A Study Guide for Psychologists and Their Theories for Students: Albert Bandura by Gale Cengage Learning

Author:Gale, Cengage Learning [Krapp, Kristine]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Gale, Cengage Learning
Published: 2015-09-15T00:00:00+00:00

Sears and childhood aggression

At the time that Bandura began his career at Stanford, Robert Sears was chairman of the psychology department there. Sears was yet another member of the group of psychologists who had been heavily influenced by Hull at Yale, and who had gone on to make their own mark in psychology. Sears was especially interested in studying child-rearing patterns. He hoped to find observable behaviors that could be tied to psychoanalytic concepts of personality development. Psychoanalytic theory, originally developed by Sigmund Freud, held that people’s behavior is often the result of unconscious mental activity. According to the theory, many adult emotional problems are the result of unconscious conflicts that first arose during critical stages of emotional development in childhood.

In an effort to find the childhood sources of dependency and aggression, Sears compared children’s personality traits to their mothers’ child-rearing practices. There were some flaws in the way Sears designed his study. For one thing, he relied on the mothers’ self-reports of their practices, which may not have been accurate. Nevertheless, Sears found that more use of punishment by the mothers was related to higher levels of both dependency and aggression in the children.

Sears was only one of many psychologists at the time who were looking for a way to reconcile behaviorism, with its total focus on external behavior, and psychoanalytic theory, with its opposite focus on internal experience. For example, Dollard and Miller had also suggested that many emotional disorders might be conditioned responses to parental punishments. This idea received at least partial support in Sears’s research.

Like Sears, Bandura was interested in exploring the childhood roots of aggressive behavior. However, Sears believed that parents influenced their children to become more aggressive through the use of punishments. Bandura, on the other hand, stressed that parents were role models for their children, who learned to behave aggressively mainly by imitation.

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