Erikson, Piaget & Psychology Theories & Concepts Explained

Cognitive Theories of Motivation: Expectancy-Value and Beyond

A straight-A student turns down an advanced chemistry class she could easily ace. A struggling classmate signs up for it anyway. Same opportunity, same odds of academic success, completely different choices. Expectancy-value theory offers one of the clearest explanations for that kind of split: motivation depends not only on whether someone believes they can succeed, but on whether they believe...

Types of Nonverbal Communication: 8 Signals Your Body Sends

You walk into a job interview, shake hands, and sit down. Before you say a complete sentence, the interviewer has already started forming an opinion of you, based almost entirely on your posture, your expression, and the tone in your voice. Psychologists have spent decades mapping the different types of nonverbal communication that shape these snap judgments, and the signals...

The Sensorimotor Stage: How Babies Build Intelligence One Touch at a Time

An eight-month-old watches her mother slide a toy under a blanket. A month earlier, this would have ended the game entirely, out of sight meant gone for good. Instead, she reaches straight for the blanket and pulls it away. That shift in understanding sits at the center of the sensorimotor stage, the opening chapter of Piaget’s theory of cognitive development....

The Phallic Stage of Development: What Really Happens

Around age three, something shifts. The phallic stage of development is the third of Freud’s five psychosexual stages, and it’s where a young child’s curiosity about bodies collides with equally strong feelings about mom and dad. Freud believed this collision produces two of psychology’s most talked-about ideas: the Oedipus complex in boys and the Electra complex in girls. Neither is...

Freud’s Psychosexual Stages: What Each One Really Explains

Picture a coworker who rewrites your emails before sending them, or a friend who can’t sit through an awkward silence without cracking a joke. Sigmund Freud had an explanation for both, and it starts in early childhood. Freud’s psychosexual stages describe five phases of childhood development, each tied to a different part of the body, that Freud believed quietly shape...

Mesosystem Examples: The Bridges Connecting a Child’s World

A second grader is falling behind in reading. His teacher notices the struggle within the first two weeks of the semester and calls home that same afternoon. His parents already suspected something was off, and within days the three of them have a plan: consistent phonics practice at home using the same method the teacher uses in class, weekly check-ins,...