Chapter 1: History, Theory, & Research Strategies

    "Give me a long shot of whiskey and a short shot of gin.
    I've got a long way to go and a short time to make it in."
    Freely adapted from one of many versions of The Signifying Monkey.

    "If my daddy had ever thought that any of us were even dreaming about not finishing school, he would have probably killed us in our sleep. He got sent to work in the coal mines when he was 6 years old and never learned to read,  the rest of his life. He was relieved when World War II started because it got him out of the mine."

The speaker is a good friend of mine whose daddy grew up in the Old South. Whether we think about it or not, a lot of the values that we use when raising children are based upon both good and bad things that happened to us when we were growing up.

 

    "Of course your mother was let out of school when it was time to pick cotton. I don't know if she ever went into the fields and picked any, but no children went to school during the cotton harvest."

My father told me this about my mother's life about 25 years after she died.

    This semester, we are covering 19 chapters of material in less than 19 weeks. We have a very long way to go and a relatively short time to make it in. Since Developmental Psychology is about people, each lecture will begin with one or more true stories or quotes from real people to try to put a face on the variety of developmental issues that we will all face if we live long enough. Some of us will have to experience or have already experienced most of the issues in the book; others, by either accident or choice, will not face marriage, rearing children, or dealing with elderly parents and their inevitable deaths. To me, a full life is often an exciting or stressful one, depending upon one's philosophical orientation. The image that comes to mind is the scene in Parenthood where Steve Martin has a mental image of a roller coaster as his son does not perform as well as he had hoped at a school pageant. If you can force yourself to be an existentialist (it's very difficult and takes lots of practice), even tragic events are interesting. A friend who is an existentialist asked me if I was with my mother when she died. When I said "yes," he said, "That must have been interesting." Rather than being offended, I thought for a moment and realized that it was interesting in addition to being merely tragic. By the way, this cold-sounding individual went to the trouble of sending his own mother to my mother's funeral, which was in the middle of nowhere, Tennessee.

    Human development is the field of study devoted to understanding both constancy and change throughout the lifespan. The research in this field is both practical (applied) and scientific. This field is also interdisciplinary; it draws from people who are trained in education, medicine, psychology, anthropology, and a variety of other areas too numerous to mention here. As an example, I am on a moral development listserv that is international. I read emails from people who are training teachers and are upset because the current class seems to be amoral and are wondering what to do to make them MORE moral before they unleash them to be role models for our children; other emails discuss the measurement of emotion by scientific instruments when a moral decision is made. Of course, in developmental psychology as in other branches of psychology we rely on theories, which are integrated, organized sets of statements that try to describe, explain, and predict behavior. Theories are ONLY theories; they are meant to give structure and coherence to our thoughts, but they are not the Ten Commandments and are always subject to change or revisions when more accurate or insightful information becomes available.

    There were originally two basic theoretical views of the developing person. An organismic theory assumes that change is stimulated from within the person; psychological structures inside you underlie and control development. Mechanistic theories view the person as more passive; you are molded by your environment. If this sounds a lot like the nature versus nurture controversy, I myself find a resonance. Nature refers to the hereditary information that we just get as a gift (!?) from our parents and have no control over. Nuture looks at all of the environmental forces that act upon us such as our physical environment, parents, friends, siblings, schools, and our American culture and/or ethnic subculture. Another spat within the theoretical community has been whether development is continuous or discontinuous. Continuous theories do not break up development into stages. Discontinuous theories emphasize a particular skill or attribute at a particular age. Age-stage theories always emphasize that the stages are qualitatively different from each other and represent a definite break from the previous way of thinking or behaving. If you remember anything from General Psychology, you know that age-stage theories are tremendously popular: we have Freud, Piaget, Erikson, Kohlberg, and Kubler-Ross to name a few of our better known theorists. I believe that this type of theory is popular because it is easy to understand and memorize; people want things to be neat and tidy, even in humans, who are NOT neat and tidy. Some theories emphasize the stability of behaviors or abilities across a person's life. These theories typically stress heredity or early experience. Other theories state that change is possible and likely if new experiences support it. There is a lot of controversy on the stability versus change issue, especially across different domains of development. I think that the only way to explain this is to give an example: my cognitive abilities, or my thinking domain, is unlikely to change very much at this point in my life because a) I had parents who stressed intellectual development, b) it is somewhat hereditary and my older relatives were very bright in spite of being unschooled, and c) it is a skill I have to use every day of my life. On the other hand, my interpersonal or social domain has changed a lot since I was in my 20's. I went to LSU and got accustomed to being with people who were either drunk or under the influence of some unknown chemical almost every waking moment. Today, I genuinely hate drunks and will leave a party or club if there are too many intoxicated people; they just don't amuse me and I wonder who they will kill on the way home if they don't find a designated driver.

    The modern lifespan perspective attempts to put all of the squabbles where they belong...in the intellectual trashcan. All modern theories recognize the organismic and mechanistic viewpoints, they no longer talk about nature versus nurture but ask how they work together, they look at a person's entire life instead of the first 20 years, and in general the lifespan perspective is a more complex and thoughtful way of looking at human growth. The lifespan perspective has four qualities that makes it unique:

    I was thrilled when I read the above list because most of my previous psychology textbooks have ignored the first and last items. Freud felt that everything important happened before age five, and almost all of the age-stage theories ignored the context surrounding the person, implying that we all charge through a sequence of changes regardless of our historical eras or uniquely personal triumphs or disasters. This course is divided into eight pieces that roughly parallel Erikson's stages. We don't endorse Erikson as THE theorist; the eight pieces are merely a convenience. Please refer to page 13 for details. Within each of the eight periods, we will be looking at physical, cognitive, and emotional development. These three domains overlap and interact with each other throughout life.

    There is a section on historical foundations, but after reading it, I came to a decision: you may read it as background and I promise not to test you on it (pg 11.) I really need to begin with the mid-twentieth century theories just to make sure that you are familiar with them as a springboard for our current theories. Your text gives an excellent review of Freudian theory, so I will let you do that review. The term "psychoanalytic" refers not just to Freud but to a whole family of theorists who emphasized early childhood experiences, the unconscious, and conflict between different parts of the personality. Erikson is grouped with Freud because while he presented a model of lifelong development, he seems to believe that if one does not resolve a given psychosocial conflict at the appropriate age, one remains "stuck" emotionally. While Freud in toto is not terribly popular today because his theory is so relentlessly sexist, we still must give him credit for looking at childhood experiences and thinking about the child's relationships with other people as an important basis for later relationships in life.
    Another early theory is behaviorism. Traditional behaviorism focuses on classical conditioning and operant conditioning. The main thing that the behaviorists believed is that the environment is the ONLY variable worth looking at because it is not possible to theorize about what might be happening in someone's mind. (Actually, if you were trained as a behaviorist, as I was, you are not allowed to use that word, mind. Don't be alarmed; I'm now a Jungian, which is much weirder but a lot more fun.) Since classical conditioning only works with reflexes and operant conditioning is the same thing as dog training, even the behaviorists realized that something might be missing, so Bandura came up with social learning theory. This intuitively obvious theory says that people can learn by watching others rather than doing the target behavior themselves. In later years, Bandura waded into semi-heresy by further talking about what is in our minds (horrors!!)...he used concepts such as expectancy and self-efficacy. To me, the most interesting aspect of Bandura's theory is that people learn behaviors even when they see the behaviors being punished. Bandura's research was supposed to have a great impact on the content of TV shows (his main work on observational learning was done in the 1960's), but when we compare today's shows to those of the 1960's, we are modeling some grossly unacceptable behavior and vocabulary for our younger viewers. TV shows during the 1960's were not exactly intelligent or even entertaining, but they weren't the toxic waste that passes for programming today. Behavior modification has been useful in situations where there is an undesirable behavior that needs to be eradicated or a positive behavior that needs to be fostered; if one can really use reinforcement, punishment, and extinction properly, the behavior will change. Modeling is also a great force in behavior modification but it can take a bit longer to accomplish. Of course, all of the behaviorist theories have been criticized for placing too much emphasis on the environment.
    Piagetian theory is important because it looks at children as active learners. Piaget proposed four cognitive stages, which are adequately explained in your text on page 16. He used naturalistic observation of his own children and later did clinical interviews wherein he asked children of various ages why they answered a given problem in a particular way. His work stimulated a huge amount of research on children, but he has been criticized for assuming that no major cognitive changes happen after adolescence. Additionally, newer experiments have demonstrated that he underestimated the age at which his cognitive stages occur. In every chapter up through adolescence, we will cover Piaget's theory in detail.

    At the present time, Berk feels that there are four new theoretical approaches competing for our attention. Information processing theory focuses on problem solving and memory. It does not cut up thinking into a series of stages but views cognitive development as continuous. People are viewed as active beings who modify their thinking in response to the environment. This theory tends to ignore creativity, imagination, and real-life learning situations. The newest twist on information processing research is called developmental cognitive neuroscience. Since this involves either getting examined using PET scans and fMRIs, most of this research takes place in a medical setting. Ethological theory looks at the survival value of a behavior and tries to place behaviors in an evolutionary context. This approach emphasizes the "sensitive period," which is defined as the optimal time in the child's life for certain abilities to emerge and in which the person is especially responsive to environmental influences. While ethologists have traditionally studied attachment, recently they have looked at all aspects of how a person interacts with the social, cultural, and physical environment. A recent area of research in evolutionary psychology is the study of how people process abstract versus social information. Based upon an experiment, a group of us at SAC was given a seemingly simple problem to solve. Out of about twelve people, only one got the correct answer. We were then given the identical problem couched in social terms; it was ridiculously easy and we were all able to answer correctly immediately. I personally felt idiotic for missing the first problem, but the experiment was a wonderful example of how socially important information gets processed in a completely different way from other information! I will return often to this theoretical approach because some of the most exciting developmental research today uses evolutionary theory as its basis. The third new theory that Berk discusses is Vygotsky's sociocultural theory. He primarily discusses cognitive development as a socially mediated process rather than something that "just happens" at the correct time. I like Vygotsky quite a bit because his theory can be applied to all types of learning at a variety of ages. When you read Vygotsky's ideas, then you know that Grandpa is not just wasting time when he tells the children about his own childhood. Vygotsky brings personal involvement of significant others into the learning process.  Brofenbrenner's ecological systems theory views the person as developing within a multilayered system of relationships. Ecological transitions, or shifts in context, are considered to be important turning points in development. Brofenbrenner is my least favorite theorist, so you will not see his contributions on closed-book Test 1.  I believe that we all intuitively realize that our exosystems and macrosystems change more rapidly today then they did 100 years ago, and all of the rapid change affects the way that we raise our children. We look at cross-cultural research to discover what is a biological process and what is a product of a person's culture. Sometimes, cross-cultural studies are the ONLY way that we can untangle biological and environmental issues important to development.

    To sum up theories of development, they can be distinguished from each other by their focus on various aspects of development. Some theorists look at thinking; others look at social interaction; still others look at a tiny piece of behavior such as speech or intelligence. The various theories also differ in the amount of emphasis they place on biological processes versus social processes. Every theory has strengths and weaknesses. At the present time, there is no theory that gives a complete picture of the developmental process.

    Your text has rather a long section at the end of Chapter 1 on research methods. I am not going to re-do Berk's lecture but make a few comments on research and human development. First, if you are confused about Berk's description of research methods, you are welcome to look at my lecture for Chapter 1 in my General Psychology course. The section on research methods is after history and systems, so just scroll down and look for it if you need it. My training is in experimental psychology, so I am intimately familiar with the experimental method. I need to say that most of the information in the field of developmental psychology is NOT gathered using the experimental method. How can I tell? I just look for words like "randomized," "control group," and "independent variable" and if they are not in a short description of the research, then the research is OTHER, which is to say that one is not allowed to make any cause-effect statements about the behavior being described. If you read the section on longitudinal research and cross-sectional research quite carefully, you will see that psychologists are doing interviews, taking data on school performance, giving questionnaires or tests, but not doing experiments often.  The data that is gathered is usually analyzed using correlational methods, which means that these researchers are NEVER allowed to make a cause-effect statement based upon their findings. What this means is practical terms is that developmental psychology is the "softest" sub-area in what is considered a "soft" science. Human research is messy and difficult to design properly; when doing an experiment, one usually has to use deception, which involves a mandatory debriefing session. We also have ethical guidelines which prevent us from doing experiments to find out directly what causes what in human behavior. Because this area relies so strongly on correlational evidence, most of the data will be expressed as "X is associated with alcoholism" or "Y appears to result from a mother who is physically distant." If the author decides to stretch the envelope on non-experimental data, she might even say "Z might be caused by stress during pregnancy," but you need to always keep in mind that if there was no experiment, the statement is only an indication of probability except in cases of clear-cut biological causation (such as trisomy 21 causes Down's syndrome or alcohol during pregnancy causes FAS).

    This lecture did not have any required external links because the book information was so exhaustive and I could have worn you out terribly by sending you all over the worldwideweb in search of competing theories. In all future lectures, you will have two or more links per chapter, and the information from your links will be on your closed-book tests. You will recognize a link because it will be in a different color from the text and it will be underlined. Just place the cursor on the underlined word or sentence to get to the www articles that I have spent hours deciding upon. This is not for credit because I don't want any www posts for Chapter 1, but go to any major search engine like www.google.com and type in the term "human development." You will get a huge number and variety of "hits" ranging from foundations working to provide a better moral or ecological environment to articles on how humans grow physically. This is an enormous data area. Good luck and have fun with it.

To prepare for Test 1, you must know the following material:

Define what a theory is

Has a single theory been able to explain all aspects of human development?

What is an age-graded influence?

Give an example of an age-graded influence

Give an example of a history-graded influence

Contrast Freud & Erikson

Explain id,  ego & superego

Briefly explain Piaget's theory

Contrast Piaget & Vygotsky

Compare Piaget's theory with information-processing theory

Explain evolutionary developmental theory

Explain exactly what is important to behaviorists

Describe the Little Albert experiment

Explain Skinner's concept of reinforcement & punishment

List some psychologists who have stage theories of development

Explain Bandura's theory, including modeling & social learning

Define independent variable & dependent variable

What is the major limitation of correlational research?

Explain plasticity

Explain imprinting & sensitive period

Define resilience

 

   If you are ready to take the quiz on Chapter 1, click on this sentence.
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           This fractal courtesy of Paul Carlson