PSY 1010 Module 5 Development and Personality Written Assignment Example

A Four-Year-Old, a Grandmother and Me: Development Across Three Generations and Four Ways to Explain One Personality

Student Name

Bachelor of Arts in Psychology, Thomas Edison State University

PSY-1010: Introduction to Psychology

Mentor Name

Month Day, Year

A Four-Year-Old, a Grandmother and Me: Development Across Three Generations and Four Ways to Explain One Personality

The last module of the course covers human development across the life span and the major approaches to personality. Three generations live in or near my home in Ocean County, New Jersey: my four-year-old daughter, me at thirty-four, and my mother, who is seventy-two. The first two answers apply developmental theories from the textbook (Feldman, 2021) to them, and the third compares how four approaches to personality would describe me.

Question 1: Cognitive Development in Early Childhood

Piaget proposed that children pass through four stages of cognitive development: sensorimotor, preoperational, concrete operational and formal operational (Feldman, 2021). My daughter is in the preoperational stage, roughly ages two to seven, when children use symbols and language but do not yet reason logically about objects and events.

Two features of this stage appear in our house daily. The first is egocentric thought, viewing the world entirely from one's own perspective. When she talks to her grandmother on the phone, she nods instead of answering and holds up drawings to the phone as if Grandma could see them. The second is a lack of conservation, the understanding that quantity stays the same when its appearance changes. When I poured her juice from a short, wide cup into a tall, narrow one, she was delighted that she had more. Piaget would predict that she will grasp conservation in the concrete operational stage, around age seven. The textbook also notes later research showing that children often reach these abilities earlier than Piaget thought when tasks are made simpler, which is a useful caution against treating the stages as fixed ages.

Attachment adds a social side to her development. Ainsworth's research, summarized in the textbook, classified infants' attachment as secure or insecure based on how they respond to separation and reunion with a caregiver. My daughter cries briefly at day-care drop-off but settles quickly and runs to me at pickup, a pattern consistent with secure attachment.

Question 2: Psychosocial Development Across Adulthood

Erikson described development as eight stages across the life span, each defined by a crisis to resolve (Feldman, 2021). At thirty-four I am between intimacy versus isolation and generativity versus stagnation, the stage of middle adulthood in which people seek to contribute to the next generation through family, work and community. Returning to college so that I can supervise and train new dispatchers fits generativity well; so does the attention I give my daughter's development.

My mother is in Erikson's final stage, ego integrity versus despair, in which older adults review their lives and come to accept them or regret them. Since retiring she has been sorting family photographs and telling my daughter stories about growing up in Trenton, which looks like the life review this stage describes. Her occasional comments that she should have finished college herself show that integrity is not reached all at once; it includes coming to terms with what did not happen. Seeing the three of us side by side made the idea of development as a life-long process concrete.

Question 3: Four Approaches to My Personality

The textbook presents several approaches to personality, the pattern of enduring characteristics that make people unique. Each describes me differently.

The psychodynamic approach, from Freud, explains personality through unconscious forces and defense mechanisms. After a bad call I tend to make jokes, which might be read as a defense that keeps painful feelings out of awareness. The approach offers a plausible story but is hard to test. The trait approach describes personality as a set of consistent characteristics, most often the Big Five: openness, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness and neuroticism. On a short online inventory I scored high on conscientiousness and agreeableness, moderate on extraversion and low on neuroticism, which fits a job that rewards reliability and calm. Roberts et al. (2006) found in a meta-analysis that people tend to become more conscientious and emotionally stable in young adulthood, so my scores may partly reflect age and a demanding job rather than a fixed nature.

The social cognitive approach emphasizes how thoughts, behavior and environment influence one another. Bandura (1977) proposed that self-efficacy, the belief that one can perform a task successfully, shapes what people attempt and how long they persist. My self-efficacy as a dispatcher is high, but as a student it was low at first; passing the first quizzes raised it, and I now take on harder assignments. The humanistic approach, from Rogers and Maslow, stresses people's capacity for growth and the importance of unconditional positive regard. My mother's steady support when I decided to return to school is the kind of acceptance Rogers believed helps people grow toward their potential.

Each approach adds something the others miss. The trait approach describes what I am like, the social cognitive approach explains how I changed as a student, the humanistic approach explains the conditions that helped, and the psychodynamic approach raises questions about my coping that the others ignore. The trait and social cognitive approaches have the strongest research support, which is why I find them most useful.

Conclusion

Piaget's stages and attachment research describe my daughter's thinking and relationships, Erikson's stages describe the tasks facing my mother and me, and comparing four approaches to personality shows that each approach answers its own question about one person. Ending the course with these topics has tied together much of what I learned, since development and personality draw on the biology, learning, thinking and motivation covered in earlier modules.

References

Bandura, A. (1977). Self-efficacy: Toward a unifying theory of behavioral change. Psychological Review, 84(2), 191-215. https://doi.org/10.1037/0033-295X.84.2.191

Feldman, R. S. (2021). Essentials of understanding psychology (14th ed.). McGraw Hill.

Roberts, B. W., Walton, K. E., & Viechtbauer, W. (2006). Patterns of mean-level change in personality traits across the life course: A meta-analysis of longitudinal studies. Psychological Bulletin, 132(1), 1-25. https://doi.org/10.1037/0033-2909.132.1.1