Psikologi Anak
Pertemuan 1
The nature of child development
Developmental Processes
• Biological processes – changes in
individual’s body; genes and hormones
• Cognitive processes – changes
in individual’s thought, intelligence, and
language
• Socioemotional processes – Changes in
an individual’s emotions, personality, and
relationships
Developmental processes and periods of
development
Core Issues in
Child Development
• Nature and nurture
• Continuity and discontinuity
• Early–later experience issue
Five Major Theories
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Psychoanalytic
Cognitive
Behavioral and social cognitive
Ethological
Ecological
Psychoanalytic Theories
• Describe development as:
– Primarily unconscious
– Heavily colored by emotion
– Behavior is surface characteristic
– Analyze symbolic workings of mind
– Emphasize early experiences
– Biological process important here
Erikson’s
Psychosocial Theory
• Eight stages of development
– Primary human motivation is social
– Eight stages unfold over the life span
– At each stage, unique developmental task
confronts individuals with crisis that must
be resolved
Piaget’s Cognitive Developmental
Theory
• Children actively construct their
understanding of the world
– Assimilation: incorporation of new information
into existing knowledge
– Accommodation: adjusting knowledge to fit new
information and experience
Vygotsky’s Sociocultural Cognitive
Theory
• Culture guides cognitive development
• Knowledge is situated and collaborative
• Memory, attention, reasoning involves
learning to use society’s inventions
Behavioral Theories
• Three approaches: Pavlov, Skinner, and
Bandura
• Observations in controlled labs
– Behavior: observable and measurable
– Behavior is learned from experience with the
environment
Ethological Theory
• Behavior
– Influenced by biology, tied to evolution
– Characterized by critical or sensitive periods
– Lorenz: imprinting is rapid, innate learning within
a critical period of time
– Bowlby’s view of attachment
Ecological Theory
Bronfenbrenner’s view that development
influenced by five environmental systems:
– Microsystem
– Mesosystem
– Exosystem
– Macrosystem
– Chronosystem
Abnormal Child Psychology:
Defining psychological disorders
• Determining what is normal and abnormal is an arbitrary process
• Traditionally defined as a pattern of behavioral, cognitive, or
physical symptoms, that is associated with one or more of:
– distress
– disability
– increased risk for further suffering or harm
• Many childhood problems best depicted in terms of relationships
• Labels describe behavior, not the child
• Problems may be the result of children’s attempts to adapt to
abnormal or unusual circumstances
Developmental Pathways
• Refers to the sequence and timing of behaviors, and the relationship
between them over time
• Two types of developmental pathways:
– multifinality: similar early experiences lead to different outcomes
– equifinality: different early experiences lead to a similar outcome
• With abnormal child psychology, must keep in mind:
– there are many contributors to disordered outcomes in each child
– contributors vary among children who have the disorder
– children express features of their disturbances in different ways
– pathways leading to particular disorders are numerous and
interactive
Risk
Resilience
 risk factors are variables that
precede a negative outcome and
increase the chances that the
outcome will occur
 typically involves acute, stressful
situations, as well as chronic
adversity
 known risk factors include:
community violence and
disasters, divorce/family breakup, chronic poverty,
homelessness, parental
inadequacies, parental
psychopathology, perinatal stress
 the ability to avoid negative
outcomes despite being at risk for
psychopathology
 associated with strong selfconfidence, coping skills, ability to
avoid risk situations, ability to fight
off or recover from misfortune
 not a fixed attribute
 connected to a “protective triad” of
resources and health-promoting
events, involving strengths of the
child, the family, and
school/community