The Psychology Book

by DK

  Piaget’s portrayal of children as primarily independent and autonomous in their construction of knowledge and their understanding of the physical world also met with some resistance, as it seemed to ignore the important contribution that other people make to a child’s cognitive development. Pioneering psychologist Lev Vygotsky’s work focused on proving that knowledge and thought are essentially social in nature, and disproving Piaget’s assumption that a child was not really a part of the social whole. His theory suggests human development exists on three levels: the cultural and the interpersonal as well as the individual, and his main concern was with the first two levels. His “zone of proximal development” theory—which states that children require the help of adults or older children to complete some tasks—served as a response to Piaget.

  Another area of exploration has been the assumed universality of the developmental stages identified by Piaget. Although he had no compelling evidence to support this assumption at the time, more recent cross-cultural investigations concerning the sensorimotor stage (including one study conducted by Pierre Dasen in 1994) indicated that the sub-stages suggested by Piaget are indeed universal, though environmental and cultural factors seem to affect the rate at which these stages are reached, and how quickly they are then completed.

  Piaget’s work unquestionably paved the way for many new areas of enquiry into the nature of child development and human cognitive development. He created the context in which a vast body of research took shape in the 20th and 21st centuries, and fundamentally changed the nature of education in the Western world.

  Australian Aboriginal children aged between eight and 14, and living in remote parts of central Australia, were found by Pierre Dasen to progress through the stages identified by Piaget.

  "The deep structures, the basic cognitive processes, are indeed universal."

  Pierre Dasen

  JEAN PIAGET

  Born in Neuchâtel, Switzerland, Jean Piaget grew up with an insatiable interest in the natural world, and at the age of 11 he wrote his first scientific paper. He studied natural sciences and earned a PhD from the University of Neuchâtel at the age of 22. His interest moved to psychoanalysis and he developed his theories of genetic epistemology in France. In 1921, he became the director of the Jean-Jacques Rousseau Institute in Geneva. He married Valentine Châtenay and they had three children, who were the subjects of many of Piaget’s observations about cognitive development. In 1955, he created the International Center for Genetic Epistemology and was its director until his death in 1980. He was awarded prizes and honorary degrees worldwide.

  Key works

  1932 The Moral Judgment of the Child

  1947 The Psychology of Intelligence

  1952 The Origins of Intelligence in Children

  1962 The Psychology of the Child

  See also: Alfred Binet • Jerome Bruner • Lev Vygotsky • Erik Erikson • Françoise Dolto • Lawrence Kohlberg • Jerome Kagan

  IN CONTEXT

  APPROACH

  Social constructivism

  BEFORE

  1860s Francis Galton sparks debate about whether nature (innate ability) or nurture (upbringing) has the most influence on personality.

  AFTER

  1952 Jean Piaget argues that the ability to absorb and process information develops through interaction between children’s innate talents and their environment.

  1966 Jerome Bruner suggests that any subject can be taught effectively to a child at any stage of development.

  1990 American educational psychologist Robert Slavin designs his Student Teams Achievement Divisions (STAD)to promote more collaborative learning, and downgrade competitive, winner—loser approaches to education.

  For Russian psychologist Lev Vygotsky, the skills needed to reason, understand, and remember all stem from a child’s experiences with parents, teachers, and peers. Vygotsky saw human development as taking place on three levels—cultural, interpersonal, and individual. He focused on the cultural and interpersonal levels, believing that our most formative experiences are social; “we become ourselves through others.”

  Vygotsky believed that children absorb the accumulated wisdom, values, and technical knowledge of previous generations through interactions with their caregivers, and use these “tools” to learn how to conduct themselves effectively in the world. But it is only through social interaction that children can experience and internalize these cultural tools. Even our ability to think and reason on an individual level stems from social activities in the course of our development that foster our innate cognitive abilities.

  Vygotsky’s theories influenced approaches to both learning and teaching. He believed that teachers should play an instructive role, constantly guiding and nurturing their pupils in order to improve their attention span, concentration, and learning skills, and so build up their competence. This idea had a marked effect on education, particularly in the late 20th century, stimulating a shift from child-centered to curriculum-centered teaching, and to a greater use of collaborative learning.

  "All higher psychological functions are internalized relationships of the social kind."

  Lev Vygotsky

  See also: Francis Galton • Jerome Bruner • Jean Piaget

  IN CONTEXT

  APPROACH

  Parenting systems

  BEFORE

  1945 American psychoanalyst René Spitz reports on the disastrous effects of bringing up children in institutions.

  1951 John Bowlby concludes that an infant requires an intimate and continuous relationship with his mother.

  1958 US anthropologist Melford Spiro writes Children of the Kibbutz, insinuating that Western child-rearing methods, with the focus on the mother as the main carer, work best in all cultures.

  AFTER

  1973 American psychiatrists Charles M. Johnston and Robert Deisher argue that communal child-rearing provides advantages that few nuclear families offer.

  While running a center where disturbed children were raised successfully by professional carers, Bruno Bettelheim began to question the common assumption that the best upbringing involved a close mother—child relationship. He wondered if the Western world might have something to learn from communal child-rearing systems, such as the one used on an Israeli kibbutz.

  In 1964, Bettelheim spent seven weeks on a kibbutz, where children were cared for in special houses, away from their family home. In his 1967 book The Children of the Dream, he stated that “a kibbutz child is not beholden to any particular parent,” and although he observed that this led to fewer one-to-one relationships, it did encourage many less intimate friendships and an active social life.

  Successful adults

  Before his study, Bettelheim had predicted that a kibbutz might produce mediocre adults who had little cultural impact on society. Instead, he found that kibbutzniks often become accomplished adults. In fact, the children Bettelheim studied were tracked down in the 1990s by a journalist, who discovered that a high percentage were now successful professionals.

  Bettelheim concluded that the kibbutz’s communal approach was a huge success. By publishing his findings, he hoped to improve childcare systems in the US.

  Kibbutz children, Bettelheim found, often develop closer bonds with each other than with adults. This ability to relate well to their peers may explain their professional success as adults.

  See also: Virginia Satir • John Bowlby

  IN CONTEXT

  APPROACH

  Psychosocial development

  BEFORE

  1905 Sigmund Freud develops his theory of psychosexua
l development, claiming there are five stages through which a child progresses toward sexual maturity.

  1930s Jean Piaget proposes a stage-based theory of cognitive development.

  AFTER

  1980 Building on Erikson’s work, American psychologist James Marcia explores identity formation in adolescence.

  1996 In her bestselling book New Passages, American writer Gail Sheehy notes that adults are prolonging their adolescence into their 30s, pushing back all of Erikson’s stages of adulthood by approximately ten years.

  Erik Erikson understood human development in terms of the epigenetic principle, which states that every organism is born with a certain purpose and its successful development results in the fulfillment of this purpose. In Erikson’s own words, “anything that grows has a ground plan, and out of this the parts arise.” He proposed that the human personality unfolds and evolves in eight predetermined stages. According to Erikson, this growth involves the constant interaction between heredity and environmental influences.

  "Hope is both the earliest and the most indispensable virtue inherent in the state of being alive."

  Erik Erikson

  The eight stages

  The first stage, which takes place during a baby’s first year, is “trust versus mistrust.” If the infant’s needs are badly or inconsistently met, feelings of mistrust develop that can recur in later relationships. The second stage, “autonomy versus shame and doubt,” takes place from 18 months to 2 years. This is when the child learns to explore, but also for the first time must deal with feelings of shame and doubt as a result of small failures or parental reprimands. Healthy willpower develops as a result of learning to negotiate both success and failure.

  Stage three, from three to six years, presents the crisis of “initiative versus guilt.” This is when children learn to act creatively and playfully, but also with purpose. As they interact with others they discover that their actions can adversely affect someone else. Severe punishments at this stage can inflict paralyzing feelings of guilt.

  From 6 to 12, children focus on education and learning social skills. This fourth stage is known as “industry versus inferiority,” and it provides a feeling of competence, although an over-emphasis on work can lead children mistakenly to equate self-worth with productivity. From here we enter adolescence and the fifth stage of “ego-identity versus role confusion.” This is when we develop a coherent sense of who we are, through consideration of our past, present, and future. When successfully negotiated, this stage ensures a unified sense of self, but problems here can lead to an “identity crisis”—a term coined by Erikson.

  During the sixth stage of “intimacy versus isolation,” between the ages of 18 and 30, we build close relationships and experience love. The penultimate stage, “generativity versus stagnation,” from 35 to 60, sees us working on behalf of future generations, or contributing to society through cultural activities or social activism.

  The final stage, “ego-integrity versus despair,” starts at the age of around 60. It occurs when people reflect on their lives, becoming either satisfied and at peace with their old age, or despairing over physical disintegration and the reality of death. Successful negotiation of this stage results in the attainment of wisdom.

  Erikson said that in our older years we achieve a sense of completeness and “personal wholeness” in direct proportion to the degree to which we successfully negotiated earlier stages.

  ERIK ERIKSON

  Erik Erikson was born in Frankfurt, Germany, as the result of an extramarital affair. He was given the surname of his mother’s husband, never knew his biological father, and his mother married again when he was three years old. Unsurprisingly, Erikson always struggled with identity issues. He was encouraged to study medicine, but rebelled and studied art, touring Italy in his youth as a “wandering artist.” He then suffered what he called an “aggravated identity crisis” and went to Vienna, where he taught art in a school run on psychoanalytic principles. Embracing these fully, he then trained as a psychoanalyst under Anna Freud. In 1933, he married Joan Serson and they emigrated to Boston, where he became the first child psychoanalyst in the city. He later taught at Harvard, Yale, and Berkeley. He changed his surname to the self-chosen “Erikson” when he became an American citizen in 1933.

  Key works

  1950 Childhood and Society

  1964 Insight and Responsibility

  1968 Identity: Youth and Crisis

  See also: G. Stanley Hall • Sigmund Freud • Kurt Lewin • Jean Piaget • Lawrence Kohlberg

  IN CONTEXT

  APPROACH

  Attachment theory

  BEFORE

  1926 Sigmund Freud presents the psychoanalytic theory of “cupboard love,” suggesting that infants become attached to caregivers because they fulfil physiological needs.

  1935 Konrad Lorenz’s research shows that nonhumans form strong bonds with the first moving object they encounter.

  AFTER

  1959 Harry Harlow’s work demonstrates that macaque monkeys separated from their mothers in infancy develop social and emotional problems.

  1978 Michael Rutter shows that children can become strongly attached to a variety of attachment figures (such as fathers, siblings, peers, and inanimate objects).

  In the 1950s, the prevailing theory on how infants form attachments was based on the psychoanalytical concept of “cupboard love.” This suggested that babies form bonds with people who fulfil their physiological needs, such as feeding. At the same time, the animal studies of Konrad Lorenz suggested that animals simply bond with the first moving object they encounter, which is usually the mother.

  It was against this background that John Bowlby took a distinctly evolutionary perspective on early attachment. He argued that because newborn infants are completely helpless, they are genetically programed to form an attachment with their mothers in order to ensure their survival. Mothers, he believed, are also genetically programmed to bond with their babies, feeling the need to keep them in close proximity. Any conditions that threaten to separate mother and child activate instinctive attachment behaviors and feelings of insecurity and fear.

  These ideas formed the basis of Bowlby’s theory, which developed to explain the lifelong significance of the mother—infant bond as well as the psychological difficulties that children suffer if this bond is damaged or entirely broken.

  "Mother love in infancy is as important for mental health as are vitamins and proteins for physical health."

  John Bowlby

  Mothers only

  One of the most controversial aspects of Bowlby’s theory is that infants always attach to a female, never a male. This female figure may not be the natural mother, but she certainly represents a mother-figure. The term he gave for this tendency to attach to a female is “monotropy,” and he emphasized that, although an infant may have more than one attachment figure, his attachment to a mother-figure is simply different from and more significant than any other attachment he will form throughout his life. Both the infant and his mother behave in ways that secure this attachment. An infant, for instance, engages in sucking, cuddling, looking, smiling, and crying in order to shape and control his caregiver’s behavior, and a caregiver would be sensitive and responsive to the infant’s needs. In this way the two behavioral systems—attachment and caregiving—help to shape one another and create a lifelong bond.

  Bowlby believes that this bond is so deeply formative that if it fails to take place, or breaks down within the first few years of life, the child will go on to suffer serious negative consequences i
n later life. He also argues that there is a critical period during which a mother and infant should develop a secure attachment: it should take place during the first year, or at the very least before the child is two years old. Bowlby thought that any attempts at mothering beyond the age of three would be useless, and the child would be on course to suffer the effects of maternal deprivation.

  "Attachment behavior is held to characterize human beings from the cradle to the grave."

  John Bowlby

  Maternal deprivation

  In 1950, Bowlby was commissioned by the World Health Organization to study children who had suffered maternal deprivation during World War II due to evacuation or being made homeless. He was also asked to investigate the effects of being raised in residential nurseries and other large institutions (such as orphanages). The result of this early work was Bowlby’s 1951 report, Maternal Care and Mental Health, in which he observed that children deprived of maternal care for prolonged periods of time during early childhood suffered some degree of intellectual, social, or emotional retardation later in life.