Developmental Psychology: An Overview

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Developmental Psychology Overview

• Developmental Psychology is the study of human development and its three domains: physical, cognitive, and psychosocial
• Key human development issues involve: nature of change (continuous or discontinuous), the course of change (one or multiple), and the influences of nature and nurture

Domains in Human Development

• Physical domain: involves height, weight, fine and gross motor skills, brain development, puberty, sexual health, fertility and menopause, changes in senses, and primary and secondary aging
• Cognitive domain: involves language development; thinking (logical, abstract); learning and understanding; memory, moral reasoning, practical intelligence, and wisdom
• Psychosocial domain: involves psychological and social development; temperament and attachment; emotions, personality, self-esteem, relationships, identity development, dating, romance, cohabitation, marriage, having children, finding work/career, caregiving, retirement, coping with losses, and death/dying

Key Human Development Issues

• Continuous development: a cumulative process that gradually improves existing skills
• Discontinuous development: occurs in unique stages at specific times or ages

One Course or Many Courses

• One course: development is essentially the same for all, is universal, and follows stage theories
• Many courses: development follows a different course for each child based on their specific genetics, environment, and culture

Nature versus Nurture

• Nature: biology and genetics
• Nurture: environment (e.g., parents, peers, culture)
• Genes and environment interact and shape who we become; The relative contribution of each is debated.

Basic Periods of Human Development

• Prenatal period: germinal, embryonic, and fetal periods
• Infancy and toddlerhood: the first two years
• Early childhood: ages 2-5/6
• Middle childhood: ages 6-11
• Adolescence: ages 12-18
• Early adulthood: late teens, twenties, and thirties
• Middle adulthood: late thirties (or age 40) through the mid-60s
• Late adulthood: "young old" (65-74 years), "old old" (75-84 years), and "oldest-old" (85+ years)

Lifespan Perspective

• Lifespan development is the biological, cognitive, and psychosocial changes and constancies throughout life
• An approach attributed to Paul Baltes, a German psychologist and lifespan development and aging expert

Key Principles of the Lifespan Perspective

• Development: occurs across the entire lifespan (lifelong), is multidimensional and multidirectional, resulting in gains and losses, is plastic (malleable or changeable), is influenced by contextual and sociocultural influences, and is multidisciplinary

What is meant by Lifelong, Multidimensional, and Multidirectional

• Lifelong: it encompasses the entire lifespan, from conception to death
• Multidimensional: a complex interaction of biological, cognitive, and socioemotional changes influences development
• Multidirectional: puberty in adolescence involves physiological/physical changes (hormone levels, sex characteristics, height/weight) and cognitive changes (abstract thinking)

What is meant by Plastic, Contextual, and Multidisciplinary

• Plastic: example is cognitive decline in aging as dimensions of cognitive decline are partially reversible due to the brain's lifelong capacity for plasticity and reorganization
• Contextual: development varies from person to person depending on factors such as biology, family, school, church, profession, nationality, ethnicity
• Multidisciplinary: requires the knowledge from different disciplines (psychology, sociology, neuroscience, anthropology, education, economics, history, medicine)

Types of Contextual Influences

• Normative age-graded influences: biological and environmental factors with a strong correlation to chronological age (puberty/menopause) and age-based social practices (starting school/retiring)
• Normative history-graded influences: influences associated with a specific time period that defines the broader environmental and cultural context (Great Depression, WWII, Vietnam War, Cold War, War on Terror, advances in technology)
• Nonnormative influences: unpredictable, not tied to a certain time, and are unique individual experiences (master's degree, certain job offer, divorce, death of a child)

Other Contextual Influences

• Cohort: a group of people born at roughly the same time period in a particular society who experience the same historical events and cultural climates
• Socioeconomic status/social class: identifies families/households based on shared levels of education, income, and occupation; members tend to share lifestyles, consumption patterns, parenting styles, stressors, religious preferences, and other daily life aspects although there are individual variations occur
• Culture: a blueprint shared by a group that specifies how to live and ideas about what is right/wrong, what to strive for, what to eat, how to speak, what is valued, and what emotions are called for in certain situations that is learned from parents, schools, churches, media, friends, and others throughout a lifetime Ethnocentrism: belief that our culture's practices/expectations are right/superior
• Cultural relativity: appreciation for cultural differences and understanding that cultural practices are best understood from that culture's standpoint

Research in Lifespan Development

• Psychology studies how to do research, how the the scientific method valuable, what compares to various types and objectives in developmental research, the methods for collecting research data (surveys, observations, case study, content and content secondary analysis), explain correlational research and the value of experimental research, and compare the advantages and disadvantages of developmental research designs: ( cross-sectional, longitudinal, and sequential)
• Challenges include conducting research as ethics is involved and how do we know what we know.

How do we know what we know

• Experiential reality: knowing based on our history
• Agreement reality: knowing based on what others have told you/in cultural ideas
• Personal inquiry: tendency to see what we believe because of cognitive blinder and the tendency to look for evidence that we are right in doing so, ignore contradictory evidence

Scientific method

• Provides the continued process of science, continuously renewing the ongoing investigation of questions we have and a theory cannot be falsified
• Sampling is a systematic way to make comparisons and guard against bias
• A random sampling is important when selecting the group to study

Quantitative for Scientific Methods

• Quantifying/using statistics helps to understand these certain phenomena

1. Determine a research question.
2. Conduct a literature review of previous studies on the topic.
3. Determine a method of gathering information.
4. Conduct the study.
5. Interpret the results.
6. Draw conclusions; state limitations of the study and make suggestions for future research.

Quantitative for Scientific Methods

Make your findings available to others

• To share information
• To have your work scrutinized by others