JAMES-LANGE THEORY

JAMES – LANGE THEORY OF EMOTIONS-

William James, who was the founder of the functionalist perspective in the early history of psychology and a physiologist and psychologist from Denmark, Carl Lange, both came up with an explanation of emotion so similar to each other that it is refered to as the James-Lange theory of emotion. It is said in this theory that a stimulus of some sort (for example, a snarling dog) produces a physiological reaction. This reaction is nothing but the arousal of the sympathetic nervous system(fight or flight) which produces bodily sensations such as increased heart rate, dry mouth, and rapid breathing. In short they believed that physical arousal led to the labeling of the emotion (here, “fear”). The idea behind the James – Lange theory was that an emotion was not a direct reaction to some environment event, but rather a reaction to how the body was responding to that environmental event. For example, the line given explains the theory well, “ I am nervous because my stomach is fluttering”. In short the theory can be represented by the following flowchart:

STIMULUS à PHYSIOLOGICAL CHANGES à EMOTION.

For example:

Snarling dog à ANS arousal, changes in the body à conscious fear.

The James-Lange theory did more than merely focus on bodily responses (both autonomic and somatic) occurring during stress. The theory put forward the notion that these bodily responses formed the basis for an emotional experience.

CRITICISM:

• James identified emotion with outward expression only but it is not so in reality. Another psychologist Snout argued that it may be impossible for emotions to exist without expressing itself, but it does mean that the sense of expression constitute the whole emotion.
• Emotion not only contains physiological expression but it also includes effects of it on our perception, thinking and behavior. So with the abstraction of feelings of bodily symptoms from consciousness, emotion never dies down.
• James said,” if one refused to express an emotion it dies”. But it is not so , emotion if suppressed can never readily be withered away. The strength of a particular emotion doesn’t end or finish. Later on it expresses itself in a more vigorous way.  Moreover, it may have detrimental effects on physical and mental health as well. 

FORM PERCEPTION

GESTALT PRINCIPLES OF PERCEPTION-

Gestalt theory first arouse in 1890 as a reaction to the prevalent psychological theory of the time – atomism. Atomists believed the nature of things to be absolute and not dependent on the context. However, gestalt’s scientists were concerned about the fact about the way our mind perceives wholes out of incomplete elements. According to the Gestalts , things were affected by where they are and what surrounds them. Therefore things are better described as more than the sum of there parts. Gestalts believed that context was very important in form perception.

THE PRINCIPLES OR THE LAWS-

LAW OF PRAGNANZ(figure and ground) –  Edgar Rubin , a Danish psychologist was the first to systematically investigate the figure and ground phenomenon. The phenomenon tells us that in perceiving a visual field , some objects take a prominent roll or the figure while others recede into the background or the ground . The visual field is thus divided into these two basic parts .  One cannot observe both figure and ground at the same time as the ground becomes figure when the focus shifts. A breakdown of figure and ground occurs with camouflage , where the objective is to make the figure so much like the ground that it disappears from the view.

LAW OF SIMILARITY- The principle of similarity states that things which share visual characteristics such as shape, size, color, texture, value or orientation will be seen as belonging together.Just as in the figure 1 below,we see alternate horizontal rows of orange and purple color and not as alternate columns of orange and purple color.Similarly in figure 2, we see the second row as different from the others and not four vertical columns with the second element as bigger than the rest. 

LAW OF PROXIMITY OR CONTIGUITY- The principle of proximity or contiguity sates that things that are closer together will be seen as belonging together.For example,the figure below shows two pairs of elements and not four vertical elements.

LAW OF CONTINUITY- The principle of continuity predicts the preference of perceiving continuous figures.In the figure below we perceive a cross and not four lines meeting at a point.

LAW OF CLOSURE – The principle of closer applies when we tend of see whole or complete figure out of incomplete figure.Like we see in the diagram below,we easily make out it is a circle with missing elements or gaps.

LAW OF AREA-The principle of area states that the smaller of two overlapping figure is perceived as figure while the larger is regarded as ground.In the figure below,we perceive the smaller box as a hole in the bigger box or the bigger box becomes the ground and the smaller tends to be the figure.

LAW OF SYMMETRY-  The principle of symmetry describes the instances where the whole of a figure is perceived rather that the individual part which make up the figure. We perceive the figure below as three sets of bracket and not two paired elements in the middle and two unpaired at the ends.

NATURE AND NURTURE

DEFINITION OF  NATURE AND NURTURE-

Nature refers to heredity at the genetic makeup or “ genotypes ” (i.e., information encoded in DNA ) an individual carries from the time of conception to the time to death .Heredity may range from genetic predispositions that are specific to certain groups and that therefore account for group differences in related characteristics and to those that are theorized to be shared by all humans and are generally thought to set humans apart from other species (e.g. the language acquisition device in humans). The notion of nature therefore refers to the biologically prescribed tendencies and capabilities individuals possess, which may unfold themselves throughout the course of life.

Nurture, by contrast , refers to various external or environmental factors to which an individual is exposed from conception to death .These environment factors involve several dimensions. For example, they include both physical environments (e.g., secondhand smoking and prenatal nutrition) and social environments (e.g., the media and peer pressure).Also, environmental factors vary in their immediacy to the individual  ; they involve multiple layer of forces , ranging from most immediate  (e.g., families , friends and neighborhoods ) to large contexts ( e.g. school systems and local governments ) to macro factors ( e.g. , international politics and global warming ) . To complicate matters even further, the factors in each of these layers influence and are influenced by elements within and outside of these layers . For example, the kind of peers a child is exposed to may depend on his parents’ view of what ideal playmates are like , the local government’s housing policies, and the history of race relations.

RELATIVE IMPORTANCE OF HEREDITY AND ENVIRONMENT-

Many aspect of human characteristics (such as height and eye color ) are largely genetically determined . Psychology researchers, however , tend to be interested in dimensions that are relatively less determined by genetics- traits that subject more to environmental influences, such as how a person feels , acts and thinks . Given that the degree of genetic determination appears to vary from one dimension to another ( e.g. , skills versus language acquisition) , how can one determine the relative influences of hereditary and environment for various human characteristics , and how can one understand the complex relationship between them? The field of behavioral genetics aims at understanding the observable differences in a wide variety of human characteristics  typically by analyzing the contributions made by heredity (nature) and environment (nurture) in the development of the characteristics in questions. Although the research behavioral genetics is ideologically and methodologically diverse , it is fair to state that it often helps one theorize how much heredity (nature) and environment (nurture) contribute to an observed outcome , and how various factors may interact with each other to create a particular outcome.

PRAGMATIC DEVELOPMENT

PRAGMATIC DEVELOPMENT-In addition to mastering phonology,vocabulary and grammar,children must learn to use language effectively in social contexts.for a conversation to go well . Particpants must take turns, stay on the same topic,state their messages clearly,conform to cultural rules that govern how individuals are supposed to interact.During the preschool years,children make considerable headway in mastering the pragmatics of language.

GRAMMATICAL DEVELOPMENT

THE GRAMMATICAL DEVELOPMENT-

Sometime between 1 and a half year and 2 and a half years , as productive vocabulary approaches 200 words ,children combine two words , such as “mommy shoe” , “ go car”  and “more cookie”. These two word utterences are called telegraphic speech because like telegram,they focus on high content words and leave out smaller , less important ones. Children the word over use two-word utterances to express a wide variety of meanings.According to one view, a more complete , and perhaps adult like , grammar lies behind these two word sentences(Glietman et al. ,1988;Pinker,1994; Valian,1991 )Consistent with the idea,children often use the same construction to express different propositions.For example, a child might say,”mommy cookie” when he sees his mother eating a cookie and also when he wants his mother to give him a cookie.Perhaps the more elaborate structures are present in the child’s mind,but he cannot yet produce the longer word string.In thr third year,three word sentences appear in English speaking children follow a subject-verb-object word order.Children learning other languages adopt the word orders of the adult speech to which they are exposed.Between ages 2 and a half and 3 ,children create sentences in which adjective,articles,nouns and verbs and prepositional phrases start to conform to an adult structure,indicating that they have begun to master the grammatical categories of their language.Between ages 3 and a half and 6, children produce more complex constructions and their usage increasingly conforms to the rules of their language.First,connectives appear that join whole sentences and verb phrases (“I got up and ate breakfast”).The most general connective and is used first, followed by connectives expressing more specific meanings,such as then and when for temporal relations,because and so far causal relations,if for conditionals and but for opposition(Bloom et al.,1980). During the school years,children’s mastery of complex constructions improves. The passive voice is an example.At all ages,children produce more abbreviated passive statements than full passives.During middle childhood and early adolescence,children use the passive voice-including full passive statements-more often.Another grammatical achievement of middle childhood is advanced understanding of infinitive phrases,such as the difference between “john is eager to please” and “john is easy to please”(Ghomsky,1969).Like gains in vocabulary ,appreciation of these subtle grammatical distinctions is supported by children’s improved capacity o analyze and reflect on language and to attend to multiple linguistic and situational cues.

SEMANTIC DEVELOPMENT

SEMANTIC DEVELOPMENT-

Word comprehension begins in the middle of first year.At nine months , after hearing a word paired with an object , babies looked longer at other objects in the same category than at those in a different category(Balaban and Waxmam,1997).On average , children say there first word around 12 months.By age six,they have a vocabulary of about 10,000 words(Bloom,1998).To accomplish this feat, children learn about five new words each day.As these achievements reveal children’s comprehension the language they understand , develops ahead of production, the language they use. Comprehension is ahead f production because comprehension requires only that children recognize the meaning of a word, where as production demands that they recall or actively retrieve from their memories,both the word and the concept for which is stands failure to say a word does not mean that toddlers do not understand it . If we rely only on what children say, we will underestimate their language progress.
THE EARLY PHASE-To learn words,children must identify which concept each level picks out in there language community.First words refer to important people(“mama”,”dada”),animals(“dogs”,”cats”), objects that move(“ball”,”car”,”shoe”),foods(“milk”,”apple”),familiar actions(“bye-bye”,”more”,”up”),or outcomes of familiar actions(“dirty”,”hot”,”wait”)(Hart,2004;Nelson,1973).According to 1 pair of researcher , “children seem motivated to acquire words that are revent to the particular cognitive problems they are working on at the moment”(Gopnik and meltzoff,1986).Besides cognition,emotion influences early word learning.At first,when acquiring a new word for an object,person or event,1and a half year olds say t naturally;they need to listen carefully to learn and expressing strong emotion diverts their attention.As words become better learned,toddlers integrate talking and expressing feelings(Bloom,1998).Young toddlers add to their vocabularies slowly at a pace of 1 to 3 words per week.gradually,the number of words learned accelerates.the increase is much more rapid n comprehension than in production.Because rate of word learning between 18 and 24 months is so impressive(1 or 2 words per day), many researchers concluded that toddlers undergo a spurt in vocalbulary –a transition between a slow and a faster learning phase once the number of words produced reaches 50 to 100.recent evidence,however,,indicates that a vocabulary spurt characterizes only a minority of young children(Ganger and Brent,2004).Most show a steady,continuous increase in rate of word learning that persists through the preschool years,when children add as many as 9 new words per day.children build their vocalbularies so quickly because an improved ability to categorize experience , retrieve words from memory and pronounce new words is involved (Depretto and Bjork , 2000 ; Gershoff-Stove and Smith , 1997) . I addition , a better grasp of other’s intentions,evident in toddlers imitation around 18 months,supports rapid vocabulary growth because it helps toddlers figure out what others are talking about (Bloom , 2000 ; Tomasello ,2003). Although the average age at which children produce their first word is 12 months , the range is large , from 8 to 18 months – variation that results from a complex blend of genetic and environment influences.Many studies shoe that girls are slightly ahead of boys in vocabulary growth until 2 years of age , when boys gradually catch up (Reznick and goldfield , 1992 ) . The surrounding language environment , too, contributes to these differences Mothers talk much more to toddler-age girls than boys , and parents converse less often with shy than with sociable children (Leaper , Anderson , and Sanders , 1998 ; Patterson and fisher , 2002). Children also have unique styles of early language learning. Most toddlers use a referential style ; their vocabularies consist mainly of words that refer to objects . A smaller number of toddlers use an expressive style ; compared with referential children , they produce many more social formulas and pronouns. Rapidly developing , referential style children often have an especially active interest in exploring objects. They also eagerly imitate their parents’ frequent naming of objects , and their parents imitate back- a strategy that supports swift vocabulary growth by helping children remember new labels (Masur and Rodemaker , 1999). Expressive-style children tend to be highly sociable and their parents more often use verbal routine that support social relationship (Goldfish , 1987). Three types of words –objects ,  actions , and state – are most common in young children’s vocabularies.Careful study of each provides important information about the course of semantic development .Many young language learners have more object than action words in their beginning vocabularies (Au , Dapretto and Song, 1994 ; Caselli et al. , 1995) . Early emphasis is on naming objects because nouns refer to concepts (such as table, bird or dog) that are easy to perceive . When adults label an object , they frequently help the child discern the word’s meaning by showing and repeating the label.As a result , toddlers readily match objects with their appropriate labels.In contrast , verbs require more complex understanding s of relationships between objects and actions. In addition, when adults use verbs , the action to which they refer usually are not taking place(Gleitman and gleitman ,1992). Between 2 and 2 and a hlf years, children’s use of state (or modifier) words expands to include labels for attributes of objects, such as size and colour asa well as possession. Words referring to the functions of objects appear soon after . When young children first learn words , they often do not use them just as adults do .They may apply words too narrowly , an error called underextension. A more common error between 1 and 2 and a hlf years is overextension-applying a word to a broader collection of objects and events than is appropriate.Children often overextend deliberately because they have difficulty recalling or have not acquired a suitable word. In addition , when a word is hard to pronounce , toddlers frequently substitude a related one they can say (Bloom ,2000 ;Elsen 1994). As vocabulary and pronounciation improve , overextension disappear.

THE LATER PHASE-On average school age children learn about 20 new word each day, a rate of growth exceeding that of early childhood.In addition of fast-mappig,school-age children enlarge their vocabularies by analyzing the structure of complex words.From “happy” they quickly derive the meaning of “happiness”. They also figure out many more word meanings from context.As at earlier ages, children benefit from engaging in conversation with more expert speakers, especially when their partners use complex words and explain them. But because written language contains a far more diverse and complex vocabulary than spoken language , reading contributes enormously to vocabulary growth in middle childhood and adolescence.As their knowledge expands and becomes better organized school aged children think about and use words more precisely. School-age children’s more reflective and analytical approach to language permits them to appreciate the multiple meanings of words.The capacity of abstract thinking permits adolescents to add such words as counterintuitive and philosophy to their vocabularies.They also become masters of sarcasm and irony. School age children sometimes realize that a sarcastic remark is insincere if it is said in an exaggerated , mocking tone of voice.But adolescents and adults need only notice the discrepancy between a statement and its context to grasp the intented meaning. In addition, adolescents can better grasp figurative language.

PHONOLOGICAL DEVELOPMENT

Phonological development is a complex process that depends on the child’s ability to attend to sound sequences,produce sounds, and combine them into understandable words and phrases.

The early phase: Children's first words are influenced in part by the small number of sounds they can  pronounce ( Hura and Echols,1996 ; Vihman 1996 ) . The easiest sound sequences start with consonents and with vowels , and include repeated syllables , as in “mama”,”dada”. Sometimes young speaker use the same sound to represent a variety of words a feature that makes their speech hard to understand. 1 year old first learning to talk know how familiar words – such as “dog” , “baby” , “ball” – are supposed to sound , even when they mispronounce them. Researchers showed fourteen months pairs of objects( such as a baby and a dog) , accompanied by a voice speaking the word for one of the objects , with either correct pronunciation (baby), slight mispronunciation (vaby), or considerable mispropunciation (raby),(Swingley ans Aslin,2002). The toddlers easily detected the correct pronunciation of words they ad heard many times. They looked longer at the appropriate object when a word was pronounced correctly then when it was either mildly or extremely mispronounced.When learning  new word , toddlers often do not pic up the fine details of its sound a failure that contributes to their pronunciation errors. Toddlers don’t apply their impressive sensitivity to speech sounds when acquiring new words because associating words with their referents  places extra demands on toddler’s limited working memories. Intend on communicating they focus on the word – referent pairing while the world’s sounds, which they encode imprecisely.

Appearance of phonological strategies : By the middle of the second year children move from trying to pronounce whole syllables and words to trying to pronounce each individual sound within a word. As a result they can be heard experimenting with phoneme patterns . Because young children get more practice perceiving and producing phoneme patterns that occur frequently in their language , they pronounce words that contain those patterns more accurately and rapidly. Words that are unique in how they sound are generally different to pronounce (Mounsun,2001).A close look reveals that children apply systematic strategies to challenging words so that these words fit with these pronunciation capacities yet resemble adult utterances although individual differences exist in the precise strategies that children adopt they follow a general developmental pattern(Viman 1996).At first , children produce minimal words in which they focus on the stressed syllable and try to pronounce its consonant-vowel combination. Soon they add ending consonents (“jus”), adjust vowel length(“beee” for please), and add unstressed syllables(“mae-do” for “tomato”). Finally they produce the full word with a correct stress pattern, although they may still need to refine its sounds(“ timemba” for “ remember”)(Demuth,1996;Salidis and Johnson,1997).over the preschool years children's pronunciation improves greatly.maturation of the vocal tract and the child's active problem solving effort are largely responsible,since children’s phonological errors are very resistant t adult correction.

Later phonological development-Although phonological development is largely completed by age 5, a few syllable stress patterns that signal subtle differences in meaning are acquired in middle childhood and adolescence.Changes in syllabic stress after certain abstract words take on endings-“humid” to “ humidity” are not mastered untll adolescence (Camarata and Leaonard ,1986).These late attainments are probably affected by the semantic complexity of the words , in that hard-to-understand words are more difficult to pronounce.even at later age, working simultaneously on the sound and meaning of a new word may over load the cognitive system,causing children to sacrifice pronounciation temporarily until they better grasp the word’s meaning

Delineate with suitable examples the stages of language development from birth to adolescence

Language consists of several subsystems that have to do with sound,meaning,overall structure and everyday use.Knowing language entails mastering each of these aspects and combining them into a flexible communication system. The first component , phonology , refers to the rules governing the  structure and sequences of speech sounds. Semantics, the second component involves vocabulary- the way underlying concepts are expressed in words and word combinations . Grammar, the third component of language , consists of two main parts: syntax the rules by which words are arranged into sentences and morphology , the use of grammatical markers that indicate number , tense , case , person , gender , active or passive voice and other meanings. Pragmatics refer to the rules for engaging in appropriate and effective communication. The given four components of language although being different in there aspects are interdependent on each other. Acquisitions of each facilitates mastery of the others.

• PHONOLOGICAL DEVELOPMENT
• SEMANTIC DEVELOPMENT 
• THE GRAMMATICAL DEVELOPMENT 
• PRAGMATIC DEVELOPMENT