Lecture
Deviations in human development can arise from the complex interaction of various factors, including genetic, biological, psychological, and sociocultural ones. Listed below are some of the mechanisms that can contribute to the emergence of developmental deviations:
Genetic factors: Heredity plays an important role in shaping human development. Genetic mutations, disorders of the chromosomal apparatus, or the inheritance of genes associated with developmental disorders can lead to various physical, psychological, and mental anomalies.
Sex chromosomes: Some developmental disorders may be related to features of the sex chromosomes. For example, Down syndrome, caused by an extra copy of chromosome 21, can lead to intellectual disability and physical anomalies.
Exposure to external factors: Exposure to harmful factors at early stages of development, such as radiation, toxins, viruses, and other pathological factors, can cause anomalies in fetal development.
Stress and trauma: A mother's emotional stress during pregnancy or trauma in early childhood can affect the normal development of the child's body and psyche.
Psychological factors: Early psychological traumas, a lack of stimulation in early childhood, or deprivation can cause a variety of psychological and behavioral deviations.
Sociocultural factors: Developmental deviations may be conditioned by the norms and values of society. For example, stigmatization, discrimination, and a negative attitude toward people with developmental deviations can have a psychological impact.
Inadequate upbringing environment: The environment in which a child grows up can also affect his development. Insufficient attention and care, or conversely, excessive protection, can affect the formation of skills and behavior.
Disruption of internal processes: Some developmental deviations may be related to disruptions of internal biological and psychophysiological processes.
Social factors: Poverty, lack of access to education and healthcare, and family dysfunction can have a negative impact on a child's development.
Many foreign authors devote central attention to studying the mechanisms behind the emergence of deviations, difficulties, and the negative sides of personality. One of the first to draw attention to the positive sides of personality development was the American humanistic psychologist Abraham Maslow. He studied the personalities of healthy and creative people and believed that psychology should deal with the strengths of personality, not only with human weaknesses. Maslow developed a concept of the mentally healthy person, the essence of which is revealed in the following propositions:
First, a person has his own essential nature, a self. These are innate needs, abilities, and tendencies which, in their essence, are not evil, but good or neutral.
Second, fully healthy, normal, and desirable development consists in the actualization of this nature, in the realization of these potentials. This is essentially self-actualization, i.e., a striving toward self-development.
Third, this inner nature of the person is weak, subtle, and fragile, and can easily be overwhelmed by external obstacles: the pressure of culture, the wrong attitude of those around him, and his own habits and weaknesses.
Practically every human being, says A. Maslow, has an active will to health, an impulse toward growth or toward the actualization of human potential.
A person has no innate evil. It is the environment that makes him unhappy and neurotic. Maslow proposed a theory of human motivation in which he distinguishes between basic needs and metaneeds. Basic needs are needs for food, attachment, safety, and self-esteem. Metaneeds are needs for justice, kindness, beauty, order, unity, and needs for personal growth. Basic needs are stronger than metaneeds and are organized hierarchically. Metaneeds are also innate, and if they are not satisfied, this becomes the cause of such psychopathologies as alienation, suffering, apathy, and cynicism.
According to psychoneurologists, child psychiatrists, and specialists in the field of remedial pedagogy, developmental disorders are most sharply manifested in a child's emotional-volitional sphere and character (A. F. Lazursky, V. P. Kashchenko, M. I. Buyanov, A. I. Zakharov, A. E. Lichko, and others). The literature identifies various characterological and behavioral deviations in children. Let us list the most typical of them.
Disinhibition, hyperactivity. Motor disinhibition can be combined with other deviations. Most often, disinhibition is combined with psychic immaturity, which is called infantilism (M. I. Buyanov).
Increased emotional excitability (affectivity). Affective behavior is not a medical diagnosis but a tendency of children toward frequent, acute, and destructive emotional states. It is manifested in heightened touchiness, unrestrained emotions of laughter and crying, capriciousness, stubbornness, sharply expressed likes and dislikes toward people, and impulsiveness in the child's actions and impulses. There may also be inhibition, fears, and other forms of behavior.
Shyness, fearfulness, the presence of pathological fears (phobias), passivity are characteristic not only of children but also of adolescents. They may be expressed to varying degrees and in various forms. Pessimism (despondency, hopelessness, a tendency to see only the bad in everything) is also an anomaly in youth, just as its opposite is—excessive, constant cheerfulness. Constant dissatisfaction with oneself and one's surroundings creates many problems in communication and in solving life's tasks.
A special group is made up of children with autistic behavior (self-immersion, withdrawal from one's surroundings). Such children belong to the category of «difficult» children, since ordinary methods of interaction and educational influences are not always accepted by them.
Disturbances in the development of a person's volitional processes are also associated with such a phenomenon as impulsivity. It manifests itself in the fact that an action involuntarily breaks out of the subject; he cannot consciously regulate his intentions, weigh them, or think them through. Sometimes this may be mistaken for decisiveness. However, a strong, impulsive, unconsidered action quickly weakens as soon as it meets resistance that requires prolonged effort.
Susceptibility to negative influences is connected with heightened suggestibility - an uncritical pliability to the action of suggestion, a readiness to submit to the suggestive influences of others, of advertising, and so on.
Negativism manifests itself in unmotivated resistance to any influence coming from others. Negativism arose as a defensive reaction to influences that contradict a person's needs. Refusal to comply with a demand is a peculiar way of getting out of a conflict. The psychological literature describes two forms of negativism - passive, expressed in a refusal to carry out the demands presented, and active, in which opposite actions are performed. Negative reactions accompanying prolonged emotional distress in a child can become traits of his personality.
Cruelty, despotism, aggressiveness are expressed in fights, a destructive attitude toward things, insults, abuse, and a desire to torment the weak or animals. Aggression can be physical and verbal, direct and indirect.
Aimless lying - when the child does not know the reason for his untruthfulness and does not connect it with any intent. Unintentional lying that he cannot refrain from.
Aimless stealing - a rudimentary form of the phenomenon that specialists call kleptomania. The child may collect the most unusual objects, and the motivation at first glance remains unclear.
A passion for vagrancy may be a pathological urge of psychopathic or hysterical personalities, but it can also be a habit in the absence of any pathological predisposition. V.P.Kashchenko states that a passion for vagrancy sometimes develops in early childhood and begins with the child repeatedly failing to return home after lessons and wandering about somewhere until night. Gradually, vagrancy becomes a habit with all its accompanying phenomena - begging, theft, and so on. Laziness as a state of inactivity, mental sluggishness, and passivity also has a varied nature and can be «normal» or pathological. It manifests itself most often at school age. According to physicians, most lazy schoolchildren are perfectly healthy people. But in some pupils, laziness is one of the manifestations of pathology. Its main signs are low mobility, low working capacity, a disorder of the will, indifference to life, and a high degree of submissiveness to others. A frequent cause of this state is «somatogenic asthenia, i.e., physical and mental weakness caused by a somatic illness». It is fully overcome with the help of a protective regimen. In healthy schoolchildren, on the other hand, the cause of laziness, as the classic Russian pedagogue K.D.Ushinsky notes, is most often a direct disinclination toward the activity to which the adult is calling the child. The causes of such a disinclination are likewise varied, but the pedagogue says that upbringing itself is to blame for them. Thus, it is not uncommon for a child to be presented with demands and burdened with a multitude of duties that hold no interest for him whatsoever, for which he is not ready, but which he must carry out as an obligation. Constantly impressing on a child his duties and the demands of obligation can produce the opposite effect.
Sometimes, writes K. D.Ushinsky, laziness arises «from unsuccessful attempts at learning». From the very beginning of mastering an activity that is new to him, the child encounters failure. Systematic failures frighten him and make him lazy. However, if a child achieves success without making any effort, he too can become lazy. But here, too, upbringing is to blame.
On the whole, developmental disorders manifest themselves in a child's persistently low academic performance or underachievement; in being «difficult to educate»; and in antisocial behavior.
It is important to understand that developmental deviations are a complex and multifaceted process that can be conditioned by numerous factors. The work of specialists in the field of correctional (special) pedagogy, psychology, and medicine is aimed at assessing and supporting people with developmental deviations, as well as at developing individualized approaches to their instruction, upbringing, and socialization.
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