exam 3

• B.F Skinner
• conducted research on the nature and function of reinforcement
• found that attention can be a powerful reinforcer
• also found that behavior that has been intermittently reinforced is the most difficult to extinguish.
• Behavior Modification: therapeutic technique in which reinforcement contingencies are changed to encourage more adaptive behavior.

• children learn by observing they do not need to actually perform the action
  

• role taking: ability to adopt the perspective of another person, to think about something from anothers point of view, essential to understanding another persons thoughts, feelings, motivates
  
• before age 6, children unaware of others perspectives other than their own, they think everyone thinks the same thing they do

• emphasizes the crucial role of cognitive processes in social behavior
• analysis based on children use of aggression as a problem solving strategy
• hostile attributional bias: general expectation that others are antagonistic to them

• Dodges Theory
• tendency to assume that other peoples ambiguous actions stem from a hostile intent
  

• study of behavior with an evolutionary context.
• attempts to understand behaviors in terms of adaptive or survival value
• imprinting: process in witch newborn mammals attached to mother at first sight

• Darwinian concepts of natural selections and adaptation to human behavior, species are genetically predisposed to behave a certain way
• Parental- Investment Theory

characterized by a motivational force or action tendency and by changes in physiology, subjective feelings, and overt behavior

• immediate environment that an individual personally experiences
• friends, peers, parents, family, teachers

• general beliefs, values, customs, and laws of the larger society in which all other levels are embedded
• ex: general culture, social class groups

• connections among the microsystem (peers, family, friends)

• setting that children may not directly be apart of but that can still influence their development
• ex: parents workplace

• organized integrated understanding of how psychological processes such as intentions, desires, beliefs, perceptions, and emotions influence behavior
• basic understanding of how the mind works and how it influences behavior
• preschoolers T.O.M includes knowledge that beliefs often originate either from physiological states such as hunger or pain, or from psychological states such as wanting to see a frien
• 
  

• children base their self worth on the approval they receive (or do not receive) from other people about their intelligence, talents, and personal qualities.
• seek out situations in which they can assured of success and avoid situations on which they might be criticized

• self esteem of children based on their own effort and learning and not on how others evaluate them

• a theory that a persons level of intelligence if fixed and unchangeable
  

• a theory that a persons intelligence can grow as a function of experience

• another person believes something to be true that the child knows is false (TOM)
  
• ex: smarties test

• shown a box that contains smarties and has a picture of the candy on it. the experimenter asks what is in the box. the child responds smarties. the experinementer opens the box and it is crayons. 5 yr old say a person would guess smarties, 3 yr old would say crayons

• from early infancy, children show impressive understanding of some spatial concepts, such as above, below, left, and right
• certain parts of the brain are specialized for coding particular types of spatial information

• temporal order: knowing what happened first, next...can remember the order of events for a substantial period of time
  
• infants can discriminate between long and short durations

• numerical equality: idea that all sets of N objects have something in common
• ex: two dogs = pair
• 5 month olds have sense of numerical equality

• by age 3, most children acquire the ability to count, allowing them to establish the number of objects in sets of larger than three when objects are viisible
• majority of 3 yr olds can count to 10

• one-one correspondence: each object must be labeled by a single number word
• stable order: the numbers should always be recited in the same order
• cardinality: number of objects in the set of corresponds to the last number stated
• order irrelevance: objects can be counted left to right, right to left, or in any other order
• abstraction: any set of discrete objects or even can be counted

• deals with how children and adolescents make sense of categories
  
• order matters

• hypothesized brain mechanism devoted to understanding other human beings
• among typical children exposed to typical environments, TOMM matures over the first five years
• theorists who take an empiricist stance and maintain that psychological understanding arises from interactions with other people
• other empiricist theorists emphasize the growth of general information processing skills as essential to children’s understanding of other people’s minds

• deals mostly with how an infant or young child perceives objects and categorizes them
  
• order doesnt matter
• 
  

• Banduras concept that child-environment influences operate in both directions; children are affected by aspects of their environment, but they also influence the environment
  
• ex: a case in which a child's aggressive tendencies have an impact on his playmates and are, in turn, shaped by how those playmates respond

• observing someone receive a reward or punishment
  
• BOBO: those children who saw aggressive children were punished imitated the aggressive behavior less

• skinner: inconsistent response to the behavior of another person, sometimes punishing a child for unacceptable behavior and sometimes not
• ex: if a child is a whining one night they dont get dessert, if it happens another night the parent may just give in and give the child dessert so they quiet down

• psychoanalytical theory, the earliest and most primitive personality structure.
• unconscious and operates with the goal of seeking pleasure

• psychoanalytical theory, second personality structure to develop
  
• rational, logical, problem solving component of personality

• psychoanalytical theory, third personality structure
• consists of internalized morals and standards

• There of Mind Module (TOMM): proposed brain mechanism specialized for understanding other people

• TOM arises from interactions with others --> siblings (particularly older and opposite sex)
• TOM develops in tandem with information processing abilities --> need to be able to process complex counterfactual statements and inhibit automatic response

• have trouble establishing joint attention
• show less distress than other children when other people appear distressed
• poor language skills limit opportunities to learn about others thoughts and feelings
• continue to find false belief tasks very difficult to solve even when teenagers

• emotions are innate and are discrete from one another from very early in life
• each emotion is packaged with a specific and distinctive set of bodily and facial reactions
• Emotions are innate

• consistently expressed at similar times and in similar ways (facially and vocally) across infants

• primary (basic) emotions
• birth-2months: interest, disgust, contentment
• 2-7 months: anger, sadness, joy, surprise, fear

• emphasize the role of the environment in emotional development
• proposes that the basic function of emotions is to promote action toward achieving a goal
• maintains that emotions are not discrete from one another and may vary somewhat based on the immediate social environment

• TOM
• requires perspective taking of another person
• helpful in dvlp because it allows young children to understand that people have their own thoughts and feeling
• 
  

• historical changes that influence the other systems
• ex: technology