Читать книгу Developmental Psychopathology - Группа авторов - Страница 93

Cultural stereotypes of males and females involve broad expectations of behavior that we call gender or sex‐roles. In Western cultures, the feminine sex‐role stereotype includes traits such as gentleness, helpfulness, dependence, warmth, emotionality, and submissiveness, while the masculine sex‐role stereotype includes independence, self‐confidence, competitiveness, and aggressiveness. There are four major views on the process of sex‐role identification in children. While not always substantiated by evidence, the first is the psychodynamic view, conceptualized by Freud. This view uses Freud’s psychosexual stages of development and assumes young children are caught in hidden conflicts between their fears and desires. According to this view, early stages of psychosexual development, such as the phallic stage, mark the period during which children look to their parents for ways in which they ought to behave. Through the process of identification, children look for cues on how to be similar to their same sex parent.

The second major view of sex‐role identity is called the social learning view, which emphasizes two processes—modeling and differential reinforcement. Modeling is the process by which children observe and imitate individuals of their own gender. Movies, television shows, books, and magazines tend to portray male and female characters differently; this can play a significant role in how boys and girls decide how they should behave. Differential reinforcement occurs when girls and boys are differentially rewarded for engaging in gender‐appropriate behavior (boys may be praised for engaging in aggressive behavior while girls may be punished).

The third and fourth major views are the cognitive‐developmental view and the gender schema view, respectively, which focus on the idea that a child’s own conceptions are central to the formation of sex‐role identity. Three stages proposed by Kohlberg are highlighted in the cognitive‐developmental view. The first stage is basic sex‐role identity where a child labels oneself as a boy or a girl. The second stage is sex‐role stability in which the child starts understanding the stability of the sex‐role over time. The third stage is sex‐role constancy in which the child understands that sex remains the same no matter the situation. The gender schema view, in contrast, states that the environment affects a child’s understanding of gender through schemas, or mental frameworks, which guide them to act in gender appropriate ways. A gender schema is a mental model containing information about males and females that is used to process gender‐relevant information (Martin & Ruble, 2004).