Developmental Psychology Overview

Developmental Psychology

• Developmental psychology studies behavior, thoughts, and emotions throughout the lifespan, including childhood, adolescence, and adulthood.
• Individuals change as they progress from emerging adulthood to the end of life.

Differences and Commonalities

• Every individual has unique aspects of their life journey, like experiencing events such as parental divorce or living alone.
• However, typical aspects of adult life are common across many individuals, which can relate to the future.

Stability and Change

• Stability represents consistent personality traits, preferences, and behaviors throughout life.
• A 40-year-old individual may have similar characteristics to their 20-year-old self, like enjoying reading.
• Change is the opposite of stability; it's the evolution of an individual through their life.

Adulthood as a Topic of Study

• Studying adult development benefits individuals by helping maintain function for longer durations and coping with life changes.
• It allows for a social impact through improved social systems.
• It helps dispel common myths about aging.

Characteristics of Development

• Stability and change: Traits may stay constant throughout life, while others evolve. Knowledge, for instance, may gradually become more complex.
• Sources of change include: normative age-graded influences (like wrinkles and hair graying), normative history-graded influences (like events affecting a generation), and non-normative influences (like a specific event e.g., cancer diagnosis).
• Culture and cohorts impact development due to changes like epidemics, as do other events like climate change. This is all intertwined in developmental change.
• Time-related changes include the influence of genetics, environment, epigenetic factors, and how these interact over time.

Definitions of Age

• Chronological age: measured in years.
• Biological age: relates to the aging of physical systems like lungs and bones.
• Social age: refers to roles and responsibilities.
• Psychological age: refers to an individual's ability to adjust to life circumstances.

Guiding Perspectives

• Lifespan approach: Recognizes multi-directional developmental changes, potential gains and losses with age, life's plasticity (ability to adapt), and the impacts of history.
• Contextualism: Considers interaction between different systems e.g. microsystem, mesosystem, exosystem, macrosystem and chronosystem to understand development. This perspective emphasizes that an individual develops within their environment and these systems have an influence.
• Biological model- Bronfenbrenner's model: It examines the micro, meso, exo, and macro systems of influences in interaction and how culture, politics, and historical events can impact development.

Current Perspectives on Adulthood

• Demographics: Fertility rate and the increasing proportions of older adults.
• Social age: roles and responsibilities change with time.

Myths and Stereotypes

• Stereotypes about aging often influence how people view aging, distancing themselves and others, leading to misunderstandings and negative associations surrounding older age.

Interventions to Decrease Ageism

• Education and communication to promote understanding of age-related changes and dispel misconceptions.
• Encourage interaction between generations, acknowledging and respecting developmental perspectives.

Developmental Research

• Developmental research encompasses different approaches and designs like:
  • Age effects (changes related to aging).
  • Cohort effects (differences relating to generation and era).
  • Time of measurement effects (influences of events occurring during the study period).
• Design methods: Cross-sectional (different age groups studied at one time), Longitudinal (same group studied over time), and Sequential designs (combining elements of both).

Data Collection Methods

• Self-report: individuals provide information about themselves.
• Interviews: gathering data through direct interaction.
• Naturalistic observation: observing individuals in their natural environment.

Ethics

• Ethical considerations in developmental research involve securing consent regarding participation, especially for vulnerable populations, to ensure respect and informed decisions.