Psychology- a Complete Introduction

by Sandi Mann

  Application of Maslow’s theory to the workplace:

  http://www.businessballs.com/maslow.htm

  Fact-check

  1 Personality traits are:

  a Relatively stable characteristics that cause people to behave in certain ways

  b Unstable characteristics that cause people to behave in certain ways

  c Unconscious processes that affect the development of personality

  d Elements of free will that lead to the development of personality

  2 Which of the following is not one of Cattell’s 16 personality factors?

  a Dominance

  b Warmth

  c Liveliness

  d Moodiness

  3 Which of the following is not mentioned as a personality dimension by Eysenck?

  a Introversion

  b Agreeableness

  c Neuroticism

  d Emotional stability

  4 Which of the following is not one of Cattell’s Big Five personality factors?

  a Psychoticism

  b Openness

  c Extraversion

  d Agreeableness

  5 Psychodynamic theories of personality emphasize:

  a The influence of traits on the development of personality

  b The influence of the unconscious on the development of personality

  c The importance of emotional stability in the development of personality

  d The need to consider the self in the development of personality

  6 Which of the following does Freud not claim contributes to the development of personality?

  a Instinctual drives

  b Unconscious processes

  c Early childhood influences

  d Free will

  7 Behavioural theories state that personality develops as a result of:

  a An interaction between the individual and the environment

  b An interaction between the individual and their unconscious

  c The environment and the social situation

  d The environment and the id

  8 Which of the following is not a characteristic of self-actualizing people?

  a The ability to speak more than one language.

  b Openness and spontaneity

  c The ability to develop close friendships without being overly dependent on other people

  d Awareness and acceptance of themselves

  9 Which of the following is not one of Maslow’s motivations in his hierarchy of needs?

  a Physical needs

  b Social needs

  c Esteem needs

  d Satisfaction needs

  10 According to Vroom, a person will only be motivated to do something if:

  a They think they are capable of doing it

  b They think that doing it will lead to rewards

  c They believe those rewards are worth the effort

  d All of the above

  10

  Developmental psychology

  Developmental psychology is concerned with, among other areas, cognitive development across the entire lifespan but particularly from birth to adulthood. This involves areas such as problem-solving, moral understanding, conceptual understanding, language acquisition, social development, development of personality, emotional development and self-concept and identity formation. Some of these areas have been addressed in other chapters of this book, and this chapter will concentrate on significant factors that contribute to the development of an emotionally healthy child. For many psychologists, this starts with attachment.

  Attachment Theory

  Attachment Theory was originally developed by John Bowlby (see the ‘Spotlight’ below) and focuses on the importance of developing emotionally meaningful relationships with significant others. Attachment is described as a biological system or powerful survival impulse that evolved to ensure the survival of the infant. The theory deals with how early-childhood attachment experiences contribute to the way adult human beings respond within relationships when hurt, being separated from loved ones, or perceiving a threat.

  Spotlight: John Bowlby

  Born in London in 1907, John Bowlby graduated from the University of Cambridge in 1928. He undertook some work experience in a school that was to set him on his course for life. While at this school, he encountered two different children: one who was remote and affectionless and one who followed Bowlby around everywhere. Both children had poor relationships with their mothers and it was these experiences (and his own, as he was brought up primarily by his nanny who left when he was four, leaving him with an acute sense of loss) that led Bowlby to his now classic work on Attachment Theory. Bowlby died in 1990.

  The basic premise of Attachment Theory is that close and early attachment of a baby to its mother is essential for healthy relationships across the child’s entire life.

  ‘[Attachment is] the propensity to make strong emotional bonds to particular individuals [and is] a basic component of human nature.’

  J. Bowlby, A Secure Base: Parent–Child Attachment and Healthy Human Development (London: Routledge 1988), p. 3

  Bowlby believed that there are four main characteristics of attachment:

  • Proximity maintenance: this is the desire of children to be near their primary caregiver.

  • Safe haven: this is where the child returns to the attachment figure for comfort and safety when faced with anything that could be perceived as fear, discomfort or threat.

  • Secure base: the attachment figure acts as a safe base from which the child can explore, comforted in the knowledge that they can return to the base if needed.

  • Separation distress: this is the anxiety that occurs when the child is away from the primary caregiver.

  Bowlby went on to make three key propositions as part of his Attachment Theory:

  • When children are raised to have confidence that their primary caregiver will be there for them when they are needed, they will be less fearful than those who are raised without that confidence.

  • He believed that there is a critical period (the first three years – see below) in a child’s life when that confidence needs to be created and that whatever occurs during that critical period will have long-lasting effects.

  • Finally, he pointed out that any expectations that people have about relationships are directly related to the experiences that they have had with their caregivers in the past.

  Bowlby believed that there are four stages to the attachment process and that these occur at fairly typical ages in an infant’s life – within the sensitive and critical first three years:

  Pre-attachment phase (age birth to six weeks): in this stage, the baby uses its innate skills (crying, grasping tightly, gurgling, etc.) to attract and maintain the attention of its caregiver. When this goes according to plan, the baby learns that the caregiver is nearby and will respond when ‘asked’. However, at this stage they are not attached to any particular caregiver and will not mind being left with strangers.

  Attachment in the making phase (age six weeks to six to eight months): at this point the infant begins to recognize its primary caregiver and responds differently to them than to others. But he or she is still happy to be left with strangers.

  Clear-cut attachment phase (age six to eight months to 18–24 months): at this point the infant begins to experience separation anxiety and will be clearly distressed at the primary caregiver’s absence. This stage often becomes less acute when Piaget’s stage of object permanence begins (see later in this chapter).

  Formation of reciprocal relationship (18–24 months and beyond): the child soon learns to understand the nature of its caregiver’s comings and goings and that they will return (and even when they will return). They often try to negotiate with the caregiver, using language skills and other strategies, to influence the length of the separation.

  Case study: Harlow’s monkey experiments

  The American psychologist Harry Harlow (1905–81) is best known for his maternal-separation experim
ents on rhesus monkeys. He conducted most of his research at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, where the humanistic psychologist Abraham Maslow (see Chapter 9) worked for a time with him.

  Harlow’s experiments were controversial since they involved rearing baby monkeys in isolation chambers, apart, not only from their mothers, but also from other monkeys, for up to 24 months; most emerged severely disturbed. So controversial were these animal experiments that some believe that they even led to the rise of the animal liberation movement in the United States.

  These controversial monkey studies actually began life as something else entirely and were never intended as the studies in maternal deprivation into which they evolved. Harlow first established a breeding colony of rhesus macaques in 1932 in order to study cognitive processes. It was during these experiments that Harlow noticed effects that he hadn’t been expecting; although he and his team soon learned how to care for the physical needs of their infant monkeys, they soon realized that the nursery-reared infants became very different from their mother-reared peers. In fact, these infants seemed slightly strange: they were reclusive and had definite social deficits and they clung to their cloth nappies. This attachment to the soft cloth of their nappies and the psychological deficits seemed to correlate with the absence of their mother, which led Harlow to investigate the mother–infant bond further.

  He then embarked on the now famous monkey studies with the aim of discovering whether the attachment that an infant has to its mother is due to the food (milk) she provides – or whether the nourishment is not as important as the comfort and love offered. Harlow tested this by creating an intriguing experiment. Using wire and wood, he built inanimate surrogate mothers for the baby monkeys. Even though the wire ‘mothers’ could not move or offer warmth or real comfort, each infant became attached to its particular inanimate mother, recognizing its unique face and preferring it above all others.

  Harlow next wanted to know what the most important features of these inanimate mothers were: her texture or her provision of milk. For this experiment he presented the infants with a cloth mother and a wire mother under two conditions. In one, the wire mother held a bottle with food and the cloth mother held no food, and in the other, the cloth mother held the bottle and the wire mother had nothing.

  Overwhelmingly, the infant primates preferred spending their time clinging to the cloth mother. Even when only the wire mother could provide nourishment, the monkeys visited her only to feed, returning to the milk-less cloth mother the rest of the time. Harlow concluded that there was much more to the mother–infant relationship than milk and that this ‘contact comfort’ was essential to the psychological development and health of infant monkeys and children. Later experiments showed that the babies used the inanimate mother as a base for exploration and a source of comfort and protection in novel and even frightening situations; for example, in one experiment Harlow presented the infant monkeys with a loud mechanical toy from which they fled to the comfort of the cloth mother (rather than the milk-providing wire one). Thus, he showed that they became attached, in Bowlby’s sense, to the warmth and comfort offered by the milk-less cloth ‘mother’ rather than to the food offered by the cold and hard ‘mother’.

  Spotlight: Monkey hatred

  Despite Harlow being famous for his work with monkeys, he had a strong dislike for the primates and is quoted as saying, ‘The only thing I care about is whether a monkey will turn out a property I can publish. I don’t have any love for them. Never have. I don’t really like animals. I despise cats. I hate dogs. How could you like monkeys?’

  THE INFLUENCE OF MARY AINSWORTH

  Mary Dinsmore Salter Ainsworth (1913–99) was an American-Canadian developmental psychologist known for her work in early emotional attachment with the Strange Situation Procedure in 1965, as well as her work in the development of Attachment Theory. She developed the Strange Situation Procedure as a way of assessing attachment behaviour in young children. The investigative procedure is divided into eight episodes, all of which are observed through a one-way mirror:

  1 The infant and his or her caregiver are introduced into a laboratory setting, filled with toys and two chairs. The caregiver interacts and plays with the baby.

  2 After a minute the caregiver is asked to withdraw and sits quietly, not interacting as before, leaving the child to explore his or her surroundings.

  3 After a further minute, a person unknown to the infant enters the room and at first, just observes, then slowly tries to engage with the child.

  4 The first separation: the caregiver now leaves the child with the stranger for three minutes; this generally causes the child to become distressed and the stranger attempts to comfort them.

  5 First reunion: the caregiver returns and is able to comfort the child and the stranger leaves.

  6 Second separation: the caregiver departs for a second time, leaving the child entirely alone for three minutes, which is again expected to cause some anxiety.

  7 It is then the stranger who enters and offers to comfort the infant.

  8 Finally, the caregiver returns, and is instructed to pick up the child.

  The reunions and separations are of particular interest to observers. On the basis of their behaviours, the 26 children in Ainsworth’s original Baltimore study were placed into one of three classifications. Each of these groups reflects a different kind of attachment relationship with the caregiver, and implies different ways of responding to perceived threats.

  • Secure attachment: a child who is securely attached to its mother will explore freely while the caregiver is present, using her as a ‘safe base’ from which to explore. The child will engage with the stranger when the caregiver is present, and will be visibly upset when the caregiver departs but happy to see the caregiver on his or her return.

  • Avoidant insecure attachment: a child with the anxious-avoidant insecure attachment style will avoid or ignore the caregiver – showing little emotion when the caregiver departs or returns. The child will not explore very much regardless of who is there. There is not much emotional range regardless of who is in the room or if it is empty.

  • Resistant insecure attachment: children classified as anxious–ambivalent/resistant showed distress even before separation, and were clingy and difficult to comfort on the caregiver’s return.

  A fourth category was added later:

  • Disorganized/disoriented attachment: this is when there is no clear (or mixed) attachment between the child and his caregiver, probably because the parent acts as an apprehensive caregiver and a reassuring one at different times. The child may look away when the parent tries to hold them or engage with them.

  Piaget’s Theory of Cognitive Development

  If Bowlby and Ainsworth were concerned with the development of secure attachments, the French developmental psychologist Jean Piaget (1896–1980) was more occupied with how cognitive and intellectual skill develops in children. Children, he claimed, were like scientists, actively trying to understand and make sense of their world. He proposed that children progress through a series of four key stages of cognitive development, each stage being marked by a shift in understanding. This process of understanding and change involves two basic functions: assimilation and accommodation.

  Assimilation is when children adapt new information into pre-existing cognitive schemas. This occurs when children are faced with new or unfamiliar information, which they try to make sense of by fitting it into what they already know. In contrast, accommodation is the process of altering pre-existing schemas in order to fit in the new information. This happens when they try to accommodate (i.e., fit the new knowledge into existing schemas) but this attempt does not work so they need to change pre-existing schemas to fit the new information they have. Using accommodation and assimilation, the child progresses through Piaget’s four stages of cognitive development:

  THE SENSORIMOTOR STAGE

  This is the first stage that begins at birth and extends into the
period of language acquisition. During this stage (which has six sub-stages), infants and toddlers acquire knowledge through sensory experiences and manipulating objects; they learn about their world, primarily, via their senses and physical actions that they take in their environment. There is no use of symbols. The child begins to learn that she is separate from the environment and that this environment continues to exist, even when she cannot see or hear it (this realization is termed object permanence); thus they learn that Mum will return or that an object hidden under a blanket is still there even though they can’t see it.

  THE PREOPERATIONAL STAGE

  This stage (which has two sub-stages) starts around age two and lasts until the age of around seven. Children learn through pretend and symbolic play (e.g. a box is a car), which increases during this stage, but they still struggle with logic and taking the point of view of other people (i.e. they are still what Piaget termed ‘egocentric’).

  THE CONCRETE OPERATIONAL STAGE

  This happens at around the age of seven and lasts until the age of about eleven. Children at this point of development begin to think more logically, but their thinking can also be very rigid. They tend to struggle with abstract and hypothetical concepts; they can only solve problems that apply to concrete events or objects. ‘Concrete’ means based on actual people, places and things that children have observed in their environment. Their representations are limited to the tangible, touchable and concrete and thus they find it hard to understand events that require imagination or abstract thought.

  The primary milestones of a child’s concrete operational stage include the ability to distinguish between their own thoughts and perceptions and those of others (and to know that these might be different), the ability to think logically about objects and events and the ability to conserve (this is the ability to understand when the amount of something remains constant across two or more situations despite its appearance changing across those situations). There are seven types of ‘conservation’ including number, length, liquid, mass, weight, area and volume. An example of conservation is when a child recognizes that a thin, tall beaker can hold the same amount of liquid as a short, fat one.