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.
Saturday, November 24, 2007
Friday, November 23, 2007
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.
Friday, November 16, 2007
memories
Memory is used in all parts of our daily life. The concept of memory is used in nearly all actions that we take part of. It will help us in passing a test to recall certain elements in our lives. There are three elements that go into memory. The first task that goes into memory is encoding. Encoding is when you take in the information that you are attempting to remember. There are two ways to do this: the first being verbatim and the second is gist. Verbatim is the details of the situation and gist is the “essence of the event” (Siegler and Alibali p.228). The second element of memory is storage. The storage part is when the memory is store in your brain. The third part of memory is the retrieval. This is the actual recall of memories. These three parts are needed in order to have a successful memory.
One of my strongest childhood memories is of an accident that I had when I was in the first or second grade. I was playing tag with some friends when I decided to climb the jungle gym. When I reached the top of the jungle gym, I slipped and fell. As a result I received a cut to my head and had to be rushed to the emergency room. Without the use of autobiographical memories I would not be able to recall events from my own life. Although this memory of mine is one of my earliest, research has shown that individuals are able to remember events before this. An example would be toddlers remembering to kick their leg in order to make a mobile move. This is the very basic kind of memory. As children grow older their memory improves and gets better. Even recollection of memories before the age of four is hard to believe.
The recollection of memories for all ages can be altered to suit are own needs. The changing of memories is easiest among young children. Children are able to change their mind about what they remember because they are easily suggestible. Memories can be planted into children mind by the way that we ask them to recall the memory. The questioner can “trick” the children into thinking that something happen when in fact it did not by the way that they ask the question. Another way that children get memories confused is by having to image what happen. They will often confuse a new event with a past event. Or they will combine two past events into one. A third problem with children’s memories is that they can be influence with suggestion by others. I have this memory of taking my mothers keys out of her purse and starting the car when I was a toddler. Everyone swears by this event that it did actually happen. But since I was so young, how much of my memory was the telling of stories by my family.
The recollections of memories are not just needed by the individual, but often times by others. Sometimes children are needed to testify in court. With the ability to be easily suggestible and easily influence, society needs to create a standard for questioning children. As stated in the book, open-ended questions are the best way to question children. Children are less likely to please the questioner and create answers.
Memories are useful in all parts of life. Memories can benefit the person trying to remember things as well as others relying on that other person memory. As we grow older, we start to rely more on our memory. Memories in older people also are more important than anything else.
Theory of mind
Theory of mind is the understanding that individuals have mental states that not always is accessible to others or the public and this may guide other people behavior. Children from age 4 to 5 years old start recognising that minds are separate and that may hold different thoughts.
Pretended play is an activity that prompts children to think about mental states. They start making mental representantions of an object pretending to be another or performing other social roles such as cops, robbers and thier super hero spiderman. Children when use their mental representaition in role play, they start acting, talking and pretending to be someone esle, which help them understand not everyone have the same attitudes, behavior, desires, beliefs and thoughts. Cops and robbers for example are two individuals who are different from one another and have different set of mind; therefore role play helps the child see this difference.
Family can also foster Theory of mind in children by doing family discussions in conflict with other member in their family. For example, how their sibilings might be feeling, what motives, intention and beliefs other siblings. The more often mothers talk about other people's mental states with their infants, toddlers and preschoolers, the more likely children are able to recognize the different mental states of others and develop understanding toward other people set of mind. Also, kids who have older brother are more likely to develop a quicker acquisition of this theory than other childrens are because they learn from their sibling and are exposed to more complex pretended play and interact with older siblings how already are succesful at understanding theory of mind of others, who influence and help their younger siblings to do so.
Pretended play is an activity that prompts children to think about mental states. They start making mental representantions of an object pretending to be another or performing other social roles such as cops, robbers and thier super hero spiderman. Children when use their mental representaition in role play, they start acting, talking and pretending to be someone esle, which help them understand not everyone have the same attitudes, behavior, desires, beliefs and thoughts. Cops and robbers for example are two individuals who are different from one another and have different set of mind; therefore role play helps the child see this difference.
Family can also foster Theory of mind in children by doing family discussions in conflict with other member in their family. For example, how their sibilings might be feeling, what motives, intention and beliefs other siblings. The more often mothers talk about other people's mental states with their infants, toddlers and preschoolers, the more likely children are able to recognize the different mental states of others and develop understanding toward other people set of mind. Also, kids who have older brother are more likely to develop a quicker acquisition of this theory than other childrens are because they learn from their sibling and are exposed to more complex pretended play and interact with older siblings how already are succesful at understanding theory of mind of others, who influence and help their younger siblings to do so.
Pretend Play and Egocentrism
Regarding Tuesday’s lecture on Pretend Play, I found it interesting to learn that some adults still have imaginary friends. I realize the adult version of the imaginary friend may often take a very different form than the childhood playmate, but my first reaction to this information was surprise and skepticism that adults would continue to maintain relationships with fictional characters.
However, this reminded me of a study I read for another class, describing another child-like thought process that changes in a similar way as the child matures. This was the idea of egocentrism. When my psychology classes have covered this topic, they have taught that this is a stage a child leaves at about age five, and after this point the child/adult no longer interprets the world egocentrically. This study was designed to explore that theory. The main part of the study used a variation of the “Sally doll” experiment, where a doll leaves a room, someone moves a toy she had put away, and the child is asked where “Sally” will look for the toy when she returns. In the variation for adults, there were four boxes, each painted a different color. “Sally” left her toy in one box, and when she left, her friend moved the toy to another box – and moved all four boxes, so when “Sally” returned, she found them in a different order than when she left. Half of the adults were also told where the friend hid “Sally’s” toy. The adults were then asked to assign a probability to each box (0 to 100 percent), showing what they thought the chance was that “Sally” would check that box first to find her toy.
The adults that were not told which box currently held the toy assigned equal probability to all four boxes. The adults that did know the new location of the toy assigned a slightly higher probability to the box that contained the toy. Although the scenario was significantly more complex than the traditional “Sally doll” experiment, it appears that adults also may use some egocentric thought processes. I think the adult version of the invisible friend is similar to this. The child does not completely lose their way of thinking, or replace it with something new – instead, the old behaviors and thought processes are modified and adapted and merged with new, better, and more mature ones. Some studies we’ve read in this class have indicated other areas where adults display similar thinking patters to children, such as determining which side of a scale will go down depending on the magnitude and location of weights. I think it would be very interesting to see the results from similar experiments exploring other thought patterns and behaviors from childhood that are assumed not to exist in adults.
Gender Differences in Child Development
This class has a lot of overlap with a few of my other classes and I always find it very interesting to relate my classes to one another and to analyze how different ideas and topics can be applied to one another. In my Psychology of Gender class we discuss many of the different ways males and females differ and how they are the same. I am curious how this relates to child development and how gender differences affect the way we each develop. I have noticed in almost all of our readings for this class almost none of them look at developmental differences between boys and girls and almost always rely solely on age of the child instead.
In my Psychology of Gender class we often talk about how most of the differences that we observe between girls and boys are socially constructed. We reward children who follow the sex roles we create for them while we penalize or at least fail to reward children who don't conform to these roles. Parents create and reinforce the differences we observe between girls and boys by the way that they treat their child’s actions. There are also many differing explanations for the gender differences between boys and girls.
Leonard Sax wrote a book called “Why Gender Matters: What Parents and Teachers Need to Know about the Emerging Science of Sex Differences.” In this book he talks about how a few years ago most experts believed that differences in how girls and boys behave were mainly due to differences in how they were treated by their parents, teachers, and friends. He said however that it is very hard to hang on to that belief today. An avalanche of research over the past twenty years has shown that sex differences are more significant and profound than anybody guessed. Sex differences are real, biologically programmed, and important to how children are raised, disciplined, and educated according to Dr. Sax. One of the main examples that he shows of this is that girls are born with more sensitive hearing than boys, and those differences increase as they grow up. So when a grown man speaks to a girl in what he thinks is a normal voice, she may hear it as yelling. Conversely, boys who appear to be inattentive in class may just be sitting too far away to hear the teacher-especially if the teacher is female. These male students are then much more likely to be diagnosed with ADD and given drugs to treat this, which is often unnecessary because the boy simple can’t hear his soft spoken female teacher so she thinks that he is just not paying attention to her.
Sax also discusses how the amygdala is the place known for negative emotions to be held in our brains. He says that girls are able to talk about their feelings sooner than boys because they develop the connection between the amygdala and the cerebral cortex much earlier. This however develops much later for boys, thus showing why they find it hard to discuss their feelings articulately. I am interested to see how this will apply to social interactions that we are learning about next week and how males and females differ in their social interaction. Females tend to have strong close relationships that rely on emotions and feelings, while males close relationships rely more on doing things or activities with another person to build a strong relationship. These gender differences in children are very interesting to me in the developmental process.
Leonard Sax wrote a book called “Why Gender Matters: What Parents and Teachers Need to Know about the Emerging Science of Sex Differences.” In this book he talks about how a few years ago most experts believed that differences in how girls and boys behave were mainly due to differences in how they were treated by their parents, teachers, and friends. He said however that it is very hard to hang on to that belief today. An avalanche of research over the past twenty years has shown that sex differences are more significant and profound than anybody guessed. Sex differences are real, biologically programmed, and important to how children are raised, disciplined, and educated according to Dr. Sax. One of the main examples that he shows of this is that girls are born with more sensitive hearing than boys, and those differences increase as they grow up. So when a grown man speaks to a girl in what he thinks is a normal voice, she may hear it as yelling. Conversely, boys who appear to be inattentive in class may just be sitting too far away to hear the teacher-especially if the teacher is female. These male students are then much more likely to be diagnosed with ADD and given drugs to treat this, which is often unnecessary because the boy simple can’t hear his soft spoken female teacher so she thinks that he is just not paying attention to her.
Sax also discusses how the amygdala is the place known for negative emotions to be held in our brains. He says that girls are able to talk about their feelings sooner than boys because they develop the connection between the amygdala and the cerebral cortex much earlier. This however develops much later for boys, thus showing why they find it hard to discuss their feelings articulately. I am interested to see how this will apply to social interactions that we are learning about next week and how males and females differ in their social interaction. Females tend to have strong close relationships that rely on emotions and feelings, while males close relationships rely more on doing things or activities with another person to build a strong relationship. These gender differences in children are very interesting to me in the developmental process.
Pretending Childhood
As our guest lecturer, Alison, talked about pretend play in our class on Monday, it brought back some of my memory from childhood. When I was a kid, I loved to tie one end of a jacket, blanket, or large towel around my neck and leave the rest hanging down my back so it would look like a cloak. Then I would run around and jump from place to place, pretending that I can fly with this ‘wing’ that I put on myself. The reason I was pretending to be flying came from the cartoon I was watching around the time, where the super hero had a cloak and flies around to save people.
When I was four years old, my sister was born. And by observing her childhood, I remember that there was a brief period in which she had a doll as her friend, and she would talk to her and hug her during sleep. Sometimes our family even needed to make a space for her ‘friend’ to sit when we are watching TV together. However, unlike me, I don’t remember ever seeing my sister pretend to be some super hero or princesses in her childhood. Comparing my sister’s childhood with mine, I agree with one of the study Alison talked about, that boys tend to have pretend identity while girls tend to have imaginary friend.
While reviewing my childhood experience and my sister’s, I realized that pretend identity or imaginary friend is often influenced by culture and media. The super hero that I was pretending during my childhood was from a Japanese cartoon, which is the reason that I don’t think children in the US at the time would pretend to be that same hero. Moreover, as time changed, the media has also changed. With a lot more new characters from cartoon or other media types, children’s pretending target has changed. Only the classic super heroes, such as Superman and Spiderman, survived and still stayed as the top in children’s pretending list.
When I was four years old, my sister was born. And by observing her childhood, I remember that there was a brief period in which she had a doll as her friend, and she would talk to her and hug her during sleep. Sometimes our family even needed to make a space for her ‘friend’ to sit when we are watching TV together. However, unlike me, I don’t remember ever seeing my sister pretend to be some super hero or princesses in her childhood. Comparing my sister’s childhood with mine, I agree with one of the study Alison talked about, that boys tend to have pretend identity while girls tend to have imaginary friend.
While reviewing my childhood experience and my sister’s, I realized that pretend identity or imaginary friend is often influenced by culture and media. The super hero that I was pretending during my childhood was from a Japanese cartoon, which is the reason that I don’t think children in the US at the time would pretend to be that same hero. Moreover, as time changed, the media has also changed. With a lot more new characters from cartoon or other media types, children’s pretending target has changed. Only the classic super heroes, such as Superman and Spiderman, survived and still stayed as the top in children’s pretending list.
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