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.