Human Development Stages

Human Development

• Development is the sequence of age-related changes that occur as a person progresses from conception to death
• An orderly, cumulative process with two themes: transition and continuity

Prenatal Development

• Germinal stage
• Embryonic stage
• Fetal stage
• Environmental factors influencing development: maternal drug use, maternal illness, and maternal nutrition

Childhood Development

• Motor development: cephalocaudal trend (head-to-foot direction) and proximodistal trend (centre-outward direction)
• Sudden burst of growth accompanied by restlessness and irritability, attributed mostly to maturation
• Developmental norms and benchmarks, with individual and cultural variations
• Great similarity in sequence and timing of motor development

Temperament

• Refers to characteristic mood, activity level, and emotional reactivity
• Considerable variation, with three styles: easy (40%), slow-to-warm-up (15%), and difficult (10%)
• Temperament at 3 months is a fair predictor at age 10 years

Attachment

• Harlow's substitute mothers: wire vs. cloth substitutes, highlighting the importance of contact comfort
• Bowlby's evolutionary perspective: attachment is a product of natural selection, biologically programmed, and has survival value
• Emotional development: attachment is not instantaneous, but in stages, with separation anxiety starting around 6-8 months
• Patterns of attachments: secure, anxious-ambivalent, avoidant, and disorganized-disoriented

Effects of Secure Attachment

• Associated with resilient, competent toddlers with high self-esteem, persistence, curiosity, self-reliance, and better peer relationships
• Advanced cognitive development, but cannot assume causality due to complicated relationships and other factors

Bonding and Culture

• Bonding at birth: skin-to-skin contact, "magic moment"?
• Effects of daycare, and cultural variations in child-rearing practices influencing attachment styles

Personality Development

• Erikson's Stage Theory: eight stages based on psychosocial crises, with key being how these crises are dealt with

Cognitive Development

• Embryological parallelism: suggests common ancestry and common development
• Piaget's Stage Theory: four major stages, including sensorimotor, preoperational, concrete operational, and formal operational periods
• Criticisms of Piaget: underestimated children's cognitive development, ignored individual differences, and cultural variations in timetable

Neo-Piagetian Theories

• M-capacity and staircase model
• Vygotsky's Sociocultural Theory: importance of social interaction, language acquisition, and zone of proximal development

Cognitive Abilities

• Habituation-Dishabituation Paradigm: new stimulus elicits an increase in the strength of a habituated response
• Critical periods of development: sensitive or optimal period, six-month threshold in Romanian study

Moral Reasoning

• Kohlberg's Stage Theory: based on Piaget, focuses on moral reasoning, with six stages

Adolescence

• Not a universal experience, with onset of puberty and various social and emotional issues
• Marginal status, workload, physiological changes, and search for identity

Emerging Adulthood and Adulthood

• Exploration and instability, followed by social clock, stress, and stability of personality
• Adjusting to marriage, parenthood, empty nest, work, career, retirement, and aging

Explore the sequence of age-related changes from conception to death, including prenatal development and childhood stages. Understand the themes of transition and continuity.