Week 1: Lifespan Development

Ted Kaczynski

• called the "unabomber"

• wanted for 2 decades

• he was born with a severe allergic reaction which made him isolated from other people

Aileen Wuornos

• serial killer

• was sexually abused at a young age

• had an incest relationship with her brother

• thrown out of the house when she was a teenager

• became a sex worker

Halle Berry

• award-winning actress and former beauty queen

• first african-american to win an oscar

• product of a dysfunctional family

• was abused by her father

Alice Walker

• was born poor and was a victim of discrimination because she is an african-american woman

• was blinded due to an accident with her brother

• worked as a social worker, teacher, and lecturer

• took part in the 1960s civil rights movement in mississippi

• won the 1983 pulitzer prize for fiction for her novel "the color purple"

• acclaimed poet and essayist

Development

the pattern of movement or change that starts at conception and continues through the human life span.

Traditional Approach

emphasizes extensive change from birth to adolescence (especially during infancy), little or no change in adulthood and decline in old age.

Life-span Approach

emphasizes developmental change throughout adulthood as well as childhood.

122 years

oldest age documented.

Jeanne Louise Calment

oldest person documented.

Life Expectancy

the average number of years that a person born in a particular year can expect to live.

Development is Lifelong

no age or period dominated development

Development is Multidimensional

consists of biological, cognitice, and socioeconomic dimensions.

Cognitive Dimension

includes attention, memory, abstract thinking, speed of processing, information, and social intelligence.

Development is Multidirectional

some dimensions and components of dimension expand and others shrink.

Development is Plastic

plasticity means the capacity to for change

Developmental Science is Multidisciplinary

is composed of psychologists, sociologists, anthropologists, neuroscientists, and medical researchers.

Development is Contextual

• setting

• families, schools, peer groups, churches, cities, neighborhoods, university laboratories, countries.

Normative Age-Graded Influences

includes biological processes such as puberty and menopause, sociocultural, environmental processes such as beginning formal education and retirement.

Normative History-Graded Influences

• common to people of a particular generation

• long term changes in genetic and cultural makeup of a population

Non-normative or Highly Individualized Life Events

unusual occurrences that have a major impact on the individual's life.

Culture

• behavior, patterns, beliefs, products of a particular group of people that are passed on from generation to generation

• results from the interaction of people over the years

Ethnicity

• rooted in culture heritage, nationality, race, religion, and language.

• the root word of this word means nation

Socioeconomic Status

refers to a person's position within society based on occupational, education, and economic characteristics.

Gender

the psychological and sociocultural dimensions of being female or male.

Social Policy

• government's course of action designed to promote the welfare of its citizens

• shaped by values, economics, and politics

Minnesota Family Investment Program

found that an increase in the incomes of working poor parents were linked with benefits for their children - school achievement improved and behavior problems increased.

Biological Processes

• changes in the individual's physical nature

• e.g. genes, development of brain, height and weight gains, changes in motor skills, hormonal changes of puberty, and cardiovascular decline

Cognitive Processes

• changes in the individual's thought, intelligence, and language

• e.g. watching a colorful mobile swinging above the crib, putting together a two-word sentence, memorizing a poem, imagining what it would like to be a movie star, and solving a crossword puzzle

Socio-emotional Processes

• changes in the individual's relationship with other people, changes in emotions and changes in personality

• e.g. infant's smile in response to a parent's touch, toddler's aggressive attack on a playmate, a school-age child's development of assertiveness, adolescent's joy at the senior prom, and affection of an elderly couple

Developmental Period

refers to a time frame in a person's life that is characterized by certain features.

Prenatal Period

• conception to birth

• involves continuous growth from a single cell to an organism complete with a brain and behavioral capabilities.

Infancy

• birth to 18-24 months

• time of extreme dependence upon adults

• many psychological activities such as language, symbollic thought, sensorimotor coordinatio, and social learning are just beginning

Early Childhood

• 2-5 years

• also called as the "preschool years"

• learn to become more self-sufficient and to care for themselves, develop school readiness skills and spend many hours in play with peers

• first grade marks the end

Middle and Late Childhood

• 6-11 years

• corresponds to the elementary school years

• fundamental skills of reading, writing, and arithmetic are mastered

• achievement becomes a more central theme of the child's world and self-control increase.

Adolescence

• 10-12; 18-22 years

• transition from childhood to early adulthood

• begins with rapid physical changes - dramatic gains in height and weight, changes in body contour and development of sexual characteristics

• the pursuit of independence and an identity are prominent

• thought is more logical, abstractm and idealistic

Early Adulthood

• 20 to 30s

• time of establishing personal and economic independence, career development, and for many: selecting a mate, learning to live with someone in an intimate way, starting a family and rearing children

Middle Adulthood

• 40 to 50s

• time of expanding personal and social involvement and responsibility of assisting the next generation in becoming competent, mature individuals, and of reaching and maintaining satisfaction in a career

Late Adulthood

• 60 to 70s

• time of life review, retirement, and adjustment to new social roles involving decreasing strength and health

• longest span of any period of development

First Age

childhood and adolescence.

Second Age

prime adulthood; twenties to fifties.

Third Age

• approximately 60-79 years of age

• healthier and can lead more active, productive lives

Fourth Age

• approximately 80 years and older

• health and well-being decline for many individuals

Chronological Age

• is the number of years that elapsed since birth

• based on the birth date

Biological Age

• is a person's age in terms of biological health

• involves knowing the functional capacities of a person's vital organs

Psychological Age

• is an individual's adaptive capacities compared with those of other individuals of the same chronological age

• older adults who continue to learn, flexible, motivated, and think clearly are engaging in more adaptive behaviors than their chronological age-mates who do not do these things

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 roles - in predicting an adult woman's behavior, it may be more important to know that she is the mother of a 3-year-old child than to know whether she is 20 or 30 years old

Theory

• is an interrelated, coherent set of ideas that helps to explain the phenomena and make predictions

• suggests hypotheses which are specific assertions and predictions that can be tested

Nature

refers to an organisms's biological inheritance.

Nurture

refers to its environmental experiences.

Extreme Environments

those that are psychologically barren or hostile can depress developments.

Stability and Change

• involves the degree to which early traits and characteristics persist through life or change

• stability is the result of heredity and possibly early experiences in life

• later experiences can produce change

Continuity and Discontinuity

• focuses on the degree to which development involves either gradual, cumulative change or distinct stages

• qualitative and quantitative

Psychoanalytic Theories

• describe development as primarily unconscious and heavily colored by emotions

• behavior is merely a surface characteristic and that a true understanding of development requires analyzing the symbolic meanings of behavior and the deep inner working of the mind

• early experiences with parents extensively shape development

Sigmund Freud

• is the most famous personality for the psychoanalytical theory

• is the founder of the psychosexual development

Oral Stage

• birth to 1.5 years

• infants pleasure centers on the mouth

• infants develops a sense of trust and comfort

• a person who is fixated at this stage may be over dependent on other and may seek oral stimulation through smoking, drinking, or eating

Anal Stage

• 1.5 to 3 years

• child's pleasure focuses on the anus

• major conflict is toilet training - the child learns to control his/her bodily needs (sense of accomplishment and independence)

• positive experiences during these stage served as the basis for people to become competent, productive, and creative adults

Anal Expulsive Personality

• results when the parents approach is too lenient

• individual has a messy, wasteful, or destructive personality

Anal Retentive Personality

• results when parents are two strict or begin training too early

• individual is stringent, orderly, rigid, and obsessive

Phallic Stage

• 3 to 6 years

• child's pleasure focuses on the genitials

• children also begin to discover the differences between males and females

Oedipus Complex

describes the feelings of wanting to posses the mother and the desire to replace the father.

Electra Complex

describes the feelings of wanting to posses the father and the desire to replace the mother.

Latency Period

• 6 years to puberty

• child represses sexual interests and develops social and intellectual skills

• the stage begins around the time that children enter school and become more concerned with peer relationships, hobbies, and other interests

• this stage is important in the development of social and communication skills and self-confidence

Genital Stage

• puberty onwards

• time of sexual reawakening: source of sexual pleasure becomes somebody outside the family

• interest in the welfare of others grows during this stage

• the goal of this stage is to establish a balance between the various life areas

• if this stage along with the other stages have been completed successfully, the individual should now be well-balanced, warm, and caring

Erik Erikson

he is psychoanalyst and is the founder of the psychosocial theory.

Erikson's Psychosocial Theory

• were developed in psychosocial stages, rather than in psychosexual stages

• according to him the primary motivation for human behavior is social in nature and reflects a desire to affiliate with other people

• he also said that developmental change occurs throughout the life span

Trust vs Mistrust

• in the first year of life

• trust in infancy sets the stage for a lifelong expectation that the world will be a good and pleasant place to live

Autonomy vs Shame

• 1-3 years (late infancy and toddlerhood)

• they start to assert their sense of independency

• they realize their will

Initiative vs Guilt

• 3-5 years (early childhood and preschool years)

• as preschool children encounter a widening social world, they face new challenges that require active, purposefully, responsible behavior

Industry vs Inferiorly

• 6 years to puberty (middle and late childhood; elementary school years)

• children now need to direct their energy toward mastering knowledge and intellectual skills

Identity vs Identity Confusion

• 10-20 years (adolescence)

• if adolescent explore roles in a healthy manner and arrive at a positive path to follow in life, then they achieve a positive identity.

Intimacy and Isolation

• 20s to 30s (early adulthood)

• at this time, individuals face the developmental task of forming intimate relationships

• young adults form healthy friendships and an intimate relationship with another.

Generativity vs Stagnation

• 40s to 50s (middle adulthood)

• concerned with helping the younger generation to develop and lead useful lives.

Integrity vs Despair

• 60s onwards

• achieved through a person's life review whether their life was well spent or not.

Cognitive Theories

emphasizes conscious thoughts.

Piaget's Cognitive Developmental Theory

• states that children go through four stages of cognitive development as they actively construct their understanding of the world

• two processes underlie this cognitive construction of the world: organization and adaptation

The Sensorimotor Stage

• lasts from birth to about 2 years of age

• infants construct an understanding of the world by coordinating sensory experiences (such as seeing and hearing) with physical and motoric actions

The Preoperational Stage

• lasts from approximately 2-7 years of age

• children begin to go beyond simply connecting sensory information with physical action and represent the world with words, images, and drawings

• preschool children still lack the ability to perform what he calls operations, which are internalized mental actions that allow children to do mentally what they previously could only do physically

The Concrete Operational Stage

• lasts from approximately 7-11 years

• children can perform operations that involve objects, and they can reason logically when the reasoning can be applied to specific or concrete examples

The Formal Operational Stage

• appears between the ages of 11 and 15 and continues through adulthood

• individuals move beyond concrete experiences and think in abstract and more logical terms

• as part of thinking more abstractly, adolescents develop images of ideal circumstances

• in solving problems, they become more systematic, developing hypotheses about why something is happening the way it is and then testing these hypotheses

Lev Vygotsky

• russian developmentalist

• argued that children actively construct their knowledge.

Vygotsky's Sociocultural Cognitive Theory

• emphasizes how culture and social interaction guide cognitive development

• maintained that cognitive development involves learning to use the inventions of society, such as language, mathematical systems, and memory strategies

Information-Processing Theory

• emphasizes that individuals manipulate information, monitor it, and strategize about it

• individuals develop a gradually increasing capacity for processing information, which allows them to acquire increasingly complex knowledge and skills

• emphasizes that an important aspect of development is learning good strategies for processing information

Robert Siegler

states that thinking is information processing - when individuals perceive, encode, represent, store, and retrieve information, they are thinking.

Behavioral and Social Cognitive Theories

• behaviorism essentially holds that we can study scientifically only what can be directly observed and measured

• development is observable behavior that can be learned through experience with the environment

• emphasize continuity in development and argue that development does not occur in stage-like fashion

Skinner's Operant Conditioning

• through this, the consequences of a behavior produce changes in the probability of the behavior's occurrence

• a behavior followed by a rewarding stimulus is more likely to recur, whereas a behavior followed by a punishing stimulus is less likely to recur

• the key aspect of development is behavior, not thoughts and feelings

• he emphasized that developmet consists of the pattern of behavioral changes that are brought about by rewards and punishments

Bandura's Social Cognitive Theory

• emphasizes that cognitive processes have important links with the environment and behavior

• his early research program focused heavily on observational learning (also called imitation or modeling), which is learning that occurs through observing what others do

• most recent model of learning and development includes three elements: behavior, the person/cognition, and the environment

Ethological Theory

• stresses that behavior is strongly influenced by biology, is tied to evolution, and is characterizes by critical or sensitive periods

Konrad Lorenz

• studied the behavior graylag geese, which will follow their mothers as soon as they hatch

• called the process imprinting, the rapid innate learning that involves attachment to the first moving object seen

John Bowlby

stressed that attachment to a caregiver over the first year of life has important consequences throughout the life span.

Ecological Theory

• emphasizes environmental factors

• identifies five environmental systems: microsystem, mesosystem, exosystem, macrosystem, and chronosystem

Microsystem

• setting in which the individual lives

• includes the person's family, peers, school, and neighborhood

• most direct interactions with social agents take place - with parents, peers, and teachers

• the individual is not a passive recipient of experiences in these settings, but someone who helps to construct the setting

Mesosystem

• involves relations between microsystems or connections between contexts

• examples are the relation of family experiences to school experiences, school experiences to religious experiences, and family experiences to peer experiences

Exosystem

• consists of links between a social setting in which the individual does not have an active role and the individual's immediate context

• for example, a husband's or child's experience at home may be influenced by a mother's experiences at work

Macrosystem

• involves the culture in which the individual's live

Cross-Cultural Studies

the comparison of one culture with one or more other cultures - provide information about the generality of development.

Chronosystem

• consists of the patterning of environmental events and transitions over the life course, as well as sociohistorical circumstances

• for example, divorce is one transition

• researchers have found that the negative effects of divorce on children often peak in the first year after the divorce

Urie Bronfenbrenner

holds that development reflects the influence of several environmental systems.