Unit 9
Prenatal Development and
the Newborn

 Conception
 Only takes one sperm to penetrate the egg’s outer
coating and fuse together to form a cell (baby)
 Zygote: conception to 2 weeks
 Embryo: 2 weeks to 8 weeks
 Fetus: 9 weeks to birth
Prenatal development

 Cell division produces a zygote
 Fewer than half of all fertilized egss survive beyond
the first 2 weeks
 After the zygote attaches to the mother’s uterine wall
(embryo)
 Over the next 6 weeks organs began to form and
function
Prenatal development

 By 9 weeks looks “human” (fetus)
 Fetus becomes responsive to sound
 Mother’s voice over any others after birth
Prenatal development

 Placenta-transfer nutrients and oxygen from mother
to fetus and screens harmful substances
 Teratogens: harmful agents such as viruses and
drugs
 No safe amount of alcohol during pregnancy
 Fetal alcohol syndrome: physical and cognitive
abnormalities
The newborn

 Born with coordinated sequence of reflexes
 Touches cheek>babies turn>open mouth>
 Reflexive tonguing, swallowing, sucking, and
breathing
 Habituation: overtime decreasing responsiveness
with repeated stimulation
The Newborn

 We prefer familiar sights and sounds that facilitate
social responsiveness
 We prefer objects 8 to 12 inches away (happens to be
distance from nursing baby eyes to mothers eyes)
Infancy and Childhood

 Physical Development
 On the day your were born you had the most brain
cells you will ever have
 Neural networks grow more complex as you mature
 Maturation: growth enable changes in behavior
uninfluenced by experience
Infancy and Childhood

 Motor development
 Physical coordination
 Rolling over>crawling>walking (illustrating a
maturing nervous system)
 Genes play a role
 Cerebellum (readiness to walk/balance)
Infancy and Childhood

 Maturation and infant memory




Infantile amnesia
Average age of earliest conscious memory is 3.5 years
Memory still processes information before that time
Conscious mind not know or express in words, the
nervous systems somehow remembers
 Sweating example of remembering pre-schoolers
Cognitive Development

 Mental activities associate with thinking, knowing,
remembering, and communicating
 Piaget’s studies proved that children minds develop
in stages
 Piaget: “make sense of our experiences”
Cognitive Development

 Maturing brain builds schemas, concepts or mental
molds to our experiences
 First we assimilate new experiences (interpret) and
later accommodate (adjust) our original schemas
 Spurts of change to greater cognitive stability
Piaget’s theory and current
thinking

 Sensorimotor stage
 From birth to 2
 Take in the world through their sense and actionsthrough looking, hearing, touching, mouthing, and
grasping
 Object permanence (young infants lack up until
around 8 months)
Piaget stages

 Preoperational Stage
 Until about age 6 or 7
 Too young to perform mental operations
 Concept of conservation-that quantity remains the
same despite changes in shape
 Egocentrism: difficulty perceiving things from
another’s point of view
Piaget theory of mind

 Begin to tease, empathize, and persuade
 Ability to take another’s perspective develops
 Children with autism have difficulty understanding
other states of mind, reflecting on their own mental
states, and less likely to use personal pronouns
 Gradually develop
Concrete Operational
Stage

 Around 6 or 7 till 12
 Comprehend mathematical transformations and
conversations
Formal Operational
Stage

 By age 12
 Concrete reasoning to encompass abstract thinking
 Children begin to approach hypothetical
propositions and deducing consequences
Reflecting on Piaget’s
Theory

 Identified significant cognitive milestones
 Studies around the globe have confirmed that
human cognition unfolds as Piaget predicated
 Today researchers see development as more
continuous that Piaget did
Lev Vygotsky

 Emphasis on how the mind grows through
interaction with the social environment
 Language provides the building blocks for thinking
 Zone of proximal development-what they could
learn with and without help
 Interacting with others
Implications for parents
and teachers

 Positive feedback vs. negative feedback
 Better to build on what they already known
engaging them in concrete demonstrations and
stimulating them to think for themselves
 Children’s cognitive immaturity is adaptive
Social Development

 Developing an intense bond with caregivers
 Stranger Anxiety- By 8 months some infants show a
fear of STRANGERS
 Separation Anxiety- crying or otherwise showing
distress if their mothers leave them (even if only for
a few moments)
Origins of Attachment

 Attachment-a powerful survival impulse that keeps
infants close to their caregivers
 Infants become attached to those who satified their
need for nourishment
Origins of AttachmentBody contact

 Harlow experiment
 Monkey overwhelmingly
preferred the comfy cloth
mother as opposed to the wire
mother who provided food
 Cling to mother (comfy) when
anxious
 Rocking, warmth, and feed
made the cloth mother even
more appealing
Origins of AttachmentFamiliarity

 Form during a critical period-an optimal period
when certain events must take place to facilitate
proper development
 Children become attached during a sensitive period
 Mere exposure to people and things fosters fondness
Origins of Attachment

 Imprinting-certain animals attached during a critical
time
 Goslings, dockings, chicks: hours after hatching
 Konrad Lorenz experiment
Attachment differences:
Temperament and

Parenting
 Placed in a strange situation the majority of infants
(60%) displayed secure attachment
 Play comfortably in their mothers presence, when
she leaves they are distressed, and when se returns
they seek contact
 Insecure attachment: cling to mom (won’t explore),
upset or indifference toward mother leaving and
returning (about how they react when parents
return)
Attachment differences

 Sensitive mothers and fathers tend to have securely
attached infants
 One aspect of personality is temperament (reactive,
intense, fidgety, easygoing, quiet, irritable,
unpredictable, cheerful, relaxed)
 Heredity predisposes temperament differences
Secure vs. Unsecure

 Secure: Mothers who are affectionate and RELIABLE
>securely attached child
 *Secure children are happier, friendlier, and more
cooperative. They are also less likely to MISBEHAVE
and tend to do better in school
 Insecure: Unresponsive or unreliable caregiver
>insecure child
Attachment differences

 Erik Erikson: Securely attached children approach
life with a sense of basic trusts (early parenting)
 Our early attachment forms the foundation for
affection and intimacy later in life
 Affect future relationships with your own children
 Affect motivation
Deprivation of
Attachment

 Harlow monkey: cowered in fright or lashed out in
aggression placed in rooms with other monkeys,
incapable of mating
 Most children growing up under adversity are
resilient and become normal adults
 However, others don’t bounce back so readily
 Extreme trauma leave footprints on the brain
 Slow serotonin response in abused children
Disruption of
Attachment

 Courts are reluctant to remove children from their
homes
 If placed in a more positive and stable environment,
most infants recover from separation distress
 A series of foster families can be very disruptive
 Deep and longstanding attachments seldom break
quickly
Does Daycare affect
attachment?

 New research confirms quality day-care matters
 Socio-economic status readily determines quality of
day-care
 Children ability to thrive under varied types of
responsive caregivers
 Consistent/warm relationships, can form trusting
relationships
Child abuse and neglect

 Most parents are kind and LOVING
 Neglect: failure to give a child adequate food,
shelter, emotional support, or schooling
 more problems result from neglect than from abuse
 *3 million children in the US are neglected
Child abuse and neglect

 Stress, especially unemployment
 History of ABUSE
 Acceptance of violence as a way of coping
 Lack of ATTACHMENT to child
 Substance abuse
 Rigid attitudes about child REARING
 Children often imitate their parent’s behavior, but it
is possible to break the CYCLE
Self-concept

 By the end of childhood about age 12 most children
have developed a self-concept-understanding of who
they are
 Mirror images fascinate infants around 6 months
 About 18 months the child recognizes oneself in the
mirror
Self-concept

 By school age, children began to describe themselves
in terms (gender, traits, comparison)
 By age 8 or 10, their self-image is quite stable
 Children who form positive self-concept are more
confident, independent, optimistic, assertive, and
sociable
Parenting-style

 Authoritarian: parents impose rules and expect
obedience
 Permissive: parents submit to their children’s desires
 Authoritative: both demanding and responsive
 Children with the highest self-esteem, self-reliance,
and social comptence-____________ parents
Culture and ChildRearing

 Western culture-independence
 Many Asian and African cultures value emotional
closeness and encourage a strong sense of family sef
 All in all: children across place and time have thrived
under various child-rearing systems
Parents and Early
Experiences

 Experience and brain development
 Enriched brains are more complex not necessarily
bigger
 Rosenweig and Krech rat study
 Impoverished vs. enriched: activities, weight
 Exposer to language before adolescences
 Genie never mastered a language
How much credit or
(blame) do parents

deserve?
 Countless genetic influences beyond their control
 Parents feel enormous satisfaction and guilt over
their child’s successes or failures
 Freud blamed bad mothers
 Power of parenting-abusive, neglect, political
attitudes, religious beliefs, manners
Peer Influence

 We seek to fit in with groups and are subject to their
influences
 Children will adopt the language accent of their
peers not their parents
 Parents influenced the culture that shapes peer
group (neighborhood, schools)
Gender Development

 The biological and social characteristics by which
people DEFINE as male or female
 Gender Similarities: among 46 chromosomes 45 are
unisex
 More alike than different!!!
Overall Gender
Differences

 Age of puberty
 Women live 5 years longer, 70% carry more fat, 40%
less muscle, 5 inches shorter, smell fainter odors,
express emotions more freely, offered help more
often, vulnerable to depression and anxiety, 10 times
more likely to develop an eating disorder
 Men 4 times more likely to commit suicide or suffer
alcohol dependence, far more diagnosed with
autism, color-blindness, adhd, antisocial personality
disorder
Gender and Aggression

 Men tend to behave more aggressively
 Gender gap regarding physical aggression
 Throughout the world
 Hunting, fighting, (men receive more support to go
to war)
Gender and Social
Power

 In most societies men are more socially dominant
 Leadership tends to go to males
 As leaders men are more autocratic, women tend to be
more democratic
 Everyday behavior men are more likely to talking
assertively, interrupting, initiating touches, staring
more, and smiling less
 Such behaviors are sustain due to social power
inequities: pay, political power
Gender and Social
Connectedness

 Surface early in children’s play
 Girls play in smaller groups, less competitive, more
imitative, more open and responsive to feedback
 Boys play in large groups with an activity focus and
little intimate discussion
Gender and Social
Connectedness

 Females are more interdependent: spend more time
with friends, conversation
 Men-activities side by side and use conversation to
communicate solutions
 Bonds are stronger between females
Gender Differences

 Gender differences in power, connectedness, and
other traits peak in late adolescence
 As teenage girls become less assertive and more
flirtatious boys become more domineering and
unexpressive
 By 50, men become more empathic and less
domineering, women become more assertive and
self-confident (especially if working)
The nature of Gender

 Different sex chromosomes and differing
concentrations of sex hormones
 Seven weeks determines sex: father decides the sex
 4th-5th month sex hormones bathe the fetal brain and
influence the wiring
 Women have thicker frontal lobes in the area involved
in verbal fluency
 Part of the parietal cortex (space perception) is thicker
than males
 Hippocampus, amygala differences
The nature of Gender

 Hormonal malfunctions (will inject)
 Genetically female infants are born masculineappearing
 Hormones won’t reverse their gender identity
 Exhibit tomboyish behavior
 *The effect of early exposure to sex hormones is direct
(appearance) and indirect influence of social
experiments)
The nurture of Gender

 Gender roles
 Our expectations about the way men and women
SHOULD behave
 Can smooth social relations, saving awkward
decisions, but if we deviate from conventions we may
feel anxious
 Employed men spend less time at home (employed
women spend more)
 Stayed home with sick child?__________,
 ________________countries offer the greatest gender
equity. ___________and _________the least.
The nurture of Gender

 Gender and Child-rearing
 Gender identity-sense of being male or female
 Gender typed-exhibit masculine or feminine traits
 Social learning theory: children learn gender-like
behaviors by observing and imitating and by being
rewarded or punished
 Cognition: gender schemas (shape experiences based
on observation)
Adolescence

 The years spend morphing from child to adult starts
at the beginning of sexual maturity and ends with
achievement of independent adult status
 G. Stanley Hall: A period of “storm and stress”
 Negative?
 Positive?
Physical Development

 Puberty-mature sexually
 Beginning for girls around 11 and boys 13
 Primary and secondary sex characteristics develop
 Timing: for boys early maturation: being stronger,
athletic, >popular, self-assured, independent
 For girls early maturation: may suffer from teasing
and sexual harrassment
Physical Development

 As teens mature the frontal lobe continues to develop
 Bring improved judgment, impulse control, plan for
long term
 However, hormonal surge and un-developed frontal
lobe explains impulsive, risky teen behaviors
 Teens are guilty by reason of adolescence
 Juvenile death penalties unconstitutional
Cognitive Development

 Developing reasoning power
 The ability to reason hypothetically and deduce
consequences also enables them to detect
inconsistencies in others’ reasoning and to spot
hypocrisy
Developing Morality

 Discerning right from wrong and developing
character
 Kohlberg moral stages of development
 Preconvetional: before age 9 children morality on selfinterest
 Conventional: by early adolescence, focuses on caring
for others and uphold laws and rules
 Postconventional: Actions judged as “right” because
they flow from people's rights (or from self-defined)
Moral Feeling

 Make moral judgments quickly
 Feel disgust when seeing people engaged in
degrading acts or feel elated when seeing people to
what is “right”
 Quick-gut feelings
 Humans are hard-wired for moral feelings
 Doing the right thing!
Social Development

 Erik Erikson stages of psychosocial development
 Infancy (trust vs. mistrust)
 Adolescence (identity vs. role confusion)
Forming an identity

 Group identities often form around how we differ
from those around us
 Some forge their identity early, simply by adopting
their parents’ values and expectations
 Other adolescents may adopt an identity define in
opposition to parent but in conformity with a peer
group
Forming an identity

 Most young people do develop a sense of
contentment with their lives
 A desire to accomplish something personally
meaningful
 Identity becomes personalized
 Developing capacity for intimacy
Parent and Peer
Relationships

 Adolsecents begin to pull away from their parents to
form their own identities
 Arguments between parents and kids are over
mundane-things
 Parent-child conflict tends to be greater with first-borns
 Kids who are close to their parents tend to have close
relationships with friends, healthy, and do good in
school
 Teens look to parents regarding religious views and
college/career over friends
Emerging adulthood

 Delayed independence and earlier sexual maturity
have widened the interlude between biological
maturity and social independence
 18-mid 20s: dependent on parents financially and
emotionally
Adulthood

 Physical Development
 Our physical abilities-muscular strength, reaction
time, sensory keenness, and cardiac output all crest by
the mid-twenties
 Physical changes in Middle Adulthood
 Physical vigor has less to do with age than with a
person’s health and exercise
 Women-menopause
 Men-gradual decline in sperm count, tester one level,
erection and ejaculation
Physical changes in later
life

 Increasing life expectancy combines with decreasing
birthrates make older adults and larger population
segment
 Women outlive women 5-6 years
 Body ages (with age people’s chromosome tips wear
down and aging cells may die without being
replaced with perfect genetic replicas)
 Why? Evolutionary theory
Physical Changes

 Sensory abilities
 Visual sharpness diminishes
 Muscle strength, reaction time, and stamina
 Stairs get steeper, print gets smaller, people mumble
more
Physical Changes

 Health
 Body disease fighting immune system weakens, more
susceptible to cancer and pneumonia not the common
cold
 Slows the neural processing
 Memory and frontal lobe atrophy during aging
 Physical exercise stimulates brain cell development
and neural connections
Dementia and
Alzheimer's Disease

 Substantial loss of brain cells
 A series of small stroke, a brain tumor, or alcohol
dependence can progressively damage the brain
causing dementia
 Alzheimer's
 First memory deteriorates then reasoning (& smell)
 After 5 to 20 years the person becomes emotionally
flat, disoriented and disinherited, incontinent, and
mentally vacant
Cognitive Development

 Aging and memory
 The ability to recall new information decline during
adulthood, but the ability to recognize new info did not
 Prospective memory (remember to): declines with age
 Teens/young adults are better at time-based tasks
 Easier to remember if information is meningful
Cognitive Development:
Intelligence

 Phase 1: Cross-sectional Evidence for Intellectual
Decline
 In time tests fewer correct answer than younger adults
 Eventually challenged this idea
Cognitive DevelopmentIntelligence

 Phase 2: Longitudinal Evidence for Intellectual
Stability
 Intelligence remains stable until late in life
 Other environmental factors at play
 Never too old to learn
Cognitive Development:
Intelligence

 Phase 3: It all depends
 Multiple intelligences need to measure several distinct
abilities
 Those who are around may be bright healthy people
 Crystallized intelligence-accumulated knowledge
increases up to old age
 Fluid intelligence-ability to reason speedily and
abstractly decreases slowly up to age 75
 Mental ability strongly correlates with proximity to
death
Social Development:
Ages and Stages

 Forties-middle adulthood
 Crisis? Not really-unhappiness, divorce, job
dissatisfaction does not rise
 Divorce most common in 20s, Suicide most common
70-80s
 Social clock-”right time”
 Western world-still ticks but people feel freer to be out
of sync with it
 Chance events-romantic partner
 Repeated exposure, similar background, class,
attractiveness, reciprocates your affections
Social Development:
Adulthood

Commitments
 Love
 Adult bonds of love are most satisfying marked by
similarity of interests and values, sharing of emotional
and material support, intimate self-disclosure
 Stronger with couple who marry after 20
 Why is the divorce rate high? Women’s lessened
economic dependence on men, and rising expectations
 Enduring bond, equal wage earner, caregiver, intimate
friend, warm, responsive lover
Social Development:
Adulthood

Commitments
 Those who cohabit before marriage have had higher
rates of divorce
 Less committed to the ideal of enduring marriage
 Less marriage-supporting while cohabiting
 Marriage is a predictor of happiness, health, sexual
satisfaction, and income
 Marriage that last are not always devoid of conflict
 Five-to-one ratio of positive to negative interactions
 Smiling, touching, complimenting, and laughing as
opposed to criticism, sarcasm, insults
Social Development:
Adulthood

Commitments
 Work
 Difficult
 Not directly tied to your college majors
 Happiness is key: do what makes you happy
Social Development:
Adulthood

Commitments
 When children begin to absorb time, money, and
emotional energy, & satisfaction
 Empty nester syndrome: sometimes can be difficult
or launch a second honeymoon
Well-being across the
life span

 From teens to midlife, people experience a
strengthening sense of identity, later in life
challenges arise
 Happiness is higher in older adults
 Risk of depression tapers off in later life
 Bad feelings we associate with negative events fade
faster than do the good feeling we associate with
positive events
Well-being across the
life span

 As we age (later in life) we find ourselves less often
feeling excited and provoke less elation and criticism
 Less intense joy but more contentment and increased
spirituality (especially if social)
Death and Dying

 Most difficult separation is from a spouse (women
suffer)
 Grief is severe when the death of a loved one is
unexpected and before the “social clock”
 Facing death with openness helps people make sense
of life’s meaningfulness and unity (sense of integrity)
Reflections on three
major developmental

Issues
 Nature vs. nurture both impact development
 Continuity and Stages
 Researchers emphasize experience see development as
slow continuous process
 Researchers emphasize biology see development as
predisposed stages
 Research cast doubt on the idea that life proceeds
through neatly defined, age-linked stages, the stage
concept remains useful
Reflections on
development

 Stability and Change




Personality gradually stabilizes with age
Life requires both
Stability to depend on others
Change motives our concerns about present influences