Sigmund Freud
Sigmund Freud developed psychoanalysis in the 1900s. A lot of his ideas, concepts, and studies are still influencing how we view the effect of a person's development early on in life on his or her development in the future. According to Freud, we are all born with an id, which is our basic drives. Infants have no way to control their id. Freud discovered the pleasure principle which is operated by the id. He showed how children don't have it because it seeks immediate gratification for all its urges. Freud also believed that children do not develop a superego until later in life because they do not have an internal sense of guilt and generally can not feel bad for their actions. Freud also came up with five stages in child and adolescent development and psychosexual stages. The five stages are the oral stage, the anal stage, the phallic stage, the latency stage and the genital stage.
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Erik EriksonErikson focused more on issues of the ego rather than the id. Erikson described psychosocial stages while Freud studied psychosexual stages because these issues are rooted in social experiences that are typical of each stage of development rather than in sexual urges. Erikson believed that the crucial battle for infants is trust vs. mistrust because infants have yet to develop trust in the world. Erikson believed that development does not stop in adolescence. He added three stages of development to Freud's to show how they continue to develop into adolescence.
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John B. WatsonWatson is the father of the theory known as behaviorism. He was different from other psychologists at this time because he focused mostly on what he could observe people doing and their behavior. Watson believed that the determining factor for a person's personality, abilities, and all other qualities was the person's environment. Watson is also known for his development of classical conditioning.
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B. F. SkinnerSkinner was also a behaviorist and further developed Watson's ideas by introducing operant conditioning which studied a person's response strength. He also came up with reinforcements, which increase the likelihood that a behavior will continue or happen again. These reinforcements can be positive like a rewards or they can be negative like removing something depending on the desired results.
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Jean PiagetPiaget developed the cognitive developmental theory. He analyzed children's thoughts by encouraging them to speak their minds openly. He believed that we are constantly adapting to our environment and used schemas to explain how our minds organize the world as we see it. Piaget made two processes of adaptation: assimilation and accommodation. Like Freud and Erikson, Piaget also believed that children under go qualitative changes as they grow, but he believed that children are less knowledgeable than adults as well as their thoughts are at different developmental levels.
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Lev VygotskyVygotsky developed the sociocultural theory. He thought that learning took place mostly in interactions, so he emphasized the importance of the social world and culture by promoting cognitive growth and thought. Vygotsky developed the concept of the zone of proximal development, which can be described as the distance between the actual developmental level of a person and the level that they should be at, determined by comparing to peers and problem solving abilities. He also created the practice of scaffolding as a useful practice, which involves supporting a child's learning and continuously offering less guidance until the child can perform something him or herself. This allows the child to move forward in education.
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Abraham MaslowAbraham Maslow was a pychologist, and he is best known for establishing Maslow's hierarchy of needs. This is a theory of psychological health based on fulfilling innate human needs in priority in order to reach the highest level of self-actualization possible. People must achieve their basic needs in order to move up to accomplish the next one. Below is Maslow's hierarchy of needs.
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