Story of Psychology - Morton Hunt [227]
—A young mother, on the floor next to her year-old daughter, suddenly pretends she has hurt herself. “Oh! Ooo! It hurts!” she cries out, clutching her knee. The little girl reaches out as if to pat her, then bursts into tears and hides her face in a pillow.
—In a small office, a psychologist holds up a green poker chip and says to the ten-year-old girl seated on the other side of the desk, “Either the chip in my hand is red or it is not yellow. True or false?” She promptly says, “False.” Later that day he does the same with a fifteen-year-old girl; she thinks a moment, then says, “True.”
—A woman researcher plays a tape-recorded scene for a dental student. In it, a Mrs. Harrington, new in town, goes to a dentist for the first time. He says that some of her expensive crowns are defective and cannot be repaired, and that she has advanced periodontal disease, which her previous dentist did nothing about. Mrs. Harrington is upset and disbelieving. The researcher stops the tape and asks the student to assume the role of the dentist and deal with the situation.
In their diverse activities, these people have a common quest: the discovery of the processes by which the psychological acorn becomes a psychological oak. Specifically:
—After inserting the opaque lens, the experimenters trained the rat to run a maze, then sacrificed it and examined its brain under a microscope. Their aim was to find out, by comparing its right and left visual cortexes, the extent to which experience increased the number of dendritic branches in the neurons. (Because the left eye was obscured, the right visual cortex did not receive messages during the maze training.)
—The heartbeat of the pregnant woman’s fetus was being monitored, and proved to be more rapid than when the same poem was read above her abdomen by a stranger. The unborn child evidently recognized its mother’s voice.
—The four-month-old seeing the blinking light showed surprise when the flashing became less frequent; even at that age, an infant is aware of regularity in temporal intervals.
—The researcher who drew the curtain, hiding the toy dog, was exploring the development of infant memory—in this case, the awareness that a hidden object still exists.
—The man asking to be taught how to play marbles—Jean Piaget, in the 1920s—was studying the development of moral reasoning in young children.
—The mother simulating pain was collaborating with researchers in seeking to pinpoint the earliest appearance of empathy in children.
—The researcher asking the odd questions about a green poker chip was examining the growth of logical reasoning in children.
—The woman asking the dental student how he would handle a difficult situation was investigating the development of moral reasoning at the adult level.
These are only a few examples of the multiform activities and interests of contemporary developmental psychologists. Their field is a very broad specialty, and in a way the quintessential one: It deals with all that makes us become what we are and with the ways in which we can influence those processes.
Until the seventeenth century, there was little interest in this vast subject. Until then, according to the historian Philippe Ariès, the dominant view in much of Europe was that children were miniature adults, with small-scale adult traits, virtues, and vices. They were cared for until about the age of six, when they could care for themselves. Thereafter they were dressed like adults, put to work alongside them, punished like them for wrong deeds or disobedience to authority, and even hanged for thievery.
That attitude toward childhood began to change when Locke asserted that the infant’s mind was a blank slate. But his theory of what turns it into an adult mind was rudimentary and grossly incomplete; development was believed to be due simply to the accumulation of experiences and associations.
Two centuries later, Darwinian