Wholesalememories's Blog

Teaching Social Competence

wholesalememories — Sat, 18 Dec 2010 17:43:07 +0000

Parents and teachers can help teach social competence first by demonstrating it themselves. Second, by displaying faith in the child’s ability to achieve. Third, by explaining the existence and nature of the tools available to the child for the purposes of developing social competence (the ability to coordinate affect, cognition, and behavior). It is important that the expectations of patents and teachers for a child’s development of social competence be age appropriate.

Shall social competence have a different definition for each developmental stage? Certainly, the application of the definition requires addressing individual efficacy; it is important that children not be expected to perform beyond their developmental capacity. In that respect, social competence must be defined in terms of developmental achievement, but this task has been imposed upon us by the artificial stage demarcations that have arisen out of an intellectual construct that may have no more utility than a metaphor to help us, the observer to understand phenomena. Those demarcations may well be analogous to latitude and longitude lines drawn upon a globe. Developmental social competence underneath these lines of demarcation just might be a seamless spectrum. Far more important is a multi-dimensional criterion for assessment of social competence.

Research Validity

wholesalememories — Sat, 18 Dec 2010 17:41:19 +0000

nternal validity is the result of an experiment being crafted in such a manner that the outcome of the experiment matches its teleology. That is to say it in fact does what it purports. In order to have internal validity the experiment must demonstrate that it was the variable manipulation and not some other extraneous cause that brought about the effect. External validity is the ability of the experimental results to be extrapolated to the general population or to another sample group.

Threats to validity are important considerations when designing studies because first the most effective response to validity threats is in the original design, specifically the design of the sampling procedure. The choice of participants must be made in such a manner as to maximize the similarity both between groups and between the groups and the population at large in order to minimize the threats to validity. There should be similarity between groups to increase internal validity; similarity between both groups and the general population to increase external validity.

Because studies take place over time the elapse of time itself can be a confounding variable especially in the study of children wherein the elapse of even a small amount of time can effect drastic changes in the operating parameters of the subjects. Also because experiments take place over time, attrition is a threat to validity not only mortality proper, but attrition due to relocation and simple dropout. These changes in the selected groups may alter the parameters carefully chosen at the beginning of the study.

During the time interval between the beginning and conclusion of a study, events may occur outside of the experiment which have a confounding effect even if irrelevant to the study. For example, a study of seasonal affective disorder in New York City conducted from August through December of 2001 might have confounded results through no fault of the study design. Outside influences can also threaten external validity, wherein a subset of a group receives an experience that enhances or detracts from the experimental treatment. Whereas the threat to internal validity is to the attribution of cause, the threat to external validity is to generalizability.

Naturally occurring developmental changes to the sample population may also introduce confounding causes. Activities of the sample population outside of the experiment may also have an adverse effect on the end result for example; a new exercise or diet fad amongst the general population may spoil the results of a concurrent weight loss study.

Pretesting may sensitize participants to not only the content of the instrumentation but also to the process of testing. Improved scores on tests may reflect improvement on what is being measured but it may merely measure the aspect of practice makes perfect. Test-pretest sensitivity is a threat to internal validity that threatens external validity as well in that the experiment repeated without the pretest may yield different results not attributable to any other factors in the repetition thereby adversely affecting generalizability.

When the administration or scoring of a test is inconsistent, the interpretation of the results has no sound basis. Validity can not only be affected by the interpretation of the statistics, but also by the statistical model itself. While regression toward the mean may be ameliorated by dropping outliers out of the equation, it is a trifle naïf to assume that the choice of the use of the mean or the median has no effect on the analysis of the data. Also the experimenters themselves may have a deleterious effect on results, whether in the administration of the test or by unintended non-verbal cues of the tester. The threat to external validity labeled reactive arrangement is also known as the “Hawthorne effect” which has been explained as an effect of participants being aware of the experiment. However there is a simpler explanation. Elton Mayo’s observations were of worker productivity at a factory (Bell, Paul A., Green, Thomas C., Fisher, Jeffery D., Baum, Andrew 2001). Anyone who has worked on a production line would be able to explain the increase in productivity when an experimenter changed the independent variable not so much as the result of condition changes but as a result of worker fatigue having a smaller effect on worker productivity when the worker is under supervisory or other observation. It is also trifle naïf to assume that observation has no effect upon the thing observed.

Lev Vygotsky

wholesalememories — Tue, 14 Dec 2010 16:12:07 +0000

Vygotsky’s theories are often criticized out of a misapprehension of his concepts in their contextual setting. He was a showpiece of Soviet science. Living and working in a totalitarian régime, he had to pay far more than lip service to Marxist dogma. However the fact that Marxist doctrine forms the foundation for Vygotsky’s thought does not in and of itself disqualify his theories. It is the economic theory of value that does not pass the acid test of empirical experience in the realm of time. Vygotsky’s theories were specific to human development and he describes them in a manner analogous to dialectical materialism. Specifically, the dialecticalism which was the Hegelian foundation for the thought that Marx took in a Materialistic direction away from the Absolute Spirit of Hegel.

He introduces a dichotomy between the satisfaction of developmental hurdles by the individual and the race as to methodology. For example, the conceptual contextual background to dialectical materialism is that of the evolution of social structure in history leading to the dictatorship of the proletariat as a culmination similar to the culmination of physical evolutionary forces in the human species. This goes beyond mere phylogeny and ontogeny. In accordance with the Marxist theory of history there is an element of social development to Vygotsky’s theories. This forms a background to the foreground of individual development. This dialogue between phylogeny and ontogeny can be described in geometrical terms as there are multiple dimensions. There is an epistemological dimension, an active dimension, and more. In activity there are the implementation of tool usage and its development through practice. Signs are transmitters of meaning, but what is meaning? It is by communication that existential aloneness is transformed into meaning. It is the dialectical exchange between the individual and society.

Joseph Campbell speaks of social roles as masks in his lecture series, “Mythos”. He indicates a possibility of minimal relation between the inner and outer selves.

Once again, the meaning is found (in Marxist theory) in the dialogue. Activity consists of spectrums of development in four stages. The practice of tool usage begins with the use of the hands to insert items in one’s mouth and continues unto the construction of complicated machines.

Motivation has an additional fifth step that consists in the discrimination between ends and means. This step is primary because ends and means are the pathway to action.

There is only one demarcation for the spectrum between internal and external development because there must be a developmental foundation laid before interaction between them can occur.

The delta vectors for these values are different for history than for the child. First, Marxist theory of social evolution through history is an unsupported presupposition made in advance of empirical data. But there are also similarities such as long term interactions between levels. Interactionism is an integral part of dialectical Materialism but both individual and social development begins with tool usage. We have no soft tissue fossil evidence of laryngeal development, so we have no idea when vocal communication entered the social development of our ancestors, but it is not unreasonable to assume that the employment of hand axes preceded communication except for communication the construction techniques necessary for building a stone hand axe by example. But in the child there is no doubt that the vocal manipulation of the environment precedes the digital.

Beyond the most basic examples of stimulus-response association and cut and try techniques, deliberative judgments concerning concrete relations and tool usage as a means toward an end describe a progression away from Interactionism. Thinking in terms of concepts in the absence of sensory input whereby cultural values are internalized, and rational analysis employing mathematical and logical operations are the systems on mentation that describe us as humans and the gulf between us and beasts. The chimpanzee, who employs a stick even one of constructed length to get at a bananna, does so in a flash of insight and not by any synthetic or analytic judgments. It is human thought that transcends empirical tranactionalism.

The distinctiveness of human cognition was attributed by Vygotsky to cultural history, but this is a reflection of the Marxist theoretical environment in which he operated. To state that the analysis by dialectical materialism upon human history discovers a difference between animal behavior and human in terms of the adaptability and development of animals and the adaptability and historical development adds nothing to the equation beyond humans develop through history and animals do not because humans have culture and animals do not. The difference between synthetic and analytical judgments is essential to understanding this failing of Vygotsky’s. This statement beyond that of the species does not add anything in terms of descriptions of qualities of the predicate and while this may be criticized as a positive historical error of pettio principi, one must understand that for Vygotsky’s political and scientific overlords, Dialectical Materialism was an article of faith, and his position in society, was dependent upon developing a Marxist psychology in line with the Marxist philosophy of history, no self revelation of the Absolute Spirit culminating in human art, philosophy and religion allowed, the ultimate self-revelation of the Absolute Spirit was the development of the dictatorship of the Proletariat. Was he merely expressing the dialogue between his inner and outer self by employing active motivation to interact with his social environment?

References:

Killian, Melanie, Langer, Jonas Ed., 1998 Piaget Evolution and Development Lawrence Earlbaum and Assoc. Mahwah, New Jersey, and Killen, Melanie

Langford, Peter E., 2005 Vygotsky’s Developmental and Educational Psychology Psychology Press, Taylor and Francis Group, Hove and New York

John Dewey Human Nature and conduct

wholesalememories — Tue, 14 Dec 2010 16:09:42 +0000

There is a positive and negative side to morals. In ethics it may be sufficient to do no harm, but morals go beyond mere avoidance of the contumely of society. This is the spiritual pride of the prodigal son’s elder brother. Claiming moral praiseworthiness only on the basis of an absence of blameworthiness is above all only another permutation of self-concern. Not being the cause of ill is not the same as creating a new good. Yet there are some who do not break their arm when patting themselves on the back based upon not being a killer or bringing harm with the best of intentions. On the other hand, there are those whose exaltation of an ideal world wherein imperfection could be seen as an opportunity for real positive change instead of confirming evidence of the dichotomy between the ideal and actual and furthermore a confirmation of a neo-Platonic distinction between personal realities such as that theorized by Rene’ Descartes.

Indeed, the Cartesian solution for the mind-body problem leads some to give up real physical morality and ethics as a bad idea unattainable in a world not ideal, something only to be pursued within the individual consciousness. This aversion to the actual drags morality away form ethics; makes it something personal and not social. Something that is divorced from human interaction, something that is exclusively human inaction. All religions condemn this form do unto others . . . to practice compassion at all times to all creatures. Even Islam whose ideal is a religious society teaches that morality is a matter of social interaction.

Dewey elucidates two theories of social change, one wherein all social improvement is founded upon the preeminent change of individual character, and one for which improved morality “trickles down” from a primary change in social institutions. Each, in promoting its preferred theory of change, asserts the impossibility of the obverse. Each limits human individual freedom. One, by exalting it to exclusive ethereality, and the other by denying it completely. Shall a person contemplate their navel until it absorbs them, or shall society be condemned to follow some law of historical evolution or dialectical materialism into the new horizon? Some would deny this dilemma. Like Dewey these would point out that human behavior is the interaction between the individual and their surroundings. Environmental psychology for the natural surroundings and social psychology for group behavior. But is group behavior the same as interaction between the individual and social environment? We see that social change can stimulate individual change and individual change can stimulate social change but is this organic change that brings reform just as planned economies fail, planned social reform brings unintended consequences. One cannot merely do one thing.

Morals are a science of ends, means, and actions. Morality is not constrained to stasis as character alone. Morality is dynamic. Morality is a matter of intelligent design. It is teleological; involved with final causes. The forces of relativism confuse the actions of the individual, the interrelationship of the individual to the environment, and the individual themselves. The morality of an act is not the result of a changing environment, but the result of the individual’s choice of interaction with that environment.

Teaching children social competence

wholesalememories — Tue, 14 Dec 2010 16:08:02 +0000

Global Warming?

wholesalememories — Sun, 07 Nov 2010 01:02:27 +0000

Global warming is s shibboleth of the modern day. Here in Oregon, a few years ago the governor punished the chief climatologist of Oregon State University with excommunication (its equivalent) for insisting in the face of the dictates of current faith, the equivalent of the earth moving around the sun.
Without citing references the partisans claim that the earth has warmed two degrees Fahrenheit in the last 100 years and seven degrees Fahrenheit since the last ice age. I say equally without supporting references that Greenland ice cores show that during the last ice age, global temperatures varied through twenty degrees centigrade in the space of one year except I can provide references and will at a later date.

These same partisans attribute global warming to human activity as evidenced by the conversion of forest to farmland, but from the end of the last ice age, until the Holocene period, far more forest land in Europe was converted into savanna by naturally occurring global warming.
The consequences of global warming are climate change. Patterns of erosion on the Egyptian sphinx indicating water flow and extinct tropical coral reefs off the coast of Norway, coal deposits in Antarctica and mammoths frozen solid in ice in Siberia so that their meat was fresh and edible as was the vegetable material in their teeth and stomachs show that the earth has undergone far greater warmings and coolings and far quicker than a few paltry degrees per century. Again I can provide references and will at my convenience, I just want to illustrate how the partisans for global warming throw out supposed data just as some religious leaders throw out historical data without any backing. Just how much we are talking about articles of faith here is exactly my point.
Forty years ago ecologists made dire predictions, but better forest and farmland management resulting in greater productivity prevented a catastrophic explosion of the population bomb. It was not that Thomas Malthus was wrong, it was just that man helped nature to set a bigger table. Still it moves!
Global warming 55million years before the present, is evidenced by a sediment layer whose carbon is unusually rich in the carbon-12 isotope (light carbon) indicates a massive release of methane from oceanic methane hydrate.
Temperature variation is normal, because an ice age is really the earth’s answer to global warming to wit large massive sheets of ice do not form as a result of colder temperatures. Ice draws moisture out of the air. Frost is the result of cold temperatures. Large massive sheets of ice are the result of snow pack. Snow piled upon snow piled upon snow piled upon snow. For a glacier to form, there must first be tremendous amounts of precipitation. A prerequisite of precipitation is evaporation, A prerequisite of evaporation is increased molecular motion of water molecules. Motion will not increase without an influx of energy. Ergo, an ice age evidenced by massive glaciation without a prior enormous heat wave will not occur. Such a heat wave could occur as a result of an asteroid strike with a resultant shock wave traveling through the earth’s crust, disrupting tectonic plates, initiating global volcanic activity. Whether large increases in atmospheric water vapor without volcanic smoke would lead to increased snowfall or more greenhouse effect remains to be seen. But the decrease of global temperature as a result of the K-T event (evidenced by a deposition layer of iridium ash) has as its mirror image the Permian extinction whose deposition layer of light carbon indicates global temperature from a massive methane release either from a cometary strike or a release into the atmosphere of seafloor methane hydrate.

Gender Roles in a Subsistence Level Economy

wholesalememories — Sun, 07 Nov 2010 00:42:25 +0000

Whether one believes in evolution or special creationism, at one point in human history, humans were greatly outnumbered by large carnivorous species. At that time, social cooperation for defense was necessary for survival. Whether the human economy was as hunter-killers or as scavengers is irrelevant as in either case that economy was subsistence level only. Due to physiological sexual dimorphism, and the necessity of distributing labor in the most efficient manner possible, food provider roles became concentrated in the male. This was because his greater size gave him greater ranging ability. Also, nurturing duties became concentrated in the female, for breast feeding infants not only restricted her range, but also made her the most efficient mode of storing extra calories. This division of labor developed into women becoming the servants of life, while men became the servants of society. It is the nature of the case of child rearing that for some period of time at the beginning of one’s life, one must be the center of the universe, due to the inability of the human infant to care for itself. Gender roles confer adulthood differently. In a subsistence level economy, a girl becomes a woman purely by biology, the onset of menses determines her role, the ability to bear children and produce milk. But the male role must be learned, larger musculature does not automatically confer skill with the spear or the thrown rock. In a subsistence level economy, boys must be made into men. They are initiated into warrior society. They are forcefully taught self-sacrifice, to go out, gather food, and bring it back and give it to others. Thus biology confers a certain self centeredness in the female role as the number of women in a population controls the number of potential individuals in the next generation, women are charged with the conservation of resources if only to preserve the ability, through good nutrition, to produce breast milk, which in times of distress can be a source of calories for the entire group. Thus even though men may need more calories for the chase, it is to the advantage of all that the majority of food produced be given to the female. The male, however, does not acquire weapons skill by virtue of his testes dropping. He must be taught, not only the skills to acquire food, but the social necessity of bring it back home to feed the rest of the group. Self-sacrifice must be integrated into the socialization of his gender role for the greater good. Just as it is the female’s role to be who she is, it is the male’s role to go beyond what he is. As the males were busy procuring food, it is more likely that the female invented agriculture through foraging near home, and through snatch crops, also invented animal husbandry and domestication. Thus it can be said that civilization is the invention and gift of the female. Once civilization was a going concern, agriculture and animal husbandry was absorbed into the male role. While living in the garden of Eden or as arboreal proto-humans, food production was not an issue, all gleaned as their appetite dictated. Survival issues were mostly defense against predation or invasion which was addressed by group action under the leadership of the “Big Man”. The big man also prevented petty domestic squabbles from getting out of hand. He kept order. Once humans ate bread by the sweat of their brow”, greater social organization than a big man and a pecking order was needed; gender roles were developed by society according to what worked. Males were bigger, males did the physical work. Females gave and preserved life, females were, in their gender roles, the life of the tribe; thus they were a commodity that a failing tribe might seek to steal.

Territoriality

wholesalememories — Sun, 07 Nov 2010 00:41:39 +0000

Robert Ardrey postulated that territory for early humans was a function of the pair bond. Extrapolating from stamping ground behavior of certain ungulates, wherein males possessed of territory ignored available females outside of their personal territory, he developed the idea that territory was not for sex but that sex was for territory. While early humans lived in communal groups, the greater and longer dependency of the human infant required greater care giving organization than that utilized by chimpanzees or baboons. This required some modus of identification for the community sub-group unit known to us as family. For this then territory was the glue which cemented the pair bond and kept family units from dissolving into the communal group as a whole.

Persuasion

wholesalememories — Sun, 07 Nov 2010 00:38:43 +0000

The more strongly held an attitude is the more difficult it is to change also the greater lengths of time of view is held the more difficult used to change there are Cross links to other attitudes and behaviors a social identity an attitude that is publicly known is the most difficult to change there are three components to persuasion the messenger the message and the audience and this would be the logos and pathos of rhetoric messenger the messenger needs to be perceived as being attractive in that the messenger is similar to the audience the messenger needs to be perceived as credible and reliable there are two types of message one-sided and two-sided. One-sided message is preaching to acquire the and the two cited message is a told one system analysis type of message with the present hurt will present the audience’s side of the argument first and contrary arguments last of this arises out of Carl Rogers concept of unconditional positive regard in the audience there’s variety between an within the audience’s the paces important a slow pace degrades the estimation of the messenger to the behavior feel the feeling in attitude change it is necessary to change itself talk the internal dialogue inhibition of counter arguments behavior that is ignore to drops out there appears to be a time limit to attitude’s attitude no inoculation since he is a dual process highly motivated thinking is the process low motivation thinking is shallow process the quality of an argument the substance of an argument gives weight the relevance of the argument to the audience gives the argument await there is an inverse proportional ratio between the quality and the quantity of the argument the issue must be involving to the objects mood is important there are highly suggest will people they have low self-esteem and low confidence and a high interpersonal trust the very young and the very old are the most common members of this group

Group Therapy

wholesalememories — Sun, 07 Nov 2010 00:38:09 +0000

The central issue to group therapy, as in any therapy is how does the therapy improve the quality of life for the recipient? The methodology of applying therapy is determined by this question as a paradigm. The individual therapist has a vested interest in the theoretical foundation for the therapy (s)he prescribes. Client improvement may well have different attributions based upon these theoretical biases. Irrespective of theoretical and attributional changes, the life quality improvements that therapy brings to the client are often brought about by the same methods of change. Obviously change only comes about by action, and that action is fueled by the hope of effectiveness. Long term potentiation is an example of a physiological change brought about by a psychological state.

In order to amalgamate differing theories of therapy, one must separate the letter from the spirit, the ritual from the life, the mechanism of change from the actual change itself. The core of therapy, like any other core is the definition, the seed, the means of renewal.