This assignment requires me to research the main psychological factors that have an affect upon human growth and development, I shall identify the primary social factors that influence psychological and social development then apply them to myself; discussing how these factors may impact upon the individual and within a counselling setting. I will also deliver to my peers a presentation on Daniel N.
Stern and his work relating to human growth and development (see appendix), discuss my research of his theory within this assignment then comment on the work of additional theorists. Daniel N. Stern Professor Daniel N. Stern is one of the world’s leading scientist in the field of infant psychology along side, Bowlby, and Winnicotte. Stern developed detailed models of how infants as young as a few weeks of age begin to develop and retain a representation of the mother-child interactions which they are experiencing.
He demonstrated that the infant could bring to the mother-child interaction an influence of its own, and that the very young infant’s inherent or genetically given characteristics, reflected largely in its patterns of affective sign and degree of motor activity and non-verbal communication, these were factors in later behaviour that could be characterized as secure or insecure. Stern’s studies also showed that the quality of mother-infant “face play” starting at about three months has a profound and durable effect on later measures of security and cognition.
Stern believed for the infant to develop representations of him/herself, its mother or other primary carer, and the nature of their interactions, it is obviously necessary that infants are capable of constructing and retaining these representations in some form of nonverbal or preverbal memory. It was once believed that only toward the latter part of the first year of life, and that for the first couple of months after birth the infant is generally unresponsive and unaware of the physical and social environment, but rather lives in a sort of autistic fantasy.
Over the past 25 years, the notion that even a very young infant does not distinguish itself as separate from its environment nor develops representations of objects and events has been systematically contested by experimental observations of infants by a large number of researchers. Stern (1985; also cited in Bowlby, 1988, and Beebe and Lachmann, 1988) presents his own work and that of many other researchers demonstrating that infants virtually from birth are able to perceive and begin to store images of perceptual constancies and inconstancies in their environment, including those representing spatial shape and patterning.
These capacities are seen as necessary in the process of developing secure or insecure attachments. The shape of events in time and the infant experiences in interactions with the mother (or carer) are retained by the infant as preverbal representations, and if their adaptive or maladaptive disposition are maintained consistently through the second year, these representations come to form a significant component of the growing child’s sense of core self.