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Social Interactionist Theory
Lev Vygotsky proposed that infants have basic perceptual, attention, and memory capacities which are similar to other animals. They develop through contact with their environment. The rapid growth of language is what leads to a profound change in thinking. As a result of this, they begin to communicate with others as well as themselves, and this is what sets human cognitive progress apart from other animals.
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Cognitive Theory
Jean Piaget proposed that children build and refine their psychological structures through perceptual and motor activities, and that language developed through an interaction with their environment. He theorized that they express their thoughts in whatever form they may occur, regardless of if anyone can understand them. The term "egocentric speech," now referred to as private speech, reflects his idea that children do not take on the perspectives of others, and talk for themselves.
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Trait Theory
Gordon Allport theorized that personality is determined at birth and then shaped by their environment. He proposed that cognitiive and motivational processes determine things like temperament and attitudes.
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Hierarchy of Needs
Abraham Maslow proposed that the needs of all human beings are in a hierarchy, and that the needs located at the bottom (food, water, rest) must be met before the needs at the top (achieving one's full potential) can be attended to.
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Personality Theory
Hans Eysenck theorized that everyone inherits a nervous system that affects the way they adapt to an environment and how they learn. Therefore, biology determines personality.
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Nativist Theory
Noam Chomsky proposed that children have a language acquisition device (LAD) that permits them to combine words they know into grammatically consistent thoughts and to understand when they hear it from others. Chomsky also proposes that within the LAD there is a universal grammar among all languages.
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Behaviorist Theory
B. F. Skinner proposed that language is developed by environmental influence. He posited that children learn the right way to speak by being positively reinforced when they do it correctly.
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Attachment Theory
John Bowlby theorized that a child's relationship with their mother shapes their emotional, cognitive and social development. He believed that early seperation of a child from their mother led to maladjustment. His reason for this is because a caregiver provides safety and security for a child and attachment ups the child's chance of survival.
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Psychosocial Theory
Erik Erickson theorized that children go through eight stages of personality development, in which a psychosocial crisi occurs, which either has a positive or negative outcome on personality development.
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Social Learning Theory
Albert Bandura builds on top of the Behaviorist theory of classical and operant conditioning, adding that behavior is learned from the environment through observational learning. When children observe the people around them, they encode and imitate their behavior.
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