Lesson Structure: Child Psychology BPS104

1. Introduction to Child Psychology
   • Levels of development, nature or nurture, isolating hereditary
     characteristics, cause versus correlation, continuity versus discontinuity,
     cross sectional and longitudinal studies, reliability of verbal reports
2. The Newborn Infant
   • The Interactionist approach, range of reaction, niche picking,
     temperament stimulus seeking, emotional disturbances during pregnancy
3. States and Senses of the Infant
   • Sensory discrimination, infant states (sleep, inactivity, waking, crying etc),
     why psychologists are concerned with defining and describing infant states,
     habituation, crying, soothing a distressed baby, sensory discrimination,
     depth perception, oral sensitivity
4. Learning
   • Habituation, vicarious learning, classical conditioning, operant conditioning,
     reinforcement, the importance of learning control, etc
5. Emotions and Socialisation
   • Producing and recognising emotional expression, smiling, biological explanation,
     perceptual recognition, mother-child Attachment, Freudian approach, Bowlby’s approach,
     Social Learning approach, Harlow’s approach, role of cognition in attachment formation, day care
6. Cognitive Development
   • Developing the ability to reason.
7. Language Development
   • Is language ability learned or innate? Social Learning Approach, Hypothesis testing approach,
     under extending
8. Intelligence
   • Measuring Intelligence, Cultural Bias, IQ, Testing Intelligence as a tool.
9. Socialisation … Part A
   • Social Cognition, self awareness, awareness of others, development of empathy,
     taking turns, having a point of view/perspective, social scripts, pretend play
10. Morality
    • Moral development, aggression and altruism, Freud, Piaget and Kohlberg on moral development
11. Sexuality
    • Freud’s phases (oral phase, anal phase, phallic phase, latent phase, genital phase),
      gender and role Identity, psycho-social development
12. Socialisation … Part B
    • Family influence, discipline, siblings, family structures, school influence, peer influence,
      acceptance and rejection, modelling, reinforcement.

Practicals:

• Discuss what environmental and social aspects you think are required for the ideal environment for a developing child in your country.
• Genetic and environmental factors operate together in influencing the child’s personality development” Discuss the above statement.
• Name and describe one personality characteristic which may be genetically determined. What evidence supports the possibility that it may be hereditary?
• Genetic and environmental factors operate together in influencing the child’s personality development”Discuss the above statement.
• Name and describe one personality characteristic which may be genetically determined.
• What evidence supports the possibility that it may be hereditary?
• Name the kind of learning in which a stimulus which usually produces an unconditioned response is manipulated to produce a conditioned response. Give an example of this kind of learning.
• Discuss exactly how you would use operant conditioning to encourage a child to socialise.
• Use the perceptual recognition approach to explain smiling and fear in infants.
• How are Freud, Harlow and Bowlby explanations of the formation of mother-child attachments different? Which do you think is more credible and why?
• Explain reflection-impulsivity, and its significance in cognitive development.
• Explain the strengths and weakness of social learning theory in explaining language acquisition.

WHAT IS CHILD PSYCHOLOGY

Child psychology is concerned with the development of a person over the course of their childhood. This
involves the development of a child’s mental processes (ie. cognitive development); emotional and social
behaviour. It is important to state that development does not end at adulthood.

Adults continue to experience changes in their mental, emotional and social behaviours. Some characteristics
are however more easily developed and changed during childhood.

For convenience, a distinction is made between the cognitive, emotional and social aspects of behaviour.
However, this distinction is purely theoretical. It is made simply to help us learn and understand. In reality,
the different aspects of behaviour interact with each other.

When problems develop in any area of development, they usually become rapidly evident in other areas as well.
The study of child psychology is partly concerned with identifying such interrelationships.

NATURE-NURTURE
Needless to say, child psychologists are particularly interested in discovering the causes of certain
patterns of behaviour in children. They are interested, for instance, in how the child’s environment and
relationships (eg. home, school & neighbourhood) affect the child’s development.

This involves an attempt to establish causes. They are also interested in “outcomes” of certain childhood
experiences; for example, how does the experience of living in a poverty stricken environment affect the later behaviour of
the child?

It is difficult to identify “one” solitary cause for any behaviour. Usually a behaviour is far more
complex, having been influenced by a mixture of prior experiences.

If you have already studied some psychology, you have probably learned that there is considerable
debate amongst psychologists as to whether human behaviour is determined primarily by our genetic
makeup or whether it is primarily determined by what we learn through interaction with our environment.
This is called the nature-nurture debate, and is of great interest when trying to understand children’s behaviour.

NATURE
‘Nature’ refers to biological influences on our behaviour. Psychological attributes such as intelligence,
addictiveness and depression may be caused by genetic influences (such as a gene passed on by one
parent, or the human genetic makeup) or by biological factors (such as a hormonal imbalance,
developmental stages, nervous system damage etc.).

Hereditary refers to behaviours or characteristics
which have been transmitted from parents to offspring. The units of hereditary are genes, which
determine the course of development in the growing human embryo.

Isolating hereditary characteristics
An interesting research method used by child psychologists to determine which traits and behaviours are
inherited is by comparing monozygotic twins and dizygotic twins. This provides a way of isolating genetic
influence.

The rationale is that since monozygotic (identical) twins are born from the same zygote (an
ovum that has been fertilised by a sperm cell), they will have an identical genetic make up. Dizygotic
twins are born from two different zygotes, thus their genetic make up differs as much as any two siblings
genetic make up would.

For example, in a study to determine if intelligence is genetically determined, the researcher will want to
learn if the intellectual capacity of identical twins is more similar, or more closely correlated than that of
dizygotic twins. If it is (and this has actually been discovered to be correct) then the evidence indicates
that intelligence is largely genetically determined.

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