Working on the project...

I'm very proud of myself today beacuse I worked on my semester project a lot. I think it is a very good thing that we are doing this project since I get to know myself better. There are some pictures of my childhood that I want to use in the paper but since I'm not living with my parents, they will have to search through the photo albums and send me the pictures somehow. Anyway, I have to get back to work.

The first quiz...

In today’s class, we had a quiz. It was the first quiz of the year so I was a little excited. We had to study for the sensorimotor stage, preoperational stage, attachment, memory, self concept and theory of mind. Although I was nervous it went really well. I also think that this has made it a lot easier to get ready for the exam since I have already studied these topics once.

I also started writing my project which is going pretty well at the moment. I’ve done an interview which I think contains very good material for my paper.

Preoperational Stage

In the beginning of the lecture on Friday, we talked about self concept and self esteem. Then we started discussing the preoperational stage. We said that the stage is between ages 2-7. We talked about pretend play and how it is important for imaginaton. One thing I now from my own self is that since I am a single-child, I used to play by myself most of the time since I was the only kid in the house. And I can also say that I used to have a very huge imagination. So in class when we said that usually single children and first born children have more pretend play since they have to play with themselves more than others, I saw a reflection from my own life.



Then we discussed the characteristics of this stage. We said that there is difficulty seperating fantasy and reality. We also said that there is egocentrism. I learned that adolescents think of themeselves as unique and they usually say things like “Nothing will happen to me if I do this”. This is called personal fable. There is overdiferentiation of self and others. I also learned a thing called imaginary audience in which adolsecents think that everybody is watching them. When I think of my high school years, I remember that I used to think everyone was watching me too.
Then we talked about animism which means giving inanimate objects feelings, thoughts, intentions. Another term I learned was transductive which means seeing a casual relationship between seperate events. Afterwards, we talked about transductive logic. We said that there is lack of conservation. We talked about two aspects: centration, lack of reversibilty. In centration, we said that the child focuses on one aspect of a problem. The video of the conservation task was a very good example. In the video, the girl was only focusing on the shape of the container but she couldn’t focus on the amount. In lack of reversibilty, we said that since children don’t have this, they don’t have operations.
The last characteristic we talked about was artificialism. We gave examples like “The sky is so blue because someone painted it blue”.
Lastly, we talked about Theory of Mind. We said that the child has a theoryof the content another’s mind. 3 year olds don’t have a theory of mind and otistic children also have a lack of it. We said that there are 2 ways of testing it:
1)False-Belief test - Sally-Anne test:

2)Appereance-Reality Distinction: ex:changing the marker caps
Probably the best part of the lesson was at the end when we watched the video of the Marshmallow Test. I really enjoyed watching it although I still believe that it was very cruel what they did to those children.

Reviewing attachment...

The class on Thursday was very helpful because we reviewed the subject attachment. We went through what we did in the previous lecture. We discussed the theories of attachment. The class was not very crowded so it was easy for me to understand and focus .

Attachment

This Friday, most of the students majoring in psychology didn’t come to the lecture because they had another exam I think. So we did a short lesson and talked about attachment. I had been to the conference by Alan Sroufe last month so I had already known a bit about this topic.
We said that attachment is the bond between a child and the primary caregiver. It can be emotional or cognitive.



Functions of attachment:
• Aids survival - All children develop attachment to survive.
• Provides confidence for children - The child uses this person, the attachment figure as a secure base. If they don’t have this, they don’t have the confidence to go out and explore.
• Close contact/comfort

Then we watched a video with the monkey and saw how the mother becomes the secure base. It was very interesting.

Attachment styles: They have very important influences o the rest of your life.
1) Secure Attachment: Has the most positive attachment. Children are willing to take chances and they are much more confident.
2) Insecure Attachment:
• Ambivalent
• Avoidant/Resistant
• Disorganized



Then we watched a video about the experiment called the “Strange Situation”. We looked at the attachment relationships between some children and their mothers. I think watching these videos really helped me understand the attachment styles. But I also felt very bad for the children when they were crying. It upset me a lot.

We also said that attachment can change if:
• Caregiver changes (sometimes insecure attachments can become secure attachments)
• Environmental changes

Another interesting thing I learned was that a person’s relationship with God can either be secure or insecure depending on that person’s attachment to their primary caregiver.

Lastly we talked about the theories of attachment.
Theories of Attachment:
1) Cognitive
2) Learning
3) Ethological
4) Psychoanalytic

Some review and a practice quiz...

We did some review of Piaget in today’s class. We did a practice quiz in which I scored 9/10 and it felt really good. I sometimes feel that my general psychology knowledge is not enough for this lesson since my major is economics. So when I do well in these practice quizzes, I start being more confident about myself and my knowledge :)

Piaget and Cognitive Development

Last Friday’s lesson was about cognitive development. So we started talking about Piaget. We said that he started his work with IQ testing. He worked in Binet’s laboratory. While working, he looked at the process of understanding. For example, he was wondering why children were giving wrong answers to questions. Later we said that he has four stages:
1) Sensorimotor(age 0-12)
2) Preoperational(age 2-7)
3) Concrete operational(age 7-12)
4) Formal operational(age 12-adult)
One thing which caught my attention in the beginning of the lesson was that in the preoperational period, fantasy and reality are very similar. The example our teacher gave about her daughter was also interesting.

Then we talked about cognition and listed two elements:
1) Adaptation: fitting in
Three processes:
• Assimilation
• Accomodation
• Equilibration
For assimilation we said that new information or knowledge comes in and fits in your existing scheme. However this is not very easy for children. For example if you are kid and you see a dog, you can easily say that it is a mammal. But if you see a whale you can not say that it is a mammal because you don’t think that it looks like a mammal so it doesn’t fit your scheme.
2) Scheme: like a framework
We said that schemes can be mental or physical.

Later, we asked the question “How does cognitive development occur?” This question asks how children go from one stage to the other. When answering this question, we talked about physical maturation. These are the four ways:
• Central nervous system, brain
• Direct experience(ex: playing is very important fort he cognitive development of children)
• Social transmission(ex: teaching)
• Equilibration

We continued talking about Piaget. We discussed his importance and limitations. We said that his historical importance is considerable. His stages are universal. His contemporary importance is high but he underestimates children’s cognitive ability. His stages have less qualitative difference and less of microelements.

In the last part of our lesson, we talked about the sensorimotor stage and its six substages.

Substage 1:Reflex
This happens between 0-1 months. Some reflexes are sucking and grasping.

Substage 2: Primary Circular Reactions
We said that primary refers to the child’s body, circular refers to repeated and reactions refer to response. This happens between 1-4 months. There is focus on child’s body. For example in thumb sucking the thumb goes into the mouth by chance, the child starts sucking the thumb, if he likes it he keeps on sucking. We also gave a bit of a disgusting example with saliva which I will not mention here.

Substage 3: Secondary Circular Reactions
Secondary refers to external. This stage is between 4-8 months. There is focus on the external world. Examples are rattling an object, kicking something, grabbing things.

Substage 4: Coordination of Secondary Schemes
Happens between 8-12 months. There are multiple schemes and now they are becoming more coordinated. There are means-ends.

Substage 5: Tertiary Circular Reactions
This stage covers the period from 12-18 months. There is deliberate trial error. There is modification of secondary schemes to accomplish goals and better understanding of cause and effect. The example we discussed about the crib and the stick was very interesting. The kid is trying to get the stick in the crib but can’t do it since he is not holding it upside down. He has to turn the stick which means that now he is modifying the grasping scheme to accomplish goal.

Substage 6: New Means through Mental Combinations
Covers the period through 18-24 months. This is the beginning of symbolism (symbolic thought), mental representation. There is less outright trial/error.
After this stage the child moves to stage 2, the preoperational stage.

This was last week’s lecture and it was a very fun topic to learn. I hope what we will learn this week will be interesting too.

The Brain

In the beginning of the lesson, we talked about our project. We learned that the due date was postponed to December 31st which was a great relief. I was really afraid that I would not be able to finish my work on time so learning that we have like about a month more to work on it made me feel really good.

Later, we started a new topic, the “brain”. Although it might be very boring to learn about the brain for many people, I like it. When I was in high school, my favourite science subject was biology and I had studied the brain in English so I didn’t have a hard time understanding this lesson.

First, we started talking about the neurons. A neuron is the basic unit of the nervous system. It receives and transmits messages. It contains dendrytes, cell body and axon. We learned that axon-dendryte connections are very few in children. Then we learned something called the myelin sheath which is covering the axon. The lack of myelin sheath causes inefficiency in the brain because if there is no myelin sheath, the signal is lost. The lack of it also causes MS. Then we talked about neurotransmitters. We said that they transmit the signal from one neuron to the next. Antidepressants work on the neurotransmitters. Some examples are endorphin, serotonin. Then we talked about the synapse and the synaptic cleft.



Moreover, we said that children are born with very less myelin sheath. Then there are two developments:
1) Myelination: A 2 year old can’t really focus on one thing: she passes playing from one toy to the other, jumping from one activity to the other. This is because there is not much myelination. However when she becomes 6 years old, she can focus. But we also added that myelination is small in teenagers.
2) Neural connections increase: Till age 3, children can easily learn second languages. Later, there is pruning. Pruning means that if certain neuroconnections are not being used, the brain will eliminate them. So pruning causes loss of neural pathways/connections. There is also redundancy.

Then we talked about the parts of the brain. There are two hemispheres in the brain and they are connected by the corpus callosum. The parts of the brain are brain stem, cerebellum, limbic system and cerebral cortex.

An interesting thing I learned in this lesson was that the brain is folded to contain more information. I also learned that fish don’t have cerebral cortex.

The cerebrum/cerebral cortex is the part which makes us important. Here are the four parts and their functions:
Frontal lobe: reasoning, planning speech…
Occipital lobe: vision
Temporal lobe: hearing, memory
Parietal lobe: touch, smell, taste

Another interesting thing I learned in this class which I haven’t learned in my previous biology lessons was that teenagers don’t have an entirely matured frontal lobe which makes them think it’s okay for drinking and driving. The most interesting thing was the story about the railroad worker who got shot in the head and his personality changed.

Baby reflexes

In this lesson we talked about some baby reflexes. I thought they were very funny. We said that reflexes are simple, unlearned, stereotypical responses. These are the ones we learned in class.
• Rooting
• Sucking
• Moro or startle reflex
• Grasping or palmar reflex
• Stepping reflex
• Babninski reflex
• Tonic-neck reflex

Then we said that increased brain development reduces reflexes. Later we talked about why babies cry and said that at first when they are very little, they cry for everything. As they grow older they have differentaited cries. we also said that adults usually get very annoyed if there is a baby crying. This is because you have instincts which make you want to protect the baby.

This was a very nice lesson and I really enjoyed the videos we watched about these reflexes. It was a short lesson since we did in class time on Thursday.

Stages and Birth

Wow! It's been a very long time since my last entry. I guess I was so busy with my midterms that I forgot about my blog which I'm very upset about. The last thing I wrote about was how I was doing with my project. However I forgot to write about our final lesson before the exam. In that lesson we talked about the stages and later talked about birth. We had discussed the stages in our previous lesson but in this lesson we added some more. These are some of the things we said in class:
• Implantation occurs in the germinal stage.
• Embryonic stage is important since the development of some major organs like the lungs, heart occur in this stage. Organ systems are formed. Also the development of placenta takes place in this stage. We also noted that the embryo is very small at this time but will get bigger in the fetal stage.
• In the fetal stage, the fetus is maturing, it is gaining weight and getting larger.

An interesting thing we talked about in class was that if the mom drinks alcohol, uses drugs during pregnancy, these can be passed to the fetus which can cause significant damage. I was shocked when I learned that some babies are born addicted to cocaine or heroine. We also learned that babies can be responsive to mothers’ psychological states. Later we talked about the amniotic sac and the fluid it contains which is the amniotic fluid. We said that it is nutrient rich and it protects the baby. The baby breathes the amniotic fluid which makes the lungs develop.

Then we talked about birth. We said that the first stage begins with contractions. The baby goes down and moves to the cervix. Sometimes amniotic fluid is released during this time. Later the cervix dilates up to 10cm, the membrane across the cervix gets thinner and thinner. While talking about birth, I learned that if a baby is coming upside down it can be a huge problem. Also another interesting thing I learned is that there are some birth hormones which have an important effect on the mothers’ brains. Some people say that the size of women’s brain increases after birth and this increase makes the women more responsive to their babies. Later I learned a new term “crowning” which means that the head of the baby shows through the vaginal track. This is when the second stage begins. From crowning till birth is the second stage. Later comes the third stage in which the placenta and the umbilical cord is released from the mother’s body. However we said that sometimes the umbilical cord can be wrapped around the baby’s neck which is very dangerous since it can cause fetal death.

Probably the most interesting and disgusting part of this lesson was when we started watching the birth videos. Although they are so miraculous and fascinating, this still doesn’t change the fact that they are disgusting to watch. But I have to say that I have never watched a birth video or a live birth before so I learned a lot of things. I also have to say that birth in water was very interesting and it seemed a bit more relaxing that giving a normal birth. But when we started watching the C-section, I thought I was going to vomit so I had to close my eyes most of the time. Also I didn’t realize that the placenta we were always talking about in class was a very big part so I also got a chance to see it by watching the video.

In my next entry, I will write about baby reflexes.

The journey begins...

This week was a bit shorter than the others due to bayram so we didn't have class or lecture. But we had to hand in our research topic and article reference. Throughout the week, I thought of changing my topic but then decided on keeping it. So now, I will be writing a paper about the effects moving to a different city has on a child. I thought we were supposed to find 3 articles for this week but later realized that only one was enoguh.



Anyway now I started talking to my parents about my childhood and try to remember things from the time we had that long distance move. I'm really curious about the things that I will find out about my topic and I think that this reserach paper will take me on a very interesting journey.

Conception, Heredity, Pregnancy and Sexual Differentiation

In this week’s lesson, we studied conception, heredity, pregnancy and sexual differentiation. We started our lesson with conception. We said that conception is the process when a sperm and ovum unites together and the ovum is fertilized. Then we talked about the male and the female reproductive systems and their parts. Although I knew most of the terms from high school, some were new to me. We also said that a sperm is weaker and smaller whereas an egg is stronger and bigger. In a part of our lesson, we talked about the genetic abnormalities and gave “down syndrome” as an example. We learned that a 45 year old woman getting pregnant has a much higher risk for genetic abnormalities than a 20 year old. This is because a 45 year old woman’s ovum have been exposed to environmental threats like pollution, radiation longer.

Then we compared the cells in our body. Most of the cells in our body have 23 pairs of chromosomes making 46 in total. But sperm and egg have 23 chromosomes. In most cells there is reproduction by mitosis. Within each chromosome we have DNA which contains genetic information. In mitosis the number of chromosomes is duplicated. On the other hand, in sperm and egg, there is meiosis which is reproduction by reduction. At the end we said that a zygote has 23 pairs of chromosomes; 23 from the mother and 23 from the father.

Later, we started the topic “heredity”. In class, we gave the example of Ali Bey and Aslı Hanım having kids which helped me understand the situation better. We assumed that they are both brown haired with the genes Bb (B for brown hair which is dominant and blonde hair which is recessive). We said that they can have four different babies; 3 brown haired with the genes BB, Bb, bB and one blonde with bb. So we understood that when the dominant is paired with a recessive, the dominant shows up. However Aslı Hanım and Ali Bey both have the recessive genes for blonde hair. We say that blonde hair is a recessive trait. I also have friends, brothers and sisters; one with brown hair and brown eyes and the other blonde hair with blue eyes. Although they are related, their colours are very different and this is again due to the dominant and recessive genes of their parents.

We learned that XX represents female and XY represents male. Mother always gives X to the baby but the father can give either X or Y which also means that father determines the sex of the baby. It is interesting to see that in our country, men who want a son leave their wives if the baby born is not a boy although they are the ones who are determining whether the baby is going to be a girl or a boy.

Also we talked about twins. Twins can be two types; dizygotic where 50% of the genes are shared, or monozygotic where 100% is shared. But I still have a question in my mind. I have twin cousins who look exactly the same, act the same, dress the same but although for all this time I thought they were monozygotic in fact they are dizygotic.



Then we talked about pregnancy and said that it had three stages:
1.Germinal Stage:
Formation of blastocyst.
2.Embryonic Stage:
Implantation occurs in the uterus (the implantation outside the uterus is called ectopic pregnancy).
It is the critical developmental period because the lungs and heart are formed. We call growing from head down cephalocaudal and growing from inside out is called proximodistal.
3.Fetal Stage

Lastly, we learned about sexual differentiation. We said that it occurs during the embryonic stage. At first we all have the same sex organs because the male penis and the female clitoris have the same structure. But when developing, if the developing embryo is exposed to androgens, the person becomes a male, if not a female. Probably the most interesting part of this lesson was when we talked about the Androgen Insensitivity Syndrome. We said that it can be either partial (PAIS) or complete (CAIS). In this situation, we have a genetic male whose body is not sensitive to androgens. So the person is a physical female but a biological male and does not have penis.

This is all for this week. Now I will keep on researching for my article.

What happened this week....

At the beginning of the week, I tried to form a research question for my semester project. I had been thinking about it for a while and decided on the topic of how moving to a different city affects a child's psychology. First, I found some articles related to my topic but then realized that they were not scientific so I researched more and found two new articles. At the end, I decided to use one of them. However we were given one more week for coming up with a research question and finding articles so now I will try to revise mine.



In the class on Thursday, we had a practice quiz which I thought was very helpful. I got to see how I was doing in class and realized that I was doing pretty well. Before taking the course, I had some concerns whether I will have difficulties with it but since I've started studying, I'm not facing any problems.

In the lecture on Friday, we talked about conception, heredity, pregnancy and sexual differentiation. My next entry will focus on these topics.

Probably the most interesting thing I've done this week was attending the conference by Alan Sroufe on Friday. It was a very good opportunity for me to learn more about child development since I'm very new to it. I'm so happy that I attended the conference.

Reserach in child development

This week we had a class on Thursday but we didin't have a lecture on Friday. I will mainly talk about what we did in class.

After learning the basic issues and theories about child development, we started learning how we study child development. First of all, we said that we use a scientific method. We added that this method has five steps:
The Scientific Method
1.Formulation of reserach question
2.Development of a hypothesis
3.Testing the hypothesis
4.Drawing conclusions about hypothesis
5.Publishing findings
Then we discussed two more methods; correlational method and the experimental method.
Correlational Method
In this method we try to see if there is a connection between behaviours, traits. For example, we can look at the relationship between intelligence and school achievement. If intelligence is increasing, so does the school achievement. Therefore we can conclude that there is positive correlation between these two.
However if we have a look at the relationship between working after school and school achievement, we will see that there is a negative correlation since one increases while the other decreases.
We also said that there is a correlation coefficient which shows the direction and the strength of these relationships. The value of the correlation coefficient is between -1 and +1. For example if this coefficient is 0.7, there is probably a good relationship. However there is still a point that we can not understand, which is casuality. We can not say if intelligence is the reason to school achievement or vice versa. Maybe there is another third factor affecting these two.
The Experimental Method
In this method, we try to do an experiment with a dependent and an indepent variable, experimental group and a control group.
In class, we gave the example of violent cartoon watching. Now let's think of this as the independent variaable and say that peer agression is the dependent variable. We get 100 kids, divide them into two groups(where everything is the same). One of the groups will be shown violent cartoons whereas the other group will be shown a normal cartoon which does not contain violence. By doing this experiment, we will see if violence increases peer agression or not.
Later, we learned about longitudinal, cross-sectional and cross-sequential research.
Longitudinal reserach: We have a group of children all the same age and we study their development in periods of time.
Cross-sectional research: We have groups of children with different ages and we look at their development processes.
Cross-sequential research: This can be considered as a combination of longitudinal and cross-sectional research.

These were the things we discussed in this week's class. Now what I have to do is to find my own research topic, form a research question and find an article about it.

Second lesson

This week, since some of the students in our class (including me) wanted to learn some more about the theories, we talked a little more about them and I thought that it was very helpful. I got to learn more about Freud, some of his books, thoughts. We learned the five stages in more detail. We talked about Freudian slips where unconscious motives, desires become conscious. It was really interesting to learn that the things we see in our dreams are also our unconscious desires, wishes which come up in a different format. Another interesting thing I learned is that the early experiences shape adult personality.


Then we went through Freud’s five stages again and said that each of these stages involve a crisis. It is so unbelievable to see all the stages that a human has to develop through. I can not recall so much from back in the days but now it is so crazy to see that I’ve also been through most of Freud’s stages.

The lesson was going pretty fun but when we started talking about personality, it became more interesting. First we talked about the id stage where there is the pleasure principle. As the child develops, he has an ego which means conscious. Now he has control over the pleasure principle, he has control over his wishes, desires, wants. Later there is the superego which is developed from the parents and people around us. In this stage, there are rules and restrictions.

We shouldn’t forget that there is a conflict between pleasure principle and superego and this conflict is not just for the children but it is for everybody and due to these conflicts, we have defense mechanisms. I think the part that I enjoyed the most in this lesson was the time we got to this subject. This is because when we started talking about defense mechanisms, I started seeing some elements from my own personality.

In class we said that someone can believe he is a peaceful person but if someone bumps into him on the street, he will get angry. The thing which prevents him from experiencing this anger will be the defense mechanism. For example this person will be so angry but he won’t admit it so he would do something else, maybe start exercising to discharge the energy. Well this sounds familiar because most of the time when I’m upset with something, I either go to the gym or start jogging in the nearest park. In this lesson, I learned that this thing I was doing was called sublimation.

Another type of defense mechanism is called projection where rather than dealing with anger, you make others angry, projecting your anger to others. By doing this you are hiding from what you are feeling. Just like anger, we said that sexuality can also be a problem.

Rationalization is another defense mechanism where we disassociate from the feeling that we have.

Lastly we mentioned that repression is also another type where something has happened to you in your childhood but unconsciously you have repressed your memory.

Then we continued with Freud’s stages. I don’t want to give so much detail about it in this entry but I have to say that something really caught my attention. I found it really interesting that in the phallic stage, the boy has sexual feelings for his mother and sees his father as a big threat. Also we said that girls have a different identification of the mother and consequently they have a less developed superego. I didn’t really understand the reason behind this but learning about it was both impressive and upsetting.

Later in the lesson, we studied Erikson in more detail. We said that his stages are developing all the way through death and at each stage of life, there is a crisis. We talked about the importance of early experiences and that social relationships are key. Then we started discussing the stages.

Stage 1: Trust vs. Mistrust
Baby comes to the environment with some reflexes.
(I didn’t know that if you touch a baby’s cheek, he/she will turn to that side thinking that it is the nipple. This is called rooting.)
If the baby’s basic needs are met consistently (most of the time or all the time) it will lead to trust. But for example the child is hungry and you never feed him this will lead to mistrust.

Stage 2: Autonomy vs. Shame, Doubt

We didn’t go into detail in the other stages but talked about the significance of the outcomes of the stages. If there is a negative outcome from one stage, it will affect the next stage and there will be problems in every other stage.

In a part of our lesson, we talked about some baby reflexes and I found it very interesting if you pretend like you are dropping a baby, their arms will go out to the sides and if you ut your finger inside their palms, they hold your fingers so tight that you can lift them up. I’m sure it would be very funny doing that to a little baby.

At the last part of the lesson, we got a chance to start learning the cognitive theories. We talked a little about Piaget and information processing.



Piaget
We talked about adaptation. The child is developing so that his/her cognition matches up with the environment which means that he/she is adapting to the environment. When we say environment it’s not just the physical environment but it is everything that a child experiences. We said that the child is active, he/she interacts with his/her world and over time child adapts better and better. Also there is discontinuous stage progression.

Information Processing
The mind is compared to the computer. The stimuli comes to our five senses, goes to the sensory memory (if not processed gets lost very easy) and then to short term memory and long term memory. However if we don’t process the information which also comes to STM it will get lost and won’t be processed in LTM. We also said that there are some memory stores where the information is kept in your memory. At the end, we said that this development was continuous, universal and quantitative.

Theories of Child Development

This entry will be about some of the theories we learned in our first child development class. We started talking about psychoanalytic theories. Since I don’t have so much background information about these theories, in this entry I will only talk about the things we discussed in class. We said that psychoanalytic theories have discontionuos stages, they are more nature based and more passive. We also said that psychosocial refers to the development which takes place with other people, it occurs in a social setting. Later, we started talking about Erikson. We said that his theory has 8 stages which cover the entire life. These stages are:
1. Trust vs. Mistrust
2. Autonomy vs. Shame & Doubt
3. Initiative vs. Guilt
4. Industry vs. Inferiority
5. Identity vs. Role Confusion
6. Intimacy vs. Isolation
7. Generativity vs. Stagnation
8. Ego Integrity vs. Despair
I believe students majoring in psychology have learned about Erikson’s stages last year but all this stuff is very new to me so I guess I should start reading about them a little.

We didn’t spend so much time on Erikson and started talking about Freud. Of course I’ve heard of him before but mainly in my philosophy lessons. Now I’m looking at his work from a whole new perspective. In our first lesson, I learned that Freud believes that biology is your destiny, his theories are biologically deterministic and he has five stages. These stages are:
1. Oral
2. Anal
3. Phallic
4. Latency
5. Genital
Then we compared Freud and Erikson and said that they are both on the nature side but Erikson is less than Freud, he is more on the nurture side.

In the last part of our lesson, we studied the learning theories. We talked about classical and operant conditioning. We said that Pavlov’s dog is an example for classical and Skinner’s pigeon is an example for operant conditioning.

Classical Conditioning:
There is an unconditioned stimulus which can be referred as an automatic response from and animal or person. For example if we show food to a dog, the dog will start salivating. Here, the food will be the unconditioned stimulus and the reflex response will be salivating. If we start ringing a bell while showing the food and then take the food and just ring the bell, the dog will still keep on salivating. In this case the bell will be the conditioned stimulus and salivation will be the conditioned response.


I believe that this is very interesting. Then we passed on to the operant conditioning. I thought I wouldn’t understand it but I easily understood with the child and the toy example.

Operant Conditioning:
Let’s think of a child crying for a toy. The mother can either buy the toy for the child or she won’t buy it. We shouldn’t forget that the mother’s actions will shape the behaviour of the child. If the mother buys the toy, she will reinforce the behaviour so the frequency of the behaviour will increase and the child will always cry for the toy. However if the mother says “No! I’m not buying the toy”, if she uses punishment rather than reinforcement, the frequency of the behaviour will decrease. We concluded this topic by saying that operant conditioning is continuous, nurture and universal.

While studying this example, I remembered my childhood. When I was a child, my mother never bought me a toy if I cried for it. I grew up in a society where wealthy families would do anything to make their children happy but my parents didn’t think it was the right way to raise their kid. Now I’m really thankful to them because I learned to be happy with what I’ve got. I never feel the need to ask for a lot more. If my parents have raised me in a different way, I could have been one of those girls who are never satisfied with what they’ve got.

Basic Issues

In our first lesson, we started talking about some basic issues about child development. Later, we went on with some theories. So we started with these four issues:
1. Nature vs. Nurture:
This is about how heredity and environment interacts. For example we said that height can be affected by both nature and nurture.
2. Continuous vs. Discontinuous:
This issue is about how development proceeds. We talked about 2 types of development; quantitative and qualitative. When we say quantitative, we mean a continuous process where you add up information as you grow, whereas in qualitative, the stages are not related to each other.
3. Universal vs. Context-Specific:
While discussing this issue, we gave the example of eating. Eating is a universal progression where people all around the world start with nursing when they are babies and then pass on to solid food. However we also said that expectations of eating might be context-specific as it may differ from culture to culture. In some places such as Turkey, children are forced to eat mostly by older family members. Another example for context-specific would be display rules. How people react to the way we express our emotions are not the same everywhere. In many cultures it is okay for a woman to cry but a shame to for a man to cry. If we'd think of our country, we don’t see men crying in public but it is likely to see a women crying in public.
4. Active vs. Passive:
We can understand this issue by looking at the relationship between a child and the environment. When a child is playing with the environment, we can say that this is active but the child and his development is also influenced by the environment and this is passive.

Although I thought that I’ve really understood these issues, I had a bit of a hard time when it came to finding them in the theories. In many of these theories that we have discussed, I couldn’t decide if one was continuous or discontinuous, active or passive, etc. Anyway I’ll work on them a bit more and write about them next time.

Saying hello to child development

Hello everyone, this is my first entry to this blog so I think it will be better if I briefly introduce myself first. I’m a second year economics student in Bilgi. You might be wondering why a student majoring in economics would be writing a blog about child development, so let me clear it for you. Two years ago while getting prepared for the university entrance exams, many people(my friends, teachers, classmates, family members) told me that it would be very good if I study psychology because they thought that it suited me very well. Anyway you can not let others decide what you want to study and I wanted to study economics. Last year when I started studying economics, I realized that it was not the only thing that I wanted my university education to be all about and I wanted to do a bit more. So I said why not do a double major with psychology. I haven’t applied for the program yet but I’m thinking of applying in the second semester of this year but first I wanted to see whether I would like this major or not so I decided to take the Child Development lesson.

Since I don’t have a lot of background information about the things we discuss in class, in this blog I will mainly talk about what we have learned during the lesson and my interpretations(I’ll try to combine what I learned with my own life experiences). Also it would be very helpful if the ones reading my blog can comment on my posts and share their ideas with me.
This is all for now, my next entry will be about our first lesson. I hope you’ll enjoy it!!