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SUSS PSY 207 STUDY UNIT 5 (Chapter 11: Self and Personality (The Adult…

- - - - Nature: Innate Predispositions
        
        Noam Chomsky (2000) proposes that humans have a unique genetic capacity to learn language. He believes that:
        
        humans are equipped with knowledge of a universal grammar; common rules and properties for learning any of the world’s languages
        
        Most languages share similar/overlapping structures (Subject, object, verb/ Subject, verb, object).
        
        Exposure to language activates the language acquisition device (LAD) which analyses the language, applies the universal rules, and tailors the
        system to the specifics of the language spoken in the child’s environment
        
        Chomsky's language model:
        
        Linguistic input
        
        Feeds into the LAD (Linguistic processing skills Existing knowledge)
        
        Which generates a theory of language (Phonology/ Semantics/ Morphology/ Syntax)
        
        Which determines Child's grammatical competence (Comprehension of others’ speech Speech production)
        
        Evidence supporting this view
        
        The “learnability factor” – children acquire an incredibly complex communication system rapidly and without formal instruction.
        
        Children progress through the same sequence of language
        development at similar ages and make the same kinds of errors Suggests language development is guided by a species-wide maturational plan.
        
        Identical twins score more similarly than fraternal twins on measures of verbal skills.
        
        Certain speech, language, and reading disorders appear to run in families
      - Nurture: Environment and Learning
        
        According to learning theory, Children’s language development is influenced by their environment:
        
        More likely to start using new words if they are reinforced for usage
        
        Learn the language their parents speak, including accent
        
        Learn the words they hear spoken by others, even if these words are not directed at them (learn by “eavesdropping”)
        
        Children with caregivers who encourage conversation are more advanced in early language development
        
        However imitation and reinforcement cannot account for children learning the
        grammatical rules:
        
        E.g. Children make overregularisation errors which they would not have
        heard adults make
      - Nature and Nurture Working Together
        
        Interactionists believe that both learning theorists (nurture) and nativists (nature) are correct:
        
        Children’s biologically based competencies and their language environment interact to shape the course of language development.
        
        Language acquisition depends on other developments (perceptual, cognitive,
        motor, social, emotional) that take place concurrently
        
        Scaffolding - As adults converse with young children, they create a supportive learning environment. Such interactions often operate within the child's zone of proximal development.
        
        Expansion - One of the techniques when toddlers use a familiar word or phrase (“that plane”), mothers often respond with an expansion—a more grammatically complete expression of what the toddler stated
        
        Child-directed speech adults use short, simple sentences spoken slowly in a high-pitched voice with repetition and exaggerated emphasis on key words
  - - - By 7.5 months of age, they demonstrate word segmentation ability; they can detect a target word in a stream of words.
        
        The cat ate a fish” is a string of 5 words", not one long word
      - By 5 months, infants realise the sounds they produce have an effect on their caregivers’ behaviour
      - Very young infants can distinguish between phonemes.
        
        Phonemes: basic units of sound that can change the meaning of a word (Man – Can)
        
        Cooing around 6-8 weeks of age
      - Newborns already show a preference for speech over non-speech sounds; also for their native language over others.
        
        infants produce sounds which exercise vocal chords—cries, burps, grunts, and sneezes
      - Babbling around 3-4 months of age
        
        Repeating consonant-vowel combinations such as “bababa”
      - By 8 months, babbling includes intonation pattern of the language babies hear and is restricted to the phonemes of that language
      - 10-month-olds can comprehend ~50 words but do not produce any of them yet.
        
        comprehension (or reception) is ahead of production (or expression)
        
        This gap between comprehension and production persists and may reflect the relative importance of understanding speech over producing speech
        
        Rely on attentional cues such as how important an object seems to be from their perspective (i.e. If their attention is captured by the ball in front of them, they may assume that mom’s verbalizations refer to this ball)
      - By 12 months of age, though, their reliance on personal relevance is decreasing and infants begin to use social and linguistic cues to learn words:
        
        Joint attention, or social eye gaze—two people looking at the same thing.
        
        Infants listen to parents repeatedly labelling and pointing at objects, directing their gaze, and otherwise making clear the connection between words and their referents
        
        Children use the process of syntactic bootstrapping when they use the syntax of a sentence—that is, where a word is placed in a sentence—to help determine the meaning of the word
      - ~1 year of age The first meaningful word is generally spoken at one year more. First words have been called holophrases because a single word often conveys an entire sentence’s worth of meaning.
        
        First words are used mainly to talk about familiar objects and actions;
        
        Common nouns that represent objects and people the child interacts with
        daily
        
        Objects that the child can manipulate (ball) or that can move on its own
        (truck)
        
        Words used to facilitate social interactions (Hello)
      - at ~18 months of age; the infant experience Vocabulary spurts.At this time the child has mastered about 30-50 words.
        
        Vocabulary spurt occurs as a result of the realisation that everything has a name and that by learning the names of things, they can share what they are thinking about with others and vice versa.
        
        The pace of word learning quickens dramatically
        
        Rapid acquisition of words due to fast mapping, which allows children to use sentence context to help them make an educated guess about word meaning.
        
        Rapid vocabulary acquisition leads to the child making mistakes:
        
        Overextension: word used too widely; every man is “daddy.
        
        Underextension: only family dog is “doggie”
      - at 18-24 months of age the child experience Telegraphic speech - combinations of two or more words comprising the critical content words while the rest are omitted
      - Between the ages of 2 and 5 years, there is a dramatic increase in the number and types of sentences produced
        
        With rapid vocabulary acquisition, errors known as overregularization
        
        overapplying the rules
        to cases in which the proper form is irregular (using past tense or plural nouns indiscriminately)
- - - - Personality is often defined as an organized combination of:
        
        attributes
        
        motives
        
        values
        
        and behaviors unique to each individual.
        
        All of which are broadly divided into the following three aspects:
        
        Genetic makeup, and cultural/situational influences help shape all three aspects of personality.
        
        Dispositional Traits
        
        One way we describe personalities is in terms of relatively enduring dispositional traits
        
        Dispositional traits are broad, relatively stable dimensions of personality along which people differ (i.e. Introversion-extraversion)
        
        Narrative identities
        
        A third aspect of personality is narrative identities.
        
        Narrative identities Unique and integrative “life stories” that we construct to give ourselves an identity and meaning to our lives
        
        Characteristic adaptations
        
        Another aspect of personality is characteristic adaptations.
        
        Characteristic adaptations are situation-specific, changeable ways in which people adapt to their roles and environments.
        
        i.e. include motives, goals, plans, schemas, self-conceptions, developmental issues and concerns, and coping mechanisms
      - Identity
        
        Overall sense of who we are, where we are heading and how we fit into society.
        
        Various Self-Concepts/perceptions are pulled together to form an identity
        
        Self-concept
        
        your perceptions, positive or negative, of your unique attributes and traits as a person.
        
        May or may not be accurate.
        
        Self-concept is about “what I am,”
        
        Pre-school children’s self-concept is concrete and physical:
        
        Describe self in terms of physical characteristics,
        possessions and preferences.
        
        Lesser focus on psychological and inner traits
        
        ~8 years
        
        At age 8 years, children begin to form a social identity; sees self as part of social units – e.g. belonging to a particular school or club
        
        Also begin to describe self in terms of personality traits; e.g. as being funny or smart
        
        Capable of social comparison; able to use information about how they compare with others to evaluate self
        
        Toddlers show evidence of their emerging self-concepts
        
        By 2 years of age, personal pronouns are used (I, me, mine, you)
        
        Describe themselves in terms of age and gender
        
        Self-esteem
        
        A closely related aspect of self-perception is self-esteem.
        
        Self-esteem is an overall evaluation of our worth as a person based on the self-concept.
        
        Concerns “how good I am”
        
        Development Self-esteem
        
        By mid–elementary school, children differentiate among five aspects of self-worth
        
        Behavioural conduct (staying out of trouble)
        
        Athletic competence (being good at sports)
        
        Social acceptance (being popular or feeling liked)
        
        Physical appearance (feeling good-looking)
        
        Scholastic competence (feeling smart or doing well in school)
        
        Preschool children distinguish only two broad aspects of self-esteem
        
        Personal and social adequacy (e.g. social acceptance)
        
        Their competence (both physical and cognitive)
        
        As children get older, they also integrate their self-perceptions (Self-Concept) in these distinct domains to form an overall sense of self-worth (Identity).
        
        Meanwhile the accuracy of their self-evaluations increases steadily
        
        At the same time, children are forming an ever grander sense of what they “should” be like—an ideal self.
        
        Social comparisons that leads to a widening gap between the real self and the ideal self, contribute to a decrease in average self-esteem from early to middle childhood
        
        Influences on Self-Esteem
        
        Competence
        
        some children display more competence than others; they experience more success and come out better in social comparisons as a result
        
        Social Feedback
        
        Social feedback from parents, teachers, and peers can make a big difference in their self-perceptions
        
        Children with high self-esteem tend to be securely attached to parents who are warm and who frequently communicate approval and acceptance to their children
        
        Genetic make up
        
        self-esteem is a heritable characteristic, influenced by genes as well as by unique or nonshared experiences
    - - Psychoanalytic Theory
        
        In general, psychoanalytic theory postulates that people generally:
        
        Progress through the same stages of personality development
        
        Undergo similar personality changes at similar ages.
        
        Freud believed that personality was formed during the first 5 years of life.
        
        Unfavourable early experiences (e.g. Fixation, psychic trauma) would leave a permanent mark and appear in adult personality traits
      - Trait Theory
        
        In trait theory, personality is seen as a set of dimensions along which people can differ
        
        Personality traits are relatively enduring. personality can be described in terms of a fivefactor model; the Big Five Model
        
        The big five trait model
        
        This mdoel suggests that personality are genetically influenced and emerge early in life and that personality traits are salient across all culture (Albeit differing in intensity)
        
        The five dimensions of personality traits accoridng to the big five model:
        
        Openness to experience
        
        Conscientiousness
        
        Extraversion
        
        Agreeableness
        
        Neuroticism
      - Social learning theory
        
        Personality is seen as a set of behavioural tendencies shaped by interactions with others in specific social situations.
        
        Consistency in personality over time is likely if social environment remains the same
        
        Individuals will behave differently in different social environments which change as we grow older, take on new roles, etc. (Goffman’s theory of identity)
        
        Personality are not enduring but are dynamic based on environment.
  - - - Infants may be born without a sense of self, but they quickly develop an implicit, if not conscious, sense of self.
        
        It is based in their perceptions of their bodies and actions and grows out of their interactions with caregivers
      - 2 - 3 months
        
        The capacity to differentiate self from world becomes more apparent by around 2 or 3 months of age, when infants display a sense of agency—a sense that they can cause things to happen in the world. ( i.e. Throw a soft toy)
      - 6 months
        
        Over the first 6 months of life, then, infants discover properties of their:
        
        physical selves
        
        distinguish between themselves and the rest of the world
        
        discover that they can act upon other people and objects.
      - 9 months
        
        Show awareness that others are separate beings with different perspectives but which can be shared
        
        Displays joint attention; for example, pointing to an object and then looking at others to direct attention towards object
      - 18 months
        
        Recognise self visually as a distinct individual. Infants display self-recognition – show ability to recognise oneself in a mirror or photograph
        
        (i.e. When a mark is made on the infant’s face and then the infant is placed in front of a mirror, the infant can be said to have achieved self-recognition when he notices the mark on his face and reaches for it on his own face instead of the mirror.)
        
        Self awareness
        Following are contributing factors to self awareness infancy:
        
        cognitive development
        
        social interaction
        
        cultural context (Individualistic vs collectivist)
      - 2 years
        
        As babies get to know themselves better, they also form a categorical self; that is, they classify themselves into social categories based on age, gender, and other visible characteristics, figuring out what is “like me” (in group) and what is “not like me” (Out group)
    - - Three ways to view temperament
        
        2. Behavioural Inhibition
        
        That the tendency to be extremely shy, restrained and distressed in response to unfamiliar people and situations
        
        Biologically based; children with inhibited temperament show increased arousal (faster pulse) in situations which do not cause the same response in other children •
        
        Inhibited temperament is a risk factor for later anxiety disorders
        
        Suggests a genetic basis for temperament:
        
        Genes influence the development of the nervous system and how it responds to various stimuli
        
        3. Surgency, Negative Affect and Effortful Control
        
        Rothbart defined infant temperament in terms of dimensions rather than types.
        
        They have also considered not only infants’ reactivity to experiences, but also their capacity for self-regulation.
        
        Identified at least three major dimensions of temperament, each made up of more specific dimensions.
        
        Negative Affectivity
        
        Tendency to be sad, fearful, easily frustrated.
        
        Present at infancy
        
        Effortful Control
        
        Ability to sustain attention, control own
        behaviour and regulate own emotions.
        
        Develops by early childhood
        
        Surgency (extraversion)
        
        The tendency to actively approach novel experiences in a positive way.
        
        Present at infancy.
        
        1. Easy, Difficult, and Slow-to-Warm-Up Temperaments
        
        Based on the overall patterning of infant temperamental qualities, most infants could be placed into one of three categories
        
        Difficult Temperament
        
        Active, irritable and irregular in habits
        
        Often react very negatively to changes in routine, slow to accept new experiences
        
        Slow-to-warm-up Temperament
        
        Somewhat inactive and moody, moderately regular in habits
        
        Slow to adapt to new experiences, but eventually adjust to changes
        
        Easy Temperament
        
        Contented and happy, regular feeding and sleeping habits
        
        Open and adaptable to new experiences
      - Goodness of fit
        
        Goodness of fit between child and environment is the extent to which the child’s temperament is compatible with the demands and expectations of the social world to which she must adapt.
        
        genes and environment interact
        to influence the development of temperament.
        
        Infants’ temperaments and their parents’ parenting behaviors reciprocally influence one another and interact over time to steer the direction of later personality development
  - - - Self-conceptions becomes:
        
        Less physical and more psychological
        
        Less concrete and more abstract.
        
        More self-aware and reflective.
        
        More differentiated
        
        Percevied accpetance of social-self into social groups, diversies (acceptance by the larger peer group,
        acceptance by close friends, etc)
        
        More integrated and coherent;
        
        Adolescents organise their self-perceptions into a holistic coherent presentation, instead of listing traits
      - Self-esteem tends to decrease from childhood to early adolescence.
        
        Adolescent are more knowledgeable and realistic about their strengths and weaknesses.
        
        May be unsure of themselves when moving between schools
        
        Unhappy with their changing bodies during puberty
        
        Social comparisons prompted by the social context can affect self-esteem.
        
        Big-fish – little-pond effect: academic self-esteem affected by average academic achievement level of classmates.
      - Forging an Identity
        
        According to Erikson’s psychosocial stages theory, adolescents experience the challenge of identity versus role confusion
        
        According to Erikson our society supports youths by allowing them a moratorium period—a time during the high school/college years when they are relatively free of responsibilities and can experiment with different possibilities to find themselves.
        
        Erikson believed that an adolescent “identity crisis” can be explained by:
        
        Physically - Changing bodies that require a revised self-concept and adjustment to being sexual beings
        
        Mentally - Cognitive growth that allows thinking about various possibilities, including possible future selves
        
        Socially – Socio/cultural demands to act according to age norms
        
        Marcia's 4 statuses of identity
        
        Marcia expanded on Erikson’s theory and developed a procedure to assess adolescent identity formation.
        
        Adolescents are classified into one of four identity statuses (statuses, not stages) based on their progress toward an identity in each of several domains (for example, occupational, religious, and political–ideological).
        
        Key questions are whether the individual has experienced a crisis and whether the individual has achieved a commitment
        
        Foreclosure
        (Commitment with no crisis)
        
        Adolescents accept identities suggested to them by their parents or others
        
        Without thinking through on their own about what suits them
        
        Identity Achievement (Commitment and Crisis)
        
        The individual has resolved his/her identity crisis and made commitments to particular goals, beliefs, and values
        
        Identity Diffusion Status
        (No commitment and No crisis)
        
        Adolescents either have not thought about who they are yet
        
        Or has failed to chart directions in life.
        
        Moratorium
        (No commitment, Crisis)
        
        The individual is experiencing an identity crisis, actively raising questions, and have yet to make any commitments
        
        Identity formation
        
        Identity formation not only takes a long time but occurs at different rates in different domains of identity.
        
        Influenced by:
        
        Quality of relationship with parents.
        
        Youths who get stuck in the Identity diffusion status of identity formation are sometimes neglected or rejected by their parents and emotionally distant from them.
        
        Adolescents in the foreclosure status are often extremely close to parents who are loving but overly protective and controlling
        
        Adolescents in the moratorium and identity achievement statuses generally have warm and democratic parents, the same kind of parents who foster high self-esteem
        
        Personality.
        
        Adolescents who explore and achieve identity tend to score low in neuroticism and high in openness to experience and conscientiousness
        
        They are emotionally stable, curious, and responsible.
        
        Cognitive development
        
        Adolescents will likely be able to resolve identity issues if they:
        
        have achieved mastery of formal-operational thought,
        
        think in complex and abstract ways
        
        actively seek relevant information
        
        Opportunities to Explore and Cultural Context
        
        Higher education leads to greater exposure to ideas and greater opportunities to explore
        
        Culture also plays a role; adolescents in traditional societies may adopt foreclosure status more than identity achievement
  - - - Enduring traits
        
        Consistency in Big Five personality dimensions across adulthood
        
        i.e. An extroverted young adult is likely to remain an outgoing elderly person
      - Personality Changes
        
        Across various countries, the same changes have been found on the Big Five personality dimensions
        
        From adolescence to middle adulthood:
        
        Extraversion and openness to experience decline modestly
        
        Agreeableness, conscientiousness and emotional stability (lack of neuroticism) increase
        
        From middle adulthood to late adulthood:
        
        Agreeableness increases
        
        Openness to experience tends to decrease
        
        Activity levels (an aspect of extraversion) decline
    - - Age and Gender Differences
        
        Males often display higher self-esteem than females in early adulthood but gender differences fade in old age.
      - Strategies to maintain self-esteem
        
        Reducing the Gap between Ideal and Real Self
        
        Gap between the ideal self and the real self that widens during adolescence, and gives us a sense of falling short.
        
        Older adults scaled down their visions of what they could ideally be. Thus, their ideal and present selves converged
        
        Adjusting Goals and Standards of Self-Evaluation
        
        Older adults are less affected in general by losses and failures;
        
        e.g. promotions may not be as important to older adults
        
        Comparing to Other Older Adults
        
        Older adults maintain self-esteem by making social comparisons primarily to other older adults who share the same experience.
        
        Also, they can strategically select worse-off peers to judge themselves against, making downward social comparisons
        
        Not Internalizing Ageist Stereotypes
        
        Stereotypes on ageism, which we learn in childhood, can result in self-stereotyping when we reach old age.
        
        Older adults resist applying negative stereotypes of aging people to themselves (Resist self -stereotyping).
      - Culture
        
        Individualistic culture, individuals are socialized to put their own goals ahead of others, whereas in a collectivist culture, people give group goals and relationships higher priority.
        
        Thus, when asked to describe themselves, American adults talk about their unique personal qualities but Japanese adults more often refer to their social roles and social identities and mention other people
    - - Erikson’s 8 Psycho-social Stages
        
        Transition years
        
        research does support the identity achievement versus role confusion conflict in adolescence.
        
        Identity forging in adults is more complex as we have seen in Marcia's four status model.
        
        Identity vs. role confusion
        
        (12 to 20 years)
        
        Adolescents ask who they are and must establish social and vocational identities; otherwise they will remain confused about the roles they should play as adults.
        
        Childhood
        
        Trust vs. mistrust
        
        (birth to 1 year)
        
        Infants must learn to trust their caregivers to meet their needs. Responsive parenting is critical.
        
        Autonomy vs. shame & doubt
        
        (1 to 3 years)
        
        Children must learn to be autonomous–to assert their wills and do things for themselves–or they will doubt their abilities.
        
        Initiative vs. guilt
        
        (3 to 6 years)
        
        Preschoolers develop initiative by devising and carrying out bold plans, but they must learn not to impinge on the rights of others.
        
        Industry vs. inferiority
        
        (6 to 12 years)
        
        Children must master important social and academic skills and keep up with their peers; otherwise, they will feel inferior.
        
        Adulthood
        
        Early Adulthood.
        
        research supports the psychosocial conflict of intimacy versus isolation.
        
        Studies show that Those with well-formed identities (i.e. achieved identity status) were more likely to be capable of genuine, lasting intimacy
        
        Middle adulthood
        
        often a time when important issues arise, self-evaluations are made and goals may change.
        
        It seems appropriate to call what many middle-aged adults experience as midlife questioning, i.e. to recognize that it can occur in response to life events at a variety of ages, and to appreciate that it is usually not a true psychological crisis.
        
        Adults who have achieved a sense of identity and intimacy are more likely to achieve generativity (i.e. agreeable, more concerned with others)
        
        Late adulthood
        
        Sense of identity in early adulthood predicts both generativity in middle adulthood and integrity in late adulthood
        
        Achieving integrity related to a high sense of psychological well-being and low depression
        
        Intimacy vs. isolation
        
        (20 to 40 years)
        
        Young adults seek to form a shared identity with another person, but may fear intimacy and experience loneliness and isolation.
        
        Generativity vs. stagnation
        
        (40 to 65 years)
        
        Middle-aged adults must feel that they are producing something that will outlive them, either as parents or as workers; otherwise, they will become stagnant and self-centered.
        
        Integrity vs. despair
        
        (65 years to older)
        
        Older adults must come to view their lives as meaningful to face death without worries and regrets.