Developmental Issues, Prenatal Development, and the Newborn

Developmental Psychology’s Major Issues

LOQ: What three issues have engaged developmental psychologists?

Developmental psychology examines our physical, cognitive, and social development across the life span, with a focus on three major issues:

• Nature and nurture: How does our genetic inheritance (our nature) interact with our experiences (our nurture) to influence our development?

• Continuity and stages: What parts of development are gradual and continuous, like riding an escalator? What parts change abruptly in separate stages, like climbing rungs on a ladder?

• Stability and change: Which of our traits persist through life? How do we change as we age?

Developmental Psychology: a branch of psychology that studies physical, cognitive, and social change throughout the life span.

Continuity and Stages

Experience and learning typically develop as a slow, continuous shaping process.

• various stages may be quick or slow

• everyone passes through the stages in the same order.

Stability and Change

We experience both stability and change. Some of our characteristics, such as temperament, are very stable

• We cannot predict all aspects of our future selves based on our early life

• social attitudes, for example, are much less stable than our temperament

Life requires both stability and change.

• Stability provides our identity, enabling us to depend on others and on ourselves.

• Potential for change gives us our hope for a brighter future, allowing us to adapt and grow with experience.

Prenatal Development and the Newborn

LOQ: What is the course of prenatal development, and how do teratogens affect that development?

Conception

The process started inside your grandmother—as an egg formed inside a developing female inside of her. (Your mother was born with all the immature eggs she would ever have.)

• Your father begins producing sperm cells nonstop at puberty

Prenatal Development

Fewer than ½ of the zygotes concieved make it past 2 weeks

• 10 days after conception, the zygote attaches to the mother’s uterine wall starting the pregnacy term

• 9 weeks after conception the embryo starts showing human like features

• Two months before birth, fetuses demonstrate learning in other ways, as when they adapt to a vibrating

Learning of language begins in the womb

• Fetus’ prefer hearing their mother’s language

Teratogens, agents such as viruses and drugs, can damage an embryo or fetus.

• one reason pregnant women are advised not to smoke or to drink alcohol.

• Light drinking or even ocassional binge drinking can affect the fetus’s development

  • This damage may occour because alcohol has an epigentic effect

• Smoking also can be an epigenetic effect cuasing developmental problems

Zygote: the fertilized egg; it enters a 2-week period of rapid cell division and develops into an embryo

Embryo: the developing human organism from about 2 weeks after fertilization through the second month.

Fetus: the developing human organism from 9 weeks after conception to birth.

Teratogens: (literally, “monster makers”) agents, such as chemicals and viruses, that can reach the embryo or fetus during prenatal development and cause harm.

Fetal Alcohol Syndrome (FAS):physical and cognitive abnormalities in children caused by a pregnant woman’s heavy drinking. In severe cases, signs include a small, out-of-proportion head and abnormal facial features.

The Competent Newborn

LOQ: What are some newborn abilities, and how do researchers explore infants’ mental abilities?

Having survived prenatal hazards, we as newborns came equipped with automatic reflex responses ideally suited for our survival

• Ex. withdrawing our limbs to escape pain, turneing our head from side to side and swiped the cloth off our face

Habituation: decreasing responsiveness with repeated stimulation. As infants gain familiarity with repeated exposure to a stimulus, their interest wanes and they look away sooner.

Infancy and Childhood

Maturation: biological growth processes that enable orderly changes in behavior, relatively uninfluenced by experience.

Physical Devleopment

LOQ: During infancy and childhood, how do the brain and motor skills develop?

Brain Development

The developing brain cortex actually overproduces neurons

• Peaks at 28 weeks

• You have the most amount of brain cells you will ever have when you are born

• Rapid development helps explain why infant brain size increases rapidly

Brain’s  association areas—those linked with thinking, memory, and language are the last cortical areas to develop.

Motor Development

Physical coordination's is enabled by the developing brain

• These skills emerge during infancy

  • This exercises their maturing muscles and nervous system

• Genes guide motor development

• Maturation creates our readiness to learn walking at about age 1

Brain Maturation and Infant Memory

We typically do not remember much if anything from before age 4

• infantile amnesia wanes as children get older

• hippocampus and frontal lobes, continue to mature during and after adolescence

• Traces of forgotten childhood languages may also persist

  • English-speaking British adults who had no conscious memory of the Hindi or Zulu they had spoken as children

    • They could relearn subtle sound contrasts in these languages that other English speakers could not learn even at 40 years old,

Cognitive Development

LOQ: From the perspectives of Piaget, Vygotsky, and today’s researchers, how does a child’s mind develop?

Piaget’s studies led him to believe that a child’s mind develops through a series of stages, in an upward march from the newborn’s simple reflexes to the adult’s abstract reasoning power

• core idea was that our intellectual progression reflects an unceasing struggle to make sense of our experience

  • the maturing brain builds schemas to end this process

• proposed two more concepts

  • we assimilate new experiences by interpreting them in terms of our current understandings (schemas)

  • we accommodate, our schemas to incorporate information provided by new experiences.

Cognition: all the mental activities associated with thinking, knowing, remembering, and communicating.

Schema: a concept or framework that organizes and interprets information.

Assimilation: interpreting our new experiences in terms of our existing schemas.

Accommodation: adapting our current understandings (schemas) to incorporate new information.

Piaget’s Theory and Current Thinking

• believed that children construct their understanding of the world while interacting with it

  • minds experience spurts of change

• cognitive development consisted of four major stages:

  • sensorimotor

  • preoperational

  • concrete operational

  • formal operational

Sensorimotor Stage

Babies take in the world through their senses and actions

• Happens between birth and age 2

• They do this by looking, hearing, touching, mouthing, and grasping

  • learn to make things happen

• Very young babies seem to live in the present:

  • Out of sight is out of mind.

  • Young infants lack object permanence

    • 8 months, infants begin exhibiting memory for things no longer seen

      • infant will momentarily look for a toy that you hid

Sensorimotor Stage: in Piaget’s theory, the stage (from birth to nearly 2 years of age) during which infants know the world mostly in terms of their sensory impressions and motor activities.

Object Permanence: the awareness that things continue to exist even when not perceived.

Preoperational Stage

Piaget believed that until about age 6 or 7, children are in a preoperational stage

• able to represent things with words and images but too young to perform mental operations

  • Ex. such as imagining an action and mentally reversing it

• Children lack the concept of conservation

  • the principle that quantity remains the same despite changes in shape

• Symbolic thinking and pretend play appear at an earlier age than Piaget supposed

• taught us that preschool children are egocentric

  • difficulty perceiving things from another’s point of view

  • Children’s conversations also reveal their egocentrism

  • develop the ability to infer others’ mental states when they begin forming a theory of mind

Preoperational Stage: in Piaget’s theory, the stage (from about 2 to 6 or 7 years of age) during which a child learns to use language but does not yet comprehend the mental operations of concrete logic.

Conservation: the principle (which Piaget believed to be a part of concrete operational reasoning) that properties such as mass, volume, and number remain the same despite changes in the forms of objects.

Egocentrism: in Piaget’s theory, the preoperational child’s difficulty taking another’s point of view.

Concrete Operational Stage

Piaget said children enter the concrete operational stage

• They begin to grasp conservation when given concrete (physical) materieals

• Believed that children become able to comprehend mathematical transformations and conservation

Concrete Operational Stage: in Piaget’s theory, the stage of cognitive development (from about 7 to 11 years of age) during which children gain the mental operations that enable them to think logically about concrete events.

Formal Operational Stage

Systematic reasoning, what Piaget called formal operational thinking, is now within their grasp.

• our reasoning expands from the purely concrete (involving actual experience) to encompass abstract thinking (involving imagined realities and symbols) by age 12

• can ponder hypothetical propositions and deduce consequences

Formal Operational Stage: in Piaget’s theory, the stage of cognitive development (normally beginning about age 12) during which people begin to think logically about abstract concepts.

An Alternative Viewpoint: Lev Vygotsky and the Social Child

Vygotsky emphasized how the child’s mind grows through interaction with the social environment vs Piaget who emphasized how the child’s mind grows through interaction with the physical environment

• giving children new words and mentoring them provide a temporary scaffold from which children can step to higher levels of thinking

• Language provides the building blocks for thinking

  • age 7, children increasingly think in words and use words to solve problems

    • Do this by internalizing their culture’s language and relying on inner speech

  • talking to themselves helps children control their behavior and emotions and master new skills

Scaffold: in Vygotsky’s theory, a framework that offers children temporary support as they develop higher levels of thinking

Reflecting on Piaget’s Theory

Piaget identified significant cognitive milestones and stimulated worldwide interest in how the mind develops

• emphasis was less on the ages at which children typically reach specific milestones than on their sequence

  • Studies confirmed that human cognition unfolds basically in the sequence Piaget described

  • Researchers today see development as more continuous than did Piaget

    • revealed conceptual abilities Piaget missed

    • see formal logic as a smaller part of cognition than he did

    • we adapt Piaget’s ideas to accommodate new findings

Implications for Parents and Teachers

Nature’s strategy for keeping children close to protective adults and providing time for learning and socialization

• children’s cognitive immaturity as adaptive

Autism Spectrum Disorder

LOQ: What is autism spectrum disorder?

Autism spectrum disorder (ASD)

• marked by social deficiencies and repetitive behaviors

  • underlying cause of ASD’s traits seems to be poor communication between brain regions that usually work together to let us understand another’s viewpoint

  • differing levels of severity

    • half of people with ASD experience a “fair” or even “good” outcome (also used to be called Asperger's Syndorm)

      • Function at a high level, highly intelligent, usually also have a very good talent or skill

      • more severe end struggle to use language.

• Mix of biological factors such as genetic influences and abnormal brain development, contribute to ASD

  • Childhood vaccinations do NOT contribute to ASD

  • Prenatal environment matters

    • maternal infection and inflammation, psychiatric drug use, or stress hormones

• Diagnosis increasing

  • Used to think it affected 1 in 2500 children but now it is around 1 in 68 American children by age 8

  • Rates vary from place to place

  • Diagnoses offset by a decrease in the number of children with a “cognitive disability” or “learning disability

  • 3:1 ratio for boys to girls who are diagnosed

    • Simon Baron-Cohen believes this is because boys are often “systemizes”

      • tend to understand things according to rules or laws, as in mathematical and mechanical systems

    • Believes that girls are naturally predisposed to be “empathizers”

      • tend to excel at reading facial expressions and gestures

Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD): a disorder that appears in childhood and is marked by significant deficiencies in communication and social interaction, and by rigidly fixated interests and repetitive behaviors.

Social Development

LOQ: How do parent-infant attachment bonds form?

The brain, mind, and social-emotional behavior develop together

Stranger Anxiety: the fear of strangers that infants commonly display, beginning by about 8 months of age.

of adulthood, a time of rewarding friendships, heightened idealism, and a growing sense of life’s exciting possibilities.

Adolescence: the transition period from childhood to adulthood, extending from puberty to independence.

Physical Development

The timing of puberty is very important

• boys, early maturation has mixed effects

  • Typically stronger and more athletic during their early teen years tend to be more popular, self-assured, and independent, though also more at risk for alcohol use, delinquency, and premature sexual activity

• girls, early maturation can be a challenge

  • may begin associating with older adolescents, suffer teasing or sexual harassment, or experience severe anxiety

The teenage brain is still a work in progress

• Until puberty, brain cells increase their connections,

  • during adolescence comes a selective pruning of unused neurons and connections

    • Use it or lose it

• their frontal lobes also continue to develop

  • continuing growth of myelin

    • fatty tissue that forms around axons and speeds neurotransmission enables better communication with other brain regions

    • improved judgment, impulse control, and long-term planning.

  • Frontal lobe maturation lags behind the emotional limbic system.

Puberty: the period of sexual maturation, during which a person becomes capable of reproducing.

Cognitive Development

LOQ: How did Piaget, Kohlberg, and later researchers describe adolescent cognitive and moral development?

During the early teen years, reasoning is often self-focused

Developing Reasoning Power

They may think about what is ideally possible and compare that with the imperfect reality of their society, their parents, and themselves

• may debate human nature, good and evil, truth and justice

• sense of what’s fair changes from simple equality to equity

• Reasoning hypothetically and deducing consequences also enables adolescents to detect inconsistencies and spot hypocrisy in others’ reasoning.

  • can lead to heated debates with parents

Developing Morality

To be a moral person is to think morally and act accordingly

• Jean Piaget and Lawrence Kohlberg proposed that moral reasoning guides moral actions

• Newer views suggest much of our functioning occurs not on the “high road” of deliberate, conscious thinking but on the “low road,” unconscious and automatic.

Moral Reasoning

Piaget believed that children’s moral judgments build on their cognitive development

• Lawrence Kohlberg agreed and sought to describe the development of moral reasoning, the thinking that occurs as we consider right and wrong

  • posed moral dilemmas (for example, whether a person should steal medicine to save a loved one’s life) to children

  • His analysis of their answers led him to propose three basic levels of moral thinking: preconventional, conventional, and postconventional

    • claimed these levels form a moral ladder

    • the sequence is unvarying

    • critics have noted that his postconventional stage is culturally limited,

Moral Intuition

Jonathan Haidt believes that much of our morality is rooted in moral intuition

• quick gut feelings, or affectively laden intuitions

• According to this intuitionist view, the mind makes moral judgments in much the same way that it makes aesthetic judgments

  • Feelings of disgust or of elation trigger moral reasoning,

Moral Action

Our moral thinking and feeling surely affect our moral talk

• big part of moral development is the self-discipline needed to restrain one’s own impulses

Our capacity to delay satisfaction now allows for bigger rewards later

• Ex. future academic, vocational, and social success

Social Development

LOQ: What are the social tasks and challenges of adolescence?

Theorist Erik Erikson contended that each stage of life has its own psychosocial task, a crisis that needs resolution

Forming an Identity

A self-definition that unifies the various selves into a consistent and comfortable is an identify

• group identities are often formed by how we differ from those around us

• People in a minority ethnic group, for gay and transgender people, or for people with a disability tend to form a social identity around their differences

Erikson noticed that some adolescents forge their identity early

• Did this by adopting their parents’ values and expectations

• Some teens and young adults may adopt the identity of a particular peer group—jocks, preps, geeks, band kids, debaters.

• adolescent identity formation is followed in young adulthood by a developing capacity for intimacy

Identity: our sense of self according to Erikson, the adolescent’s task is to solidify a sense of self by testing and integrating various roles

Social Identity: the “we” aspect of our self-concept; the part of our answer to “Who am I?” that comes from our group memberships.

Intimacy: in Erikson’s theory, the ability to form close, loving relationships; a primary developmental task in young adulthood

Parent and Peer Relationships

LOQ: How do parents and peers influence adolescents?

Adolescents pull away from their parents when forming their own identity

• These differences tend to lead to real splits and great stress

• Positive parent-teen relations and positive peer relations often go hand in hand

  • teens who felt close to their parents have tended to be healthy and happy and to do well in school

  • Misbehaving teens are more likely to have tense relationships with parents and other adults

• typically a time of diminishing parental influence and growing peer influence

Peer approval matters

• See parents as influential in shaping their religious faith and in thinking about college and career choices

• Most teens identify with their parents’ political views

Emerging Adulthood

LOQ: What is emerging adulthood?

Adolescents and young adults now take more time to become independent than in the 1960s

• This includes financial independence, getting a job, moving out, and relationships

Emerging Adulthood: a period from about age 18 to the mid-twenties, when many in Western cultures are no longer adolescents but have not yet achieved full independence as adults.

Adulthood

Origins of Attachment

Parent-infant attachment bond is a powerful survival impulse that keeps infants close to their caregivers

• Their parents are comfortable and familiar

• psychologists reasoned that infants became attached to those who satisfied their need for nourishment

  • Overruled by an accidental finding

Attachment: an emotional tie with another person; shown in young children by their seeking closeness to their caregiver and showing distress on separation.

Body Contact

The Harlow's recognized that this intense attachment to the blanket contradicted the idea that attachment derives from an association with nourishment

• This came from a experiment with baby monkeys and their mothers, some with clothes and some without

• Researchers earned that other qualities—rocking, warmth, and feeding—made the cloth mother even more appealing.

Infants become attached to parents who are soft and warm and who rock, feed, and pat them

• parent-infant emotional communication occurs via touch

  • Can either be soothing or arousing

• Human attachment consists of one person providing another with a secure base from which to explore and a safe haven when distressed.

  • we are social creatures at all ages

Familiarity

Familiarity bases in attachments in many animals that form during a critical period

• Ex. goslings, ducklings, and chicks, shortly after hatching typically see their mother first and then follow her around for everything

• Once this bond is created it is very hard to reverse it or get rid or it

Konrad Lorenz explored this attachment process called imprinting

• Wondered “what would ducklings do if he was the first moving creature they observed?”

  • This was true as every duckling that saw Konrad first followed him around everywhere

• Children do not imprint, but do become attached to things they know

  • Mere exposure to people and things increases fondness such as rereading books or rewatching movies

Critical Period: an optimal period early in the life of an organism when exposure to certain stimuli or experiences produces normal development.

Imprinting: the process by which certain animals form strong attachments during early life.

Attachment Differences

LOQ: How have psychologists studied attachment differences, and what have they learned?

Mary Ainsworth designed the strange situation experiment

• observed mother-infant pairs at home during their first six month

• Later observed the 1-year-old infants in a strange situation (usually a laboratory playroom) with and without their mother

• 60 percent of infants and young children display secure attachment has been shown in research

  • Other infants show insecure attachment, marked either by anxiety or avoidance of trusting relationships

    • less likely to explore their surroundings; they may even cling to their mother

    • May cry loudly and remain upset or seem indifferent to her departure and return

Attachment Styles and Later Relationships

Erik and Joan Erikson  believed that securely attached children approach life with a sense of basic trust

• attributed basic trust not to environment or inborn temperament, but to early parenting

• theorized that infants blessed with “sensitive, loving caregivers” form a lifelong attitude of trust rather than fear.

Many researchers now believe that our early attachments form the foundation for our adult relationships and our comfort with affection and intimacy

• Children with sensitive, responsive mothers tend to flourish socially and academically

• Feeling insecurely attached to others may take one of two main forms

  • anxious attachment, in which people constantly crave acceptance but remain vigilant to signs of possible rejection

    • In romantic relationships, an anxious attachment style creates constant concern over rejection, leading people to cling to their partners

  • avoidant attachment, in which people experience discomfort getting close to others and use avoidant strategies to maintain distance from others.

    • An avoidant style decreases commitment and increases conflict

Basic Trust: according to Erik Erikson, a sense that the world is predictable and trustworthy; said to be formed during infancy by appropriate experiences with responsive caregivers.

Deprivation of Attachment

LOQ: How does childhood neglect or abuse affect children’s attachments?

children growing up under adversity are resilient

• they withstand the trauma and become well-adjusted adults

• hardship short of trauma often boosts mental toughness

• tendency to bounce back and go on to lead a better life

  • many who experience enduring abuse don’t bounce back so readily

• can also leave epigenetic marks

  • explain why young children who have survived severe or prolonged physical abuse

  • are at increased risk for health problems, psychological disorders, substance abuse, and criminality

Affluent children are at elevated risk for substance abuse, eating disorders, anxiety, and depression

The unloved may become the unloving

• Most abusive parents—and many condemned murderers—have reported being neglected or battered as children

• Around 30 percent of people who have been abused later abuse their children

  • Most abused children do not later become violent criminals or abusive parents

• extreme early trauma may nevertheless leave footprints on the brain

  • exhibit stronger startle responses

Developing a Self-Concept

LOQ: How do children’s self-concepts develop?

By the end of childhood, at about age 12, most children have developed a self-concept

• behavior provide clues to the beginnings of self-awareness

• By school age, they develop more detailed descriptions that include their gender, group memberships, psychological traits, and similarities and differences compared with other children

  • views of themselves affect their actions; ex. positive self-concept are more confident, independent, optimistic, assertive, and sociable

Self-Concept: all our thoughts and feelings about ourselves, in answer to the question, “Who am I?”

Parenting Styles

LOQ: What are the four main parenting styles?

Parenting styles can be described as a combination of two traits:

• how responsive

• how demanding parents are

Authoritarian parents are coercive. They impose rules and expect obedience: “Don’t interrupt.” “Keep your room clean.” “Don’t stay out late or you’ll be grounded.” “Why? Because I said so.”

Permissive parents are unrestraining. They make few demands, set few limits, and use little punishment.

Negligent parents are uninvolved. They are neither demanding nor responsive. They are careless, inattentive, and do not seek to a close relationship with their children.

Authoritative parents are confrontive. They are both demanding and responsive. They exert control by setting rules, but, especially with older children, they encourage open discussion and allow exceptions.

Adolescence

LOQ: How is adolescence defined, and how do physical changes affect developing teens?

Many psychologists once believed that childhood sets our traits.

• developmental psychologists see development as lifelong.

  • this life-span perspective emerged, psychologists began to look at how maturation and experience shape us not only in infancy and childhood, but also in adolescence and beyond

Adolescence is a time of vitality without the cares

Adulthood

Physical Development

LOQ: What physical changes occur during middle and late adulthood?

Our physical abilities all begin an almost imperceptible decline in our mid-twenties.

Physical Changes in Middle Adulthood

During early and middle adulthood, physical vigor has less to do with age than with a person’s health and exercise habits.

Women experience menopause

• Menstrual cycles stop usually within a few years of age 50

• Some experience distress, as do some men who experience declining virility and physical capacities.

Menopause: the time of natural cessation of menstruation; also refers to the biological changes a woman experiences as her ability to reproduce declines.

Physical Changes in Late Adulthood

Life Expectancy

Increasing life expectancy combines with decreasing birthrates

• Some people say this is humanities greatest achievement

• Older adults are a growing population segment

  • 1 in 10 people worldwide are 60 or older

• few of us live to 100

  • Disease, aging, cells stop reproducing, body becomes more frail, and weather and mild infections are more significant

  • Tips of chromosomes, called telomeres, wear down

    • This is accelerated by smoking, obesity, or stress

      • Breast-fed children have longer telomeres

      • abuse or bullying exhibit the biological scars of shortened telomeres

    • Telomeres short on when aging cells may die without being replaced with perfect genetic replicas

Sensory Abilities, Strength, and Stamina

Not aware of it at the time, but our physical decline begins in early adulthood

• Vision gets blurrier, hearing becomes more muffled, and activities take more effort

Health

People start caring less about what their body looks like as they age

• Care more about how it functions

• As people age there are ups and downs to their health

  • suffer fewer short-term ailments, such as common flu and cold viruses

  • body’s disease-fighting immune system weakens

The Aging Brain

Older people take a bit more time to react, to solve perceptual puzzles, even to remember names, than teens and young adults do

• Brain regions important to memory begin to atrophy during aging

  • blood-brain barrier also breaks down

    • This starts in the hippocampus

    • furthers cognitive decline

  • still some plasticity in the aging brain

    • Try's to compensate for what it loses by recruiting and reorganizing neural networks

Exercising and Aging

Exercise slows aging

• Active older adults tend to be mentally quick older adults

  • appears to slow the progression of Alzheimer’s disease

• enhances muscles, bones, and energy and helps prevent obesity and heart disease

• maintains the telomeres that protect the chromosome ends

• stimulates brain cell development and neural connections

  • reduces brain shrinkage in aging brains

  • promotes neurogenesis in the hippo campus

Cognitive Development

Aging and Memory

LOQ: How does memory change with age?

As we age, we remember some things well

• display this “reminiscence bump” when asked to name their all-time favorite music, movies, and athletes

• tend to name events from their teens or twenties

Teens and young adults surpass both young children and 70-year-olds at prospective memory

• older people’s prospective memory remains strong when it triggers a memory

  • Ex. “Get milk at the store”

• remembering seems also to depend on the type of information we are trying to retrieve

Maintaining Mental Abilities

Psychologists who study the aging mind debate whether “brain fitness” computer-based training programs

• Our brain remains plastic throughout life

• some computer game makers have been marketing daily brain-exercise programs for older adults

Cross-Sectional Study: research that compares people of different ages at the same point in time.

Longitudinal Study: research that follows and retests the same people over time.

Neurocognitive Disorders and Alzheimer’s Disease

LOQ: How do neurocognitive disorders and Alzheimer’s disease affect cognitive ability?

Among older adults, hearing loss, and its associated social isolation

• predicts risk of depression and accelerated mental decline

Series of small strokes, a brain tumor, or alcohol use disorder can progressively damage the brain

• Mental erosion from this is called neurocognitive disorder (NCD, formerly called dementia).

• Heavy lifelong smoking also increases the risk for this

Alzheimer’s Disease

• loss of brain cells and a deterioration of neurons that produce the neurotransmitter acetylcholine, which is vital to memory and thinking

  • before symptoms appear—the degeneration of critical brain cells and diminished activity in Alzheimer’s-related brain areas

• somewhat less common among those who keep their minds and bodies active, through activities like reading, attending educational lectures, and running or lifting weights

Neurocognitive Disorders (NCDs): acquired (not lifelong) disorders marked by cognitive deficits; often related to Alzheimer’s disease, brain injury or disease, or substance abuse. In older adults, neurocognitive disorders were formerly called dementia.

Alzheimer’s Disease: a neurocognitive disorder marked by neural plaques, often with onset after age 80, and entailing a progressive decline in memory and other cognitive abilities.

Social Development

LOQ: What themes and influences mark our social journey from early adulthood to death?

Adulthood’s Ages and Stages

Some psychologists have argued that for many the midlife transition is a crisis

• Unhappiness, job dissatisfaction, marital dissatisfaction, divorce, anxiety, and suicide do not surge during the early forties

  • Divorce, for example, is most common among those in their twenties, suicide among those in their seventies and eighties

• 1 in 4 say the trigger is not age, but a major event, such as illness, divorce, or job loss

Life events trigger transitions to new life stages at varying ages.

• The social clock says when to leave home, get a job, marry, have children, and retire

  • varies from era to era and culture to culture

Social Clock: the culturally preferred timing of social events such as marriage, parenthood, and retirement.

Adulthood’s Commitments

Love

Evolutionary perspective, relatively monogamous pairing makes sense

• Parents who cooperated to nurture their children to maturity were more likely to have their genes passed along to posterity than were parents who didn’t.

People who live together before marriage (and especially before engagement) have had higher rates of divorce and marital dysfunction than those who did not

• Ninety-five percent of Americans have either married or want to

• Stable marriages provide five times more instances of smiling, touching, complimenting, and laughing than of sarcasm, criticism, and insults

Relationships that last are not always devoid of conflict

• Some couples fight but also shower each other with affection

• Other couples never raise their voices yet also seldom praise each other or nuzzle

• Successful couples learn to fight fair

  • “I know it’s not your fault” or “I’ll just be quiet for a moment and listen.”

Work

Choosing a career path is difficult, especially during bad economic times for both men and women

• having work that fits your interests and provides you with a sense of competence and accomplishment

Well-Being Across the Life Span

LOQ: How does our well-being change across the life span?

Compared with teens and young adults, older adults do, however, tend to have a smaller social network, with fewer friendships and greater loneliness

• older adults are happiest when not alone

  • experience fewer problems in their relationships—less attachment anxiety, stress, and anger

The aging brain may help nurture these positive feelings

• older adults show that the amygdala responds less actively to negative events (but not to positive events)

As we age, life therefore becomes less of an emotional roller coaster.

• Compliments provoke less elation and criticisms less despair

Death and Dying

LOQ: A loved one’s death triggers what range of reactions?

For many people, the most difficult separation they will experience is the death of a partner

• Events like this may trigger a year or more of memory-laden mourning that eventually subsides to a mild depression

Loss is unbearable for some people

• Reactions to a loved one’s death range more widely than most suppose

  • Some cultures encourage public weeping and wailing; others hide grief.

  • Individuals within the cultures differ

  • With similar losses, some people grieve more others grieve less

Common misconceptions about grieving

• Terminally ill and bereaved people do not go through identical predictable stages, such as denial before anger

• Those who express the strongest grief immediately do not get rid of their grief more quickly. But grieving parents who try to protect their partner by “staying strong” and not discussing their child’s death may actually prolong the grieving

• Bereavement therapy and self-help groups offer support, but there is similar healing power in the passing of time, the support of friends, and the act of giving support and help to others. Grieving spouses who talk often with others or receive grief counseling adjust about as well as those who grieve more privately