skills later in life
- The areas of the cortex that support social cognition and emotional understanding age more slowly than the areas that support nonsocial cognition
- It has been observed that in completing social-cognitive tasks, older adults tend to rely on cognitive strategies such as simple rules of thumb and strongly-held beliefs about people
- Social-cognitive skills may hold up well, especially in "real life" people-reading tasks, because they are used - exercised - every day
Differences in social cognitive abilities of older adults
- Those who have the sharpest social-cognitive skills tend to be socially active and involved in meaningful social roles such as spouse, grandparent, church member, and worker
- It is mainly when elderly people become socially isolated or inactive that their social cognitive skills become rusty
3 basic components of morality
- the affective or emotional component
- cognitive component
- behavioral component
Affective component
- consists of the feelings (guilt, concern for others' feelings, and so on) that surround right or wrong actions and that motivate moral thoughts and actions
Cognitive component
- centers on how we conceptualize right and wrong and make decisions about how to behave
Behavioral Component
- reflects how we behave when, for example, we experience the temptation to cheat or are called upon to help by a needy person
Moral affect
- positive and negative emotions related to matters of right and wrong
- can motivate behavior
Negative emotions
- shame, guilt
- can keep us from doing what we know is wrong
Positive emotions
- pride, self satisfaction
- can occur when we do the right thing
Empathy
- the vicarious experiencing of another person's feelings
- an emotional process that is important in moral development
- can motivate prosocial behavior
Prosocial Behavior
- positive social acts, such as helping or sharing, that reflect concern for the welfare of others
Freud's Theory of Moral Development
- researchers agree about his main themes
- moral emotions are an important part of morality and motivate moral behavior
- early relationships with parents contribute to moral development
- children must internalize moral standards if they are to behave morally even when no authority figure is present to detect and punish their misbehavior
Cognitive Developmental Theorists
- study morality by looking at the development of moral reasoning
- Moral Reasoning
- thinking process involved in deciding whether an act is right or wrong
- believed to progress through an invariant sequence- a fixed and universal order of stages, each of which represents a consistent way of thinking about moral issues that is different from the stage preceding or following it
Piaget's theory of moral development
- includes three aspects
- the premoral period, heteronomous morality, and autonomous morality
Premoral period
- during the preschool years
- children show little awareness or understanding of rules and cannot be considered moral beings
Heteronomous Morality
- Children 6 to 10 years old take rules seriously, believing that they are handed down by parents and other authority figures and are sacred and unalterable
- They judge rule violations as wrong based on the extent of damage done, not paying much attention to whether the violator had good or bad intentions
Autonomous Morality
- At age 10 or 11, most children enter a final stage of moral development in which they begin to appreciate that rules are agreements between individuals - agreements that can be changed through a consensus of those individuals
- In judging actions, they pay more attention to whether the person's intentions were good or bad than to the consequences of the act
Kohlberg and Moral Development
- Lawrence Kohlberg concluded that moral growth progresses through a universal and invariant sequence of three broad moral levels, each of which is composed of two distinct stages
- Each stage grows out of the preceding stage and represents a more complex way of thinking about moral issues
Summary of Kohlberg's Theory (Level 1)
- preconventional morality
- stage 1: punishment and obedience orientation
- stage 2: instrumental hedonism
Summary of Kohlberg's Theory (Level 2)
- conventional morality
- stage 3: "good boy" or "good girl" morality
- stage 4: authority and social order maintaining morality
Summary of Kohlberg's Theory (Level 3)
- stage 5: morality of contract, individual rights, and democratically accepted law
- stage 6: morality of individual principles of conscience
Influences on moral thinking (Freud)
- emphasized the role of parents
Influences on moral thinking (Piaget and Kohlberg)
- cognitive growth
- social interactions with equals
Cognitive Growth
- at the conventional level, the ability to take other people's perspective is required
- at the postconventional level, formal-operational thinking is required
Social interactions with equals
- negotiations to work out differences in perspectives
- advanced schooling
- participation in a complex, diverse, democratic society
Social learning theorists and morality
- focus on the behavioral component of morality
- believe that moral behavior is learned in the same way that other social behaviors are learned: through observational learning and reinforcement and punishment principles
Social Learning Theorists continued
- moral behavior most strongly influenced by situation
- due to situational influences, what we do is not always reflective of our internalized values and standards
Bandura and Morality
- emphasized that moral cognition is linked to moral action through self-regulatory mechanisms that involve
--monitoring and evaluating our actions
--disapproving of ourselves when we contemplate doing wrong
--approving of ourselves when we behave responsibly or humanely
Moral Disengagement
- mechanism by which Bandura suggested we allow ourselves to avoid condemning ourselves when we engage in immoral behavior even though we know right from wrong
- individuals who have perfected moral disengagement tend to be the ones who engage in the most antisocial and unethical behaviors
Evolutionary Theorists and Morality
- focus on how moral thought, emotion, and behavior may have helped humans adapt to their environments over the course of evolution
- Prosocial behaviors (cooperation, altruism) and mechanisms for controlling and inhibiting harmful behaviors may have evolved because they enhanced survival
Evolutionary Theorists continued
- also argue that humans have an evolved genetic makeup that predisposes them not only to behave antisocially but also to empathize with their fellow humans and to behave prosocially and morally
Early Moral Training
- Infants are predisposed to be empathic, prosocial beings and learn many important moral lessons during their first 2 years of life
- Infants begin to learn that their actions have consequences, to associate negative emotions with violating rules, and to exert self-control when they are tempted to violate rules
Moral Socialization
- Kochanska and colleagues
- based upon a secure parent-infant attachment
- development of a mutually responsive orientation
Mutually responsive orientation
- A close, emotionally positive, and cooperative relationship in which child and caregiver care about each other and are sensitive to each other's needs
How parents can foster early moral development?
- by discussing their toddlers' behavior in an open way, expressing their feelings, and evaluating their children's acts as good or bad
Empathy and Prosocial Behavior
- evidence that both are part of human evolutionary heritage
- Newborns display a primitive form of empathy when they are distressed by the cries of other newborns
- From the ages of 1 to 2, infants develop a form of empathy that motivates helping, such as when a toddler tries to comfort someone in distress
- Prosocial behaviors (helping, sharing, comforting) become increasingly common from age 1 to age 2
Nelson's study
- study showed that young children can base their moral judgments on both a person's intentions and the consequences of his act
- showed that Piaget and Kohlberg may have underestimated children's abilities to engage in moral reasoning
Turiel and Understanding Rules
- observed that children distinguish b/w different kinds of rules
- moral rules, social conventional rules
- from their preschool years, children understand that moral rules are more compelling and unalterable than social-conventional rules
Applying Theory of mind
- Once they develop a theory of mind, children's moral thinking becomes more sophisticated
- Preschoolers who pass theory-of-mind tasks are able to distinguish between lying (deliberately promoting a false belief) and simply having one's facts wrong
- Theory-of-mind skills also help young children understand people's emotional reactions to people's behavior, an important consideration in judging right and wrong
Hoffman and Moral Socialization
- compared childrearing approaches that foster moral behavior and moral thoughtand affect
- love withdrawal
- power assertion
- induction
- Love withdrawal
- withholding attention, affection, or approval after a child misbehaves (creating anxiety by threatening a loss of reinforcement from parents)
- usually not effective
Power Assertion
- using power to threaten, chastise, administer spankings, take away privileges (using punishment)
- use often associated with moral immaturity than with moral maturity
- At the extreme, children whose parents are physically abusive feel less guilt and engage in more immoral behaviors such as stealing than other children
- It is generally ineffective to use even milder power tactics such as physical restraint and commands to keep young children from engaging in prohibited acts
- However, Hoffman (2000) concluded that mild power assertion tactics such as a forceful "No," a reprimand, or the removal of privileges can be useful occasionally
Induction
- explaining to a child why the behavior is wrong and should be changed by emphasizing how it affects other people
- more often positively associated with children's moral maturity than either love withdrawal or power assertion
- works well because it breeds empathy
Summary of Hoffman's view of childrearing approaches
- "a blend of frequent inductions, occasional power assertions, and a lot of affection" (2000, p. 23)
- Effective parents use proactive parenting strategies
- Tactics designed to prevent misbehavior and reduce the need for correction or discipline (e.g., distraction for younger children and explicit teaching of values for older children)
Temperament and Morality
- an important determinant of how morally trainable she is and what motivates her moral behavior
Kochanska and colleagues found that children are easiest to socialize if
- They are by temperament fearful or inhibited (likely to experience guilt and distress)
- They are capable of effortful control, and therefore are able to inhibit their urges to engage in wrongdoing
Main developmental trend in moral reasoning during adolescence
- shift from preconventional to conventional reasoning
- During this period, most individuals begin to express a genuine concern with living up to the moral standards that parents and other authorities have taught them and ensuring that laws designed to make human relations just and fair are taken seriously and maintained
- Postconventional reasoning does not emerge until adulthood, if it emerges at all
Antisocial Behavior
- crime rates in most societies peak during adolescence
- Most severely antisocial adults begin their antisocial careers in childhood and continue into adolescence
- Engage in juvenile delinquency
- May have a psychiatric diagnosis of conduct disorder that becomes a diagnosis of antisocial personality disorder as an adult
Juvenile Delinquency
- law breaking by a minor
Conduct Disorder
- a persistent pattern of violating the rights of others or age-appropriate societal norms through such behaviors as fighting, bullying, and cruelty
Two Subgroups of Antisocial Youths
- early onset group
- late onset group
Early Onset Group
- recognizable in childhood through acts such as torturing animals and hitting other children and is persistently antisocial across the lifespan
Late-Onset Group
- a larger group that behaves antisocially mainly during adolescence, partly in response to peer pressures (outgrows this behavior in adulthood)
Origins of antisocial conduct
- moral reasoning
- moral emotions
- social information processing
Moral Reasoning
- Juvenile delinquents are likely than nondelinquents to rely on preconventional moral reasoning (lack a well-developed sense of right and wrong)
Moral Emotions
- Aggressive or conduct disordered adolescents are less likely than other adolescents to show empathy and concern for others in distress, and they often feel little guilt and remorse about their acts
Social Information Processing
- Aggressive or conduct disordered adolescents process social information differently than other adolescents do
- Dodge's social information-processing model
Dodge's Social Information Processing Model
- explains aggressive behavior by an individual who is provoked (by being tripped)
- 6 steps
- Encoding of cues: taking in information
- Interpretation of cues: making sense of this information and deciding what caused the other person's behavior
- Clarification of goals: deciding what to achieve in the situation
- Response search: thinking of possible actions to achieve the goal
- Response decision: weighing the pros and cons of these alternative actions
- Behavioral enactment: doing something
Dodge's Social Information Processing Model continued
- Highly aggressive youths show deficient or biased information processing at every step
- Many aggressive youths act impulsively with an automatic response based on their past experiences
- They are easily angered and quickly attribute hostile intent to whoever harms them
- Severely violent youths have often experienced abandonment, neglect, abuse, and bullying
Patterson & Colleagues and Antisocial Behavior
- found that highly antisocial children and adolescents often grow up in coercive family environments
- Family members engage in power struggles to control each other through negative, coercive tactics
- Parents are negatively reinforced when their threatening, yelling, and hitting temporarily stops their children's misbehavior
- Children are negatively reinforced when their difficult behavior (ignoring requests, whining, temper tantrums) successfully stops their parents' behavior
Patterson & Colleaues and Antisocial Behavior continued
- the coercive family environment sets in motion the next steps in the making of an antisocial adolescent
- The aggressive, unpleasant child performs poorly in school and is rejected by other children
- He then becomes involved in a peer group made up of other low-achieving, antisocial, and unpopular youths, who positively reinforce one another's delinquency
Severe antisocial behavior
- product of a complex interplay between genetic predisposition and social learning experiences
- From an evolutionary perspective, male aggression may have evolved to enable successful competition for mates and genetic contribution to the next generation
- Some individuals (female and male) are genetically predisposed to have difficult, irritable temperaments, impulsive tendencies, and other response tendencies and personality traits that contribute to aggressive, delinquent, and criminal behavior
Gene-Environment Interaction
- mechanism by which children with certain genetic predispositions may become antisocial if they also grow up in a dysfunctional family and receive poor parenting or are physically abused
Dodge and Gene Environment Interaction
- Children who have a variant of the monoamine oxidase (MAOA) gene (a gene on the X chromosome that normally contributes to an ability to control our tempers) that results in low MAOA activity
- If they are abused or mistreated may attribute hostile intentions to others
- Cannot control their anger and lash out impulsively
Gene Environment Correlation
- Mechanism by which children who inherit a genetic predisposition to become aggressive may actually evoke the coercive parenting that fosters aggression
- Evocative Gene Environment Correlation Effect
Evocative Gene Environment Correlation Effect
- evident even when aggression-prone children grow up with adoptive parents rather than with their biological parents because these children bring out negativity in their adoptive parents
Other Risk Factors and Protective Factors that can influence the outcome for a child who is genetically predisposed to be aggressive
- prenatal environment
- complications during delivery
- cultural contexts
- subcultural and neighborhood factors
- school environment
Biopsychosocial Model of Aggression
- Dodge & Colleagues
- integration of influences on antisocial behavior that recognizes the contributions of biological predisposition, individual psychology, and social or contextual factors
Dodge & Colleagues Dynamic Cascade Model
- shows how various influences, playing out over childhood and adolescence, can result in chronic and serious violence in adolescence and beyond
- Biological factors (genes) and sociocultural context factors (a disadvantaged, violence-prone neighborhood) put certain children at risk from birth
- Then a chain of causal events plays out: experiences with harsh, inconsistent parenting in early childhood, poor readiness for school, early behavior problems, failure in elementary school (both academically and socially), lack of appropriate parental supervision in early adolescence, and affiliation with antisocial peers
Efforts to prevent antisocial behavior
- An emphasis on positive parenting, beginning in infancy or toddlerhood
- Comprehensive, school-based programs aimed at children at risk
Conduct Problems Prevention Research Group
- used a multi-pronged approach involving the teaching of social information-processing and social skills, efforts to improve academic skills, and behavior management training for parents
- Proven effective in reducing antisocial behavior and preventing diagnoses of conduct disorder and related psychiatric disorders
Kohlberg and Changes in Moral Reasoning
- 20 year longitudinal study
- most adults in their 30s still reasoned at the conventional level, although many of them had shifted from stage 3 to stage 4
- There is evidence that social-cognitive skills hold up well across the lifespan
- Most studies find no major age differences in complexity of moral reasoning, at least when relatively educated adults are studied and when the age groups compared have similar levels of education
Kohlberg's Theory in Perspective
- Kohlberg's idea that everyone progresses from preconventional to conventional reasoning is well supported
- However, the idea that people continue to progress from conventional to postconventional reasoning is not supported
- It has been charged that Kohlberg's theory is biased against people who are non-Western, politically conservative, and female and that it slights moral emotion and behavior
Is Kohlberg's Theory culture biased?
- Cross-cultural studies suggest that post-conventional moral reasoning emerges primarily in Western democracies
- People in collectivist cultures that emphasize social harmony often look like stage 3 conventional moral thinkers in Kohlberg's system, but in fact they may have sophisticated concepts of justice that focus on the individual's responsibility for others' welfare
Is Kohlberg's theory biased against political conservatives?
- Researchers find some merit in the idea that Kohlberg's theory favors people who support human rights and take liberal positions on issues
Is Kohlberg's Theory Gender Biased?
- Kohlberg's stages were developed based on interviews with males only and in some studies, women seemed to reason at stage 3 when men usually reasoned at stage 4
-
Carol Gilligan and Kohlberg's Theory
- Carol Gilligan argued that boys, who traditionally have been raised to be independent, come to view moral dilemmas as conflicts between the rights of two or more parties and to view laws as necessary for resolving these inevitable conflicts (a perspective reflected in Kohlberg's stage 4 reasoning)
- Gilligan argued that girls are brought up to define their sense of "goodness" in terms of their concern for other people (a perspective that approximates stage 3 in Kohlberg's scheme)
Gilligan's Arguments that Kohlberg's theory is Gender Biased
- A "masculine" morality of justice focused on laws and rules, individual rights, and fairness
- A "feminine" morality of care focused on an obligation to be selfless and look after the welfare of other people
Neither morality is more "mature" than the other
Gilligan's Work continued
- claim of Kohlberg's bias not really supported
- her work increased our awareness that both men and women often think about moral issues in terms of their responsibilities for the welfare of other people and that Kohlberg emphasized only one way - a legalistic and abstract way - of thinking about right and wrong
New Approaches to Morality
- Developmentalists today are trying to correct for Kohlberg's overemphasis on rational deliberation in moral reasoning by exploring the emotional component of morality
Recent research on morality
- The emotions and the regulation of emotions when children and adults engage in moral or immoral behavior
- The idea that gut emotional reactions and intuitions play an important role in morality
- dual process models of morality
Dual Process Models of Morality
- both deliberate thought and emotion/intuition inform decisions about moral issues and motivate behavior
Religion and Spirituality
- guide the moral thinking and behavior of many people
Religiosity/Religiousness
- has generally been defined as sharing the beliefs and participating in the practices of an organized religion
Spirituality
- involves a quest for ultimate meaning and for a connection with something greater than oneself
- may be carried out within the context of a religion (some people are both religious and spiritual) or outside it (some people say they are spiritual but not religious)
Changes in Religiosity and Spirituality over the years
- Dillon and Wink
- Religiosity was strong in adolescence, decreased somewhat in middle age, and rose again in people's late 60s and 70s closer to its earlier levels
- Spirituality was judged to be at lower levels than religiosity throughout adulthood and changed more dramatically with age, increasing significantly from middle age to later adulthood, especially among women
Wink and Dillon continued
- found that individuals are highly consistent over the years in their degrees of religiosity and spirituality, probably because of their personalities
- Religiosity and spirituality contribute positively to psychosocial adjustment but in different ways
Benefits of Religiosity
- contributes positively to psychosocial adjustment
- Religiosity in late adulthood is correlated with a sense of well-being stemming from positive relationships with other people, involvement in social and community service activities, and the sympathetic and caring qualities associated with Erikson's concept of generativity
- Highly religious adults are very involved in their religious communities and act on their religious beliefs by serving others
- Other research suggests that religious involvement is linked to good health, good mental health, and prosocial behavior
Benefits of Spirituality
- contributes positively to psychosocial adjustment
- Highly spiritual older adults have a sense of well-being derived from personal growth
Spiritual adults are highly involved in activities that allow them to express their creativity and build their knowledge and skills
- Spiritual adults display qualities associated with wisdom such as introspectiveness and insightfulness
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