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The Developmental Area: KEY THEME – External Influences on Children’s Behaviour.
Developmental Psychology is concerned with how people change and develop across their
life.
There are 2 shared assumptions of developmental psychologists:
1. People change and develop with age:
Other areas of psychology focus on psychological processes in adults. Cognitive psychology
looks at cognition taking place in the mind of the adult individual, and social psychology looks at
processes taking place between adults. However, our everyday experience tells us that people
change with age. What happens in the mind of a child is not entirely the same as what happens
in the mind of an adult, and groups of young adults do not necessarily behave socially like
groups of older adults.
2. Human development is an interaction of the influences of nature and nurture:
Strengths of the Developmental Area Weaknesses of the Developmental Area
Developmental Psychology has improved Some aspects of development are hard to
our understanding of people at different study scientifically: One limitation in the
ages and stages of development: developmental area is the difficulty psychologists
Understanding people are different at different face when attempting to measure children’s
ages has improved our understanding of human thoughts and behaviour. We must therefore
cognition, behaviour and emotion. This has question how valid measurements of children’s
changed our whole view as a society about, for behaviour are, particularly when the tests are
example, what it means to be a child. Prior designed by adults! For example, Bandura et al’s
theorists such as Kholberg, who explored the study has been criticised for assuming that the
development of moral reasoning, children were children’s behaviour towards the Bobo doll was
largely thought of as little adults. Developmental ‘aggressive’. In actual fact it may be that the
psychologists have shown us that children, children interpreted their own behaviour as playful.
adolescents and adults each have their own
psychological characteristics.
Developmental research can help us There are many ethical issues in the
positively influence children’s behaviour: developmental area: This area can pose some of
Bandura et al demonstrate the influence of the greatest difficulties in designing experimental
aggressive role models on children’s behaviour. procedures, materials and measurements that are
Understanding the influence of observational appropriate for child participants. This is
learning has led to measures such as film particularly true when studying behaviour such as
certifications, to reduce the negative impact of aggression (e.g., Bandura et al) or behaviour that
media violence on young audiences. Similarly, can impact on children’s health (e.g., Chaney et al)
techniques such as positively reinforcing the as protecting children from physical or mental harm
correct use of asthma drugs as in the study by must be paramount. There are additional problems
Chaney et al has important health benefits for in collecting a participant sample, which requires
children. informed consent, as well as briefing and
debriefing young people in a way that makes
sense to them.
Bandura et al and Chaney et al investigated the effect of observational learning and operant
conditioning on children’s behaviour. Bandura et al found that the children who observed
aggressive models were more likely to behave in an aggressive manner themselves, suggesting
that how we are nurtured can shape our behaviour. However, he also found that boys were
more likely to show physical aggression than girls, and this indicates that nature can play a role
in children’s development also.
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The Behaviourist Perspective.
Core studies that can be understood from the behaviourist perspective include the following:
- Bandura et al (1961). Bandura et al explained the results of their study in terms of
observational learning. Children learned aggression towards the Bobo doll by imitating
the model.
- Chaney et al (2004). Chaney et al explained the results in terms of operant conditioning.
In other words, children received reinforcement for correct use of the Funhaler in the
form of an incentive toy that could whistle and whirl.
This approach dominated psychology for the first half of the 20th century. More than anyone else
it was the behaviourists that established psychology as a scientific discipline. Few psychologists
describe themselves as behaviourists nowadays; however, the influence of behaviourism
remains strong because behaviourists made many discoveries that still hold true. The following
are some of the main assumptions of the behavioural perspective:
1. The proper subject matter of psychology is observable behaviour.
The early behaviourists were determined to make psychology a respectable science. One
way in which they tried to do this was to ignore the mind and focus on behaviour. This is
because we cannot see directly into the mind, and the behaviourists believed that good
science required that psychologists should study only what could be seen. Behaviourism
is sometimes called ‘black box’ psychology because it treats the mind as a closed box that we
cannot see into. Instead, what is studied is stimulus and response. A stimulus is anything in
the environment that is detected by one of the senses. A response is the behaviour that results
from detecting the stimulus. We can see this in the form of a diagram.
Stimulus Response
2. We are products of our environment.
In the nature-nurture debate, behaviourists fall on the side of nurture. In fact, the early
behaviourists believed that human behaviour was entirely a product of environmental
influences. John Watson, the founder of behaviourism, once said:
“Give me a dozen healthy infants, well-formed, and my own specified world to bring them up in
and I’ll guarantee to take any one at random and train him to become any type of specialist I
might select – doctor, lawyer, artist, merchant-chief and yes, even beggar-man and thief,
regardless of his talents, penchants, tendencies, abilities, vocations, and race of his ancestors”.
- Watson, J.B. (1930) Behaviourism. University of Chicago Press.
By this, Watson meant that we are entirely products of environment and that if we control
someone’s environment we can control their development. Modern behaviourists take a slightly
less extreme view. For example, behaviourists studying the learning of phobias have identified
the phenomenon of preparedness – we seem to be hard-wired to learn fear of some things but
not others. We can easily acquire phobias of snakes and spiders, but not of cars or guns, which
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are actually much more dangerous. However, behaviourists are still concerned with the
influence of the environment on behaviour.
3. We acquire our behaviour through learning.
According to the behaviourists we learn our behaviour. Behaviourists are concerned with three
types of learning:
- Classical Conditioning: Learning to associate a stimulus that already triggers a
response (called an unconditioned stimulus) with another stimulus (a neutral stimulus),
so that the latter comes to trigger the same response. For example, we might fear
muggers but have no feeling about bus stops. If we are mugged at a bus stop we are
likely to associate the bus stop with the mugging and learn to be weary of bus stops.
Classical conditioning can explain how some simple responses – fear, salivation, sexual
arousal, etc. – are learned.
- Operant Conditioning: This is learning by the consequences of our actions. When we
perform a behaviour and this has a good consequence we become more likely to repeat
that behaviour. This is called reinforcement. Similarly, when something we do has a bad
consequence, we are less likely to do it again. This is called punishment. Operant
conditioning can explain the development of quite complex behaviours, but not
necessarily where the behaviour originated – remember that we have to try a behaviour
for the first time before it can be reinforced or punished.
- Observational Learning: This is a much more recently discovered type of learning than
the previous two and takes place when an observer imitates behaviour modelled by
another individual. Observational or social learning is sometimes described as ‘neo-
behaviourist’ rather than behaviourist, because the theory makes reference to cognitive
processes. For observational learning to take place, the observer must attend to the
behaviour being demonstrated and retain it in their memory. Attention and memory are
cognitive processes, and a true behaviourist would probably not place so much
emphasis on this type of process.
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