Developmental Psychology
Stages of Development
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Prenatal
Infancy
Toddler
Early Childhood
Adolescence
Emerging Adulthood
Early or Young Adulthood
Middle Adulthood
Old Age
What is Developmental Psychology
• Developmental psychology is the scientific study of
changes that occur in human beings over the course of
their life.
• Originally concerned with infants and children, the field has
expanded to include adolescence, adult development,
aging, and the entire lifespan.
• This field examines change across a broad range of topics
including motor skills and other psycho-physiological
processes; cognitive development involving areas such
as problem solving, moral understanding, and conceptual
understanding; language acquisition; social, personality,
and emotional development; and self-concept and identity
formation.
Importance
• The study of human development is important
not only to psychology, but also to biology,
anthropology, sociology, education and
history.
• Developmental psychology helps us to better
understand how people change and grow and
then apply this knowledge to helping us reach
our full potential
Research
• Developmental psychology examines issues such as the
extent of development through gradual accumulation
of knowledge versus stage-like development
• The extent to which children are born with innate
mental structures, versus learning through experience
• Many researchers are interested in the interaction
between personal characteristics, the individual's
behavior, and environmental factors including social
context and their impact on development
Theories in Developmental Psychology
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Attachment
Constructivism
Ecological
Psychosexual
Moral
Psychosocial
Cognitive
Social Learning
Attachment Theory
• Originally developed by John Bowlby
• Focuses on the importance of open, intimate,
emotionally meaningful relationships
• Attachment is described as a biological system or
powerful survival impulse that evolved to ensure
the survival of the infant
• A child who is threatened or stressed will move
toward caregivers who create a sense of physical,
emotional and psychological safety for the
individual
• Attachment feeds on body contact and familiarity
Constructivism
• Constructivism is a paradigm in psychology that characterizes learning as a
process of actively constructing knowledge
• Individuals create meaning for themselves or make sense of new
information by selecting, organizing, and integrating information with
other knowledge, often in the content of social interactions.
• Constructivism can occur in two ways: individual and social
• Individual constructivism is when a person constructs knowledge through
cognitive processes of their own experiences rather than by memorizing
facts provided by others
• Social constructivism is when individuals construct knowledge through an
interaction between the knowledge they bring to a situation and social or
cultural exchanges within that content
Ecological
• Originally formulated by Urie Bronfenbrenner
• Specifies 5 types of nested environmental systems with
bi-directional influences within and between the
systems
• The 5 systems are
– Microsystem
– Mesosystem
– Exosystem
– Macrosystem
– Chronosystem
Each system contains roles, norms and rules that can
powerfully shape development.
Ecological
• The Ecology of Human Development has had
widespread influence
• Family
• Economic
• Political structures
Psychosexual
• Freud
• Believed that we all had a conscious,
preconscious, and unconscious level
• In the conscious we are aware of our mental
process
• The preconscious involves information that,
though not currently in our thoughts, can be
brought into consciousness
• Lastly, the unconscious includes mental processes
we are unaware of
Psychosexual
• He believed there is tension between the
conscious and unconscious, because the
conscious tries hold back what the
unconscious tries to express.
• To explain this he developed three personality
structures:
– Id
– Ego
– Superego
Psychosexual
• He proposed five universal stages of development, that
each are characterized by the erogenous zone that is the
source of the child's psychosexual energy
• The first is the oral stage, which occurs from birth to 12
months of age
• The second is the anal stage, from one to three years of age
• The third is the phallic stage, which occurs from three to
five years of age (most of a person’s personality forms by
this age)
• The fourth is the latency stage, which occurs from age five
until puberty
• Stage five is the genital stage, which takes place from
puberty until adulthood
Moral
• Piaget claimed that logic and morality develop
through constructive stages. Expanding on
Piaget's work
• Lawrence Kohlberg determined that the
process of moral development was principally
concerned with justice, and that it continued
throughout the individual's lifetime
Moral
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He suggested three levels of moral reasoning;
Preconventional moral reasoning
Conventional moral reasoning
Postconventional moral reasoning
Psychosocial
• Erik Erikson reinterpreted Freud’s
psychosexual stages by incorporating the
social aspects of it
• He came up with eight stages, each of which
has two crisis (a positive and a negative)
Psychosocial
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Trust vs Mistrust
Autonomy vs Shame & Doubt
Initiative vs Guilt
Industry vs Inferiority
Identity vs Identity Diffusion
Intimacy vs Isolation
Generativity vs Self-Absorption
Integrity vs Despair
Trust vs Mistrust
• Infancy - birth to 18 months
• Children develop a sense of trust when
caregivers provide reliability, care, and
affection
• A lack of this will lead to mistrust
Autonomy vs Shame & Doubt
• Early Childhood - 2 to 3 years
• Children need to develop a sense of personal
control over physical skills and a sense of
independence
• Success leads to feelings of autonomy, failure
results in feelings of shame and doubt
Initiative vs Guilt
• Preschool - 3 to 5 years
• Children need to begin asserting control and
power over the environment
• Success in this stage leads to a sense of
purpose
• Children who try to exert too much power
experience disapproval, resulting in a sense of
guilt
Industry vs Inferiority
• School Age - 6 to 11 years
• Children need to cope with new social and
academic demands
• Success leads to a sense of competence, while
failure results in feelings of inferiority
Identity vs Identity Diffusion
• Adolescence - 12 to 18 years
• Teens need to develop a sense of self and
personal identity
• Success leads to an ability to stay true to self,
while failure leads to role confusion and a
weak sense of self
Intimacy vs Isolation
• Young Adulthood - 19 to 40 years
• Young adults need to form intimate, loving
relationships with other people
• Success leads to strong relationships, while
failure results in loneliness and isolation
Generativity vs Self-Absorption
• Middle Adulthood - 40 to 65 years
• Adults need to create or nurture things that
will outlast them, often by having children or
creating a positive change that benefits other
people
• Success leads to feelings of usefulness and
accomplishment, while failure results in
shallow involvement in the world
Integrity vs Despair
• Maturity - 65 to death
• Older adults need to look back on life and feel
a sense of fulfillment
• Success at this stage leads to feelings of
wisdom, while failure results in regret,
bitterness, and despair
Cognitive Development
• Jean Piaget, a Swiss theorist, posited that children
learn by actively constructing knowledge through
hands-on experience
• He suggested that the adult's role in helping the
child learn was to provide appropriate materials
that the child can interact with and use to
construct
• He used Socratic questioning to get children to
reflect on what they were doing, and he tried to
get them to see contradictions in their
explanations
Cognitive Development
• Piaget believed that intellectual development
takes place through a series of stages, which he
described in his theory on cognitive development
• Each stage consists of steps the child must master
before moving to the next step.
• He believed that these stages are not separate
from one another, but rather that each stage
builds on the previous one in a continuous
learning process.
Cognitive Development
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He proposed four stages:
Sensorimotor
Pre-operational
Concrete operational
Formal operational
Though he did not believe these stages occurred
at any given age, many studies have determined
when these cognitive abilities should take place
Social Learning
• Learning is a cognitive process that takes place
in a social context and can occur purely
through observation or direct instruction
• In addition to the observation of behavior,
learning also occurs through the observation
of rewards and punishments, a process known
as of vicarious reinforcement
Social Learning
• Learning is not purely behavioral; rather, it is a
cognitive process that takes place in a social
context.
• Learning can occur by observing a behavior
and by observing the consequences of the
behavior (vicarious reinforcement).
Social Learning
• Learning involves observation, extraction of
information from those observations, and making
decisions about the performance of the behavior
(observational learning or modeling). Thus, learning
can occur without an observable change in behavior.
• Reinforcement plays a role in learning but is not
entirely responsible for learning.
• The learner is not a passive recipient of information.
Cognition, environment, and behavior all mutually
influence each other (reciprocal determinism).
Real Life
• http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radioarchives/episode/487/harper-high-school-partone
• Using your notes from Chapter 5 & from the
lecture discuss the following:
– What are the variables that might be a factor in the
youth from Harper High School?
– Using Erikson’s 8 Stages identify which stage the youth
are in.
– Discuss the implications of their environment.