Chapter 1

• Development is the pattern of movement or change that starts at conception and continues through the lifespan. Development is:

  • age-related
  • orderly
  • cumulative
  • directional
• The field of lifespan development is defined as the field of study that describes and explains intraindividual change and interindividual differences in change from conception through the lifespan
• Why is it important to study lifespan development?

  Understanding how individuals change and develop across their lifespan helps us gain insights into human behavior, relationships, and the factors that influence our development.
• What are the characteristics of lifespan development?

  1. development is lifelong, multidimensional, plastic, and contextual
• How is developmental multidimensional?

  Developmental is multidimensional because it involves multiple aspects or domains, such as physical, cognitive, emotional, and social development.
• Context exerts 3 kinds of influence:

  1. Normative age-graded (similar for all individuals of the same age)
  2. Normative history graded (same for age cohort)
  3. Nonnormative life events (unique for each individual)
• Bronfenbrenner's ecological theory:

  1. Microsystem
  2. where the individual lives and interacts, as well as genetic makeup
  3. Mesosystem
  4. interactions between microsystems
  5. Exosystem
  6. links between a social setting in which the individual does not have an active role
  7. Macrosystem
  8. culture in which individuals live
  9. Chronosystem
  10. time; patterning of environmental events
• 3 domains of development:

  1. Biological processes
  2. Cognitive processes
  3. Emotional and social processes
• 4 conceptions of age:

  1. Chronological age (years since birth)
  2. Biological age (biomarkers of vital organs)
  3. Psychological age (adaptive capacities)
  4. Social age (connectedness with others)
• Quantitative change vs qualitative change:

  • Quantitative change refers to increases in the amount of an ability a child already has
  • Qualitative change is a fundamental transformation in a child's abilities over time
  • stages are distinguished by qualitative changes, and it's assumed that the transition from one stage to the next is marked by simultaneous changes in a great many aspects of a child's behaviour
• Nature-nurture controversy:

  • the extent to which development is influenced by an organism's biological inheritance vs environmental experiences
  • whether infants are born with innate knowledge of concepts, or if children construct knowledge through experience
• Plasticity vs stability:

  • the degree to which and the conditions under which development is open to change and intervention
  • lifelong change vs infantile determinism
  • influenced by critical and sensitive periods
• Critical period: period during which specific environmental or biological events must occur if development is to proceed normally

  Sensitive period: time window during which a particular experience (or lack thereof) has a more pronounced effect on the organism than does exposure to the same experience at another time
• Individual differences:

  1. what makes individuals different from one to another?
  2. to what extent are individual differences stable over time?
• Preformatism: human is pre-formed at the instant of conception and only grows in size and mass until birth; children = miniature adults

  • decline due to discoveries in biology about prenatal development and economic changes requiring more education
• Locke's ideas on development:

  • rejected the widespread belief that there are vast, innate differences among people
  • education is important in shaping people
  • inspired by environmental approaches
• Rousseau's ideas on development:

  • there is a natural group plan for healthy growth that leads to the stagewise development of different skills at different ages
  • the social world spoils adults as they conform to the views of society and forget how to see with their own eyes and to think with their own minds
• Freud's key ideas:

  • unacceptable, mainly biological-sexual impulses are repressed; repression dates back to early life
  • repressed ideas remain influential (unconscious) compromised expression of conflicts produces pathological symptoms and operate in normal persons
• Levels of consciousness:

  1. Conscious
  2. Preconscious
  3. Unconscious

  Structures of personality:

  1. Id
  2. Ego
  3. Superego
• Stages of psychosexual development:

  1. Oral stage (infancy)
  2. pleasure centres on sucking
  3. Anal stage (2-3 years)
  4. pleasure centres on elimination
  5. Phallic stage (4-6 years)
  6. pleasure derived from sexual organs
  7. Latency stage (6-12 years)
  8. sexual impulses temporarily turned off
  9. Genital stage (adolescence)
  10. mature sexuality
• Oedipus complex: boys fall in love with their mother; fear that their father may castrate them

  Electra complex: girls fall in love with their father; wish to bear their father's child

  Resolution: leads to identification with same-sex parent
• Infantile determinism: every adult psychological problem can be traced back to infancy and early childhood

  • Fixation: thee state of arrested psychosexual development in which energies remain focused on a particular erogenous zone
• Defense mechanisms: mechanisms employed by the ego to deal with unpleasant, anxiety-provoking thoughts and desires
• Criticisms of Freud:

  • drive reduction
  • too much emphasis on sexuality
  • reliance on case studies
  • not testable
  • negative view of women
  • bound by his time and culture
  • too little power given to ego
• Erikson's psychosocial theory:

  • believed developmental changes occur throughout the lifespan
  • characterized by crisis, conflict between a positive and negative pole
  • at each stage, the positive resolution of a crisis results in particular ego strengths
  • qualitative difference in crisis
  • stages are universal
• Trust vs mistrust (infancy):

  • development of a sense of basic trust if parent is consistent and dependable
  • favourable balance of trust and mistrust
• Autonomy vs shame and doubt (toddlerhood):

  • shame and doubt come from an awareness of social expectations and pressures
  • Ego strength: the unbroken determination to exercise free choice as well as self restraint
• Initiative vs guilt (early childhood):

  • crises result from realization that the biggest plans are doomed for failure
  • Ego strength: competence; the free exercise of intelligence and skill in the tasks unimpaired by excessive feelings of inferiority
• Industry vs role confusion (adolescence):

  • identity crisis; questioning and reworking of previous identifications and accomplishments, new integration
  • Ego strength: ability to sustain one's freely pledged loyalty
• Intimacy vs isolation (young adult):

  • intimate relationships are not characterized by efforts at self-definition but by genuine mutuality
  • Ego strength: love; the mutuality of devotion forever subduing the antagonisms
• Generativity vs self-absorption and stagnation (adulthood):

  • the creation of children, as well as the production of things and ideas through work
  • Ego strength: care
• Ego integrity vs despair (old age):

  • inner struggle, life review
  • Ego strength: wisdom, which reflects a thoughtful, hopeful effort to find value and meaning in the face of death
• Criticisms of Erikson's theory:

  • no special emphasis on activity of child
  • too closely tied to Freudian libidinal zones
  • overemphasizes independence in childhood, gender bias
  • conceptual vagueness
  • culturally universal
• Naturalistic observation:

  • recording naturally occurring behaviour observation of behaviour in everyday environment
  • Strength: provides a rich description of behaviour in a natural setting
  • Weakness: influence on reactivity, lack of control, observer bias
• Structured observation:

  • experimenter sets up a laboratory situation that evokes the behaviour of interest so that every participant has an equal opportunity to display the response
  • Strength: control
  • Weakness: no information about how children feel and think
• Clinical interview:

  • unstructured conversational style is used
  • Strength: first-person perspective, large amount of information
  • Weakness: social desirability, lack of standardization
• Structured interviews/Questionnaires:

  • each participant is asked the same set of questions in the same way
  • Strength: easy to score, lots of information in a short amount of time
  • Weakness: social desirability, shallow information ( no follow up)
• Standardized/Unstandardized tests:

  1. Standardized test
  2. uniform procedure for administration and scoring; normed; reliability and validity are established
  3. Unstandardized test
  4. uniform procedure for administration and scoring but typically not normed
  5. Strength: controlled; allows for comparisons
  6. Weakness: competence vs performance
• Psychophysiological methods:

  1. Autonomic measures, measure of stress, measure of brain functioning
  2. Strength: another aspect of functioning is captured
  3. Weakness: physiological response doesn't necessarily explain physiological phenomena
• Clinical or case study:

  • an in-depth analysis of a single case
  • Strength: enables intensive study of rare phenomena
  • Weakness: poor method of determining cause-effect relations; researcher bias