OCR Psychology For A Level Book 1 sample

In Section B of the Component 02 exam you may be required to discuss the principles and concepts of five different areas in psychology. The developmental area of psychology is one of those five areas. In Chapter 7 we look at the developmental area of psychology again (see page 334), including its strengths and weaknesses, and applications. What is the developmental area of psychology? The developmental area of psychology is sometimes understandably but misleadingly thought of as child psychology: understandably because the major part of the literature in the developmental area is about children; misleadingly because it gives the impression that psychological development stops as a child enters adulthood. A truly comprehensive developmental psychology concerns itself with the whole lifespan of human development. Having said this, the studies in this chapter reflect the traditional preoccupation with children. We are interested in how children develop their thoughts, feelings and behaviour. What are the things that make us good or bad, docile or aggressive, selfless or selfish? Development is something that interests many people her than psychologists. For example, artists and writers have observed how we go through different stages in our lives and they have recorded these changes in pictures and plays and novels. The speech from Shakespeare’s As You Like It suggests men go through seven stages in their progress from the cradle to the grave, and the picture by Hans Baldung Grien ( The seven ages of women , above) shows a similar progression for women, though why they have to have their cl hes off all their life is anyone’s guess. Introduction to the developmental area of psychology What is a child? This is not such a silly question as you might think. There have been many views of what childhood is in different cultures and in different periods of history. It is difficult to know how people saw the world 500 years ago but we can have an idea if we look at what they wrote and what they painted. For example, a lot of medieval pictures show children as little adults. They have the proportions of adults, only smaller. In reality, children don’t have the same proportions as adults; for example, their heads are much larger in proportion to their bodies (look at the baby in the picture below left and you can see this). Maybe the people who produced and looked at those pictures thought of children as being small adults. We know that 500 years ago children took on responsible roles from a young age and were commonly put to work. What does a child know when it is born? What can it do? Can it make sense of the world when it opens its eyes? Does it have a range of instincts that develop as it grows? Alternatively, is it born with a ‘blank slate’ (called a tabula rasa ) onto which experience will write the knowledge that gives the child its personality and cognitive skills? This nature–nurture debate has been alive for over 300 years in this country and whatever answer is favoured has a significant effect on the social policies of the time for dealing with children (see page 345). Today we buy into the idea that children are immature humans and they require support and direction to develop into healthy adults. Although this seems like a modern idea, it was proposed by the Greek philosopher Aristotle in the fourth century BCE. How do children think? The way children think is very different from adults. In many ways they are cognitive aliens. There are many examples of these differences and we offer two here. Language You’d maybe think that children learn language by listening to adults and then copying what they hear. But just listen to them. They make rule- based errors that they never hear. For example, it is not uncommon to hear a child say ‘I goed out’ and we all laugh. But they have taken the general rule for a past tense (which is add ‘ed’) and applied it to a new example. They could not have heard this said. They have puzzled out the rule and then used that for new sentences. Children’s drawings Another illustration of the different way that children see the world to adults is in their drawings of people. The drawings follow a predictable developmental pattern that is nothing like the way adults draw people. Most remarkably, they start off by leaving out the body and draw the arms and legs coming out of a big head. This is like the famous Mr Men, but it is the Mr Men that copy children rather than children copying the Mr Men. culture corner Chapter 4: Developmental psychology 168 Background reading AS & A level