Unit 9Developmental Psychology

Unit Overview• Prenatal Development and the Newborn• Infancy and Childhood• Cognitive Development

• Jean Piaget’s Theory• Social Developmanet

• Harlow’s Attachment• Kohlberg’s Moral Dilema• Erickson’s Stages

Click on the any of the above hyperlinks to go to that section in the presentation.

Prenatal Development

•Zygote = the fertilized egg, it enters a 2-week period of rapid cell division and develops into an embryo.

•Embryo = the developing human organism from about 2 weeks after fertilization through the second month

•Fetus = the developing human organism from 9 weeks after conception to birth.

Physical DevelopmentBrain Development

•Brain development•Maturation = biological growth processes

that enable orderly changes in behavior, relatively uninfluenced by experience.

Cognitive Development

•Cognition•Jean Piaget

• Schema = a concept or framework that organizes and interprets information.

• Assimilation = interpreting our new experiences in terms of our existing schemas.

• Accommodation = adapting our current understandings (schemas) to incorporate new information.

Cognitive DevelopmentPiaget’s Theory and Current Thinking

•Sensorimotor Stage – learn through sensory impressions and motor activites• Object permanence “out of sight, out of

mind”

Cognitive DevelopmentPiaget’s Theory and Current Thinking

•Preoperational Stage – too young to preform mental operations• Conservation

Cognitive DevelopmentPiaget’s Theory and Current Thinking

•Egocentrism = in Piaget’s theory, the preoperational child’s difficulty taking another’s point of view.

•Theory of Mind = people’s ideas about their own and other’s mental states – about their feelings, perceptions, and thoughts, and the behaviors these might predict.

Cognitive DevelopmentPiaget’s Theory and Current Thinking

•Concrete Operational Stage = in Piaget’s theory, the stage of cognitive development (from about 6 or 7 to 11 years of age) during which children gain the mental operations that enable them to think logically about concrete events.

Cognitive DevelopmentPiaget’s Theory and Current Thinking

•Formal Operational Stage: people begin to think logically about abstract concepts.

• Abstract concepts

Cognitive DevelopmentPiaget’s Theory and Current Thinking

Social DevelopmentOrigins of Attachment

• Attachment = keeps infants close to their caregivers

• Stranger Anxiety- Fear of strangers common to infants at about 8 months.

• Body contact• Harry Harlow’s

• Harlow's Monkey Experiment

• Critical period• Imprinting – process of forming

attachment

Social Development

• Forming an identity (Childhood’s major achievement. • Self Concept – an understanding and evaluation of who we are. • Identity = our sense of self; according to Erikson, the adolescent’s

task is to solidify a sense of self by testing and integrating various roles.

• Social identity = the “we” aspect of our self-concept; the part of our answer to “Who am I?” that comes from our group memberships.

• Intimacy = in Erikson’s theory, the ability to form close, loving relationships; a primary developmental task in late adolescence and early adulthood

• Parent and peer relationships

Parenting Styles• Authoritarian: Parents impose rules and expect obedience

• “Because I said So!”

• Permissive: Parents submit to their child’s desires, make few demands and use little punishment.

• Authoritative: Parents are BOTH demanding and responsive. They set rules and enforce them, but they explain the reasons and with older children, encourage open discussions and allow exceptions.

Parenting Styles• Studies reveal a CORRELATION, that children with the highest self-

esteem, self-reliance, and social competence usually have warm, concerned, AUTHORITATIVE, parents.

• Children’s traits may influence parenting, more than vice versa. Parental warmth and control may vary from child to child. More warm and competent children elicit warmth and less competent and cooperative children elicit less.

Cognitive DevelopmentDeveloping Morality

•Lawrence Kohlberg• Preconventional morality• Conventional morality• Postconventional morality

•Moral feeling•Moral action

Moral Dilema• In Europe, a woman was near death from a special kind of cancer. There was one

drug that the doctors thought might save her. It was a form of radium that a druggist in the same town had recently discovered. The drug was expensive to make, but the druggist was charging ten times what the drug cost him to make. He paid $200 for the radium and charged $2,000 for a small dose of the drug. The sick woman's husband, Heinz, went to everyone he knew to borrow the money, but he could only get together about $ 1,000 which is half of what it cost. He told the druggist that his wife was dying and asked him to sell it cheaper or let him pay later. But the druggist said: "No, I discovered the drug and I'm going to make money from it." So Heinz got desperate and broke into the man's store to steal the drug-for his wife. Should the husband have done that?

• KOHLBERG'S SIX STAGES• Level 1. Preconventional Morality

• Stage 1. Obedience and Punishment Orientation -The child assumes that powerful authorities hand down a fixed set of rules which he or she must unquestioningly obey.

• Stage 2. Individualism and Exchange. At this stage children recognize that there is not just one right view that is handed down by the authorities. Different individuals have different viewpoints

• Level II. Conventional Morality• Stage 3. Good Interpersonal Relationships - Good behavior means having

good motives and interpersonal feelings such as love, empathy, trust, and concern for others. If Heinz’s motives were good, the druggist's were bad.

• Stage 4. Maintaining the Social Order - . Now the emphasis is on obeying laws, respecting authority, and performing one's duties so that the social order is maintained. many subjects say they understand that Heinz's motives were good, but they cannot condone the theft. What would happen if we all started breaking the laws whenever we felt we had a good reason?

• Level III. Postconventional Morality• Stage 5. Social Contract and Individual Rights - Stage 5 respondents basically believe

that a good society is best conceived as a social contract into which people freely enter to work toward the benefit of all

• Stage 6: Universal Principles - principles of justice require us to treat the claims of all parties in an impartial manner, respecting the basic dignity, of all people as individuals. The principles of justice are therefore universal; they apply to all.

• In actual practice, Kohlberg says, we can reach just decisions by looking at a situation through one another's eyes. In the Heinz dilemma, this would mean that all parties--the druggist, Heinz, and his wife--take the roles of the others

Social Development

• Forming an identity (Childhood’s major achievement. • Self Concept – an understanding and evaluation of who we are. • Identity = our sense of self; according to Erikson, the adolescent’s

task is to solidify a sense of self by testing and integrating various roles.

• Social identity = the “we” aspect of our self-concept; the part of our answer to “Who am I?” that comes from our group memberships.

• Intimacy = in Erikson’s theory, the ability to form close, loving relationships; a primary developmental task in late adolescence and early adulthood

• Parent and peer relationships

Adulthood• Older people become more susceptible to short term illness• Durring old age many of the brain’s neurons die. • If they live to be 90 or older, most people eventually become senile. • Recognition memory – the ability to identify things previously

experienced, declines with age• Life satisfaction peaks in the fifties and gradually declines after 65.

Aging and Intelligence• Phase 1 : CROSS SECTIONAL STUDIES: show that mental abilities

decline with age by testing different people in different age groups. • Phase 2: LONGITUDINAL STUDIES: Show that until late in life

intelligence remains stable by testing the same people at different stages in their lives!

• PHASE 1 & PHASE 2 EVIDENCE CONTRADICT!!!

• Phase 3: IT ALL DEPENDS: on what we are studying• CRYSTALIZED INTELLIGENCE : our accumulated knowledge and verbal skills

increases with age! • FLUID INTELLIGENCE : our ability to reason speedily and abstractly decreases slowly

up to age 75, then rapidly after 85.