Developmental psychology
Chapter 1 – Developmental psychology: themes and context
Developmental psychology:A field of study that seeks to understand and explain change in
individual’s cognitive, social and other capacities, first by describing changes in the child’s observed
behaviours and second by uncovering the processes that underlie these changes.
Identify and describe changes in the way we think and behave, and to uncover the developmental
processes that drive these changes. Interested in what things change as we get older and how these
changes come about.
Themes of development
Scientists have examined and debated a number of recurring and key themes relating to psychological
growth. Some of the most important themes: those concerning the origins of human behavior, the
specificity of generality of change, and the individual and contextual forces that define and drive
development.
Origins of behavior: inheritance and environment
The question of how we should understand the relationship between inheritance and environment is
sometimes referred to as the nature vs. nurture debate. These nature and nurture positions are referred
to, respectively, as nativism (the idea that development is primarily determined by inherited factors)
and empiricism (the idea that development is primarily determined by environmental influences). Both
environment and inheritance influence human development.
Genetic variations between different individuals can lead to different developmental outcomes because
of the different ways in which individual children’s genetic inheritance interacts with the
environments in which they are placed.
The active nature of the human organisms supports interaction between inherited propensities and the
environment which those propensities exposes them to over the course of development. Thus, the
interaction between inheritance and environment is an active, dynamic process to which the
developing children themselves make an active and vital contribution.
Describing developmental change: continuity versus discontinuity
Another question for developmental psychologists: how to describe patterns of developmental change.
Continuous development: a pattern of development in which abilities change in a gradual and smooth
way. Developmental changes add or build on earlier abilities in a cumulative or quantitative way,
without any abrupt shifts from one change to the next.
However, sometimes we notice an abrupt change in our ability. Discontinuous development: a pattern
of development in which changes occur suddenly, resulting in qualitatively different stages (periods)
of development.
Siegler: sees development as basically continuous or quantitative, but agrees that it can be interspersed
with sudden or discontinuous/qualitative shifts.
Critical and sensitive periods
Critical period: period of development (age range) at which specific experiences are vital for
development to occur in a typical way.
Sensitive period: a period of development (age range) at which particular experiences are important
for typical development. If those experiences do not occur during that period, typical development
may still occur.
Both critical and sensitive periods imply that there are certain things we can do in order to optimize
the environment for fostering the best outcomes we can for developing children.
,Domain-general or domain-specific development
Question developmental psychologists: the extent to which the development of a new ability or skill
has impacts in other domains.
Domain general influence: the idea that developments can have an impact on a wide range of abilities
Domain specific influence: the idea that the development of various abilities occur independently and
has little impact on skills in other domains.
Locus of developmental change
An important question to ask concerns what changes when development occurs.
Levels of explanation: the way in which we choose to describe psychological abilities (and the
developments of those abilities). Levels of explanation can include biological, behavioral, social and
emotional. Change is happening at all of these levels at once.
Perspectives of development
It is possible to describe developmental change at several different levels of explanation, and perhaps
at more than one level at once. This means that developmental psychologists have sometimes chosen
very different ways to explain psychological development.
Individual characteristics and contextual influences
Developmental psychology has to try to account for individual variations in development. Different
paths trough development can occur to the extent that individuals are considered to be developing
atypically. However, individual variation also occurs within typical development.
Developmental psychologists differ in their emphasis on individual characteristics versus
situational/contextual influences. It is appropriate to think of the development of the individual as an
interaction between genes and the environment.
Cultural contexts
Examination of the contribution that context makes to child development has also led to increased
interest in how culture relates to development.
Comparing development across cultures, as well as being a valuable way of understanding how
development can vary, also provides big clues to the role of the (cultural) environment on the
development of our psychological abilities. It turns out that even some of the basic abilities which we
take for granted vary considerably across different cultures.
The biological perspective
Whenever we develop, something biological is changing. Without a biological body, brain and a
nervous system, we would not be able to develop. Up until recently, many developmental
psychologists rejected the idea that we could learn about development by considering biology.
Development and the interaction of our inheritance and environment does happen at the level of
neurons and patterns of functional brain activity. These ‘biological constraints’ exert an influence on
the development of our behaviour, our social relationships and our cognitive abilities.
The ecological perspective
Ecological perspective: a perspective that stresses the importance of understanding not only the
relationships between organisms and various environmental systems, but also the relations among
such systems themselves.
Microsystem (setting in which the child lives and interacts) mesosystem (interrelations among
components of the microsystem) macrosystem (ideological and institutional patterns of
(sub)culture) chronosystem (these four systems change over time).
The lifespan perspective
Another relatively recent perspective considers development across the lifespan. Lifespan perspective:
a view of development as a process that continues throughout the life cycle, from infancy through
adulthood and old age.
Age cohort: people born within the same generation.
,Psychology and developmental psychology
Developmental psychology is one of the central areas of research and interest in the discipline and as a
consequence there is often a symbiotic relation between developmental and other research.
Without an understanding of the mature state of our abilities, a careful scientific study of development
can end up going down blind alleys.
Developmental psychology is also crucial for other domains of psychology.
Developmental psychology is central to so much in psychology because, just as every person has a
developmental history, so almost every psychological process has developed over time.
, Chapter 2 – Theories in developmental psychology
Rather than passively observing and measuring the world around us, developmental scientists propose
theories that can be tested in order to make the progress in understanding of development quicker.
The role of theories in developmental psychology
Developmental psychologists undertake their work in order to answer two key questions: (1) to
describe developmental change, and (2) to explain developmental change. The job of theories of
developmental psychology is to advance coherent and plausible solutions to these questions about how
and why developmental change occurs. Such theories can then be taken out into the world or into the
research lab to investigate their validity.
It is not uncommon for contrasting developmental theories to co-exist. Contrasting theories may
provide different accounts for the same observation or phenomenon, and in such cases researchers will
often develop experiments to test out which of the two competing explanations is more adequate.
Origins of thought about human development
Philosophers had been considering questions about psychological development well before the origins
of psychology as a scientific field of study.
John Locke argued that infants are born into the world tabula rasa (blank slate).
‘Rationalist philosophers’: argued that the mind imposes some kind of order on the environment in
order to be able to comprehend it.
William James (1890) famously took a rather empiricist position on the origins of perceptual abilities
in babies, stating that new born infants perceive only ‘a blooming buzzing confusion’.
The principal opponents to this empiricist view were the maturationists who suggested that
development is shaped more by a genetic blueprint than the environment.
Behaviourism and maturationism in the early twentieth century
Behaviourism
Behaviourism: a school of psychology prominent in the early twentieth century, which emphasized
the role of learning in human behaviour and attempted to describe behaviour in such terms. (Important
names: Watson, Thorndicke, Pavlov and Skinner).
The key of their position is that changes in behaviour are driven by experience, and that these changes
in behaviour happen gradually and continuously.
The two key forms of learning the behaviourists advocated were classical conditioning and operant
conditioning. Classical conditioning is a type of learning in which two stimuli are repeatedly
presented together until individuals learn to respond to the unfamiliar stimulus in the same way they
respond to the familiar stimulus.
Operant conditioning is a type of learning that depends on the consequences of behaviour; rewards
increase the likelihood that a behaviour will occur, whereas punishment decreases that likelihood.
Operant conditioning has been incorporated into many applied programmes to help teachers and
parents change children’s behaviour, including hyperactivity and aggression.
Maturational theory
Maturational approach: an early approach to explaining development in terms of maturational
timetables, predetermined by genetic inheritance. (Important names: Darwin, Gessell, McGraw).
Maturational theories have been very influential in explaining the emergence of children of different
temperaments.
It is important to acknowledge that behaviourists and maturationists adopted variations on a moderate
position, acknowledging that nature and nurture have a role, but varying as to how much importance
they placed on those relative roles. As we shall see, perhaps the most important advance on this
position was that of Piaget, who next attempted to understand exactly how nature and nurture interact.
Psychodynamics and ethology
The Psychodynamic approach
In the early 1900s, Freud introduced his theory of psychodynamics: in this view of development,
which is derived from Freudian theory, development occurs in discrete stages and is determined
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