Human Development: An Overview

Human Development: An Ever-Evolving Field

• Human development studies the systematic changes and stability in people scientifically.
• Developmental scientists look at how people change from conception through maturity, and also at what remains stable.
• Research in this field informs child rearing, education, health, and social policy.
• Life-span development includes the entire human life span, from conception to death.
• Development can be positive or negative.
• Key considerations are the timing of parenthood, maternal employment, and marital satisfaction.
• Description, explanation, prediction, and intervention are some of the field's goals.
• Averages for behavior are established by developmental scientists observing large groups of children and establishing norms.
• This knowledge can then predict future behavior and be used to intervene in development.
• Sensitive instruments measuring eye movement, heart rate, and muscle tension are used in studies.
• Digital technology is used to analyze how mothers and babies communicate
• Brain imaging makes it possible to compare a normally aging brain with the brain of a person with dementia.
• Studies are interdisciplinary and multifaceted.
• Psychology, psychiatry, sociology, anthropology, biology, genetics, family science, education, history, and medicine are all important to the research.

Basic Concepts

• Developmentalists study physical, cognitive, and psychosocial aspects of the self.
• Physical development includes the growth of the body and brain, sensory capacities, motor skills, and health.
• Cognitive development involves learning, attention, memory, language, thinking, reasoning, and creativity.
• Psychosocial development involves emotions, personality, and social relationships.
• These domains are interrelated each affecting the others.
• Social construction is that the division of life span into periods is an invention of a particular culture or society.
• In Western industrial societies, a sequence of eight periods is usually accepted.
• These include prenatal, infancy and toddlerhood, early childhood, middle childhood, adolescence, emerging and young adulthood, middle adulthood, and late adulthood.

Influences on Development

• Individual differences occur in characteristics, influences, and developmental outcomes.
• Each person has a unique developmental trajectory.
• Heredity - These are inborn traits or other characteristics inherited from the biological parents
• Environment - The totality of nonhereditary, or experiential, influences on development.
• Maturation occurs as a natural unfolding of the body and brain.
• Both inherited characteristics and environmental factors affect human development.
• Maturation continues to influence certain biological processes throughout life.
• Differences in rates and timing of development are seen between people.
• We must then look at the inherited characteristics that give each person a start in life, as well as consider the many environmental factors.

Context of Development

• From the beginning humans develop within a social and historical context.
• The family is the immediate context for an infant that is subject to the wider influences of neighborhood, community, and society.
• A nuclear family is a household unit consisting of parents and children that are either biological, adopted, or stepchildren.
• Extended family is a multigenerational network of parents, children, and other relatives, sometimes in the same household.
• Family income and education and occupation levels determine socioeconomic status (SES).
• The likelihood of a negative developmental outcome is increased by various risk factors.

Culture and Normative Influences

• Culture refers to a society’s total way of life.
• Customs, traditions, laws, knowledge, beliefs, values, language, and physical products are all included.
• An ethnic group has a shared identity due to a distinctive culture, ancestry, religion, language, or national origin
• Ethnic and cultural patterns affect development.
• Historical context refers to time in which people live.
• Normative influences affect many or most people in a society in much the same way.
• events may be biological or environmental.
• Influences that are age-graded are highly similar for people in a particular age group.
• Historical generations are of people who were strongly influenced by a major historical event during their formative period.
• Nonnormative influences are the effects of unusual events that have a major impact on individual lives and disturb the expected life cycle.

Periods

• Critical period refers to a specific time when an event has a specific impact on development.
• Sensitive periods are when a developing person is especially responsive to certain kinds of experiences.
• Plasticity is the range of modifiability of performance.
• Characteristics assumed to be negative, like high reactivity, may become adaptive when the environment is supportive.

Language Acquisition

• There can be a critical period for language acquisition, beginning in early infancy and ending around puberty.
• It would be difficult for an individual to acquire language where they have not yet acquired it by puberty.
• Another thought is a sensitive period existing rather than a critical period for developing language.
• Researchers have found that language processing occurs in the brain, and should damage be done early, other parts of the brain take over.

Life-Span Developmental Approach

• Seven principles exist:

• Development is lifelong with unique characteristics and value in all periods.

• Development is multidimensional and occurs along multiple interacting dimensions like biological, psychological, and social.

• Development is multidirectional, gains are made in one area while losses happen in another.

• development is influenced by both biology and culture, but the balance between these influences changes.

• Development means changing resource allocations to invest in time, energy, talent, money, and support in varying ways

• Development displays plasticity and many abilities can improve with training and practice, even later in life.

• Development relies on historical and cultural context with each person developing within multiple circumstances.