Question

Reflect: Describe an aspect of your development that differs form a parent's or a grandparent's when he or she was your age. Using influences highlighted by the lifespan perspective, explain this difference in development.

Apply: A 4-year-old becomes frightened of the dark and refuses to go to sleep at night. How would a psychoanalyst and a behaviorist differ in their views of how this problem developed?

Review: Explain how each recent theoretical perspective: 1. Information processing, 2. Ethology and Evolutionary developmental psychology, 3. Vygotsky's sociocultural theory and 4. Ecological systems theory, regards children and adults as active contributions to their own development.

Answer 1

I wouldn’t exactly be able to answer your first question because I never got to see my grandparents.

Moving, on to the next one, the case of the 4-year-old girl’s case. A fear of darkness/night time is usually called ‘Nyctophobia’. It is common for the children until their first decade. Just to list out the basic symptoms which are usually experienced are a panic attack, shortness of breath, increased heart rate, heavy sweating, trembling etc. Nyctophobia, usually fades out by the time the child steps into his late teens. It may pass on to the adulthood and old age in some cases based on various environmental socio-cultural factors.

From the psychoanalytic point of view:

The psychoanalytic theories of phobias are based on the theories of repression and displacement. Repression: unconscious mechanism employed by the ego to keep away any kind of disturbing thoughts from becoming conscious. Displacement: Satisfying usually a negative emotion with an acceptable and less threatening target/object rather than an unacceptable and a threatening target or object.

Phobias are said to be unresolved conflicts between the ID and the Superego. Many psychoanalysts say that conflicts which usually arise during the childhood were repressed and/or displaced into a feared object. According to the work of Sigmund Freud, phobias are a defense against anxiety produced by various repressed impulses. People usually don’t confront their fears and avoid such situations. For nyctophobia, past experience could be a reason which could play a major role in its existence. In many other cases, found in children and passed on to their adulthood was a perception of the dark. It is commonly presumed that people are scared of the dark, particularly children. The reality is that, they are not afraid of the dark, it is the dark space where we cannot see we fear. People may have a smaller fraction of the phobias in their life ahead. This could also be an evolutionary reaction because predators hunt at night, and human beings are not nocturnal species. Sigmund Freud theorized that fear of the dark was the manifestation of the separation anxiety disorder.

From the behaviorist point of view:

The main concept of behaviorism is that phobic actions are learned. Which exact learning mechanism triggered the phobia and hoe did it develop and maintain in one’s mind is the questions. Classical conditioning and operant conditioning is the answer. Classical conditioning mentions how the process of acquisition of a phobia occurs, and operant condition maintains it. We can take the example of little Albert, in this case explaining his development of phobia of white furry animals.

White Rat (Neutral Stimulus)	->	Baby (No Response)
Loud noise (Unconditioned Stimulus)	->	Baby Crying (Unconditioned Response)
White Rat and Loud noise (Neutral stimulus + Unconditioned stimulus)	->	Fear response (Unconditioned Response)
White Rat	->	Fear response (Conditioned Response)

In case of operant conditioning, once the fear has been acquired, individuals then show avoidance responses where behaviours that marginally reduce the odds of contact and/or interaction with the feared object or a situation, which reduces the fear of response, reinforcing the avoidance responses, making them more likely to occur again in the future.

For Example: if someone witnessed a kidnapping in the dark, this individual will choose to sleep with lights on and a baseball bat to protect himself (negative reinforcement) because it reduces the fear response associated with being in the dark.

Information processing:

It consists of 3 stages:

1. Input
2. Process
3. Output (with

Children in their personal development stage are into learning everything using technology, with their exposure to technology, whereas traditional learning process was best suited for the old.

Ethology:

Ethology usually consists of adaptive, survival, value of behavior and is evolutionary. In this case, the individual is epically adaptive to external factors. Children are great contributors to this. They use gadgets and gizmos like its nothing, whereas the elder suffer. The old people will be theoretically right if they had to study, and explain a para article/moral, but the experience and smartness are two little contributors who are sitting

Vygotsky's sociocultural

According to Vygotsky’s theory, social learning anticipates development. Young children are curious and actively involved by which they end up learning and discovering of various understanding. His theory believed for cognitive development and growth it is vital for social interaction of the child, which includes the community. He quoted “learning is a necessary and universal aspect of the process of developing culturally organized, specifically human psychological function”

Ecological systems theory

This states how a child’s inherent qualities and the environment interact in order influence the growth and development of the child. A child is almost engaged in different ecosystems from his home (immediate environment) to school & college (macro environment) and beyond. Every stage there are factors which influence a child’s life in many ways during this course of growth and development. In case of adults, they are the final product of the growth stage, passing all the systems, and they dwell on the chromo system until old age.

Child	Micro system	Mesosystem	Exosystem	Macro environment	Chrono system
	Immediate environment	connections	Indirect environment	Social and cultural values	Changes over time