Psych Notes: Attachment Cont'd

Critical Periods: the optimal period shortly after birth when an organism's exposure to certain stimuli or experiences produce proper development

-those who are deprived of touch have trouble forming attachment when they are older

Types of Attachment

1. Secure:  where your parents can go off to work but you feel comfortable being alone
2. Avoidant: when your parents come home and you feel upset that they left you
3. Anxious/Ambivalent: excited to see parent come back but ignore them later (or vice versa)

Parenting Styles

1. Authoritarian Parents: parents in charge
2. Permissive Parents: laissez-faire; kids in charge
3. Authoritative Parents: parents and kids compromise

Erik Erikson

-neo-Freudian

-worked with Anna Freud

-thought our personality was influenced by our experiences with others

Stages of Psychosocial Development

each stage centers on a social conflict

1. Trust vs. Mistrust: 0-2 yrs. old
• babies want to know if they can trust their caregivers
2. Autonomy vs. Shame & Doubt
• toddlers begin to control their bodies (ie: toilet training)
• control temper tantrums
• big word is "NO"
• can they learn control or will they doubt themselves?
3. Initiative vs. Guilt: 3-6 yrs. old
• From "NO" to "WHY?"
• inquisitive about the world and ask lots of questions
• Is their curiosity encouraged or scolded?
4. Industry vs. Inferiority
• school begins
• Am I successful or am I worthless?
• Do we feel good or bad about our accomplishments?
• We are, for the first time, evaluated by a formal system and our peers
• can lead us to feel bad about ourselves for the rest of our lives (inferiority complex)
5. Identity vs. Role Confusion: teenage years
• Who am I?
• try out different roles
6. Intimacy vs. Isolation: young adulthood
• balance work and relationships
• sort out priorities
7. Generativity vs. Stagnaion: Middle Ages
• Is everything going as planned?
• Am I happy with what I've done?
• Mid-life crisis sometimes occurs at this time
8. Integrity vs. Despair: senior citizens
• look back on life
• Was my life meaningful?

Cognitive Development

-Jean Piaget

-kids learn differently than adults

-it was thought that kids were just stupid versions of adults

-Schemas: ways we interpret the world around us; children view the world through schemas 

-Assimilation: incorporating new experiences into existing schemas

-Accomodation: changing an existing schema to adopt to new information

Stages of Cognitive Development

1. Sensorimotor Stage (0-2 yrs. old)
• experience the world through our senses
• do not have object permanence
2. Preoperational Stage (2-7 yrs. old)
• have object permanence
• begin to use language to represent objects and ideas
• egocentric: cannot look at the world through anyone's eyes but their own
• Conservation: the idea that a quantity remains the same despite changes in appearance and is part of logical thinking
• rejecting a sippy cup over the bottle because they think it doesn't have the same content
3. Concrete Operational Stage (7-11 yrs. old)
• can demonstrate concept of conservation
• learn to think logically
4. Formal Operational Stage (11+ yrs. old)
• abstract reasoning
• manipulate objects in our mind without seeing them
• hypothesis testing
• trial and error
• metacognition
• not every adult gets to this stage

Types of Intelligence

-crystallized intelligence: accumulated knowledge, increaeses with age

-Fluid Intelligence: ability to solve problems quickly and think abstractly, peaks in the 20s and then decreases over time

Moral Development

-Lawrence Kohlberg

1. Pre-conventional Morality: based on rewards and punishments
2. Conventional Morality: look at morality based on how others see you (if your peers or society thinks it's wrong, then so do you)
3. Post-conventional Morality: based on self-defined ethical principles; you behave based on your own set of ethics