Human Behavior and the Social Environment: A Look at Three Theories

Development of a person throughout his or her whole lifetime can be seen either as a continuous process or as a final status to be attained. Psychologists agree

Life span developmental psychology takes a scientific approach to human growth and change, focusing on change during the life span. There are three main aspects to life span development: cognitive, social, and physical development. This class is not simply a discussion of nature vs. nurture, it explores the interaction between genetic and environmental factors that orient us towards specific behaviors. Initially, my views on life span development were limited to more sociological factors, and did not take into consideration physical developments of the brain. In relation to my personal and professional identity this course has made me realize that development occurs on a spectrum and that not everyone develops at the same time, in the same ways, making me more understanding and compassionate towards those who developed differently than me. The three most important lessons I have learned from this class are that development occurs throughout the entire life span, infants begin learning at a very young age, and that senescence begins as early as young adulthood.

Social aging is referring to the changes in individual’s roles and relationship in the society as they age. There are many different theories concerning sociological aging. Social theories on aging examine the relationship between individual experiences and social institutions e.g., aging and retirement; aging and institutional care; aging and government policy etc (Barkan 2012). All have limitations, and some can be considered more than others when attempting to understand social changes in aging. Also individuals move through life surrounded by social support system. Some theories of aging such as, role theory, activity theory, modernization, etc. consist of different ways older adults transition through life such as, networks of relatives, friends, and organization that help provide emotional support and help in managing activities in daily living.

Professor Heck defines role as “a pattern of behaviors, rights, and duties associated with a position in a group”. Role is identified as an abstract idea of culture due to the ways of life of individuals or groups within a society. For example, in some cultures, a marriage between children within the age of 13 is considered a norm. That child would occupy the role as a wife and possibly a mother at that young age. This situation is one example on how role is identified with culture. As each culture differs, the roles within are distinct as well.

Development psychology refers to the scientific study of the systematic psychological changes that normally occur to human beings throughout their growth period from birth to old age. It was originally concerned with children and infants, but it has since expanded to include the entire life span of mankind including adolescence and adulthood. Development psychology covers the extent to which human development occurs through gradual accumulation of knowledge, and the extent to which children born with inmate mental structures learn through experience. Several psychological theories and approaches like the behavioral, humanistic, psychoanalytic, biological, and cognitive approaches have been developed to explain the

The three theories I have chosen to discuss are all extremely relevant ideas; although I prefer Erik Erikson’s stage of psychosocial development. Erik Erikson’s theory covers a person’s entire lifespan showing the many different stages throughout one’s life. A person is always

After the event, I was able to consider the impact of human behavior on the social environment. I feel that the ecological theory fits with my experience. Ecological theory has an emphasis on the interdependence of organism and environment (Gitterman & Heller, 2011). The social work profession has a long and proud tradition of comprehending the complexities of client’s and their environments, offering services and doing so with a commitment to the social justice issues that often compound private problems (Gitterman & Heller, 2011).

The life span perspective in Paul Baltes ' view is the "study of constancy and change in behaviour throughout the life course from conception to death.” (Baltes, 1987, p.611). Being a development psychologist, Baltes constructed seven frameworks that shows that development is multi directional, which means different processes of change all through the lifespan. Secondly, development is multiply influenced by a person 's development, an effect brought about from both biological and environmental factors. Thirdly, understanding development requires multiple disciplines, development that analyse in all directions so that it can be understood through many perspectives

The general concept of Social Work is defined by human behavior and the environment. These two components are the tools that give meaning to the profession and narrate its functions in the broadest terms. Behavior is a characteristic of living things which is often identified with life itself. Modern day Social Work practice dates back to several social movements of the 19th century and beyond and to two very prominent perspectives on the origin of human problems: those aspects that viewed the 'person' as the central point for change and those

In this Individual Theory Paper, I decided to write about Erikson’s Psychosocial Theory of Development. Erik Erikson is greatly influenced by Freud but instead of concentrating on psychosexual stages, Erikson choose to focus more on the individual’s psychosocial stages as well as their personality development. Psychosocial theory can be defined as a study about human development as an outcome of the interaction in which involves the psychological or the needs of an individual, and the expectations from their society (Merriam-Webster, 2016). Freud’s stage theory was too specifically focused on an individual’s body zones, and he also vaguely discussed about the interaction between children and their significant others wherein Erikson was trying to elaborate by introducing some comprehensible concepts stage by stage in his theory (Crain, 2011). In Erikson’s theory, he tend to highlight the role of society as well as the conflict that can occur, and this made Erikson an ‘ego’ psychologist. An assumption was made that every stage is faced with different conflicts and if the individual fail to resolve it at that time, it will be dragged into their next stages of life. Thus, Erikson suggested a lifespan model of development for his theory that is set well in eight stages.

Generally speaking a rational analysis (RA) is “an explanation of an aspect of human behavior based on the assumption that it is optimized somehow to the structure of the environment” (Anderson, 1991, p. 471). Anderson (1991) developed a model to predict memory performance where the goal of memory is assumed to be to provide access to needed information acquired in the past. This model is an idealization that represents what memory items are made readily available, given a model of the environment in which the memory is to be retrieved, the value of retrieving the memory, and the cost of retrieving the memory (Anderson). On this idealization, a rationally designed information-retrieval system stops retrieving when the probability that the memory is relevant to the current context is low enough that the expected gain (measured in some appropriate way relative to the agent’s goals) of retrieving the target memory is less than the cost of retrieving the memory (Anderson).

The article’s main social concern is to examine prevention and intervention methods and their subsequent impact on family poverty and children’s mental, emotional and behavioral health. As a conceptual framework, Yoshikawa, Aber and Beardslee (2012), tackle four aspects of poverty, the family and child as the main subjects or selection factors, the multidimensional nature of poverty, the mechanisms through which poverty effects children on an individual, relational and institutional level, and the multidimensionality of children’s outcomes. The authors used two types of interventions. The first set of interventions were advanced by experts in child and family development, targeting the mediating mechanisms such as

Human behavior and the environment are interconnected, for an instant, we learn behaviors from family, peers and the environment around us. In 1600, English philosopher John Lock stated that the human brain starts out as a blank slate “His ideas that we are all born as a tabula rasa (blank slate) still dominate much social and political thinking today, although they are challenged by some neuropsychologists.” (SMITH, 2003) Albert Bandura concentration was on “social cognitive theory is at the core of his prominence. In this theory, cognition plays a central role in the regulation of and motivation for behavior. Its key concepts include vicarious learning, symbolic thought, outcome expectancies, self-efficacy, self-reflection,

Group behaviour, also known as gregarious behaviour, occurs in a wide variety of animals including, but not limited to, invertebrates (Ritz, 1994), fish (Shaw, 1970), birds (Lack, 1968), wildebeests (Gueron and Levin, 1993), lions (Bertram, 1975), and primates (Nakagawa, 1990). Benefits of group living include improved reproductive success, increased foraging success, and improved predation survival (Hamilton, 1971; Reluga and Viscido, 2005). Social behaviours evolve when the benefits of group living outweigh the costs (Fleagle, 2013). Predation risk is lowered in social groups by confusing the predator so the predator’s success decreases (Hall et al., 1986; Smith and Warburton, 1992), by providing improved vigilance – more

In modern day society bestiality and zoophilia are more often than not automatically associated as a sexual taboo and being morally wrong. As this is often always assumed, rarely is discussed to why this is the case, what is the reasoning behind our pre-disposed notations of what these two words mean? Generally people cite reasons such as because the normal reaction is disgust it must be morally wrong, or that because animals are unclean it would hazardous to one’s health (Milligan , 2011). These assumptions seem to be common and often used in place of a more scientific and ethical discussion on why bestiality is frowned upon. For instance, as animals cannot give consent sexual relations even those considered mutual should be considered as interspecies sexual assault. It may also be considered abnormal behavior as there have been many studies showing that bestiality occurring in children creates more unstable people later in life suggesting that this deviant behavior has negative effects(Beetz, 2005), (Earls, 2009), (Hensley, 2010), (Holoyda, 2016). It is no coincidence that bestiality occurs most frequently among violent offenders, sex offenders and those that have been sexually abused.