Developmental psychology

1
Developmental psychology

• Child development

2
Developmental psychology

• Developmental issues
• Is it nature or nurture? Or some of each?
• How much of development is continuous, and how
  much is in stages?
• Once a characteristic is formed, is it stable or
  changeable?
• Conclusion Development is a life-long process.

3
Child development

• Conception and prenatal development
• Testing the abilities of infants
• Reflexes and Apgar scores
• Behavioral Gaze, suck, turn head
• Learning and information processing Odor, sound,
  taste
• Neural development The role of experience

4
Cognitive development

• What is cognition?
• The importance of contingent responses from the
  environment
• Watson Ramey (1972) Mobile control and learned
  helplessness
• Piagets notion of schemas
• Processes of cognitive development
• Assimilation
• Accommodation

5
An assimilation-accommodation problem
6
Sensorimotor stage, birth to age two

• Cognition develops as sensing and acting
• Object permanence is minimal prior to age 6
  months, but
• It unfolds gradually thereafter
• Habituation learning is seen as early as 7 hours
• One-month-old babies develop visual schemas for
  the pacifier they had only felt.
• Physical impossibilities cause infants to gaze
  longer (Bailargeon, 1992)
• Five-month-old babies are sometimes surprised by
  changes in number

7
Transition

• Deferred imitation
• Beginning symbol use
• Signifiers
• Language or signs

8
Operations

• Preoperational stage
• Ready use of symbols
• Age two to seven
• Egocentrism and conservation
• Concrete operational stage, age 7 to 11
• Formal operational stage, after age 12

9
Social development

• Stranger anxiety
• Attachment Body contact and the secure base
  (Harlow)
• Critical periods and imprinting (Lorenz)
• Study effects of deprivation, daycare, and
  divorce
• Key factors Interaction (responsive parenting)
  and conflict

10
Parenting styles

• Authoritarian parents Obedient, unhappy,
  distrustful children
• Authoritative parents Highest self-esteem and
  social competence
• Permissive parents Least self-reliant and
  curious
• Rejecting-neglecting parents Troubled kids
• Critical thinking Correlational research

11
Adolescence and adulthood

• Moral development
• Kohlbergs research
• Carol Gilligans critique
• Womens ways of knowing
• Psychosocial development
• Erik Eriksons model and Shakespeare
• Intellectual development in adulthood
• Methods of developmental research

12
Water Level Task
13
Water Level Task (Piaget Inhelder)

• Performance improves until, at age 9, it is
  consistently accurate.
• However, students in college and graduate school
  may have difficulty.
• 50 of men do well, but only 25 of women.
• Field independent people do better.
• Mental rotation and error amount correlate