Developmental Psychology
Reasons of Studying Development

Developmental Process
Development – systematic continuities and
changes in the individual that occur
between conception and death (to avoid
fixation)
- Caused by Maturation, the
biological unfolding of the individual
according to species-typical biological
inheritance and an individual person`s
biological inheritance.
2 Developmental Processes that underlie
developmental change


Maturation – Biological unfolding of the
individual
 species typical
 person`s biological inheritance
Learning
 Experiences produces relatively
changes in our:
- feelings
- thoughts
- behavior
4 Approaches of Development
1. Continual
2. Holistic
3. Plasticity

Development is a key to understanding
children`s capabilities
 Motor Skills: gross motor
fine motor
 Cognitive Skills
 Social Skills
Development as a means for insight into
the nature form.
 Development and social policy
Nature of Development
Period of Development
Areas of Development
1. Pre – Natal
2. Infancy
3. Preschool
4. Young School Age
5. Later School Age
6. Adolescence
7. Young Adulthood
8. Middle Adulthood
9. Late Adulthood
Perception
Action
Cognition
Morality
Social Behavior
Emotions
Basic Questions about Psychological
Development



Stage like, continuous or both?
Global or Local?
Nature or Nurture?
Perspective on Development
Empiricism – All knowledge are acquired
through senses

4. Historical and Cultural

John Locke – knowledge is built up
by forming links, on mental
associations, between the
phenomena and our experiences.
George Berkeley – Association
based knowledge explained in how

we perceive and interpret the visual
world.
David Hume – used associationbased knowledge to develop a
theory about how humans
understand cause and effect
relationship.
Nativism - The nativists agreed that these in
born capacities (knowledge) were more
specialized and more complex than the
general associative mechanism proposed by
the empiricists.
Comparative and Evolutionary
- cross-species; - generational
same time
- ask how and why a particular trait,
whether it is a body part or behavior,
emerged over successive generations of a
population through the process of natural
selection.
- Ethology – the study of traits from an
adaptive evolutionary perspective that
usually involves comparisons across species.
Thus, ethologists examine how certain traits
improves as species fitness within its
specific environment, conferring
advantages that make members of the
species that have these traits more likely to
survive and produce viable offspring.
Cross Cultural
Main issues :
1. How do cultural variations influence
patterns of development?
2. What aspects of behavior or mind, if
any, develop in the same way
throughout the world?
Neuroscience- Maturation of the brain
- Nervous system changes
as a result of experiences.
Behaviorist - Focus on observable behaviors
and how they are shaped by external
factors over the course of development.
- Deliberately ignore all
information about mental states and
processes.
Psychoanalytic – Emphasize the power of
the unconscious thoughts and emotions
occurring outside awareness – to affect
behavior
- the view that many kinds
of psychological problems are result of
conflicts between different components of
the mind.
Cognitive Science
different types of information processing
take lace in real organism in real time.
Psychology
Computer
Linguistics
Science
Cognitive
Science
Philosophy
Neuroscience
Research Strategies: Basic Methods of
Designs

What makes scientific psychology
scientific?


Observation
Question
Reject
hypothesis
Results
Experiment


Hypothesis
Prediiction
Objective - everyone who examines the
data will have the same conclusions
Replicable- Everytime the method is
used it results in the same data and
conclusions.
Basic Fact-Finding Strategies


Self-report Methodologies
- Interviews and Questionnaires
Scientific method because of
empiricism
Theory
does not guarantee validity. ( Greasley,
2006)
Reliability – yields consistent
information over time and across others
Validity – It measures what it is
supposed to measure
An instrument must be reliable before it can
possibly be valid. Yet reliability, by itself,
Observational Methodology
-