Unit 3.1 Lifespan Development

Developmental psychology

a branch of psychology that studies physical, cognitive, and social changes throughout the lifespan

Nature vs nurture

genetic inheritance or experience?

Continuity vs stages

is development gradual or in distinct stages?

Stability vs change

is our personality established as kids or do we change over time?

Longitudinal study

research in which the same people are restudied and retested over time

Ex: How does your IQ test change from age 20 (in 2017) to age 70 (2067)? 👧 → 👩 → 👵

Cross-sectional study

• a study in which people of different ages are compared with one another

  • Ex: In 2017, do 20 year olds score higher on an IQ test than 70 year olds? 👦 AND 👨 AND 🧓

• Can be experimental or correlational!

Maturation

Development that reflects the gradual unfolding of one’s genetic blueprint

• Change that comes with age– not based
  on learning or experience

• Biological growth process

• Ex: growing really tall because everyone
  in your family is tall

1) Prenatal periods of development

• Germinal →  conception-2 weeks

Baby is a Zygote = Fertilized egg

2) Prenatal Periods of development

• Embryonic → 3-8 weeks

  • Baby is an Embryo = organs begin to form and function

  • Very vulnerable at this stage → miscarriages, major birth defects caused by problems in this stage

3) Prenatal Periods of development

• Fetal → 9 weeks- birth

  • Baby is a Fetus = developing more complex physical and cognitive abilities 

Teratogens

Any external agent that can harm the embryo or fetus

• Ex: Prescription drugs, alcohol, tobacco, recreational drugs, viruses, etc.

• All pass through the placenta to the baby's bloodstream

• → Can cause birth defects

Fetal alcohol syndrome (ex of teratogen)

physical and cognitive abnormalities in children caused by pregnant person’s heavy drinking 

• Severe cases = noticeable facial misproportions 

• Ex: Babies of heroin addicts will be born addicted to the drug as well

• Ex: Maternal illnesses– Placenta will screen for infectious agents, but will not catch all

  • Chicken pox, measles,  HIV/AIDS

• Even environmental pollutants can pass through to the baby

Habituation

decreasing responsiveness with repeated stimulation 

• Babies attention will wane the longer or more often a stimulus is presented- they become familiar with it

• Focus on new stimuli longer→ new people, toys, places, etc.

• This allows us to understand what newborns are able to remember

Newborns’ preference for faces 

• When shown these two stimuli with the same elements, newborns spent nearly twice as many seconds looking at the facelike image. 

• innate preference for social interaction

• ex: baby toys always have a face 

When did you have most of your neurons?

the day you were born

• As you learn- neural connections are
  formed

• Nervous system is immature at birth

• Most rapid growth in frontal lobe

• Associations develop last

  • Thinking, language, memory

When is it rare to have our earliest memories

earliest memory is rarely before our 3^rd birthday

Reflexes

Automatic behaviors, not learned, necessary for survival

• Information for reflexes is not interpreted or processed by the brain

Rooting reflex

Necessary for feeding

• Touch a baby's cheek and baby turns
  head in that direction

Grasping reflex

Babies will hold onto things

• Ex: if a baby grabs your hair- hard to get the
  baby to let go

Gross motor skills

Involving large muscles or whole body movement

• Develop coordination 

• Ex: crawling, running, jumping jacks, etc.

Fine motor skills

movements involving small muscles 

• Develop dexterity 

• Ex: drawing, cutting, grabbing, etc.

Sit, crawl, walk, run

the sequence of these motor development milestones is the same around the world, though babies reach them at varying ages.

When will crawling occur

when the baby is physically ready to crawl

• Not influenced by watching mom and dad crawl

• Happens when nervous system is prepared 

→ cerebellum needs to develop

Development time for each child

Genes oversee the process

• Order of development is generally the same 

• Exact timing is different for every baby

• Often, for identical twins its very similar

Critical periods

an optimal periods early in the life of a child when exposure to certain stimuli or experiences produces normal development

• Ex: language– those who were not exposed to language never developed it

Imprinting (ex of critical periods)

• Infant animals follow whatever is seen first after birth → might imprint on wrong animal

• AKA: sensitive periods– not necessarily written in stone → thanks to neuroplasticity

Parents often compare their kids development to what is deemed “normal” development

• Indicates the typical (median) age at which children display various behaviors and abilities

• Useful benchmarks

• Use as general guidelines

• Development will not be exact

What can influence physical and cognitive development?

Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACEs)

Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACE)

• potentially traumatic events that occur in childhood (up to 18)

  • Rat study– enriched environment (p. 307)

Jean Piaget

developmental psychologist who believed children learn from interacting with
the environment; intelligence is not fixed

• Children’s ability to understand, think about, and solve problems in the world develops in a stop-start, discontinuous manner

• “Little Scientists” constantly trying to
  make sense of the world around
  them

Schemas

concept or framework that organizes & interprets information

• seeing black Labrador for your first seeing of a dog

Assimilation

interpreting/improving existing info thanks to new but similar information 

• Ex: seeing a Dalmation for the first time– that’s a dog→ matches idea of “dog”

Accommodation

adapting our current schemas based on new information that contradicts old information

• Ex: seeing a cow → thinking it’s a dog → having to adjust

  • Not all black and white, 4-legged animals are dogs

  • Have to change idea of “dog”& create concept of “cow”

Piaget’s Stages of Cognitive Development

four qualitative stages, each with distinctive characteristics that allow certain types of thinking

Piaget Stages(1) - Sensorimotor

Birth-2 years(range)

• Experiencing the world through sensations/actions

  • Looking, hearing, touching, mouthing, grasping

  • Raw sensations, significant movement development

    • Reach for bottle or toys

Egocentric (prevalent in sensorimotor)

only can see things from their perspective

• Out of sight, out of mind → hide and seek fail

• Begin language development

  • Connection between objects and sounds/words

Object permanence (also in sensorimotor)

kids view the world from their own reference point

• Before this– If you hide something, it’s gone

• Once developed, a child knows things are permanent, even when out of sight

  • Ex: Peek-a-boo

• Demonstrates the beginning of memory

Seperation anxiety (sensorimotor)

• A baby is afraid when mom or dad leave

  • Normal, universal across cultures

• Begins when object permanence is developed

  • Babies now can remember you & they can understand that you are leaving

• Important to teach babies that you will return

  • Connects to attachment (later)

Piaget Stages (2) - Preoperational

2-7 years

• Still egocentric

• Acquire language and the ability to use symbols

  • Represent things with words and images

• Understand things are permanent

• Still not capable of logical thought

Development of symbolic thought in preoperational allows for:

Animism and pretend play

Animism

believing nature, objects are alive/have feelings

• Ex: my sister and the dishwasher

Pretend play

the stage of play engaged in by children who are capable of assigning action to symbolic objects. 

• Ex: taking on roles/characters, assign meaning to objects, and transform their reality into a world of their own

• Ex: playing with Barbies/house– each one gets their own personality, come up with a complex story…

• Ex: Using stick as a swords

What are children incapable of in preoperational stage

children are still incapable of logical thought

What 2 concepts are not achieved until the end of preoperational stage

Reversibility and conservation

Reversibility

A relationship that goes in one direction can also go in the opposite direction

• Ex: “do you have a brother?” 

• Ex: “does your brother have a brother?”

Conservation

Some of an object's
characteristics can change while others
remain the same

• Ex: $5 bill vs. five $1 bills

Persisting ego-centrism develops into what

Theory of mind

Theory of mind

people’s ideas about their own vs. others’ mental states

• Kids can begin to understand how others see the world, what others’ intentions might be, predict behavior, etc. 

  • Ex: Crayon experiment 

  • Ex: Sally Anne test (next slide)

Sally-Anne Test

• Without theory of mind: child will believed Sally knows what they know (the ball is in the box) 

• WITH theory of mind: child will see the world from Sally’s point of view– she was not present when Anne hid the ball, therefore she will think the ball is still in the basket 

Piaget Stages (3) - Concrete Operational

7-11 years

• Understand world in logical, realistic, and straightforward ways, but struggle to think systematically → need tangibility

• Learn to compare items

• Can think logically about concrete events

• Grasping concrete analogies

  • Performing mathematical operations

    • 8+4 = 4+8

    • If this then that

Piaget Stages (4) - Formal operational

11 years+

• Highly symbolic thought is developed

• Potential for mature and moral reasoning

• Abstract thinking and hypothetical thought→ think of how a tween tells a story vs. little kids

  • Ex: logic, math, ethics, pro/con list, “What if…”

• → some logic develops earlier than 11– easier if it’s concrete 

  • Ex: If John is in school, then Mary is in school. John is in school. Where is Mary?

Piaget’s stages - criticism

• Development is more continuous than Piaget claimed

  • Heavy focus on age

  • Should be focused on unique development of kids

• Proposed not everyone achieve formal operational

Lev Vygotsky

Emphasized social interaction in the development of cognitive abilities

• He believed the more a child is talked to or interacted with by other people, the better their cognitive abilities will develop– collectivist

• More stimulation = more neural connections

Scaffolding

framework that offers children temporary support as they develop higher levels of learning

• Ex: learning repeated addition before multiplication

• vygotsky

Zone of proximal development

The measurement or indication of what a child can do alone versus when other people are around offering encouragement and guidance

• Kids might feel comfortable completing a task when parent or teacher is present, but get frustrated if not

1. parents offer encouragement and guidance

2. parents there makes them feel secure

3. when they leave they lose this security

4. might demonstrate they don't know something but they actually do

• Vygotsky

Language

mutually agreed upon system of arbitrary symbols that are rule-governed and generative to produce an infinity of ideas 

• our spoken, written, or signed words and the ways we combine them to communicate meaning

Phoneme

the smallest distinctive sound unit in a language

• Bat = b, a, t

• Chat = ch, a, t

• Not all languages have the same phonemes! 

• Not the same as syllables!

Morpheme

smallest units that communicate meaning

• Ex: dog

• Ex: un-, -ed, -ly, pre-

• Charcuterie has 1 morpheme, while mistakes has 3!

Semantics

set of rules by which we derive meaning from morphemes 

Ex: -ed meaning the past; a- meaning not; dog meaning a fluffy canine pet

Syntax

the rules for combining words into grammatically sensible sentences in a given language

• Ex: Clifford the big red dog, not Clifford the
  red, big dog

• → different order for different languages

Nonverbal manual gestures

a form of communication that uses body movements, postures, and gestures to convey messages 

• A type of body language 

• Ex: pointing at an object signals that you want it or want someone to look at it

Grammar

system of rules that enables
us to communicate with and understand others → written, spoken, and signed

• Ex: Because it was sunny, I walked to the store

• Ex: American Sign Language has 

• different signs than British Sign
  Language even though both stem
  from English-speaking populations

What did B.F. Skinner believe

Children learn language through association, imitation, and reinforcement 

• Connecting sights with sounds, using grammar/syntax the same way as those around them, reinforced by smiles, reactions

Nurture

• Children learn their language

• Depends on environmental factors

• Ex: grow up hearing English and Spanish → you will learn both English and Spanish 

• Benjamin Whorf: Linguistic determinism

• Our language abilities structure the way we think

• As vocab increases, intelligence and thinking skills improve

• Ex: if your language does not use past-tense, it is more difficult to think about the past 

  • Ex: if your language had 100 different terms for types of snow, how might this affect your perception of snow?

Cooing/Babbling (1st for learning language)

~3-4 months; the infant spontaneously utters various sounds at first unrelated to the household language → not tied to a language

• Ex: cooing = vowel sounds (ooh, ahh)

• babbling = consonant sounds (da-da)

One-word stage (2nd in Learning language)

~1 year; child utters single words

Holographic speech= one word standing for an entire sentence (“ball” = “I want the ball”)

Telegraphic speech (3rd in Learning language)

18-24 months; Child utters 2-word statements

• Speaks like a telegraph → verb before noun

• Ex: “goes daddy”

• aka Two word stage

• From 2+ years, learn longer sentences quickly

When people make errors in language its because of?

Overgeneralization of rules

• the application of a grammatical rule in cases where it doesn't apply

• Ex: child saying “foots” instead of “feet” 

• Ex: “I goed to the store” vs. I went to the store

• → Trying to apply rules where there are exceptions

The wugs test

wug is made of word but children would use it right even it was made up word and say “wugs”

Temperament

 a person’s characteristic emotional reactivity and intensity 

Easy Temperament

cheerful, relaxed, on predictable feeding and eating schedules

Difficult temperament

irritable, intense, and unpredictable

• Tend to remain stable throughout life, particularly childhood 

• Likely genetic– identical twins tend to be very similar

  • Means that temperaments/personalities are not necessarily “given” to or copied by kids from their parents

Attachment

an emotional tie with another person

• Shown in young children by their seeking closeness to the caregiver and showing distress on separation

Ex of Attachment is Harry Harlow’s Contact Comfort

• Experiments on monkeys 

• Attachment was better through
  contact and warmth

• Not so much about providing
  food and nourishment

Monkey experiment

• 2 “mothers” that “raised” a baby monkey

  • “Wire mother” was cold and hard, only provided a bottle

  • “Cloth mother” provided no nutrients, just made of soft cloth

• Baby monkeys formed attachments
  more quickly and effectively with the
  cloth mother than the wire mother

• What does this tell us about how we
  develop attachment?

What can influence how children attach to their caregivers

temperament

Attachment style

the characteristic ways people relate to others in close relationships

• influenced by how a person's primary caregivers interacted with them as an infant

• Mary Ainsworth’s Strange Situation 

Secure Attachment

children who feel protected by and can trust their caregiver

• Ex: children who show some distress when their caregiver leaves but are able to compose themselves quickly when the caregiver returns

• Children who grow up with secure
  attachment styles tend to be secure in
  future relationships → more trusting,
  more social

Insecure Attachment

•  elements of mistrust toward caregiver → Can be for a number of reasons

Anxious attachment

upset when parent leaves, but when parent returns, alternates between clinging to them and rejecting them

• Due to inconsistent reactions from caregiver

• Tend to become adults who crave
  attention but often worry about
  being rejected– clingy

Avoidant attachment

child avoids parent when they returns → due to typically being ignored

• Tend to become adults who struggle w/ commitment, discomfort, conflict

• Tend to avoid relationships

Disorganizaed attachment

reactions to parent leaving/returning are inconsistent and disorganized

• Often stemming from inconsistent or frightening caregiving experiences– source of comfort is also source of fear

• Fears both intimacy
  and isolation

Diana Baumrind = studied parenting styles

Determined 4 main parenting styles which predicted behaviors in children 

• Correlational! 

Consider: a child’s personality traits may influence the parenting style

• maybe calm, easy-going babies evoke more trusting parents

• maybe competent parents have competent children, influencing a more trusting parenting style

Authoritative 🔼 rules 🔼 emotion (parenting style)

-Parents use themselves as role models

-Reason with the children

-Emphasize maturity

-Democratic parenting

-Children become social and competent

-Children exhibit the highest level of self-esteem, self-reliance, and self- regulation

Permissive 🔽 rules 🔼 emotion

-Parents do not take an interest in the child

-Children are free to do whatever they please

-Children are not taught responsibility and consequences for their actions

-Children end up more aggressive and immature

Authroitarian🔼 rules 🔽 emotion

-Based on power and emphasis on discipline

-Children might end up experimenting with various behaviors that were prohibited

-Children exhibit less self-esteem, less social skills, and a brain that overreacts when they make a mistake

Negligent 🔽 rules 🔽 emotion

-Parents are uninvolved

-Neither demanding, nor responsive

-Careless, inattentive

-Do not seek close relationship with kids

-Children with more academic and social problems

Ecological systems theory

the different environments we encounter affect our cognitive, social, and biological development

• 5 nested systems, varying in influence from direct to indirect

Starts with the individual  

Microsystem

groups that have direct contact with the individual 

• Ex: parents, siblings, teachers, friends

Mesosystem

he relationships between the groups in the microsphere

• Ex: school, the neighborhood, home

Exosystem

indirect factors in an individual’s life

• Ex: media (TV shows, music), parents’ jobs, local governments,, friends’ parents…

Macrosystem

world events that affect the individuals and others around them 

• Ex: social norms, legal systems, political landscape, economic systems…

Chronosystem

the individual’s current stage of life 

• Ex: becoming a big sister, starting kindergarten, graduating high school, getting a phone…

whats infancy major social achievement

attachment

whats childhood’s major social achievement

self-concept

Self-concept

An understanding and assessment of who they are

• Early on, this means recognizing oneself The Rouge Test

Rouge Test

recognizing that the person in the mirror is you, your reflection

Parallel play

children playing side-by-side with minimal interaction, but still being aware of each other's presence

• By school age: more detailed description
  of who they are/what makes them happy

  • “I like yellow” “I like my friends” “I like
    to play soccer”

What happens during adolescence

• Parental influence diminishes, while
  peer influence increases

• Search for identity (our sense of self) becomes more serious/complicated  

  • Looking for where they fit into society

  • Frequently changing their peer groups