A branch of psychology which examines the biological, social, and intellectual development of people from before birth throughout the life-course. Most attention has been paid to young children, in whom shifts in understanding appear more obvious. While some psychologists study individual patterns of development, most focus upon the developmental function - the changes which are common to all people at various stages of life.
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Developmental psychology, also known as Human Development, is the scientific study of progressive psychological changes that occur in human beings as they age.
Developmental psychologists investigate key questions, such as whether children are qualitatively different from adults or simply lack the experience that adults draw upon. Other issues that they deal with is the question of whether development occurs through the gradual accumulation of knowledge or through shifts from one stage of thinking to another; and whether development is driven by the social context or by something inside each child.
Developmental psychology informs several applied fields, including: educational psychology, child psychopathology and developmental forensics. Developmental psychology complements several other basic research fields in psychology including social psychology, cognitive psychology, cognitive development, and comparative psychology.
Theory
Many theoretical perspectives attempt to explain development, among the most prominent are: Jean Piaget's Stage Theory, Lev Vygotsky's Social Contextualism (and its heir, the Ecological Systems Theory of Urie Bronfenbrenner), and especially the information processing framework employed by cognitive psychology.
Historical theories continue to provide a basis for additional research, among them are Erik Erikson's eight stages of psychosocial development and John B. Many other theories are prominent for their contributions to particular aspects of development.
Ecological Systems Theory
Generally regarded as one of the world's leading scholars in the field of developmental psychology, Bronfenbrenner's primary contribution was his Ecological Systems Theory, in which he delineated four types of nested systems, with bi-directional influences within and between systems.
Microsystem: Immediate environments (family, school, peer group, neighborhood, and childcare environments) Mesosystem: A system comprised of connections between immediate environments (i.e., a child’s home and school) Exosystem: External environmental settings which only indirectly affect development (such as parent's workplace) Macrosystem: The larger cultural context (Eastern vs. Western culture, national economy, political culture, subculture)Each system contains factors that can powerfully shape development, as can the interaction of factors across systems.
The major statement of this theory, The Ecology of Human Development (1979) had widespread influence on the way psychologists and others approached the study of human beings and their environments.
Role of experience
A significant question in developmental psychology is the relation between innateness and environmental influence in regard to any particular aspect of development. A nativist account of development would argue that the processes in question are innate, that is, they are specified by the organism's genes. Today developmental psychologists rarely take such extreme positions with regard to most aspects of development;
One area where this innateness debate has been prominently portrayed is in research on language acquisition. The nativist position argues that the input from language is too impoverished for infants and children to acquire the structure of language.
The empiricist position on the issue of language acquisition suggests that the language input does provide the necessary information required for learning the structure of language and that infants acquire language through a process of statistical learning. From this perspective, language can be acquired via general learning methods that also apply to other aspects of development, such as perceptual learning.
On the other hand, Chomsky's critique of a specific empiricist position on this issue, radical behaviorist Burrhus Frederic Skinner's Verbal Behavior written in 1957, is widely considered among developmental psychologists to have sparked the decline in influence of behaviorism and signaled the beginning of the cognitive revolution in psychology.
Mechanisms of development
Developmental psychology is concerned not only with describing the characteristics of psychological change over time, but also seeks to explain the principles and internal workings underlying these changes. This is sometimes done in reference to changes in the brain that may correspond to changes in behavior over the course of the development. Computational accounts of development often use either symbolic, connectionist (neural network), or dynamical systems models to explain the mechanisms of development.
History of developmental psychology
The modern form of developmental psychology has its roots in the rich psychological tradition represented by Heraclitus, Aristotle and Descartes. In the mid-eighteenth century Jean Jacques Rousseau described three stages of childhood: infans (infancy), puer (childhood) and adolescence in Emile: Or, On Education.
In the late nineteenth century, psychologists familiar with the evolutionary theory of Darwin began seeking an evolutionary description of psychological development;
A more scientific approach was initiated by James Mark Baldwin, who wrote essays on topics that included Imitation: A Chapter in the Natural History of Consciousness and Mental Development in the Child and the Race: Methods and Processes. Later, Rudolf Steiner articulated stages of psychological development throughout human life.
The role of mothers
Traditionally mothers (and women generally) were emphasized to the exclusion of other caregivers.
For example, the traditional father had little to do with an infant directly, but his method of interacting with the mother (supportive, abusive, neglectful) had a great deal of impact on the infant indirectly.
Stages of development
Prenatal
The prenatal development of human beings is viewed in three separate stages:
Germinal (conception through week 2) Embryonic (weeks 3 through 8) Fetal (week 9 through birth)These stages are not the same as the trimesters of a woman's pregnancy.
The germinal stage least resembles a grown human.
The embryonic stage occurs once the zygote has firmly implanted itself into the uterine wall.
The fetal period is when the brain most substantially forms, becoming more and more complex over the last few months.
During pregnancy the risk to the developing child from drugs and other teratogens, spousal abuse and other stress on the mother, nutrition and the age of the mother are quite acute.
Three methods of determining fetal defects and health include the ultrasound, amniocentesis, and chorionic villus sampling.
Ultrasound uses sound waves and a computer monitor, and is non-invasive, thus minimizing potential harm to fetus and mother.
Chorionic villus sampling is a form of prenatal diagnosis to determine genetic abnormalities in the fetus.
The advantage of CVS is that it can be carried out at 10-12 weeks of pregnancy, earlier than amniocentesis (which is carried out at 15-18 weeks).
Amniocentesis is another medical procedure used for prenatal diagnosis, in which a small amount of amniotic fluid is extracted from the amnion around a developing fetus.
Although difficult, some methods of treating fetal disorders have been developed, both surgical and drug based.
Infancy
From birth until the child begins to speak, they are referred to as an infant.
While no agreement has yet been reached regarding the level of stimulation an infant requires, we are well aware that a normal level of stimulation is very important, and that a lack of stimulation and affection can result in retardation and a host of other developmental and social disorders.
The majority of an infant's time is spent in sleep.
Infants can be seen to have 6 states, grouped into pairs:
quiet sleep and active sleep (dreaming, when REM occurs) quiet waking, and active waking fussing and cryingInfants respond to stimuli differently when in these different states.
Habituation is used to discover the resolution of perceptual systems, for example, by habituating a subject to one stimulus, and then observing responses to similar ones, one can detect the smallest degree of difference that is detectable by the subject.
Infants have a wide variety of reflexes, some of which are permanent (blinking, gagging), and others transient in nature. A partial list of infantile reflexes includes:
Moro reflex or startle reflex: Startle spreading out the arms (abduction) unspreading the arms (adduction) Crying (usually) Tonic neck reflex or fencer's reflex Rooting reflex, sucking reflex, suckling reflex: can be initiated by scratching the infant's cheek;Infants have particularly poor vision, and are legally blind.
Hearing is well-developed prior to birth, however, and a preference for the mother's heartbeat is well established.
Smell and taste are present, with infants having been shown to prefer the smell and taste of a banana, while rejecting the taste of shrimp.
Infants have a fully developed sense of touch at birth, and the myth believed by some doctors even today that infants feel no pain is inaccurate.
Piaget felt that there were several sensorimotor stages within his broader Theory of cognitive development.
The first sub-stage occurs from birth to six weeks and is associated primarily with the development of reflexes. The second sub-stage occurs from six weeks to four months and is associated primarily with the development of habits. The third sub-stage occurs from four to nine months and is associated primarily with the development of coordination between vision and prehension. The fourth sub-stage occurs from nine to twelve months and is associated primarily with the development of logic and the coordination between means and ends. This is an extremely important stage of development, holding what Piaget calls the "first proper intelligence."When studying infants, the habituation methodology is an example of a method often used to assess their performance. These include the high-amplitude sucking procedure, in which infants suck on a pacifier more or less depending on their level of interest, the conditioned foot-kick procedure, in which infants move their legs to indicate preference, and the head-turn preference procedure, in which the infant's level of interest is measured by the amount of time spent looking in a particular direction.
Object permanence is an important stage of cognitive development for infants. Infants before this age are too young to understand object permanence, which explains why infants at this age do not cry when their mothers are gone. (see also: Infant metaphysics)
Toddler
Intelligence is demonstrated through the use of symbols, language use matures, and memory and imagination are developed.
Socially, toddlers are little people attempting to become independent. Self-control begins to develop. The child's autonomic development will be inhibited, be less prepared to successfully deal with the world in the future.
Early Childhood
When children go to preschool, they broaden their social horizons and become more engaged with those around them. Impulses are channeled into fantasies, which leaves the task of the caretaker to balance eagerness for pursuing adventure, creativity and self expression with the development of responsibility. If caretakers are properly encouraging while being consistently disciplinary, children are more likely to develop positive self-esteem while becoming more responsible, and will follow through on assigned activities.
Childhood
In this stage intelligence is demonstrated through logical and systematic manipulation of symbols related to concrete objects. Operational thinking develops, which means actions are reversible, and egocentric thought diminishes.
Children go through the transition from the world at home to that of school and peers. If children can discover pleasure in intellectual stimulation, being productive, seeking success, they will develop a sense of competence. If they are not successful or cannot discover pleasure in the process, they may develop a sense of inferiority and feelings of inadequacy that may haunt them throughout life.
Adolescence
Intelligence is demonstrated through the logical use of symbols related to abstract concepts. January 1998) http://www.uoregon.edu/~moursund/Math/developmental_theory.htm
The adolescent asks himself "Who am I?
Early Adulthood
The person must learn how to form intimate relationships, both in friendship and love. The development of this skill relies on the resolution of other stages. It may be hard to establish intimacy if you haven't developed trust or a sense of identity.
Middle age
Old age
Death
see Erikson's stages of psychosocial development
Schools of psychology
Cognitive development
Cognitive development is primarily concerned with the ways in which infants and children acquire cognitive abilities. Major topics in cognitive development are the study of language acquisition and the development of perceptual and motor skills. Piaget was one of the influential early psychologists to study the development of cognitive abilities. His theory suggests that development proceeds through a set of stages from infancy to adulthood and that there is an end point or goal. Other accounts, such as that of Lev Vygotsky, have suggested that development does not progress through stages rather that the development process that begins at birth and continues until death is too complex for such structure and finality.
In addition, modern cognitive development has largely moved away from Piagetian stage theories, and is influenced by accounts of domain specificity, which argue that development is guided by innate evolutionarily specificed and content-specific information processing mechanisms.
Social development
Social psychology is the study of the nature and causes of human social behavior, with an emphasis on how people think towards each other and how they relate to each other.
Attachment Theory
Attachment Theory focuses on close, intimate, emotionally meaningful relationships. Its methods of study involve such approaches as the Strange Situation Protocol developed by Mary Ainsworth and the Adult Attachment Interview developed by Mary Main. Attachment Theory was developed by Sir John Bowlby.
Research methods
Developmental psychology employs many of the research methods used in other areas of psychology. However, infants and children cannot always be tested in the same ways as adults, so different methods are often used to study development.
Child research methods
When studying older children, especially adolescents, adult measurements of behavior can often be used, but they may need to be simplified to allow children to perform certain tasks.
Lifespan development
Developmental psychologists have a number of methods to study changes in individuals over time.
In a longitudinal study, a researcher observes many individuals born at or around the same time (a cohort) and carries out new observations as members of the cohort age. This method can be used to draw conclusions about which types of development are universal (or normative) and occur in most members of a cohort. Researchers may also observe ways in which development varies between individuals and hypothesize about the causes of variation observed in their data.
In a cross-sectional study, a researcher observes differences between individuals of different ages at the same time.
An accelerated longitudinal design or cross-sequential study combines both methodologies. By comparing differences and similarities in development, one can more easily determine what changes can be attributed to individual or historical environment, and which are truly universal.
Additionally, these are all correlational, not experimental, designs, and so one cannot readily infer causation from the data they yield. Nonetheless, correlational research methods are common in the study of development, in part due to ethical concerns. In a study of the effects of poverty on development, for instance, one cannot easilly randomly assign certain families to a poverty condition and others to an affluent one, and so observation alone has to suffice. theories Jean Piaget: Theory of cognitive development Lawrence Kohlberg: Kohlberg's stages of moral development Jerome Bruner: Cognitive (Constructivist) Learning theory / Narrative Construction of Reality Lev Vygotsky: Social Contextualism / Zone of Proximal Development Urie Bronfenbrenner: Ecological Systems Theory John Bowlby, Harlow & Harlow, Mary Ainsworth: Attachment theory Erik Erikson: Erikson's stages of psychosocial development Sigmund Freud: psychosexual development
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