Which of the following is often the first social category learnt by a developing child?
E. Age is often the first social category learnt by a child. It is thought to be developed even before a child develops full language abilities. Even the concept of numbers comes later. Exemplifying this, it is noted that age-related mistakes, such as calling an adult a baby, almost never occur in children. Gender identity develops around 3 years of age.
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The average age by which most humans develop self-recognition is:
C. Self-recognition could be demonstrated in a growing infant by using a mirror. When a red dot is unknowingly placed on the face of a child, the child starts touching its face to explore the dot when a mirror is shown. This ‘touching the dot’ phenomenon does not occur less than 15 months of age; 5 to 25% of infants touch the dot by 18 months, while nearly 75% touch the dot by age 20 months. It is thus concluded that self-recognition rapidly develops between 18 and 20 months. Object permanence is thought to be a prerequisite to develop self-recognition so it is not possible before 9 months of age.
‘Touching the dot’ is a popular psychological experiment to demonstrate which of the following concepts?
C. Gallup conducted the famous ‘touching the dot’ experiments to demonstrate self-recognition. It is noted that only higher primates and humans older than 20 months successfully demonstrate ‘touching the dot’. Mirror recognition by primates may be a reflection of behavioural recognition, that is ‘the one in the mirror is the same as me’ rather than self-recognition, that is ‘the one in the mirror is me’.
After her failure in an examination in spite of hard work, a candidate starts regarding the failure as a stepping stone to success.
Which of the following explains such an attitude?
A. When we spend much effort in attaining a goal but do not attain the goal eventually, we are faced with a dissonance. The two facts ‘I worked really hard’ and ‘I failed my exam’ cannot coexist logically. Hence one starts perceiving that the result is not so bad and some may even consider that the result was indeed good for one’s spiritual progress! This ‘suffering-leadsto-liking’ effect is also called effort justification dissonance. There is no narcissism or passive aggression in such behaviour. This is not a denial as the subject still accepts the failure but interprets it differently.
Which of the following methods of measuring attitudes uses bipolar adjectives?
B. Osgood’s Semantic Differential Scale is used to measure verbally expressed attitudes. It allows different attitudes about a particular topic to be measured on the same scale. It includes various factors constituting an attitude; for example while expressing one’s attitudes regarding a politician one can rate him using an evaluative component (good ↔ bad), activity component (active ↔ inactive), and potency component (powerful ↔ weak), etc. Between the extremes of these bipolar adjectives a seven-point scale is placed and the subject is asked to indicate a score for each factor. Osgood’s semantic differential assumes that every concept can be represented in a hypothetical semantic space with two extremes. Sociometry is a method of measuring interpersonal attitudes and it involves constructing a sociogram—for example a representation of ‘who likes whom’ in a family. Guttman’s scalogram consists of various statements arranged in a hierarchy. Choosing a statement invariably implies that all statements that come below the chosen statement are accepted. Scalogram is also utilized in measurement of attitudes.
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