quiz 6 - ch. 13 and 14

social-emotional learning - Hymel

defined as "the process through which we learn to recognize and manage emotions, care about others, make good decisions, behave ethically and responsibly, develop positive relationships and avoid negative behaviors" -Hymel and her colleagues use SEL in their work to promote children's well-being, and have worked to include SEL in British Columbia school curricula with the aim of creating safe and caring school environments -Programs focus on developing students' nonacademic competencies to support the skills and knowledge they will undoubtedly need in the wider world. Three core competencies have been identified: (1) communication, (2) creative and critical thinking, and (3) personal and social responsibility.

Evidence for Biological Influences on Gender-Role Development - hormonal influences

-. Before the consequences were known, some mothers who had had problems carrying pregnancies to term were given drugs containing progestins, which are converted to the male hormone testosterone by the body. -congenital adrenal hyperplasia (CAH): genetic anomaly that causes the adrenal glands to produce unusually high levels of androgen from the prenatal period onward; often has masculinizing effects on female fetuses. - born with external genitalia resembling cis male -Money and Ehrhardt - followed such andronized females whose external organs were surgically altered and who were then raised as girls - many more androgenized girls were tomboys who often played with boys and preferred boys' toys and activities to traditionally feminine pursuits -began dating somewhat later than other girls and felt that marriage should be delayed until they had established their careers. -far percentage identified as bisexual or lesbian -perform better than most girls and women on tests of spatial ability -Even normal variations in girls' exposure to testosterone (produced by their mothers) prior to their birth are associated with girls' play behaviour at age : girls exposed to high-normal levels of testosterone before birth show stronger preferences for masculine toys and activities than do female age-mates exposed to lower levels of testosterone (1) some differences between males and females may be -hormonally mediated, and (2) prenatal exposure to male sex hormones can influence the attitudes, interests, and activities of human females.

contributors to self-recognition

-18-24 months recognize selves in mirror - same age where internalize their sensorimotor schemes to form mental images -begin to notice the contingency between actions they can see in the mirror and proprioceptive information they can sense from their own bodily movements, thus recognizing that the child in the mirror who is doing what I'm doing must be "me" -once 3.5-4 year olds start encoding experiences as autobiographical memories, realize that self stable and earlier events happened to them -Pipp and colleagues administered a complex test of self-knowledge to 2- and 3-year-olds—a test assessing the child's awareness of his or her name and gender, as well as tasks to assess self-recognition—and found that securely attached infants had more complex awareness of both themselves and their mothers than infants with insecure attachments -parents also contribute to self-concept by providing descriptive info and evaluating behaviour, ask questions so can understand storyline narratives of life -> help contribute to understanding of extended self -cultural differences: Keller et al - 3 month olds - studied cameroon group, greek group, costa rica group -> found that the mothers from the three cultures did differ in the parenting styles with their 3-month-old infants, with the Nso mothers stressing interdependence, the Greek mothers stressing autonomy, and the Costa Rican mothers falling in between the other two. -> toddlers whose mothers had stressed interdependence were not likely to recognize themselves in the rouge test, whereas toddlers whose mothers had stressed autonomy were much more likely to recognize themselves

Social Contributors to Self-Esteem: peer influences

-4-5, children begin to recognize differences among themselves and classmates as use social comparison (the process of defining and evaluating the self by comparing oneself to other people.) information to tell them if better or worse in various domains than peers -comparison between peers increases and becomes more subtle with age, plays an important role in shaping children's perceived competencies and global self-esteem esp in western cultures -Recent research suggests that teachers can play an important role in buffering the negative impact from poor social comparisons and subsequent peer rejection by providing individual support to children

observational learning of gender roles - general

-According to Bandura (1989), children acquire many of their gender-typed attributes and interests by observing and imitating a variety of same-sex models. -selectively attending to and imitating a variety of same-sex models, including peers, teachers, older siblings, media personalities, and their mothers or their fathers -but seems that in preschool period attending to all genders' behaviours -> children of employed mothers (who play the masculine instrumental role) or of fathers who routinely perform such feminine household tasks as cooking, cleaning, and child care are less aware of gender stereotypes than are children of more traditional parents -boys with sisters and girls with brothers have less gender-typed activity preferences than children who have only same-sex siblings -Children's toy choices can be affected by the ways in which they are marketed and even presented in toy stores, toys often segregated in different parts of store according to gender -> Toys rated the highest on educational value, scientific attributes, and cognitive and physical skill development were those categorized as neutral or moderately masculine.

cultural influences on gender stereotyping

-Although 8- to 10-year-olds from Western individualistic societies are becoming more flexible in their thinking about many violations of gender stereotypes, the same pattern may not always be apparent elsewhere. -In Taiwan, a collectivist society with an emphasis on maintaining social harmony and living up to social expectations, children are strongly encouraged to accept and conform to appropriate gender-role prescriptions. As a result, Taiwanese 8- to 10-year-olds are less accepting of gender-role violations (particularly by boys) than their age-mates from a Western individualistic society

Achievement motivation: Phase 2: Approval-Seeking

-As they near age 2, toddlers begin to anticipate how others will evaluate their performances -seek recognition when they master challenges and expect disapproval when they fail -2-year-olds already appraise their outcomes as mastery successes or failures and have already learned that they can expect approval after successes and disapproval after failures

gender - social-learning theory - general

-Bandura: children acquire their gender identities and gender-role preferences in two ways 1) , through direct tuition (or differential reinforcement): teaching young children how to behave by reinforcing "appropriate" behaviours and by punishing or otherwise discouraging inappropriate conduct. 2) through observational learning, children adopt the attitudes and behaviours of a variety of same-sex models.

Beyond Achievement Motivation: Development of Achievement Attributions - age differences in achievement-related attributes

-Before age 7 or so, children tend to be unrealistic optimists who think they have the ability to succeed on almost any task, even those they have repeatedly failed to master in the past -young children have incremental view or growth mindset of ability: belief that one's ability can be improved through increased effort and practice. -children distinguish between ability and effort when move toward entity view or fixed mindset of ability: belief that one's ability is a highly stable trait that is not influenced much by effort or practice. -> at 8-12 -this is in part bc of changes with school - assign grades that reflect the quality of work that students perform rather than the amount of effort expended, placed into "ability groups" based on the teacher's appraisal of their competencies -parents' responses to their children's failure can be motivating when the parents focus on the process of learning through discussions of what could be learned from the failure experience (the failure-is-enhancing approach). Parents' responses to failure can be demotivating when they respond directly to a child's supposed lack of ability or talent -when teachers focus on the learning process and not solely on its outcome, they are more likely to encourage development of a growth mindset -The late elementary school period (Grades 4 to 6) is the time when many students begin to value academic achievement less and to develop rather negative academic self-concepts, a trend that becomes even stronger during the middle school years

Achievement motivation: Phase 1: Joy in Mastery

-Before the age of 2, infants are visibly pleased to master challenges -However, they do not call other people's attention to their triumphs or otherwise seek recognition, and rather than being bothered by failures, they simply shift goals and attempt to master other toys. They are not yet evaluating their outcomes in relation to performance standards that define success and failure.

Actual Psychological Differences between the Sexes - mathematical ability

-Beginning in adolescence, boys show a small but consistent advantage over girls on tests of arithmetic reasoning -Girls actually exceed boys in computational skills and earn higher grades in math, in part because girls are more inclined than boys are to adopt learning rather than performance goals, thereby working harder to improve their mathematical competencies -boys more confident in math skills -Boys also have acquired more mathematical problem-solving strategies that enable them to outperform girls on complex word problems, geometry, and the mathematics section of the Scholastic Assessment Test -male advantage in mathematical problem solving is most apparent among math high achievers; more males than females are exceptionally talented in math -age may moderate the male advantage, such that elementary and middle school children show little to no gender differences, with differences emerging in adolescence and disappearing again in adulthood -sex differences in visual/spatial abilities and the problem-solving strategies they support may be associated with sex differences in arithmetical reasoning -social forces also involved - e.g. encouragement

Beyond Achievement Motivation: Development of Achievement Attributions - Learned helplessness -> how does learned helplessness develop?

-Dweck: parents and teachers may unwittingly foster the development of a helpless achievement orientation if they praise the child for working hard when she succeeds but criticize her lack of ability when she fails -if emphasize efforts when succeed and emphasize lack of efforts when fails, may conclude that capable just needs to try harder -Dweck study: Grade 5 students who received the helplessness-producing pattern of evaluation while working at unfamiliar tasks began to attribute their failures to a lack of ability, whereas classmates who received the mastery-oriented evaluative pattern attributed their failures to a lack of effort -> created in less than an hour

Are There Advantages to Being Androgynous?

-Bem demonstrated that androgynous men and women behave more flexibly than more traditionally gender-typed individuals. - can expressed both independence and nurturance -Androgynous people seem to be more highly adaptable and able to adjust their behaviour to the demands of the situation at hand -androgynous children appear to enjoy higher self-esteem and are perceived as more likable and better adjusted than their traditionally gender-typed peers -It has also become clear that androgynous men can still feel quite masculine and androgynous women quite feminine even though they sometimes express traits traditionally associated with the other sex -but , subsequent research has since found that the masculine scale alone predicts these processes as well as—and often better than—the androgyny scale -> e.g. in terms of behavioural flexibility and better adjustment -> masculine traits are more highly valued than feminine traits -children who strive too hard and express too many of the traits considered more appropriate for members of the other sex are at risk of being rejected by peers and experiencing low self-esteem -one may need to be secure in a gender-typical orientation in childhood, feeling like one of the guys or gals, before one can derive many benefits from cross-gender explorations later in life. -flexibility is probably adaptive, and it is certainly not harmful for girls and women to become a little more "masculine" and for boys and men to become a little more "feminine"

Combating Gender Stereotypes with Cognitive Interventions

-Bigler and Liben: devised and compared two cognitive interventions aimed at reducing children's gender-schematic thinking about the occupations that men and women might pursue. -The 5- to 11-year-olds who participated in this research were assigned to one of three conditions: 1) Rule training. Through a series of problem-solving discussions, children were taught that (1) the most important considerations in deciding who would perform well at such traditionally masculine and feminine occupations as construction worker and beautician are the person's interests and willingness to learn, and (2) the person's gender was irrelevant. 2) Classification training. Children were given multiple classification tasks that required them to sort objects into two categories at once (e.g., men and women engaged in masculine and feminine activities). This training was designed to illustrate that objects can be classified in many ways—knowledge that would, it was hoped, help children to see that occupations can be classified independently of the kinds of people who normally enact these roles. 3) Control group. Children were simply given lessons on the contributions of various occupations to the community. -----> Compared with children in the control group, those who either received rule training or improved in classification skills showed clear declines in occupational stereotyping -----> children who received rule training or who had gained in classification skills after the classification training were much more likely than "control" children to remember counterstereotypic information in stories -teachers may unwittingly foster gender-schematic thinking if they group children on the basis of gender and emphasize gender differences during the first few years of school.---> After only four weeks, children in the "gender classrooms" endorsed more gender stereotypes than those in control classrooms, particularly if they were one-dimensional thinkers who had trouble understanding that a person can belong to more than one social category at the same time

Origins and Development of Self-Esteem: general

-Bowlby's working-models theory -> securely attached children evaluate themselves more favourably than insecurely attached children, whose working models are not so positive. -> evidence to support this by age 4-5

Social Contributors to Self-Esteem: culture, ethnicity, and self-esteem

-Children from such collectivist societies as China, Japan, and Korea tend to report lower levels of global self-esteem than their age-mates from individualistic countries such as the Canada, the United States, and Australia -> different emphases that collectivist and individualistic societies place on individual accomplishments and self-promotion -People from collectivist societies are more interdependent than independent. They tend to value humility and self-effacement and to derive self-worth from contributing to the welfare of the groups (e.g., families, communities, classrooms, or even the larger society) they belong to. -acknowledging weaknesses can make children from collectivist societies feel good about themselves because these behaviours are likely to be viewed by others as evidence of appropriate humility and increased commitment to the group's welfare -collectivists showed stronger relationships between attachment anxiety and the physical appearance contingency of self-worth, as well as attachment avoidance and the family support contingency. These results reflect collectivists' focus on defining themselves in terms of others. -What children think about their academic competency and the importance they assign to this aspect of their selves can have implications for their learning and development through the elementary and high school years.

Who Am I to Be? Identity as an Extension of Self-Concept

-Erikson - the major developmental hurdle that adolescents face is establishing an identity—a firm and coherent sense of who they are, where they are heading, and where they fit into society. -Erikson thought that identity formation major task of adolescence and young adulthood, but also thought that it was a lifelong development, beginning at first self-recognition -self-realization coupled with a mutual recognition -identity formation can be conceived of as the evolution of the self-concept

Evidence for Biological Influences on Gender-Role Development - a psychobiosocial viewpoint

-Halpern (1997) proposed a psychobiosocial model to explain how nature and nurture might jointly influence the development of gender-typed attributes. -prenatal exposure to male or female hormones influences the organization of male and female brains in ways that might make boys, for example, somewhat more receptive to spatial activities and girls somewhat more susceptible to quiet verbal exchanges. -These heightened sensitivities, in concert with others' beliefs about the kinds of experiences most appropriate for boys and for girls, mean that boys are likely to (and actually do) receive a richer array of spatial experiences than girls do, whereas girls are exposed more often to verbal play activities -the different early experiences that boys and girls have will influence the neural pathways laid down in their immature and highly plastic (i.e., changeable) brains. - affects wiring of brains

Applications: On Changing Gender-Role Attitudes and Behaviour

-How might we reduce sexism and encourage children to be more flexible about the interests and attributes they might display? -Bem (1983, 1989) believes that parents must take an active role by (1) teaching their young children about genital anatomy as part of a larger lesson that one's biological sex is unimportant outside the domain of reproduction, and (2) delaying children's exposure to gender stereotypes by encouraging cross-sex as well as same-sex play and by dividing household chores more equitably, with fathers cooking and cleaning and mothers cutting the grass or making repairs. -preschoolers should be less inclined to construct the rigid gender stereotypes that might otherwise evolve in a highly sexist early environment. - androgynous parents tend to raise androgynous kids -interventions that simply show children the benefits of cross-gender cooperation or that praise them for playing with other-sex toys and play partners have no lasting effect; children soon retreat to same-sex play and continue to prefer same-sex peers after the interventions are over -efforts to change gender-role attitudes are more effective with younger children than with older ones, and possibly with girls than with boys -> makes sense bc easier to alter children's thinking early on, before their stereotypes have become fully crystallized, and many researchers now favour cognitive interventions that either attack the stereotypes directly or remove constraints on children's thinking that permit them to construct these rigid gender schemas.

Do Androgynous People Really Exist?

-In 1974, Bem, and Spence, Helmreich, and Stapp published the Bem Sex Role Inventory (BSRI) and Personal Attributes Questionnaire (PAQ), respectively. Both are self-perception inventories that contain a masculinity (or instrumentality) scale and a femininity (or expressivity) scale. -The scales differ in their approach to measuring androgyny, in that the BSRI focuses on the desirability of possessing masculine or feminine traits, and the PAQ assesses the likelihood of possessing certain traits in men and women -study of university students: 33 percent of the test takers proved to be "masculine" men or "feminine" women, about 30 percent were androgynous, and the remaining individuals were either undifferentiated or "sex-reversed" -changes across time: women's femininity scores decreased while their masculinity scores remained about the same. Men's femininity and masculinity scores did not change

Kohlberg's Cognitive-Developmental Theory - general overview

-Kohlberg's major themes are as follows: 1) Gender-role development depends on cognitive development; children must acquire certain understandings about gender before they will be influenced by their social experiences. 2) Children actively socialize themselves; they are not merely passive pawns of social influence. -suggests that children first establish a stable gender identity and then actively seek out same-sex models and other information to learn how to act like a boy or a girl -> different from psychoanalytic and social learning theories -Kohlberg believes that children pass through the following three stages as they acquire a mature understanding of what it means to be male or female: 1) Basic gender identity. By age 3, children have labelled themselves boys or girls. 2) Gender stability. Somewhat later, gender is perceived as stable over time. Boys invariably become men, and girls grow up to be women. 3) Gender constancy/consistency. The gender concept is complete when the child realizes that one's sex is also stable across situations. Five- to 7-year-olds who have reached this stage are no longer fooled by appearances. They know, for example, that one's gender cannot be altered by cross-dressing or taking up cross-sex activities. -According to Kohlberg, self-socialization begins only after children reach gender consistency. So for Kohlberg, a mature understanding of gender (1) instigates true sex typing and (2) is the cause rather than the consequence of attending to same-sex models. -supported by research, attainment of gender consistency (or conservation of gender) is clearly associated with other relevant aspects of cognitive development, such as the conservation of liquids and mass

sex differences: cultural myths

-Maccoby and Jacklin's (1974) proposition that many (perhaps most) gender-role stereotypes are "cultural myths" that have no basis in fact -one of most widely accepted myths - Maccoby and Jacklin's (1974) proposition that many (perhaps most) gender-role stereotypes are "cultural myths" that have no basis in fact -stereotypes are powerful - Gender-role stereotypes can be viewed as: -> well-ingrained cognitive schemas that we use to interpret and often distort the behaviour of males and females -> the features we assign to women and men that are based on their social roles: both descriptive and prescriptive, and map closely onto cultural ideas of being "feminine" or "masculine." -people use schemas to classify infant behaviour: watched video of 9 month old child introduced as girl or boy, asked to interpret reactions to toys -> The resulting impressions of the infant's behaviour clearly depended on his or her presumed sex. For example, a strong reaction to the jack-in-the-box was labelled "anger" when the child was presumed to be a boy and "fear" when the child was presumed to be a girl

Achievement Motivation During Middle Childhood - general

-McClelland et al. -told children to write stories based on pictures - looked at achievement related themes -> children who scored high in achievement motivation on this and other measures tended to receive better grades in school than those who scored low

Achievement Motivation During Middle Childhood - home influences on mastery motivation and achievement -> child rearing and achievement

-McClelland proposed that parents who stress independence training—doing things on your own—and who warmly reinforce such self-reliant behaviour contribute in a positive way to achievement motivation. -> collaborative learning and scaffolding also needed -> direct achievement training—setting high standards and encouraging children to do things well—also fosters achievement motivation -> patterns of praise, criticism, and punishment that accompany the child's accomplishments are also important -e.g. Children who shy away from challenges and are low in achievement motivation have parents who are slow to acknowledge their successes -parents of children high in achievement motivation possess three characteristics: (1) they are warm, accepting, and quick to praise their child's accomplishments; (2) they provide guidance and control by setting standards for their child to live up to and then monitoring her progress to ensure that she does; and (3) they permit their child some independence or autonomy, carefully scaffolding tasks for young children to allow them to succeed on their own and allowing older children a voice in deciding how best to master challenges and meet their expectations. -> Baumrind: authoritative parenting: flexible, democratic style of parenting in which warm, accepting parents provide guidance and control while allowing the child some say in deciding how best to meet challenges and obligations. -parents can undermine a child's school performance and motivation to succeed if they (1) are uninvolved and offer little in the way of guidance or (2) are highly controlling and do such things as nag continually about homework, offer tangible bribes for good grades, or harp incessantly about bad ones

A Biosocial Overview of Gender Differentiation and Development - general

-Money and Ehrhaardt: a number of critical episodes or events affect a person's eventual preference for the masculine or the feminine gender role 1) the child inherits either an X or a Y chromosome from the father, leads to the development of testes or ovaries (gonads) 2) testes of a male embryo secrete two hormones: testosterone, which stimulates the development of a male internal reproductive system, and Müllerian inhibiting substance (MIS), which inhibits the development of female organs. In the absence of these hormones, the embryo develops the internal reproductive system of a female. 3) 3-4 months after conception, secretion of testosterone by the testes normally leads to the growth of a penis and scrotum. If testosterone is absent (as in normal females), or if the male fetus has inherited a rare recessive disorder called testicular feminization syndrome (TFS) that makes his body insensitive to male sex hormones, female external genitalia (labia and clitoris) form. -Testosterone also alters the development of the brain and nervous system. For example, it signals the male brain to stop secreting hormones in a cyclical pattern so that males do not experience menstrual cycles at puberty. 4) Once a child is born, social factors immediately come into play. react differently depending on appearance of genitals 5) biological factors enter the scene again at puberty when large quantities of hormones are released, stimulating the growth of the reproductive system, the appearance of secondary sex characteristics, and the development of sexual urges -> .provide the basis for an adult gender identity and gender-role preference

Achievement Motivation During Middle Childhood - peer group influences

-Peer pressures that interfere with academic achievement may be especially acute for many lower-income African American and Latino students -children whose parents value education highly and work hard to promote their achievement tend to associate with peers who share those values -peer support for parental values demonstrated contributor to academic acheivement

Social Influences on Social-Cognitive Development - social experience as a contributor to role taking

-Piaget - by assuming different roles while playing together, young children become more aware of discrepancies between their own perspectives and those of their playmates -> When conflicts arise in play, children must learn to coordinate their points of view with those of their companions (i.e., to compromise) in order for play to continue. Piaget assumed that equal-status contacts among peers are an important contributor to social perspective-taking and the growth of interpersonal understanding. -research supports this, seems like some peer contact may be better than others in fostering interpersonal understanding -> e.g. disagreements among friends are particularly important because children tend to be more open and honest with their friends than with mere acquaintances and are more motivated to resolve disputes with friends -> When 8- to 10-year-olds discuss an interpersonal issue on which they disagree, pairs of friends are much more critical of their partners than pairs of acquaintances are, but friends are also more likely to fully explain the rationales for their own points of view. Disagreeing friends display increases in social understanding after these discussions are over, whereas disagreeing acquaintances do not

Cognitive Theories of Social Cognition: role taking and thinking about relationships

-Preschoolers at Selman's egocentric (Level 0) stage think that virtually any pleasant interactions between themselves and available playmates will qualify those playmates as "friends." -Common activity continues to be the principal basis for friendship among 6- to 8-year-olds - But because these youngsters have reached Selman's Stage l and recognize that others may not always share their perspectives, they begin to view a friend as someone who chooses to "do nice things for me." -> dont feel the need to reciprocate -stage 2: 8- to 10-year-olds show increasing concern for the needs of a friend and begin to see friendships as reciprocal relationships, based on mutual trust, in which two people exchange respect, kindness, and affection -By early adolescence, many children have reached Selman's Stage 3 or 4. Although they still view friends as psychologically similar people who like, trust, and assist each other, they have expanded their notions of the obligations of friendship to emphasize the exchange of intimate thoughts and feelings -> Perhaps because they rest on a firmer basis of intimacy and interpersonal understanding, the close friendships of older children and adolescents are viewed as more important and are more stable, or long-lasting, than those of younger children

Social Influences on Social-Cognitive Development - social experience as a direct contributor to person perception

-Social contacts with peers not only contribute indirectly to person perception by fostering the development of role-taking skills, but are also a form of direct experience by which children can learn what others are like. In other words, the more experience a child has with peers, the more motivated she should be to try to understand them, and the more practised she should become at appraising the causes of their behaviour ' -popularity measure of social experience: popular children interact more often with a wider variety of peers than do their less popular age-mates -> more direct experience with peers -> outperform less popular of same age on social understanding, even when role-taking skills comparable

Early Origins of Achievement Motivation general

-Stipek found that children progress through three phases in learning to evaluate their performances in achievement situations, phases we will call joy in mastery, approval-seeking, and use of standards.

Social and Emotional Consequences of Self-Recognition

-The growth of self-recognition and an emerging awareness of oneself as a participant in social interactions pave the way for many new social and emotional competencies -ability to experience self-conscious emotions such as embarrassment depends on self-recognition -> share intentions and cooperate with social partners -> perhaps unique to humans -Once toddlers display self-recognition, they also recognize the ways in which people differ and begin to categorize themselves on these dimensions, a classification called the categorical self: a person's classification of the self along socially significant dimensions such as age and sex. -race one such category -> Indigenous and Black children were able to better recognize white women over asian women, but later adjusted -> although face recognition in young children may be race-experience-dependent and they therefore show a preference for own-race versus other-race faces, this preference can be eliminated with familiarity -without the familiarization process, both white and Asian children exhibit a strong preference for own-race faces by the time they are 9 months old having initially demonstrated recognition of other-race faces at 3 months of age

Achievement motivation: Phase 3: Use of Standards

-breakthrough occurs around age 3 as children begin to react more independently to their successes and failures -adopted objective standards for appraising their performance and are not as dependent on others to tell them when they have done well or poorly -These Phase 3 children seem capable of experiencing real pride (rather than mere pleasure) in their achievements and real shame (rather than mere disappointment) after failure -evaluate their accomplishments against performance standards and are capable of experiencing pride or shame depending on how successfully they match those standards.

Psychological Androgyny: A Prescription for the 21st Century?- general

-Today, many developmentalists believe that these rigidly defined gender-role standards are actually harmful because they constrain the behaviour of both males and females -Bem (1974) argued that individuals of either sex can be characterized by psychological androgyny—that is, by a balancing or blending of both desirable masculine-stereotyped traits (e.g., being assertive, analytical, forceful, and independent) and desirable feminine-stereotyped traits (e.g., being affectionate, compassionate, gentle, and understanding) -In Bem's model, then, masculinity and femininity are two separate dimensions of personality - rather than two ends of one spectrum -A male or female who has many desirable masculine-stereotyped traits and few feminine ones is defined as a masculine gender-typed person. - One who has many feminine- and few masculine-stereotyped traits is said to be a feminine gender-typed person. - The androgynous person possesses both masculine and feminine traits, - whereas the undifferentiated individual lacks both of these kinds of attributes

observational learning of gender roles: Media Influences

-also learn gender roles from media - stories and videos -Although sexism in children's books has declined over the past 50 years, male characters are still more likely than female characters to engage in active, instrumental pursuits such as riding bikes or making things, whereas female characters are often depicted as passive and dependent individuals who spend much of their time playing quietly indoors and "creating problems that require masculine solutions" -males more likely to be featured in book titles and to be the main character -same patterns in tv, Women are still underrepresented on television and in other media compared to men -> also relationships show stereotypical heterosexual script -children who watch a lot of television are more likely to prefer gender-typed activities and to hold highly stereotyped views of men and women than their classmates who watch little television -but children dont just passively absorb, also active

Self-Esteem: The Evaluative Component of Self - general

-as age, children construct more intricate self-portraits, but they also begin to evaluate the qualities they perceive themselves as having -.self-esteem: one's evaluation of one's worth as a person, based on an assessment of the qualities that make up the self-concept. -self-concept and self-esteem are distinct concepts: -> Self-concept refers to how a child acknowledges and describes his or her qualities and sense of self. -> Self-esteem is evaluative, and refers to the child's satisfaction with those qualities comprising her or his sense of self.

Conceptions of Self in Middle Childhood

-as age, more likely to describe selves in terms of enduring inner qualities—that is, their traits, values, beliefs, and ideologies -Montemayor and Eisen and Twenty Statements Test: found a significant increase in self-conceptions in such categories as occupational roles, ideological and belief references, interpersonal style, and existential/individuating with a concomitant decrease in self-conceptions based on such factors as possessions, physical self, and citizenship -> shift to more psychological and abstract, integrated portrayal of self (from grades 4-12) -this research western - individualistic societies: society that values personalism and individual accomplishments, which often take precedence over group goals. These societies tend to emphasize ways in which individuals differ from each other. -many asian and other countries: collectivist (or communal) societies: society that values cooperative interdependence, social harmony, and adherence to group norms. These societies generally hold that the group's well-being is more important than that of the individual. -cultural differences - collectivist societies, identities more closely tied to groups than accomplishments or personal characteristics -While the term collectivist (emphasizing interdependence and relatedness) has often been used to convey the idea that non-Western people often put group-interest above self-interest, there is evidence that any differences between Eastern and Western self-concepts may be more nuanced -> e.g. Chinese self-concept more domain-specific, self-concept in Chinese children is socially oriented/collectivist in the area of relationships and family, but more autonomous/individualistic in the area of learning and achievement -cant always be categorized in collectivistic vs. individualistic: indigenous children develop their self-concepts as part of knowledge transfer within their culture. This knowledge often includes experience-based relationships with family, spirits, and nature- important to understand intergenerational component of indigenous self concept -self-concept is multidimensional, including physical, academic, and social components, shaped by cultural, biological, and environmental factors

Actual Psychological Differences between the Sexes - Visual/Spatial Abilities

-boys better than girls here -visual/spatial abilities: abilities to mentally manipulate or otherwise draw inferences about pictorial information. -male advantage in spatial abilities is not large, although it is detectable by middle childhood and persists across the lifespan

Actual Psychological Differences between the Sexes - aggression

-boys more physically and verbally aggressive than girls, starting as young as 17 months of age; in one study, parents reported that boys were more likely than girls to kick, hit, and bite - Girls, however, are more likely than boys to display covert forms of hostility toward others by snubbing or ignoring them, or by trying to undermine their relationships or social status -boys are more likely to engage in antisocial and violent behaviours than girls, and this is clearly evident in crime statistics. -differences in aggression are often linked to cultural factors, such as its modelling in the media—through television and video games, and toy commercials that are more likely to link boys than girls with aggressive behaviour

Origins and Development of Self-Esteem - components of self-esteem

-children evaluate self-esteem according to separate competencies, not global like adults -Harter - hierarchical model of childhood self-esteem - children evaluated selves on scholastic competence, social acceptance, physical appearance, athletic competence, and behavioural conduct. -> 4-7 year olds think of selves as positive in all domains - may be over-inflated -> 8- own competency appraisals begin to match others' perceptions of them -> self-knowledge and self-esteem may depend, to a large extent, on the way that others perceive and react to the child's behaviour -> cooley's looking glass self -Harter also found that children differ in importance they assign to the various competency domains assessed by her scale. What's more, children who rate themselves as very competent in the areas that they see as most important tend to be highest in overall self-worth -alternative model by Crocker and Wolfe: -domain-specific self-evaluations are important only if self-esteem is contingent on that domain -self-worth contingency - stake self-esteem on certain domain - Contingencies of Self-Worth Scale -hard to measure self-esteem through self-report - younger children may have comprehension difficulties, most self-esteem scales normed on older children -Pre-school Implicit Association Test: authors found that at this age, children were able to associate "me" with more "good" words (e.g., fun, good, happy, nice) than "bad" words (e.g., bad, mad, mean, yucky). -not only was increased physical activity related to aerobic fitness and body mass index (BMI) in children over a four-year period, it was also positively related to greater global self-worth -program for body image for girls and boys grades 5 and 6, increased physical self-esteem -bullying significantly contributes to lower self-esteem -> Intervention programs targeting prevention through early promotion of strong social and emotional skill development as well as programs addressing the consequences of bullying can enhance self-esteem

Achievement Motivation During Middle Childhood - home influences on mastery motivation and achievement -> quality of attachment

-children who were securely attached to primary caregivers at age 12 to 18 months were more likely to solve problems successfully as 2-year-olds than were those who were insecurely attached -more likely to display a strong sense of curiosity, self-reliance, and an eagerness to solve problems some three to five years later as they enter elementary school, l tend to remain more self-assured and to do better in school than their insecurely attached peers throughout middle childhood and adolescence—even when other factors known to affect academic achievement, such as IQ and social class, are held constant -youngsters are no more intellectually competent, on average, than their insecurely attached age-mates; they simply seem to be more eager to apply their competencies to the new challenges they encounter

Beyond Achievement Motivation: Development of Achievement Attributions - types of acheivement attributes

-children's achievement behaviour and academic self-concepts depend heavily on their achievement attributions - causal explanations that a person provides for his or her successes and failures -Weiner - tend to attribute our successes and failures to any of four possible causes: ability (or the lack thereof), effort, task difficulty, or luck (either good or bad) -ability and task difficulty, are stable causes, which foster strong achievement expectancies - how well (or poorly) a person expects to perform should he or she try to achieve a particular objective -effort and luck are unstable, or highly variable from situation to situation, and promote weaker expectancies. -ability and effort - internal causes (characteristics of the individual) whereas the other two, task difficulty and luck, are external causes (characteristics of the situation) - see table 13.3 -Weiner: internality/externality of our achievement attributions affects how much we value our achievement outcomes -Weiner- -> adaptive to attribute our successes to high ability, for this internal and stable attribution causes us to value what we have accomplished and leads us to expect that we can repeat our success -> more adaptive to attribute failures to low effort (rather than low ability) because effort is unstable and we are more likely to believe that we can do better in the future if we just try harder. -that two cognitive variables influence our willingness to work to achieve particular objectives within any given achievement domain. Presumably, the perceived locus of causality (i.e., internality or externality) of an outcome affects how much we value the outcome, whereas our attributions about the stability of the outcome affect our achievement expectancies. -alternative approach: -expectancy-value model of achievement performance: children's choice, persistence, and performance are predicted by expectancies of success in an activity, and the extent to which they value the activity, also taking into account context, goals, and perceptions of control -Fielding-Wells - expectancy-value theory (EVT) as the framework for a study examining the use of inquiry-based learning as a tool to increase engagement in mathematics -> Consistent with expectations, the inquiry-based approach increased motivation to engage with the problems -Thomas and Strunk found that parents' expectancy for their children's success in science significantly predicted students' science achievement in Grade 5, whereas teachers' expectancy failed to do so. Additionally, children's own science self-efficacy was significantly related to their achievement scores.

Evidence for Biological Influences on Gender-Role Development - cultural influences

-differences across cultures in expectations of different genders -Mead and New Guinea - -Both males and females among the Arapesh people were taught to be cooperative, nonaggressive, and sensitive to the needs of others. -By contrast, both men and women of the Mundugumor tribe were expected to be assertive, aggressive, and emotionally unresponsive in their interpersonal relationships -Finally, the Tchambuli people displayed a pattern of gender-role development opposite to that of Western societies: males were passive, emotionally dependent, and socially sensitive, whereas females were dominant, independent, and assertive.

Social Contributors to Self-Esteem: parenting styles

-elementary school children with high self-esteem tend to have parents who are warm and supportive, set clear standards for them to live up to, and allow them a voice in making decisions that affect them personally

development of the self-concept general

-newborns may be able to distinguish self from environment - distressed when hear other babies' cries but not own -newborns also capable of using proprioceptive feedback: sensory information from the muscles, tendons, and joints that helps us locate the position of our body (or body parts) in space. - use to mimic facial expressions of caregivers -some developmentalists think infants born without sense of self

Development of Gender-Typed Behaviour - gender segregation

-emerges by 2 years -gender segregation: children's tendency to associate with same-sex playmates and to think of the other sex as an out-group. -becomes stronger every year =elementary and preadolescent children generally find cross-gender contacts less pleasing and are likely to behave more negatively toward opposite-sex than same-sex peers -Sroufe et al: those 10- to 11-year-olds who insist most strongly on maintaining clear gender boundaries and avoid consorting with the "enemy" tend to be viewed as socially competent and popular -children who display a preference for cross-sex friendships are likely to be rejected by their peers -this declines in adolescence -why does gender segregation occur? - Maccoby- eflects differences between boys' and girls' play styles—an incompatibility that may stem from boys' heightened levels of androgen, which fosters active, rambunctious behaviour -> boys too boisterous and domineering to suit tastes of girls -girls are expected to play quietly and gently and are subject to criticism (by both boys and girls) should they become loud and rough like the boys -Once preschoolers label themselves as boys or girls and begin to acquire gender stereotypes, they come to favour the group to which they belong and eventually view the other sex as a homogeneous out-group with many negative characteristics

Development of Achievement Motivation and Academic Self-Concept - general

-even though IQ predicts academic achievement, the relationship is far from perfect. -one reason why is children differ in achievement motivation: a willingness to strive to succeed at challenging tasks and to meet high standards of accomplishment. -> people around the world value personal attributes such as self-reliance, responsibility, and a willingness to work hard to attain important objectives -White proposed that from infancy onward, human beings are intrinsically motivated to "master" their environments—to have an effect on or to cope successfully with a world of people and objects: mastery motive: an inborn motive to explore, understand, and control our environment -> see this when infants struggle to turn knobs, etc, and pleasure when succeed

self-differentiation in infancy

-first glimmerings of self emergence in first 2-3 months of life- reflexive schemes allow to become acquainted with selves -2 -month old infants have some limited sense of personal agency, or understanding that they are responsible for at least some of the events that so fascinate them -it is still an open question whether newborns can truly differentiate themselves from the surrounding environment. But even if they can't, it is likely that they learn the limits of their own bodies during the first month or two and differentiate this "physical self" from the external objects that they can control shortly thereafter

Development of Gender Identity

-first step in the development of a gender identity is to discriminate males from females and to put oneself into one of these categories. -By 4 months of age, infants have already begun to match male and female voices with faces in tests of intermodal perception -by the end of the first year, they can reliably discriminate still photographs of men and women and are beginning to match male and female voices with faces in tests of intermodal perception -children spent more time looking at pictures where the voice matched the gender shown in the picture. -Between age 2 and 3, children begin to tell us what they know about gender as they acquire and correctly use such labels as "mummy" and "daddy" and (slightly later) "boy" and "girl" -By age to 3, almost all children can accurately label themselves as either boys or girls -normally begin to understand that sex is an unchanging attribute between the ages of 5 and 7, so most youngsters have a firm, future-oriented identity as a boy or girl by the time they enter elementary school

Categorizing Males and Females: Gender-Role Standards

-gender-role standard: behaviour, value, or motive that members of a society consider more typical or appropriate for members of one sex. -> describes how males and females expected to behave and reflects stereotypes that impact behaviours -female role of childbearing can be viewed as responsible for gender-role standards and stereotypes that have prevailed in many societies -> girls have typically been encouraged to assume an expressive role that involves being kind, nurturing, cooperative, and sensitive to the needs of others -> assumed to prepare girls to successful raise a family -> boys have been encouraged to adopt an instrumental role: social prescription, usually directed toward males, that one should be dominant, independent, assertive, competitive, and goal oriented., because as a traditional husband and father, a male would face the tasks of providing for the family and protecting it from harm -Barry et al. analyzed gender-typing in 110 nonindustrialized societies, looking for sex differences in the socialization of five attributes: nurturance, obedience, responsibility, achievement, and self-reliance ---> achievement and self-reliance were more strongly encouraged in young boys, whereas young girls were encouraged to become nurturing, responsible, and obedient. -> all five attributes that Barry and his colleagues studied were encouraged in both boys and girls, but with different emphases on different attributes, depending on the sex of the child -say that children in industralized societies face gender-typing pressures but not to the same extent as others (colonialism hello) e.g. more equal emphasis on achievement -goal 1 of socialization: encourage children to acquire those traits that will enable them to become well-behaved, contributing members of society. -goal 2 of socialization: to "gender-type" the child by stressing the importance of relationship-oriented (or expressive) attributes for girls and individualistic (or instrumental) attributes for boys. -adolescents and young adults still endorse many traditional stereotypes about men and women

Actual Psychological Differences between the Sexes - Verbal Ability

-girls better verbal abilities than boys -Girls acquire language and develop verbal skills at an earlier age than boys and display a small but consistent verbal advantage on tests of reading comprehension and speech fluency throughout childhood and adolescence -Girls may also acquire a second language more easily compared to boys -outscore males on math tests that require verbal strategies -also consistently outperform boys in the area of writing ability

Achievement Motivation During Middle Childhood - cultural influences

-in contrast to North American children, who may display achievement motivation but are also quite tolerant of failures in performance, Chinese children display achievement motivation and view failures as personal failures and may be quite ashamed of such lapses -American preschoolers were more likely to view learning as a task to be accomplished and they were not critical of learning failures. In contrast, Chinese preschoolers were likely to view learning as a personal virtue to be attained and they were highly critical of failures in learning.

Development of Gender-Typed Behaviour - general

-most common method of assessing the "gender-appropriateness" of children's behaviour is to observe with whom and what they like to play. -18- to 24-month-old toddlers often refuse to play with cross-sex toys, even when no other objects are available for them to play with -Boys and girls also exhibit different modes of play, with boys more likely to play in larger groups while girls play in pairs or smaller groups, although both are equally likely to prefer playing with the same sex

Gender Schema Theory

-info-processing theory of gender-typing -researchers believe that children are intrinsically motivated to acquire interests, values, and behaviours that are consistent with their "boy" or "girl" self-images.(like Kohlberg) -this self-socialization begins as soon as the child acquires a basic gender identity at age or 3 and is well under way by age 6 to 7 when the child achieves gender consistency. (unlike Kohlberg) -combines elements of both Kohlberg's cognitive development theory and Bandura's social learning theory to describe the process by which children acquire gender role: -acquire information concerning the features of female and male gender categories and their associated elements via social learning theory -encode new information into their cognitive representations of these categories with respect to cognitive development theory -learn to access gender-role schemas when processing new information. -establishment of a basic gender identity motivates a child to learn about the sexes and to incorporate this information into gender schemas: organized sets of beliefs and expectations about males and females that guide information processing. -> divide word into masculine and feminine categories: 1) children acquire a simple in-group/out-group schema that allows them to classify some objects, behaviours, and roles as "for boys" and others as "for girls" - guides thinking 2) construct an detailed knowledge of own-sex schema: plans of action that enable a person to perform gender-consistent activities and to enact his or her gender role. -> explore same-sex activities more in-depth 3) Once formed, gender schemas serve as scripts for processing social information: -children are likely to encode and remember information consistent with their gender schemas and to forget schema-inconsistent information or to otherwise distort it so that it becomes more consistent with their stereotypes esp if they have reached age 6 to 7, when their own stereotyped knowledge and preferences have crystallized and are especially strong

theories of gender role development: Criticisms of the Evolutionary Approach

-it applies mainly to sex differences that are consistent across cultures and largely ignores differences that are limited to particular cultures or historical periods -the deterministic nature of its argument—that men's and women's behaviour evolved for survival reasons—has been criticized in various areas of psychology. -> used as justification for unequal treatment of men and women -social roles hypothesis: argued that psychological sex differences do not reflect biologically evolved dispositions. Instead, these differences emerge because of variations in (1) roles that cultures assign to men and women (provider versus homemaker, for example) and on (2) agreed-upon socialization practices to promote traits in boys and girls (assertion versus nurturance, for example) to properly enact these roles -deterministic nature of evolutionary research has been softened more recently, takes more of an interactionist approach - can be influenced by culture

Some Facts and Fictions about Sex Differences - general

-males and females are anatomically different. -Adult males are typically taller, heavier, and more muscular than adult females, while females may be hardier in the sense that they live longer. -But although these physical variations are fairly obvious, the evidence for sex differences in psychological functioning is not as clear as most of us might think.

Evidence for Biological Influences on Gender-Role Development - genetic influences

-may contribute to some differences in personality, cognitive abilities, and social behaviour. -timing of puberty, a biological variable regulated in part by our genotypes, has a slight effect on visual/spatial performances (the timing-of-puberty effect: people that reach puberty late perform better on some visual/spatial tasks than those who mature early.) -> may be bc slow maturation promotes increasing specialization of the brain's right hemisphere, which serves spatial functions -but later research has shown that spatial performances of both boys and girls are more heavily influenced by their previous involvement in spatial activities and their self-concept than by the timing of puberty -> strong masculine self-concept and ample experience with spatial toys and activities fosters the growth of spatial skills in both boys and girls, whereas having restricted spatial experiences and a feminine self-concept seems to inhibit spatial abilities. -twin studies -> genotype accounts for about 50 percent of the variability in people's masculine self-concepts but only 0 to 20 percent of the variability in their feminine self-concepts

theories of gender role development: evolutionary theory

-men and women faced different evolutionary pressures over the course of human history and that the natural selection process conspired to create fundamental differences between males and females that determined gender divisions of labour. -males only need to contribute sperm so can best ensure that genes survive by mating with multiple partners and producing many children. -females need to invest more, so supposedly involved in ways that would make them kind, gentle, and nurturing (expressive characteristics) and to prefer men who would display kindness toward them and would provide resources (food and protection) to help ensure children's survival - competitive, assertive, and aggressive (instrumental traits) -supposedly, males and females may be psychologically similar in many ways but should differ in any domain in which they have faced different adaptive problems throughout evolutionary history. -> e.g. difference in visual/spatial areas bc of hunting

sex differences in gender-typed behaviour

-more status to male role -boys stronger pressures to adhere to gender-appropriate codes of conduct -fathers of baby girls are generally willing to offer a truck to their 12-month-old daughters, whereas fathers of baby boys are likely to withhold dolls from their sons -By age 3 to 5, boys (1) are much more likely than girls to say that they dislike opposite-sex toys (2) may even prefer a girl playmate who likes "boy" toys to a boy playmate who prefers girls' activities -Between the ages of 4 and 10, both boys and girls are becoming more aware of what is expected of them and conforming to these cultural prescriptions, but girls more likely to retain interest in cross-sex areas -why are girls drawn to male activities and masculine role in middle childhood? -> increasingly aware that masculine behaviour is more highly valued -> girls are given much more leeway than boys are to partake in cross-sex activities -> fast-moving masculine games and "action" toys may simply be more interesting than the familiar household playthings and pastimes often imposed on girls to make more nurturing -children raised in homes in which parents strive to promote egalitarian sex-role attitudes are indeed less gender-stereotyped than children from traditional families in their beliefs about which activities and occupations are appropriate for males and females (Weisner & Wilson-Mitchell, 1990). Nevertheless, these children -see table 14,2 for overview of gender typing

self-recognition in infancy

-once know that they are (exist) in a position to figure out who or what are - self-concept: one's perceptions of one's unique attributes or traits. -test of exposing infants to a visual representation of the self (i.e., a videotape or mirror reflection) and see how they respond to these images. Research of this type reveals that infants only 5 months old seem to treat their own faces as familiar social stimuli -babies often find selves in mirrors, next to caregiver -> amplifies opportunities to match their own movement-produced proprioceptive information with the actions of one of the figures in the mirror, thereby discriminating this "self" from an older social partner, whose movements do not correspond so closely with their own -9-month olds able to perceive others as potential social partners or playmates -how determine if actually have stable self-image? -> Lewis and Brooks-Gunn: studied self-recognition: mothers put rouge on infants' nose and then put in front of mirror -> When infants 9 to 24 months old were given this rouge test, the younger ones showed no self-recognition: they seemed to treat the image in the mirror as if it were "some other kid." Signs of self-recognition were observed among a few of the 15- to 17-month-olds, but only among the 18- to 24-month-olds did a majority of infants touch their own noses, apparently realizing that they had a strange mark on their faces. -even if have not experience with mirrors can do this at same age - however cultural differences in self-recognition: Scottish infants performed best at mirror self-recognition, whereas Zambian infants performed best at the body-as-obstacle task that involved recognition that their own body prevented them from pushing a trolley toward their mother -not fully aware that self is a stable entity -> 2-3 year olds dont retrieve sticker off heads if comes after 2-3 minute delay, bc concept of self is : present self: early self-representation in which 2- and 3-year-olds recognize current representations of self but are unaware that past self-representations or self- relevant events have implications for the present. -extended self: more mature self-representation, emerging between ages and 5 years, in which children are able to integrate past, current, and unknown future self-representations into a notion of a self that endures over time. -> recognize that the self is stable over time and that (1) events that happened very recently have implications for the present, but (2) the sticker they see a week later on film is not still on their heads because this event happened to them a long time ago

Beyond Achievement Motivation: Development of Achievement Attributions - Learned helplessness -> helping the helpless to achieve

-one effective therapy for children with learned helplessness is: attribution retraining: therapeutic intervention in which helpless children are persuaded to attribute failures to their lack of effort rather than a lack of ability. -> Dweck tested hypothesis: Over a period of 25 therapy sessions, half the children received a success-only therapy in which they worked problems they could solve and received tokens for their successes. The other half received attribution retraining: they experienced nearly as many successes over the 25 sessions as did the children in the other group but were also told after each of several prearranged failures that they had not worked fast enough and should have tried harder. --> at the end of the 25 sessions, "helpless" children in the attribution retraining group now performed much better on the tough math problems they had initially failed to solve. When they did fail a problem, they usually attributed their outcome to a lack of effort and tried harder. -praise effects: -children who regularly receive person praise for their success, such as "You're really smart, intelligent," often become more interested in performance goals: state of affairs in which one's primary objective in an achievement context is to display one's competencies (or to avoid looking incompetent). -> if fail, give up -adults should praise according to: process-oriented praise: praise of effort expended to formulate good ideas and effective problem-solving strategies; this praise fosters learning goals in achievement contexts. -> adopting learning goals state of affairs in which one's primary objective in an achievement context is to increase one's skills or abilities. -Process-oriented rather than person-oriented praise for success appears to promote a mastery orientation and prevent learned helplessness. -in classroom, Altering curricula to emphasize individual mastery and improving their competencies should not only convince children to adopt learning goals, but should be particularly helpful to slower learners

Direct Tuition of Gender Roles

-parents actively teach gender-typed behaviours -parents already encourage gender-appropriate activities and discourage cross-gender play during the second year of life, before children have acquired their basic gender identities or display clear preferences for male or female activities. -parents who show the clearest patterns of differential reinforcement have children who are relatively quick to (1) label themselves as boys or girls, (2) develop strong gender-typed toy and activity preferences, and (3) acquire an understanding of gender stereotypes -fathers more likely than mothers to encourage "gender-typed" behaviours and to discourage behaviours considered more appropriate for the other sex -earliest preferences for gender-typed behaviours the result of parents' attempts to reinforce these interests -Throughout the preschool period, parents become less and less inclined to carefully monitor and differentially reinforce their children's gender-typed activities bc same-sex peers doing this more

Do Cultural Myths Contribute to Sex Differences in Ability (and Vocational Opportunity)? - Home Influences

-parents treat sons and daughters differently -parental expectations about sex differences in mathematical ability become self-fulfilling prophecies: phenomenon whereby people cause others to act in accordance with the expectations they have about those others, closely linked to stereotype threat -example process: parents expect sons to outperform daughters in math, attribute sons successes in math to ability and daughters' to hard work (reinforce beliefs), children internalize parents' views, thinking that lack ability, girls less interested in math and less likely to pursue related careers -Eccles research found that The negative effects of low parental expectancies on girls' self-perceptions are evident even when boys and girls perform equally well on tests of math aptitude and attain similar grades in math -the lower math expectancies that girls develop undoubtedly help explain why fewer girls than boys "bounce back" to show good math performance if they begin to underachieve in math -also see these differences in English and sports

The Other Side of Social Cognition: Knowing about Others: Age Trends in Person Perception

-person perception: the process by which individuals attribute characteristics or traits to other people. -Children younger than 7 or 8 are likely to characterize people they know in the same concrete, observable terms that they use to describe the self -but do understand intentions, how peers behave -5-6 year olds becoming more aware of behavioural consistencies that their companions display -also beginning to make other kinds of "trait-like" inferences based largely on their emerging understanding of such subjective mental states as desires and motives that might explain other people's conduct -> 5-year-olds assume that individual differences in past behaviours imply different motives with different implications for future behaviour. -3- and 4-year-olds can draw appropriate trait-like inferences that target a person's generous or harmful behaviour -> 4- and 5-year-olds can use trait labels to predict trait-relevant behaviours in the near future -if 4-6 year olds understand traits, why use so few trait words to describe people? (1) they are less likely than older children to view traits as stable over time, thinking that they are subject to change (2) they are still using trait labels as adjectives to describe recent behaviours -7 and 16, children come to rely less and less on concrete attributes and more on psychological descriptors to characterize their friends and acquaintances -> start using behavioural comparisons: the tendency to form impressions of others by comparing and contrasting their overt behaviours. - increased between ages 6 and 8 and declined rapidly after age 9 -> after that, increasingly aware of regularities in a companion's behaviour and eventually begin to attribute them to stable psychological constructs, or traits, that the person is now presumed to have => increases between 8 and 11 -eventually get to psychological comparisons: the tendency to form impressions of others by comparing and contrasting these individuals on abstract psychological dimensions. - -adolescents -10- to 11-year-olds are much more aware that others are motivated to present themselves in socially desirable ways -correct recognition of another person's feelings or emotions, such as disgust, gradually improves from infancy to preadolescence

"Who Am I?" Responses of Preschool Children

-psychologists used to think that self-concepts of preschool children devoid of psychological self-awareness -> bc when 3-5 year olds talk about themselves, talk about physical attributes, possessions, or actions -however, Eder - when 3.5-5 year olds asked to respond to contrasting forced-choice statements that require fewer verbal skills than open-ended "Who am I?" questions, they can quickly characterize themselves on psychological dimensions such as sociability (by choosing, for example, between such statements as "I like to play by myself" versus "I like to play with my friends"), athleticism, achievement orientation, argumentativeness, or intelligence -> characterize themselves differently on different dimensions, and these self-characterizations are stable over time ->> rudimentary psychological conceptions of self, long before they can express this knowledge in trait-like terminology.

Achievement Motivation During Middle Childhood - home influences on mastery motivation and achievement -> the home environment

-researchers visited the homes of fifty 12-month-old infants from lower-income families and used the HOME inventory to classify each child's early environment as intellectually stimulating or unstimulating -> followed up later ->quality of the home environment at 12 months of age predicted children's academic achievement several years later. Two out of three children from stimulating homes were performing quite well at school, whereas 70 percent of those from unstimulating homes were doing very poorly. -stimulating environments foster good grades for all children, and promote intrinsic orientation to achievement: a desire to achieve in order to satisfy one's personal needs for competence or mastery (as opposed to achieving for external incentives such as grades). -joy of discovery and problem solving is most likely to blossom in an intellectually stimulating home environment that provides many age-appropriate challenges and encouragement to master them

Actual Psychological Differences between the Sexes -general and conclusions

-review of 1800 studies by Maccoby and Jacklin - pointed to only four small but reliable differences between the sexes that were consistently supported by research. -verbal ability, visual/spatial abilities, mathematical ability, aggression -data reflects group averages, nothing about individual - e.g. sex accounts for about 5 percent of the variation that children display in aggressive behaviour -the sex differences in verbal, spatial, and mathematical abilities that Maccoby and Jacklin identified are also small, are most apparent at the extreme (i.e., very high or very low) ends of the ability distributions -most sex differences are not biologically inevitable and that cultural and other social influences play an important role in the development of males and females -most developmentalists can agree on this: males and females are far more psychologically similar than they are different, and even the most well-documented differences seem to be modest

Cognitive Theories of Social Cognition: Robert Selman's role-taking analysis.

-role-taking: the ability to assume another person's perspective and understand his or her thoughts, feelings, and behaviours -to "know" a person, one must be able to assume his perspective and understand his thoughts, feelings, motives, and intentions—in short, the internal factors that account for his behaviour. -> if havent developed these skills, have to describe her acquaintances in terms of their external attributes -Children's responses to Selman's questions to determine role-taking perspectives in table 13.4 - stage like -> Egocentric or undifferentiated perspective (roughly 3-6 years): - -> Social-informational role taking (roughly 6-8 years) -> self-reflective role taking (8-10) -> mutual role taking (10-12) societal role taking (12+): sophisticated social-cognitive theorists who can keep several perspectives in mind and compare each with the viewpoint that "most people" would adopt (Stage 4) -Perhaps the reason that these skills develop in one particular order is that they are closely related to Piaget's invariant sequence of cognitive stages -> Preoperational children are at Selman's first or second level of role taking (Stage 0 or 1), whereas most concrete operators are at the third or fourth level (Stage 2 or 3) and formal operators are about equally distributed between the fourth and fifth levels of role taking (Stages 3 and 4).

An Overview of the Gender-Typing Process from the Perspective of an Integrative Theorist

-see table 14.3 -prenatal period -birth-3 years -3-6 years -7-puberty

the self and social cognition

-self: the combination of physical and psychological attributes that is unique to each individual. -social cognition: thinking that people display about the thoughts, feelings, motives, and behaviours of themselves and other people

defining sex and gender

-sex: refer to a person's biological attributes: his or her chromosomes, physical manifestations of identity, and hormonal influences -gender: to refer to a person's individually and socially constructed identity as male or female -biological differences between the sexes - e.g. chromosomes - father determines sex - XX or XY most often -> one hypothesis that gender differences related to this -gender roles, gender typing: process by which a child becomes aware of his or her gender and acquires motives, values, and behaviours considered appropriate for members of that sex.

Do Cultural Myths Contribute to Sex Differences in Ability (and Vocational Opportunity)? - general

-study -> young women were reflecting a belief, common to people in many societies, that girls and women lack the potential to excel in either math and science courses or in occupations that require this kind of training -Kindergarten and Grade 1 girls already believe that they are not as good as boys in arithmetic, and throughout the elementary school years, children increasingly come to regard reading, art, and music as girls' domains and mathematics, athletics, and mechanical subjects as boys' domains -women are overrepresented in fields that call for verbal ability (e.g., library science, elementary education) and are seriously underrepresented in most other professions, particularly the sciences and other technical fields (e.g., engineering) that require a math/science background -stereotype threat may be involved -> stereotype threat: when people's behaviour is influenced by a desire to contradict the stereotypes they believe may be applied to them. -Walton and Spencer (2009) found that stereotyped groups' performance was worse than nonstereotyped groups under conditions of threat, but improved once the threat was removed. Stereotype threat can also be reduced by making an unstable attribution about the stereotype—for instance, by emphasizing the link between math performance and effort, rather than ability

Serbin and Gender stereotyping

-suggests that even by their second birthday, young toddlers may have acquired knowledge of gender-role stereotypes, especially for feminine activities. -children spent much longer looking at men engaged in female-stereotyped activities than women engaged in these same activities. Children did not differ in their looking times when male-stereotyped activities were being viewed. -Eventually, elementary school children draw sharp distinctions between the sexes on psychological dimensions, learning first the positive traits that characterize their own gender and the negative traits associated with the other sex -3-7 year olds treat gender stereotypes as very rigid, treating sex-role standards as blanket rules that are not to be violated, maybe bc so important at this age - firmly classifying themselves as boys or girls and beginning to suspect that they will always be boys and girls., exaggerate to get cognitively clear -By age 8 to 9, however, children are becoming more flexible in their thinking about gender -clear distinction between moral rules that people are obligated to obey and gender-role standards that are customary but nonobligatory.

Do Cultural Myths Contribute to Sex Differences in Ability (and Vocational Opportunity)? - scholastic influences

-teachers also have stereotypes -Grade 6 math teachers, for example, believe that boys have more ability in math but that girls try harder at it -their message that girls must try harder to succeed in math may nonetheless convince many girls that their talents might be best directed toward other, nonquantitative achievement domains for which they are better suited—such as music or English. -this isnt inevitable - irls whose parents are nontraditional in their gender-role attitudes and behaviours do not show the declines in math and science achievement that girls from more traditional families are likely to display

Social Influences on Social-Cognitive Development - general

-the growth of children's self-awareness and their understanding of other people are as closely tied to cognitive development as cognitive theorists suggest? -e.g. even though children's role-taking abilities are related to their performances on Piagetian measures and IQ tests, it is quite possible for a child to grow less egocentric and mature intellectually without becoming an especially skillful role taker -> must be other, noncognitive factors that contribute to the growth of role-taking skills and may even exert their own unique effects on children's social-cognitive development

An Integrative Theory of Gender Role Development

-the processes that different theories emphasize seem to be especially important at different periods: -Biological theories account for the major biological developments that occur before birth that induce people to label the child a boy or a girl and to treat him or her accordingly. -differential reinforcement process that social-learning theorists emphasize seems to account rather well for early gender typing -. As a result of this early socialization and the growth of categorization skills, - to 3-year-olds acquire a basic gender identity and begin to form gender schemas that tell them (1) what boys and girls are like and (2) how they, as boys and girls, are supposed to think and act. -when they finally understand, at age 6 or 7, that their gender will never change, children begin to focus less exclusively on gender schemas and to pay more and more attention to same-sex models to decide which attitudes, activities, interests, and mannerisms are most appropriate for members of their own sex (Kohlberg's viewpoint). -this doesnt mean that the factors arent involved at different stages - e.g. biological factors involved later on BUT an integrative theorist would emphasize that, from age 3 on, children are active self-socializers who try very hard to acquire the masculine or feminine attributes that they view as consistent with their male or female self-image -One more point: all theories of gender-role development would agree that what children actually learn about being male or female depends greatly on what their society offers them in the way of a "gender curriculum." In other words, we must view gender-role development through an ecological lens and appreciate that there is nothing inevitable about the patterns of male and female development that we see in our society today

Racial Categorization and Racism in Young Children

-toddlers and preschool children define others in terms of their observable characteristics and to place people into categories -> 3- and 4-year-olds have formed ethnic categories and can apply labels such as black and white -by age 5, many white children have some knowledge of ethnic stereotypes, and display at least some prejudicial attitudes toward black people and Indigenous people -yet parents often believe that children oblivious to ethnic diversity and prejudice -apparently it's not about parental attitudes but rather categorizing according to skin color and ingroup/outgroup? -As children enter the period of concrete operations and become more flexible in their thinking, prejudicial attitudes often decline in strength. This increased tolerance of 8- to 9-year-olds reflects their more realistic evaluation of ethnic groups -but social forces definitely maintain and emphasize prejudice: Euro-Australian children's prejudice toward black Indigenous Australians declined between ages 5 and 9 and then intensified at age 10 to 12, returning to the high levels displayed by 5- to 6-year-olds -> reflecting adult attitudes -best way to combat ethnic prejudice is for parents and teachers to talk openly about the merits of ethnic diversity and the harmful effects of prejudice, beginning in the preschool period, when strong favouritism toward one's own in-group and early indications of prejudice often take root -program in massachusetts and three-pronged approach: teacher training, youth groups, ands parent groups -> based on idea that the key to combating ethnic prejudice is to be honest about it with children, rather than shunning the topic or trying to cover it up, important bc once prejudiced developed, hard to change -but if cant prevent, interventions that increase positive contact with peers (either directly or indirectly through media instruction) and focus on friendships/similarities with out-group peers can yield positive outcomes

development of gender-role stereotypes

-toddlers begin to acquire gender-role stereotypes at about the same time that they become aware of their basic identities as boys or girls -Kuhn et al,: showed male and female doll to 2.5-3.5 year olds, asked about sex-stereotyped behaviours -> lmost all the 2.5 year-olds had some knowledge of gender-role stereotypes. For example, boys and girls agreed that girls talk a lot, never hit, often need help, like to play with dolls, and like to help their mothers with chores such as cooking and cleaning 3 phases of gender-stereotype development: 1) before 5, children engage in gender stereotyping based on characteristics such as toy preference 2) by age 5 to 6, this knowledge is consolidated and applied by sex (e.g., believing that boys only like masculine activities and toys and girls only like feminine ones) 3) by age 7 to 8, children use stereotypical information about masculine and feminine objects and activities to infer others' preferences -may be gender differences in conformance to gender stereotypes, with recent research finding that cross-culturally, boys feel greater pressure to conform -An understanding of gender labels seems to accelerate the process of gender stereotyping -.just because elementary school children say that boys and girls can legitimately pursue cross-sex interests and activities does not necessarily imply that they approve of those who do - esp when boys violate, gender role transgressions

gender - is biology destiny?

-two male identical twins, one suffered damage to penis during circumcision, made him a "girl" anatomically and treated as a "girl", observed and given treatment from Money to help her be feel like a "girl" -> followed up - over time, became uncomfortable with feminine pursuits - at age 14 refused to take hormones and underwent surgery to get male anatomy -committed suicide - physical and mental torments experienced in childhood -biological males in DR with testicular femininization syndrome - labelled and raised at girls, but once hormones made them more masculine, most adopted masculine identities and heterosexual relationships with women -> may be biological, may be bc were never really treated as girls - One study of TFS males raised as females among the Sambia people of New Guinea found that social pressures—namely, the argument that they could not bear children—is what appeared most responsible for the gender switches that occurred after puberty -> we are predisposed by our biology to develop as males or females; the first three years of life are a sensitive period, perhaps, but not a critical period for gender-role development; and neither biology nor social labelling can fully account for gender-role development

Cognitive Theories of Social Cognition: Piaget's cognitive-developmental approach

-ways that children think about the self and other people largely depend on their own levels of cognitive development -preoperational children: describe their peers in very concrete, observable terms, mentioning their appearance and possessions, their likes and dislikes, and the actions they can perform. -concrete operational children: actively comparing themselves with their peers (decentering), become more attuned to regularities in their own and others' conduct and use psychological constructs, or traits, to describe these patterns. -formal operations: bility to think in dimensional terms and to reliably order people along a dimensional scale (as is necessary in making psychological comparisons) implies that a person is able to operate on abstract concepts—a formal-operational ability

Criticisms of Kohlberg's Theory (gender)

1) gender typing is well under way before the child acquires a mature gender identity. -> 2-year-old boys prefer masculine toys before they have achieved a basic gender identity, and that 3-year-olds of each sex have learned many gender-role stereotypes and already prefer same-sex activities and playmates long before they begin to attend more selectively to same-sex models. 2) gender reassignment is exceedingly difficult after children reach age 3 (Kohlberg's basic identity stage) and have initially categorized themselves as boys or girl -> So Kohlberg overstates the case in arguing that a mature understanding of gender is necessary for gender typing to begin.

Actual Psychological Differences between the Sexes -other possible sex differences ->> activity level; fear, timidity, and risk taking; developmental vulnerability; emotional expressivity/sensitivity; compliance, self-esteem (6)

=Critics were quick to challenge Maccoby and Jacklin's review, claiming that the procedures they used to gather and tabulate their results led them to underestimate the number of sex differences that actually exist -More recent research, which often combines the results of several studies and provides a better estimate of the reliability of sex-related differences (i.e., a meta-analysis), points to several additional sex differences in personality and social behaviour. -Activity Level: -boys more physically active before they're born and through childhood, esp when with peers -> why they are more likely than girls to initiate and be receptive to bouts of nonaggressive, rough-and-tumble play -Fear, Timidity, and Risk-Taking: -As early as the first year of life, girls appear to be more fearful or timid in uncertain situations than are boys. -also more cautious and less assertive in these situations than boys are, taking far fewer risks than boys do -Sex differences in risk-taking may stem, in part, from boys' heightened activity levels -parents also try harder to reinforce rules about risk taking for girls -Developmental Vulnerability: -boys are more physically vulnerable than girls to prenatal and perinatal hazards and to the effects of disease -more likely than girls to display a variety of developmental problems, including reading disabilities, speech defects, hyperactivity, emotional disorders, and intellectual disabilities -Emotional Expressivity/Sensitivity: -dont differ in displays of emotion in infancy -from toddlerhood onward, boys are more likely than girls to display one emotion—anger—whereas girls more frequently display most other emotions -girls talk more about emotions more with parents, use more emotion-related words -social support for reflecting on their feelings may help to explain why girls and women characterize their emotions as deeper or more intense and why they feel freer to express them than do boys and men -Girls and women consistently rate themselves (and are described by others) as more nurturing and empathic than boys and men -Compliance: -From the early preschool period, girls are more compliant than boys with the requests and demands of parents, teachers, and other authority figures -when trying to persuade others to comply with them, girls are more likely to rely on tact and polite suggestions, whereas boys, who are quite capable of and usually do collaborate amicably, are nevertheless more likely than girls to resort to demanding or controlling strategies -Self-Esteem: -Boys show a slight advantage over girls in global self-esteem -more noticeable in early adolescence and persists through adulthood

Beyond Achievement Motivation: Development of Achievement Attributions - Dweck's Learned-Helplessness Theory

Dweck: two types of children: 1) mastery oriented: a tendency to persist at challenging tasks because of a belief that one has high ability and/or that earlier failures can be overcome by trying harder. -attribute successes to high ability and failures to unstable causes -> persist despite failure 2) learned-helplessness orientation: a tendency to give up or stop trying after failing because these failures have been attributed to a lack of ability that one can do little about. - entity/fixed mindset about failures

developmental trends in gender-typing general

Gender-typing research has traditionally focused on three separate but interrelated topics: 1) The development of gender identity, or the knowledge that one is either a boy or a girl and that gender is an unchanging attribute 2) The development of gender-role stereotypes, or ideas about what males and females are supposed to be like 3) The development of gender-typed patterns of behaviour—that is, the child's tendency to favour same-sex activities over those normally associated with the other sex

Little Carter is just 1 month old. His mother has attached an attractive mobile to his crib. When she puts him in his crib, he begins to move his arms and legs and he watches the mobile with delight as it turns and plays a tune. One day the batteries in the mobile burn out and his movements no longer make the mobile turn and play its tune. Carter wiggles more vigorously and begins to cry. It appears that Carter recognizes that he can be the cause of an event. How do developmental psychologists refer to this realization?

personal agency