Developmental Psychology Review

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• This review covers key concepts in developmental psychology, research methods, prenatal development, infant competencies, cognitive development, moral reasoning, theory of mind, psychosocial development, temperament, emotional development, attachment, self-concept, self-esteem, and gender development.

Developmental Psychology Basics

• Development involves both change and stability across the lifespan, from womb to tomb.
• Development is holistic and multidisciplinary, encompassing physical, cognitive, and psychosocial aspects.
• Key dimensions include age period and various aspects of development.

Types of Developmental Changes

• Normative age-graded changes are universal changes common to every member of a species.
• These changes are related to human biology and shared experiences.
• E.g. Baby’s first step, Older adults’ skin becoming more wrinkled
• Normative history-graded changes affect most members of a cohort due to factors during a specific historical period.
• E.g. Pandemic, Wars, Disasters
• A cohort is a group of individuals born in the same historical time period.
• A cohort effect occurs when development is impacted by the characteristics of the cohorts being studied.
• Nonnormative changes result from unique, unshared events like illness, accidents, or genetic differences.

Recurrent Themes in Development

Nature vs. Nurture

• Nature highlights biological processes and genes, and nurture focuses on experiential factors and environment.
• Both nature and nurture contribute jointly to development.
• Babies are equipped with behaviors from birth, showing inborn biases, such as responding in certain ways.
• E.g. Babies seem to be equipped with a set of behaviors despite their nationality
• E.g. Some babies can be relatively easy to be comforted, combination of both
• Behavioral genetics explores how much genes and environment matter using twin and adoption studies.
• Molecular genetics studies which specific genes play a role in specific aspects of development.
• No single genes affect significantly but jointly are influenctive
• Critical periods are specific times when an organism is especially sensitive to certain experiences.
• After that period people lose their ability to develop irreversible, like language development in children.
• Sensitive periods show individuals are particularly responsive to specific experiences; people still retain the ability to develop but it's less effective.
• E.g. Social learning, emotional development
• Plasticity indicates the ability to change in response to experience.

Continuity vs. Discontinuity

• Development can occur as gradual quantitative changes or stage-like qualitative changes.
• If development involves only additions, the concept of "stage" is not necessary.
• Child’s physical growth (height, weight)
• If development also involves the emergence and reorganization of new characteristics, the "stage" concept is useful.
• Infants’ ability to conceive object permanence

Universality vs. Cultural Specificity

• Developmental variations come from cultural, socioeconomic, historical, and individual variations.
• Normative age-graded changes within each context, Normative history-graded changes, Nonnormative changes

Developmental Theories

• Eclecticism utilizes multiple theoretical perspectives to study human development.

Psychoanalytic Theories

• Developmental changes are influenced by internal drives and emotions.
• Freud's psychosexual theory posits that development is driven by internal drives for physical pleasure centering on different body parts at different developmental stages.
• Satisfaction of the internal drive at each stage results in optimal development.
• Erikson's psychosocial theory states that development is driven by crises due to tension between internal drives and sociocultural demands.
• According to his theory, personality develops through eight life crises that occur across the lifespan, trust vs mistrust (birth-1 year), autonomy vs shame & doubt (1-3 years), intitiative vs guilt (3-6 years), industry vs inferiority (6-12 years), identity vs role (12-18 years), intimacy bs isolation (18-30 years), generativity vs stagnation (30-late adulthood), and integrity vs despair (late adulthood)
• One either finishes each crisis with a good or poor resolution.

Learning Theories

• The development results from an accumulation of experiences
• Pavlov's classical conditioning indicates that learning occurs when a conditioned stimulus becomes strongly associated with an unconditioned stimulus, eliciting the same response
• Skinner's operant conditioning suggests that development occurs as behavior changes shaped by reinforcement and punishment. Social cognitive theory indicates that people learn from models, depending on how the situation is interpreted cognitively and emotionally.

Cognitive Theories

• Cognitive theories emphasizes mental processes in development, such as logic and memory
• Piaget's cognitive-developmental theory describes children as active learners who learn lessons on their own and are intrinsically motivated
• Vygotsky's sociocultural theory states that complex forms of thinking originate from social interactions
• Scaffolding involves an adult guiding and structuring a child's learning experience.
• The zone of proximal development (ZPD) is the developmental level where the learning process should be adapted.
• Information-processing theory uses the computer as a model for human cognitive functioning, where encoding, storage, and retrieval processes change with age.
• Because of both brain maturation and practice

Biological and Ecological Theories

• Biological and ecological theories highlight how environmental factors interact with physiological processes to shape development Behavioral genetics
• The study of the role of heredity in human development involves behavioral genetics.
• Ethology, sociobiology, and evolutionary psychology emphasize the role of natural selection in evolution.
• Bronfenbrenner's bioecological theory describes how each individual with their unique biology is exposed to nested systems of environment that interact in intricate ways to affect individual's development over time

Research Methods in Developmental Psychology

• Goals are to describe, explain, predict, and influence developmental outcomes.
• Data collection methods include observations, interviews, surveys, behavioral tests, physiological assessments, case studies, and archival research.
• Physiological assessments contain traditional assessments, genetics research, & neuroscience research
• Correlational research: 2 or more things are related, experimental research: one thing is the cause and the other is the effect
• Cross-sectional designs compare participants of different ages at the same point in time, such as kindergarteners vs. primary school children and young adults vs. middle adults
• Cross-sectional designs are able to efficiently caputre age-related differences, but unable to examine individual differences in development & unable to tease apart age effects and cohort effects
• Longitudinal designs study the same participants repeatedly across different ages, such as following children across primary grades & following the elderly over the years
• Longitudinal designs are able to reveal age-related differences and individual differences in development
• Sequential designs combine cross-sectional and longitudinal designs.

Prenatal Period

• Human pregnancy lasts 38 weeks or 9 months.
• There are three stages to prenatal development: germinal (0-2 weeks), embryonic (3-8 weeks), and fetal (9 weeks-birth).
• Cephalocaudal pattern: Development proceeds from the head downward.
• Proximodistal pattern: Development proceeds from the middle of the body outward.
• These influencers include genetic and environmental factors.
• Genetic influences include autosomal disorders (caused by genes located on the autosomes), sex-linked disorders (caused by genes located on the X chromosome), and chromosomal error
• Environmental Influences: Sensitive periods (embryonic-early fetal stage) and teratogens (Substances such as viruses and drugs, that can cause birth defects, maternal diseases (COVID), drugs (tobacco, alcohol, illegal drugs), pollution, nutrition & emotion

Infant Competencies

Newborn reflexes:

• These are innate, automatic, fixed patterns of action in response to particular stimulation.
• Adaptive reflexes help infants survive; weak or absent suggests that their brain is not functioning properly
• Include rooting and sucking
• Primitive reflexes are controlled by the less sophisticated parts of the brain: Moro, Babinski
• By 6 to 8 months of age, primitive reflexes begin to disappear; if they persist, the baby may have some neurological problem
• With age, children can develop Visual acuity
• Vision Development:
• Rapid development of visual acuity
• "20/200" (low vision) at birth & adult-like "20/20” by 6 months of age
• Adult-like color vision develops at 4-6 months.
• Tracking slow-moving objects develops before two months; skilled tracking comes at 6-10 weeks
• Depth perception involves binocular, monocular kinetic, and monocular static cues. Hearing: Auditory acuity is nearly adult-like at birth, except for high-pitched sounds.
• Location of sounds is nearly adult-like by 18 months Motor Milestones: Gross motor skills enable infants to get around in the environment, such as crawling. Fine motor skills enable children to use their hands and fingers, such as stacking blocks.

Cognitive Development during Childhood and Adolescence

• Children are active learners who learn on their own and are intrinsically motivated.
• A scheme is an internal cognitive structure that provides a procedure to use in a specific situation.
• Assimilation is the process of using a scheme to interact with the environment.
• Accommodation is the process of changing a scheme as a result of new information.
• Equilibration is the process of balancing assimilation and accommodation to create schemes that fit the environment; piaget considers this the search for a better equalibrium
• When children are in a given stage, their thinking and behavior exhibit the features characteristic of that stage.
• The stages occur in the same order for all children universally
• transitions between stages occur quickly

Piaget's Stages of Cognitive Development:

Sensorimotor Stage (Birth-18 Months)

• Infants use senses and motor actions to learn. Major Achievements: Circular reactions involve repeating events caused by motor actions, includes three substages: primary CR (organized around own body), secondary CR (trigger a reaction from external objects , & tertiary CR (active and experimental) Object permanence is the understanding that objects continue to exist when they cannot be seen. Major Limitations: Limited mental representation restricts mental imagery and problem-solving. Limited symbolic function affects pretend play and language.
• A-not-B error

Preoperational Stage (18 Months-6 Years)

• Children use symbols in thinking and communicating. Major Achievements:
• Advances in mental representation and symbolic function occurs, such as delayed imitation & anticipation in problem-solving Major Limitations:
• Centration is a child's tendency to think of the world in terms of one variable at a time.
• Conservation is the understanding that matter can change in appearance without changing in quantity. Understanding that matter can change in appearance without changing in quantity
• Class inclusion is Understanding that subordinate classes are included in larger, superordinate classes
• Egocentrism is a child's belief that everyone sees and experiences the world the way they do, and they are poor at “perspective-taking”, using the 3-mountain task to find if the child is able to pick out a drawing that shows how someone else sees the scene

Concrete Operational Stage (6-12 Years)

• Children construct schemes to think logically about objects and events in the real world. Major achievements
• Capable of logical thinking with concrete information, overcoming centration and egocentrism

Formal Operational Stage (12 Years and Up)

• Adolescents reason logically about abstract concepts. Major Achievements
• Hypothetico-deductive reasoning is the ability to derive conclusions from hypothetical premises.
• Systemic problem-solving processes include the process of testing single factors, and verbal reasoning about abstract concept.

Challenges to Piaget's Explanations

• Piaget's theory is Underestimation of young children's abilities, and lacks the tasks demanding capacities besides what’s aimed to be tapped
• There is overemphasis on individualism, with a lack of consideration for environmental contributors like parents and peers
• Vygotsky's sociocultural theory states that complex forms of thinking originate from social interactions

Moral Development

Piaget's Work on Moral Development

• Moral reasoning is the process of making judgments about the rightness and wrongness of specific acts
• There is are two stages of moral developments, the realism stage (6 - 8 years) and the relativism stage (8+ years)

Kohlberg's Work on Moral Development

• His stages of moral reasoning are categorized into preconventional (3-7 years), conventional (8-13+ years), & postconventional (adulthood)
• The Heinz dilemma explores whether a person should steal a drug they cannot afford to save a loved one's life.

Criticisms of Kohlberg's Theory

• The theory is not universally applicable to all cultures & other emotions, such as empathy and caring, should also be considered
• Moral reasoning does not always reflect everyday moral behavior & For decisions about actual moral behavior, contextual factors may be more important variables than the level of moral reasoning

Theory of Mind

• It focuses on the understanding that one's ideas, beliefs, and desires could be different from anothers
• Influences include cognitive development, perspective taking, pretend play, working memory, language skills, cultural influences

Psychosocial Development During Childhood and Adolescence

• Temperament: Inborn predispositions that form the foundations of personality that is biologically based
  • There are three key dimensions (Buss & Plomin): activity level, emotions, and sociability -There is also the five key dimensions (Rothbart): activity level, approach/ positive emotionality/ sociability, inhibition and anxiety, negative emotionality/ irritability/ anger, and effortful contril/ task persistence

Early Emotional Development

• It begins with emotion experience, expression, & the understanding of self
• This includes emotional self, social smile, interest, disgust, enjoyment, distress, sadness, anger, and fear.
• Later emotional development continues with Self-conscious emotions, stranger anxiety, & separation anxiety

Infant Attachment

• Synchrony: A mutual, interlocking pattern of attachment behaviors shared by a parent and child, modernly replaced by the use of phones
• The emotional tie or bond to a parent stems from The infant's use of others' facial expressions as a guide to his or her own emotions
• Bowlby's attachment theory: Infants are biologically predisposed to form emotional bonds with caregivers → shape later social and personality development

Self Development

• The subjective self Is the awareness that you are a separate person who endures through time and space
• With age, they understand their objective (descriptive) self leading them to ask "Who am I?"
• With age, they consider experiences (cultural & societal) which is influenced by feedback

Self Esteem

• Factors influencing self-esteem include social self-assessment, support from parents and peers, the sense that the child is liked and accepted, friends with whom they can develop stable relationships,
• A high self-esteem is correlated with positive outcomes (less peer pressure & depression)

Gender Development

• Gender development stems from cognitive thoughts & stereotypes, from Kohlberg's theory
• Cultural & societal norms, gender roles, peer pressure & Media all contribute to gender identification