CHAPTER 1
FUNDAMENTALS
Instructor: Roberto L. Rinaldi PhDc
Course: SOP 3015 Social & Personality Development
Key Terms
Development: The systematic continuities
and changes in the individual that occur
between conception and death.
 Socialization: The process by which
individuals acquire the beliefs, values,
and behaviors, considered desirable or
appropriate by their culture or subculture.
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Key Terms
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Personality: a dynamic and organized set of
characteristics possessed by a person that uniquely
influences his or her cognitions, motivations, and
behaviors in various situations.
The word "personality" originates from the Latin
persona, which means mask.
Significantly, in the theatre of the ancient Latinspeaking world, the mask was not used as a plot
device to disguise the identity of a character, but
rather was a convention employed to represent or
typify that character
The Universal Parenting Machine
The universal parenting machine, a
hypothetical thought experiment in which
children are raised with peers and without
parents or a prevailing culture, provides an
interesting context for thinking about the
processes and products of normal social and
personality development.
 An experiment such as this would require
several questions to be developed and
investigated.
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The Universal Parenting Machine
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Would these children interact w/one another &
become sociable creatures?
Would these children love, depend, or develop
stable friendships?
Would the children ever develop a spoken
language or some other efficient method of
communication?
Would the environment provide rich stimulation
needed for intellectual development?
The Universal Parenting Machine
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Would the children develop gender roles and/or
become sexual beings?
Would they develop a sense of pride in their
accomplishments?
Would the interactions be benevolent (cooperation,
altruistic) or belligerent (aggressive or
antagonistic)?
Would they develop standards of good and evil or
right and wrong to govern day-to-day interactions?
So How Would It Turn Out?
We can’t be absolutely sure!
 There is at least one case in which a small
group of Jewish war orphans did indeed form
their own “society” in the absence of adult
supervision while in a German prison camp
during WWII. (Chapter 13)
 So where do we turn to develop some
predictions about the outcome of this
experiment?
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Historical Perspective
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Childhood and Adolescence were not always
regarded as the special and sensitive periods we
know them to be today.
In the early days of recorded history, children had
few if any rights, and their lives were not always
valued by the elders.
Children were killed as religious sacrifice and even
embedded in the walls of buildings to “strenghten”
their structures.
Historical Perspective
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Roman parents were legally entitled to kill their
deformed, illegitimate, or otherwise unwanted
infants, and even after this practice was outlawed,
unwanted babies were left to die in the wilderness
or sold as servants.
During the 17th and 18th centuries, attitudes about
children and child rearing began to change.
Religious leaders of that era stressed that children
were fragile creatures of God who should be
shielded from the wild and wanton behavior of
adults.
Historical Perspective
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So during the 17th and 18th centuries came a more
humane outlook on children, and shortly thereafter
some parents began to record the development of
their infant sons and daughters in baby
biographies.
Baby Biography: A detailed record of an infant’s
growth and development over a period of time.
Perhaps the most influential of the baby
biographers was Charles Darwin, who made daily
records of the early development of his son.
Psychology of Childhood
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The scientific study of development did not emerge
until nearly 1900, as G. Stanley Hall, in the United
States, and Sigmund Freud, in Europe, began to
collect data and formulate theories about human
development.
Soon, other researchers were deriving hypotheses
and conducting research to evaluate and extend
early theories.
Psychology of Childhood
Theory: A set of concepts and propositions
designed to organize, describe, and explain an
existing set of observations.
 Hypothesis: A theoretical prediction about
some aspect of experience.
 Theories are particularly useful when they are
parsiminious, falsifiable, and heuristic.
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Role of Theory in the Scientific
Enterprise
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Parsimony: A parsimonious theory is one that uses
relatively few explanatory principles to explain a
broad set of observations.
Falsifiability: A theory is falsifiable when it is
capable of generating predictions that could be
disconfirmed.
Heuristic-Value: An heuristic theory is one that
continues to stimulate new research and new
discoveries.
Questions and Controversy
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Development theorists have different points of view
on at least five basic issues:
 Are
children inherently good or inherently bad?
 Is nature or nurture the primary influence on human
development?
 Are children actively involved in the development
process or passive recipients of social and biological
influences?
 Is development continuous or discontinuous?
 Are aspects of development universals that all humans
display or are the particularistic?
Different Philosophical Views of
Child in 17th-18th Century
Hobbes: “original sin” (children born in sin). Pessimistic
view of human nature: Influenced Freud.
Locke: " tabula rasa") (need to mold child).
Mechanistic view: Development is product of
experience. Influenced learning theory (Watson,
Skinner).
Rousseau: "innate purity” (let child develop freely).
Organismic view: Development is product of child's
own activity, guided by internal program. Influenced
cognitive developmental theory (Piaget).
Research Methods
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Today’s developmentalists, guided by the scientific
method, allow objective data to determine the
adequacy of their thinking.
Acceptable research methods are those that possess
both reliability and validity.
A method is reliable if it produces consistent,
replicable results; it is valid if it accurately reflects
what it was intended to measure.
Data Collection
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The most common methods of data collection in the
field of social and personality development are
self-reports, observational methodologies, case
studies, and ethnography.
Self-reports include standardized procedures, such
as structured interviews or structured
questionnaires (including diary studies), that allow
direct comparisons among research participants,
and flexible approaches like the clinical method,
which yields an individualized portrait of each
participant’s feelings, thoughts, and behaviors.
Data Collection
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Structured interviews or structured
questionnaires: A technique in which all
participants are asked the same questions in
precisely the same order.
Diary Study: A self-report methodology in which
participants respond to standardized questions, in a
diary or notebook, at a specific time or whenever
they are instructed to respond by prompt from an
electronic pager.
Data Collection
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Clinical Method: A type of interview in which a
participant’s response to each successive question
(or problem) determines what the investigator will
ask next.
Observational Methodologies
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Naturalistic observations are obtained in the
natural environments of children or adolescents,
whereas structured observations take place in
laboratories where the investigator cues the
behavior of interest.
Observer Influence: Tendency of participants to
react to an observer’s presence by behaving in
unusual ways.
Time Sampling: A procedure in which an
investigator records frequencies of a behavior in
the time the participant is being observed.
Observational Methodologies
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Structured Observation: An observation method in
which the investigator cues the behvior of interest
and observes participants’ responses in a
laboratory setting.
Case studies allow investigators to obtain an indepth understanding of individual children or
adolescents by collecting data based on interviews,
observations, and test scores of the individual in
question, as well as information about that person
from such knowledgeable sources as teachers and
parents.
Observational Methodologies
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Ethnography, used originally by anthropologists, is
a descriptive procedure in which the researcher
becomes a participant observer within a cultural or
subcultural context.
He or she will carefully observe the community
members, make notes from conversations, and
compile such information into a detailed portrait of
the group’s values and traditions and their impacts
on developing children and adolescents.
Observational Methodologies
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In recent years, developmentalists have turned to
psychophysiological methods.
Psychophysiological methods measure the
relationship between physiological responses and
behavior.
They are often used to reveal the biological
underpinnings of children’s perceptual, cognitive, or
emotional responses.
DETECTING RELATIONSHIPS: CORRELATIONAL
AND EXPERIMENTAL DESIGNS
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Once researchers have decided what they want to
study and how they will collect their data, they must
then formulate a research plan, or design, that
permits them to identify associations among events
and behaviors and to specify the causes of these
relationships.
Two general research designs permit researchers to
identify relationships among variables that interest
them.
Correlational Design
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Correlational designs examine relationships as
they naturally occur, without any intervention.
The correlation coefficient is used to estimate the
strength and magnitude of the association between
variables.
However, correlational studies cannot specify
whether correlated variables are causally related.
Correlation does not infer causation!
Experimental Design
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The experimental design does point to cause-andeffect relationships.
The experimenter manipulates one (or more)
independent variables, exercises experimental
control over all other confounding variables (often
by random assignment of participants to
treatments), and observes the effect(s) of the
manipulation(s) on the dependent variable.
Experimental Design
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IV: The aspect of the environment that an
experimenter modifies or manipulates in order to
measure its impact on behavior.
DV: The aspect of behavior that is measured in an
experiment and assumed to be under the control of
the IV.
Confounding Variable: Some factor other than the
IV. Not controlled for.
Random Assignment: Assignment to experiment
conditions through an unbiased procedure.
Experimental Design
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Experiments may be performed in the laboratory
or, alternatively, in the natural environment (that is,
a field experiment), thereby increasing the
ecological validity of the results.
The impact of events that researchers cannot
manipulate or control can be studied in natural
(quasi) experiments.
However, lack of control over natural events
prevents the quasi-experimenter from drawing
definitive conclusions about cause and effect.
Designs For Studying Development
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Cross-sectional, longitudinal, and sequential designs
are employed to detect developmental change.
The cross-sectional design, which compares
different age groups at a single point in time, is
easy to conduct; but it cannot tell us how individuals
develop, and its results may be misleading if the
age trends one observes are actually due to cohort
effects rather than true developmental change.
Designs For Studying Development
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The longitudinal design detects developmental
change by repeatedly examining the same
participants as they grow older.
Though it identifies developmental continuities and
changes and individual differences in development,
the longitudinal design is subject to such problems
as selective attrition, which results in
nonrepresentative samples.
Moreover, the cross-generational problem of longterm longitudinal studies implies that results may be
limited to the particular cohort studied.
Designs For Studying Development
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The sequential design, a combination of the crosssectional and longitudinal designs, offers
researchers the advantages of both approaches
and allows them to discriminate true developmental
trends from troublesome cohort effects.
The microgenetic design studies children intensively
over a brief period when developmental changes
normally occur in an attempt to specify how or why
these changes occur.
Cross Cultural Comparisons
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Cross-cultural studies, in which participants from
different cultures or subcultures are compared on
one or more aspects of development, are becoming
increasingly important.
Only by comparing people from many cultures can
we identify “universal” patterns of development
and at the same time demonstrate that other
aspects of development are heavily influenced by
the social context in which they occur.