Developmental psychology
University of Groningen, PSBE1-03
Chapter 1: Understanding Life-Span Human Development 4
Chapter 2: Theories of Human development 11
Chapter 3: Genes, Environment, and Development 18
Chapter 4: Prenatal development and Birth 25
Chapter 5: Body, brain & health 32
Chapter 6: Sensation, Perception and Action 41
Chapter 7: Cognition 48
Chapter 8: Memory and Information processing 55
Chapter 9: Intelligence and Creativity 62
Chapter 10: Language and Education 69
Chapter 11: Self and Personality 75
Chapter 13: Social cognition and Moral development 81
Chapter 14: Emotions, Attachment and Social Relationships 89
Partly! Chapter 15: The Family 96
Chapter 16: Developmental psychopathology 97
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,Chapter 1: Understanding Life-Span Human
Development
1.1
Learning objectives
● Define development, aging, and their relationship to each other.
● Explain and illustrate the role played by age grades, age norms, and the social clock
in making human development in different historical, cultural and subcultural
contexts.
● Summarize the extreme positions one can take on the “nature-nurture” issue and the
position most developmental scientists today take.
Development = systematic changes and continuities in the individual that occur between
conception and death, or from “womb to tomb”.
→ development means more than positive growth during infancy, childhood and
adolescence.
3 domains:
1. Physical development
→ the growth of the body and its organs, the functioning of physiological systems
including the brain, physical signs of aging, changes in motor abilities, etc.
2. Cognitive development
→ changes and continuities in perception, language, learning, memory, problem
solving and other mental processes.
3. Psychosocial development
→ changes and carryover in personal and interpersonal aspects of development,
such as motives, emotions, personality traits, interpersonal skills, relationships and
roles played in the family and in the larger society.
Growth = the physical changes that occur from conception to maturity.
Biological aging = the decline of organisms that leads inevitably to their death.
Aging = involves more than biological aging; a range of physical, cognitive and psychosocial
changes, positive and negative, in the mature organism.
Period of life Age range (estimate)
Prenatal period conception to birth
Infancy first 2 years of life (1st month is the neonatal or newborn period)
Preschool period 2-5 (could be named as toddlers)
Middle childhood 6-10 (or until the onset of puberty
Adolescence 10-18 (puberty to when individual becomes relatively independent)
Emerging adulthood 18-25 or even 29 (transitional period between adolescence &
full-fledged adulthood.
Early adulthood 25-40 (adult roles are established)
Middle adulthood 40-65
Late adulthood 65+
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,Emerging adults:
→ explore their identities
→ lead unstable lives filled with job changes, new relationships and moves
→ are self-focused, relatively free of obligations to others and therefore free to focus on their
own psychological needs
→ feel in between; adultlike in some ways but not others
→ believe they have limitless possibilities ahead.
5 objective markers of adulthood:
1. completing an education
2. being financially independent
3. leaving home
4. marrying
5. have children
Culture = the shared understanding and way of life of people;
→ Includes beliefs, values and practices concerning the nature of humans in different
phases of the life span, what children need to be taught to function in their society and how
people should lead their lives as adults.
Age grade = each socially defined age group in a society; defines how people in each
culture treat people in different age groups.
Age norms = norms of how people expect you to behave at a certain age.
Rite of passage = ritual that marks a person’s “passage” from one status to another, usually
in reference to the transition from childhood to adulthood.
Social clock = a person’s sense of when things should be done and when he or she is
ahead of or behind the schedule dictated by age norms; Neurgarten (1968).
Age grade, age norms and social clocks differ from culture to culture, but also from
subculture to subculture.
Socioeconomic status (SES) = ranking in society based on indicators such as occupational
prestige, education and income.
→ parents and children living in poverty experience more stress than higher-SES parents
and children.
The damaging effects of poverty can be seen in measurable differences in brain
development between high- and low-SES children that grow wider over the critical months of
infancy and early childhood and that are linked to lower school achievement in adolescence.
Historical changes in periods of lifespan:
● Childhood as an age of innocence; nowadays children must be protected and
nurtured, but until the 17th century children were treated adultlike.
● Adolescence was not recognized as a separate phase between childhood and
adulthood before the 20th century,
● Emerging adulthood only became a phase in the early 21st century.
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, ● Middle age as an emptying of the nest, in the 20th century parents lived longer to see
their children grow up and leave home.
● Old age as retirement was not recognized until the 20th century, people worked till
they dropped dead.
Life expectancy = average number of years a newborn who is born now can be expected to
live; in the 21st century it is almost 79 years.
Nature-nurture issue = the question of how biological forces and environmental forces act
and interact to make us the way we are.
● Nature; focus on heredity, universal maturational processes guided by the genes,
biologically based or innate predispositions produced by evolution, and biological
influences on us every day of hormones, neurotransmitters and other biochemicals.
Maturation = the biological unfolding of the individual as sketched out in the genes
(=the hereditary material passed from parents to child at conception 50/50).
● Nurture; focus on environmental factors such as the external physical and social
conditions, stimuli and events that can affect us, social interactions with family
members, peers and teachers and the neighborhood and broader cultural context.
Learning = the process through which experience brings about relatively permanent
changes in thoughts, feelings or behavior.
Developmental changes are the products of a complex interplay between nature and
nurture, not just one.
Nature affects nurture and nurture affects nature.
→ nature provides us with the beginnings of a brain that allows us to learn from our
experiences (nurture), experiences that in turn change our brains by altering neural
connections and that can even change our genes by activating or deactivating them.
1.2
Learning objectives
● Summarize the four goals of the science of life-span development and describe how
the study of human development began
● List and illustrate the seven key assumptions of the modern life-span perspective.
Goals of life-span development:
1. describing
2. predicting
3. explaining
4. optimizing development
1. Characterize the functioning of humans of different ages and trace how it changes
with age. Describe both normal development and individual differences, or variations
in development.
2. Seek to identify factors that predict development and establish that these factors
actually cause humans to develop as they typically do or cause some individuals to
develop differently than others.
3. Establish if a relationship is causal or correlational and explain the relationship
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