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Chapter one
Human Development
The scientific study of the processes
of development
Four Goals of
Developmental Psychology
● Describe
 Example: When do
children say their first
words?
● Explain
 Example: How do
children learn to use
language?
• Predict
 Example: Will delayed
language development
affect speech?
● Modify
 Example: Can therapy help
speech delays?
Life Span Development
Developmental processes: change and
stability
Two kinds of change:
• Quantitative: change in number/amount
(growth, height)
• Qualitative: change in kind, structure,
organization
Two Types of
Developmental Change
• Qualitative
 Structure or
Organization
 Often Example:
difficult to
anticipate
 Changing from
nonverbal to
verbal
communication
• Quantitative
 Number or Amount
Examples:
Height
 Weight
 Size of Vocabulary
Life Span Development
Physical development: change and stability in
growth of the body and brain, sensory capacities,
motor skills, and health
Cognitive development: change and stability in
mental abilities, learning, attention, memory,
language, reasoning, creativity
Psychosocial development: change and stability in
emotions, personality, social relationships
Life Span Development
Influences on development:
normative: most people, similarities
individual differences: specific differences
Heredity & Environment
Heredity: inborn traits or characteristics
inherited from the parents
Environment: inner and outer environment
Life Span Development
Maturation: Unfolding of a natural sequence
of physical changes and behavior patterns,
mastery of skills, ability to learn.
Culture & Ethnicity
Culture is the society or group’s total way of
life
Ethnic: people united by a distinct culture,
ancestry, religion, language, or national
origin
Timing of Influences: Critical or
Sensitive Periods
Lorenz: hatched ducklings
Imprinting: automatic and irreversible;
instinctive bonding with mother; a
predisposition to learning
Critical Period: specific time when a
given event (or absence) has specific
impact on development. Not absolutely
fixed.
Plasticity: ability to modify
Sensitive Periods: especially responsive
to specific type of experience
The Effects of Early Experience
Questions to consider:
1. How important are early experiences and
how much of an effect do they have on a
person’s later life?
2. Are there critical periods during which a
child must be exposed to certain
stimulations or experiences (or forever be
disadvantaged)?
3. How “plastic” is the child? That is, how can
a child take and still bounce back? How
much can a child endure before his/her later
development will be permanently impaired?
Without feedback from the
environment (that is, without
experience) how can further
development occur?
A child raised in a deprived
environment with inadequate
stimulation and feedback might fail
to learn. The damage to a child is
significant when love and attention
are absent.
Critical & Sensitive Periods
Critical and sensitive periods are both
times when the organism is
biologically primed to most benefit
from a particular experience.
Sensitive Periods: adverse effects caused
by missing a sensitive period may be
overcome at a later time, although with
great difficulty.
Critical Periods: adverse effects caused by
missing a critical period are permanent.
The only clearly demonstrated critical period in
human beings involves early stimulation of
certain neural and body cells. Without such
stimulation, these cells atrophy and die (e.g.,
visual neurons must have light during their
early development or they will die.
Depth perception may occur as well.
The first 5 to 6 years of childhood may be
a critical period for the development of
the brain.
Even when a part of the brain is damaged,
if damage occurs before age 5/6, the
brain may compensate and take over
the functions. After age six, highly
unlikely.
Other ways a child may suffer permanent
disability by early childhood:
1. occurrence of irreparable physical damage
upon which later development will depend
2. a critical period that passes without the
child’s obtaining the necessary experience
or stimulation
3. a situation where the child is kept by their
culture or environment from ever obtaining
the learning necessary for proper
development.
Learning and Early Experience
Sometimes a child misses an important
learning experience because the
environment fails to provide it. If the
child eventually receives the necessary
experiences they may be able to
recover.
Baltes’s Life Span Approach:
6 Key Principles
1. Development is lifelong
 Change & adaptation occur throughout life
2. Development involves both gain & loss
 Ex: Gaining vocabulary, but losing ability to acquire language
3. Biological & cultural influences shift over time
4. Development involves changing allocation of resources
 Resources used for growth, maintenance, & recovery
5. Development shows plasticity
 Ex: Memory can be improved with practice
6. Development is influenced by historical and cultural
context.
Theory & Reseach
Two models:
Mechanistic: locke
Organismic: Rousseau
The Life-Span Perspective
Development is Contextual
Normative agegraded influences
Biological and environmental
influences are similar for
individuals in a particular age
group
Normative history- Biological and environmental
graded influences influences are associated
with history
Non-normative life Unusual occurrences that
have a major impact on a
events
specific person’s life
The Nature of Development
Processes in Development
Fig. 1.3
The Life-Span Perspective
Views of Child Development
Original sin view
Children are born into a world
corrupted with inclination
toward evil
Tabla rasa view
Children born as “blank slates”
and acquire characteristics
through experience (Locke)
Innate goodness
view
Children born inherently good
(Rousseau)
John Locke- English philosopher
• Tabula rasa: believed that the child’s mind is a
blank slate, experience is imprinted
• Children born with different temperaments and
propensities; but the child could be infinitely
improved and perfected through experience,
humane treatment, and education
• Adults mold children’s moral character and
intellect by conditioning them to have the “right”
habits
• Child as malleable
Key assumption: that children are mostly a product
of their environment; react to their environment
almost like a machine
Jean-Jacques Rosseau- Swiss-born philosopher
• Introduced a romantic conception of
children
• Born in a state of natural goodness
• Adults should not shape them forcibly but
protect them from the pressures of society
and allow them to develop naturally
• Each dimension of development (physical,
mental, social, and moral) followed a
particular schedule and should be respected
and protected
Jean-Jacques Rosseau- Swiss-born philosopher
• Children are incapable of true reasoning until age
12
• During early period of development, children
should be permitted to learn through discovery
and experience
• Key assumption: the curriculum must evolve from
the natural capacities and interests of the child,
and must foster the child’s progression toward
higher stage of development
• People are an active, growing organism that set
their development in motion; initiate events, not
just react; internal drive
Development continuous or stages
Continuous: Mechanist theorists; allows prediction
of earlier behaviors from later ones; quantitative
changes (frequency of response)
Stages: Organismic theorists; emphasis qualitative
changes; stages, building on previous problems
and developments.
Current theorists:
Active versus passive development
People change their world as it also changes them
The Nature of Development
Developmental Issues
Extent to which development
Nature and Nurture is influenced by nature and
by nurture
Stability and
Change
Degree to which early traits
and characteristics persist
through life or change
ContinuityDiscontinuity
Extent development involves
gradual, cumulative change
(continuity) or distinct stages
(discontinuity)
The Nature of Development
Continuity and Discontinuity
in Development
Fig. 1.7
Major developmental perspectives
1-Psychoanalytic Perspective
• Development shaped by unconscious forces that
motivate human behavior
• Psychoanalysis helps give patients insight into
unconscious emotional conflict
• The unconscious is the thoughts, wishes, feelings
and memories that we are largely unaware
• Dreams are the “royal road” to the unconscious
The Mind as an Iceberg
• Freud believed the mind is like an iceberg—
mostly hidden, with the unconscious
containing thoughts and memories of which
we are largely unaware. Some of these
thoughts we store temporarily in a
preconscious area.
• Our conscious awareness is the part of the
iceberg that floats above the water.
Figure 15.1 Freud’s idea of the mind’s structure
Myers: Psychology, Eighth Edition
Copyright © 2007 by Worth Publishers
• Initially, he thought hypnosis might unlock
the door to the unconscious. However,
recognizing patients’ uneven capacity for
hypnosis, Freud turned to free association,
which he believed produced a chain of
thoughts in the patient’s unconscious. He
called the process (as well as his theory of
personality) psychoanalysis.
• Freud believed that personality arises from our
efforts to resolve the conflict between our
biological impulses and the social restraints
against them.
• He theorized that the conflict centers on three
interacting systems:
– the id, which operates on the pleasure principle
Immediate gratification);
– the ego, which functions on the reality principle, and
– the superego, an internalized set of ideals. The
superego’s demands often oppose the id’s, and the ego,
as the “executive” part of personality, seeks to reconcile
the two.
Freud’s Psychosexual Stages of Development
• Freud maintained that children pass through a
series of psychosexual stages during which the
id’s pleasure-seeking energies focus on distinct
pleasure-sensitive areas of the body called
erogenous zones.
• During the oral stage (0–18 months), pleasure
centers on the mouth
• During the anal stage (18–36 months) on
bowel/bladder elimination. Also independence.
Freud’s Psychosexual Stages of Development
• During the critical phallic stage (3–6 years),
pleasure centers on the genitals. Boys
experience the Oedipus complex, with
unconscious sexual desires toward their
mother and hatred of their father. They cope
with these threatening feelings through
identification with their father, thereby
incorporating many of his values and
developing a sense of gender identity.
Electra Complex- female equivalent
Freud’s Psychosexual Stages of Development
• The latency stage (6 years to puberty), in
which sexuality is dormant
• The genital stage (puberty on) when youths
begin to experience sexual feelings toward
others.
• In Freud’s view, maladaptive adult
behavior results from conflicts unresolved
during the oral, anal, and phallic stages.
At any point, conflict can lock, or fixate, the
person’s pleasure-seeking energies in that
stage.
Theories of Development
Psychoanalytic Theories
• Development depends primarily on the
unconscious mind
– Heavily colored by emotion
– Behavior is a surface characteristic
– Important to analyze symbolic meanings of
behavior
– Early experiences important in
development
Theories of Development
Freud’s
Psychosexual Theory
• Id, ego, and superego create personality
• Defense mechanisms and Repression
• Anxiety and defense mechanisms
• Five stages of psychosexual development
Theories of Development
Freudian Stages
Fig. 1.8
Erikson
Each stage is a crisis in the personality that
must be resolved
Theories of Development
Erikson’s Psychosocial Stages
Fig. 1.9
Erikson’s Eight Stages of Psychosocial
Development
• Erik Erikson theorized eight stages of life,
each with its own psychosocial task.
• In infancy (the first year), the issue is trust
versus mistrust.
• In toddlerhood (the second year), the
challenge is autonomy versus shame and
doubt.
• Preschoolers (age 3 to 5) learn initiative or
guilt.
• Elementary school children (age 6 to
puberty) develop competence or inferiority.
• A chief task of adolescence is to solidify
one’s sense of self—identity versus role
confusion.
• For young adults (twenties to early forties)
the issue is intimacy versus isolation.
• For middle-aged adults (forties to sixties),
generativity versus stagnation.
• Late adulthood’s (late sixties and older)
challenge is integrity versus despair.
Learning Perspective
1- Learning Theory
• development results from learning, a longlasting change in behavior based on
experience or adaptation to the environment
• Behaviorism: describes observed behavior
as a predictable response to experience
• React to environment when find it pleasing,
painful, or threatening
• Associative learning: link is made between
two stimuli/sensory events
Learning Perspective
Classical Conditioning
Classical conditioning is a natural form of
learning that occurs even without
intervention.
• Pavlov: taught dog to salivate
• A natural response to a stimulus is paired
with another stimulus through repeated
associations. Learning a new response to an
existing response.
• Conditioned response is a learned response
• Watson: little Albert
Learning Perspective
Operant Conditioning- Skinner
• Learning that behavior has consequences;
operates on environment
• Baby cries, someone soothers- will cry to
be soothed.
• Reinforce, extinguish, use successive
approximations, learning through
imitation of others
• Tend to repeat response that has desirable
consequences and suppress a response
that has a negative consequence
(punishment)
Punishment: process of weakening a
behavior, decreasing likelihood of
repetition. Suppresses a behavior
thought aversive consequence.
Withdrawing a positive (not using car)
or aversive (jail)
Reinforcement can be positive or negative
Positive: reward
Negative: taking away something the
person does not like (aversive event)
Extinguish: when no longer reinforce a
behavior
Behavior modification: behavioral
therapy; operant conditioning to instill
positive behavior.
2- Social Learning Theory (Social
Cognitive)- Bandura
• People learn
• Development comes from the person
• Learn appropriate social behavior mainly by
observing and imitating modelsObservational Learning
• Through feedback, gradually development
standards for judging own behavior
• Self-Efficacy: confidence that have what it
takes to succeed
3- Cognitive Perspective- Piaget
At each stage, child’s mind develops in a new
way from simple to complex
Organization: tendency to create increasingly
complex cognitive structures (system of
knowledge; ways of thinking that incorporate
more and more accurate images of reality
Schemas: organized patterns of behavior that a
person uses to think about and act in a
situation.
Adaptation: how children handle new
information in light of what they
already know
Assimilation: taking new information
and incorporating it into existing
cognitive structures (sucking on sippie
cup versus breats)
Accommodation: adjusting one’s
cognitive structures to fit new
information (sipping from cup/glass,
changes how uses tongue/mouth)
Equilibration: constant striving for a
stable balance/equilibrium, dictates shift
from assimilation to accommodation
Theories of Development
Piaget’s Four Stages of Cognitive
Development
Fig. 1.10
Vygotsky
Sociocultural Theory of Cognitive Development
• Vygotsky argued that children’s efforts to
understand their world are embedded in a
social context. Value educative processes.
• They strive to understand their universe by
asking questions of others—
• The young child is an apprentice in thinking.
• Parents, child-care workers, and older
siblings act as mentors stimulating
intellectual growth
Vygotsky
• Children learn to think through guided
participation in social experiences that
explore their world- guided social
interactions
• Vygotsky argued that what children can do
with the help of others may be more
indicative of their mental development than
what they can do alone.
• Shared activities help internalize their
society’s modes of thinking and behaving.
Vygotsky
• The zone of proximal development, a range of
skills that the child can perform with assistance
but not quite independently.
• How and when children master important skills
is partly linked to the willingness of others to
provide scaffolding, or sensitive structuring of
children’s learning encounters.
• Cognitive accomplishment occurs in a social
context- through collaborative help/direction
from others
Information Processing Theory
• Explain cognitive development by analyzing the
processes involved in perceiving and handling
information.
• Compare brain to computer. Helps estimate later
intelligence from early efficacy of sensory
perception and processing.
4- Evolutionary/Sociobiological Perspectives
Wilson
• Concerned with evolutionary and biological
forces of social behavior
• Emphasis on function of behavior in
promoting survival of species.
• Darwin: survival of the fittest and natural
selection.
5- Contextual Perspective
Development understood from a social context
Individual inseparable from environment
Vygotsky also in this camp.
Theories of Development
Ecological Theory
• Bronfenbrenner’s view that
development influenced by five
environmental systems
– Microsystem
– Mesosystem
– Exosystem
– Macrosystem
– Chronosystem
Theories of Development
Bronfenbrenner’s Ecological Theory
Fig. 1.13
Research
Quantitative research: objectively measurable data
Qualitative research: interpretation of
nonnumerical data (subjective responses,
feelings, beliefs)
Sampling
Sample: cannot study entire population.
Adequately represents the population being
studied; has relevant characteristics in same
proportions as entire population; otherwise
cannot be adequately generalized
Research
Quantitative research: objectively measurable data
Qualitative research: interpretation of
nonnumerical data (subjective responses,
feelings, beliefs)
Sampling
Sample: cannot study entire population.
Adequately represents the population being
studied; has relevant characteristics in same
proportions as entire population; otherwise
cannot be adequately generalized
Random selection: each person has equal chance
of being chosen.
Scientific method: characterized by:
• Identifying a problem
• Formulation of hypothesis
• Collecting data
• Analyzing data
• Forming tentative conclusions
• Disseminating findings
Major Methods
• Self-report, diary, interview, questionnaire: asked
about some aspect of their lives; highly structured or
vague
• Naturalistic observation: observing in natural
environment with no interaction
• Laboratory observation: observed in laboratory with
no attempt to manipulate behavior
• Behavioral measures: tested on abilities, skills,
knowledge, competencies, physical responses
• Operational definition: stated clearly in terms of
operations and procedures used to measure a specific
phenomenon
Research Designs
Case Studies: single person studied Emotions,
beliefs, or life history of a single individual.
Ethnographic Studies: study of culture/subculture
Correlational study: attempt to find
positive/negative relationship between variables.
Correlations are reported as numbers from –1.0
(perfect negative correlation) to +1.0 (perfect
positive correlation)
Research in Life-Span Development
Possible Explanations for
Correlational Data
Fig. 1.17
Experiment: controlled procedure; controls
independent variable to determine effect on
the dependent variable.
Experimental group: exposed to the
treatment/item studied
Control group: do not receive the treatment
Independent variable: controls; wants to see if
effects the dependent variable
Dependent variable: may/may not change as
result of the independent variable
Research in Life-Span Development
Principles of Experimental Research
Fig. 1.18
Longitudinal: involves repeated measurements
obtained from the same subject over time.
Cross-Sectional: requires that a number of subjects
of different ages be measured, tested, or observed
at one given time.
Ethics: rules and guidelines to follow
Informed consent, avoidance of deception when
possible; not cause undue pain, anxiety or harm;
debrief; share results; assess any harm/suffering.
Research in Life-Span Development
Research Ethics
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Informed consent
Confidentiality
Debriefing
Deception
Gender bias
Cultural and ethnic bias
– ‘Ethnic gloss’ and over-generalizing