Psychology UNIT TWO Sex and gender

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What is the difference between sex and gender?

Sex is a biological term. A child is either male or female, and the sex identity of a child can be determined at birth by biological factors such as hormones and chromosomes.

Male hormone = Testosterone Male chromosomes= XY

Female hormone= Oestrogen Female chromosomes= **

Gender is a psychological term. A child's gender can be identified by their attitudes and behaviour. This determined whether the child's gender identity is masculine or feminine.

Sex identity is the same in all cultures whereas gender identity can be different. In Britain we distinguish between two gender identities- masculine and feminine. The Mohave Indians recognise four different gender identities- traditional males, traditional females, males who choose to live as women and women who choose to live as men.

Girls might show feminine behaviour by wearing pink clothes and playing with dolls. Boys might show masculine behaviour by playing football and being aggressive.

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Psychodynamic theory of gender

Phallic stage: Freud's third stage of psychosexual development, in which gender development takes place between the ages of three and five.

Identification: to adopt the attitudes and behaviour of the same-sex parent.

Oedipus complex: the conflict experienced by a boy in the phallic stage because he unconciously desires his mother and is afraid of his father.

Electra complex: the conflict experienced by a girl because she unonciously desires her father and is afraid of losing her mother's love.

In the phallic stage, a child is unconciously attracted to the opposite sex parent, and is jealous and resentful of the same-sex parent. They become anxious that the same sex parent will discover their feelings. The boy believes his father will castrate him, and girls believe they have already been castrated so she is not as fearful, but is afraid of losing her mother's love. To resolve the complex, the child gives up their feelings for the opposite sex parent and identifies with the same sex parent. They begin to behave like them and adopt a masculine or feminine gender role by doing the things they do.

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Freud- Little Hans and Evaluation

Aim: to investiagte Little Hans's phobia.

Method: Hans' father wrote to Freud to tell him about Hans's development- at the age of four Hans developed a phobia of horses. He was frightened that a horse might bite him or fall down and was particularly afraid of large white horses with black around the mouth. This was analysed

Results: Freud claimed that Hans was experiencing the Oedipus complex, and he was displacing the fear of his father on to horses. The white horse with black around the mouth represented his father who had a dark beard. His fear of being bitten by a horse represented his fear of castration and his fear of horses falling down was his unconcious desire to see his father dead.

Conclusion: This supports Freud's ideas about the Oedipus complex.

Evaluation: Freud's ideas are difficult to test because they are based on unconcious thoughts and feelings. Although there has been a rise in the number of children raised in lone parent families, there has not been an increase in the homosexual population as Freud suggested would happen. A wide range of people influence a child's development and the Little Hans case study was carried out on one child so it cannot be generalised.

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Gender development in a lone parent household

According to Freud, a child brought up in a lone-parent household will have a poorly developed gender identity because the child does not experience/resolve the Oedipus/Electra complex.

Carl- Rekers (1974) described the case of Carl who was eight years old and had a gender identity problem. He had a feminine voice and liked to talk about dresses, cosmetics and babies. He preferred to play with girls and often played house with his sister- he would pretend to be ill or injured rather than paly with other boys. He lived with his mother and did not have a stable father figure in his life.

Rekers and Moray

Aim: is there a relationship between gender disturbance and family background?

Method: 46 boys with gender disturbance were rated for gender behaviour and gender identity- their family background was also investigated.

Results: 75% of the most severly gender disturbed boys didn't have a father figure with them.

Conclusion: boys who do not have a father figure are more likely to develop gender problems.

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Social learning theory of gender

Social learning theorists believe that gender is learnt from watching and copying the behaviours of others. The processes involved in social learning theory are modelling, imitation and vicarious reinforcement.

Modelling: a role model provides an example for the child.

Imitation: copying the behaviour of a model.

Vicarious reinforcement: learning from the model's being either rewarded or punished.

People who are most likely to be role models for the child include those who are:

  • similar to them- friends, same-sex parent
  • powerful- teachers, older brothers and sisters
  • loving and caring towards the child- parents, teachers
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Social learning- Perry and Bussey and Evaluation

Aim: to show that children imitate the behaviour of same-sex role models.

Method: children were shown films of role models carrying out activities that were unfamilar to the children. In one condition, all the male role models did one activity while all the female role models did the other. In the second condition, both male and female role models did each activity.

Results: in the first condition, the children imitated what they had seen the same-sex role models doing- boys copied the males and girls copied the females. In the secon condition, there was no difference in the activities the boys and girls chose.

Conclusion: when children are in an unfamiliar situation they wll observe the behaviour of same-sex role models. This gives them information about whether the activity is appropriate for their sex, and if it is they will imitate that behaviour.

Evaluation- the theory is well supported by research, it does not explain certain situations (e.g why children brought up in one parent families without a strong same-sex role model, do not have any difficulty developing their gender), it ignores biological differences (reductionist)

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Social Learning- media and gender

The media provides models for gender behaviour. Macklin and Kolbe claimed that children want to imitate characters on television beacuse they are often physically attractive.

Aim: to investigate the effects of television on the gender development of children.

Method: in 1975, Williams studied children in Canada. At the beginning of the study one of the towns was being provided with television for the first time while the other towns already had television. He measured the attitudes of chuldren living in these towns at the beginning of the study and again two years later.

Results: The children who now had television were more sex stereotyped in their attitudes and behaviour than they had been two years previously.

Conclusion: gender is learnt by imitating attitudes and beahviour seen on television.

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Gender schema theory of gender

Gender stereotypes: believing that all males are similar and all females are similar.

Gender schema: a mental building block of knowledge that contains information about each gender.

Martin and Halverson believe that gender schemas develop with age. From the age of two, children know whether they are a boy or a girl. They are able to identify other people as belonging to the same sex as them or belonging to the opposite sex.

Once children are aware that there are two different sexes, they learn about gender from what they see and experience in their environment. At this stage their ideas are rigid and stereotyped.

As they get older, they gain more knowledge about the world and their gender schemas become more flexible- they learn that some nurses are men and some footballers are women.

By the age of six, children have a detailed and complex knowledge of their own gender but know less about the other gender. They concentrate on the things that are appropriate for their own sex and pay less attention to information associated with the opposite sex.

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Gender schemas- Martin

Aim: To show that children's understanding of gender becomes less stereotyped and more flexible as they get older.

Method: children heard stories about the toys that male and female characters enjoyed playing with. Some characters liked gender-stereotyped activities, while others liked non-gender-stereotyped activities. The children were asked to predict what toys each character would or would not like to play with.

Results: younger children only used the sex of the character to decide what other toys he/she would or would not like. They would say that a boy character would like to play with trucks even if they had been told that he liked playing with dolls. The older children considered both the sex of the character and the other toys that the character enjoyed playing with. For example, they would say that a girl who liked playing with trucks would be less likely to want to play with a doll

Conclusion: older children have a more flexible view of gender than younger children do.

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Gender schemas- Levy and Carter and Evaluation

Aim: to show that there are individual differences in the way children think about gender.

Method: children were shown pictures of two toys and asked which one they would like to play with. Sometimes the toys in the picture were both masculine, sometimes they were both feminine and sometimes there was one of each. The pictures were shown to high and low gender schematised children.

Results: highly gender schematised children chose quickly between pictures where they were shown one of each kind of toy. If they were shown two masculine or two feminine toys they took longer to choose because they either wanted both of the toys or none of them. The less gender schematised children chose on the basis of personal preference. It therefore took them the same amount of time to choose between the toys on each set of pictures.

Conclusion: highly gender schematised children choose toys on the basis of whether or not they are appropriate for the their sex, whereas less gender schematised children choose on the basis of their personal preference.

Evaluation: detailed and thorough, well supported. Doesn't explain why: some are more highly gender schematised, gender develops at two, choosing same sex friends before 2 years old.

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