The scientific study of systematic processes of change and stability in humans.
Life Span Development
Development from conception to death.
"From womb to tomb."
Can be positive (e.g., enrolling in college courses after retirement) or negative (e.g., isolating oneself after retirement).
Studying the Life Span
Initially focused on infant and child development.
Currently examines the entire human lifespan.
The Goals of Human Development Study
Description: What happens at each stage of human development.
Explanation: Why these developments occur.
Prediction: Predicting behavior based on factors.
Intervention: Modifying or preventing certain behaviors.
Domains of Development
Physical Development
Growth of the body and brain, sensory capacities, motor skills, and health.
Cognitive Development
Learning, attention, memory, language, thinking, reasoning, and creativity.
Psychosocial Development
Emotions, personality, and social relationships.
All three domains influence each other.
Periods of the Life Span
Social Construction
A concept or practice that is an invention of a particular culture or society.
Division of the lifespan into periods:
Prenatal Period: Conception to birth.
Infancy and Toddlerhood: Birth to age 3.
Early Childhood: Age 3-6.
Middle Childhood: Age 6-11.
Adolescence: Age 11 to about 20.
Emerging & Young Adulthood: Age 20-40.
Middle Adulthood: Age 40-65.
Late Adulthood: Age 65-over.
Influences on Development
Individual Differences
Variations in characteristics, influences, and developmental outcomes.
Heredity, Environment, Maturation
Heredity (Nature)
Inborn traits.
Characteristics inherited from biological parents.
Environment (Nurture)
The world outside the self, starting in the womb.
Learning from experience.
Maturation
Maturation of the body and brain.
Differences in innate characteristics and experiences play a larger role as children grow into adults.
Maturation continues to influence biological processes throughout life, such as brain development.
Context of Development
Family
Nuclear family.
Extended family.
Socioeconomic Status (SES) & Neighborhood
SES is based on family income, education, and occupation levels of adults in the household.
Poverty is a risk factor in development due to lack of nutrition.
Supportive parents and external assistance can positively influence development even in impoverished environments.
Culture and Race/Ethnicity
Culture refers to the way of life of a society or group, including customs, traditions, laws, knowledge, beliefs, values, language, and physical products.
Culture is learned, shared, and transmitted among members of a social group.
Culture and race/ethnicity are passed down from parents to children.
The Historical Context
The time period in which individuals live significantly impacts development.
Specific experiences related to time and place can influence a person's life.
Normative & Non-normative Influences
Normative Influences
Biological and environmental events that affect many people in a society in similar ways.
Normative age-graded influences:
Experiences common to people within a specific age group (e.g., puberty).
Normative history-graded influences:
Significant events that shape the behavior and attitudes of a historical generation (e.g., a pandemic).
Historical Generation ≠ Age Cohort
Historical Generation
A group of people who experience an event during a formative time in their lives.
Age Cohort
A group of people born around the same time.
Nonnormative Influence
Unusual events that have a major impact on individual lives by disrupting the expected sequence of the life cycle.
Typical events occurring at an atypical time of life (e.g., teen pregnancy).
Atypical events (e.g., surviving a plane crash).
Timing of Influences: Critical or Sensitive Periods
Critical Periods
Specific times when the presence or absence of an event has a specific impact on development.
E.g., Lack of attachment formation from 0-1 year will cause difficulties in forming relations later.
Sensitive Periods
Developmental periods when a person is particularly open to certain kinds of experiences.
Concept sensitive periods is considered a better fit because many aspects of development have shown plasticity.
E.g., attachment can only form from 0-1 year, after that the focus of development will change.
The Life-Span Developmental Approach
Development is lifelong.
Development is a lifelong process of change. Each period is impacted by what happened prior and what will happen later.
Development is multidimensional.
Occurs across multiple, interacting dimensions—biological, psychological, and social—each potentially developing at different rates.
Development is multidirectional.
Gains in one area may coincide with losses in others.
E.g., physical skills of teens develop, but language skills decrease.
Relative influences of biology and culture shift over the life span.
The balance between biological and cultural influences changes throughout life.
E.g., biological skills such as senses weaken as one ages, but cultural habits such as education helps offset this.
Development involves changing resource allocations.
Individuals allocate resources (time, energy, talents, money, and social support) in various ways for growth, maintenance, and managing loss when possible.
Allocation of resources for these functions changes across the lifespan, with growth being prioritized in childhood and managing loss in old age, while middle age involves a more balanced allocation.
Development shows plasticity.
Many abilities can be improved significantly with training and practice, even in late life.
Development is influenced by the historical and cultural context.
Each person develops within specific circumstances partially determined by maturation and partially by time and place.
Humans affect and are affected by their historical-cultural context.
Each theorist demonstrates the importance of development based on their theoretical assumptions and study based on the following:
Level of analysis (Individual vs. Community)
Focus (Structure Vs. process)
Content importance (Personality vs. cognition)
Importance on overt vs. Covert behavior.
Universal development Vs. individual development.
Methodology Used.
Jean Piaget: Cognitive-Stage Theory
Jean Piaget (1896-1980)
Influential researcher in developmental psychology.
Born in Neuchâtel, Switzerland; father was a historian, mother was intelligent and kind with a neurotic temperament.
Family turmoil sparked his interest in psychoanalysis theory.
Mechanical interests, sea shells, birds, fossils.
Created "autovap" description, a combination of cart and locomotive.
Published first one-page article about an albino sparrow at age 10.
Before secondary school offered curatorship of mollusks at Geneva history museum (publications in mollusks) but declined to complete secondary school.
Spent adolescence reading Bergson, Kant, Spencer, Comte, Durkheim, and William James and philosophy to publish a philosophical novel in 1917, which was not a bestseller.
"I wrote even if it was only for myself, for I could not think without writing—but it had to be in a systematic fashion as if it were to be an article for publication”.
Received Ph.D. at 21.
Explored psychoanalysis at the Zurich laboratory for psychology; met Theodore Simon and was requested to test Binet’s Reasoning Test on French-speaking children.
Became interested in unanswerable questions and learned that age affects answers.
Wanted to understand more about correct and incorrect answers and how a child thinks.
books:
The Language and Thought of the Child (1923)
Judgment & Reasoning in the Child (1924)
The Child’s Conception of the World (1926)
The Child’s Conception of Physical Causality (1927)
The Moral Judgment of the Child (1932)
Continued research at the institute, taught philosophy at the University of Neuchâtel, studied Gestalt Psychology, and observed his own babies.
Albert Einstein encouraged him to study time, speed, and movement, resulting in The Child's Conception of Time (1946a) and The Child’s Conception of Movement and Speed (1946b).
Received the Distinguished Scientific Contribution Award from the American Psychological Association in 1969.
Studied children's thinking until death in 1980.
General Orientation
Epistemology
The study of knowledge.
How someone can understand knowledge.
How it can be formed, emerge, and obtain.
“The problem of the relation between the acting or thinking subject and objects of his experience”.
He konsen how people think, how a child can know something, and when the opportunity comes.
genetic = development or “emergence”.
Genetic Epistemology
“By studying developmental changes in the process of knowing & in the organization of knowledge, Piaget can answer the question of epistemology.”
How a child obtains knowledge of something and organizes the knowledge in their cognition to understand how someone can have a particular knowledge.
Piaget’s Questions
How do we come to know something?
By acting on it.
Knowledge is a process rather than a state in a relationship between the knower and the known.
Children understand the ball by manipulating it.
… knowledge is a process rather than a state. It is an event or a relationship between the knower and the known.
… children understand the ball by manipulating it.
By construct it in their cognition.
People construct knowledge. They actively contribute to their own knowledge to contribute to the form and knowledge that takes place.
The accumulation of knowledge by having an interaction with certain things would help with making new knowledge in the brain.
Are there certain innate ideas, or must all knowledge be acquired?
Must be acquired!
Knowledge comes Individually through acting on and construct it. So, knowledge must be acquired actively.
Cognitive humans actively select and interpret information in the environment where they do not passively soak up information to build a storehouse of knowledge.
There are no innate ideas, but there are reflexes as tools to gain knowledge.
E.g., sucking to get food and change how they interact with new objects.
Is objective knowledge, unbiased by the nature of the knower, even possible?
Knowledge changes (biased can be different for each individual) because cognitive systems are always developing. So as new experience is acquired, old knowledge and views will eventually change.
Experience is always filtered through the child’s current ways of understanding. More experience = more develop and knowledge.
Letting kids explore objects will give them more knowledge.
Mechanism of Cognitive Development
Happens all the time as new information passes in our senses.
Scheme → New info → cognitive conflict → Adaptation → Assimilation & Accommodation → Equilibrium → New scheme.
Schema
“An organized pattern of behavior" to reflect a way of interacting with the environment.
The pattern of sucking includes just sucking and the opening of the mouth and putting it in the mouth.
Assimilation
The process of fitting reality into one current cognitive organization to match information to cognitive knowledge.
Accommodation
The process of changing cognitive structures to accept something from the environment to create a new pattern.
What Develops?
Structural Change: Scheme & Logicomathematical Structures with the addition of:
Assimilation
Accommodation
Logicomathematical
Knowing which one is larger or smaller. Calculating math, cause and effect. E.g., making tea and adding more or less sugar.
Schemes become increasingly more complex, they are termed structures the structure new scheme.
Knowing that markers, pens, erasers are parts of stationery to understand what stationery is the structure new scheme.
If one's structures become more and more complex, they are organized into hierarchical manner such as
Eating → involves sucking, chewing, swallowing.
Stationary which can be a part of a lot of things.
Cognitive conflict is good to create an adaptation to seek a way to be comfortable.
Stage Approach
Stage
Period of time in which child mind and behavior depicts how their mind behaves in one behaviour and structure.
Structured within the state equilibrium
There are structures new with many adaptation with to get to equilibrium cognitively.
Each stage coming for the previous
There 4 tahapan in Piaget misal 2, it came for 1 for the preparing to the third tahapan.
The stages follow a invariant sequence
Jadi setiap manusia akan mulai dari tahap 1, 2, 3, 4. Menurut Piaget, tidak ada manusia yang bisa loncat tahap. Karena, apa yang terjadi di tahap ini ada hubungannya dengan tahapan yang sebelumnya dan setelahnya.
Stages are universal
Therefore every human is universal according to Piaget.
Each stage includes a coming-into-being and a being
Misalnya ada di stage yang ke-2, jadi stage ke-2 itu adalah coming-into-being menuju ke stage yang ke-3. Ada masa preparation, kemudian ada being-nya itu sendiri.
Method
Clinical Method
A chain-like verbal interaction between the experimenter and the child to know more of that is in the mind.
Question → Child’s answer → Probing.
Interview + Object Manipulation
There will be object presented to child for them to asked questions.
Observation
Piaget made notes from seeing observation and then got helped with this analysis of 3 dilahirkan.
Description of the Stages
Sensorimotor Period (Birth-2 years)
Gaining knowledge through senses & motor (movement)
Using reflexes to react.
Stage 1: Modification of Reflex (0-1 month)
A child modify refleks of adaapt to the environment.
Starting to generalisasi refleks Sucking to toys.
Being able to knows the differences so we can recognize that one differnt object such as the nipples is toy is different than nipple.
Stage 2: Primary Circular Reactions (1-4 months)
Circular Reaction → perilaku that dilakukan Secara ulang-ulang, when starting tidak sengaja tetapi anak ngerasa hal yang Seneng akhirnya perilaku di repetisi.
Berorientasi pada diri anak tersebut.
Menghisap jempol awalnya dilakukan secara tidak sengaja, lalu karena bayi merasa senang saat menghisap jempol, maka ia melakukannya berulang kali.