Chapter 2: Theories of Human Development

activity-passivity issue

The issue in developmental theory centering on whether humans are active contributors to their own development or are passively shaped by forces beyond their control.

continuity-discontinuity issue

The debate among theorists about whether human development is best characterized as gradual and continuous or abrupt and stagelike.

developmental stage

A distinct phase within a larger sequence of development; a period characterized by a particular set of abilities, motives, behaviors, or emotions that occur together and form a coherent pattern.

universality-context-specificity issue

The debate over the extent to which developmental changes are common to everyone (universal, as in most stage theories) or different from person to person (particularistic).

psychoanalytic theory

The theoretical perspective associated with Freud and his followers that emphasizes unconscious motivations for behavior, conflicts within the personality, and stages of psychosexual development.

instinct

An inborn biological force assumed to motivate a particular response or class of responses.

unconscious motivation

Freud’s term for feelings, experiences, and conflicts that influence a person’s thinking and behavior even though they cannot be recalled.

id

A psychoanalytic term for the inborn component of the personality that is driven by the instincts or selfish urges.

ego

Psychoanalytic term for the rational component of the personality.

superego

The psychoanalytic term for the component of the personality that consists of the individual’s internalized moral standards.

libido

Freud’s term for the biological energy of the sex instinct.

psychosexual stages

Freud’s five stages of development, associated with biological maturation and shifts in the libido: oral, anal, phallic, latency, and genital.

fixation

In psychoanalytic theory, a defense mechanism in which development is arrested and part of the libido remains tied to an early stage of development.

identification

Freud’s term for the individual’s tendency to emulate, or adopt the attitudes and behaviors of, another person, particularly the same-sex parent.

defense mechanisms

Mechanisms used by the ego to defend itself against anxiety caused by conflict between the id’s impulses and social demands.

repression

Removing unacceptable thoughts or traumatic memories from consciousness.

regression

A defense mechanism that involves retreating to an earlier, less traumatic stage of development.

psychosocial stages

Erikson’s eight stages of development (trust, autonomy, initiative, industry, identity, intimacy, generativity, and integrity), emphasizing social influences more and biological urges less than Freud’s psychosexual stages.

behaviorism

A school of thinking in psychology that holds that conclusions about human development should be based on controlled observations of overt behavior rather than on speculation about unconscious motives or other unobservable phenomena; the philosophical underpinning of early theories of learning.

classical conditioning

A type of learning in which a stimulus that initially had no effect on the individual comes to elicit a response because of its association with a stimulus that already elicits the response.

operant conditioning

Also called instrumental conditioning, a form of learning in which freely emitted acts (or operants) become more or less probable depending on the consequences they produce.

positive reinforcement

The process in operant conditioning whereby a response is strengthened when its consequence is a pleasant event.

negative reinforcement

The process in operant conditioning in which a response is strengthened or made more probable when its consequence is the removal of an unpleasant stimulus from the situation.

positive punishment

The process in operant conditioning whereby a response is weakened when its consequence is an unpleasant event.

negative punishment

The process in operant conditioning in which a response is weakened or made less probable when its consequence is the removal of a pleasant stimulus from the situation.

extinction

The gradual weakening and disappearance of a learned response when it is no longer reinforced.

social cognitive theory (social learning theory)

Bandura’s social learning theory, which holds that children and adults can learn novel responses merely by observing the behavior of a model, making mental notes on what they have seen, and then using these mental representations to reproduce the model’s behavior; more broadly, a theory emphasizing the importance of cognitive processing of social experiences.

observational learning

Learning that results from observing the behavior of other people; emphasized in Bandura’s social cognitive theory.

latent learning

Learning occurs but is not evident in behavior; children can learn from observation even though they do not imitate (perform) the learned responses.

vicarious reinforcement

In observational learning, the consequences experienced by models, because of their behavior, that affect the learner’s likelihood of imitating the behavior.

overimitation

An adaptive and apparently universal tendency of children to imitate every detail of what they see a model do, even actions that are not directly useful in achieving a goal.

self-efficacy

The belief that one can effectively produce desired outcomes in a particular area of life.

reciprocal determinism

The notion in social cognitive theory that the flow of influence between people and their environments is a two-way street; the environment may affect the person, but the person’s characteristics and behavior will also influence the environment.

constructivism

The position taken by Piaget and others that humans actively create their own understandings of the world from their experiences, as opposed to being born with innate ideas or being programmed by the environment.

sensorimotor stage

Piaget’s first stage of cognitive development, spanning the first 2 years of life, in which infants rely on their senses and motor behaviors in adapting to the world around them.

preoperational stage

Piaget’s second stage of cognitive development, lasting from about age 2 to age 7, when children think at a symbolic level but have not yet mastered logical operations.

concrete operations stage

Piaget’s third stage of cognitive development, lasting from about age 7 to age 11, when children are acquiring logical operations and can reason effectively about real objects and experiences.

formal operations stage

Piaget’s fourth and final stage of cognitive development (from age 11 or 12), when the individual begins to think more rationally and systematically about abstract concepts and hypothetical ideas.

sociocultural perspective

Vygotsky’s theory of development, which maintains that cognitive development is shaped by the sociocultural context in which it occurs and grows out of children’s social interactions with members of their culture.

information-processing approach

An approach to cognition that emphasizes the fundamental mental processes involved in attention, perception, memory, and decision making.

systems theories

Theories of development holding that changes over the life span arise from the ongoing interrelationships between a changing organism and a changing environment, both of which are part of a larger, dynamic system.

bioecological model

Bronfenbrenner’s model of development that emphasizes the roles of both nature and nurture as the developing person interacts with a series of environmental systems (microsystem, mesosystem, exosystem, and macrosystem) over time (chronosystem).

microsystem

In Bronfenbrenner’s bioecological approach, the immediate settings in which the person functions (for example, the family).

mesosystem

In Bronfenbrenner’s bioecological approach, interrelationships between microsystems or immediate environments (for example, ways in which events in the family affect a child’s interactions at a day care center).

exosystem

In Bronfenbrenner’s bioecological approach, settings not experienced directly by individuals that still influence their development (for example, effects of events at a parent’s workplace on children’s development).

macrosystem

In Bronfenbrenner’s bioecological approach, the larger cultural or subcultural context of development.

chronosystem

In Bronfenbrenner’s bioecological approach, the system that captures the way changes in environmental systems, such as social trends and life events, are patterned over a person’s lifetime.

proximal processes

In Bronfenbrenner’s bioecological theory, the important recurring, reciprocal interactions between the individual and other people, objects, or symbols that move development forward (for example, parent and child reading bedtime stories together nightly).

PPCT model

In Bronfenbrenner’s bioecological theory, a call for doing more than comparing children who live at different social addresses by examining development as a function of four factors: process, person, context, and time.

eclectic

In the context of science, an individual who recognizes that no single theory can explain everything but that each has something to contribute to our understanding.