Introduction to Lifespan Development

Importance of Studying Lifespan Development

• Studying lifespan development helps parents and teachers deal with children responsibly
• It provides insights into one's own history from infancy to young adulthood
• It allows greater understanding of life as one grows through middle age and old age
• Studying the human lifespan raises important issues for discussion

Development

• Development involves systematic changes and continuities in an individual from conception to death
• Developmental changes are orderly, patterned, and relatively enduring
• Changes include gains, losses, and differences from one's previous state
• Development includes continuities, reflecting ways we stay the same

Human Development

• It is the scientific study of change and stability processes throughout the lifespan

Developmental Psychology

• Developmental Psychology, also known as Human Development or Lifespan Development, studies how people change and stay the same from conception to death
• The study is multidisciplinary, examining how people change and remain consistent over time
• Key questions in this field:
  • Will you be the same or different later in life?
  • How do you influence other people's lives?
  • How do others influence your life?
  • How do life roles shape development?
  • How do people deal with the thought of death?
• It reflects each person's complexity and uniqueness

Factors that Influence Development

• These shape human development and include an individual's experiences plus shared commonalities

Human Development as a Science

• It is grounded in theory and research to understand human behavior

Influences on Development

• Factors include heredity, environment, and maturation

Heredity

• Inborn traits inherited from biological parents

Environment

• Totality of nonhereditary or experiential influences

Maturation

• Unfolding of natural physical and behavioral changes

Other influences

• Family
• Socioeconomic status
• Culture
• Race/Ethnicity

Normative Influences

• Biological or environmental events that affect many or most people in a society in similar ways
• Also, events that touch only certain individuals (Baltes & Smith, 2004)
• Normative age-graded influences are similar for people in a particular age group
• Normative history-graded influences are significant events that shape behavior and attitudes of a historical generation
• Includes events such as the Great Depression or World War II and affect people experiencing them during formative years

Nonnormative Influences

• Unusual events with major individual impact
• They disrupt the expected life cycle sequence
• They include typical events at atypical times (e.g., parent's death when a child is young) or atypical events (e.g., surviving a plane crash)

The Lifespan Perspective

• Development is viewed as lifelong, multidimensional, multidirectional, plastic, multidisciplinary, and contextual
• It involves growth, maintenance, and regulation of loss (per Baltes)
• Development is constructed through interacting biological, sociocultural, and individual factors

Components of Lifespan Perspective

• Development is lifelong, with change apparent across the lifespan
• No single age is more crucial or dominates human development

Multidirectional Development

• Humans change in many directions, with gains in some areas and losses in others
• Every change entails both growth and loss, like finishing high school, getting married, or becoming a parent

Multidimensional Development

• Changes span physical, cognitive, and psychosocial domains which influence each other
• Change in one domain cascades into others

Biological Processes

• Growth of body and brain
• Includes changes in sensory capacities, motor skills, and health

Cognitive Processes

• Changes in mental abilities such as learning, attention, memory, language, thinking, reasoning, and creativity

Socioemotional Processes

• Patterns of change in emotions
• Considers personality and social relationships

Multidisciplinary Development

• Human development study requires various academic disciplines' theories, research methods, and knowledge

Characterization of Development

• Development is characterized by plasticity which reflects our ability to change
• Many characteristics are malleable
• Plasticity is seen when the brain learns from experience and recovers from injury

Multicontextual Development

• Development occurs in many contexts

Contextual Influences

• Normative age-graded influences affect a specific age group, such as toddlers or adolescents
• Normative history-graded influences shape experiences based on birth time; a cohort experiences similar circumstances
• Non-normative life influences include unique experiences that shape individual development

Recurring Issues in Human Development

• Considers Nature vs. Nurture, if genetic or hereditary influences (nature) determine the kind of person one is
• Asks if experiential or environmental influences (nurture) is responsible

Continuity vs. Discontinuity

• Human development is sometimes best seen as a slow gradual process
• Other times it is better viewed as one of more abrupt change, dependent on the theorist you ask and what topic is being studied
• Stage theories assume developmental change occurs in distinct, qualitatively different stages in a universal sequence
• Stage theorists see development as discontinuous
• Others believe development is a more slow and gradual process known as continuous development

Alternative views on Development

• Argues that adults do not possess new skills. Instead, they have more advanced skills that were present in some form when they were a child
• Brain development and environmental experiences contribute to skill acquisition

Active vs. Passive Development

• Considers how much you play a role in your own developmental path
• Explores if you are at the whim of your genetic inheritance or the environment that surrounds you
• Some theorists see humans as playing a much more active role in their own development
• Piaget thought children actively explore their world and construct new ways of thinking

Stability vs. Change

• Asks if you are similar to how you were as a child
• Some theorists argue that adult personality traits are rooted in infant and young child tendencies
• Others disagree, saying initial tendencies are modified by social and cultural forces over time

Universality vs. Specificity

• Concerns whether there is one path of development or several
• Differences are simply variations on the same fundamental process