 Eight stages of personality development  Trust vs. mistrust  Autonomy vs. shame and doubt  Initiative vs. guilt  Industry vs. inferiority  Identity vs. role confusion  Intimacy vs. isolation  Generativity vs. stagnation  Ego integrity vs. despair

 Trust vs. mistrust (to 1 year)  Infants come to trust that their parents will meet their needs  If needs are met, they come to trust environment and themselves; if not, mistrust and fear develop.  Autonomy vs. shame and doubt (1-3)  Children gain increasing autonomy. They learn to walk, hold onto things, and control themselves.  If they repeatedly fail to master these skills, self-doubt may take root.  If their efforts are belittled by adults, shame and a lasting sense of inferiority may develop

 Initiative vs. guilt (3-6)  Children undertake new projects, make plans, and conquer new challenges.  Parental encouragement for these initiatives leads to a sense of joy in exercising initiative and tackling new challenges.  If children are scolded for these initiatives, strong feelings of guilt, unworthiness, and resentment may take hold

 Industry vs. inferiority (6-12)  Children learn the skills needed to become well-rounded adults, including personal care, productive work, and independent social living  If children are stifled in their efforts to become competent and industrious, they may conclude that they are inadequate and lose faith in their power to become self-sufficient

 According to Piaget, children progress in their thinking through the complementary processes of assimilation and accommodation  Assimilation – Interpreting one’s new experience in terms of one’s existing schemas A 2 year old whose simple schema for dog is four legged animal This does not work for the cats The toddler must accommodate or modify her schema

 Accommodation – Adapting one’s current understandings (schemas) to incorporate new information The toddler now realizes that not all four legged animals are dogs Helpful Mneumonic – Some People Can’t Formally Operate

 Sensory-Motor Stage (birth to 2 years)  Object permanence – awareness that objects continue to exist even when out of sight An important outcome Hiding a toy - If the baby looks around you to find the toy, they have developed this goal  Mental Representation – they can even imagine the movement of an object that they do not actually see move Another important outcome  By the end of the sensory-motor stage, toddlers have also developed a capacity for self- recognition

 Preoperational Stage (2-7 years)  Their increasing ability to use mental representations allow for the development of language, for engaging in fantasy play ( a cardboard becomes a castle) and for symbolic gestures (slashing the air with an imaginary sword to slay an imaginary dragon) Egocentric – what children are in this stage They have difficulty seeing things from another person’s point of view Children are also easily misled by appearances I.e., Two identical glasses; then taller vs. shorter glass

 Concrete Operations (7-11 years)  Become more flexible in their thinking  Principles of conservation – able to look at a situation from someone else’s viewpoint The volume of a liquid stays the same regardless of the size and shape of the container into which it is poured

 Formal Operations (11-15 years)  Understand abstract ideas  They can formulate hypotheses, test them mentally and accept or reject them according to the outcome of these mental experiments

 Many question assumption that there are distinct stages in cognitive development  Criticism of notion that infants do not understand world  Piaget may have underestimated influence of social interaction in cognitive development

 Babbling  Make the sounds of all languages  Holophrases  One word is used to mean a whole sentence

 Skinner theorized that language develops as parents reward children for language usage  Chomsky proposed the language acquisition device  A neural mechanism for acquiring language presumed to be “wired into” all humans  Bilingualism and the development of a second language

 Gender identity  Knowledge of being a boy or girl  Occurs by age 3  Gender constancy  Child realizes that gender cannot change  Occurs by age 4 or 5

 Gender-role awareness  Knowing appropriate behavior for each gender  Gender stereotypes  Beliefs about presumed characteristics of each gender  Sex-typed behavior  Socially defined ways to behave different for boys and girls  May be at least partly biological in origin

 Preconventional (preadolescence)  “Good” behavior is mostly to avoid punishment or seek reward  Children tend to interpret behavior in terms of its concrete consequences  “Heinz should not steal the drug because he might get caught and put into prison”  Conventional (adolescence)  Behavior is about pleasing others and, in later adolescence, becoming a good citizen  To put oneself in “other person’s shoes”  “Heinz should steal the drug because he could save his wife and be thought of as a hero”

 Postconventional  Emphasis is on abstract principles such as justice, equality, and liberty  Personal and strongly felt moral standards become the guideposts for deciding what is right and wrong  People may become aware of discrepancies between what they judge to be moral and what society has determined to be legal  Heinz should steal the drug because his wife’s right for life outweighs the store owners right to property”

 Research shows that many people never progress past the conventional level  Theory does not take cultural differences into account  Theory is considered by some to be sexist in that girls often scored lower on tests of morality