PSYCH 2AA3 Lecture Notes - Lecture 1: Psych, Puberty, Funhouse
10 Jan 2017
School
Department
Course
Professor
Psych 2AA3
Lecture 23
Nov. 3rd 2016
Socio-Emotional Development I
Self-Understanding
• Based on both children an adults
• Ability to understand one’s own emotions, actions and abilities; being self-aware
o Essentially being able to recognize oneself as an independent entity, bereft of
another and being able to label/recognize oneself as a wholly distinct figure with
specific properties, appearance, skills and abilities
• Ability to understand others in different contexts and situations
Definitions
• Self – who and what we are
• Self-understanding
o Being able to understand oneself and one’s own
abilities/skills/appearances/properties
• Self is slippery and definition is vague; ambiguity exists in definition itself
• Ties to cognitive development
o Piagetian development ties
▪ Piaget’s stages outlined a developing sense of self and one’s own
limitations; developmental course of basic skills and abilities
o Meta-cognitive development
▪ Ability to step back and synthesize and be aware of your own emotions
▪ See oneself as a whole – seeing the bigger picture and your relation to
others
Self-Understanding in infancy
• What does self-understanding look like in pre-verbal infants?
• Infants cannot describe their own feelings very well
• Self-recognition
o You are your own entity
o Use or mirror-technique research
• Pre-verbal infants are aware they are themselves midway through Sensorimotor
Stage
o Gallup (1970) Animal-Mirror Expt.
▪ Do animals have consciousness?
▪ Can they understand that the thing in the mirror is them
▪ Appear to recognize that the thing in the mirror is them
▪ Probably did have “concept of self”; might differ from human
understanding
▪ Took a step further
• Put red dye on their self and violated
find more resources at oneclass.com
find more resources at oneclass.com
