Экзаменационный билет №9

Aggression.

Any physical or verbal behavior that is intended to hurt someone is considered aggression. Whether aggression is an instinctive human drive or is simply a learned behavior has been debated for many years. Certainly aggression is common among animals, and it has survival value for many species. But whether human aggression reflects biological drives or learned behavior is not an easy question to answer.

Many observers have noted strong sex differences in aggression. Even among preschool children, boys show more aggressive behavior – such as fighting, throwing toys, hitting other children – than girls do. And adolescent males are five times more likely to be arrested for violent crimes than are adolescent females.

Social psychologists have focused on ways in which we learn aggressive behaviors and on situations that encourage people to act aggressively. They believe that we can learn aggressive behaviors by observing them in other people and seeing the consequences. Opportunities for such observations in everyday life abound. We are all exposed to aggressive models each day – in our families, at work or school, and through the mass media, especially television.

Television is a major source of information about aggressive behavior. Studies have consistently shown that violent TV leads to aggressive behavior, at least among children and adolescents. It is difficult to prove causality, and certainly most people do not immediately beat up someone just because they saw it on TV. But when so many studies, using different procedures, conclude that television promotes aggression, one has to take the finding seriously.

Экзаменационный билет №10

Private speech.

Talking aloud to oneself with no intent to communicate with others is normal and common in childhood accounting for 20 to 60 percent of what children say. The youngest children playfully repeat rhythmic sounds. Older children “think out aloud” or mutter in barely audible tones.

The purpose and value of private speech have been controversial. Piaget viewed it as egocentric. Also, he maintained, young children talk while they do things because the symbolic function is not fully developed: they do not yet distinguish between words and the actions the words stand for. The Russian psychologist Vygotsky instead of looking upon private speech as immature, saw it as a special form of communication: communication with oneself. Like Piaget, Vygotsky beleived that private speech helps children integrate language with thought. Unlike Piaget, who saw private speech as characteristic of the preoperational stage, Vygotsky suggested that private speech increases during the early school years as children use it to guide and master their actions and then fades away as they become able to do this silently.

Research supports Vygotsky’s interpretation. Among nearly 150 middle-class children ages 4 to 10, private speech rose and then fell with age. The most sociable children used it the most, apparently supporting Vygotsky’s view that private speech is stimulated by social experience. The brightest children used it earliest; for them, it peaked around age 4, compared with ages 5 to 7 for children of average intelligence. By age 9 it had virtually disappeared in all children.