Psychology over life span of human life

1. Psychology and
Human Development
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2. Kannan krishnamuirthy
Chapter 8 Overview
• Theories of development
• Prenatal development
• Infancy
• Early and middle childhood
• Adolescence
• Early and middle adulthood
• Later adulthood
• Death and dying

3. Theories of Development
• Developmental psychology
• The study of how humans grow, develop, and change throughout
the life span

4. What did Piaget find regarding stages of
cognitive development?
• Piaget proposed that cognitive ability develops
in four stages, each involving a qualitatively
different way of reasoning and understanding
the world
• Four stages of development
• Sensori-motor stage
• Preoperational stage
• Concrete operational stage
• Formal operational stage

5. What did Piaget find regarding stages of
cognitive development?
• During the sensorimotor stage (birth to 2
years), infants gain an understanding of the
world through their senses and motor
activities
• Infants act on objects and events that are directly
perceived
• Major achievement of this stage is object
permanence
• The realization that objects continue to exist when
they can no longer be perceived

6. What did Piaget find regarding stages of
cognitive development?
• During the preoperational stage (age 2-7),
children acquire symbolic function
• Understanding that one thing can stand for another
• During this stage, children exhibit egocentrism
• Belief that everyone sees what they see, thinks what
they think, etc.

7. What did Piaget find regarding stages of
cognitive development?
• In the concrete operational stage (7 to 11 or 12
years), children acquire the concept of
conservation
• Understanding that a given quantity of matter stays the
same despite rearrangement or change in its
appearance, as long as nothing is added or taken away
• Conservation develops because children begin to
understand reversibility
• Realizing that any change in the shape, position, or order of
matter can be reversed mentally

8. Piaget’s conservation of volume
task

9. What did Piaget find regarding stages of
cognitive development?
• In the formal operational stage (age 11 or 12
years and beyond) preadolescents and
adolescents acquire the capacity for
hypothetico-deductive thinking
• The ability to apply logical thought to abstract and
hypothetical situations in the past, present, and future

10. What are some alternative approaches to
Piaget’s theory?
• Information processing theorists argue that
stage-like advances in cognition are due to
improvements in processes such as working
memory
• Vygotsky’s sociocultural approach
emphasizes that cognitive development
occurs within a sociocultural context in which
parents and teachers provide age-
appropriate guidance

11. What did Kohlberg claim about the
development of moral reasoning?
• Lawrence Kohlberg proposed a stage theory
of moral development
• He presented moral dilemmas to research
participants and analyzed the moral
reasoning that they described
• He classified moral reasoning into three
levels, with each level having two stages
• People progress through the levels and stages in a
fixed order
• Each level has a prerequisite stage of cognitive
development

12. What did Kohlberg claim about the
development of moral reasoning?
• Preconventional level
• Lowest level of moral development
• “Right” is whatever gains a reward or avoids
punishment
• Conventional level
• Right and wrong are based on the internalized
standards of others
• “Right” is whatever is approved by others or is
consistent with the laws of society
• Postconventional level
• Highest level of moral reasoning
• “Right” is whatever furthers basic human rights

13. Colby & Kohlberg’s longitudinal study of
moral development
• Studied moral reasoning at
different ages
• Conventional thinking
(stages 3 and 4) is not
predominant until after age
12
• Postconventional thinking
(stage 5) first appears in
adulthood, but is still rare in
30’s

14. How does Erickson’s theory describe the
process of psychosocial development?
• Erik Erikson proposed eight psychosocial
stages that encompass the entire lifespan
• Each stage is defined by a conflict that must be
resolved for healthy personality development to
occur

15. How does Erickson’s theory describe the
process of psychosocial development?
• Basic trust vs. basic mistrust
• Birth to 1 year
• Autonomy vs. shame and doubt
• 1 to 3 years
• Initiative vs. guilt
• 3 to 6 years
• Industry vs. inferiority
• 6 years to puberty

16. How does Erickson’s theory describe the
process of psychosocial development?
• Identity vs. role confusion
• Adolescence
• Intimacy vs. isolation
• Young adulthood
• Generativity vs. stagnation
• Middle adulthood
• Ego integrity vs. despair
• Late adulthood

17. Prenatal Development
• The development from conception to birth

18. What happens during each of the three
stages of prenatal development?
• Period of the zygote
• Zygote attaches to the uterine lining
• Ends 1 to 2 weeks after conception
• Period of the embryo
• Major systems, organs, and structures of the body
develop
• Ends when bone cells appear, 3 to 8 weeks after
conception
• Period of the fetus
• Rapid growth and development of body structures,
organs, and systems
• 9 weeks after conception until birth

19. Infancy
• A neonate, a newborn infant up to one month old, comes
equipped with an impressive range of reflexes, built-in
responses to certain stimuli that they need to ensure
survival in their new world

20. How do infants’ perceptual and motor
abilities change over the first 18 months
of life?
• Robert Fantz found that
infants prefer to fixate on
some objects over others
• Newborn infants can
discriminate between objects
• Newborns’ visual acuity is
about 20/600, but improves
rapidly during infancy

21. How do infants’ perceptual and motor
abilities change over the first 18 months
of life?
• Most infants develop motor
skills in the sequence
shown in the figure
• Ages listed are averages
• normal infants may reach any
milestone months earlier or
later than average
• Motor development is
largely determined by
maturation

22. Temperament
• A person’s behavioral style or characteristic way of
responding to the environment

23. How does temperament shape infants’
behavior?
• Thomas, Chess, and Birch (1970) identified
three general types of temperament
• Easy
• Have pleasant moods, approach new people and
situations positively
• Difficult
• Have generally unpleasant moods, react negatively to new
people and situations
• Slow-to-warm-up
• Tend to withdraw, are slow to adapt, somewhat negative in
mood
• Infant temperament is strongly influenced by heredity and is
somewhat predictive of personality later in life

24. How do the four attachment patterns
identified in infants differ?
• Attachment is the strong affectionate bond a
child forms with the mother or primary caregiver
• Harry Harlow found that contact comfort forms
the basis of attachment in rhesus monkeys
• Human infants exhibit separation anxiety and
stranger anxiety once attachment has formed, at
about 6 to 8 months of age

25. How do the four attachment patterns
identified in infants differ?
• Secure attachment
• About 65% of infants
• Use mother as a secure base for exploring
• Distressed by separation from caregivers, greet
caregivers when they return
• More cooperative and content than other infants
• Display better social skills as preschool children
• Avoidant attachment
• About 20% of infants
• Not responsive to mother, not troubled when she
leaves
• May actively avoid contact with mother after
separation

26. How do the four attachment patterns
identified in infants differ?
• Resistant attachment
• 10 to 15% of infants
• Seek close contact with mother, and tend not to
branch out and explore
• After separation, may display anger toward
mother; not easily comforted
• Disorganized/disoriented attachment
• 5 to 10% of infants
• Protest separation, but exhibit contradictory and
disoriented behavior when reunited

27. Early and Middle Childhood
• Mastery of language, both spoken and written, is just one
of several important developmental processes that
happen in early and middle childhood.

28. What are the milestones of language
development, and how do various theorists
explain them?
• Babbling
• Vocalization of basic speech sounds, which begins
between 4 and 6 months
• One-word stage
• First words spoken at about 1 year
• First words usually represent objects that move or
that infants can act on
• Two-word stage
• Usually begins about 18-20 months

29. What are the milestones of language
development, and how do various theorists
explain them?
• Telegraphic speech
• Between 2 and 3 years, children start using short
sentences that contain only essential content
words
• Children follow grammatical rules in their
speech, as indicated by overregularization
• Misapplying a grammatical rule, such as adding
“ed” to form a past tense
• Children say “goed”, comed”, “doed”, etc.

30. What are the milestones of language
development, and how do various theorists
explain them?
• Learning theories
• Language is acquired in the same way as other
behaviors– through imitation and reinforcement
• Noam Chomsky’s nativist position
• Language ability is largely innate
• The brain contains a language acquisition
device
• Most researchers endorse an interactionist
approach
• Acknowledging that infants have innate capacity
for acquiring language, but also recognizing
environmental influences on language learning

31. What outcomes are often associated with
the three parenting styles identified by
Baumrind?
• Authoritarian parents
• Make arbitrary rules, expect unquestioning
obedience, punish transgressions
• Authoritative parents
• Set high but realistic standards, reason with the
child, enforce limits, and encourage open
communication and independence
• Permissive parents
• Make few rules or demands, allow children to
make their own decisions and control their own
behavior

32. What outcomes are often associated with
the three parenting styles identified by
Baumrind?
• Children with authoritative parents
• tend to be happier and have higher self-esteem, and be
more self-reliant, socially competent, and responsible
than their peers
• Children with authoritarian parents
• tend to be withdrawn, anxious, and unhappy
• Children with permissive parents
• tend to be the most immature, impulsive, and
dependent, and the least self-reliant and self-controlled

33. How do social learning, cognitive
developmental, and gender-schema
theorists explain gender role
development?
• Social learning theory
• Gender role development results from modeling
and reinforcement
• Cognitive developmental theory
• Development occurs in stages marked by
increasingly sophisticated reasoning about the
permanence of gender
• Gender-schema theory
• Children acquire schemas for maleness and
femaleness from their culture and use them to
process information about gender

34. Adolescence
• The developmental stage that begins at puberty and
encompasses the period from the end of childhood to the
beginning of adulthood

35. How does puberty influence adolescents’
self-concepts and behavior?
• A period of rapid physical growth and change
that culminates in sexual maturity
• Puberty and self-concept
• Early maturation in boys is associated with higher
self-esteem
• But may also be associated with greater aggression and
hostility
• Early maturation in girls is associated with higher
risk of eating disorders, earlier sexual experiences,
more unwanted pregnancies, and earlier exposure
to alcohol and drug use

36. How does puberty influence
adolescents’ self-concepts and
behavior?
• Incidence of sexual activity
increases dramatically
through teen years
• Factors associated with later
onset of sexual activity
include
• Living with both biological
parents
• Higher academic achievement
• Involvement in sports
• Frequent attendance of religious
services

37. In what ways do parents and peers
contribute to teens’ development?
• Most adolescents have good relationships
with their parents
• Parenting style affects adolescent behavior
• Permissive parenting is associated with higher
incidence of drug and alcohol use and lower
motivation for academic success in adolescents
• Authoritative parenting is associated with more
psychological distress and lower self-confidence in
adolescents
• Peer groups provide adolescents with
standards of comparison and a vehicle for
developing social skills

38. What are the neurological and psychosocial
characteristics of emerging adulthood?
• Neuroimaging studies indicate that parts of
the brain involved in decision making and self
control mature between the late teens and
early twenties
• Jeffrey Arnett has proposed that this age-
range is a unique developmental period,
which he calls emerging adulthood
• A period when individuals explore options and
develop new skills in work and romantic domains
before committing to adult roles

39. Early and Middle Adulthood
• Early adulthood
• Ages 20 to 45 or 45
• Middle adulthood
• Ages 40 or 45 to 65
• Late adulthood
• After age 65 or 70

40. How does the body change in the early and
middle adult years?
• Presbyopia
• Lens of the eye can longer accommodate adequately
for near vision
• Occurs almost universally in mid to late 40s
• Menopause
• Cessation of menstruation, signifying end of
reproductive capacity in women
• Usually occurs between 45 and 55
• Gradual decline in testosterone in men
• From age 20 until about 60

41. In what ways does intellectual capacity
improve and decline in adulthood?
• Young adults outperform older adults on tasks
requiring speed or rote memory
• But older adults outperform younger ones on
tests measuring general information, vocabulary,
reasoning ability, and social judgment

42. What are two themes of social development
in early and middle adulthood?
• Establishment of an intimate partnership
• Majority of adults marry and have children
• But they do so at later ages today than in past
generations
• Career development
• Job satisfaction is strongly related to satisfaction
with other aspects of life, such as romantic
relationships

43. Later Adulthood
• The life expectancy in the United States has increased
from 49 to 76 years from the beginning to the end of the
20th century
• People older than age 65 constitute about 15% of the U.S.
population

44. How does the body change in the later adult
years?
• General slowing, the reduction in the speed of
neural transmission leading to a slowing of
physical and mental functions
• Decline in sensory capacity
• Development of chronic conditions such as
arthritis, heart disease, high blood pressure
• But, physical exercise can improve strength and
mobility in older adults

45. What happens to cognitive ability in later
adulthood?
• Crystallized intelligence tends to increase over
the lifespan
• Verbal ability and accumulated knowledge
• Fluid intelligence peaks in early 20s and
declines slowly as people age
• Reasoning and mental flexibility

46. What are some of the adjustment
challenges in the social lives of older adults?
• Retirement
• Loss of a spouse
• Altered living arrangements
• Most older adults cope with these adjustments
and maintain a sense of life satisfaction

47. What are the components of successful
aging?
• Maintaining one’s physical health, mental
abilities, social competence, and overall
satisfaction with life
• An optimistic outlook
• Eating a healthy diet
• Staying active cognitively and socially

48. Death and Dying
• A developmental task for every elderly person is to accept
the inevitability of death and to prepare for it

49. How do individuals with terminal illnesses
respond to their circumstances?
• Elisabeth Kübler-Ross identified 5 stages
people go through in coming to terms with
death
• Denial
• Anger
• Bargaining
• Depression
• Acceptance
• But, critics doubt the universality of these
stages, and argue that reactions to
impending death vary widely between
individuals and across cultures