Study of Human Development

• Human development is the scientific study of processes of change and stability throughout the human life span
• Human development begins from the moment of conception and continues until the last flicker of life
• Findings on human development research can be applied to child rearing, education, health, and social policy
• Life-span development includes more than infancy and childhood, extending from conception to death
• Events such as the timing of parenthood, maternal employment, and marital satisfaction are now studied as part of developmental psychology
• Physical development involves the growth of the body and brain, sensory capacities, motor skills, and health
• Cognitive development includes learning, attention, memory, language, thinking, reasoning, and creativity
• Psychosocial development encompasses emotions, personality, and social relationships
• Divisions of the life span into periods are a social construction
• Periods of the life span include prenatal, infancy and toddlerhood, early and middle childhood, adolescence, and emerging, young, middle, and late adulthood
• Influences on development include individual differences, heredity, environment, and maturation
• Heredity involves internal, biological processes and inborn traits provided by biological parents
• Environment includes external influences starting from conception and continuing throughout life
• Maturation is the unfolding of a natural sequence of physical and behavioral changes
• Contexts of development include family, socioeconomic status, culture and race/ethnicity, and historical context
• Family can be nuclear (one or two parents and their children) or extended (multigenerational network)
• Socioeconomic status can impact physical, cognitive, and psychosocial well-being
• Culture and race/ethnicity affect development through various aspects of life and social interactions
• Historical context refers to the time in which people live
• Normative influences include normative age-graded influences and normative history-graded influences
• Normative age-graded influences are similar for people in a particular age group or cohort
• Normative history-graded influences are significant events that shape the behavior and attitudes of a historical generation
• Nonnormative influences are unusual events that have a major impact on individual lives because they disturb the expected sequence of the life cycle
• The life-span developmental approach involves principles such as lifelong development, multidimensional development, multidirectional development, relative influences of biology and culture, changing resource allocations, plasticity, and influence of historical and cultural context