Developmental Psychology

What is developmental psychology?

Studies of human growth across the lifespan including:

• Changes (social, cultural environmental, physial, cognitive etc)

• Factors that affect development

• Child psychology versus lifespan psychology

Why should you study developmental psychology?

• To understand human nature

• To shape social policy

• To enrich human life

Why should you study child development?

• Understand how genetics and environment affect children’s development (e.g. nature vs nurture)

• Understand how research can be conducted with children while protecting their human rights (e.g. obtaining voluntary participation)

• Understand what psychology can tell us about effective child-rearing and child mental health (e.g. how much support vs independence they need)

Why should you study lifespan development?

• To understand how we change across our lifespan

• To understand how we recover from trauma and what supports are effective

• To understand to what extent we actively shape our lives or passively respond to surroundings

What are the seven enduring themes of development?

• Continuity & discontinuity

• Mechanisms for change

• Universality & context-specificity

• Individual differences

• Research & children’s welfare

• Nature & nurture

• The active child

What are the four types of “change”?

• Continuity = stability (e.g. a person’s name)

• Discontinuity = change (e.g. a person’s title, reflects differences in how you are perceived and interact with others)

• Continuous change = quantitative/reversible (e.g. height, capacity for memory, can change in both directions)

• Discontinuous change = qualitative/irreversible (e.g. Puberty, Theory of Mind, categorical + descriptive way of thinking)

What mechanisms are needed for developmental change to occur in species?

• Migration

• Genetic drift

• Natural selection

• Genetic differences between generations

What mechanisms are needed for developmental change to occur in behaviour?

• Precontemplation (what needs to occur in order for a change to take place)

• Contemplation (weighing up the pros and cons)

• Preparation (research)

• Action (actually doing it)

• Maintenance (sticking to a plan and goal over a given period of time)

• Relapse (conflict between present and future)

How do children with a shared background become different from each other?

• Developing different strategies to resolve conflict

• Two people’s experiences of any given event are never the same

How can researchers conduct meaningful research with infants and young people?

Infants lack a full thinking capacity, therefore:

• Not given any specific requirements

• Short study as they have short attention spans

• Caregivers must be present

How can we protect infants’ and young people’s welfare in research?

• Simplified version of a study for those who may somewhat understand

• Human welfare and safety should always come first

How do nature and nurture together shape development?

Interactions between nature and nurture both shape who we are and has a strong influence on development as shown through twin studies

How do children shape their own development?

• Different choices they make have an influence on their development

• How much they should be allowed the control to make these choices is debated

What is cognitive development?

How children/people think, learn, explore, remember and solve problems (maturation of all these thinking processes over time)

What skills are involved in cognitive development?

• Perception

• Attention

• Language

• Problem-solving

• Reasoning

• Memory

• Conceptual understanding

• Intelligence

What are theories of cognitive development?

Psychological frameworks that explain how our cognitive skills develop and guides future research with existing knowledge

What are the four stages of cognitive development in Piaget’s theory?

• Sensorimotor Stage (birth to 2 years)

• Pre-operational stage (2 to 7 years)

• Concreate operational stage (7 to 12 years)

• Formal operational stage (12 and up)

What is the sensorimotor stage?

The stage when children primarily uses senses in their environment to make sense of the world

What is the pre-operational stage?

The stage where children have the ability to represent simple thoughts through very simple language

What is the concrete operational stage?

The stage where children can think logically rather than just intuitively in a multi-dimensional way

What is the formal operational stage?

The stage where children can begin to think in a systematic way about abstract ideas and make observations

What are the disadvantages of Piaget’s theory?

• Unclear about the cut-offs for each stage

• Difficult to measure development in this way

• Underestimates the influence of environment on creating variation between different children/people

• Can only move to next stage after developing skills associated with the previous one

• Only measuring qualitative and continuous changes

What is Vygotsky’s Sociocultural Theory?

Individuals’ cognitive development is largely shaped by the social and cultural context and change is gradual and continuous

What are the core principles of Vygotsky’s Sociocultural Theory?

• Infants have basic cognitive skills when they are born (attention, sensation, perception and memory)

• As infants interact with others, these cognitive skills become more sophisticated leading to more complex skills after interacting with others within different environments

• Children have a natural instinct to help others, learning how to adapt their thoughts

• Culture has a strong influence on the skills we develop

What are the Information Processing Theories?

The human mind is a complicated information-processing system like a computer

What do different parts of the computer represent in the human mind?

• Executive function

  • Input devices: sensory memory (information in its original form)

  • Processor: working memory (temporary store)

  • Output (accumulation of specific cognitive skills)

• Hard Disk Drive: Long-term memory (knowledge system)

What is child development described as by the Information Processing Theories?

Children are like a computer system with limited processing capacity (e.g. attention span is shorter and they think more complex and abstract)

What is intelligence?

• The capacity to learn from experience and adapt to one’s environment

• Developmental concept (covers a range of different processes including lower-level ones)

• Means different things at different ages (different expectations)

• Could vary in different contexts (understood differently in different cultures)

What is General Intelligence (g)?

A person possess a certain amount of general intelligence that influences their ability on all intellectual tasks

What can intelligence be measured as?

• One dimension (e.g. IQ)

• Two dimensions (e.g. Crystalized & fluid, ability to adapt and think on the spot with new situations, using the past to help stay in the present)

• A few dimensions (e.g. Thurstone 7 Gardener 7, domains based on specific biological functions in our brain)

• Many dimensions (e.g. Carroll’s 3-stratum model)

What is mental age (MA)?

The average age at which children achieve a given score on Binet and Simon’s test

What is Intelligence Quotient (IQ)?

IQ = Mental Age/Chronological Age x 100

Why is it a problem to use IQ as a way of measuring development?

IQ is a non-changing number that involves a developmental concept (remains stable over time, not true to development)

What is John Carroll’s Three-stratum theory of intelligence?

A hierarchical integration of:

• g

• eight generalised abilities

• many specific processes

What cognitive abilities do the Stanford-Binet Scales measure?

• Fluid reasoning

• Knowledge

• Quantitative reasoning

• Visual-spatial processing

• Working memory

• Popular in the U.S for ages 2 to 23, uses MA to calculate IQ

What cognitive abilities does the British Ability Scale measure?

• Verbal ability

• Non-verbal reasoning

• Spatial ability

• Popular in U.K for ages 3 to 17, uses GI (g) to measure outcomes

How does The Wechsler Intelligence Test for Children (WISC) measure intelligence?

• Most widely used instrument for children 6+ years

• Face-to-face test so requires children to have broad auditory perception too

• Verbal - general knowledge, language skills

• Performance - spatial and perceptual abilities

• Uses MA to calculate IQ

What does the Verbal Section of the The Wechsler Intelligence Test for Children (WISC) measure?

• Information (e.g. “What is the capital of France?”)

• Vocabulary (e.g. “What is a helicopter?”)

• Similarities (e.g. “How are a hammer and a chisel alike?”)

• Arithmetic (e.g. “If 4 friends divided 20 lollies equally between them, how many would each person get?”)

• Comprehension (e.g. “Why do we have prisons?”)

• Digit Span (retrieval of information, e.g. “Repeat the follow numbers in order…”)

What does the Performance Section of the The Wechsler Intelligence Test for Children (WISC) measure?

• Measures fluid intelligence, response times etc

• Block design - arrange 9 blocks to match a picture

• Coding - Identify patterns from a series of simple shapes or numbers, each paired with a simple symbol

• Mazes - A set of increasingly difficult mazes printed in a response booklet

• Object assembly - Assemble puzzle parts to form a meaningful whole

• Picture completion - Identify which part of the picture is missing

• Picture arrangement - Arrange cartoon frames to tell a coherent story

What are the issues with these forms of measuring intelligence?

• Do not measure all the generalised abilities from the ‘Many dimensions’ model

• May be impacted by different socio-cultural contexts

• Limited comparability (e.g. using g vs IQ vs MA) but all measure some type of intelligence

What is the issue with using these different measures of intelligence in different cultures?

• Differ among ethnic groups (e.g. Average IQ of Euro-American children higher than African-American children but does not indicate difference in intelligence)

• May include culturally insensitive questions (e.g. “Who discovered America?”)

• Highly dependent on living conditions and environment rather than cognitive ability

• Not an objective or fair measure of intelligence

• People not familiar with American/European cultures may receive lower scores and be treated as ‘different’ in society or receive less resources and support

What is the Koori IQ Test?

• Judith Kari conducted ‘fair’ intelligence tests and found that Indigenous children out-performed European/American children in some ways

• Revisions were made where questions were removed to update the test for culturally sensitive and age-appropriate questions

• Demonstrates how knowledge is culturally-constructed

• Majority groups experience what it is like to be assessed and graded on the basis of unfamiliar criteria

What is social development?

The gradual acquisition of certain skills (e.g. language, interpersonal skills), attitudes, relationships and behaviours that enable an individual to interact with others and function as a member of society

What is Freud’s Theory of Psychosexual Development?

• Concerned with the relationship between the conscious and unconscious mind (e.g. biological/instinctual - pleasure, hunger, desire etc)

• Proposed five stages of psychosexual development

• Focused on children development (influence of early stages of child development on lifespan development)

What are the three main components of Freud’s Theory?

• Superego - what we believe society wants us to do (what we tend to follow out of compulsion)

• Ego - aims to resolve conflict and find compromise between Id and superego)

• Id - focused on giving into our desires

What is Stage 1 (Oral Stage) of Freud’s Theory?

• The mouth is the main source of pleasure

• If this pleasure is not satisfised, we will turn to alternative behaviour

What is Stage 5 (Genital Stage) of Freud’s Theory?

• Young people will seek out their own understanding of different parts of the world via relationships

What is Erikson’s Theory of Psychosocial Development?

• Concerned with the relationship between the individual and the social world

• Proposed eight stages of psychosocial development

• Focused on lifespan development

• Emphasises the importance of relationships in shaping someone’s personality/growth

What is Stage 1 (Trust vs Mistrust) of Erikson’s Theory?

• Resolving the conflict

• Infants purely depend on caregivers - if caregivers provide affectionate and consistent care then they are more likely to trust them

What is Stage 6 (Intimacy vs Isolation) of Erikson’s Theory?

• Young adulthood

• Need to form intimate and loving relationships with others because children can then learn how to navigate these relationships and are less likely to feel lonely

What is Stage 7 (Generativity vs Stagnation) of Erikson’s Theory?

• Feeling like there is no purpose in life

• Getting a job to feel like you are useful to society

What is Stage 8 (Integrity vs Despair) of Erikson’s Theory?

• Affects what they do as elderly people

What is the difference between Psychoanalysis theorists and Learning theorists?

Psychoanalysis theorists emphasise how our development is shaped by internal forces and subjective experiences, whereas, learning theorists emphasise how our development is shaped by external forces

What is Watson’s Classical Conditionig Theory?

Learning via association of two unrelated stimuli and applied this theory in the ‘Little Albert’ experiment

What is Skinner’s Operant Conditioning Theory?

Learning via association between behaviours and consequences and applied this theory through the ‘rat maze’ experiment.

What is Bandura’s Social Learning Theory?

Learning via observation of other people’s behaviours and applied this theory through the ‘Bobo Doll’ experiment

How did Kanner et al. (1943) document the early idea of Autism Spectrum Disorder?

• Described 11 children who showed similarities in traits

• Described the children to have a “powerful desire for aloneness and an obsessive insistence of persistent sameness”

• Early infantile autism - an inborn difference in emotional connection and social communication

• First systematic description of autism as a distinct neurodevelopmental disorder (separate from other disorders e.g. anxiety, depression, schizophrenia etc)

What is the DSM-5 criteria for Autism Spectrum Disorder?

• Social communication and interaction deficits

  • Social reciprocity (e.g. failure to have a flowing conversation)

  • Non-verbal communication (e.g. integration of body language)

  • Social relationship (e.g. knowing how to form and maintain meaningful relationships)

• Restricted and repetitive behaviour and interests

  • Stereotyped or repetitive motor movements (e.g. doing the same task repeatedly)

  • Insistence on sameness (e.g. rigid thinking and eating patterns)

  • Restricted and fixated interests (e.g. not possible to distract them)

  • Hyper- or hypo-reactivity to sensory input (e.g. overwhelmed by noise, sound, light etc)

What is the neurodiversity model for autism?

• Autism as a part of brain variation (NOT a deficit, emphasis on the differences)

• Strengths-based approach (encouraging autistic people to speak for themselves)

How does DTT (1960s) work as a behavioural therapy for autism?

• DTT (Lovaas)

  • Based on operant conditioning

  • Highly structured

  • May be effective in improving certain skills

• Criticisms

  • Lack of care for children’s feelings and needs

  • Learned skills may not be generalisable

How does NDBIS (1980s) work as a behavioural therapy for autism?

• Behavioural therapy + developmental theories

• Integrating children’s interests, feelings and natural settings

What was Wang et al. (2024) study on behavioural therapies for autism?

• Tested the effects of pivotal response treatment on language development (i.e. taking people’s interests into consideration)

• Randomised controlled trial (PRT = pivotal response treatment, TAU = treatment as usual)

• Long-term test to see if behavioural was able to be maintained

• Significantly better performance and improvements on language functions for PRT group + untargeted social and cognitive functions

What are some ways in which we can create autism-friendly communities?

• Sensory adjustment

  • Reduce overwhelming stimuli

  • Offer quiet zones or low-sensory areas

  • Allow use of calm and focus aids (e.g. headphones, fidget toys etc)

• Communication adjustment

  • Use clear and direct language

  • Give information in multiple formats

  • Allow time for processing and response

• Don’t make assumptions - always consider different needs, goals and preferences

• Be kind and be patient

What are emotions?

A combination of physiological and cognitive responses to thoughts or experiences

• Neural responses (e.g. increased adrenaline secretion)

• Physiological factors (e.g. increased heart rate and breathing rate)

• Subjective feelings (e.g. fear)

• Emotional expressions (e.g. raised eyebrows)

• The desire to take action (e.g. ‘Should I run away?’)

Are emotions innate or learned?

They are innate, biologically based and universal

What are the six basic emotions proposed by Paul Ekman’s ‘discrete emotion perspective’?

• Joy

• Sadness

• Anger

• Disgust

• Fear

• Surprise

How did Ekman identify the six basic emotions?

• Identified these emotions as ‘universal’ after travelling to PNG to observe Fore people, isolated from Western cultures

• Showed that a range of photos with people showing different facial expressions

• Found that these six basic emotion were not culturally specific - Western and Fore people identified them in similar ways

What emotion did Ekman add as the seventh basic emotion in 1992?

Contempt

What are the criticisms of the basic emotion perspective?

• Disagreement about the basic emotions

• Vagueness of biological basis (based on observations rather than biological mechanisms)

• Problematic cross-linguistic mapping (different languages have different ways of describing different emotions)

• Assumes that emotions are discrete categories (they are more commonly understood as a continuous concept)

What is the constructivist perspective of emotions?

Emotions are learned through individual experiences, cultural context and social interactions which are not innate or universal (very specific to ourselves)

What is the ‘low effect’ state in the constructivist perspective of emotions?

• Abstract

• Lacks a clear definition

• Connect abstract pre-cursor state to specific emotions (e.g. fear to increased awareness but based on past personal experiences and may take different approaches)

What is the functionalist perspective of emotions?

Emotions are biologically evolved responses that serve adaptive functions, helping individuals navigate and respond to environmental challenges for survival and wellbeing

What are the criticisms of the functionalist perspective of emotions?

Criticised as a reduction to the complexity of emotions (i.e. emotions are not simply reactions in response to a particular goal)

How does our understanding of emotions change across the lifespan?

Children’s understanding of emotions is very basic compared to the rapid growth during adolescence

What can infants (3 to 4 months) understand about emotions?

• Show more interest in facial expressions

• Evidence that they can distinguish between different facial expressions (i.e. Habituation paradigm)

What can infants (6 months) understand about emotions?

• Treat others’ emotions as meaningful

• View emotions as continuous experiences (i.e. Multimodal emotion congruency task - videos where person’s voice and facial expressions were either consistent or inconsistent)

What can children (2 years) understand about emotions?

• Engage in social referencing

• Use vocal cues of people around them to identify and navigate different social situations (i.e. Siegler et al. (2024) study showed that children (16 to 18 months) spent more time playing with toys paired/associated with positive emotions)

What can children (3 years) understand about emotions?

Can label facial expressions and understand the situations that causes some emotions (e.g. match facial expressions to different emotions)

What can children (preschool years) understand about emotions?

• Understand more complex emotions and situations that elicit emotions

• Impacted by environment growing up and more sensitive to specific cues

• Understand that emotions people display are not always consistent with their facial expressions

• Learning social cues associated with different emotions

What is emotional regulation?

A set of both conscious and unconscious processes used to both monitor and modulate emotional experiences and expressions

What is the importance of emotional regulation?

• Affects mental health and overall wellbeing

• Affects social functioning and relationships (i.e. regulating emotions in an extreme or damaging way to others)

• Affects academic and professional success (e.g. dysregulated patterns of emotion can affect performance at work/school/university)

What are some regulatory strategies to deal with emotions involving others?

• Coregulation (i.e. caregiver provides active support to reduce the child’s emotional distress)

• Social support (e.g. friends providing guidance to regulate emotions)

What are some regulatory strategies to deal with emotions on your own?

• Self-comforting behaviours (i.e. repetitive actions to regulate arousal)

• Self-distraction

• Cognitive reappraisal (i.e. requires use to re-interpret the situation once again)

• Mindfulness (e.g. yoga, meditation)

What is adaptive regulation?

Flexible use of strategies that reduce emotional distress while supporting goal-directed behaviours

What is maladaptive regulation?

Rigid, excessive or context-inappropriate strategies that maintain or intensify distress over time (e.g. self-blame, rumination etc)

What are the components need for a regulatory strategy to be successful?

Contextual and developmental

What is temperament?

• Individual differences in emotion, activity level and attention exhibited across contexts

• Primarily genetically and biologically driven (i.e. likely to remain stable across the lifespan)

• Can be identified in infancy and used to predict later psychological adjustment (e.g. traits identified in infants tend to remain similar later in life as adults)

How was the New York Longitudinal Study (1956) used to measure temperament?

• Followed 100+ children from birth to adulthood

• Classified infants into three temperament clusters

  • Easy (40%) - adapt easily and respond positively

  • Difficult (10%) - irregular routine, slow to adapt, react negatively and intensely

  • Slow to warm up (15%) - gradually adapt to new situations

  • Mixed (35%) - unclear behavioural patterns

How did the Rothbart et al. (2001) study measure temperament?

• Characterised each child along the same dimensions of temperament

• Five dimensions - fear/distress/anger/frustration, attention span, activity level, smiling and laughter

• Developed questionnaires to measure temperament from infancy to adulthood to rate performance of infants in everyday life (can be completed by parents for infants based on age)

What are the physiological measures of temperament?

• Heart-rate variability (e.g. can reflect how our CNS responds to situations)

• Electroencephalogram (EEG) (e.g. reflects how different emotions relate/react to different activities/situations via brain activity)

What can children make decisions (autonomy) about that will affect their development?

• Preferences

  • Favourite people

  • Favourite activities

• Behaviours

  • Response to emotions

  • Response to others

  • Play

• Values

  • Fairness

  • Etiquette

What is culture?

A socially transmitted or socially constructed constellation consisting of practices, competencies, ideas, schemas, symbols, values, norms, institutions, goals, constitutive rules, artefacts and modifications of the physical environment (not limited to a nationality or ethnic group but has an influence on how different information is interpreted by different people)

What are schemas?

Mental/cognitive frameworks to organise information

What are values?

Shared standards of what is moral and important to someone

What are constitutive rules?

Foundational rules for social practices (e.g. marriage - legal/social)

What are norms?

Concrete specific behaviour or guidance about to behave structurally embedded into society

What are competencies?

Thinking, reasoning and problem solving (i.e. cognitive skills someone requires in order to function effectively within society)

What was Bronfenbrenner’s perspective of development?

The child’s environment is composed of a series of nested structures, ranging from the microsystem to the macrosystem

What is the macrosystem?

Broad ideology, laws and customs of one’s culture, subculture or social class

What factors are included in the microsystem?

• Extended family

• Parents and siblings

• Childcare settings

• Medical and other professional services

• Workplace

• Neighbourhood play area