Psych Ch. 9

9.1 What is Lifespan Development?

→ How is an adult influenced by the child they once were?

• Physical development: involves growth and changes in the body and brain, senses, motor skills, and health/wellness.

• Cognitive development: involves learning, attention, memory, language, thinking, reasoning, and creativity.

• Psychological development: involves emotions, personality, and social relationships.

• Normative approach: spreads across physical, cognitive, and psychological development. Asks “what is normal development?”

• Developmental milestones: guidelines used to compare children with similar aged peers to determine approximate ages they should reach specific events

  • Ex. crawling, walking, writing, dressing, naming colors, speaking in sentences, starting puberty

• Some milestones, like puberty, are universal. Others, like learning to read, depends on the culture and when they start schooling.

Issues in Developmental Psychology

→ focuses on how people change and that all approaches address questions of change.

→ How do genetics and environment influence development?

Is Development Continuous or Discontinuous?

• Continuous development: views development as a cumulative process, gradually improving on existing skills.

  • Ex. a child’s physical growth: adding inches to height year by year

• Discontinuous development: belief that development takes place in unique stages, occurs at specific times or ages.

  • Ex. Change is more sudden, like an infant’s ability to conceive object permanence.

Is There One Course of Development or Many?

• Is there one universal path of development? Or many different paths?

• Stage theories hold that sequence of development is universal.

  • Ex. children around the world reach language milestones in a similar sequence. Infants in all cultures coo before they babble.

• Ex. Aché mothers carry their kids until they’re 23-25 months old to prevent them from getting injured in the forest. Once they can walk then they are given freedom to run around. They develop better motor skills than most US children of the same age by the time they are 9.

How do Nature and Nurture Influence Development?

→ Nature: biology and genetics

→ Nurture: environment and culture.

Nature v. Nurture debate seeks to understand how our personalities and traits are the product of our genetic makeup and biological factors and how they are shaped by our environments.

9.2 Lifespan Theories

Psychosexual Theory of Development

• Freud believed that personality develops during early childhood.

  • Also believed that during childhood if we lack proper nurturance and parenting during a developmental stage then we will become stuck in that stage.

• Psychosexual development: Freud’s stages of development, says children’s pleasure seeking urges focus on different area of the body, called the erogenous zone, at each of the five stages of development.

Psychosocial Theory of Development

• Erik Erikson (1902-1994) took Freud’s theory and modified it to become psychosocial theory.

• Psychosocial development: emphasizes the social nature of our development rather than its sexual nature.

• Erikson proposed that we are motivated by a need to achieve competence in certain areas of our lives.

• Trust is the basis of our development during infancy (birth - 12 months)

  • Infants dependent upon caregivers, caregivers must be responsive to infants needs.

• Toddlers (1-3 yrs), main goal is to resolve issue of autonomy vs. shame and doubt.

  • Ex. a 2 year old wants to pick out her outfit and dress herself. The outfits may not be appropriate for the situation, but her decisions can impact her sense of independence.

• Preschool age (3-6 yrs.), capable of initiating activities and asserting control over their world through social interactions and play. Must learn to plan and achieve goals, if not they can feel guilty.

• Elementary school age (7-11 yrs): Children face task of industry vs. inferiority. Children begin to compare themselves to peers and see how they measure up.

  • Can develop sense of pride in schoolwork, sport, and social activity or will feel inferior and inadequate.

• Adolescence (12-18): children face task of identity vs. role confusion, main task is establishing a sense of self. “Who am I?”

  • People who are successful in this stage have a strong sense of identity and are able to remain true to beliefs.

• Early adulthood (19-29), concerned with intimacy v. isolation. We are ready to share our life with others after we develop sense of self.

• Middle adulthood (30s-64), generativity v. stagnation; do we find our life’s work contributing to the development of others or do we have little connection with others?

• Late adulthood (65-end of life), Integrity v. despair, we reflect on our lives and feel a sense of satisfaction or failure.

Erikson’s Psychosocial Stages of Development

• Stage 1: (0-1 yrs) → Trust vs. mistrust → Trust (or mistrust) that basic needs, like nourishment and affection, will be met

• Stage 2: (1-3 yrs) → Autonomy vs. shame/doubt → Develop a sense of independence in many tasks.

• Stage 3: (3-6 yrs.) → Initiative vs. guilt → Take initiative on some activities - may develop a guilt when unsuccessful or boundaries overstepped.

• Stage 4: (7-11 yrs.) → Industry v. inferiority → Develop self-confidence in abilities when competent or sense of inferiority when not.

• Stage 5: (12-18 yrs.) → Identity vs. confusion → Experiment with and develop identity roles.

• Stage 6: (19-29 yrs.) → Intimacy vs. Isolation → Establish intimacy and relationships with others.

• Stage 7: (30-64 yrs.) → Generativity vs. stagnation → Contribute to society and be part of a family

• Stage 8: (65-death) → Integrity vs. despair → Assess and make sense of life and meaning of contributions.

Cognitive Theory of Development

• Jean Piaget (1896-1980) studied childhood development

• Focused on children’s cognitive growth, with distinctive stages of development.

• Children develop schemata:

  • Concepts that are used to help us categorize and interpret information. When children reach adulthood they have a schemata for everything.

  • When children learn new things, they adjust their schemata through two processes:

    • Assimilation: take in information that is comparable to what they already know

    • Accommodation: when they change their schemata based on new information.

  • Ex. 2 yr old learned schemata for dogs because family has a lab retriever. When he sees other dogs in pictures he can identify that it’s a dog. One day he sees a sheep for the first time and identifies it as a dog because his schemata only accounts for four legged animals with fur. His mom tells him that its a sheep and not a dog, so he must accommodate his schema for dogs to include more information based on his new experiences.

Piaget’s Stages of Cognitive Development

Sensorimotor (0-2 yrs.) → World experienced through senses and actions → Object permanence, stranger anxiety

• Children learn about the world through their own senses and motor behavior; touching, grabbing putting things in their mouths

• Object permanence: understanding that even if something is out of sight, it still exists.

• Also develop stranger anxiety (fear of unfamiliar people)

Preoperational (2-6 yrs.) → Use words and images to represent things, but lack logical reasoning → Pretend play, egocentrism, Language development

• Children can use symbols to represent words, images, and ideas, which is why children in this stage pretend play.

• Use language but can’t understand adult logic or mentally manipulate information, go off of their own information.

• Ex. Kenny and his sister get a slice of pizza. Kenny’s slice was cut into 5 pieces, and he told his sister that he got more pizza than she did, which is not true the slices were the same size.

  • This is conservation: idea that even if you change the appearance of something, it is still equal in size as long as nothing has been removed or added.

• Also expect children to display egocentrism: a child is not able to take the perspective of others. They think that everyone sees the world through their eyes.

  • Ex. Kenny goes to the store to buy a present for his sister’s birthday and he gets her an Iron man toy thinking if he likes it then she will too.

Concrete Operational (7-11 yrs.) → Understand concrete events and analogies logically; perform arithmetical operations → Conservation, mathematical, transformations.

• Children can think logically about concrete events, they have a firm grasp on the use of numbers and start to employ memory strategies. Can perform mathematical operations and understand transformations.

  • Reversibility: objects can be changed and then returned back to their original form or condition.

Formal Operations (12+ yrs.) → Formal operations, utilize abstract reasoning → abstract logic, moral reasoning

• Can deal with abstract ideas to problem solve, look at alternative solutions, and test them. A renewed egocentrism occurs.

  • Ex. a 15 year old with a small pimple on her face might think it’s huge and all anyone sees when they look at her.

Beyond Formal Operational Thought

• Some research suggests that children reach cognitive milestones earlier than Piaget proposed.

• Some psychologists have suggested a 5th stage, known as the postformal stage

  • Here, decisions are made based on situations and circumstances, logic is integrated with emotion as adults develop principles that depend on contexts.

Moral Theory of Development

• Lawrence Kohlberg (1927-1987) extended upon Piaget’s work by suggesting that moral development follows a series of stages.

• Ex. 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 didn’t care if your answer was yes or no, he wanted to know the reasoning behind your answer.

• Stages of Moral Reasoning: An individual progresses from the capacity for pre- conventional morality to the capacity for conventional morality, and toward attaining post-conventional morality.

  • Level 1 - Pre-conventional morality → (stage 1): Obedience and punishment: behavior driven by avoiding punishment. (stage 2): Individual interest: behavior driven by self-interest and rewards.

  • Level 2 - Conventional Morality → (stage 3): Interpersonal: behavior driven by social approval. (stage 4): Authority: behavior driven by obeying authority and conforming to social order.

  • Level 3 - Post conventional morality → (stage 5): Social contract: behavior driven by balance of social order and individual rights. (stage 6): Universal ethics: behavior driven by internal moral principles.

• Moral reasoning and moral behavior are two different things. What we say we would do in a situation vs. what we would actually do are sometimes completely different.

9.3 Stages of Development

→ Development can be broken into three areas: physical, cognitive, and psychosocial.

Prenatal Development

→ Three stages: germinal, embryonic, fetal

Germinal Stage (1-2 Weeks)

• Conception: occurs when a sperm fertilizes an egg and forms a zygote.

  • Zygote: begins as a one-cell structure that is created when a sperm and egg merge.

  • Mitosis: cell division, fragile process and fewer than one half of all zygotes survive beyond first two weeks.

  • → after five days of mitosis there are 100 cells, after 9 months there are billions.

Embryonic Stage (3-8 Weeks)

• Embryo: clump of cells that has traveled down the fallopian tubes and implanted itself into uterine lining.

• Placenta: structure connected to the uterus that provides nourishment and oxygen to the developing embryo via the umbilical cord.

  → heart begins to beat and organs form/function. Spinal cord and brain also form.

Fetal Stage (9-40 Weeks)

• Fetus is about the size of a kidney bean and begins to take on recognizable human form.

Prenatal Influences

• Prenatal care: medical care during a pregnancy that monitors the health of both the mother and baby.

• Everything in the environment affects the fetus and can have lifelong effects.

• Placenta gives nourishment to baby, hence the phrase “eating for two”

• Teratogen: any environmental agent, biological, chemical, or physical, that causes damage to the developing embryo or fetus.

  • Alcohol is an example of this, leading cause of preventable intellectual disabilities in children during pregnancy.

    • Fetal alcohol spectrum disorders are a collection of birth defects associated with heavy consumption of alcohol during pregnancy.

  • Smoking is also a teratogen because nicotine travels through the placenta to the fetus.

    • Smoking while pregnant can lead to premature birth, low birth weight, still birth, and sudden infant death syndrome (SIDS)

  • Most over the counter medicines are considered teratogens.

    • Babies born with a heroin addiction need heroin like an adult with a heroin addiction would need it.

• Critical Period: specific periods in the pregnancy when certain organs of the fetus develop.

Infancy Through Childhood

• Newborn reflexes: All healthy babies are born with these, they are inborn automatic responses to particular forms of stimulation. They help the baby survive until it is capable of more complex behaviors.

  • Rooting reflex is baby’s response to anything touching their cheek, baby will turn its head in the direction of the object and begin to suck

  • Grasping reflex is present when you put your finger in a baby’s hand.

• Newborns can show a preference for faces and prefer their mother’s voice over a strangers.

Physical Development

• In infancy, toddlerhood, and early childhood, the body’s physical development is rapid. Newborns weigh between 5-10 pounds and a newborn’s weight typically doubles in six months and triples in one year.

• Growth slows between 4-6 years old. During this time children gain 5-7 pounds and grow about 2-3 inches per year.

• By 10 years old, average female weights 88 pounds and male weighs 85 pounds.

• Previously thought that we are born with all the brain cells we would ever have, but recent research suggests that neurogenesis can continue through adulthood.

• Size of brain increases rapidly, size of a 2 yr olds brain is 55% of its adult size, and by 6 yrs old the brain is about 90% of its adult size.

• Motor Skills: our ability to move our bodies and manipulate objects.

  • Fine motor skills: focus on the muscles in our fingers, toes, and eyes; enable coordination of small actions, like grasping a toy or using a spoon.

  • Gross motor skills: focus on large muscle groups that control our arms and legs and involve larger movements, like balancing, running, and jumping.

Developmental Milestones, Ages 2-5 yrs.

Cognitive Development

• Infants shake their head no around 6-9 months

• Around 9-12 months they respond to verbal requests to do things like “wave bye” or “blow a kiss”

• Object permanence starts around 8 months old.

• Preschool age children understand basic time concepts and begin to use humor in stories.

  • Also love asking why?

• Theory of Mind: children understand that people have thoughts, feelings, and beliefs that are different than their own.

  • They can use this skill to tease others, persuade their parents to buy them candy, or understand why a sibling might be angry,

• Cognitive skills develop around ages 6-11. Thought process are more logical and they can begin to understand addition and subtraction.

Attachment

→ Long standing connection or bond with others.

• Harry Harlow conducted a series of experiments on monkeys where he separated newborns from their mothers Each monkey had two surrogate mothers, one was made of wire mesh that could dispense milk and the other was made of cloth but couldn’t dispense milk.

  • Research shows that monkeys preferred soft cuddly cloth monkey and only went to wire monkey if they wanted to be fed.

  • Prior to this experiment, doctors believed that the only thing babies looked for was nourishment, but this proved that there was ore involved in the bonding process.

• Secure Base: parental presence that gives the child a sense of safety as he explores his surroundings

  • Two things are needed: (1): caregiver must be responsive to the child’s physical, social, and emotional needs. and (2): the caregiver and child must engage in mutually enjoyable interactions.

• Mary Ainsworth identified three types of parent child attachments:

  • Secure attachment: the toddler prefers his parent over a stranger. Considered the most common and healthiest.

    • Attachment figure is used as a secure base to explore the environment and is sought out in times of stress. Securely attached children are distressed when their caregivers are not in the room with them.

  • Avoidant attachment: child is unresponsive to the parent, does not use the parent as a secure base, and does not care if the parent leaves.

    • Child reacts to parent the same way they would to a stranger and take a while to show a positive reaction when a parent reappears in their presence

  • Resistant attachment: children tend to show clingy behavior, but then they reject the attachment figure’s attempts to interact with them.

    • These kids don’t explore their area out of fear. This kind of attachment is the result of the caregivers’ inconsistent level of response to their child’s issues.

  • Disorganized attachment: children freeze, run around their area in an erratic manner, or tru to run away when their caregiver returns.

    • Seen most commonly in children who have been abused and abuse disrupts a child’s ability to regulate their emotions.

Self-Concept

• Primary psychosocial milestone of childhood is the development of a positive sense of self.

• Formation of a positive self concept begins in Erikson’s toddlerhood stage, when children establish autonomy and become confident in their abilities.

• Diana Baumrind established a theory describing four parenting styles:

  • Authoritative style: parent gives reasonable demands and consistent limits, expresses warmth and affection, and listens to the child’s point of view.

    • Make rules and explain why they have them, but also relax them sometimes, like allowing a nighttime swim on a family vacation despite bedtimes.

  • Authoritarian style: parent places high value on conformity and obedience. Parent are strict and tightly monitor their children and express little warmth.

    • This style can create anxious and withdrawn kids.

  • Permissive Style: kids run the show and everything goes. Make few demands and rarely use punishment. Tend to be very nurturing and loving, may play the role of friend and not parent.

    • Permissive parents may not have bedtimes at all and allow the child to choose their own bedtime regardless if on vacation or not.

    • Children raised with this style tend to lack discipline and have poor grades.

    • Can have higher self esteem, better social skills, and lower levels of depression.

  • Uninvolved style: Parents are indifferent, uninvolved, and sometimes referred to as neglectful. Don’t respond to child’s needs and make few demands.

    • Parents may provide basic needs but nothing else, children raised in this style are usually emotionally withdrawn, fearful, anxious, and do poorly in school.

• Temperament: innate traits that influence how one thinks, behaves, and reacts with the environment. Children with a good temperament have positive emotions, adapt well to change, and can regulate their emotions.

Adolescence

→ Period of development that begins at puberty and ends at emerging adulthood.

→ In the US it’s seen as a time to develop independence from parents while also remaining connected to them.

Physical Development

• Several changes occur during puberty:

  • Adrenarche: Maturing of adrenal glands

  • Gonadarche: maturing of sex glands

  • Primary Sexual Characteristics: organs specifically needed for reproduction, like the uterus and ovaries and testes.

  • Secondary Sexual Characteristics: physical signs of sexual maturation that do ot directly involve sex organs, like development of breasts and hips and development of facial hair and a deepened voice.

  • Menarche: beginning of menstrual periods, occurs around 12-13 years old.

  • Spermarche: First ejaculation, occurs around 13-14 years old.

• People experience a rapid height increase during puberty. Both nature and nurture can affect height outcome.

• Puberty can be a source of pride or shame for teens since puberty affects everyone differently.

  • Boys that become stronger, taller, and more athletic earlier than their peers tend to be more popular and confident and independent, but also at a greater risk for substance abuse and early sexual activity.

  • Girls that mature earlier than others may be teased or overtly admired, and can lead them to become self conscious about their bodies. These girls are at a higher risk for depression, substance abuse, and eating disorders.

  • Both boys and girls who develop later are at a higher risk for depression and conflict with parents.

• Up until puberty, brain cells continue to bloom in the frontal region.

  • This leads teens to engage in risky behavior because their frontal lobe, responsible for planning and impulse control, hasn’t developed fully.

Cognitive Development

• During adolescence, teens move out of concrete thinking and become capable of abstract thought.

  • Piaget refers to this stage as formal operational thought.

• Cognitive Empathy: known as theory of mind, related to ability to take the perspective of others and feel concern for them.

• Teens who reported having supportive fathers with whom they could share their feelings were found to be better able to take the perspective of others.

Psychosocial Development

• Erikson argued that during this stage most teens ask “who am I?” and “who do I want to be?”

• Only a small number of teens have major conflicts with their parents and most disagreements are minor.

Emerging Adulthood

• Emerging Adulthood: spans 18 years old to mid 20s, characterized as an in between time where identity exploration is focused on work and love.

• In western culture, the age that adulthood starts becomes later and later based on dependence.

  • This is because the level of education necessary to get a job has increased from a high school diploma to potentially a masters.

Adulthood

→ begins around 20 yrs old and has three distinct stages: early, middle, and late.

Physical Development

• By early adulthood, physical maturation is complete. We are at our prime, 20 to early 40s.

• Middle adulthood extends from 40s to 60s, and physical decline is gradual. Wrinkles will appear and fertility declines too with the onset of menopause around 50 yrs old.

• Late adulthood is considered to extend from 60s to death. Skin loses elasticity, reaction time slows, and muscle strength diminishes.

Cognitive Development

• Cognitive abilities remain steady throughout early and middle adulthood.

  • Crystallized intelligence remains steady as we age.

• Alzheimer’s is typically genetic, and forms when cells die in the brain and build up plaques. A person may forget how to walk, talk, and potentially eat.

Psychosocial Development

• Positive relationships with significant others in our adult years can lead to a state of wellbeing

• Socioemotional selectivity theory: Suggests that our social support and friendships dwindle in number, but remain as close, if not more close than in our earlier years.

Ch. 9.4 Death and Dying

• Culture influences how we view death

  • Ex. 50 years ago in the US a doctor might not have told someone they were dying.

• Hospice: Helps provide a death with dignity and pain management in a humane and comfortable environment outside of a hospital setting.

  • Because of hospice, many terminally ill people are able to spend their last few days at home.

• Hospice patients report being satisfied with the care they receive and tend to live longer than a hospital patient would.

• Elizabeth Kubler-Ross proposed 5 stages of grief: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance.

  • Most occur in different orders depending on how the person handles grief, and not everyone will go through all the stages.

• Research shows that people who are religious handle death better because of their hope in an afterlife.

• Living Will/ Advance Directive: written legal document that details specific interventions a person wants.

  • Ex. A person in the last stages of a terminal illness may not want to receive life extending treatments.

  • May also order a Do Not Resuscitate (DNR): if a person stops breathing or their heart stops breathing, medical professionals are not to take steps to revive or resuscitate them.

  • Living will can also have a health care proxy:

    • Appoints a specifics person to make medical decisions for you if you are unable to speak for yourself.

• People’s desires for living wills and DNRs are influenced by religion, culture, and upbringing.