Developmental Psychology

Stages of Development

• Prenatal• Infancy• Toddler• Early Childhood• Adolescence• Emerging Adulthood• Early or Young Adulthood• Middle Adulthood• Old Age

What is Developmental Psychology

• Developmental psychology is the scientific study of changes that occur in human beings over the course of their life.

• Originally concerned with infants and children, the field has expanded to include adolescence, adult development, aging, and the entire lifespan.

• This field examines change across a broad range of topics including motor skills and other psycho-physiological processes; cognitive development involving areas such as problem solving, moral understanding, and conceptual understanding; language acquisition; social, personality, and emotional development; and self-concept and identity formation.

Importance

• The study of human development is important not only to psychology, but also to biology, anthropology, sociology, education and history.

• Developmental psychology helps us to better understand how people change and grow and then apply this knowledge to helping us reach our full potential

Research

• Developmental psychology examines issues such as the extent of development through gradual accumulation of knowledge versus stage-like development

• The extent to which children are born with innate mental structures, versus learning through experience

• Many researchers are interested in the interaction between personal characteristics, the individual's behavior, and environmental factors including social context and their impact on development

Theories in Developmental Psychology

• Attachment• Constructivism• Ecological• Psychosexual • Moral• Psychosocial• Cognitive• Social Learning

Attachment Theory

• Originally developed by John Bowlby• Focuses on the importance of open, intimate,

emotionally meaningful relationships• Attachment is described as a biological system or

powerful survival impulse that evolved to ensure the survival of the infant

• A child who is threatened or stressed will move toward caregivers who create a sense of physical, emotional and psychological safety for the individual

• Attachment feeds on body contact and familiarity

Constructivism• Constructivism is a paradigm in psychology that characterizes learning as a

process of actively constructing knowledge • Individuals create meaning for themselves or make sense of new

information by selecting, organizing, and integrating information with other knowledge, often in the content of social interactions.

• Constructivism can occur in two ways: individual and social• Individual constructivism is when a person constructs knowledge through

cognitive processes of their own experiences rather than by memorizing facts provided by others

• Social constructivism is when individuals construct knowledge through an interaction between the knowledge they bring to a situation and social or cultural exchanges within that content

Ecological

• Originally formulated by Urie Bronfenbrenner • Specifies 5 types of nested environmental systems with bi-

directional influences within and between the systems • The 5 systems are

– Microsystem – Mesosystem – Exosystem – Macrosystem– Chronosystem Each system contains roles, norms and rules that can powerfully shape development.

Ecological

• The Ecology of Human Development has had widespread influence

• Family • Economic • Political structures

Psychosexual

• Freud• Believed that we all had a conscious, preconscious,

and unconscious level • In the conscious we are aware of our mental process• The preconscious involves information that, though

not currently in our thoughts, can be brought into consciousness

• Lastly, the unconscious includes mental processes we are unaware of

Psychosexual

• He believed there is tension between the conscious and unconscious, because the conscious tries hold back what the unconscious tries to express.

• To explain this he developed three personality structures:– Id – Ego– Superego

Psychosexual

• He proposed five universal stages of development, that each are characterized by the erogenous zone that is the source of the child's psychosexual energy

• The first is the oral stage, which occurs from birth to 12 months of age

• The second is the anal stage, from one to three years of age • The third is the phallic stage, which occurs from three to five

years of age (most of a person’s personality forms by this age)• The fourth is the latency stage, which occurs from age five until

puberty• Stage five is the genital stage, which takes place from puberty

until adulthood

Moral

• Piaget claimed that logic and morality develop through constructive stages. Expanding on Piaget's work

• Lawrence Kohlberg determined that the process of moral development was principally concerned with justice, and that it continued throughout the individual's lifetime

Moral

• He suggested three levels of moral reasoning;• Preconventional moral reasoning • Conventional moral reasoning • Postconventional moral reasoning

Psychosocial

• Erik Erikson reinterpreted Freud’s psychosexual stages by incorporating the social aspects of it

• He came up with eight stages, each of which has two crisis (a positive and a negative)

Psychosocial

• Trust vs Mistrust• Autonomy vs Shame & Doubt• Initiative vs Guilt• Industry vs Inferiority• Identity vs Identity Diffusion• Intimacy vs Isolation• Generativity vs Self-Absorption• Integrity vs Despair

Trust vs Mistrust

• Infancy - birth to 18 months• Children develop a sense of trust when

caregivers provide reliability, care, and affection

• A lack of this will lead to mistrust

Autonomy vs Shame & Doubt

• Early Childhood - 2 to 3 years• Children need to develop a sense of personal

control over physical skills and a sense of independence

• Success leads to feelings of autonomy, failure results in feelings of shame and doubt

Initiative vs Guilt

• Preschool - 3 to 5 years• Children need to begin asserting control and

power over the environment• Success in this stage leads to a sense of

purpose• Children who try to exert too much power

experience disapproval, resulting in a sense of guilt

Industry vs Inferiority

• School Age - 6 to 11 years• Children need to cope with new social and

academic demands • Success leads to a sense of competence, while

failure results in feelings of inferiority

Identity vs Identity Diffusion

• Adolescence - 12 to 18 years• Teens need to develop a sense of self and

personal identity • Success leads to an ability to stay true to self,

while failure leads to role confusion and a weak sense of self

Intimacy vs Isolation

• Young Adulthood - 19 to 40 years• Young adults need to form intimate, loving

relationships with other people • Success leads to strong relationships, while

failure results in loneliness and isolation

Generativity vs Self-Absorption

• Middle Adulthood - 40 to 65 years• Adults need to create or nurture things that

will outlast them, often by having children or creating a positive change that benefits other people

• Success leads to feelings of usefulness and accomplishment, while failure results in shallow involvement in the world

Integrity vs Despair

• Maturity - 65 to death• Older adults need to look back on life and feel

a sense of fulfillment• Success at this stage leads to feelings of

wisdom, while failure results in regret, bitterness, and despair

Cognitive Development

• Jean Piaget, a Swiss theorist, posited that children learn by actively constructing knowledge through hands-on experience

• He suggested that the adult's role in helping the child learn was to provide appropriate materials that the child can interact with and use to construct

• He used Socratic questioning to get children to reflect on what they were doing, and he tried to get them to see contradictions in their explanations

Cognitive Development

• Piaget believed that intellectual development takes place through a series of stages, which he described in his theory on cognitive development

• Each stage consists of steps the child must master before moving to the next step.

• He believed that these stages are not separate from one another, but rather that each stage builds on the previous one in a continuous learning process.

Cognitive Development

• He proposed four stages: • Sensorimotor • Pre-operational • Concrete operational• Formal operational • Though he did not believe these stages

occurred at any given age, many studies have determined when these cognitive abilities should take place

Social Learning

• Learning is a cognitive process that takes place in a social context and can occur purely through observation or direct instruction

• In addition to the observation of behavior, learning also occurs through the observation of rewards and punishments, a process known as of vicarious reinforcement

Social Learning

• Learning is not purely behavioral; rather, it is a cognitive process that takes place in a social context.

• Learning can occur by observing a behavior and by observing the consequences of the behavior (vicarious reinforcement).

Social Learning

• Learning involves observation, extraction of information from those observations, and making decisions about the performance of the behavior (observational learning or modeling). Thus, learning can occur without an observable change in behavior.

• Reinforcement plays a role in learning but is not entirely responsible for learning.

• The learner is not a passive recipient of information. Cognition, environment, and behavior all mutually influence each other (reciprocal determinism).

Real Life

• http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/487/harper-high-school-part-one

• Using your notes from Chapter 5 & from the lecture discuss the following:– What are the variables that might be a factor in

the youth from Harper High School?– Using Erikson’s 8 Stages identify which stage the

youth are in. – Discuss the implications of their environment.