As the semester comes to close, I look back through my posts and see everything that I have written, researched, and shared with all of you. As I go from post to post I see how each one is different and unique in its content. Looking deeper into the meanings and ideas of these post, that all are related to developmental psychology, I began to seek connections that helps to show that it all make sense and come full circle. In this final post I will share my findings of these connections between three pairings of posts have created over the past four months.
Starting from the first post I ever made, Babies: My thoughts on their thoughts, I looked into the thoughts of babies and answered the question "Do babies think?." I had a firm standing on "Yes, they do." From the Baby Lab where Angela Saini and Sylvian Sirois's study infants, I learned that babies focus on movement and color changes during testing scenarios which show that babies are attentive and focused on new and different things which is shown through recorded testing and EEG testing as well.
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| The cover of the book and the writer of it, Paul Bloom |
This led me to think about another topic that I talked about in a post which was morality. I talk about morality in my fifth post, Right, Wrong, Maybe... but WHY?, in which I dive into the theories of Lawrence Kohlberg and Jonathan Haidt. Both psychologists created a chart or a table of logical thinking for the level in which someone has moral understanding. Haidt is the one that makes me think of babies due to the Intuitionist Approach. Since I firmly believe that babies think, and there are tests to back me up, this makes me wonder if babies have a concept of morality. Intuition is supposed to be a natural thought mechanism within the human brain from birth, so if this is true then I think thought about if it could be used during infancy. In a book that I've read titled Just Babies: The Origin of Good and Evil (you can read the first seven chapters if you click the link), Yale psychologist Paul Bloom dives deep into the idea behind morality in infants. With a variety of tests done to hundreds of babies, Bloom believes that babies are born with a sense of right and wrong as well as their own opinions on which one is more appealing to them. This leads me to hypothesize that if babies can think about situations with a moral standing, then there could be tests done early on to determine what type of moral behavior a child will grow into.
The next pairing I tackled were my second and third posts. In my second post I talked about language and thought. In A Word Speaks a Thousand Thoughts. I described many different forms of language and interpretation of what language is. A theory given by Benjamin Lee Whorf with the idea that groups of people thought differently based on the language they speak. His theory was rejected in the 1960s as it was racist and stated that if groups such as Hopi Native Americans didn't have the word 'time' then they were less people, however; humans created the word time and thus, proved Whorf to be incorrect. Language is a construct by humans and new words are being created every year. Along with verbal language, humans have a non verbal language called body language. These obvious to subtle movements are what can help one understand another even if there is an age difference such as with children and parents.
Language is usually structured and easily understood, but for babies, they have their own methods of communication that are just as important when they are with their mothers. In my third blog post, Connected at the Hip? I talk about attachment parenting. A review of attachment parenting is that it is a type of parenting technique in which the parent listens to the coos and gurgles and watches a baby's move and how they interact with the world to know what their needs are at any given time, even before they utter their first word. There is a certain way in which a mother must communicate with their child during attachment parenting that is a common language to those in the relationship, but a secret code to others. This might not be english or any other language know on the earth, but it is a communication system in which babies needs and desires are recognized by their mother.
The last pair of topics I am going to discuss are both fairly controversial topic globally which would be identity and sexuality. My post 24601: Who am I?, talks about identity in terms of ethnicity, psychosocial development and identity status. Looking more at the psychosocial structure of identity created by Erik Erikson a look at a very turbulent time of life, adolescents, his basic conflicts are identity vs. role confusion. At this point in a person's life, hormones are more active and the body begins to change and people must recognize who they are in a variety of categories, one of which is sexuality.
Sexuality can be thought of in ways such as the capacity for sexual feelings which is not only male-female, but also male-male and female-female. During the stressful time of adolescents, along with figuring out what you want to do for the rest of your life, what you are going to do to get there and if it is college, applying and hoping for acceptance, you are trying to figure out do you like guys, girls, or both? Sexual identity is a very emotional time of self-discovery, some people might not realize, or at least admit, their identity until they have finished high school, past the general stage of identity. In Who are We to Judge Love? I talked very liberally about homosexuality and how crazy and barbaric some cultures go to attempt to eradicate something so natural. In another psychology class that I am in, there is wonderful analogy for homosexuality and handedness in the book's 33rd study material module in Psychology Tenth Edition in Modules by David G. Myers:
I am happy to finish this last post off on a positive note as I say my goodbyes.
Thank you everyone for reading my blog, I hope you got something out of it, I know I did writing it!
The next pairing I tackled were my second and third posts. In my second post I talked about language and thought. In A Word Speaks a Thousand Thoughts. I described many different forms of language and interpretation of what language is. A theory given by Benjamin Lee Whorf with the idea that groups of people thought differently based on the language they speak. His theory was rejected in the 1960s as it was racist and stated that if groups such as Hopi Native Americans didn't have the word 'time' then they were less people, however; humans created the word time and thus, proved Whorf to be incorrect. Language is a construct by humans and new words are being created every year. Along with verbal language, humans have a non verbal language called body language. These obvious to subtle movements are what can help one understand another even if there is an age difference such as with children and parents.
Language is usually structured and easily understood, but for babies, they have their own methods of communication that are just as important when they are with their mothers. In my third blog post, Connected at the Hip? I talk about attachment parenting. A review of attachment parenting is that it is a type of parenting technique in which the parent listens to the coos and gurgles and watches a baby's move and how they interact with the world to know what their needs are at any given time, even before they utter their first word. There is a certain way in which a mother must communicate with their child during attachment parenting that is a common language to those in the relationship, but a secret code to others. This might not be english or any other language know on the earth, but it is a communication system in which babies needs and desires are recognized by their mother.
The last pair of topics I am going to discuss are both fairly controversial topic globally which would be identity and sexuality. My post 24601: Who am I?, talks about identity in terms of ethnicity, psychosocial development and identity status. Looking more at the psychosocial structure of identity created by Erik Erikson a look at a very turbulent time of life, adolescents, his basic conflicts are identity vs. role confusion. At this point in a person's life, hormones are more active and the body begins to change and people must recognize who they are in a variety of categories, one of which is sexuality.
Sexuality can be thought of in ways such as the capacity for sexual feelings which is not only male-female, but also male-male and female-female. During the stressful time of adolescents, along with figuring out what you want to do for the rest of your life, what you are going to do to get there and if it is college, applying and hoping for acceptance, you are trying to figure out do you like guys, girls, or both? Sexual identity is a very emotional time of self-discovery, some people might not realize, or at least admit, their identity until they have finished high school, past the general stage of identity. In Who are We to Judge Love? I talked very liberally about homosexuality and how crazy and barbaric some cultures go to attempt to eradicate something so natural. In another psychology class that I am in, there is wonderful analogy for homosexuality and handedness in the book's 33rd study material module in Psychology Tenth Edition in Modules by David G. Myers:
"Most of today’s psychologists... view sexual orientation as neither willfully chosen nor willfully changed. Myers compares sexual orientation to handedness. You don’t deliberately decide (willfully choose) to be right-handed or left-handed. Similarly, you can’t intentionally alter (willfully change) your inherent inclination to use one hand over the other."If more people thought of sexuality and sexual orientation in this way (and ethnic identity), I think the world would be a more peaceful place and adolescents would have once less thing to make them feel awkward and unsure of themselves during the critical stage of life.
I am happy to finish this last post off on a positive note as I say my goodbyes.
Thank you everyone for reading my blog, I hope you got something out of it, I know I did writing it!
