Exam 10: B: Human Development

Correct Answer:

Verified

Answers will vary but should contain the following information for full credit.
--A conventional moral reasoner is described as one who conforms to majority opinions or follows social norms when reasoning about right and wrong actions.A conventional moral reasoner may hold certain political beliefs because most of the person's peers hold those beliefs.A postconventional moral reasoner uses utilitarian ethics to reason about right and wrong actions.For postconventional reasoners,acts that produce the greatest good for the greatest number of people are moral acts,even if they produce disfavour from others or involve acting against self-interest.A postconventional reasoner will not likely conform or change political attitudes due to majority influence;they tend to have internal principles of right and wrong that may not adhere to social norms.

Correct Answer:

Verified

Answers will vary but should contain the following information for full credit.
--Parenting styles fall into three (and later four)major categories:
• Permissive.Permissive parents tend to be lenient with their children,allowing them considerable freedom inside and outside the household.They use discipline sparingly,if at all,and often shower their children with affection.
• Authoritarian.Authoritarian parents tend to be strict with their children,punishing them when they don't respond appropriately to their demands.They show little affection toward their children.
• Authoritative.Authoritative parents combine the best features of both permissive and authoritarian worlds.They're supportive of their children but set clear and firm limits with them.
• Uninvolved.Neglectful parents tend to ignore their children,paying little attention to either their positive or negative behaviours.
--Outcomes: Baumrind (1991)and other investigators (Weiss & Schwartz,1996)found that children with authoritative parents tend to exhibit the best social and emotional adjustment and the lowest levels of behaviour problems,at least among Caucasian middle-class North American families.Children with uninvolved parents tend to fare the worst,and children with either permissive or authoritarian parents fall in between.But these findings do not tend to apply to collectivistic cultures.
--So what's the bottom line on parenting styles? Disappointingly,after decades of advice from parenting experts,it's hard to say all that much for sure.Still,the bulk of the research suggests that specific parenting styles may not matter as much as experts had once thought.By and large,if parents provide their children with what Heinz Hartmann (1939)termed the average expectable environment-that is,an environment that provides children with basic needs for affection and appropriate discipline-most of their children will probably turn out just fine.So contrary to what they may hear from parenting gurus on Oprah,parents needn't lose sleep about everything they do or every word they say.This doesn't let parents entirely off the hook,however.If parenting falls well below the range of the average expectable environment-that is,if it's especially poor-children's social development can suffer.

Correct Answer:

Verified

Answers will vary but should contain the following information for full credit.
--What is it and what does it measure? Mary Ainsworth and her colleagues developed the Strange Situation that psychologists settled on a systematic way of quantifying infants' attachment styles.The Strange Situation is a laboratory procedure for examining one-year-olds' reactions to separation from their mothers.Here's how it works.First,researchers place the infant in an unfamiliar room with his or her mother.The room is loaded with all kinds of interesting toys,and the mother gives the infant the chance to play with them.Then,a stranger enters.On two different occasions,the mother exits the room,leaving the infant alone with the stranger before reuniting with her infant.The Strange Situation takes advantage of infants' stranger anxiety,which,as we've learned,tends to peak at about one year.Today,most attachment researchers rely on the Strange Situation to measure infants' attachment styles
--Categorizations:
(1)Secure attachment (about 60 percent of North American infants).The infant reacts to mom's departure by becoming upset but greets her return with joy.In essence,the infant uses mom as a secure base: a rock-solid source of support to which to turn in times of trouble (Bowlby,1990).
(2)Insecure-avoidant attachment (about 15-20 percent of North American infants).The infant reacts to mom's departure with indifference and shows little reaction on her return.
(3)Insecure-anxious attachment (about 15-20 percent of North American infants).The infant reacts to mom's departure with panic.He then shows a mixed emotional reaction on her return,simultaneously reaching for her yet squirming to get away after she picks him up (for this reason,some psychologists refer to this style as "anxious-ambivalent").
(4)Disorganized attachment (about five to 10 percent of North American infants).This rarest of attachment styles wasn't included in the original classification but was added later by Mary Main and her colleagues (Main & Cassidy,1988).Children with this pattern react to mom's departure and return with an inconsistent and confused set of responses.They may appear dazed when reunited with her.
--Still,the Strange Situation has its shortcomings.Researchers must be careful to avoid mono-operation bias (Shadish,Cook,& Campbell,2002): the mistake of relying on only a single measure to draw conclusions.The Strange Situation is,after all,merely one indicator of attachment.To equate it with attachment,as some psychologists have done,is a serious error.Indeed,some researchers have begun to develop alternative indicators of attachment,such as interviews in adulthood designed to assess bonding to one's parents (Hesse,1999).The Strange Situation also isn't especially reliable.As we learned in Chapter 2,reliability refers to the consistency of a measuring instrument.If the Strange Situation were a highly reliable measure of attachment,babies who are securely attached at age 1 should tend to remain that way for a short time afterward,as should babies who are insecurely-avoidantly attached,and so on.Yet research shows that many infants switch their attachment classifications over brief time periods.In general,attachment styles remain consistent only when parents' living circumstances stay the same.If parents undergo a change in their job status,their children's attachment style often changes along with it (Bruer,1999;Thompson,1998).Moreover,almost 40 percent of children display a different attachment style with their mother than with their father (van Ijzendoorn & De Wolff,1997),suggesting that many children can't simply be pigeonholed into a single attachment classification.