Child and Educational Psychology

Explore the mother-daughter relationship during adolescence, highlighting parental influence, leading by example, and how listening, safe spaces, and open talks about sex support teenage girls through hormones and growth.

Explore the psychology of college girls, including depression, eating disorders, and substance use, and how family and life stress affect academic success.

Learn how conception begins with the zygote and chromosomes and how hereditary transmission shapes genes and DNA, then trace prenatal development from ovum to embryo and fetus and sex determination.

Explore how early caregiver–infant interactions shape newborn mental health through eye contact, attachment, and responsive care, highlighting oxytocin, sleep-wake cycles, and skin-to-skin bonding.

Explore the major schools of psychology—structuralism, functionalism, and behaviorism—through introspection, learning, conditioning, and their impact on education and psychology.

Examine the psychoanalytic tradition's focus on conscious and unconscious processes, dream analysis, and defense mechanisms. Compare Freud's theories with Adler's and Jung's alternatives, and discuss psychoanalysis as one-on-one psychotherapy.

Explore Gestalt psychology, a whole-person approach that treats perception as a configuration of the situation, emphasizing insight, active learning, and the primacy of the whole over parts.

Explore humanistic psychology as the third force in psychology, emphasizing free will, self-actualization, and the study of the whole person and personal experience through Maslow and Rogers.

Trace how growth and development differ yet interact, from prenatal life through infancy, childhood, adolescence to maturity, emphasizing genetic and environmental influences on physical, mental, social, and emotional change.

Uncover the principle of development, including continuity, lack of uniformity, and individual differences. Explore how heredity and environment interact, guiding growth from general to specific through integration and proximal-distal patterns.

Explore Piaget's cognitive development theory through sensorimotor, preoperational, concrete operational, and formal operational stages, and understand schemes, assimilation, accommodation, and equilibrium shaping infancy to adulthood.

Explains Piaget's stages from sensorimotor development with object permanence to preoperational symbol use, egocentrism, concrete operations with conservation and classification, and formal operations with abstract reasoning.

Examine Piaget's development theory and its educational impact, highlighting active discovery, equilibrium and disequilibrium, readiness, object permanence, and developmentally appropriate curricula that match teaching to cognitive states.

Explore how language and social interaction shape cognition through Vygotsky's theory, illustrating the zone of proximal development, scaffolding, inner speech, and collaborative learning to advance learners.

Explore Erick's eight psychosocial development stages from trust to integrity, detailing each stage's conflicts and outcomes and how social and emotional development unfolds across the lifespan.

Motivation is the internal process that directs effort toward satisfying needs and goals. It compares intrinsic and extrinsic motivation and notes primary and secondary motives shaping learning.

Explain McDougall's instinct theory as innate drivers of behavior, tied to emotions. Describe how it links instinctive cycles to cognition, affection, and motion, while critics argue many actions are learned.

Hull's drive reduction theory links hunger, thirst, and pain relief to motivation. The lecture also covers Freud's life and death instincts, behaviorist reinforcement, social learning, and cognitive goal-driven motivation.

Maslow's hierarchy of needs explains how unsatisfied needs drive motivation and shape personality development. Teachers cultivate motivation through intrinsic interest, curiosity, praise, rewards, and knowledge of progress.

Explore what learning is as a relatively permanent change in behavior caused by experience, and examine associative and cognitive learning, retention, memory, and the learning cycle from perceiving to feedback.

Identifies factors affecting learning, including physical and mental health, readiness, motivation, aspirations, goals, and learning experiences that shape outcomes.

Explore the behavioral approach to learning through classical conditioning, detailing Pavlov’s dog experiments with unconditional and conditioned stimuli and responses, including the bell signaling food.

Explore operant conditioning as learning through rewards and punishments, linking behavior to consequences with reinforcement strengthening responses and punishment decreasing them, highlighting Skinner's experiments and shaping.

Operant conditioning shapes behavior with immediate reinforcement, schedules, and avoidance of punishment, while discovery learning, Gestalt insight, and social learning theory emphasize whole understanding, self-guided inquiry, and positive role models.

Explore how sexual motivation functions as a physiologically based drive, shaped by learning and culture, and how Masters and Johnson describe the four stages of sexual response.

Explore the four stages of the sexual response cycle—excitement, plateau, orgasm, and resolution—as described by Masters and Johnson. Note the sex-based differences, including male refractory periods versus women.

Explore the psycho sexual stages from oral to phallic, highlighting estrogen and testosterone, hypothalamic control of sexual motivation, and the roles of external stimuli, emotion, and learning across cultures.

Compare human sexual motivation with other primary motives, showing how hunger, thirst, and warmth drive survival, while sex involves increase and decrease of arousal, energy use, and hormonal regulation.

Explore patterns of sexual behavior in America, from Kinsey's early surveys to the Chicago national study. Examine partner counts, intercourse frequency, and the diversity of sexual orientation.

Explore how basic emotions are inborn and how culture and learning shape emotion expression and interpretation, with cross-cultural studies (Ekman, 1992) showing varying display and interpretation of emotions.

Explore why humans show aggression across cultures by examining happiness differences, and evaluate instinct theory, catharsis, learning, and beliefs as drivers of violence.

Explore how frustration triggers aggression per the frustration aggression theory, with examples from children, nations, and heat, and contrast social learning and cognitive theories of aggression.

Explore how harsh punishment models aggression, peer rejection drives gang affiliation, and frustration and social learning theory shape violent youth gangs, belonging, and drug sales dynamics.