Ch1. Developmental Psychology: Themes and contexts
Developmental psychology = seeks to identify and describe changes in
the way we think and behave, and to uncover the developmental
processes that drive these changes what changes and how?
Levels of explanation:
- Our social interactions (e.g. between infant and parent)
- Our thought processes (e.g. improvements in memory)
- More biological level (e.g. maturation of our brain areas)
First observational biography of his own child – Charles Darwin
Themes of development
Key themes related to psychological growth:
- Origins of human behavior: inheritance and environment
- Specificity or generality of change (does change happen to all
the child’s thinking or behavior at the same time, or just part of it):
continuity vs discontinuity
- Individual and contextual forces that define and drive
development
based on biological, cognitive, linguistic, emotional and social aspects of
development
Origins of human behavior: inheritance and environment
Nature vs nurture = how we should understand the relationship between
inheritance and environment today we see it more as a combination
- Nature = aangeboren biologische factoren, mens is hoe hij is
- Nurture = omgevings- en ervaringsfactoren
nativism vs empiricism
E.g. The combination of the child’s inherited characteristics, and the
abusive environment, puts a child at risk
Interaction between inheritance and environment is active = dynamic
processes to which developing children themselves make an active and
vital contribution
Describing developmental change: continuity vs discontinuity
Continuous development = development is continuous, whereby each
new event builds on earlier experiences in a cumulative / quantitative way.
Discontinuous development = rather qualitative change, series of
discrete steps or stages in which behaviors get reorganized into a
qualitatively new set of behaviors.
,Overlapping waves
Critical and sensitive periods
Critical period = age during which certain experiences are required for
development to proceed in a typical way
Sensitive periode = age range at which specific experiences are optimal
for development to occur in a typical way
Domain-general or domain-specific development
Domain-general influence = development proceeds dependently in
different domains
Domain-specific viewpoint = viewpoint in which development proceeds
relatively independently in different domains (e.g. progress in math, leads
to little influence on other domains)
Locus of developmental change
Levels of explanation = the different locus of change are not mutually
exclusive?
Perspectives on development
- Individual development = development of the individual as an
interaction between genes and environment
‘Sleeper’ effects = cope well initially but exhibit problems later in life
- Cultural context
- Biological perspective: our brain and neurons influence our
behavior
- Ecological perspective = stresses importance of not only
relationships between developing organism (e.g. child) and
environmental systems, but also the relationships among these
environmental systems.
- microsystem = setting in which the child lives and interacts with
the people closest to her
- mesosystem = interrelations among the components of the
microsystem (e.g. parents interact with teachers)
- exosystem = impinge on child’s development but with which the
child has indirect contact (parent’s work etc.)
- macrosystem = ideological and institutional patterns of culture
chronosystem = these four systems change over time (puberty,
illness, birth of sibling, divorce)
, - Lifespan = not too focused on childhood but across the lifespan,
also incorporates historical factors that can influence psychological
development
- age cohort effect = group of individuals who were born in the
same year of same historical period of time
- Psychology and developmental psychology = bigger picture of
psychology is needed to make sense of what we study
Ch2. Theories in developmental psychology
Developmental theories
- Help organize and integrate existing information into coherent,
interesting and plausible accounts of how children develop
- Generate testable hypotheses or prediction about children’s
behavior
Origins of thought about human development
John Locke: tabula rasa = infants are born into the world as a ‘blank
state’
Descartes: rationalism, minds imposes some kind of order on the
environment to comprehend it.
Nativism = emphasize nature and inheritance
- Born with knowledge through evolutionary psychology
Empiricism = emphasize role of nurture and environment in development
Behaviorism = development is characterized by continuous and gradual
changes in behavior, rather than in shifts or stages.
- John Watson
- Changes in behavior are driven by experience
- Classical conditioning = whether behaviors are conditioned (dog
salivating when seeing food
- Operant conditioning = in which new behaviors are learned in
response to a specific stimulus, manipulation of the consequences of
behavior (providing a reward to encourage that ‘stimulus response’)
postitive reinforcement, punishment, withdrawel
Maturational approach = ‘biological timetables’ of development were
set out in advance by the genes of our species
Psychodynamic approach
- Sigmund Freud: personality consists of thee interrelated parts:
- the id = instinctual drives
- the ego = rational, gradually controls id, what is socially
appropriate
- the superego = emerges when the child internalizes (= accepts
and absorbs parental or societal morals, values and roles) and
developes a conscience to apply moral values to her own acts\
- Personality development = changes in organization and interaction
of id, ego and superego, involves five stages:
- oral = young infant explores sucking, eating, biting
- anal = toilet
- phallic = curiosity about sexual anatomy
- latency = sexual. Drives are submerged
- genital = sexual desires
, - Psychosocial theory of human development = Erik Erikson sees
the development through eight stages that the individual must
accomplish
Ethological theory = developed by biologists, behavior must be
viewed as occurring in a particular context, and as having adaptive or
survival value in relation to its biology.
- Observation of children in their natural surroundings
Grand theories of cognitive development
Cognitive = memory, logic, and language
- Social learning theory
- observational learning = observing and imitating others, how
well they learn this behavior depends on four cognitive processes.
1. Attend to a behavior
2. Retain the behavior in the memory
3. Have the capacity to reproduce the behavior
4. Motivated to reproduce the behavior
- Piaget’s constructionism = children’s thinking changes
qualitatively with age. Development results from their own theories
and testing them, actively acquire the environment children are
‘little scientists’
- Three periods of cognitive development with own way of thinking
1. Infants: sensory and motor abilities
2. School years: logic
3. Adolescence: abstract ideas
