Development

• Developmental Psychology


  Study of how behavior changes over the life span
• Developmental psychology is difficult to study because of possible bi-directional effects
• Nurture > nature


  Parents enrolled Lebron James in basketball camp at an early age
• Nature > nurture


  Parents noticed he was extremely athletic, body build for basketball, enrolled in basketball camp to further refine skill
• Trent Williams: '"He's what, 6-9, 250? He looks like he's slimmed down but to be that big and that naturally strong and to be able to fly through the air and have body control like he does ... that's something we probably haven't seen in a long time. Don't get me wrong, there are athletes we come across, but they don't have the total package like LeBron has. Yeah, I'd pay him that respect to say he is the best athlete I've seen by far."'
• Probability of making it to the NBA is higher for taller people
• Bidirectionality


  Moving Beyond Basketball: Parents constantly fight with one another, children grow up with psychological disorders OR children have psychological disorders, parents constantly fight with one another
• Cross-sectional design


  Examine different people of different ages at a single time
• Cohort effects


  Sets of people who lived during one period may differ from sets of people who lived during a different period
• "Millennials are more narcissistic than any other generation!"
• We found little evidence of meaningful change in egotism, self-enhancement, individualism, self-esteem, locus of control, hopelessness, happiness, life satisfaction, loneliness, antisocial behavior, time spent working or watching television, political activity, the importance of religion, and the importance of social status over the last 30 years.
• Longitudinal designs


  Track the development of the same group of participants over time
• Longitudinal designs are costly and have high attrition
• Research Questions


  Do people become more entitled as they get older? Do people stick with this new diet regimen? How do children who are identified as gifted at an early age do in their later life?
• Both nature and nurture play large roles in shaping development
• Gene-environment interaction


  The impact of genes on behavior depends on the environment where behavior develops
• Gene-environment interaction


  • Low production of monoamine oxidase (MAO) related to violent tendencies
  • COMT gene (schizophrenia) might not manifest if person does not undergo highly stressful event
• Nature via nurture


  Children with certain genetic predispositions often seek out and create their own environments
• Sigmund Freud's Theory


  Early childhood experiences shape our personality as adults
• Psychosexual development


  Must pass through a series of sexual stages (oral, anal, phallic, latency, and genital) during childhood, each stage focus on a specific erogenous zone
• Fixation/stuck


  Lack of proper nurturance during a stage
• Erik Erikson's Theory


  Personality develops throughout lifespan (rather than just in early life), personality shaped by social influences/interactions with others (ego identity), human nature motivated by the need achieve competence in certain areas of our lives
• Jean Piaget's Theory


  Stage theorist who believed skills were domain-general, each stage is characterized by a certain level of abstract reasoning capacity
• Assimilation


  Children use assimilation to acquire new knowledge within a stage to create a schemata
• Accommodation


  When one can no longer assimilate new information, accommodation forces change between stages
• Sensorimotor stage


  Focus on the here and now, lack object permanence and deferred imitation, major milestone is mental representation
• Preoperational stage


  Marked by an ability to construct mental representations of experience, egocentrism and inability to perform mental operations, inability to see another person's viewpoint/engage in "mind reading" (i.e., theory of mind)
• Concrete operations


  Can perform mental operations, but only for actual physical events
• Formal operations


  Can understand hypothetical reasoning beyond the here and now, also understand logical concepts and abstract questions
• Piaget's work was inaccurate in a number of ways, development is more continuous, he probably underestimated children's competence, using tasks that are less dependent on language have often failed to replicate his findings, his methods were culturally biased and used an educated sample, many tests used his own children as participants
• Kohlberg's Moral Development


  Used several moral problems to see what principles people used to solve them, three major stages: Preconventional - focus on punishment and reward, Conventional - focus on societal values, Postconventional - focus on internal moral principles
• Kohlberg's theory has been criticized for cultural differences, low correlation with actual moral behavior, and being confounded with verbal intelligence
• Conception and Prenatal Development

  1. Zygote: Fertilized egg

  2. Germinal (1st-2nd week): a mass of identical cells; large cell division and multiplication

  3. Embryo (2nd-8th week): preliminary development of skeleton, organs, and limbs, cells undergo differentiation

  4. Fetus (~9 weeks): recognizably human form (during the first three months of pregnancy)
• Between day 18 and the 6th month, neurons grow at an incredible rate, up to 250,000 neurons per minute at times, starting in the 4th month brain cells begin to specialize (e.g., hippocampus, cerebellum, amygdala)
• Teratogens


  Environmental factors (e.g. smoking, drugs, consuming alcohol, immense anxiety or stress) that can exert a negative impact on prenatal development
• Smoking cigarettes or marijuana or using other recreational drugs during pregnancy likely to deliver low birth weight babies (less than 5 ½ pounds)
• Genetic disruptions


  Disorders or random errors in cell division, Down syndrome: Extra 21st chromosome
• Premature births


  The less time in utero, the greater chance of serious complications
• Motor Development


  Infants are born with a large set of automatic motor behaviors (reflexes), progression of motor movement same for all children
• Adolescence


  Transitional period between childhood and adulthood commonly associated with the teenage years, our bodies reach full maturity (due to puberty hormonal release)