Readings 1

• Development


  The systematic continuities and changes that people display over the course of their lives that reflect the influence of biological maturation and learning
• Developmentalists

  • Come from many disciplines
  • All study the process of development
• Developmental psychology


  The largest of the disciplines that study development
• Normative developments


  Typical developments characterizing all members of a species
• Ideographic developments


  Developments that may vary across individuals
• Developmentalists' goals


  • Describe
  • Explain
  • Optimize development
• Human development


  A continual and life-long process that is holistic, highly plastic, and heavily influenced by the historical and cultural contexts in which it occurs
• Theories


  Generate hypotheses, or predictions about future phenomena
• Scientific method


  Sifts through data to determine whether theories should be kept, refined, or abandoned
• Acceptable research methods


  • Possess reliability (produce consistent, replicable results)
  • Possess validity (accurately measure what they are intended to measure)
• Philosophies of original sin, innate purity, and tabula rasa contributed to a more humane outlook on children


  17th- and 18th-century
• Good theories are stated to be: Parsimonious, Falsifiable and Heuristic
• Parsimonious: concise and applicable to a lot of contexts
• Heuristic: building on existing knowledge by continuing to generate testable hypotheses.
• Cross cultural studies compare participants from different cultures on one or more aspects of development. Goal is to identify universal patterns of development
• Decisions about ethicality of a research project are based on these principles: autonomy, non-maleficence and beneficence.
• Freud's 5 stages of psychosexual development: oral, anal, phallic, latency and genital
• Erik Erikson's psychosocial theory expanded on Freud's by having less focus on the sex instinct, and shifting it towards the sociocultural determinants of development. He argued that people progress through a series of 8 psychosocial conflicts
• Ecological systems theory: development is the product of transactions between the environment and humans as they change
• Mechanistic world view: Humans are machines and the sum of their parts. This is preferred by learning theorists
• Organismic world view: Humans are entities that are complex than the sum of their parts. Preferred by stage theorists