Psychology

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1. 1. Freud (1856­1939) 

Background: trained as a doctor, father of psychoanalysis, professor from Vienna 

Main tenets: unconscious motivates behavior

•  Born with sexual energy (libido), which is the source of all‐mental functioning (thoughts). 

•  Model of mind: 

o Conscious‐ smallest, everything you’re thinking of doing right now, aware of, deals with senses, ex. Everything you do when you’re awake and happening now.

1. o Preconscious‐ not thinking about now but when mentioned can bring into conscious, always working, ex. Teacher asking a question, something in the past. 

1. o Unconscious‐ no access to it only way to access is with psychoanalysis; fantasy, wish, desires, unaware of, illogical & irrational, ex. Repressed memory, or dreams 

1. o Unconscious wants to come up and conscious pushes it down 
•  Hypothetical elements of personality (that everyone’s born with) 

1. o Id – pleasure principle, immediate gratification. Imaginary thinking, illogical, primary process, part of the unconscious 

1. o Ego – develops at 1 years old, 2^nd process of thinking, reality principle 
•  Logical and rational (manipulate environment to get what you want) ego redirects/satisfies the id discharge energy when it is useful 
•  Takes a child a year to discover that they are separate from the environment 

•  Mediator between all three and reality 

1. o Superego – 4‐6 years old (should/should not stage) of society as dictated by adults regulated externally, child internalizes, and mechanism to regulate these moral codes develops the super ego 

•  Ego ideal‐ when you do good you feel pride, gives you pride/satisfaction because you abided by that code 

•  Conscious‐ deals out guilt/ or anxiety if violate moral code that was internalized as a child 

1. o Stages – represents conflict between biological urge and societal demand – parent help in this conflict 

•  Oral ‐18 months 

•  Anal 18‐3 years 
•  Phallic 3‐6 years 

• Oedipus and Electra complexes, penis envy 
•  Latency 6‐puberty 

• Period of relative emotion calm, and intellectual and social exploration 
•  Genital puberty‐YA 

• Sexual urges resurface 

1. o Characteristic‐ pleasure in different erogenous zones during different stages are unvarying. Everyone goes through in the same order, environment plays role. 

1. o Psychoanalytical‐ believed in this perspective, which is the view of human development as being shaped by unconscious forces. 

1. o Psychosexual development‐ gratification shifts from the mouth to the anus to the genital. 

1. o Fixation‐ psychologically stuck but physically moves on, might be because they were not successfully resolved. Fixation doesn’t go away, it will manifest itself later on in some sort of personality disorder. 

1. 2. Learning/Mechanistic Perspective (product based) Social cognitive theory Changes and behavior result from experiences. 

   Behaviorism (Pavlov) – Mechanistic, environment causes observable behavior

1. o Classical and operant conditioning (associative learning) mental link is formed between two events. 

1. o Classical – lab= very controlled, learning based on association of a stimulus that does not ordinarily elicit a particular response with another stimulus that does elicit the response, ex. Paring two things to 

cause a certain response

1. o Operant – consequences of behavior determine the fate of that behavior, learning based on association of behavior with its consequence, ex. Mom smiling at babbling baby, baby continues to babble 

•  Reinforcements‐ behavior is strengthened 
•  Punishments 

• Type 1 punishment‐ bringing on aversive event 
• Type 2 punishment‐ remove a positive event 

•  Social Learning Theory‐ Bandura 
1. o Bidirectional – reciprocal determinism – the child acts on the world as the world acts on the child 

1. o Kids like to imitate. What factors could lead to kids imitating this model? What degree does a teacher model? Or use peers as models? 

1. o Model and Self‐Efficacy‐ observing others similar to self‐ feel more capable. 

1. o Factors that impact self‐efficacy are past performance, emotions, and self‐persuasion. 

Cognitive perspective ‐ not the environment that shapes you (revolt against behaviorism), looks at the development of mental processes

1. 3. Piaget (1896­1980) – theory: development – dynamic process, not just a product of the environment, producer & product of self development changes in environment influence/affect people in different ways, individualism taken into account, not based on age but takes into account personality/temperament. 

•  Cognition – creation/utilization of knowledge, starts hands on and gets more abstract 

•  Intelligence – inborn ability to adapt 

•  4 stage – repetition of the world, how you think about the world, sensory/motor 

•  Schema – starts as an organized pattern of behavior/thought that you use to act/think in a given situation. The more you interact in the world; schemes will turn into organized patters of thought. 

Stages:

•  Sensorimotor (‐2 yrs) 

•  Preoperations (2‐7 yrs) 

•  Concrete operations (7‐11 yrs) 

•  Formal operations (11‐adulthood) 3 Functional invariants‐ 

•  Adaptation: adjustment to new information via assimilate/accommodate, need both in order to be successful. (Change/modify way you think and behave based on being introduced to something new) assimilate‐ encode, take in info about 

new info, accommodate – change/modify existing schema

1. o Equilibrium (balance, organization, schema), ex. Sees plane – thinks it’s a bird 

1. o Disruption (disequilibrium), ex. Notes difference between bird and plane, uncomfortable 

o   Successful adaptation, reorganization, ex. Change understanding

1. o New equilibrium (new schema), new label for bird – plane 
•  Equilibrium‐ product of successful adaptation 

•  Organization‐ creates system to integral schemes 

Stages of Cognitive Development

   Sensorimotor stage (‐2 years)

o Reflex (‐1 mo) inborn, practice to gain control, no object permanence o Primary circular reaction (1‐4 mos) repetitive and focused on body

because it produces pleasure ex. Sucking thumb

o Secondary circular reaction (4‐8 mos) repetitive and focused outside the body, prolongs an interesting experience from them, object permanence starts to develop, even though not in view, they understand it still exists, ex. Looking for a partially hidden crayon.

1. o Coordination of secondary schemes (8‐12 mos) schemes becomes decontextualized schemes and more elaborate, generalizing from past 

experiences, ex. They combine all the schemes that they learned to get

what they want.

o   Tertiary circular reaction (12‐18 mos) trial and error/novel behavior,

no invisible placement, ex. Hand game example.

o   Mental combinations (18‐24 mos) thinking before acting, child can

think about it before it happens.

   Preoperations stage (2‐6,7 years) suggests partial logic, not fully developed

o   Mental operations/ mental actions

o   Logic comes from actions not language, ex. Children‐ reflex can be

inborn, try to gain control over reflex, at the end become internal, if

they find it interesting, they will repeat it (when language is

developed).

o   Egocentrism – 3 mountains task, child believes everyone sees and

thinks about the world the way they do. They don’t attempt to place

themselves in the listeners POV. Piaget doesn’t think that speech is

very important, ex. Child nodding on the phone, talking to parent

while watching TV.

1. o Beaker/Clay paradigm examples‐ same amount of water but different shapes initially‐ change shape kids think the amount has changed. 

•  Centration – focus on only one aspect and neglect all other relevant aspects of that situation, will lead to illogical solutions 

•  Irreversibility – not able to understand an operation can go both ways, pouring liquid into the fat beaker to regular beaker is still the same amount, can’t retrace steps. 
•  Focus on states vs. transformation‐ beginning and end state; they don’t realize there’s a transformation. 

•  Perception bound thinking 

•  Transductive reasoning: reason from particular event to another particular event vs. appropriate casual fashion, can’t reason it, ex. I wish you’d go away to dad ‐> parents split ‐> child blames themselves. 

•  Animistic thinking – give animate lifelike qualities to inanimate objects, ex. Truck angry, clouds lonely, a sun sets and sun is sleepy. Equate life with activity (4‐6 years) Restrict life to things that move (6‐8 years) Restrict life to objects that move on their own – animals (after 8 years). 

•  Lack of hierarchical classifications 

• Ex. can’t group things into more than one category. They can’t sort by color and shape. Just color or just shape. 

•  Concrete operations – overcomes preoperation limitations but not the what if situations (7 to 11 years) 

1. o Less egocentric – can understand 3 mountains task, even in formal operation still there not fully gone. 

1. o Decenter‐ water will still have the same amount, can understand amount in different shapes, focuses on all relevant aspects of situation. 

1. o Reversibility‐ understands an operation can go both ways. 4+5=9 and 9‐4=5 

o   Do not focus on a state/ understand transformation thinking is not

perception bound.

o   Inductive, they go from particular observations about members of

class, to general conclusions about class as a whole, ex. My dog barks

so every dog barks.

1. o Now has hierarchical classification 

1. 4. Vygotsky (1896­1934) Social constructivist – 2 people create knowledge and meaning (whereas Piaget‐ one person) 

•  Law of Higher Mental Functions: every function in a persons development appears 2 times on 2 planes‐ 1^st social, the psychological 

1. o First it appears between people as interpsychological category and then appears within the individual as an intrapsychological category. 

1. o Social relations or relations among people underlie all higher functions and their relationships 

•  Zone of Proximal Development (assess intelligence) – understand what individuals can do by themselves and then what they can do with the help of someone who knows more about the subject. 
1. o Actual level of development – independent 

1. o Potential level of development – help of a more task experienced partner 

•  How do we assess the zone? 

1. o Intersubjectivity – common ground, start at a point you both understand. 

1. o Scaffolding – adjust the amount of social support given to someone with cues and prompts, how much to help and when to stop helping. 

1. o In order for successful joint interaction learning to occur, the learner needs to internalize joint process and apply it to a new task by him or herself. 

•  Interactive Model of Memory – starts out as a joint social verbal (language) exchange: 

1. o Ask 5 Ws. 

o   Answer Qs.

o Searching memory (retrieval cues) o Organize Memory

1. 5. Piaget vs. Vygotsky – both constructivist and cognitive development, individual vs. social 

•  Piaget – learning is subordinate to development depends on actual cognitive stage they are in, what you can learn depends on cognitive structure that’s available. 
•  Vygotsky – Learning stimulate development 
•  Role of Social Interaction – crucial for Vygotsky not for Piaget 

•  Egocentric speech – when child talks out loud but don’t attempt to make sense to 

others

1. o Piaget: language is not important for child at that age, doesn’t function only because it’s the preoperational stage and doesn’t care to understand the hearers, and goes away because they go into the concrete state, overthrown by social speech 

1. o Vygotsky: children are social, attempts to communicate when child is doing egocentric speech, confused with inner speech vs. external speech. Can’t differentiate, inner speech further develops inwardly and social speech develops outwardly. 

1. 6. Broefenbrenner Ecological Systems Perspective – Contextual perspective: individual is inseparable from social context 

   Bioecological theory‐ 5 levels of environmental influences

o   Microsystem‐ home life, school, immediate environment,

o Mesosystem‐ links two microsystems together ex. Bad day at work may interact with the child in a negative way, parent teacher conferences,

o Exosystem‐ links two or more‐ microsystem and outside system, ex. Bad TV influencing students,

1. o Macrosystem‐ over arching culture affects child, ex. Church government, capitalist society, 

1. o Chronosystem‐ change of consistency in the environment, ex. Moving, terrorists, parents employment, economic cycle 

Helps us see a variety of influences on development, people affect their own development based on context

7.   Scientific Method/Non­Experimental methods of study

•  Study: Naturalistic observation, case study, interview, clinical method, correlation study‐ designed intended to discover whether a statistical relationship between variables exist. 

•  Experiments: scientific method: describe, explain, predict and modify behavior, can be used for anything including lesson plans (pg 39) 
•  True experiment: always done in a lab, independent variable – under direct control of experimenter) what they are manipulating and a random assignment (experiment group and controlled group) (pg. 39) 
•  Dependent variable what you are measuring doesn’t always depend on the independent variable. 

•  Control group/experimental group – EG being experimented on, exposed to the independent variable. CG‐ basis for comparison, extraneous variables 

•  Correlation study‐ between 2 or more variables, attempt to establish a statistical relationship between 0‐>1 (I is a perfect correlation) + or ‐, direction of relationship 

•  Case study: examine 1 person for a long period of time, some limitations like not being able to generalize, observer bias. 

8.   Nature vs. Nurture based on identical twins that were separated at birth.

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9.   Early Development – Physical/Psychology, Biology/Environment

   Components associated with pregnancy

1. o Cravings, diabetes, treatment toward pregnant women 
•  Lack of pregnancy 

1. o Timing? 

o   Twins – monozygotic, dizygotic

1. o Hostile environment (reproductive system), stress, etc. 
•  Other ways 

1. o In‐vitro fertilization – extract ovum into Petri dish, external 

1. o Artificial insemination – non sexual intro of sperm into body 

1. o Surrogacy (donor eggs) not just inseminated anymore 

1. o Donor eggs/sperm 

1. o Adoption 
•  Prenatal environment 

1. o Variables – nutrition, disease, vitamins, environment (stress) 
•  Genetic counseling 

1. o Clinical service that advises parents that might be carriers with certain diseases 

•  Choices of childbirth 

1. o Under water, birthing chair, at home, dula. /midwife, c‐section 
•  Prenatal stages of childbirth 

1. o Germinal – fertilized ovum develops into blastocyst, fluid filled sphere floating in the uterus, amniotic sac, umbilical cord, placenta forms, 

cells cluster to form embryonic disc: ectoderm, mesoderm (muscle, circulatory system), endoderm (digestive system)

1. o Embryonic – blastocyst attaches to uterine wall, critical period –if something happens it happens in this period, initial differentiation of systems, organs develop 

1. o Fetal – organs and system develop rapidly, prenatal ability 
•  Stages of Childbirth 
1. o Dilation – cervix widens due to contractions, head/body emerges, umbilical cord/placenta discharge 

•  Possible consequences of childbirth 
1. o Physical, fetal death in uterus, stillborn, injury, psychological, post‐ partum depression 

10.Historical perspective towards development/children


If you have any test reviews, homeworks, guides, anything school related that you think can be posted on this website, reach out to me at makingschooleasier@gmail.com  

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