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!!