Developmental Stages in Childhood and Young Adulthood - Essay Example

? Personality Theory Developmental Stages in Childhood and Young Adulthood Cherry, K. . Erikson's theory of psychosocial development. Psychosocial Development in Infancy and Early Childhood, 43, 12-17. According to Cherry, Erik Erikson’s theory of psychosocial development describes personality in psychology in a more extensive manner. Erikson outlines personality development in a number of stages. The foundation of Erikson’s theory, unlike Freud’s theory of psychosexual stage, capitalizes on the impact of human social life. Erikson's main focus in psychosocial stage is on ego identity development in human beings. He describes ego identity as the development of self recognition through social contact. Erikson argues that, the experiences and exposure to information through interacting with others, changes ones ego identity. Besides ego identity, Erikson also supposes that a sense of competence influences a person’s actions and behaviors. Therefore, in each stage his concerns are on building a competent being. An individual level of mastery or inadequacy depends on the ability to handle a certain stage. In addition, Erikson believes that, in each stage, there is a chance for growth or failure, urging that a person undergoing through these stages experience a conflict within him that serves as a foundation to development. The first stage is trust vases mistrust that takes place between birth and one year of age. This is the most essential stage in life because the child’s development of trust depends on the quality of the parents. As successful trust development contributes to the child sense of security and safety while failure develops to fear. The second stage is autonomy versus shame and doubts occur during the early childhood and contribute to child’s sense of personal control. He believes that a child feels in control by learning how to control his body parts, his choices of toys, food and clothing. Cherry concludes that, a success in this stage brings confidence to the child while it brings self-doubt in case of a failure (Cherry, 2012). The Adolescent and Adult According To Loevinger's Theory Bonin, A. (2012). Jane Loevinger's stages of ego development. Mental health, 32, 1-5. Bonin outlines McAdams views about the three stages of development as described in Lovervinger’s Theory of ego development. The theory describes ego development as the efforts shown in comprehending, understanding, and organizing one’s life experiences. Therefore, life experiences and challenges influence ego development in an individual. In that case, Loevinger developed a theory on cognitive growth and its influences on personality. The theory consists of three stages which are impulse control stage, interpersonal mode stage, and conscious preoccupations stage. Loevinger compares the growth along the stages with climbing stairs, to describe the principle in every stage whereby one will only move to the next stage upon mastering the current stage. This implies that as one moves towards the top level the less control desire has over him or her. The theory mainly focuses on internal emotions and objectives that portrayed as an individual processed from stages to the other. Loevinger measures ego development by subjecting individuals to a spoken sentence completion test. The test, however, excludes the infants since they cannot speak. Therefore, Loevinger does not address the infants while describing ego development stage which is contrary to other theories that include infants. During the interpersonal mode stage, an individual understands that following rules is beneficial while failure may result to deceiving relationship in the future. In early adolescence, an individual develops the need to belong to a group which marks conformist stage. In the conformist stage, a child bids to society norms and gets attracted only to a friend with the same goals. Loevinger’s theory states that upon self realization, the adolescent breaks from peer groups, which marks the beginning of conscientious stage. In this stage, the adolescent or adult has developed personal set of values, goals, and morals. However, Loevinger states that most of the adults are stuck in this stage (Bonin, 2012). The next stage is individualistic stage, where an individual understand others better as well as the ability to control internal emotional conflicts. The other stage is the autonomous stage where an individual became independent and feels a sense of self-fulfillment when he or she achieves a certain goal. Bonin concludes that it is essential to realize self-awareness and carry on to climbing the stairs of ego development (Bonin, 2012). Generativity and Adult Development Cherry, K. (2012). Generativity versus stagnation. The Seventh Stage of Psychosocial Development, 12, 4-7. According to Cherry’s article, Generativity versus stagnation is the seventh stage of Erik Erikson’s theory of psychosocial development. According to Erik Erikson, Generativity occurs at the eve of middle adulthood between the ages of approximately 40 and 65years. During this time, adults strive to acquire resources will sustain them and relatives for a long time. The adult may strive in having children or helping in community projects and society activities that contribute to positive changes of beneficial value to other people. At this stage, contributions to society and doing things that would benefit future generations are the individual’s main focus. Therefore, Generativity refers to the concerns shown by adults toward the future generations by creating a better world for them. In other words, such an action is referred to as "making your mark" on the world. Stagnation is the failure in finding a way to make contribute. In such a case, the individual feels disconnected with their community and the society as a whole. Therefore, a success in this stage gives an individual the feeling that he or she is involved in the community and that the community appreciate his or her contributions. However, those that fail to realize this skill feel left out and unproductive. Narrating Mind Stasney (2009). The Narrating mind. How to befriend the storyteller inside you, 11, 2-9. According to Stasney’s research on stories and story narrating, with the help of experts in anthropologist, neurobiologists and cognitive psychologists, stories can cause both healing and torture. Stories help make sense of the day to day experiences while on the other hand, stories may continuously generate painful thoughts in the mind. Dan MacAdams proposes that, stories and storytelling links an individual to the society. It is also a platform through which adults creates their identity. However, stories are mostly based on believes more than they are in reality. They also shape a person’s experiences, whereby the most frequent told stories tend to actualize with time. In the same article Jerome Bruner, a cognitive psychologist concludes, from his research with infants, that babies have the ability to know of their mom’s intentions. Moreover, at the age of five years old the child has developed the ability to know what everyone around it is thinking, a situation Jerome refers to as “theory of mind”. In this stage, the child is capable of guessing the thoughts of others and come up with stories to entertain them. For instant, a child can give a fun story to his or her mother after realizing her bad mood. In addition, from another research by a biologist and anthropologist Robin Dunbar, show that people spend around 65% of the time telling stories. Stasney suggests that, in order to understand the narrating mind, we would need to focus on a study by Michael Gazzaniga, a neurobiologist, on patients whose brains’ left and right hemisphere is surgically separated. The research shows that, it is only one section of a human’s brain involved in storytelling. The neurobiologist concludes that story telling involves the left hemisphere in coming up with a sensible stream of sensory impressions while the right hemisphere concentrates on the big picture. In addition, Gazzaniga and his friends found that the left brain hemisphere was responsible of filling the gaps in the brain in case the brain was unable to fill. The left brain can identify and follow a patterns as well as joining pieces of data together so as to fit in a certain pattern. He bases his arguments on an experiment where a split-brain person was shown two pictures to identify its content. Patient’s left hemisphere saw a rooster claw while the right hemisphere saw a snow scenario. The same patient was asked to pick the item on the picture, using his left hand which is usually controlled by the right hemisphere of the head. The patient picked a shovel. When he was asked why, the vocal left brain initiated into a detailed clarification of how a rooster claw is component of a rooster, and that there is need to use a shovel in cleaning up a rooster coop. In conclusion, Gazzaniga found out that the left part of the brain will always make up whatever it needs for a story to stick into the brain (Stasney, 2009). References Stasney S. (2009). The narrating mind. How to befriend the storyteller inside you. 11, 2-9. Cherry, K. (2012). Generativity versus stagnation. The Seventh Stage of Psychosocial Development, 12, 4-7. Bonin, A. (2012). Jane Loevinger's stages of ego development. Mental Health, 32, 1-5. Cherry, K. (2012). Erikson's theory of psychosocial development. Psychosocial Development in Infancy and Early Childhood, 43, 12-17. Read More