Describe people’s behavioral characteristics at different ages
Organizing Themes in Development
Learning Objectives
Mai is a 56-year-old woman who was born to a poor Vietnamese immigrant family in rural California. When Mai was 5, her parents moved the family to a large city where they eventually succeeded in building a stable business that provided an adequate income. Mai was typically quiet and shy, and she had difficulty making friends in elementary school, often feeling left out of her peers’ activities. Her social life improved in adolescence, but she often felt the need to hide her outstanding academic skills to fit in. In college and medical school, Mai felt more accepted for her intellectual prowess and freer to be herself, but she still ruminated at times about what others thought of her, and was plagued by vague anxieties. By her mid-twenties, cyclical problems with depression and anxiety had become a part of her existence. Her marriage at 33 to a scholarly man provided a haven for her, and life seemed calmer and less frightening. After the birth of a son at age 38, Mai again felt overwhelmed by anxiety. The couple struggled to balance the complex needs of a fragile infant with their own careers, and Mai’s husband found her heavy dependence on his attention and calming influence difficult to accommodate. As their son grew, however, the couple handled the balancing act more skillfully. Now, Mai’s child is starting college. Mai is busy with her work and usually finds her anxiety manageable. She continues to view her husband as the steadying force in her life.
Mai’s story raises a host of questions about the influences that have shaped her life. How important was Mai’s early poverty, her cultural background, and her parents’ immigrant status? What was the source of her early social inhibition? Would things have been different for her if her parents had not been able to eventually provide economic stability? Were Mai’s early difficulties forming social relationships just a “stage,” or were they foundational to her later problems with depression and anxiety? Did stereotype threat (expecting to be judged on the basis of ethnicity or gender) play a role? How unusual is it for a married couple to experience increased conflicts following the birth of a child? If Mai and her husband had divorced, would their child have suffered lasting emotional damage? Is Mai’s intellectual ability likely to change as she continues to age? Are her emotional problems likely to increase or decrease? What factors enable any person to overcome early unfavorable experiences and become a successful, healthy adult? And conversely, why do some people who do well as children experience emotional or behavioral problems as adults? These intriguing questions represent a sampling of the kinds of topics that developmental scientists tackle. Their goal is to understand life span development: human behavioral change from conception to death. “Behavioral” change refers broadly to change in both observable activity (e.g., from crawling to walking) and mental activity (e.g., from disorganized to logical thinking). More specifically, developmental science seeks to
· describe people’s behavioral characteristics at different ages,
· identify how people are likely to respond to life’s experiences at different ages,
· formulate theories that explain how and why we see the typical characteristics and responses that we do,
· understand what factors contribute to developmental differences from one person to another, and
· understand how behavior is influenced by cultural context and by changes in culture across generations.
· Using an array of scientific tools designed to obtain objective (unbiased) information, developmentalists make careful observations and measurements, and they test theoretical explanations empirically. The Appendix, A Practitioner’s Guide to the Methods of Developmental Science, provides a guide to these techniques. An understanding of the processes that lead to objective knowledge will help you evaluate new information from any source as you move forward in your career as a practitioner.
· Developmental science is not a remote or esoteric body of knowledge. Rather, it has much to offer helping professionals in both their careers and their personal lives. As you study developmental science, you will build a knowledge base of information about age-related behaviors and about causal theories that help organize and make sense of these behaviors. These tools will help you better understand client concerns that are rooted in shared human experience. And when you think about clients’ problems from a developmental perspective, you will increase the range of problem-solving strategies that you can offer. Finally, studying development can facilitate personal growth by providing a foundation for reflecting on your own life.
Reflection and Action
1. 1.1 Explain the role of developmental science (research and theory) in the problem-solving processes of reflective practitioners.
Despite strong support for a comprehensive academic grounding in scientific developmental knowledge for helping professionals (e.g., Van Hesteren & Ivey, 1990), there has been a somewhat uneasy alliance between practitioners, such as mental health professionals, and those with a more empirical bent, such as behavioral scientists. The clinical fields have depended on research from developmental psychology to inform their practice. Yet in the past, overreliance on traditional experimental methodologies sometimes resulted in researchers’ neglect of important issues that could not be studied using these rigorous methods (Hetherington, 1998). Consequently, there was a tendency for clinicians to perceive some behavioral science literature as irrelevant to real-world concerns (Turner, 1986).
Clearly, the gap between science and practice is not unique to the mental health professions. Medicine, education, and law have all struggled with the problems involved in preparing students to grapple with the complex demands of the workplace. Contemporary debate on this issue has led to the development of serious alternative paradigms for the training of practitioners.
One of the most promising of these alternatives for helping professionals is the concept of reflective practice. The idea of “reflectivity” derives from Dewey’s (1933/1998) view of education, which emphasized careful consideration of one’s beliefs and forms of knowledge as a precursor to practice. Donald Schon (1987), a pioneer in the field of reflective practice, describes the problem this way:
In the varied topography of professional practice, there is a high, hard ground overlooking a swamp. On the high ground, manageable problems lend themselves to solution through the application of research-based theory and technique. In the swampy lowland, messy confusing problems defy technical solutions. The irony of this situation is that the problems of the high ground tend to be relatively unimportant to individuals or society at large, however great their technical interest may be, while in the swamp lie the problems of greatest human concern. (p. 3)
The Gap Between Science and Practice
Traditionally, the modern, university-based educational process has been driven by the belief that problems can be solved best by applying objective, technical, or scientific information amassed from laboratory investigations. Implicit in this assumption is that human nature operates according to universal principles that, if known and understood, will enable us to predict behavior.
For example, if I understand the principles of conditioning and reinforcement, I can apply a contingency contract to modify my client’s inappropriate behavior. Postmodern critics have pointed out the many difficulties associated with this approach. Sometimes a “problem” behavior is related to, or maintained by, neurological, systemic, or cultural conditions. Sometimes the very existence of a problem may be a cultural construction. Unless a problem is viewed within its larger context, a problem-solving strategy may prove ineffective.
Most of the situations helpers face are confusing, complex, ill defined, and often unresponsive to the application of a simple, specific set of scientific principles. Thus, the training of helping professionals often involves a “dual curriculum.” The first is more formal and may be presented as a conglomeration of research-based facts, whereas the second, often learned in a practicum, field placement, or first job, covers the curriculum of “what is really done” when working with clients. Unfortunately, some practitioners lose sight of the value of research-based knowledge in this process. The antidote to this dichotomous pedagogy, Schon (1987) and his followers suggest, is reflective practice. This is a creative method of thinking about practice in which the helper masters the knowledge and skills base pertinent to the profession but is encouraged to go beyond rote technical applications to generate new kinds of understanding and strategies of action. Rather than relying solely on objective technical applications to determine ways of operating in a given situation, the reflective practitioner constructs solutions to problems by engaging in personal hypothesis generating and hypothesis testing. Reflective practices are now used across a wide range of helping professions, from counseling and psychology to education to medicine and nursing (Curtis, Elkins, Duran, & Venta, 2016).
How can you use the knowledge of developmental science in a meaningful and reflective way? What place does it have in the process of reflective construction? A consideration of another important line of research, namely, that of characteristics of expert problem solvers, will help us answer this question. Research studies on expert–novice differences in many areas such as teaching, science, and athletics all support the contention that experts have a great store of knowledge and skill in a particular area. Expertise is domain-specific. When compared to novices in any given field, experts possess well-organized and integrated stores of information that they draw on, almost automatically, when faced with novel challenges. Because this knowledge is well practiced, truly a “working body” of information, retrieval is relatively easy (Lewandowsky & Thomas, 2009). Progress in problem solving is closely self-monitored. Problems are analyzed and broken down into smaller units, which can be handled more efficiently.
If we apply this information to the reflective practice model, you will see some connections. One core condition of reflective practice is that practitioners use theory as a “partial lens through which to consider a problem” (Nelson & Neufelt, 1998). Practitioners also use another partial lens: their professional and other life experience. In reflective practice, theory-driven hypotheses about client and system problems are generated and tested for goodness of fit.
A rich supply of problem-solving strategies depends on a deep understanding of and thorough grounding in fundamental knowledge germane to the field. Notice that there is a sequence to reflective practice. Schon (1987), for example, argues against putting the cart before the horse. He states that true reflectivity depends on the ability to “recognize and apply standard rules, facts and operations; then to reason from general rules to problematic cases in ways characteristic of the profession; and only then to develop and test new forms of understanding and action where familiar categories and ways of thinking fail” (p. 40). In other words, background knowledge is important, but it is most useful in a dynamic interaction with contextual applications. The most effective helpers can shift flexibly between the “big picture” that their knowledge base provides and the unique problems and contexts that they confront in practice (Ferreira, Basseches, & Vasco, 2016). A working knowledge of human development supplies the helping professional with a firm base from which to proceed.
Given the relevance of background knowledge to expertise in helping and to reflective practice, we hope we have made a sufficiently convincing case for the study of developmental science. However, it is obvious that students approaching this study are not “blank slates.” You already have many ideas and theories about the ways that people grow and change. These implicit theories have been constructed over time, partly from personal experience, observation, and your own cultural “take” on situations. Dweck and her colleagues have demonstrated that reliably different interpretations of situations can be predicted based on individual differences in people’s implicit beliefs about certain human attributes, such as intelligence or personality (see Dweck, 2006, 2017). Take the case of intelligence. If you happen to hold the implicit belief that a person’s intellectual capacity can change and improve over time, you might be more inclined to take a skill-building approach to some presenting problem involving knowledge or ability. However, if you espouse the belief that a person’s intelligence is fixed and not amenable to incremental improvement, possibly because of genetic inheritance, you might be more likely to encourage a client to cope with and adjust to cognitive limitations. For helping professionals, the implicit theoretical lens that shapes their worldview can have important implications for their clients.
We are often reluctant to give up our personal theories even in the face of evidence that these theories are incorrect (Lewandowsky & Oberauer, 2016; Rousseau & Gunia, 2016). The critical thinking that reflective practice requires can be impaired for many reasons, especially if we are busy and feel overwhelmed by the demands of the moment. The best antidote to misapplication of our personal views is self-monitoring: being aware of what our theories are and recognizing that they are only one of a set of possibilities. (See Chapter 11 for a more extensive discussion of this issue.) Before we discuss some specific beliefs about the nature of development, take a few minutes to consider what you think about the questions posed in Box 1.1.
A Historical Perspective on Developmental Theories
1. 1.2 Identify distinguishing characteristics and core issues of classic theoretical approaches in developmental science, particularly classic stage theories and incremental theories.
Now that you have examined some of your own developmental assumptions, let’s consider the theoretical views that influence developmentalists, with special attention to how these views have evolved through the history of developmental science. Later, we will examine how different theoretical approaches might affect the helping process.
Like you, developmental scientists bring to their studies theoretical assumptions that help to structure their understanding of known facts. These assumptions also guide their research and shape how they interpret new findings. Scientists tend to develop theories that are consistent with their own cultural background and experience; no one operates in a vacuum. A core value of Western scientific method is a pursuit of objectivity, so that scientists are committed to continuously evaluating their theories in light of evidence. As a consequence, scientific theories change over time. Throughout this text, you will be introduced to many developmental theories. Some are broad and sweeping in their coverage of whole areas of development, such as Freud’s theory of personality development (see Chapters 7 and 8) or Piaget’s theory of cognitive development (see Chapters 3, 6, and 9); some are narrower in scope, focusing on
a particular issue, such as Vygotsky’s theory of the enculturation of knowledge (see Chapter 3) or Bowlby’s attachment theory (see Chapters 4 and 12). You will see that newer theories usually incorporate empirically verified ideas from older theories. Scientific theories of human development began to emerge in Europe and America in the 19th century. They had their roots in philosophical inquiry, in the emergence of biological science, and in the growth of mass education that accompanied industrialization. Throughout medieval times in European societies, children and adults of all ages seem to have been viewed and treated in very similar ways (Aries, 1960). Only infants and preschoolers were free of adult responsibilities, although they were not always given the special protections and nurture that they are today. At age 6 or 7, children took on adult roles, doing farmwork or learning a trade, often leaving their families to become apprentices. As the Industrial Revolution advanced, children worked beside adults in mines and factories. People generally seemed “indifferent to children’s special characteristics” (Crain, 2005, p. 2), and there was no real study of children or how they change. The notion that children only gradually develop the cognitive and personality structures that will characterize them as adults first appeared in the writings of 17th- and 18th-century philosophers, such as John Locke in Great Britain and Jean-Jacques Rousseau in France. In the 19th century, Charles Darwin’s theory of the evolution of species and the growth of biological science helped to foster scholarly interest in children. The assumption grew that a close examination of how children change might help advance our understanding of the human species. Darwin himself introduced an early approach to child study, the “baby biography,” writing a richly detailed account of his young son’s daily changes in language and behavior. By the 18th and 19th centuries, the Industrial Revolution led to the growth of “middle-class” occupations (e.g., merchandizing) that required an academic education: training in reading, writing, and math. The need to educate large numbers of children sharpened the public’s interest in understanding how children change with age. The first academic departments devoted to child study began to appear on American college campuses in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The idea that development continues even in adulthood was a 20th-century concept and a natural outgrowth of the study of children. If children’s mental and behavioral processes change over time, perhaps such processes continue to evolve beyond childhood. Interest in adult development was also piqued by dramatic increases in life expectancy in the 19th and 20th centuries, as well as cultural changes in how people live. Instead of single households combining three or four generations of family members, grandparents and other relatives began to live apart from “nuclear families,” so that understanding the special needs and experiences of each age group took on greater importance. Most classic developmental theories emerged during the early and middle decades of the 20th century. Contemporary theories integrate ideas from many classic theories, as well as from other disciplines: modern genetics, neuroscience, cognitive science, psycholinguistics, anthropology, and social and cultural psychology. They acknowledge that human development is a complex synthesis of diverse processes at multiple levels of functioning. Because they embrace complexity, contemporary developmental theories can be especially useful to helping professionals (Melchert, 2016). See the timeline in Figure 1.1 for a graphic summary of some of the key theories and ideas in the history of developmental science.
You can expect that the most up-to-date theories you read about in this text will continue to change in the future, because theoretical ideas evolve as research testing them either supports or does not support them. But theories are also likely to need adjusting because global shifts in immigration patterns, climate, and access to technology and information are likely to modify behavior and perhaps even some of the processes that govern the development of behavior. Developmental theories must accommodate such changes (Jensen, 2012).
Emphasizing Discontinuity: Classic Stage Theories
Some of the most influential early theories of development described human change as occurring in stages. Imagine a girl when she is 4 months old and then again when she is 4 years old. If your sense is that these two versions of the same child are fundamentally different in kind, with different intellectual capacities, different emotional structures, or different ways of perceiving others, you are thinking like a stage theorist. A stage is a period of time, perhaps several years, during which a person’s activities (at least in one broad domain) have certain characteristics in common. For example, we could say that in language development, the 4-month-old girl is in a preverbal stage: Among other things, her communications share in common the fact that they do not include talking. As a person moves to a different stage, the common characteristics of behavior change. In other words, a person’s activities have similar qualities within stages but different qualities across stages. Also, after long periods of stability, qualitative shifts in behavior seem to happen relatively quickly. For example, the change from not talking to talking seems abrupt or discontinuous. It tends to happen between 12 and 18 months of age, and once it starts, language use seems to advance very rapidly. A 4-year-old is someone who communicates primarily by talking; she is clearly in a verbal stage. The preverbal to verbal example illustrates two features of stage theories. First, they describe development as qualitative or transformational change, like the emergence of a tree from a seed. At each new stage, new forms of behavioral organization are both different from and more complex than the ones at previous stages. Increasing complexity suggests that development has “directionality.” There is a kind of unfolding or emergence of behavioral organization.
Second, they imply periods of relative stability (within stages) and periods of rapid transition (between stages). Metaphorically, development is a staircase. Each new stage lifts a person to a new plateau for some period of time, and then there is another steep rise to another plateau. There seems to be discontinuity in these changes rather than change being a gradual, incremental process.
One person might progress through a stage more quickly or slowly than another, but the sequence of stages is usually seen as the same across cultures and contexts, that is, universal. Also, despite the emphasis on qualitative discontinuities between stages, stage theorists argue for functional continuities across stages. That is, the same processes drive the shifts from stage to stage, such as brain maturation and social experience.
Sigmund Freud’s theory of personality development began to influence developmental science in the early 1900s and was among the first to include a description of stages (e.g., Freud, 1905/1989, 1949/1969). Freud’s theory no longer takes center stage in the interpretations favored by most helping professionals or by developmental scientists. First, there is little evidence for some of the specific proposals in Freud’s theory (Loevinger, 1976).
Second, his theory has been criticized for incorporating the gender biases of early 20th-century Austrian culture. Yet, some of Freud’s broad insights are routinely accepted and incorporated into other theories, such as his emphasis on the importance of early family relationships to infants’ emotional life, his notion that some behavior is unconsciously motivated, and his view that internal conflicts can play a primary role in social functioning. Currently influential theories, like those of Erik Erikson and John Bowlby, incorporated some aspects of Freud’s theories or were developed to contrast with Freud’s ideas. For these reasons, it is important to understand Freud’s theory. Also, his ideas have permeated popular culture, and they influence many of our assumptions about the development of behavior. As you work to make explicit your own implicit assumptions about development, it will help to understand their origins and how well the theories that spawned them stand up in the light of scientific investigation. Freud’s Personality Theory
Sigmund Freud’s psychoanalytic theory both describes the complex functioning of the adult personality and offers an explanation of the processes and progress of its development throughout childhood. To understand any given stage it helps to understand Freud’s view of the fully developed adult.
Id, Ego, and Superego. According to Freud, the adult personality functions as if there were actually three personalities, or aspects of personality, all potentially in conflict with one another. The first, the id, is the biological self, the source of all psychic energy. Babies are born with an id; the other two aspects of personality develop later. The id blindly pursues the fulfillment of physical needs or “instincts,” such as the hunger drive and the sex drive. It is irrational, driven by the pleasure principle, that is, by the pursuit of gratification. Its function is to keep the individual, and the species, alive, although Freud also proposed that there are inborn aggressive, destructive instincts served by the id.
The ego begins to develop as cognitive and physical skills emerge. In Freud’s view, some psychic energy is invested in these skills, and a rational, realistic self begins to take shape.
The id still presses for fulfillment of bodily needs, but the rational ego seeks to meet these needs in sensible ways that take into account all aspects of a situation. For example, if you were hungry, and you saw a child with an ice cream cone, your id might press you to grab the cone away from the child—an instance of blind, immediate pleasure seeking. Of course, stealing ice cream from a child could have negative consequences if someone else saw you do it or if the child reported you to authorities. Unlike your id, your ego would operate on the reality principle, garnering your understanding of the world and of behavioral consequences to devise a more sensible and self-protective approach, such as waiting until you arrive at the ice cream store yourself and paying for an ice cream cone.
The superego is the last of the three aspects of personality to emerge. Psychic energy is invested in this “internalized parent” during the preschool period as children begin to feel guilty if they behave in ways that are inconsistent with parental restrictions. With the superego in place, the ego must now take account not only of instinctual pressures from the id, and of external realities, but also of the superego’s constraints. It must meet the needs of the id without upsetting the superego to avoid the unpleasant anxiety of guilt. In this view, when you choose against stealing a child’s ice cream cone to meet your immediate hunger, your ego is taking account not only of the realistic problems of getting caught but also of the unpleasant feelings that would be generated by the superego.
The Psychosexual Stages. In Freud’s view, the complexities of the relationships and conflicts that arise among the id, the ego, and the superego are the result of the individual’s experiences during five developmental stages. Freud called these psychosexual stages because he believed that changes in the id and its energy levels initiated each new stage. The term sexual here applies to all biological instincts or drives and their satisfaction, and it can be broadly defined as “sensual.”
For each stage, Freud posited that a disproportionate amount of id energy is invested in drives satisfied through one part of the body. As a result, the pleasure experienced through that body part is especially great during that stage. Children’s experiences satisfying the especially strong needs that emerge at a given stage can influence the development of personality characteristics throughout life. Freud also thought that parents typically play a pivotal role in helping children achieve the satisfaction they need. For example, in the oral stage, corresponding to the first year of life, Freud argued that the mouth is the body part that provides babies with the most pleasure. Eating, drinking, and even nonnutritive sucking are presumably more satisfying than at other times of life. A baby’s experiences with feeding and other parenting behaviors are likely to affect her oral pleasure, and could influence how much energy she invests in seeking oral pleasure in the future. Suppose that a mother in the early 20th century believed the parenting advice of “experts” who claimed that nonnutritive sucking is bad for babies. To prevent her baby from sucking her thumb, the mother might tie the baby’s hands to the sides of the crib at night—a practice recommended by the same experts! Freudian theory would predict that such extreme denial of oral pleasure could cause an oral fixation: The girl might grow up needing oral pleasures more than most adults, perhaps leading to overeating, to being especially talkative, or to being a chain smoker. The grown woman might also exhibit this fixation in more subtle ways, maintaining behaviors or feelings in adulthood that are particularly characteristic of babies, such as crying easily or experiencing overwhelming feelings of helplessness. According to Freud, fixations at any stage could be the result of either denial of a child’s needs, as in this example, or overindulgence of those needs. Specific defense mechanisms, such as “reaction formation” or “repression,” can also be associated with the conflicts that arise at a particular stage.
In Table 1.1, you will find a summary of the basic characteristics of Freud’s five psychosexual stages. Some of these stages will be described in more detail in later chapters. Freud’s stages have many of the properties of critical (or sensitive) periods for personality development. That is, they are time frames during which certain developments must occur or can most fully form. Freud’s third stage, for example, provides an opportunity for sex typing and moral processes to emerge (see Table 1.1). Notice that Freud assumed that much of personality development occurs before age 5, during the first three stages. This is one of the many ideas from Freud’s theory that has made its way into popular culture, even though modern research clearly does not support this position.
By the mid-1900s, two other major stage theories began to significantly impact the progress of developmental science. The first, by Erik Erikson, was focused on personality development, reshaping some of Freud’s ideas. The second, by Jean Piaget, proposed that there are stagelike changes in cognitive processes during childhood and adolescence, especially in rational thinking and problem solving.
Erikson’s Personality Theory
Erik Erikson studied psychoanalytic theory with Anna Freud, Sigmund’s daughter, and later proposed his own theory of personality development (e.g., Erikson, 1950/1963). Like many “neo-Freudians,” Erikson deemphasized the id as the driving force behind all behavior, and he emphasized the more rational processes of the ego. His theory is focused on explaining the psychosocial aspects of behavior: attitudes and feelings toward the self and toward others. Erikson described eight psychosocial stages. The first five correspond to the age periods laid out in Freud’s psychosexual stages, but the last three are adult life stages, reflecting Erikson’s view that personal identity and interpersonal attitudes are continually evolving from birth to death.
The “Eight Stages of Man.” In each stage, the individual faces a different “crisis” or developmental task (see Chapter 9 for a detailed discussion of Erikson’s concept of crisis). The crisis is initiated, on one hand, by changing characteristics of the person—biological maturation or decline, cognitive changes, advancing (or deteriorating) motor skills—and, on the other hand, by corresponding changes in others’ attitudes, behaviors, and expectations. As in all stage theories, people qualitatively change from stage to stage, and so do the crises or tasks that they confront. In the first stage, infants must resolve the crisis of trust versus mistrust (see Chapter 4). Infants, in their relative helplessness, are “incorporative.” They “take in” what is offered, including not only nourishment but also stimulation, information, affection, and attention. If infants’ needs for such input are met by responsive caregivers, they will begin to trust others, to feel valued and valuable, and to view the world as a safe place. If caregivers are not consistently responsive, infants will fail to establish basic trust or to feel valuable, carrying mistrust with them into the next stage of development, when the 1- to 3-year-old toddler faces the crisis of autonomy versus shame and doubt. Mistrust in others and self will make it more difficult to successfully achieve a sense of autonomy. The new stage is initiated by the child’s maturing muscular control and emerging cognitive and language skills. Unlike helpless infants, toddlers can learn not only to control their elimination but also to feed and dress themselves, to express their desires with some precision, and to move around the environment without help. The new capacities bring a strong need to practice and perfect the skills that make children feel in control of their own destinies. Caregivers must be sensitive to the child’s need for independence and yet must exercise enough control to keep the child safe and to help the child learn self-control. Failure to strike the right balance may rob children of feelings of autonomy—a sense that “I can do it myself”—and can promote instead either shame or self-doubt.
These first two stages illustrate features of all of Erikson’s stages (see Table 1.2 for a description of all eight stages).
First, others’ sensitivity and responsiveness to the individual’s needs create a context for positive psychosocial development. Second, attitudes toward self and toward others emerge together. For example, developing trust in others also means valuing (or trusting) the self. Third, every psychosocial crisis or task involves finding the right balance between positive and negative feelings, with the positive outweighing the negative. Finally, the successful resolution of a crisis at one stage helps smooth the way for successful resolutions of future crises. Unsuccessful resolution at an earlier stage may stall progress and make maladaptive behavior more likely. Erikson’s personality theory is often more appealing to helping professionals than Freud’s theory. Erikson’s emphasis on the psychosocial aspects of personality focuses attention on precisely the issues that helpers feel they are most often called on to address: feelings and attitudes about self and about others. Also, Erikson assumed that the child or adult is an active, self-organizing individual who needs only the right social context to move in a positive direction. Further, Erikson was himself an optimistic therapist who believed that poorly resolved crises could be resolved more adequately in later stages if the right conditions prevailed. Erikson was sensitive to cultural differences in behavioral development. Finally, developmental researchers frequently find Eriksonian interpretations of behavior useful. Studies of attachment, self-concept, self-esteem, and adolescent identity, among other topics addressed in subsequent chapters, have produced results compatible with some of Erikson’s ideas. (See Chapter 4, Box 4.2 for a biographical sketch of Erikson.) Piaget’s Cognitive Development Theory
In Jean Piaget’s cognitive development theory, we see the influence of 18th-century philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau (e.g., 1762/1948), who argued that children’s reasoning and understanding emerges naturally in stages and that parents and educators can help most by allowing children freedom to explore their environments and by giving them learning experiences that are consistent with their level of ability. Similarly, Piaget outlined stages in the development of cognition, especially logical thinking, which he called operational thought (e.g., Inhelder & Piaget, 1955/1958, 1964; Piaget, 1952, 1954). He assumed that normal adults are capable of thinking logically about both concrete and abstract contents but that this capacity evolves in four stages through childhood. Briefly, the first sensorimotor stage, lasting for about two years, is characterized by an absence of representational thought (see Chapter 3). Although babies are busy taking in the sensory world, organizing it on the basis of inborn reflexes or patterns, and then responding to their sensations, Piaget believed that they cannot yet symbolically represent their experiences, and so they cannot really reflect on them. This means that young infants do not form mental images or store memories symbolically, and they do not plan their behavior or intentionally act. These capacities emerge between 18 and 24 months, launching the next stage.
Piaget’s theory is another classic stage model. First, cognitive abilities are qualitatively similar within stages. If we know how a child approaches one kind of task, we should be able to predict her approaches to other kinds of tasks as well. Piaget acknowledged that children might be advanced in one cognitive domain or lag behind in another. For example, an adolescent might show more abstract reasoning about math than about interpersonal matters. He called these within-stage variations décalages. But generally, Piaget expected that a child’s thinking would be organized in similar ways across most domains. Second, even though progress through the stages could move more or less quickly depending on many individual and contextual factors, the stages unfold in an invariant sequence, regardless of context or culture. The simpler patterns of physical or mental activity at one stage become integrated into more complex organizational systems at the next stage (hierarchical integration). Finally, despite the qualitative differences across stages, there are functional similarities or continuities from stage to stage in the ways in which children’s cognitive development proceeds. According to Piaget, developmental progress depends on children’s active engagement with the environment. This active process, which will be described in more detail in Chapter 3, suggests that children (and adults) build knowledge and understanding in a self-organizing way. They interpret new experiences and information to fit their current ways of understanding even as they make some adjustments to their understanding in the process. Children do not just passively receive information from without and store it “as is.” And, knowledge does not just emerge from within as though preformed. Instead, children actively build their knowledge, using both existing knowledge and new information. This is a constructivist view of development.
Piaget’s ideas about cognitive development were first translated into English in the 1960s, and they swept American developmental researchers off their feet. His theory filled the need for an explanation that acknowledged complex qualitative changes in children’s abilities over time, and it launched an era of unprecedented research on all aspects of children’s intellectual functioning that continues today. Although many of the specifics of Piaget’s theory have been challenged by research findings, researchers, educators, and other helping professionals still find the broad outlines of this theory very useful for organizing their thinking about the kinds of understandings that children of different ages can bring to a problem or social situation. Piaget’s theory also inspired some modern views of cognitive change in adulthood. As you will see in Chapter 11, post-Piagetians have proposed additional stages in the development of logical thinking, hypothesizing that the abstract thinking of the adolescent is transformed during adulthood into a more relativistic kind of logical thinking, partly as a function of adults’ practical experience with the complexity of real-world problems. Emphasizing Continuity: Incremental Change
Unlike stage theories, some theoretical approaches characterize development as a more continuous process. Change tends to be incremental, metaphorically resembling not a staircase but a steadily rising mountainside. Again, picture a 4-month-old girl, and the same girl when she is 4 years old. If you tend to “see” her evolving in small steps from a smiling, attentive infant to a smiling, eager toddler, to a smiling, mischievous preschooler, always noting in your observations threads of sameness as well as differences, your own theoretical assumptions about development may be more compatible with one of these incremental models. Like stage models, they can be very different in the types and breadth of behaviors they attempt to explain. They also differ in the kinds of processes they assume to underlie psychological change, such as the kinds of processes involved in learning. But they all agree that developmental change is not marked by major, sweeping reorganizations that affect many behaviors at once, as in stage theories. Rather, change is steady and specific to particular behaviors or behavioral domains. Incremental theorists, like stage theorists, tend to see “change for the better” as a key feature of development. So, adding words to your vocabulary over time would be a typical developmental change, but forgetting previously learned information might not. Social learning theory and most information processing theories are among the many incremental models available to explain development. Learning Theories
Learning theories, in what is called the behaviorist tradition, have a distinguished history in American psychology. They were the most widely accepted class of theories through much of the 20th century, influenced by many thinkers from John B. Watson (e.g., 1913) to B. F. Skinner (e.g., 1938) to Albert Bandura (e.g., 1974). These theories trace their philosophical roots from ancient Greece and the writings of Aristotle through John Locke and the British empiricists of the 17th and 18th centuries. In this philosophical tradition, knowledge and skill are thought to accumulate as the result of each person’s individual experiences. The environment gradually leaves its imprint on one’s behavior and mind, a mind that in infancy is like a blank slate. Locke described several simple processes—association, repetition, imitation, reward, and punishment—by which the environment can have an impact. Many of the processes Locke described were incorporated into behaviorist approaches to development.
Some learning theories explain behavioral change as a function of chains of specific environmental events, such as those that occur in classical conditioning and operant conditioning. In these processes, change in behavior takes place because environmental events (stimuli) are paired with certain behaviors. Let’s begin with classical conditioning, also called respondent conditioning (Vargas, 2009). A respondent is an automatic response to a stimulus. For example, when you hear an unexpected loud noise you will automatically produce a startle response. This stimulus/response association is unconditioned, built-in to your biological system. But the response can be conditioned to a new, neutral stimulus. Suppose a child calmly watches a dog approach her. At first, sight of the dog is a neutral stimulus. But the dog suddenly barks loudly, causing the child to automatically startle and pull back. Suppose that the next time the child sees the dog, it does not bark. Even so, just the sight of the dog triggers the same response as loud barking would: The child automatically startles and pulls back. The child has learned a new response, because the formerly neutral event (sight of dog) has been paired with an event (loud barking) that automatically causes a startle. Perhaps the startle reaction is also accompanied by feelings of fear. If so, the child haslearned a new response, because the formerly neutral event (sight of dog) has been paired with an event (loud barking) that automatically causes a startle. Perhaps the startle reaction is also accompanied by feelings of fear. If so, the child has learned to fear this dog and will likely generalize that fear to other, similar dogs. When a neutral event or stimulus is associated with a stimulus that causes an automatic response, the neutral stimulus can become a conditioned stimulus, meaning that it can cause the person to make the same automatic response in the future, called a conditioned response. This is classical conditioning. Operant conditioning is different. First, a person performs some behavior. The behavior is an operant, any act with potential to lead to consequences in the environment (that is, to “operate” on the environment). Immediately after the operant occurs, there is a “reinforcing event,” or reinforcement, something that is experienced by the person as pleasurable or rewarding. For example, suppose that a young child happens to babble “da” just as a dog appears in the child’s line of sight, and the child’s mother excitedly claps and kisses the child. (The mother has mistakenly assumed that the child has tried to say “dog.”) The mother’s reaction serves as a reinforcement for the child, who will repeat the “da” sound the next time a dog comes into view. In operant conditioning, the child learns to produce a spontaneous behavior or operant (e.g., “da”) in response to a cue (e.g., the appearance of a dog) because the behavior was previously reinforced in that situation. A reinforcement is a consequence of the operant behavior that maintains or increases the likelihood of that behavior when the cue occurs again (Sparzo, 2011). The mother’s approving reaction is an example of a positive reinforcement: Something pleasurable is presented after the operant occurs. There are also rewarding consequences that are called negative reinforcements: An aversive experience stops or is removed after the operant occurs. If your brother releases you from a painful hammer-hold when you yell “Uncle,” you have been negatively reinforced for saying “Uncle” (the operant) in that situation.
Social learning theories, which have focused specifically on how children acquire personality characteristics and social skills, consider conditioning processes part of the story, but they also emphasize “observational learning,” or modeling. In this kind of learning, one person (the learner) observes another (the model) performing some behavior, and just from close observation, learns to do it too. The observer may or may not imitate the modeled behavior, immediately or in the future, depending on many factors, such as whether the observer
expects a reward for the behavior, whether the model is perceived as nurturing or competent, and even whether the observer believes that the performance will meet the observer’s own performance standards. Current versions of social learning theory emphasize many similar cognitive, self-regulated determiners of performance and suggest that they too are often learned from models (e.g., Bandura, 1974, 1999).
Whatever the learning processes that are emphasized in a particular learning theory, the story of development is one in which behaviors or beliefs or feelings change in response to specific experiences, one experience at a time. Broader changes can occur by generalization. If new events are experienced that are very similar to events in the
original learning context, the learned behaviors may be extended to these new events. For example, the child who learns to say “da” when a particular dog appears may do the same when other dogs appear, or even in the presence of other four-legged animals. Or a child who observes a model sharing candy with a friend may later share toys with a sibling. But these extensions of learned activities are narrow in scope compared to the sweeping changes hypothesized by stage theorists. While these processes explain changes in discrete behaviors or patterns of behavior, learning theories do not explain developmental reorganizations and adaptations in the ways classic stage theories do. Information Processing Theories
Since the introduction of computing technologies in the middle of the 20th century, some theorists have likened human cognitive functioning to computer processing of information. Not all information processing theories can be strictly classified as incremental theories, but many can. Like learning theories, these do not hypothesize broad stages, but emphasize incremental changes in narrow domains of behavior or thought. The mind works on information—attending to it, holding it in a temporary store or “working memory,” putting it into long-term storage, using strategies to organize it or to draw conclusions from it, and so on. How the information is processed depends on general characteristics of the human computer, such as how much information can be accessed, or made available for our attention, at one time. These characteristics can change to some degree over time. For example, children’s attentional capacity increases gradually with age. Yet most changes withage. Yet most changes with age are quite specific to particular domains of knowledge, such as changes in the strategies children use to solve certain kinds of problems.
Furthermore, processing changes are not stagelike; they do not extend beyond the particular situation or problem space in which they occur. For example, Siegler and his colleagues (e.g., Siegler, 1996, 2007; Siegler & Svetina, 2006) describe changes in the ways that children do arithmetic, read, solve problems of various kinds, and perform many other tasks and skills. Siegler analyzes very particular changes in the kinds of strategies that children use when they attempt these tasks. Although there can be similarities across tasks in the ways that strategies change (e.g., they become more automatic with practice, they generalize to similar problems, etc.), usually the specific strategies used in one kind of task fail to apply to another, and changes are not coordinated across tasks. To illustrate, a kindergartner trying to solve an addition problem might use the strategy of “counting from one.” “[T]his typically involves putting up fingers on one hand to represent the first addend, putting up fingers on the other hand to represent the second addend, and then counting the raised fingers on both hands” (Siegler, 1998, p. 93). This strategy is characteristic of early addition efforts, but would play no role in tasks such as reading or spelling. Overall, then, cognitive development in this kind of model is like social development in social learning theories: It results from the accrual of independent changes in many different domains of thought and skill. Development involves change for the better, but it does not lead to major organizational shifts across domains.
Classic Theories and the Major Issues They Raise
Classic theories of development have typically addressed a set of core issues. In our brief review, you have been introduced to just a few of them. Is developmental change qualitative (e.g., stagelike) or quantitative (e.g., incremental)? Are some developments restricted to certain critical periods in the life cycle or are changes in brain and behavior possible at any time given the appropriate opportunities? Are there important continuities across the life span (in characteristics or change processes) or is everything in flux? Are people actively influencing the course and nature of their own development (self-organizing), or are they passive products of other forces? Which is more important in causing developmental change, nature (heredity) or nurture (environment)? Are there universal developmental trajectories, processes, and changes that are the same in all cultures and historical periods, or is development more specific to place and time? Classic theorists usually took a stand on one side or the other of these issues, framing them as “either-or” possibilities. However, taking an extreme position does not fit the data we now have available. Contemporary theorists propose that human development is best described by a synthesis of the extremes. The best answer to all of the questions just posed appears to be “Both.”
Contemporary Multidimensional or Systems Theories: Embracing the Complexity of Development
Throughout this text you will find evidence that development is the result of the relationships among many causal components, interacting in complex ways. Modern developmental theories, which we refer to as multidimensional or systems theories, explain and describe the enormous complexity of interrelated causal processes in development. They generally assume that in all behavioral domains, from cognition to personality, there are layers, or levels, of interacting causes for change: physical/molecular, biological, psychological, social, and cultural. What happens at one level both causes and is caused by what happens at other levels. That is, the relationships among causes are reciprocal or bidirectional processes. For example, increased testosterone levels at puberty (biological change) might help influence a boy to pursue an aggressive sport, like wrestling. The boy’s success at wrestling may cause his status and social dominance to rise among his male friends (social change), and this social change can reciprocally influence his biological functioning. Specifically, it can lead to additional increases in his testosterone levels (Cacioppo & Berntson, 1992).
These theories acknowledge and incorporate many kinds of change: qualitative, transforming changes, both great (stagelike) and small (such as strategy changes within a particular problem-solving domain), as well as continuous, incremental variations that can even be reversible, such as learning and then forgetting new information (e.g., Overton, 1990). This is one example of how contemporary theories integrate features of many classic theories of development.
Think again about a girl who is 4 months old, and then later 4 years old. Do you perceive so many changes that she is transformed into a different sort of creature, and yet, at the same time, do you see enduring qualities that characterize her at both ages? Does your sense of the forces that have changed her include influences such as her family, community, and culture? Do you also recognize that she has played a significant role in her own change and in modifying those other forces? If so, your implicit assumptions about development may be more consistent with multidimensional models than with either stage or incremental theories alone.
Multidimensional theories portray the developing person metaphorically as a vine growing through a thick forest (Kagan, 1994). In doing so, the vine is propelled by its own inner processes, but its path, even its form, is in part created by the forest it inhabits. There is continuous growth, but there are changes in structure too—in its form and direction—as the vine wends its way through the forest. Finally, its presence in the forest changes the forest itself, affecting the growth of the trees and other plants, which reciprocally influence the growth of the vine.
Many multidimensional theories have been proposed, but they are remarkably similar in their fundamental assumptions and characteristics. They are typically different in which aspects of development they provide most detail about. They include transactional theory (e.g., Sameroff & Chandler, 1975), relational theory (e.g., Lerner, 1998), dialectical theory (e.g., Sameroff, 2012), bioecological theory (e.g., Bronfenbrenner & Ceci, 1994), bio-social-ecological theory (e.g., Cole & Packer, 2011), epigenetic theory (e.g., Gottlieb, 1992), life course theory (Elder & Shanahan, 2006), life span developmental theory (e.g., Baltes, 1997; Baltes, Lindenberger, & Staudinger, 2006), dynamic systems theory (e.g., Thelen & Smith, 1998), and several others. (See Overton, 2015, for a deeper analysis of the similarities and differences among these theories.) Figure 1.2 provides one illustration of the multiple, interacting forces that these theories identify. Two examples of multidimensional models will help flesh out the typical characteristics of many of these theories. Bronfenbrenner’s Bioecological Theory
In his bioecological theory, Urie Bronfenbrenner and his colleagues (e.g., Bronfenbrenner & Ceci, 1994; Bronfenbrenner & Morris, 1998, 2006) described all developments—including personality and cognitive change—as a function of proximal processes. These are reciprocal interactions between an “active, evolving biopsychological human organism and the persons, objects and symbols in its immediate external environment” (Bronfenbrenner & Morris, 1998, p. 996). In other words, proximal processes refer to a person’s immediate interactions with people or with the physical environment or with informational sources (such as books or movies). Proximal processes are truly interactive: The organism both influences and is influenced by the immediate environment. These proximal processes are modified by more distal processes. Some of these are within the organism—such as genes. Others are outside the immediate environment—such as features of the educational system or of the broader culture. The quality and effectiveness of the immediate environment—its responsiveness to the individual’s particular needs and characteristics and the opportunities it provides—depend on the larger context. For example, parental monitoring of children’s homework benefits children’s academic performance. But monitoring is more effective if parents are knowledgeable about the child’s work. A parent who insists that his child do her algebra homework may have less effect if the parent cannot be a resource who guides and explains the work. Thus, the parent’s own educational background affects the usefulness of the monitoring (Bronfenbrenner & Ceci, 1994).
An individual’s characteristics also influence the effectiveness of the environment. For example, motivations affect the impact of learning opportunities in a given context. A man interested in gambling may learn to reason in very complex ways about horses and their relative probability of winning at the track, but he may not display such complex reasoning in other contexts (Ceci & Liker, 1986). Other important individual qualities include demand characteristics, behavioral tendencies that often either encourage or discourage certain kinds of reactions from others. A child who is shy and inhibited, a trait that appears to have some biological roots (Kagan & Fox, 2006), may often fail to elicit attention from others, and may receive less support when she needs it, than a child who is open and outgoing (Bell & Chapman, 1986; see also Chapters 4 and 5).
Changes in the organism can be emergent, stagelike, qualitative changes, such as a shift from preoperational to concrete operational thought (see Table 1.3), or they can be more continuous, graded changes, such as shifts in academic interest or involvement in athletics. Both kinds of change are the result of proximal processes, influenced by more distal internal and external causes. Once changes occur, the individual brings new resources to these proximal processes. For example, when a child begins to demonstrate concrete operational thought, she will be given different tasks to do at home or at school than before, and she will learn things from those experiences that she would not have learned earlier. This is a good example of the bidirectionality of proximal processes: Change in the child fosters change in the environment, leading to more change in the child, and so on.
In earlier versions of his theory, Bronfenbrenner characterized in detail the many levels of environment that influence a person’s development.
He referred to the immediate environment, where proximal processes are played out, as the microsystem. Babies interact primarily with family members, but as children get older, other microsystems, such as the school, the neighborhood, or a local playground and its inhabitants, become part of their lives. The microsystems interact with and modify each other. For example, a discussion between a child’s parent and a teacher might change how one or both of them interacts with the child. The full set of relationships among the microsystems is called the mesosystem. The next level of the environment, the exosystem, includes settings that children may not directly interact with but that influence the child nonetheless. For example, a teacher’s family life will influence the teacher and thereby the child. Or a child’s socioeconomic status influences where her family lives, affecting the school the child will attend, and thus affecting the kinds of experiences the child has with teachers. Finally, there is the macrosystem, including the customs and character of the larger culture that help shape the microsystems. For example, cultural attitudes and laws regarding the education of exceptional students influence the operation of a school and therefore a child’s interactions with teachers.
The environment, then, is like “a set of nested structures, each inside the next, like a set of Russian dolls” (Bronfenbrenner, 1979). In newer versions of his theory, Bronfenbrenner gave equal attention to the nested internal levels of the organism. As we have seen, a person brings to proximal processes a set of dispositions, resources (preexisting abilities, experiences, knowledge, and skills), and demand characteristics. These, in turn, are influenced by biological and physical levels of functioning that include the genes. Bronfenbrenner also emphasized, as other multidimensional theorists do, the bidirectional effects of each level on the adjacent levels. For example, proximal psychological processes playing out in the immediate context are both influenced by, and influencing, physiological processes (Bronfenbrenner & Morris, 1998, 2006). Finally, these interactions continue and change across time.
Life Span Developmental Theory
In life span developmental theories, the same developmental processes that produce the transformation of infants into children, and children into adults, are thought to continue throughout adulthood until death. Developmental change is part of what it means to be alive. Adaptation continues from conception to death, with proximal interactions between the organism and the immediate context modified by more distal processes both within the individual and in the environment. Life span theorists like Paul Baltes (e.g., 1997; Baltes, Lindenberger, & Staudinger, 2006) refer to the interacting web of influences on development as the “architecture” of biological and cultural supports. Baltes proposed that successful adaptation is benefited more by biological supports in childhood than in adulthood. Cultural supports are important in childhood, but if not optimal, most children have biological supports (we could think of them as a complex of biological protective factors) that have evolved to optimize development in most environments. For adults, successful adaptation is more heavily dependent on cultural supports or protective factors. “The older individuals are, the more they are in need of culture-based resources (material, social, economic, psychological) to generate and maintain high levels of functioning” (Baltes, Lindenberger, & Staudinger, 1998, p. 1038). We will have more to say about life span developmental theories in Chapter 13.
Applying Theory to Practice
We have described both classic theoretical approaches to development and the more integrative and complex multidimensional theories that contemporary developmentalists favor. Preferring one of these paradigms can influence the way helping professionals assess and interpret client concerns. Let’s consider how various theoretical orientations to development might apply to a counseling situation:
Juliana is a 26-year-old Latina female who was raised in an intact, middle-class family. Her father was a teacher and her mother a housewife who occasionally worked in a neighborhood preschool as a teacher’s aide. Juliana was the second child in the family, which included an older brother and a younger sister. She attended parochial schools from kindergarten through 12th grade, where she worked very hard to achieve average and sometimes above-average grades. During her early years in school, Juliana had reading difficulties and received remedial instruction. At home, her parents stressed the value of education and kept a close watch on the children. The children were well behaved, respectful, and devoted to the family. Most of their spare time was spent with their close relatives, who lived nearby. Despite Juliana’s interest in dating during high school, her parents did not permit her to spend time with boyfriends. They told her that she needed to concentrate on her schoolwork so that she could be a nurse when she grew up. After graduation, Juliana entered a small local college and enrolled in a program designed to prepare her for a career in nursing. She lived at home and commuted to school on a daily basis. Life proceeded as it had for most of her high school years. Her course work, however, became increasingly more difficult for her. She also felt isolated from most of her classmates, many of whom were working and living on their own. She tried to participate in some of the college’s social events, but without much satisfaction or success. To pass her science courses, Juliana had to spend most of her time studying. By the middle of her academic program, it was clear that she was in danger of failing. She felt frustrated and angry. At this point, she became romantically involved with Bill, a young White man who worked at the college. She dropped out of school and moved in with him, hoping their relationship would lead to marriage. Her family was shocked and upset with her decision and put pressure on her to come home. Eventually, the relationship with Bill ended, and Juliana, unwilling to return home, moved in with a group of young students who were looking for someone to share the rent. She found a low-wage job, changed her style of dress to look more like the younger students, and quickly became involved in a series of other romantic relationships. Juliana grew increasingly despondent about her inability to maintain a relationship that would lead to marriage and a family. In addition, she felt some distress about not completing her college degree. She enrolled in a night-school program at a local community college to retake her science courses. Once again, she experienced confusion, problems fitting in, and academic difficulty. She went to the college counseling center to ask for help.
Take a minute to think about how you would respond to Juliana. Do any of your views about development enter into your appraisal of her situation? If you tend to be a stage theorist, you might consider Juliana’s problems to be based on Erikson’s crisis of intimacy in early adulthood (see Table 1.2). She does seem to have difficulties with intimacy, and she is just at the age when these issues are supposed to become central to psychosocial development. But a rigid assumption of age–stage correspondence could prevent you from considering other possibilities, such as an unresolved identity crisis.
If you tend to be an incremental theorist, perhaps favoring social learning explanations, you might perceive Juliana’s situation quite differently. You may see Juliana as having problems in her intimate relationships that are similar to her difficulties with school. In both domains she is apparently “delayed,” perhaps because she has had insufficient opportunities to learn social and academic skills or perhaps because she has been reinforced for behaviors that are ineffective in more challenging contexts. Although this may be a useful way of construing Juliana’s dilemma, any stage issues contributing to her distress may be missed. Also, there could be factors in her social environment, such as cultural expectations, that might not be considered.
If you take a more multidimensional approach, as we do, you will try to remain alert to multiple influences, both proximal and distal, on Juliana’s development. The roles of her biological status, her individual capabilities, her stage of development, her earlier experiences, her family, and her culture will all be considered as possible influences and points of intervention. One disadvantage could be that the complexity of the interacting factors is so great that you may find it difficult to sort out the most effective place to begin. Another disadvantage is that macrosystem influences, such as cultural expectations about appropriate roles for women, may be quite resistant to intervention. However, one of the advantages of a multidimensional view is that it does highlight many possible avenues of intervention, and if you can identify one or a few that are amenable to change, you may have a positive influence on Juliana’s future.
Helping professionals with different developmental assumptions would be likely to choose different approaches and strategies in working with Juliana. In a sense, any set of theoretical biases is like a set of blinders. It will focus your attention on some aspects of the situation and reduce the visibility of other aspects. Taking a multidimensional or systems view has the advantage of minimizing the constraints of those blinders. In any case, knowing your own biases can help you avoid the pitfalls of overreliance on one way of viewing development.
A New Look at Three Developmental Issues
In the following sections, we examine three classic developmental issues that have garnered a great deal of attention in recent years. As you read about these issues from the viewpoint of contemporary research, you will begin to see why modern developmental theories take a multidimensional approach. Notice whether any of the new information causes you to reexamine your own assumptions about development.
Nature and Nurture
How did you respond to the first three items of the questionnaire in Box 1.1? Did you say that physical traits are primarily inherited? Did you say that intelligence or personality is inherited? Your opinions on these matters are likely to be influenced by your cultural background. Through most of the last century, North Americans viewed intelligence as mostly hereditary, but Chinese and Japanese tended to disregard the notion of “native ability” and to consider intellectual achievements more as a function of opportunity and hard work (e.g., Stevenson, Chen, & Lee, 1993). Partially influenced by psychological research, North Americans have begun to see intelligence as at least partially dependent on education and opportunity, but they still are likely to see some achievements, such as in mathematics, as mostly dependent on ability. Alternatively, North Americans have traditionally viewed social adjustment as a result of environmental experiences, especially parents’ nurturance and socialization practices, but East Asians typically see these qualities as mostly inherent traits. Developmental researchers acknowledge that both nature and nurture influence most behavioral outcomes, but in the past they have often focused primarily on one or the other, partly because a research enterprise that examines multiple causes at the same time tends to be a massive undertaking. So, based on personal interest, theoretical bias, and practical limitations, developmental researchers have often systematically investigated one kind of cause of behavior, setting aside examination of other causes. Interestingly, what these limited research approaches have accomplished is to establish impressive bodies of evidence, both for the importance of genes and for the importance of the environment!
What theorists and researchers face now is the difficult task of specifying how the two sets of causes work together: Do they have separate effects that “add up,” for example, or do they qualitatively modify each other, creating together, in unique combinations, unique outcomes? Modern multidimensional theories make the latter assumption, and evidence is quickly accumulating to support this view. Heredity and environment are interdependent: The same genes operate differently in different environments, and the same environments are experienced differently by individuals with different genetic characteristics. Developmental outcomes are always a function of interplay between genes and environment, and the operation of one cannot even be described adequately without reference to the other. In Chapter 2 you will learn more about this complex interdependence.
Neuroplasticity and Critical
(Sensitive) Periods
Neuroplasticity refers to changes in the brain that occur as a result of some practice or experience. Neurons, the basic cells of the nervous system, become reorganized as a result of such practice, resulting in new learning and memory. Neural changes were once thought to occur primarily in infancy and early childhood. Contemporary neuroscientists recognize that “there is no period when the brain and its functions are static; changes are continuous throughout the lifespan. The nature, extent and the rates of change vary by region and function assessed and are influenced by genetic as well as environmental factors” (Pascual-Leone & Taylor, 2011, p. 183). The realization that our brains continue to change throughout life has revolutionized the way scientists regard the brain. As we have seen, modern multidisciplinary theories incorporate descriptions of relative life-long plasticity.
The time-related “variation by region and function” noted previously is at the heart of the classic question about critical (sensitive) periods. Although the brain exhibits plasticity throughout life, do some changes, such as first language learning, occur more easily and more effectively at certain ages and stages? Or, is the organism able to develop or learn any new skill at any time with the right opportunities? There is little doubt that there are some behavioral developments that usually take place within a particular period. In many ways, language acquisition is nearly complete by the age of 5 or 6, for example. But is it possible to acquire a language at another point in the life cycle if this usual time is somehow “missed”? Pinker (1994) reviewed several findings that led him to conclude that although language can be learned at other times, it is never learned as well or as effortlessly as it would have been in the critical period from about 1 to 5 years. Consider deaf individuals learning American Sign Language (ASL). ASL is a “real” symbolic language, with a complex grammar. Sometimes, however, American deaf children are not given the opportunity to learn ASL in their early years, often because of a belief that deaf children should learn to read lips and speak English (the “oralist” tradition). As a result, many deaf children simply do not learn any language. When these individuals are introduced to ASL in late childhood or adolescence, they often fail to acquire the same degree of facility with the grammar that children who learn ASL as preschoolers achieve.
If findings like these mean that a sensitive period has been missed, what could be the cause of such time-dependent learning? It is usually assumed that the end of a sensitive period is due to brain changes that make learning more difficult after the change. The environmental conditions that are likely to support the new learning may also be less favorable at certain times. As we have seen, the explanation is likely to be complex. For example, total immersion in a language may be just the right arrangement for a preschooler who knows no other communicative system. Older learners, even deaf children or adults who have learned no formal language early in life, may always filter a new language through previously established communication methods, such as an idiosyncratic set of hand signals. If so, for an older child or adult, total immersion may be less effective than a learning environment that can make correspondences between the new language and the old one. In later chapters, we will examine this issue as it relates to several developments, such as the emergence of sexual identity ( Chapter 8) and the formation of bonds between mothers and infants ( Chapter 4). In each case, the evidence indicates that time-dependent, region-specific windows of opportunity for rapid neural reorganization exist alongside continuing plasticity.
Universality and Specificity: The Role of Culture
Developmental science is concerned with explaining the nature and characteristics of change. Are developmental changes universal, having the same qualities across ethnic, racial, or socioeconomic status groups, between genders, and from one historical period to another? Or does development depend entirely on the specific group or time within which it occurs? Many classic developmental theories have posited basic similarities in development across different groups and historical periods. Stage theories, like Freud’s theory in particular, often specify invariant sequences in personality or cognitive outcomes that are thought to apply to everyone, regardless of culture, group, or historical time. Yet even classic stage theories incorporate sociocultural influences.
In Erikson’s psychosocial stage theory, for example, all adolescents confront the task of formulating an adult identity. But the nature of that identity will certainly differ across groups. How complex and arduous a struggle the adolescent might face in forming an identity could vary dramatically depending on her context. Erikson’s studies of identity development in two Native American groups, the Sioux in South Dakota and the Yurok on the Pacific coast, and of mainstream White culture revealed different struggles and different outcomes in each (Erikson, 1950/1963).
Some sociocultural theories, which trace their roots to the work of Lev Vygotsky (e.g., 1934, 1978; see Chapter 3), argue that cognitive developments may be qualitatively different in different cultures (e.g., Rogoff, 2003; Sternberg, 2014). For example, in Western cultures classifying objects by functional associations (birds with nests) is a trademark of preschoolers’ sorting behavior. Hierarchically organized taxonomic classification (e.g., collies and dachshunds grouped as kinds of dogs, dogs and birds grouped as animals) is more typical of elementary-school-age children. Piaget regarded taxonomic sorting to be an indicator of the logical thinking that emerges in middle childhood. But in some ethnic groups, such as the African Kpelle tribe, even adults do not sort objects taxonomically. They use functionally based schemes, perhaps because these are more meaningful in their everyday lives, and they would probably consider such schemes more sophisticated than a taxonomic one (Cole, 1998).
Even sub-cultural groups within the same society may show differences in the development of cognitive skills. For example, in most societies, boys perform better than girls on certain spatial tasks. Yet in a study that included low-, middle-, and high-income children in Chicago, low-income girls performed as well on spatial tasks as low-income boys, even though the usual gender difference was found in the other income groups (Levine, Vasilyeva, Lourenco, Newcombe, & Huttenlocher, 2005). Differences in the typical experiences of children in different social classes are the likely reason for these cognitive variations. Bronfenbrenner (1979) explained how culture could influence behavior through proximal processes, the daily give and take with others in one’s social networks that he considered the primary engines of development. Adults in particular are “cultural experts,” and their interactions with children embody cultural expectations and ways of doing things (Oyserman, 2017).
The bulk of social science research has been done on a relatively narrow sample of WEIRD (Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic) people (Henrich, Heine, & Norenzayan, 2010), and developmental research is no exception (Fernald, 2010). Researchers have become acutely aware of the need to discover how developmental processes play out among other groups both within and outside North America to answer questions about universal versus specific developmental trajectories. To this end, culture, race, and ethnicity now have greater prominence in research than in the past, even though these constructs have proven somewhat difficult to define (Corbie-Smith et al., 2008).
Formerly, differences among racial groups, like Blacks, Whites, and Asians, were considered to be due to heredity, identifiable primarily by skin color, but also by variations in hair, bone structure, or other physiological markers. The assumption was that these superficial markers were indicators of deeper biological differences. But the range of genetic differences within groups is actually equal to or greater than those between racial groups (Richeson & Sommers, 2016). Racial groupings are now usually seen as social constructions, founded on superficial characteristics that change across time and circumstance (Saperstein, Penner, & Light, 2013). For example, Arab Americans were considered White before the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, but now are often considered non-White (Perez & Hirschman, 2010). Ethnicity is sometimes used interchangeably with race, although this too is problematic. Shared ancestry, language, a common place of origin, and a sense of belonging to the group are elements commonly used to describe membership in an ethnic group.
Adding to the complexity, culture includes a community’s shared values, rituals, psychological processes, behavioral norms, and practices (Fiske, Kitayama, Markus, & Nisbett, 1998). The concept clearly overlaps in meaning with “ethnicity.” Early studies often represented culture as a kind of “social address” (Bronfenbrenner, 1979) with gender, race, religion, age, language, ethnic heritage, and socioeconomic status as labels signifying aspects of cultural group membership. Think of your own status in relation to the items on this list. Then consider the status of another person you know. How similar to or different from you is this other person? Is there one category that stands out for you when you try to describe her social/cultural address? For someone you consider to be culturally similar to you, do all the labels overlap? Just a little reflection gives you a taste of the dizzying complexity of such distinctions.
Some research demonstrates that shared values might not be the most reliable indicator of culture. For example, a study of values drawn from approximately 169,000 participants from six continents revealed broad agreement in values, contrary to what one might expect. Autonomy, relatedness, and competence were highly ranked across all cultures although some differences were observed for the value of conformity (Fischer & Schwartz, 2011). This finding questions the assumption that cultures are reliably different in their value systems. People in the same cultural group may be too diverse to justify painting with a broad brush. In addition, increasing global migration and trade, as well as worldwide media and information networks, mean that more and more individuals have multiple ethnic/cultural experiences and many may be polycultural in perspective and behavior (Jensen, 2012; Morris, Chiu, & Liu, 2015). Cultural identities can be difficult to pin down. Currently, there is a tendency to move away from static conceptualizations of what constitutes ethnic/cultural group membership and toward more dynamic, process-oriented definitions for these important variables (Brubaker, 2009). In particular, researchers are concerned about disaggregating social class, or socioeconomic status (SES), from race and ethnic/cultural distinctions. Socioeconomic status is based on social standing or power, and is defined by characteristics of the adults in a household, including educational background, income, and occupation. Frequently, variables of race/ethnicity and SES are conflated in research, leading to questionable findings. This conflation comes in at least two forms. First, SES is a characteristic that can directly affect how people perceive an individual’s racial identity. If someone is affluent or highly educated, others may assume that she is White; if she is on welfare, others might assume that she is a member of a minority (e.g., Penner & Saperstein, 2008).
Second, SES and race/ethnicity can be conflated when research findings are attributed to one factor without examining the other. A good example of why disaggregation is important comes from a study of preschool children’s everyday activities in four cultural communities (Black and White in the United States, Luo in Kenya, and European descent in Porto Allegre, Brazil). Tudge and his colleagues (2006) observed everyday behaviors of preschool children, hypothesizing that each culture provides its young with the kinds of opportunities (e.g., school or work-related activities) deemed important for successful participation in their culture. Equal numbers of high and low SES children within each culture were included to study the intersection of culture and class. The Brazilian children engaged in fewer academic activities compared to White and Kenyan groups. Nonetheless, middle-class Brazilian children were involved in more academic lessons than their working-class counterparts. Kenyan children participated in significantly more work-related activities than all other groups. However, the working-class Kenyan children engaged in twice as much work as those from all other groups, including middle-class Kenyan children.
As complex as the identification of culture is, it is clear that cultural experience is important to development. But does culture have effects only at a superficial level (e.g., learning different behaviors, manners, customs), or are there effects on more fundamental processes, such as information processing and developing brain structures (Fiske, 2009; Kitayama & Park, 2010)? This is precisely the kind of question that experimenters in the field of cultural psychology have taken on (Sternberg, 2014; Wang, 2016).
Consider, for example, the often-cited distinction between the holistic (interdependent) modes of interacting in cultures of the Eastern hemisphere and the analytic (independent) modes in cultures of the Western hemisphere. A body of research now supports the existence of reliable differences beyond just superficial behavioral ones. First, differences have been identified in information processing (attention, understanding cause and effect, memory, and categorization) between people from Eastern and Western cultures (Nisbett & Masuda, 2003). Some analysts have speculated that the historical-cultural antecedents of these processing differences may be ancient ways of viewing the world common to Chinese and Greek societies respectively (Nisbett, Peng, Choi, & Norenzayan, 2001). In turn, each of these ways may have been shaped by the respective economies of those societies (large-scale farming vs. hunting and trading) along with their different physical environments (open plain vs. seaside mountains). Freed from the interdependence required for massive farming and irrigation projects, ancient Greeks, the forebears of Western societies, came to view the world by focusing on central objects. In other words, the ancient Greeks inhabited a world where objects were typically perceived as relatively unchanging and detached from their context. The objects’ features (size, shape, color, etc.) were investigated so as to understand their operating rules and to predict and control their operations. Logic and scientific empiricism are related to this perspective on the world.
Needing to pay attention to the larger context in order to thrive, members of Eastern societies such as China focused more holistically on interrelationships, paying as much attention to the field wherein objects existed as to the objects themselves. Understanding the world from this perspective was more likely to incorporate figure-ground relationships and to hold the dialectic of opposing points of view in balance (Nisbett & Masuda, 2003). It could be that these fundamental differences in Greek and Chinese social organization and cognition, based upon geographical constraints and the exigencies of survival, continued to affect the development of people and societies that followed in their wake.
Any study of cultural differences embodies a fundamental wish to see the world as others do. Imagine that you could literally see what people pay attention to as a way of gaining knowledge about their perspective. Seeing the world through the eyes of people who live in the Eastern and Western regions of the globe could be a fruitful place to start because any differences that evolved from long histories of practice might be more obvious. Recent studies of attention and visual processing that compare these two cultural groups, made possible by the development of a variety of advanced technologies, have indeed proved fruitful.
Results of many studies have demonstrated a greater tendency among Eastern participants to attend to context when compared to Western participants who are more likely to attend to central objects (e.g., in photos of animals in complex environments; Boduroglu, Shah, & Nisbett, 2009; Kitayama, Duffy, Kawamura, & Larsen, 2003; Masuda & Nisbett, 2001, 2006). Eastern research subjects also process groups of items in relationship to each other rather than by category (e.g., linking a cow and grass instead of a cow and chicken; Chiu, 1972; Ji, Zhang, & Nisbett, 2004). They typically make judgments of contextual characteristics more quickly than Westerners, and they engage fewer areas of the brain in the process (Goh et al., 2013). The Eastern emphasis on field also extends to making causal attributions for events. When Westerners were asked to explain the reasons for outcomes in athletic competitions or the causes of criminal events, they emphasized internal traits as causal, whereas Easterners gave more contextualized explanations for outcomes (Choi, Nisbett, & Norenzayan, 1999).
In an ingenious study demonstrating the interrelated effects of culture, development, and neuroplasticity, Goh et al. (2007) show that what you pay attention to makes a subtle yet enduring difference in your brain over time. Repeated practice results in changes in the brain that become our preferred modes of thought and action. The cultural shaping of visual processing in the brain was explored in groups of young and old North Americans and East Asians from Singapore. Researchers studied the visual ventral cortex, a complex of brain structures responsible for identifying what is being processed visually (Farah, Rabinowitz, & Quinn, 2000). Some parts of this complex process object information and other parts process background information (see Park & Huang, 2010). The inclusion of older individuals in this study allowed researchers to analyze whether sustained cultural experience with analytic (central object) versus holistic (background/context) processing sculpted the brain in unique ways over time. During experimental sessions utilizing an adapted functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMR-A) paradigm (see Chapter 2), which shows which parts of the brain are in use during different tasks, all participants viewed pictures of objects in scenes. As you can see in Figure 1.3, young Westerners’ and Easterners’ brains were similar in where and to what extent they processed objects versus backgrounds. Older participants from both cultures showed reduced processing of objects relative to backgrounds compared to younger participants. But there was an East/West difference in the older participants: The older Asian participants showed much more of a reduction than older Western participants in object processing. These older Asians did not lose their ability to focus on central objects, but they needed to be prompted to do so. For them, holistic processing had become the default mode, suggesting a lifetime cultural habit of attention to context.
A New Look at Three Developmental Issues
In the following sections, we examine three classic developmental issues that have garnered a great deal of attention in recent years. As you read about these issues from the viewpoint of contemporary research, you will begin to see why modern developmental theories take a multidimensional approach. Notice whether any of the new information causes you to reexamine your own assumptions about development.
Nature and Nurture
How did you respond to the first three items of the questionnaire in Box 1.1? Did you say that physical traits are primarily inherited? Did you say that intelligence or personality is inherited? Your opinions on these matters are likely to be influenced by your cultural background. Through most of the last century, North Americans viewed intelligence as mostly hereditary, but Chinese and Japanese tended to disregard the notion of “native ability” and to consider intellectual achievements more as a function of opportunity and hard work (e.g., Stevenson, Chen, & Lee, 1993). Partially influenced by psychological research, North Americans have begun to see intelligence as at least partially dependent on education and opportunity, but they still are likely to see some achievements, such as in mathematics, as mostly dependent on ability. Alternatively, North Americans have traditionally viewed social adjustment as a result of environmental experiences, especially parents’ nurturance and socialization practices, but East Asians typically see these qualities as mostly inherent traits. Developmental researchers acknowledge that both nature and nurture influence most behavioral outcomes, but in the past they have often focused primarily on one or the other, partly because a research enterprise that examines multiple causes at the same time tends to be a massive undertaking. So, based on personal interest, theoretical bias, and practical limitations, developmental researchers have often systematically investigated one kind of cause of behavior, setting aside examination of other causes. Interestingly, what these limited research approaches have accomplished is to establish impressive bodies of evidence, both for the importance of genes and for the importance of the environment!
What theorists and researchers face now is the difficult task of specifying how the two sets of causes work together: Do they have separate effects that “add up,” for example, or do they qualitatively modify each other, creating together, in unique combinations, unique outcomes? Modern multidimensional theories make the latter assumption, and evidence is quickly accumulating to support this view. Heredity and environment are interdependent: The same genes operate differently in different environments, and the same environments are experienced differently by individuals with different genetic characteristics. Developmental outcomes are always a function of interplay between genes and environment, and the operation of one cannot even be described adequately without reference to the other. In Chapter 2 you will learn more about this complex interdependence.
Neuroplasticity and Critical
(Sensitive) Periods
Neuroplasticity refers to changes in the brain that occur as a result of some practice or experience. Neurons, the basic cells of the nervous system, become reorganized as a result of such practice, resulting in new learning and memory. Neural changes were once thought to occur primarily in infancy and early childhood. Contemporary neuroscientists recognize that “there is no period when the brain and its functions are static; changes are continuous throughout the lifespan. The nature, extent and the rates of change vary by region and function assessed and are influenced by genetic as well as environmental factors” (Pascual-Leone & Taylor, 2011, p. 183). The realization that our brains continue to change throughout life has revolutionized the way scientists regard the brain. As we have seen, modern multidisciplinary theories incorporate descriptions of relative life-long plasticity.
The time-related “variation by region and function” noted previously is at the heart of the classic question about critical (sensitive) periods. Although the brain exhibits plasticity throughout life, do some changes, such as first language learning, occur more easily and more effectively at certain ages and stages? Or, is the organism able to develop or learn any new skill at any time with the right opportunities? There is little doubt that there are some behavioral developments that usually take place within a particular period. In many ways, language acquisition is nearly complete by the age of 5 or 6, for example. But is it possible to acquire a language at another point in the life cycle if this usual time is somehow “missed”? Pinker (1994) reviewed several findings that led him to conclude that although language can be learned at other times, it is never learned as well or as effortlessly as it would have been in the critical period from about 1 to 5 years. Consider deaf individuals learning American Sign Language (ASL). ASL is a “real” symbolic language, with a complex grammar. Sometimes, however, American deaf children are not given the opportunity to learn ASL in their early years, often because of a belief that deaf children should learn to read lips and speak English (the “oralist” tradition). As a result, many deaf children simply do not learn any language. When these individuals are introduced to ASL in late childhood or adolescence, they often fail to acquire the same degree of facility with the grammar that children who learn ASL as preschoolers achieve.
If findings like these mean that a sensitive period has been missed, what could be the cause of such time-dependent learning? It is usually assumed that the end of a sensitive period is due to brain changes that make learning more difficult after the change. The environmental conditions that are likely to support the new learning may also be less favorable at certain times. As we have seen, the explanation is likely to be complex. For example, total immersion in a language may be just the right arrangement for a preschooler who knows no other communicative system. Older learners, even deaf children or adults who have learned no formal language early in life, may always filter a new language through previously established communication methods, such as an idiosyncratic set of hand signals. If so, for an older child or adult, total immersion may be less effective than a learning environment that can make correspondences between the new language and the old one. In later chapters, we will examine this issue as it relates to several developments, such as the emergence of sexual identity ( Chapter 8) and the formation of bonds between mothers and infants ( Chapter 4). In each case, the evidence indicates that time-dependent, region-specific windows of opportunity for rapid neural reorganization exist alongside continuing plasticity.
Universality and Specificity: The Role of Culture
Developmental science is concerned with explaining the nature and characteristics of change. Are developmental changes universal, having the same qualities across ethnic, racial, or socioeconomic status groups, between genders, and from one historical period to another? Or does development depend entirely on the specific group or time within which it occurs? Many classic developmental theories have posited basic similarities in development across different groups and historical periods. Stage theories, like Freud’s theory in particular, often specify invariant sequences in personality or cognitive outcomes that are thought to apply to everyone, regardless of culture, group, or historical time. Yet even classic stage theories incorporate sociocultural influences.
In Erikson’s psychosocial stage theory, for example, all adolescents confront the task of formulating an adult identity. But the nature of that identity will certainly differ across groups. How complex and arduous a struggle the adolescent might face in forming an identity could vary dramatically depending on her context. Erikson’s studies of identity development in two Native American groups, the Sioux in South Dakota and the Yurok on the Pacific coast, and of mainstream White culture revealed different struggles and different outcomes in each (Erikson, 1950/1963).
Some sociocultural theories, which trace their roots to the work of Lev Vygotsky (e.g., 1934, 1978; see Chapter 3), argue that cognitive developments may be qualitatively different in different cultures (e.g., Rogoff, 2003; Sternberg, 2014). For example, in Western cultures classifying objects by functional associations (birds with nests) is a trademark of preschoolers’ sorting behavior. Hierarchically organized taxonomic classification (e.g., collies and dachshunds grouped as kinds of dogs, dogs and birds grouped as animals) is more typical of elementary-school-age children. Piaget regarded taxonomic sorting to be an indicator of the logical thinking that emerges in middle childhood. But in some ethnic groups, such as the African Kpelle tribe, even adults do not sort objects taxonomically. They use functionally based schemes, perhaps because these are more meaningful in their everyday lives, and they would probably consider such schemes more sophisticated than a taxonomic one (Cole, 1998).
Even sub-cultural groups within the same society may show differences in the development of cognitive skills. For example, in most societies, boys perform better than girls on certain spatial tasks. Yet in a study that included low-, middle-, and high-income children in Chicago, low-income girls performed as well on spatial tasks as low-income boys, even though the usual gender difference was found in the other income groups (Levine, Vasilyeva, Lourenco, Newcombe, & Huttenlocher, 2005). Differences in the typical experiences of children in different social classes are the likely reason for these cognitive variations. Bronfenbrenner (1979) explained how culture could influence behavior through proximal processes, the daily give and take with others in one’s social networks that he considered the primary engines of development. Adults in particular are “cultural experts,” and their interactions with children embody cultural expectations and ways of doing things (Oyserman, 2017).
The bulk of social science research has been done on a relatively narrow sample of WEIRD (Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic) people (Henrich, Heine, & Norenzayan, 2010), and developmental research is no exception (Fernald, 2010). Researchers have become acutely aware of the need to discover how developmental processes play out among other groups both within and outside North America to answer questions about universal versus specific developmental trajectories. To this end, culture, race, and ethnicity now have greater prominence in research than in the past, even though these constructs have proven somewhat difficult to define (Corbie-Smith et al., 2008).
Formerly, differences among racial groups, like Blacks, Whites, and Asians, were considered to be due to heredity, identifiable primarily by skin color, but also by variations in hair, bone structure, or other physiological markers. The assumption was that these superficial markers were indicators of deeper biological differences. But the range of genetic differences within groups is actually equal to or greater than those between racial groups (Richeson & Sommers, 2016). Racial groupings are now usually seen as social constructions, founded on superficial characteristics that change across time and circumstance (Saperstein, Penner, & Light, 2013). For example, Arab Americans were considered White before the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, but now are often considered non-White (Perez & Hirschman, 2010). Ethnicity is sometimes used interchangeably with race, although this too is problematic. Shared ancestry, language, a common place of origin, and a sense of belonging to the group are elements commonly used to describe membership in an ethnic group.
Adding to the complexity, culture includes a community’s shared values, rituals, psychological processes, behavioral norms, and practices (Fiske, Kitayama, Markus, & Nisbett, 1998). The concept clearly overlaps in meaning with “ethnicity.” Early studies often represented culture as a kind of “social address” (Bronfenbrenner, 1979) with gender, race, religion, age, language, ethnic heritage, and socioeconomic status as labels signifying aspects of cultural group membership. Think of your own status in relation to the items on this list. Then consider the status of another person you know. How similar to or different from you is this other person? Is there one category that stands out for you when you try to describe her social/cultural address? For someone you consider to be culturally similar to you, do all the labels overlap? Just a little reflection gives you a taste of the dizzying complexity of such distinctions.
Some research demonstrates that shared values might not be the most reliable indicator of culture. For example, a study of values drawn from approximately 169,000 participants from six continents revealed broad agreement in values, contrary to what one might expect. Autonomy, relatedness, and competence were highly ranked across all cultures although some differences were observed for the value of conformity (Fischer & Schwartz, 2011). This finding questions the assumption that cultures are reliably different in their value systems. People in the same cultural group may be too diverse to justify painting with a broad brush. In addition, increasing global migration and trade, as well as worldwide media and information networks, mean that more and more individuals have multiple ethnic/cultural experiences and many may be polycultural in perspective and behavior (Jensen, 2012; Morris, Chiu, & Liu, 2015). Cultural identities can be difficult to pin down. Currently, there is a tendency to move away from static conceptualizations of what constitutes ethnic/cultural group membership and toward more dynamic, process-oriented definitions for these important variables (Brubaker, 2009). In particular, researchers are concerned about disaggregating social class, or socioeconomic status (SES), from race and ethnic/cultural distinctions. Socioeconomic status is based on social standing or power, and is defined by characteristics of the adults in a household, including educational background, income, and occupation. Frequently, variables of race/ethnicity and SES are conflated in research, leading to questionable findings. This conflation comes in at least two forms. First, SES is a characteristic that can directly affect how people perceive an individual’s racial identity. If someone is affluent or highly educated, others may assume that she is White; if she is on welfare, others might assume that she is a member of a minority (e.g., Penner & Saperstein, 2008).
Second, SES and race/ethnicity can be conflated when research findings are attributed to one factor without examining the other. A good example of why disaggregation is important comes from a study of preschool children’s everyday activities in four cultural communities (Black and White in the United States, Luo in Kenya, and European descent in Porto Allegre, Brazil). Tudge and his colleagues (2006) observed everyday behaviors of preschool children, hypothesizing that each culture provides its young with the kinds of opportunities (e.g., school or work-related activities) deemed important for successful participation in their culture. Equal numbers of high and low SES children within each culture were included to study the intersection of culture and class. The Brazilian children engaged in fewer academic activities compared to White and Kenyan groups. Nonetheless, middle-class Brazilian children were involved in more academic lessons than their working-class counterparts. Kenyan children participated in significantly more work-related activities than all other groups. However, the working-class Kenyan children engaged in twice as much work as those from all other groups, including middle-class Kenyan children.
As complex as the identification of culture is, it is clear that cultural experience is important to development. But does culture have effects only at a superficial level (e.g., learning different behaviors, manners, customs), or are there effects on more fundamental processes, such as information processing and developing brain structures (Fiske, 2009; Kitayama & Park, 2010)? This is precisely the kind of question that experimenters in the field of cultural psychology have taken on (Sternberg, 2014; Wang, 2016). Consider, for example, the often-cited distinction between the holistic (interdependent) modes of interacting in cultures of the Eastern hemisphere and the analytic (independent) modes in cultures of the Western hemisphere. A body of research now supports the existence of reliable differences beyond just superficial behavioral ones. First, differences have been identified in information processing (attention, understanding cause and effect, memory, and categorization) between people from Eastern and Western cultures (Nisbett & Masuda, 2003). Some analysts have speculated that the historical-cultural antecedents of these processing differences may be ancient ways of viewing the world common to Chinese and Greek societies respectively (Nisbett, Peng, Choi, & Norenzayan, 2001). In turn, each of these ways may have been shaped by the respective economies of those societies (large-scale farming vs. hunting and trading) along with their different physical environments (open plain vs. seaside mountains). Freed from the interdependence required for massive farming and irrigation projects, ancient Greeks, the forebears of Western societies, came to view the world by focusing on central objects. In other words, the ancient Greeks inhabited a world where objects were typically perceived as relatively unchanging and detached from their context. The objects’ features (size, shape, color, etc.) were investigated so as to understand their operating rules and to predict and control their operations. Logic and scientific empiricism are related to this perspective on the world.
Needing to pay attention to the larger context in order to thrive, members of Eastern societies such as China focused more holistically on interrelationships, paying as much attention to the field wherein objects existed as to the objects themselves. Understanding the world from this perspective was more likely to incorporate figure-ground relationships and to hold the dialectic of opposing points of view in balance (Nisbett & Masuda, 2003). It could be that these fundamental differences in Greek and Chinese social organization and cognition, based upon geographical constraints and the exigencies of survival, continued to affect the development of people and societies that followed in their wake.
Any study of cultural differences embodies a fundamental wish to see the world as others do. Imagine that you could literally see what people pay attention to as a way of gaining knowledge about their perspective. Seeing the world through the eyes of people who live in the Eastern and Western regions of the globe could be a fruitful place to start because any differences that evolved from long histories of practice might be more obvious. Recent studies of attention and visual processing that compare these two cultural groups, made possible by the development of a variety of advanced technologies, have indeed proved fruitful.
Results of many studies have demonstrated a greater tendency among Eastern participants to attend to context when compared to Western participants who are more likely to attend to central objects (e.g., in photos of animals in complex environments; Boduroglu, Shah, & Nisbett, 2009; Kitayama, Duffy, Kawamura, & Larsen, 2003; Masuda & Nisbett, 2001, 2006). Eastern research subjects also process groups of items in relationship to each other rather than by category (e.g., linking a cow and grass instead of a cow and chicken; Chiu, 1972; Ji, Zhang, & Nisbett, 2004). They typically make judgments of contextual characteristics more quickly than Westerners, and they engage fewer areas of the brain in the process (Goh et al., 2013). The Eastern emphasis on field also extends to making causal attributions for events. When Westerners were asked to explain the reasons for outcomes in athletic competitions or the causes of criminal events, they emphasized internal traits as causal, whereas Easterners gave more contextualized explanations for outcomes (Choi, Nisbett, & Norenzayan, 1999).
In an ingenious study demonstrating the interrelated effects of culture, development, and neuroplasticity, Goh et al. (2007) show that what you pay attention to makes a subtle yet enduring difference in your brain over time. Repeated practice results in changes in the brain that become our preferred modes of thought and action. The cultural shaping of visual processing in the brain was explored in groups of young and old North Americans and East Asians from Singapore. Researchers studied the visual ventral cortex, a complex of brain structures responsible for identifying what is being processed visually (Farah, Rabinowitz, & Quinn, 2000). Some parts of this complex process object information and other parts process background information (see Park & Huang, 2010). The inclusion of older individuals in this study allowed researchers to analyze whether sustained cultural experience with analytic (central object) versus holistic (background/context) processing sculpted the brain in unique ways over time. During experimental sessions utilizing an adapted functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMR-A) paradigm (see Chapter 2), which shows which parts of the brain are in use during different tasks, all participants viewed pictures of objects in scenes. As you can see in Figure 1.3, young Westerners’ and Easterners’ brains were similar in where and to what extent they processed objects versus backgrounds. Older participants from both cultures showed reduced processing of objects relative to backgrounds compared to younger participants. But there was an East/West difference in the older participants: The older Asian participants showed much more of a reduction than older Western participants in object processing. These older Asians did not lose their ability to focus on central objects, but they needed to be prompted to do so. For them, holistic processing had become the default mode, suggesting a lifetime cultural habit of attention to context.
Focus on Developmental Psychopathology
In several chapters of this text, you will find sections titled Focus on Developmental Psychopathology, which highlight developmental approaches to specific behavioral disorders. These sections emphasize work in the field of developmental psychopathology, offering clinicians a unique perspective on dysfunctional behavior by integrating work from many disciplines, including developmental psychology, clinical psychology, abnormal psychology, biology, and genetics. This field takes a life span perspective on aberrant behavior by assuming that it is an outgrowth of complex but lawful developmental processes (e.g., Rutter & Sroufe, 2000). Unhealthy social, emotional, and behavioral processes, like depression or conduct disorder, emerge in the same way that healthy ones do: as a function of the individual’s attempts to adapt to her environment in interaction with the environment’s actions on the individual. Behaviors or coping strategies that are adaptive in one developmental circumstance can be maladaptive in other concurrent contexts, or they may establish a trajectory that can result in maladaptive outcomes later. “In contrast to the often dichotomous world of mental disorder/nondisorder depicted in psychiatry, a developmental psychopathology perspective recognizes that normality often fades into abnormality, adaptive and maladaptive may take on differing definitions depending on whether one’s time referent is immediate circumstances or long-term development, and processes within the individual can be characterized as having shades or degrees of psychopathology” (Cicchetti & Toth, 2006, p. 498). Developmental psychopathology is largely guided by multidimensional or systems theories of development (e.g., Cicchetti & Sroufe, 2000; Cicchetti & Toth, 2006; Rutter & Sroufe, 2000; Sameroff, 2000; Sameroff & MacKenzie, 2003). Every individual is seen as an active organism, influenced by multiple levels of internal processes, and continuously adapting to multiple embedded contexts. Increasingly, culture is also viewed as something that one “develops” over time through an intricate interplay of biology and environment. More than a fixed social group membership with only higher-order, macrosystem effects, culture should be viewed as a primary, proximal influence on development, affecting the course of beneficial and harmful outcomes as the person progresses through the life span (Causadias, 2013). Abnormality results from the same proximal processes that produce more normative patterns: As the individual transacts with the environment, she attempts to meet her needs and to adjust to environmental inputs and demands. She brings both strengths and vulnerabilities to these transactions, and the environment contributes both stressors and supports. Both the individual and the environment are somewhat altered by each transaction, reciprocally influencing each other. That is, the change processes are bidirectional. The individual’s strengths and vulnerabilities as well as environmental stressors and supports are all variables or factors that impact the overall development of the individual. Both healthy and unhealthy outcomes are the result of the interplay of the individual’s characteristics and her experiences across time. “Single factors can be potent in destroying systems . . . a gunshot can destroy a child. But single factors cannot create a child or any other living system” (Sameroff, 2000, p. 37). The individual’s strengths and the environment’s supports are protective factors, helping to promote healthy outcomes; the individual’s vulnerabilities and the environmental stressors she experiences are risk factors that can interfere with healthy development. Among the individual’s characteristics that may matter are various genetic and other biological factors, temperamental traits, cognitive capacities, social skills, attitudes, beliefs, and so on. Among the environmental factors are socioeconomic status, safety of the neighborhood, quality of the schools, family history and culture, parental nurturing and monitoring, peer attitudes, friendships, marital and community supports, cultural dynamics including racial and ethnic processes, and so on.
You may recognize that many of these risks seem to fit together. As Garbarino (1999) points out, many children “fall victim to the unfortunate synchronicity between the demons inhabiting their own internal world and the corrupting influences of modern American culture” (p. 23). So, not only do risks gain power as they accumulate, but they also operate in clusters that serve as “correlated constraints” (Cairns & Cairns, 1994). In other words, they reinforce each other by their redundancy and work together to shape the developmental trajectory. As a result, although altering one or just a few risk factors can have a positive impact on behavior and outcomes, sometimes such limited changes have little effect because the other related risks maintain the status quo.
Certain risks, as well as certain protections, become more important at different points in development. For example, the protection offered by prosocial peers and the risks associated with exposure to deviant ones are particularly powerful as children approach adolescence but less so in early childhood (Bolger & Patterson, 2003). On the other hand, some protections, such as authoritative parenting, appear to retain their power throughout childhood and adolescence. Some risk factors (e.g., deficits in perspective taking or problems with peer relationships) may be related to the development of multiple disorders, such as conduct disorder or depression.
Work in developmental psychopathology has brought into focus the importance of both mediating and moderating relationships between variables or factors in development. Let’s begin with mediating variables. Suppose that one factor appears to be a cause of some behavioral outcome. For example, when a child experiences early, pervasive poverty, she is at higher risk than other children for developing mental health problems and medical diseases in adulthood, from depression to cardiovascular disease to some cancers (Chen, 2004). Even if children’s economic circumstances improve in later childhood or adulthood, the increased risk of adult problems persists. One mediating variable that links early poverty to later health vulnerability is a compromised immune system. Specifically, poor children are more prone to inflammation. Changes in the functioning of certain genes cause this “pro-inflammatory profile,” which lasts into adulthood and can contribute to poor health, including some mental health problems like depression (Chen, Miller, Kobor, & Cole, 2011).
Moderating variables are those that affect the strength of the relationship between other variables (Baron & Kenny, 1986). They interact with causal factors, altering and sometimes even eliminating their effects on outcome variables. For example, researchers have found that not all adults exposed to early poverty are characterized by a “pro- inflammatory profile” (Chen, Miller, Kobor, & Cole, 2011). Adults who suffered chronic early poverty but who report having a warm, supportive relationship with their mothers in childhood often have normal immune system functioning. Warm mothering appears to be a protective factor that moderates the impact of early poverty, a risk factor. See Figure 1.5 for a graphic illustration of both mediating and moderating factors related to early poverty’s effects. Recent research in psychopathology has focused on the role of endophenotypes as mediators and moderators. Endophenotypes are biobehavioral processes that can be traced to genes. These processes serve as intermediary links between the actual genes that contribute to disorders and their expressed behavioral manifestations. The “pro-inflammatory profile” that serves as a mediator between early childhood poverty and later mental and physical health problems is an example of an endophenotype, because it has been found to result from epigenetic processes (Chen et al., 2011; see Chapter 2). Lenroot and Giedd (2011) artfully describe endophenotypes as “bridges between molecules and behavior” (p. 429). Study of these intermediary links can help us better understand the processes by which genetic information exerts influence on observable behavior (Gottesman & Gould, 2003). Because so many interacting factors are involved, there is no such thing as perfect prediction of who will have healthy outcomes, who will not, when problems may arise, and how they will evolve. A rough guideline for prediction is that the more risk factors and the fewer protective factors there are, the more likely an individual is to have adjustment problems. Developmental psychopathology also recognizes two axiomatic principles: multifinality and equifinality (e.g., Cicchetti & Rogosch, 1996). The principle of multifinality is that individual pathways of development may result in a wide range of possible outcomes. For example, children exhibiting conduct-disordered behavior in the elementary school years may, as adults, display one or more of several different disorders, including antisocial personality, depression, substance abuse, and so on. The complementary principle of equifinality specifies that different early developmental pathways can produce similar outcomes. For example, Sroufe (1989) has demonstrated two pathways, one primarily biological and one primarily related to parenting style, that lead to attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). Using these ideas from systems theory allows for the study of multiple subgroups and multiple pathways to disorders. Most important, it allows for a more realistic look at the problems people face (Cicchetti & Toth, 1994).
Here again, biobehavioral research is taking us a step closer to making better predictions about who will be affected by disorders and who will have more healthy outcomes. It may also help us unravel the mystery of multifinality. For example, why do some emotionally abused children become depressed as they age while others develop substance abuse disorders? Research on transdiagnostic risk factors (Nolen-Hoeksema & Watson, 2011), which are conceptually similar to endophenotypes, takes a close look at how risk factors other than the target one (e.g., history of emotional abuse) may moderate the effects of the target factor. Assessment of the moderating impact of different risk factors on each other is aimed at explaining “divergent trajectories”: how different disorders evolve from the same target risk factors. Careful explication of these intervening sequences supports the fundamental goals of these new scientific fields.
Two primary goals of developmental psychopathology are to increase the probability of successfully predicting problematic outcomes and to find ways of preventing them. Developmental psychopathology is therefore closely linked to the field of prevention science, which aims at designing and testing prevention and intervention techniques for promoting healthy development in at-risk groups. Developmental psychopathologists also emphasize the value of studying individuals at the extremes of disordered behavior, for the purpose of enlightening us about how developmental processes work for everyone. Consider one example: Typically developing children eventually form a coherent and relatively realistic notion of self, so that they distinguish the self from others; they differentiate the real from the imagined; they form integrated memories of what they have done and experienced, and so on (see Chapters 5 and 7). Our understanding of when and how a coherent sense of self emerges in normal development has benefited from studies of maltreated children whose sense of self is often disorganized. In one study comparing maltreated with non-maltreated preschoolers, maltreated children showed substantially more dissociative behaviors, such as talking to imaginary playmates, being forgetful or confused about things the child should know, and lying to deny misbehavior even when the evidence is clear (Macfie, Cicchetti, & Toth, 2001). Note that all of these kinds of behaviors are typical of preschoolers sometimes. But finding that non-maltreated preschoolers are less likely to engage in these behaviors than maltreated youngsters helps substantiate two things: First, relationships with caregivers are important to the development of a coherent self-system, and second, typically developing preschoolers are beginning to form a cohesive self-system even though the process is not complete.
The field of developmental psychopathology has several practical implications for clinical practice. First, interventions and treatments need to be developmentally appropriate to be effective. One approach will not fit all situations or age groups. For example, maltreated preschoolers showing signs of excessive dissociative behavior can be helped to form a more coherent self-system if helpers intervene with primary caregivers to increase their positivity, sensitivity, and responsivity (see Chapters 4 and 5); interventions with adults who suffer from dissociative behaviors would require other approaches. Second, periods throughout the life span marked by disequilibrium or disorganization with resultant reorganization may be considered points at which individuals might be most receptive to change. Developmental psychopathologists suggest that at these sensitive periods, interventions may be most effective because the individual can incorporate treatment into newly emerging levels of cognitive, emotional, and behavioral organization. Thus, the issue of timing of interventions is one of great interest to this field. In addition, the wide variety of possible pathways and outcomes involved in the development of psychopathology is an argument for the use of multiple means of intervention and treatment. However, interventions should be carefully considered and based on a thoughtful assessment of a person’s developmental level and quality of adaptation, the contexts that the person must function within, and the availability of external supports. This discipline’s ideas and research findings hold out great promise for helpers.
Case Study
Anna is a 9-year-old third-grade student in a public school on the outskirts of a large industrial city. She is the oldest of three children who live in an apartment with their mother, a 29-year-old White woman recently diagnosed with rheumatoid arthritis. Despite her young age, Anna’s past history is complicated. Anna’s biological father, Walter, is a 37-year-old man who emigrated from Eastern Europe when he was in his early 20s. He married Anna’s mother, Karen, when she was 19 years old. The couple married hastily and had a child, Anna, but Walter abandoned the family shortly after Anna’s birth. Walter and Karen had fought constantly about his problems with alcohol. Karen was particularly upset about Walter’s behavior because her own father, now deceased, had suffered from alcoholism and left her mother without sufficient resources to care for herself.
Alone with a child to support and only a high school degree, Karen went to work in the office of a small family-owned business. There she met Frank, one of the drivers who worked sporadically for the company. They married within a few months of meeting and, within another year, had a son named John. Karen, with Frank’s grudging consent, decided not to tell Anna about her biological father. She reasoned that Anna deserved to believe that Frank, who filled the role of father to both children, was her real parent. Anna was developing normally and seemed to be attached to Frank. But, unknown to Karen, Frank had some problems of his own. He had been incarcerated for theft as a young man and had an inconsistent employment history. The family struggled to stay together through many ups and downs. When Anna was 6, Karen became pregnant again. Frank wanted Karen to have an abortion because he didn’t think the family’s finances could support another child. Karen refused, saying that she would take on another job once the new baby was born. Ultimately, the marriage did not survive the many stresses the couple faced, and Karen and Frank were divorced when Anna was 7.
Karen’s situation at work is tenuous because of her medical condition. Her employer balks at making accommodations for her, and she fears she might be let go. After the divorce, Karen filed for child support, and Frank was directed to pay a certain amount each month for the three children, but Frank was outraged that he should have to pay for Anna’s care because she was not his biological child. During a particularly difficult conversation, Frank told Anna the “truth” that he was not her “real” father. Karen, still unable to deal with this issue, insisted to Anna
that Frank was her biological parent. Karen could not bring herself to mention Walter, whose existence had never been mentioned to the children before. Karen desperately needed the money for Anna’s support, especially because she had amassed substantial credit card debt. She felt her only pleasure was watching shopping shows on TV and ordering items for her children.
In school, Anna is struggling to keep up with her peers. Her academic performance is a full grade level behind, and her teachers are concerned. The school Anna attends has high academic standards and pressures for achievement are intense. Anna behaves in immature ways with peers and adults, alternating between excessive shyness and overly affectionate behavior. She does not appear to have any friendships.
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