Developmental Psychology

The science of human development

seeks to understand how and why people—all kinds of people, from everywhere and of every age—change over time. The goal is a happy, productive, and meaningful life for everyone, of all ages, cultures, and aspirations.

Development over the life span is

multi-directional, multi-contextual, multi-cultural, and plastic.

Scientific Method 5 Steps:

Begin with curiosity

Develop a Hypothesis

Test the Hypothesis

Draw Conclusions

Report the Results

Step 1: Begin with curiosity

Ask questions. Consider the theory, study research, and gather observations.

Step 2: Develop a Hypothesis

A prediction that can be verified.

Step 3: Test the Hypothesis

Design a study and conduct research to gather empirical evidence.

Step 4: Draw Conclusions

Use evidence to support or refute the hypothesis. Consider that there are alternate interpretations, unexpected results, and possible biases.

Step 5: Report the Results

Share data, conclusions, and limitations. Suggest further research to explore new questions and to corroborate conclusions.

Replication:

Repeating a study’s procedures and methods with different participants.

Why is replication important?

Every study involves particular people in a specific context. Something in design, in local conditions, or in the participants, might produce results that are valid only under those conditions. Replication distinguishes what is generally true and what is limited.

Nature:

Refers to the influence of the genes that people inherit

Nurture

Refers to environmental influences, beginning with health, diet and the stress of the future person mother at conception, and continuing lifelong, including experiences in the family, school, community, and nation.

The Nature—Nurture Debate

Some believe that most traits are inborn, that children are innately good “an innocent child” or bad “beat the devil out of them”. Others stress nurture, crediting or blaming parents, or neighborhoods, drugs, peers, or additive to food. When someone is good or bad “hero or villain”. NEITHER BELIEF IS ACCURATE

Genes and environment both affect every characteristic:

Nature always affects nurture and then nurture affects nature.

Differential Susceptibility:

The impact of any good or bad experience might be magnified or inconsequential, depending on genes or experiences.

What’s the difference between and dandelion and an orchid?

Dandelions grow well under many conditions, and orchids thrive only with special care. When these flowers are a metaphor for human development, some people seem impervious to special harm (dandelion) and other (orchids) are sensitive to conditions, for good or ill.

How might differential susceptibility apply to adults?

The impact of any sensation, thought, or event in an adult’s life is affected by that person’s genes and past experiences. For example, if you are fired from your job, you might be devastated or even happy, depending on experience and personality.

The Life-Span Perspective:

Takes account to all phases of life and all aspects of development. This perspective is a multi-disciplinary, with insights from psychology, biology, history, and sociology.

Multiple changes, in every direction, characterize the life span, making development

multi-directional.

The pace of change varies as well—Sometimes discontinuity is evident

Change can occur rapidly and dramatically, as when caterpillars become butterflies.

The pace of change varies as well—sometimes continuity is found

Growth can be gradual, as when redwoods grow taller over hundreds of years.

Some changes are sudden and profound because of a critical period,

a time when something must occur for normal development, or the only time when an abnormality might arise.

Such time is called a sensitive period.

Scientists studying the life span find that humans have few critical periods. Often, however, a particular development occurs more easily—not exclusively—at a certain time.

Development is Multi-Contextual:

Everyone is profoundly affected by their surroundings; to understand people, a multi-contextual perspective is needed.

Social Context is crucial

every who influences each developing person, immediately and over time, directly and indirectly.

Ecological-systems approach:

Each person is affected by many social contexts and interpersonal interactions.

Microsystem

– each person’s immediate social contexts, such as family and peer group.

Ecosystems

– Local institutions such as school and church.

Macrosystem

– a larger setting, including cultural value, economic policies, and political processes.

Mesosystem

—, consisting of the connections among the other systems.

Chronosystem

which literally means “time system”, the historical context.

The bioecological system

—the internal biology of a person.

A group defined by its members shared birth age. All persons born within a few years of one another are called what? (Millennials, Generation X, Boomers, and so on)

Cohort

The Socioeconomic Context:

Some people believe socioeconomic status underlies every other system. SES reflets income, education, occupation, and neighborhood.

Development is Multi-Cultural:

To learn about “all kinds of people, everywhere, at every age” we need to recognize development as multi-cultural. Culture is defined broadly, to include “shared beliefs, conventions, norms, behaviors, expectations”.

People do not develop in isolation but rather in?

relationship to the culture of their community, transmitted by the words, objects, and actions of other people.

Culture is a powerful social construction…

a concept created or constructed by a society. They affect how people think and act—what they value, ignore, and punish.

Quiet children and talkative children may be appropriately in their respective cultures.

Neither norm is bad; both depend on the context. Everyone needs to learn when to talk and when to listen.

Difference-Equals-Deficit Error:

unusual beliefs, conventions, norms, behaviors, or expectations. Leads people to believe that people from other cultures are to be pitied, feared, criticized and changed.

Cultural differences are not always wrong and inferior nor the opposite.

Cultural variations fuel wars and violence when?

differences are seen as deficits.

Members of an ethnic group

Almost always have the same ancestors, and often have similar national origins, religion, and language. Ethnicity is a social construction, not a biological one.

Race is the concept that

some people are distinct from others because of their physical appearance typically skin color. Social scientists think race is a misleading idea, although race can be a powerful sociological idea, it’s not based in biology.

Intersectionality:

idea that various identities need to be combined, this is important in determining modes of privilege and discrimination.  Idea that we each are pushed and pulled—sometimes strongly, weakly—sometimes by ourselves, and others—by gender, religion, generation, nation, age, culture, and ethnicity.

Development is Plastic: The term plasticity denotes two complementary aspects of development—

People can be molded (like plastic), but people maintain a certain durability (like plastic).

This provides hope and realism—hope because change is possible and realism because development builds on what has come before.

Both brain and behavior are far more moldable than once was thought. Plasticity is basic to the life span perspective because—

People can change overtime

New behavior is affected by what has already happened.

Dynamic-Systems Approach:

human development is an ongoing, ever-changing interaction between the individual and all the systems.

 A theory

A comprehensive and organized explanation of many phenomena; a hypothesis is more limited and may be proven false. Theories are general, and they are useful as a starting point; hypotheses are specific, a step in the scientific method.

Developmental Theory:

a group of ideas, assumptions, and generalizations about human growth. It provides a framework to interpret growth and change.

Psychodynamic:

stresses the power of a person’s past experiences and emotions to shape their current thoughts and actions.

The first cluster of psychodynamic theories are called

psychoanalytic

Inner drives and motives are the foundation of the

psychoanalytic theory.

According to Freud, development in the first six years affects

personality, impulses, and emotions lifelong

Early development occurs in three stages, each characterized by

sexual pleasure centered on a particular part of the body.

  Infants experience

the oral stage because their erotic body part is in the mouth, followed by the anal stage in the early childhood, with focus on the anus.

In the preschool years (the phallic stage),

the penis becomes a source of pride and fear for boys and a reason for sadness and envy for girls.

Middle childhood becomes latency,

a quiet period that ends with a fourth stage, the genital stage, at puberty. Freud thoughts that the genital stage continued throughout adulthood, which makes him the most famous theorist who thought that development stopped after puberty.

Freud believed that the genital stage lasts through

adulthood. He also said that the goal of a healthy life is “to love and to work”

Freud maintained that at each stage, sensual satisfaction is linked to

developmental needs, challenges and conflicts. How people experience and resolve those conflicts determines personality because “the early stages provide the foundation for adult behavior”.

Erikson’s Theory—Psychosocial:

described 8 psychological stages, each characterized by a challenging crisis.  He believed that adult problems echo childhood conflicts. For example, an adult who cannot form a secure, close relationship may not have resolved the crisis of infancy.

Behaviorism:

A theory of human development that studies observable actions. It’s also called the learning theory because it describes how people learn to do what they do. This theory emphasizes nurture, including the social context and culture but especially the immediate responses from other people to whatever a person does.

Classical Conditioning:

learning occurs through association; neutral stimulus becomes a conditioned response

Operant Conditioning:

learning occurs through reinforcement and punishment, weak or rare responses become strong and frequent—or with punishment, unwanted reasons become extinct.

Reinforcement:

in behaviorism, the positive experience that follows a behavior, making it likely that the behavior will occur again.

Social Learning:

learning occurs through modeling what others do, observed behaviors become copied behaviors.

Behaviorists believe that people at every age,

from newborn to centenarian, learn to think and act, influenced by the responses of other people, and the constraints of the body and environment.

Cognitive Theory:

Each person’s ideas, and beliefs are crucial. A theory of human development that focuses on how people think. According to this theory, our thoughts shape our attitudes, beliefs, and behaviors.

Sensorimotor

Birth to 2 years, Infants use senses and motor abilities to understand the world. Learning is active, without reflection. Infants learn that objects still exist when out of sigh (object permanence) and begin to think through mental actions.

Preoperational

2-6 years, Children think symbolically, with language, yet children are egocentric, perceiving from their own persepctive. The imigination flourishes, and language becomes a significant means of self-expression and social influence.

Concerete Operational

6-11 years, children understand and apply logic. Thinking is limited by direct experience. By applying logic, children grasp concepts of conversation, number, classification, and many other scientfic ideas.

Formal Operational

12 years throughout adulthood, adolescents and adults use abstract and hypothetical concepts. They can use analysis now. Ethics, politics, and social and moral issues become fascinating as adolescents and adults use abstract, theortetical reasoning.

Intellectual advancement occurs because

humans seek cognitive equilibrium, which is a state of mental balance.

The easiest way to achieve this balance is to

interpret new experiences through lens of preexisting ideas. (Assimilation). Sometimes, however, a new experience is jarring and incomprehensible causing disequilibrium.

Disequilibrium leads to

cognitive growth because it forces people to reassess their old concepts (called accommodation) to include the new information.

Information Processing:

Thoughts influence emotions and actions. This is sometimes called a constructive view of human cognition because people of all ages build their understanding of themselves and their world, combining their experiences and their interpretations.

When people are not confused because they can use their existing thought processes to understand current experiences and ideas, they are demonstrating:

Cognitive Equilibrium. (A state of mental balance)

Constructive View:

Thoughts influence emotions and actions.

Evolutionary Theory:

When used in human development, the idea that many current human emotions and impulses are a legacy from thousands of years ago.

The fears, impulses, and aspirations that protected the human species were

encoded into human genes, and thus our genes today.

Although humans inherited

irrational fears (snakes, blood, thunder), humans also inherited wonderful impulses, such as cooperation, spirituality, and compassion. People survived because they cared for one another.

Humanity benefited from

protective parental instincts that allow mothers and fathers to care for children for decades and allow the human brain to grow much more than the brain of other primates.

Scientific Observation:

Watching and recording participants’ behavior in a systematic and objective manner—in a natural setting, in a laboratory, or in searches of archival data.

Experiment:

A research method in which the researcher adds one variable (called the independent variable) and the observes the effect on another variable (called the dependent variable) to learn if the independent variable causes change in the dependent variable.

Independent Variable:

In an experiment, the variable that is added by the researcher to see if it affects the dependent variable.

Dependent Variable:

In an experiment, the variable that may change because of the IV. In other words, the DV depends on the IV.

Survey:

A research method in which information is collected from many people by interviews, written questionnaires, or some other means.

Cross- Sequential Research:

A research design that compares people who differ in age but not in other important characteristics.

Longitudinal Research:

A research design that follows the same individuals over time.

Cross-Sequential Research:

Hybrid research deign that includes cross-sectional and longitudinal research. (Also called cohort-sequential research or time-sequential research).

CORRLEATION DOES NOT EQUAL CAUSATION:

CORRELATION REVEALS THAT TWO VARIABLES OCCUR TOGETHER BUT IT DOES NOT REVEAL THAT ONE CAUSED THE OTHER. IT IS ALSO POSSIBLE THAT A THIRD VARIABLE AFFECTED BOTH VARIABLE, SO NEITHER WAS THE CAUSE OF THE OTHER.

Quantitative Research:

Is research that provides data expressed with numbers, such as ranks or scales.

Qualitative Research:

Is research that considers qualities individually instead of quantities (numbers).

Ethics:

The most important challenge for all scientists is to follow ethical standards. Each professional society involved in research of human development has a code of ethics (a set of moral principles).

Most colleges and hospitals have an Institutional Review Board (IRB), a group that required research to follow guidelines set by the federal government.

The most important challenge for all scientists is to follow ethical standards. Each professional society involved in research of human development has a code of ethics (a set of moral principles).

The study of human development

is a science that seeks to understand how people change or remain the same over time. As a science, it begins with questions and hypotheses and then gathers empirical data. Replication confirms, modifies, or refutes conclusions.

Nature (genes) and nurture (environment) always interact, and each human characteristic is affected by that interaction.

In differential susceptibility, both genes and experiences can make some people change when others remain unaffected.

Development is multi-directional, with losses and gains at every point.

Both continuity (sameness) and discontinuity (sudden shifts), and critical and sensitive periods are evident in the processes of human development.

Development is plastic, which means that change is ongoing, even as some things do not change.

A dynamic-systems approach is needed to understand development.

Behaviorism emphasizes conditioning —

a lifelong learning process in which an association between one stimulus and another (classical conditioning) or the consequences of reinforcement and punishment (operant conditioning) guide behavior. Social learning theory recognizes that people learn by observing others.

Cognitive theorists believe that

thoughts and beliefs powerfully affect attitudes, actions, and perceptions, and those affect behavior.

Information processing

looks more closely at the relationship between brain activity and thought.