I Can’t Tell You What I Remember!

Although memory has been a favorite topic in many of the psychology courses that I have taken, I have not had memory and language acquisition concepts presented together. These two developmental processes and the way in which they interact can have crucial implications for later treatment of trauma experienced in the preverbal stage of early childhood. Research indicates that memories that may have been formed before a child acquires language will be difficult at best to be described verbally by the child once language is acquired. It seems that the most likely of reasons for this phenomenon is that the memory was not encoded using language and therefore not retrievable using verbal cues, discovering the precise retrieval cues may be problematic.

When an adolescent or even an adult is experiencing inexplicable difficulties in their everyday life, there can be a link to early childhood trauma. Symptoms of mood disorders such as post-traumatic stress disorder, dysthymia, and major depression often find their roots in the early childhood stress/trauma experienced by individuals. What interests me is how we can begin to treat a client who is unable to recall and articulate in words events that may be contributing to their disorder. Some individuals have flashes of memory, like snapshots in time or just a ‘sense’ that they were abused, neglected, or mistreated as very young children but cannot retrieve the memories. The inability to remember or recall more than scant details of the past may lead to further complications when the client is unable to substantiate their feelings with memories.

I am interested in working with children who have experienced trauma and am aware that simple talk therapy may not be completely effective. I have been investigating alternative ways in which traumatic memories can be accessed in an effort to guide a client toward better mental health. One such alternative to talk therapy is art therapy. The notion behind art therapy is that creative artwork gives clients an additional language to explore their current situation, identify issues, and cope with their feelings. The use of paint, clay and puppets are a few of the ways that children create in art therapy. Art therapy may be particularly effective with preverbal memories because although language originates in the left side of the brain, artwork engages the right side of the brain, which matures and develops earlier than the left/language side. Through use of creativity and the right brain children may retrieve memories, gain insight, and/or be able to ‘describe’ events that have activated trauma responses and abetted a detrimental life course.

If I weren’t already sold on art therapy…the connections that I have made between the developmental concepts of language acquisition and memory would have led me in that direction.

Let's Pretend- More than a Game

Children often begin to pretend from around the age of 12 months, or when they start talking. There are three different types of pretend play that children engage in: self as vehicle, toy/object as vehicle, or nothing as vehicle. In all of these situations, children ascribe physical or behavioral traits to a person, object, or imaginary being that aren't actually there. For example, in Alison Shawber's guest lecture, we were introduced to a little boy who's pretend identity was Spiderman. When spiderman, the boy pretended to shoot webs from his wrists and jump from building to building (couch to couch). We met a few personified objects, like Lamby Baby, the pregnant lamb, too. We also learned about imaginary friends, one of whom, Elfie Welfie, had rainbow hair and sometimes bossed her creator around. Research with children has shown that pretend play, specifically "role play," is correlated with better performance in many areas of development, such as verbal ability, sociability, creativity, theory of mind, and executive function. A question I wish I'd asked is, "Have there been any long term studies regarding pretend play and adult behavior and beliefs?" Of course, adults can self report on whether or not they played pretend as a child, but they may have insufficient memories of that age to accurately report it all the time. What I want to know is, does pretend play predict important social skills that we value as a society once an individual reaches adulthood, like empathy, cultural sensitivity, charity, ingenuity, diplomacy- all of which, on some level, require us to put ourselves in someone else's place? If we have practice pretending to be someone other than we are, that might make us more able to understand someone else's circumstances. This is related to the Simulationist View, which suggests that we understand what someone else is thinking or feeling by "simulating" that experience in our own mind. If we are able to better simulate what someone else might be going through, that may lead to the above valued behaviors.

We know from experience that not all imagining produces good results- many criminals fantasize about doing harm to others before they carry it out. This pretending does not seem to help them put themselves in their victim's place. But pretend play in a healthy childhood environment seems to be a positive predictor of many mental and social skills. Pretend play may be a tool that parents and schools can use more effectively to benefit children's development.

Social Learning

Learning is a process that occurs through relationships and interaction with the external environment. The sociocultural theory addresses the effect of a child's social environment on their cognitive development. Lev Semenovich Vygotsky was one of the first researchers to develop sociocultural theory. In this thoery, Vygotsky cites two central ideas which are as follows; "(1) cognitive development occurs in social interaction, and (2) psychological functioning is mediated by cultural tools, including language (Alibali & Siegler 109). " A great deal of research has recently been shifted to focus on cultural differences and what effects these differences have on psychology. In general, most people adopt the beliefs and customs of the culture they are immersed in. One's culture can shape the way they learn about the wrold and their place within it. Community and culture also depict the way a child will spend the majority of their time and what activites they will be exposed to.
Learning is thus very subjective and dependent on the environment in which it ensues. To me this seems to counteract the theories of conceptual development learned in Chapter 8. In an earlier post I discussed biological concepts and my skepticism that they are innately determined. From the biological concepts theory, it is stated that preschoolers eventually come to understand the concept of inheritance without direct instruction on the concept. However, in some Native American cultures where folk lore plays a large part in their belief system, it is believed that humans have animal relatives and can often morph into animals. In such cultures, inheritance is often determined by the will of the gods and is not necessarily genetically based. Their concpet of biology is very different from the concept of biology that I was taught. Thus as seen in sociocultural theory, learning takes place largely through community and social interaction causing it to be a product of nurture over nature.

Social Cognition: Machine VS Human's and their role in learning

Although some of the topics that apply to social cognition seem to be very obvious I found this subject extremely interesting. Of course humans have evolved to learn how to imitate and observe other people in order to gain new knowledge about the world, but I think that the research involving human vs machine and their roles in learning give a really interesting insight into the way that we interact with the world as children.
While reviewing the lecture slides I couldn't help but find it strange that children treated QRIO as if he were a mentalistic agent yet further on in the lecture we learned that other research had found that children are able to distinguish between hands and tools. Although QRIO behaved and responded in the same ways that mentalistic agents do, he still had the physical qualities of a machine. The tools in which were used to grasp the objects in the Woodward studies also responded in similar ways as the human hand had shortly before it and yet the children were able to distinguish it as an inanimate object. And even more interesting is the fact that the children were unable to learn the same task from a machine that a human had performed previously in the "unfulfilled goal study".
I feel like this information can be beneficial to improving how we teach infants and children novel tasks. I think that in today's society we rely greatly on machine's and these studies prove that children are better able to learn when they are observing real human interaction. By using this information we can come up with new techniques that involve teachers or parents showing them things which aid in children's development. Unfortunately I think that a lot of new toys are being developed to teach kids new tasks that are based on using inanimate objects but this may not be the best way in which the teach them. I think that parents should be aware that children respond much better the observing humans and can imitate their actions much better.
I think that it would also be interesting to see how beneficial some of the new programs that are offered for the TV and computer are to children's development. Do they really learn new skills from these things? Even if they were shown to be learning from these machines I wonder how much more efficient they are than if they were to be taught these things through more conventional ways. It seems to me that human interaction is extremely important and by eliminating that would have negative effects on children's development. Because in today's world we do relay so heavily on machine's I don't see things moving in the opposite direction and so it would be important to continue studies that emphasize the importance of human interaction to child development and learning.

Blog #5 Final Post - Forgotten sexual abuse

One of the most controversial topics in regards to child development is the existence of false memories. I believe that any memories implicating sexual or physical abuse by an adult should be taken very seriously and investigated immediately. However, overwhelming evidence suggests that children can be easily persuaded and manipulated into believing stories, facts, or narratives that may have never occurred. In the documentary “Capturing the Friedman’s”, a variety of sexual abuse allegations surfaced against Mr. Friedman and his youngest son. Many of the children denied that any abuse supposedly took place while others adamantly accused Mr. Friedman of continuous and detailed sexual abuse. The question is who does one believe if there is minimal evidence except for a child’s testimony? The topic of false memories came up a lot while I was taking a course this summer called Psychology of Trauma. I was most fascinated with those children who denied that abuse had occurred when overwhelming evidence proves that in fact it had. There are a number of theories why children would deny the existence or experience of abuse. One in particular is especially alarming. Jennifer Freyd here at the University of Oregon proposes a theory called Betrayal trauma that may explain why children may truly forget that a traumatic sexual abuse has occurred. An extremely high proportion of children are sexual abused by someone whom they have an emotional attachment with. This person is often their caregiver, parent, friend, or relative. When a child is sexually abused by person they share an attachment relationship with it violates and undermines the trust and power that is in place. Most children depend upon attachment relationships with their caregiver or parent(s) in order to secure a healthy psychological and emotional wellbeing. In order to maintain this attachment relationship they adapt to the abusive situation by “forgetting” the abuse. Children in this situation unknowingly experience psychogenic amnesia of the abusive memories, which allows them to sustain the attachment relationship. Interestingly, many children who initially forgot documented sexual abuse have been known to remember many years later. Often by this time is difficult to prosecute (statute of limitations) and even harder for victims or overcome. Although this theory may help explain the existence of false memories it is not easily applicable for the Friedman case. Many of the children supposedly abused were older and little physical evidence existed which could prove that Mr. Friedman and his son were guilty. Also, many of the children may not have considered Mr. Friedman or his son persons with whom they shared an emotional attachment with although the children likely respected them both. Because of this the male students would have no emotional or psychological need to suppress or “forget” sexual abuse memories. Although the Betrayal Trauma theory may not explain why some children swore by the abuse while others denied that it happened, I personally believe that by the end of the documentary both Mr. Friedman and his son were compelled to tell the absolute truth: that they did in fact sexually abuse some of the male students.

Continuing Cognitive Development

I find it interesting that the majority of the theorists studied in current developmental psychology focuses almost exclusively on the cognitive development of infants and children. Taken to a literal extreme this would tend to imply that cognitive development ends, or is “accomplished” by the end of the teen years and the beginning of adulthood. While some theorist have begun to focus on the effects of age on cognitive faculties (how abilities deteriorate in old age) there remains a gap between the teen years and the senior years. Cognitive development continues throughout life including the adult years.
One of the pillars of development theory was Piaget. His theories describes cognitive development in stages: the sensorimotor stage (ages 0 –2); the pre-operational stage (ages 2-6); the concrete operational stage (ages 7 –11) and; the formal operational stage of cognition (ages 12 and above). I dispute the limited end stage and profess that there are other landmark ages of cognitive development. I would suggest a stage start at age 18 and would term it the age of responsibility. Another at age 25 corresponding to the beginning of the brain’s decrease in size. And again at age 35, which is the youngest age at which one could become president of the United States, representative of grey matter and wisdom.
More helpful to understanding a lifetime of cognitive development in my opinion, is the developmental stages outlined by Erickson. According to his theories, as opposed to Piaget and others, in each stage of development the person deals with multiple developmental conflicts. One never fully arrives; cognitive development never ends.
How cognitive development changes during the adult years is a neglected area of research in Developmental Psychology. More attention should be paid to the years between 12 and 70.

interviewing children

In a study done in interviewing techniques by Limberg, et al (2003) interviewers were trained in one or 3 procedure for assesing children form age 6 to 7 , who were interviewed after watching a film about a mother hitting her son. As result, researchers concluded that dolls and memory aids do not help on children's memory recallation, and first open question hurt recall. When interviewer digged more, this implied more suggestions and comfabulation; therefore one uncover incorrect information. They suggest let the children take over and remain silent after doing their first recall. Several studies have tested proceddure on how effective an intervention procedure is well performend, but in the case of the Jessy in the movie shown at class. His parent and him were victim of a lack of knowleage about how the police and intervieres coached and misleaded children in testifying erroneous information. There was even one children who strongly believed he was a victim of sexual abuse, When we was asked if he remembered all the events he described before about being abused at the computer calss, his answer was " no I can't rember" he also said after hypnosis he came out knowing he was abused by these two man. I not only felt sorry for Jessy who went to yell for 13yrs, his parent commiting suicide and a family completly in caos, but these children who were mislead and were condititoned to believe they were victims of abused. The person who was treated with hypnosis, I think was really affected and surely believed he vively had those horrible experiences. I could see in his body language, tone of voice that this hypnosis and interviewing procedure affected his memory and thier emotional state, which it was very harmful for them. Thankfully, interviewers in assesing children testimony are more aware on not only getting erronous info and not adding harmul emotional state to a child.