Term Paper on "Child Psychology Behaviorism"

Term Paper 10 pages (2951 words) Sources: 1+

[EXCERPT] . . . .

Psychology

Child Psychology and Inherent Concepts of Animacy

The question of animacy and how early an understanding of the concept develops among human beings is not as certain as was once thought. In the past, based largely on the work of Jean Piaget, psychologists came to accept his conclusion that children developed a conception of animism very gradually over a period of many years. Piaget went so far as to suggest that the individual's animistic sense is not fully developed until sometime around age eleven or twelve (Stone, 1930). At issue is how quickly the child develops a sense of the difference between animate objects and inanimate ones.

It may seem obvious to us as adults that animals and plants are animate, while rocks are not. To a child, however, this is less clear. Rocks can move, after all -- from a child's logic that movement could be construed as a product of willful action instead of just physics. When a river flows downhill, it could be easy for a child to mistake such motion as evidence of the river's animate nature. Only with time does a conception of the principles of animacy develop. The real question is how long of a period of time does it take for this sense to emerge. Piaget argued that it took more than a decade; however, evidence has mounted to demonstrate that Piaget's conclusions were inaccurate at best. Ample evidence exists to indicate that a conception of animism emerges in children at a much younger age than that.

Piaget's research into child development concluded that children's conception of animacy didn't reach maturity until at least age eleven or age twelve. His arguments centered on his conclusion that children remain animistic until early adolescence. By this, Piaget meant that children inappropriately attribute properties of animate beings to inanimate objects. This quality made young children animistic because they wrongly assumed that most objects possessed an animate will that shaped actions (Dewart, 1979; Dolgin and Behrend, 1984). The incapacity to understand the difference between animate objects and inanimate objects is the difference between the philosophical concepts of a subject and an object. A subject is capable of action and can make choices and act on decisions made. A subject is an actor in the world capable of affecting change. An object, on the other hand, can only be acted upon. It is passive in the world, and is little more than a sometimes useful prop that subjects make use of during the course of their actions.

This difference, though it seems obvious to all of us now, is subtler than one realizes. Outlining the characteristics of animate subjects in particular can be challenging, because one must be specific without excluding certain kinds of animate beings. People and animals are obvious, but what about plants? Or bacteria? If Piaget's conclusions about childhood development were correct, then it should have been considered nothing less than fantastic that human children are able to develop a mature conception of animate and inanimate objects within just a decade of life.

Unfortunately for Piaget's ego, a growing body of scholarly studies on the subject have illustrated that animistic tendencies -- the incapacity to be able to clearly differentiate between animate and inanimate objects -- is not as common as Piaget reported nor as long lasting (Dolgin and Behrend, 1984). Numerous studies -- over the last twenty years especially -- have come to light that indicate that animistic persistence is not common at all. Of course, like any researcher, Piaget could only base his conclusions on the research he had done and the evidence at hand. It may just be that his sample size or selection was too small or unvaried to provide accurate conclusions about childhood development for all people. In fact, Dolgin and Behrend (1984) came to a similar conclusion. Their study also examined the matter of persistent animism in children, but they used a much larger sample size than Piaget had employed. What's more, the researchers questioned the children regarding a larger number of properties of a larger number of animate and inanimate objects. Their results found no significant evidence to suggest that animism is a pervasive part of early childhood development or that it occurs consistently in children.

One of the primary questions that researchers must ask when they seek to better understand the nature of the development of the concepts of animate and inanimate objects is whether or not children have a knowledge of the innate differences between biology, physics, and psychology (Inagaki and Hatano, 2006). This is the key question that must be asked, even if researchers pursue from a variety of angles. Obviously, the nature of biology plays a large role in our understanding of the differences between animate and inanimate objects. Biological life is almost exclusively attributed to the former category, while non-life is placed in the latter. Understanding how objects can demonstrate some qualities of subjects is the domain of physics. A person and a rock can both roll down a hill, but one does it through action of will and the other does it by dint of the physical nature of gravity. Finally, we cannot ignore the input that psychology plays in making determinations between animate and inanimate objects. The capacity for thought and internal decision-making is invariably a property of animate objects, though inanimate objects might mistakenly be assumed to possess similar qualities.

The emerging consensus among researchers into developmental studies is that children as young as five possess a knowledge system known as naive biology that is capable of making coherent predictions and explanations about biological phenomena (Inagaki and Hatano, 2006). This knowledge system allows children at this young of an age to accurately distinguish between living and nonliving things. Since understanding the difference between living and nonliving things is arguably one of the most important factors in deciding whether or not an object is animate or inanimate, it follows that the presence of naive biology in five-year-olds is an especially instructive find. This capacity would have had to develop in children by the time that they reached Piaget's mark of eleven or twelve years if we could expect them to have a mature understanding of the difference between animate and inanimate objects. That the ability emerges much earlier than this -- by half -- is a stunning conclusion that undermines Piaget's map of development and pushes back the development of an understanding of the difference between animate and inanimate objects.

In fact, more recent and reputable research has consistently pushed back the age of development of this conception to around four or five years old. Rather than waiting for adolescence, children are apparently developing basic conceptions of animate and inanimate objects before entering kindergarten. Inagaki and Hatano (1996) found that by the age of five children can distinguish animals and plants from inanimate things based on the ability of the former to grow over time. Since only animate, living beings can grow it becomes readily apparent that even at this young age children have an integrated conception of the differences between living and nonliving things. Whether this is the same as the naive biology mentioned earlier was beyond the scope of this particular study. Nonetheless, it follows the same lines and demonstrates that at a very young age children are classifying their environment based on characteristics of life vs. non-life. Granted, this study doesn't necessarily prove that children have an autonomous sense of biology, even an innate biological knowledge coded into their genes. Proving that is much more difficult.

However, even if we accept that the ability to classify the environment based on animate and inanimate categories is a developed ability, this study still pushes back that development significantly. Early studies such as Piaget's conformed to the conclusion that this sense only develops in early adolescence; this research challenges that conventional view of development and illustrates that the development of this sense at least much occur much more rapidly than previously believed to occur in children.

But as fantastic as it might seem that children develop a conception of animacy by age five, other studies into linguistics reveal that the foundation for this conception appears much earlier during the language learning process. Dewart (1979) found that linguistic concepts of animacy develop as early as age three or four. When presented when basic sentence structures -- noun-verb-noun -- children questioned were significantly more likely to expect that the first noun in the sentence would be animate while the second would be inanimate. This conclusion runs parallel to our standard expectations of grammatical sentence construction that is noun-verb-direct object. The noun acts on the direct object, which is acted upon. As we already saw, animate beings are possessed of agency and subjectivity in contrast to inanimate objectivity and passivity. Children in this study were able to make that distinction at a remarkably young age based on the construction of the sentence.

This finding suggests two points: first, Piaget's argument that animism is… READ MORE

How to Reference "Child Psychology Behaviorism" Term Paper in a Bibliography

Related Term Papers:

Child Psychology Child Development Term Paper

Child Psychology

Child development is a constantly changing psycho/social discipline with almost countless theories associated with it. The fundamental nature of children and how they develop to become either successful… read more

Term Paper 18 pages (5209 words) Sources: 12 Style: APA Topic: Psychology / Behavior / Psychiatry

---

Psychology Psychoanalysis Is a Theory Term Paper

Psychology

Psychoanalysis is a theory that was developed by Sigmund Freud that is all about human nature and what motivates and causes people to behave in certain ways. Psychoanalysis primarily… read more

Term Paper 2 pages (816 words) Sources: 4 Topic: Psychology / Behavior / Psychiatry

---

Psychology Assessment Multiple Choice Questions in Light Assessment

Psychology Assessment

Multiple Choice Questions

In light of problems posed by the concept of drive, Premack, one of Skinner's followers, proposes that we consider reinforcement:

In terms of the power… read more

Assessment 3 pages (1116 words) Sources: 0 Topic: Psychology / Behavior / Psychiatry

---

Psychology Essay

Psychology

The following question requires you to write a brief answer consisting of a few sentences or a listing. List the five goals of psychology and briefly explain a situation… read more

Essay 2 pages (775 words) Sources: 0 Topic: Psychology / Behavior / Psychiatry

---

Aspects of Psychology Term Paper

Psychological Perspectives - Evolutionary Psychology, Behaviorism, & Cognitive Psychology

Behaviorism

Followers of the school of behaviorism believe that a person's behavior could be explained scientifically through observation and reinforcement. This… read more

Term Paper 2 pages (614 words) Sources: 1+ Topic: Child Development / Youth / Teens

---

View 100+ more related papers  >>