Chapter 5: Developmental Psychology
“Developing Through the Lifespan”
Major Debates
1. Nature/nurture
2. Continuity/stages
3. Stability/change
I.
II.
Prenatal Development and the Newborn
a. Conception
i. “Life is a sexually transmitted, terminal disease.”
ii. An egg is 85,000 times the size of a single sperm
b. Prenatal development
i. Zygotes
ii. Embryo
iii. Fetus
c. The Competent Newborn
i. Habituation: decreasing responsiveness with repeated
stimulation. As infants gain familiarity with repeated
exposure to a visual stimulus, their interest wanes and they
look away sooner.
1. Used to do much research on babies
2. Figuring our what they can hear, smell, and “think”
ii. Novelty preference procedure
Infancy and Childhood
a. Physical Development
i. Brain Development
1. Peak of neurons is at 28 weeks, with “only” 23
billion at birth
2. Proliferation of neural pathways after birth until
puberty
3. Neural “pruning” happens after puberty or a little
after.
ii. Motor development
1. Genes play a huge role in motor development
2. Sitting, crawling, walking
iii. Maturation and Infant Memory
1. Average age of conscious memory is 3.5
2. Infantile amnesia
b. Cognitive Development
i. Piaget (stages)
1. Schemas: concepts or mental molds (cats, dogs, love)
2. Assimilation: we interpret new experiences in terms
of our current understandings of them
3. Accommodation: adjusting our schemas to
incorporate information provided by new
experiences
4. Theory of Mind: being able to take another’s
perspective (sally, anne, and the yellow ball)
c. Social Development
i. Origins of Attachment
1. Body contact
a. Harlow and his monkeys
2. Familiarity
a. Critical period
b. Imprinting: Conrad Lorenz and his geese
ii. Attachment differences
1. Ainsworth and the strange situation
a. Secure attachment: 60%
b. Insecure attachment
2. Result of parenting or result of temperament?
3. Erik Erikson
a. Basic trust: a sense that the world is
predictable and reliable
iii. Deprivation of Attachment
1. “Hurt people hurt people.”
2. Cycle of abuse
3. Disruption of Attachment
d. Self Concept
i. Major achievement of childhood is a positive sense of self.
ii. Self awareness begins when we can recognize ourselves in
a mirror?
1. Dabbing paint on a child’s face…will they try to rub it
off?
e. Parenting Styles
i. Authoritarian: impose rules and expect obedience
III.
ii. Permissive: submit to children’s desires
iii. Authoritative: both demanding and responsive
Adolescence
a. Physical development
i. Puberty
ii. Primary sex characteristics
iii. Secondary sex characteristics
b. Cognitive Development
i. Developing Reasoning Power
1. Abstract and hypothetical reasoning
ii. Developing Morality (Kohlberg)
1. Preconventional
2. Conventional
3. Postconventional
4. Moral feeling
a. Haidt’s social intuition: moral feelings
precede moral reasoning
5. Moral Action
a. As our thinking matures, our behavior
becomes less selfish and more caring.
b. Delayed gratification
c. Social Development
i. Erik Erikson
IV.
ii. Forming an Identity
1. 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
2. Social identity: the “we” aspect of our self-concept;
the part of our answer to “Who am I?” that comes
from our group memberships
3. Developing a capacity for intimacy
iii. Parent and Peer Relationships
1. Diminishing parental influence and increasing peer
influence
iv. Emerging Adulthood
1. 18-mid 20s (seniors, that’s you!!!)
Adulthood
a. Physical development
i. Alzheimer’s and dementia
ii. General bodily degeneration
b. Cognitive development
i. Aging and Memory
1. Decline in memory abilities, particularly short term
2. Prospective memory: remembering to do something
in the future
ii. Aging and Intelligence
1. Crystalized intelligence: our accumulated knowledge
and verbal skills; tends to increase with age
2. Fluid intelligence; our ability to reason speedily and
abstractly; tends to decrease during late adulthood.
c. Social Development
i. Social clock: the culturally preferred timing of social events
such a marriage, parenthood, and retirement.
ii. mid-life crisis/ mid0life transition