This course deals with the fundamentals important in Psychology as a science. Psychology is the study of behavior and the mind. But all of us have tried to understand and predict behavior throughout our lives, first with our parents, then with our peers and teachers, and finally with our friends and co-workers. The difference is that psychological scientists conduct research that discovers the facts about behavior and our minds, so its principles are based on science and not just on intuition and experience. The course covers the fundamentals of learning, memory, motivation, emotion, and how behavior changes as we age. The content of the course has received approval from "Quality Matters", an organization that evaluates on-line courses. The learning outcomes are: (1) Students will be able to recognize and describe major psychological principles of learning; (2) Students will be able to distinguish between different types of memory; (3) Students will be able to describe how motivation and emotion can affect how we behave; and (4) Students will know how cognitive behavior and social behavior develops as we age.
Lecture Video 4.2: Social Development
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From the course by Georgia Institute of Technology
Introduction to Psychology as a Science 2 – Fundamentals of the Mind and Behavior
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Georgia Institute of Technology
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From the lesson
Section 4: Development
We also need to understand how behavior changes as we age. In this section we will discuss how cognitive and social behavior develops. We will also discuss my area of research, how memory changes in old age.
Meet the Instructors
Dr. Anderson D. SmithRegents’ Professor Emeritus
School of Psychology
Last time we talked about cognitive development.
And now in this video we're going to talk about social development.
The important word here is attachment. That is, we have to very early in life
make a bond with the caregiver Typically mom, which really is the contact we have
with the world around us. Now the attached caregiver because she
used to believe that that was because she provided the nourishment.
She's the one that fed us our food. When we sucked we got nourishment.
And so that's why we attach our sales to the mom, the caregiver.
Ans actually that's not completely true. Harry Margaret Harlow, famous
psychologist actually worked with infant monkeys and they gave them surrogate
mothers. Really two kinds of surrogate mothers, a
wire mother, which was just made of wire and a block head, but this also had a
feeding tube that the infant monkey could drink from, and then a cloth mother a
soft cloth with sort of fuzzy and warm but no feeding tube and when the monkey
would do is it would go to the wire mother when it needed nourisment because
that's where the milk was, and suck. But would stay most of the time,
essentially all the time when it wasn't feeding, with the cloth mother.
So, the nourishing wire mother and the comfortable cloth mother, the infant
preferred the cloth mother. He called that contact comfort.
The fact that it got, really, comfort from contact.
With its fuzzy and warm mother, a very important phenomenon.
So it's the contact, and the nurturing of the mother, not necessarily just the
nourishment that it provided. Now Bowlby is the psychologist who
developed attachment theory, and He actually studied inference in orphanages
and the belief was that the orphanages provided nourishment and they provided
all the things the child needed and so they would develop normally.
But what, what, what we discovered is they didn't develop normally.
They had cognition deficits, they had middle health deficits.
Because what they didn't have was this contact comfort from the caregiver.
In fact, most orphanages in the 1st part of the 20th century, when we devloped
attachment theory had ten or 15 infants per helper, or caregiver.
So the didn't have that contact And they didn't have that attachment that was so
important for normal development, according to Bowlby .
A colleague of mine, Tiffany Field at the University of Miami.
She actually, work, is the Director of the Touch Research Institue at the
University of Miami. believes that touch is very important.
In fact she found when she was working in a neonatal laboratory.
Where they had, infants that were severely small and fragile because they
were premature. That if touch them and just massage them
with touch, they develop much quicker. They develop better and they gain weight
faster simply by this ability to touch them and providing massage.
And she found by the way this touch really is an amazing intervention in, in
creating normal, healthy social development.
Contact comfort, or attachment, attachment to the caregiver.
But also touch is important, but also familiarity is important.
for example this, we know with lots of animals, there's a critical period for
developing attachment early in life. In fact, if certain animals do not have a
mother, if they, their mother died before, while they were still very small
infants, that the object that they are familiar with, one that's there, they'll
develop attachment to that object. For example imprinting, that's what it's
called. I went to a center, for example, that
takes wild fowl, geese and cranes. And they atta-, they, they don't have a
mother so they don't learn how to, how to migrate.
So they actually use an ultralight airplane and the geese learn to follow
that airplane and they learn how to fly in In together and have normal migration.
I'm going to s, by the way when I was child, I had 200 chickens.
I sold eggs as my 4-H project. And I once had a rooster.
And of course, if you get a rooster, you don't want it to be with the chickens,
the hens, because that, you want the eggs to develop without the rooster's help.
And so I left, I took the rooster out of the chicken pen and since it was a little
small infant, it imprinted to me. So everywhere I went for about two years,
the rooster followed me. very interesting sort of attachment, It
imprinted to me. So this is critical period that after
that it won't occur. Now another thing, if the caregiver that
it's attached to is separated from the infant then anxiety will occur.
And by the way, this separation anxiety occurs in all cultures.
So, and as Mary Ainsworth points out, there's a film in your OLI that you can
look at and see this. there's a difference between secure
attachment and insecure attachment, that is where you have a normal anxiety when
the caregiver's taken away, and when you don't have that, because of the insecure
attachment, and watch the films, you'll see that, in OLI.
Now Kagan is a psychologist who studied separation anxiety, and he actually
looked at the percentage of children that cried when the mother left the room.
For example, they'd bring the infant and the mother into a experimental room and
then experimenter would come in, and the experimenter and mother would leave.
And, of course, that creates seperation anxiety in the child, and we looked at
what percentage cried. Here you can see this sort of increase in
crying, up to about, 13 months and then a decrease.
He also looked at the difference between children that went to daycare In children
that stayed home with their mother all the time.
And really there was no, there were no differences.
Day care, is not something that produces this insecure attachment.
It really is separation from the mother, that does that.
No differences between day care and staying at home.
And it peaks at about 13 months, that's the peak of the critical period for
separation anxiety. Now the major psychologist in study of
social development is Erik Erickson. He was a psychoanalyst, he was not a
scientist, but he developed from his observations about social development,
and the reason he's such an important figure in theory about social development
is because he dealt with the entire lifespan, from infancy all the way up
through late adulthood. Let's look at what he, what he found,
what he said. He said there's certain cro.
sort of chalenges that occur at a particular age.
And then you need to positively satisfy that challenge to move to the next stage,
beginner's stage theory. The first, less than a year, is this
challenge of trust versus mistrust. And the positive solution to that, would
be that the child develops. A healthy trust relationship with their
caregiver, what we've been talking about, attachment.
Between one and three, the toddler, the challenge is between autonomy and shame
and doubt. And the satisfaction of that is when the
child learns what it can control and what it cannot control in the environment.
So it's just beginning to learn its relationship to its own behavior.
The next stage is preschool between the age of three and six, and the challenge
is between initiative and guilt, and the child, if the possibilities satisfy this,
the child learns to be independent by exploring the environment.
It learns to explore and be independent from the caregiver.
Elementary school between six and 12 that the challenge is between industry and
inferiority and here, the child is, is learning to do things well, do things
correctly, probably learn standards of others primarily in school.
Then we have adolescence, the teenage years, and here the challenge is identity
versus role confusion. And the adolescent to satisfy it
positively, the adolescent will develop a well defined and positive sense of self
in relationship to others. Then we have the adult stages, young
adulthood, 20 to 40. And the, here the, the, challenge is
intimacy versus isolation. And the positive solution that is the,
the, at the young adult learns to love and they have long term commitments with
others. Then middle adulthood, 40 to 60.
In the challenges generativity versus stagnation.
And the positive solution to that is the person develops interest in guiding the
development of further generations. Typically by becoming a parent.
And then we have late adulthood, 65 and above.
And the challenge is ego identity, excuse me, ego integrity versus dispair.
And here, the person develops, sort of accepts their life as it was or not.
So that's Erik Erikson, a developmental theorist that really has taken
development to mean the whole lifespan from infancy to late adulthood and has
had tremendous influence on psychology. Thank you.
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