Psychology theories
1 Identify the main ideas of major theories of intelligence.
Intelligence can be one of the most complex subjects of discussion and has been in existence for several years. It is mainly debated within psychology but there is no general definition to be used precisely on what intelligence constitute. Some scholars have proposed that intelligence is a general, single capacity, while other states that intelligence entails a wide range of aptitudes, talents, knowledge, and skills. Historically, the way people think of intelligence has changed over the years, whereby Spearman suggested that intelligence was common (g factor) and emphasized steadiness in people throughout performance fields. On the other hand, Catell and Horn differentiated between fluid (problem solving) and crystallized (knowledge base) intelligence. Nevertheless, psychology has mainly concentrated on intelligence as something, which could be scaled (psychometric approach). Modern theories have emerged with different perspectives. For instance, these theories concentrate on measurement and tend to drift away from the traditional IQ testing while stressing intelligence, which is applied in our daily lives. Multiple intelligence theory by Gardner illustrates that each of the intelligences is unique from others and have their own progressive paths associated to unique systems of the brain.
Robert Sternberg on the other side gives a theory of intelligence, which stresses on three varying factors of intelligence. He stressed that to evaluate entirely intelligence, the context under which they act, their earlier experiences with the work, and their information-processing plans needs to be observed. Sternberg also defined intelligence as the capacity to be successful in life. This comes about as being able to act purposefully, think rationally, and to adjust well to your surrounding. Usually, however, with challenges intelligence can be stated as a personal performance on an IQ test.
2 Evaluate the relative influences of environment and genetics on intellectual achievement.
Family background often has been found to entail permanent influences on adult intellectual, economic, and occupational impact. Families vary both environmentally and genetically; hence, there has been a challenge in interpreting family impact on studies of persons or biological associations. This intellectual achievement is also influenced by some other aspects, which include cultural bias, motivation to excel, how “test-wise” a person is, and the existence of stereotype threats. Gene’s development for instance, varies according to an individual. Genes have a crucial role in IQ development, for adoptive children have IQ rates similar to those of their biological parents as compared to those of their adoptive parents. On the same note, there are more correlations between MZ twins than in DZ twins or the other siblings. No matter how close the adoptive children might be to their parents, they will still portray IQ similar to those of their biological parents likewise to children brought together.
The environmental factors also have major roles in shaping the intellectual achievements of an individual. Socioeconomic status for example plays a vital part in IQ because of the way it models physical surrounding and parenting. Environmental risks factors also influences intellectual achievement, for when more risks are exposed to the child, there are high chances that the child will have lower level of IQ. These risks are nearly all correlated with SES, and children that are transferred to a more privilege environment portray some gradual increase in the IQ levels. Comparing children in European-American and African-American shows these differences clearly, whereby those from advantage environment shows improved IQ development than those from less privileged areas like Africa (“The Bell Curve,” 1994).
3 Delineate the specific environmental variables that contribute to intellectual performance.
Environmental variables play a crucial role in shaping and improving on an individual’s intellectual performance. Understanding environmental factors is one of the most significant parts in IQ test scores as well as other measures of cognitive capacity. Some of the environmental factors most of which are socio-cultural include:
The family: being in a position to get family resources and having a home life appropriate for learning, obviously influences scores on intellectual performances. Nevertheless, it is hard to separate likely genetic aspects from a parent’s attitude or application of language, for instance.
Peer group: J.R. Harris proposed in nurture postulation that a person’s peer group affects their intellectuals’ performance highly throughout time, and that various peer group features could be liable for the black-white IQ gap. Various longitudinal research aid the inference that peer groups greatly influence scholastic development, but comparatively less research have evaluated the influence on tests of cognitive capacity. Nevertheless, there are some proofs suggesting that peer groups affect tests on cognitive capacity.
Education is the other environmental factor but has some complex association with intelligence; it is both independent and dependent. For instance, those who perform well on intelligence tests during childhood incline to have reduced drop out rate and finish several years in school, thus making intelligence a prognostic aspect of the way an individual will thrive in schooling. On the other side, education has been illustrated to increase an individual’s performance on these tests performances from a tender age.
Training and intervention also is the other environmental factor affecting intellectual performance. This relate to fluid intelligence that can be enhanced by training especially in adults. Other factors include environmental enrichment, which influences cognitive and intellectual performance on neurobiological view.
4 Explain the consequences of intellectual level across the lifespan.
Intellectual levels have different consequence across an individual’s lifespan. Lifespan psychology focuses on the development of a person right from conception to old age. Throughout this period, the intellectual levels of a person changes according to the exposure and the surrounding of an individual. The consequences are transformational, maintenance, acquisition, and attrition in psychological systems and tasks involved. This simultaneous concern of developmental factors epitomizes the observation of lifespan psychology, which the general ontogenesis of mind and character is dynamic, multifunctional, multidimensional, and non-linear. (Baltes, 1997). A lifespan view prepositions that an essential progressive change happens across the entire life path, and progressive change is both qualitative (change in type, nature) and quantitative (change in rate, level, and degree).
Intellectual levels have different consequences that increase person’s differences. In many occasions of cognitive, physical, and social development, the range of differences or variances among persons of the equal chronological age is higher in old age as compared to childhood. For instance, most children attain developmental highlights such as talking, walking, or going to school in a comparatively limited age; children do not vary much in age for which this duties are achieved. Nevertheless, adults differ greatly in logical age related to such occurrences as marriage, menopause, birth of first child, gray hair development. In addition, because of different intellectual levels, there seems to be less developmental incidents in adults, which are universal. The rise in level of differences among people in adulthood has many allegations for adult growth and education. The level of thinking and task operation changes as individuals grow, bringing many differences across the lifespan.
5 Explain why differences are seen between intellectual ability and academic performance.
Intellectual abilities come from the genes and can mold an individual to have high thinking capacities while solving problems in life. On the other hand, academic performances are acquired skills through learning. However, studies shows that as much as there are differences between intellectual abilities and academic performances there are also some close relationship between the two. A person with high intellectual abilities is likely to be good academically and a person who performs poorly academically is likely to have low intellectual abilities. The differences also occur because of the different levels of exposure. Those people who are exposed to different life issues early will be able to tackle those challenges when they encounter them in future than those who just went to school without being exposed to challenges. The issue of being able to solve life issues is not much related to one’s level of academic performance but to personal intelligence.
Academic performances are also acquired skills through training and experiences while intellectual abilities are innate capacities that cannot be altered or moved acquired naturally. Intellectual abilities also depend on an individual’s background, for a person who comes from a stable family is likely to be of higher intellectuals than those from unsteady families who get their intelligences only through training and experiences in schooling. Intellectual abilities are also closely connected to individuals who are more creative and this is not linked to academic performance in any way.
6 Outline the major milestones in language development across the lifespan.
The development of communication skills vary greatly from one child to another. There are children who will develop some given skills faster than others will, and are usually varying between boys and girls. The first milestone is the fact the infants cry as a way of communicating before developing any language. However, for infants to master their language, they should know the language’s phonemes, syntax, and morphology. Within the first two years, language communication is mainly by cooing, crying, fussing (0-2 months), squeals, vowel sounds, and growls (3-6months), and then from 12-18 months the child begins to comprehend some common words recognizing spoken vocabularies and spurt some word sentences. At 24 months and above, the child develops some multiword sentences that are audible and can be understood by everyone. Furthermore, after 30 months the child gets to know other vocabularies and develop some more understandable communication skills. Through the following stages language development does not change much as one becomes accustomed to the environment and peer languages.
7 Predict the lifetime outcomes and risks for varying levels of educational achievement.
Varying level of education achievements has many implications in the society especially in rural areas. As the level of education differs among the members of the society some will just isolate themselves from the less educated creating an unbalance environment where cases of dependency will increase. Those who achieve high education level will see themselves as the most reliable people in the society and village people should seek them for advice. This will create a low-level society since the educated people might decide to exploit the less educated taking advantage of their situations. This is not healthy for a community since the resulting discrimination would bring hatred, jealousy, and lack of support for the commoners.
A generation gap will also be formed for those who are educated and those who are not. To fill that gap will create many challenges to the society since most many people would have sidelined themselves from helping the other. On the other hand, attaining different levels of educations can be beneficial since most people will have different skills and experiences necessary for the development and growth of the country. Information will be adequate in the community and problems will be solved easily as people have different skills. However, the other risk with this incident is that it can lead to destroying the natural systems of the society. A society is healthy when they are all characters, but everyone is educated taking advice or directions will be a problem since everyone thinks that they know what they are doing. No one can be controlled or led. Some other risks factors emerging because of education variance include a given family behavior, peer groups, which de-emphasize school, poor goodness of fit between learners and school, negative feedback, and pubertal changes, which coincide with school adjustment.
8 Predict the effects of parenting style and parenting behaviors on self-esteem and the development of personality.
Psychodynamic theories stress the function of the unconscious (especially early childhood) in shaping character by predictable stages. Personality has five factors that describe an individual. These factors include openness, extroversion, neuroticism (emotional instability), conscientiousness, and agreeableness. These factors do not overlap and can be measured through asking an individual to rate their personal characteristic tendency. Parenting styles affect self-esteem on a bigger extent, with democratic (authoritative) parenting producing highest self-esteem. The effects can be defined as influencing children with high self-esteem look for constructive response from others, have excellent adoption generally (social competences, friendships, resistance to peer pressure, and academic competence). In addition, high self-esteem appears to have been persistent on the elementary school years. However, this effects change has one grows; self-esteem in children differs from the one of adolescence and adults. Hence, reliable parenting results to enhanced self-esteem throughout one’s life. On the other hand, unreliable gives room for changes where an individual will form external self-esteem depending on the peer influence.
9 Explain the relative effects of genetics and environment on the development of personality.
The genes are the most influential factors in one’s development of personality. Children will mostly likely to act and behave like their parents, this shows that the genetic characteristic they inherited from them are more influential than the environmental factors, which they achieve as they grow. Genes determines the confidence of an individual and the way they handle issues. On the other hand, as one grows they encounter different environmental variables. This affects an individual’s personality in that what one is exposed to determine what they will be in future, access to resources for instance, gives one high chances of being successful, while lack of recourses and basic wants restrict an individual from succeeding and developing other personal skills.
10 Apply Erikson's theories to understand how an individual develops at specific life stages and in response to specific experiences.
According to Erikson’s stages of personal development, individual pass through various stages of life and each stage has different wants and perceptions concerning an individual. For instance, from birth to 1 year, a child weight between trust and mistrust. This is where children learn to either trust or mistrust those around him depending on the basic needs and care like warmth, nourishment, physical contact, and cleanliness. From one to three years, there is autonomy against shame and doubt. Here a child learns to be confident in him in activities like feeding, talking, and walking, and sometimes they doubt their capabilities. 3-6 years the development task involved is initiative against guilt. At this stage children desire to perform adult duties and a times overdoing them and feeling some guilt. A child wants to explore but with parental restrictions, they fear doing some things. This continuous up to the age of 7 -11 where they develop some industriousness and inferiority as they learn to be efficient and productive while others feel inferior and not able to carry out any activity. At adolescence, the children begin to set up identity groups and choose roles they want to do in future. They develop sexual, career identity, ethnic, or are confused not knowing what to do. Adulthood and maturity has also same features that improve the personality of an individual. This stage determines one’s productivity and with establishing their own families and friendships distinct from their parents. Other loose direction and become inactive with evaluating their life experiences.
11 Discuss the ways in which personality changes (and does not) over the lifespan.
People’s personality keeps changing throughout the years. The changes are accelerated by environmental factors, experiences, and training. No single personality is constant and people tend to grow with different levels of personalities, which dictate who an individual is or what whether they are successful or not. Few things do not change in a person’s life, especially after attaining maturity. However, researchers have found out that the big five personality traits do not change much after 30 years. The big five traits that do not change include openness, conscientiousness, neuroticism, agreeableness, and extraversion. These characteristics are not based on aspects like mood. Most researchers believe that these five main traits are essentially genetic, and for that reason do not change, but some scholars proposes that people not only persist to change but also adjust this highline, while others even change more in some way.
On average, individuals get better in personality on dealing with challenges and success of life. This happens because people become more reactive and caring with age since various conditions and incidents usually produce a series of emotional responses in normal people. Erikson’s childhood stages are in line with some other psychodynamic theories; his facts concerning identity development are extensively allowed illustrating that adults who figure out identity and intimacy earlier are potentially to get attain generativity in middle age.
12 Identify the major milestone in the development of gender and sexuality
Gender identity is referred to as an individual idea of oneself as male or female. This idea is closely linked to the idea of gender role that is stated as outward illustrations of character, which reflect the gender identity. Male gender tasks stresses agency that entails action and effectiveness, while female gender role stresses communality in many cultures-stress is on caretaking and associativity to and of others. At infancy, there is less difference between the genders, but as they grow parents start to treat and observe babies in gender types methods from birth. This, therefore, makes babies learn of their class (male or female) at their first birthday and fully understand their category when they are 18 months old, and there henceforth, gender skills begins to shape their character. At around 4-6 years, children have negative responses to character, which occur counter to their gender stereotypes. However, these behaviors change gradually and become rigid when they are 9 years old, and as they tend towards puberty, rigidity raises again. These characteristics are then shaped by the environmental factors, which one is exposed to and are transferred to adult age.
13 Explain both biological and social theories of gender identity and gender role.
Gender role theory speculates that girls and boys learn the suitable character and attitudes from the family and general traditions they are exposed in life and thus non-physical gender variances are an outcome of socialization. Social role theory on the other hand, suggests that social system is the principal force for the gender variances. It suggests that the division of labor existing between genders in the community illustrates the sex-variable act. Division of labor generates sex roles that consequently results to gendered social character.
On the other hand, it is known that biological sex is established at conception. It is precise from a series of research involving human and animals that chromosomal and hormonal variances between females and males influence a variety of feminine and masculine characteristics that supports the biological perspective. The equivalence of gender duties across cultures illustrates at least some biological consequences occurring through evolution. The twins’ biological theory also supports this concept where biological consequence is associated to the impact of testosterone on social effects on gender development.
