Human Development Notes

Human Development

  • Human development is the scientific study of systematic processes of change and stability in people.
  • It explores how people change from conception through maturity and identifies characteristics that remain stable.
  • Research in this field has applications to child rearing, education, health, and social policy.
  • For example, delaying middle and high school start times improves student outcomes:
    • Students report longer sleep times.
    • Reduced daytime sleepiness.
    • Less difficulty staying awake in class.
    • Lower levels of depression.
    • Greater participation in extracurricular activities.
    • Increased driving safety.
    • These effects occur because later start times align with adolescent biological circadian rhythms.

Life-Span Development

  • Life-span development views human development as a lifelong process that can be studied scientifically.
  • It encompasses the entire human life span from conception to death (womb to tomb).
  • Development can be positive or negative, acknowledging change throughout life.
  • In some societies, there is no concept of adolescence or middle age.

Goals of Human Development

  1. Describe:
    • Describe when most children say their first word or vocabulary size at a certain age.
  2. Explain:
    • Explain how children acquire language and why some learn to speak later.
  3. Predict:
    • Predict future behavior based on current knowledge, like the likelihood of speech problems.
  4. Intervene:
    • Use understanding to intervene in development, such as providing speech therapy.
  • Development is complex, multifaceted, and shaped by interacting influences.

The Study of Human Development: Basic Concepts

Domains of Development

  1. Physical Development:
    • Growth of the body and brain.
    • Changes in sensory capacities, motor skills, and health.
  2. Cognitive Development:
    • Changes in mental abilities.
    • Learning, attention, memory, language, thinking, reasoning, and creativity.
  3. Psychosocial Development:
    • Changes in emotions, personality, and social relationships.
  • Each aspect of development affects the others; they are separate yet interrelated.

Periods of the Life Span

  • Prenatal Period (Conception to Birth):
    • Conception occurs through fertilization or other means.
    • Genetic endowment interacts with environmental influences.
    • Basic body structures and organs form; brain growth spurt begins.
    • Physical growth is rapid.
    • Vulnerability to environmental influences is great.
    • Abilities to learn, remember, and respond to sensory stimuli develop.
    • Fetus responds to mother's voice and develops a preference.
  • Infancy and Toddlerhood (Birth to Age 3):
    • All senses and body systems operate at birth.
    • The brain grows in complexity and is sensitive to environmental influence.
    • Physical growth and motor skills develop rapidly.
    • Abilities to learn and remember are present.
    • Use of symbols and problem-solving develop.
    • Language comprehension and use develop rapidly.
    • Attachments to parents form.
    • Self-awareness develops.
    • Shift from dependence to autonomy occurs.
    • Interest in other children increases.
  • Early Childhood (Ages 3 to 6):
    • Growth is steady, appearance becomes slender.
    • Appetite diminishes, and sleep problems are common.
    • Handedness appears; fine and gross motor skills improve.
    • Thinking is somewhat egocentric, understanding of perspectives grows.
    • Cognitive immaturity results in illogical ideas.
    • Memory and language improve.
    • Self-concept and understanding of emotions become complex.
    • Independence, initiative, and self-control increase.
    • Gender identity develops.
    • Play becomes imaginative and social.
    • Altruism, aggression, and fearfulness are common.
    • Family is the focus of social life.
  • Middle Childhood (Ages 6 to 11):
    • Growth slows.
    • Strength and athletic skills improve.
    • Respiratory illnesses are common.
    • Intelligence becomes more predictable.
    • Egocentrism diminishes.
    • Children begin to think logically but concretely.
    • Memory and language skills increase.
    • Cognitive gains permit formal schooling.
    • Some children show special educational needs and strengths.
    • Self-concept becomes more complex, affecting self-esteem.
    • Coregulation reflects a shift in control from parents to child.
    • Peers assume central importance.
  • Adolescence (Ages 11 to About 20):
    • Physical growth and changes are rapid.
    • Reproductive maturity occurs.
    • Major health risks arise from behavioral issues.
    • Ability to think abstractly and use scientific reasoning develops.
    • Immature thinking persists in some attitudes and behaviors.
    • Education focuses on preparation for college or vocation.
    • Search for identity becomes central.
    • Relationships with parents are generally good.
    • Peer group may exert a positive or negative influence.
  • Emerging and Young Adulthood (Ages 20 to 40):
    • Physical condition peaks, then declines slightly.
    • Lifestyle choices influence health.
    • Thought and moral judgments become more complex.
    • Educational and occupational choices are made.
    • Mental abilities peak.
    • Expertise and practical problem-solving skills are high.
    • Personality traits and styles become stable.
    • Intimate relationships and personal lifestyles are established.
    • Most people marry and become parents.
  • Middle Adulthood (Ages 40 to 65):
    • Slow deterioration of sensory abilities, health, stamina, and strength may begin.
    • Women experience menopause.
    • Creative output may decline but improve in quality.
    • Career success and earning powers peak for some.
    • Sense of identity continues to develop.
    • Midlife transition may occur.
    • Dual responsibilities of caring for children and parents may cause stress.
    • Launching of children leaves empty nest.
  • Late Adulthood (Age 65 and Over):
    • Most people are healthy and active, though health and physical abilities decline.
    • Slowing of reaction time affects functioning.
    • Most people are mentally alert.
    • Intelligence and memory may deteriorate, but people compensate.
    • Retirement from workforce may occur.
    • People develop strategies to cope with personal losses and impending death.
    • Relationships with family and close friends provide support.
    • Search for meaning in life assumes importance.

*Developmentalists suggest that certain tasks must be mastered for typical development.

*Havighurst suggests that certain basic needs must be met.

Social Construction

  • Division of lifespan into periods is a social construction.
  • A concept or practice invented by a particular culture or society.
  • The form varies across cultures.
  • Adolescence is a new addition during the 1920s.
  • Emerging adulthood (Arnett, 2000) is also a newly proposed addition, the transitional time between the end of adolescence and before individuals acquire all the benchmarks of adulthood.
  • Life-span developmentalists describe life-span development in terms of "4 ages":
    • First age: Childhood and adolescence
    • Second age: Prime adulthood (20s to 50s)
    • Third age: Approximately 60 to 79 years old
    • Fourth age: Approximately 80+ years old
  • A key aspect in the study of life-span development is how development in one period is connected to development in another.

Influences on Development

  • Developmentalists study individual differences in characteristics, influences, and developmental outcomes.
  • People differ in gender, height, weight, body build, health, energy level, intelligence, temperament, personality, and emotional reactions.
  • Context is also a factor.
  • One challenge in developmental psychology is to identify universal influences on development and apply them to understanding individual differences.

Nature vs. Nurture

  1. Heredity (Nature):
    • Inborn traits or characteristics inherited from biological parents.
    • Genetic role.
  2. Environment (Nurture):
    • Totality of non-hereditary, or experiential, influences.
    • Starting with the prenatal environment and continuing throughout life.
  • The relative influence is debated, but contemporary theorists are interested in how they work together.
  • Epigenetics explains how genes change due to development or environmental influence.
  • Maturation is the unfolding of a natural sequence of physical and behavioral changes.
  • It influences certain biological processes continuously.
  • All people undergo these processes, but rates and timing vary.
  • Ages for events are averages, with wide variation among people.
  • Only extreme deviations from the average should be considered exceptional.
  • Individual differences tend to increase with age.

Stability vs. Change

  • Concerns the degree to which early traits and characteristics persist through life or change.
  • Developmentalists emphasizing stability argue it results from heredity and early experiences.
  • Developmentalists emphasizing change believe later experiences can produce change.
    The debate is about the role of early and later experience
  • Some argue that unless infants experience warm, nurturant caregiving in the first year of life, their development will never be optimal.
  • Later experience advocates see children as malleable throughout development, with later sensitive caregiving as equally important.

Continuity vs. Discontinuity

  • Focuses on whether development involves gradual, cumulative change (continuity) or distinct stages (discontinuity).
  • Continuity: oak seed to oak tree (quantitative)
  • Discontinuity: metamorphosis (qualitative)

Contexts of Development

Family

  1. Nuclear Family:
    • Two-generational kinship, economic, and household unit with one or two parents and their biological, adopted, or stepchildren.
    • Common in developed countries.
  2. Extended Family:
    • Multigenerational kinship network of parents, children, and other relatives, sometimes living together.
    • Common in Asia, Africa, and Latin America.

Socioeconomic Status

  • Poverty is stressful and can damage children's and families physical, cognitive, and psychosocial well-being.
  • Poor children are more likely to go hungry, have frequent illnesses, lack access to health care, experience violence and family conflict, and show emotional or behavioral problems.
  • The harm poverty does is often indirect through its impact on parents' emotional state, parenting practices, and the home environment.
  • Threats to well-being multiply if several risk factors are present.
  • The earlier poverty begins, the longer it lasts, and the higher the concentration of poverty in the community, the worse the outcomes.
  • Poverty's negative effects are not inevitable.
  • Factors like supportive parenting and temperament profiles can buffer children against ill effects.
  • Affluence does not necessarily protect children from risk.
  • Adolescents, particularly girls, are at higher risk for substance abuse problems.

Culture & Race / Ethnicity

  • These are fluid and continuously changed and redefined by social & political forces.
  • Culture:
    • A society's or group's total way of life, including customs, traditions, beliefs, values, language, and physical products.
    • Learned behavior passed on from parents to children.
    • Constantly changing, often through contact with other cultures.
  • Ethnic Group:
    • A group united by ancestry, race, religion, language, or national origins, which contribute to a sense of shared identity.
    • Ethnic and cultural patterns affect household composition, economic and social resources, interactions, foods, games, learning, school performance, occupations, and perceptions of the world.
  • Ethnic Gloss:
    • Overgeneralization about an ethnic or cultural group that obscures differences within the group.
  • Race:
    • Historically viewed as a biological category but now defined as a social construct.
    • No scientific consensus on its definition and impossible to measure reliably.
    • Makes a difference in how individuals are treated, where they live, their employment opportunities, the quality of their health care, and whether they can fully participate in their society.
    • All humans are the same species with cultural differences

Gender

  • Differences in experiences effect based on gender
  • Females develop speech earlier then makes.
  • Gender roles and expectations may affect development.

Historical Context

  • Normative Age-Graded Influences:
    • Highly similar for people in a particular age group.
    • Examples: marriage, retirement, puberty (age 12 to 14), menopause (late 40s & early 50s).
  • Normative History-Graded Influences:
    • Significant events that shape the behavior and attitudes of a historical generation: a group of people who experience the event at a formative time in their lives.
    • Examples: COVID-19 pandemic, WW2, Great Depression.
  • A historical generation is not the same as an age cohort, a group of people born at about the same time.
  • Cohorts are part of a historical generation only if they experience major, shaping historical events at a formative point in their lives.
  • Non-Normative Influences:
    • Unusual events that have a major impact on individual lives because they disturb the expected sequence of the life cycle.
    • Typical events that happen at an atypical time of life (death of a parent when the child is young) or atypical events (surviving a car crash).
    • Some are beyond a person's control, while people create their own (deciding to have a baby at 15).

Timing of Influence

  • Imprinting:
    • Instinctive learning during a critical period in early development where a young animal forms an attachment to the first moving object it sees, usually the mother.
    • Konrad Lorenz believed this was automatic and irreversible.
    • The readiness of an organism's nervous system to acquire certain info during a brief critical period in early life.
      critical period of ducks ; few hours after birth
  • Critical Period:
    • A specific time when a given event, or its absence, has a specific impact on development.

ex: at birth dapat may oxygen na agad sa brain or else makaka-develop ng ID yung bata.

*   Length is not absolutely fixed.
  • The concept of critical periods in humans is controversial.
  • Plasticity, or modifiability of performance, suggests sensitive periods, when a developing person is especially responsive to certain experiences.
  • There is growing evidence that there are individual differences in plasticity of responses to environmental events.
    Characteristics generally assumed to be negative-such as a difficult or reactive temperament-can be adaptive (positive) when the environment is supportive
    when levers of family adversity were low, highly reactive children showed even more adaptive profiles than children law in reactivity - more prosocial, more engaged in school, I shoved lower levels of externalizing symptoms.
  • Critical Period:
    • A time when it is essential for an animal to be exposed to a specific stimulus to develop normally.
    • Very short in duration.
    • With well-defined beginning and end points.
    • Effects are irreversible.
  • Sensitive Period:
    • Less sensitive than a critical period.
    • No exact time frame
    • Effects are not necessarily as dramatic or irreversible
    • Humans are especially responsive/open to experiences

ex: adolescence

Research in Action

  • Infant-Directed (ID) Speech:

"baby talk"

*   Simplified grammar, slower tempo, pitch variations, exaggerated intonation, and repetition of key words and phrases.
*both men & women Use this*
*   Infants as young as 7 weeks display ID speech preferences.
*   They pay special attention to ID speech even in languages other than their own.
*   Associated with numerous benefits: association of sounds of words with meanings, increase in long-term word recognition, and increased neural activity.
*   ID speech preference begins to decline as early as 9 to 12 months, as infants become more linguistically sophisticated.
*   Whether ID speech is used or not, infants achieve language fluency along roughly the same timetable worldwide.

Life Span Developmental Approach

  • 7 principles / characteristics of the life-span perspective (Paul Baltes, 1987).
  1. Development is lifelong.
    • Development is a lifelong process of change.
    • Each period is affected by what happened before and will affect what is to come.
    • Each period has unique characteristics and value.
    • No period is more or less important than any other.
  2. Development is multidimensional.
    • It occurs along multiple interacting dimensions (biological, psychological, and social), each of which may develop at varying rates.
  3. Development is multidirectional.
    • As people gain in one area, they may lose in another, sometimes at the same time.
    • Children grow mostly in one direction (up) in size and abilities.
    • Adolescents typically gain in physical abilities, but their facility in learning a new language typically declines.
    • Some abilities, such as vocabulary, often continue to increase throughout most of adulthood; others, such as the ability to solve unfamiliar problems, may diminish; but some new attributes, such as wisdom, may increase with age.
  4. Relative influences of biology and culture shift over the life span.
    The process of development is influenced by both biology and culture
    The balance between these influences changes.
    *Biological abilities weaken with age, but cultural supports may help compensate.
  5. Development involves changing resource allocations.
    • Individuals choose to invest resources of time, energy, talent, money, and social support in varying ways.
    • Resources may be used for growth, maintenance/recovery, or dealing with loss.
    • The allocation of resources to these three functions changes throughout life as the total available pool of resources decreases.
  6. Development shows plasticity.
    • Many abilities can be improved with training and practice, even late in life.
    • Plasticity has limits that depend on the influences on development.
    • Developmental research discovers to what extent particular kinds of development can be modified at various ages.
  7. Development is influenced by the historical and cultural context.
    • Each person develops within multiple contexts.
    • Human beings not only influence but also are influenced by their historical-cultural context.
    • Developmental scientists have found cohort differences in intellectual functioning, women's midlife emotional development, and personality flexibility in old age.

Development is a co-construction of biology, culture, and the individual

Select- optimize - compensate (SOC) - Neugarten

Development is contextual.
see # 4 above

Significance of Age

  • Study of human development is multidisciplinary.
  • It draws on disciplines such as psychology, psychiatry, sociology, anthropology, biology, genetics, family science, education, history, philosophy, and medicine.
  • Significance depends on many factors.

Age & Happiness

  • Some research suggests it is positively correlated, some negatively, and some U-shaped.
  • Baby boomers reported being less happy than those born earlier, possibly because they are not lowering their aspirations as they age.

Conception of Age

  • Some life-span experts believe chronological age is not very relevant to understanding psychological development.
    Age does not matter lol
  • There are other "Ages" other than chronological age
    • Biological Age:
      • A person's age in terms of biological health.
      • Involves knowing the functional capacities of a person's vital organ.
    • Psychological Age:
      • An individual's adaptive capacities compared with those of other individuals of the same chronological age.
      • Psychological maturity
        older adults who continue to learn, are flexible, are motivated, have positive personality traits, control their emotions, and think clearly are engaging in more adaptive behaviors than their chronological age-mates who do not continue to learn, are rigid, are unmotivated, do not control their emotions, and do not think clearly
    • Social Age:
      • Refers to social roles and expectations related to a person's age.
      • Consider the role of "mother" and the behaviors that accompany the role
  • From a life-span perspective, an overall age profile of an individual involves not just chronological age but also biological age, psychological age, and social age*

For example, a 70-year-old man (chronological age) might be in good physical health (biological age), be experiencing memory problems and not be coping well with the demands placed on him by his wife's recent hospitalization (psychological age), and have some friends with whom he regularly plays golf (social age).

consider all these in understanding a person & his development.

Maturation Theory

  • Gesell used the term "maturation" to describe genetically activated process of development.
  • Argues that the rate at which children develop primarily depends on the growth of their nervous system.
  • As their minds develop & As it grows, their behaviors change accordingly.
  • Observed that maturational development always unfolds in fixed sequences.
  • This theory states that social & cultural environments also play a role in their development & these are most effective when they are harmonious w/ the inner maturational time table.
  • Opposed efforts to teach children things ahead of their developmental schedule; they will naturally develop it once their ns has matured adequately.