Introduction to Psychology

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Myers EXPLORING PSYCHOLOGY (6th Ed)
Chapter 4 The Developing Person
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The Developing Person

• Developmental Psychology
• study of physical, cognitive, and social changes
  across the life span

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Developmental Issues

• Nature versus Nurture
• How much is human development influenced by our
  heredity (nature) and how much by our experience
  (nurture)?
• Continuity versus Stages
• Is development gradual and continuous or does it
  proceed through a sequence of separate stages?
• Stability versus Change
• Do our early personality traits persist through
  life, or do we become different persons as we age?

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Union of Egg and Sperm
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Prenatal Development

• Zygote
• fertilized egg
• enters a 2-week period of rapid cell division
• develops into an embryo
• Embryo
• developing human organism from 2 weeks through
  second month
• Fetus
• developing human organism from 9 weeks to birth

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Prenatal Development and the Newborn
40 days 45 days 2 months 4 months
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Prenatal Development

• Teratogens
• agents that can reach the embryo or fetus during
  prenatal development and cause harm
• chemical, e.g., alcohol, some medicines, cocaine,
  nicotine
• viral, e.g., HIV, Rubella
• Fetal Alcohol Syndrome
• physical and cognitive abnormalities in children
  caused by a pregnant womans heavy drinking

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The Competent Newborn

• Rooting Reflex
• tendency to turn head, open mouth, and search for
  nipple when touched on the cheek
• Preferences
• human voices and faces
• facelike images--gt
• smell and sound of mother preferred

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Infancy and Childhood

• Maturation
• biological growth processes that enable orderly
  changes in behavior
• relatively uninfluenced by experience
• sets the course for development while experience
  adjusts it

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Infancy and Childhood Cognitive Development
-Piaget

• Schema
• a concept or framework that organizes and
  interprets information
• Assimilation
• interpreting ones new experience in terms of
  ones existing schemas

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Infancy and Childhood Cognitive Development-
Piaget

• Accommodation
• adapting ones current understandings (schemas)
  to incorporate new information
• Cognition
• All the mental activities associated with
  thinking, knowing, remembering, and communicating

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Piagets Theory of Cognitive Development
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Infancy and Childhood

• Object Permanence
• the awareness that things continue to exist even
  when not perceived

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Piaget

• Preoperational Stage
• stage during which a child learns to use language
  but does not yet comprehend mental operations of
  concrete logic
• Animism inanimate objects are alive moon,
  teddy bear
• Difficulty double classifying
• Egocentrism
• the inability of the preoperational child to take
  anothers point of
• View
• Theory of Mind
• peoples ideas about their own and others mental
  states

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Piagets Theory of Cognitive Development

• Concrete Operational Stage
• stage during which children gain the mental
  operations that enable them to think logically
  about concrete events
• Conservation
• the principle that properties such as mass,
  volume, and number remain the same despite
  changes in the forms of objects
• Reversibility

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Infancy and Childhood Cognitive Development

• Conservation
• the principle that properties such as mass,
  volume, and number remain the same despite
  changes in the forms of objects

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Piaget - Cognitive

• Formal Operational Stage
• stage during which people begin to think
  logically about abstract concepts
• Hypotheses testing and scientific reasoning

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Infants Can Think

• After sucking on one of these, babies looked
  longer at the nipple they had felt in their mouth

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Cognitive Development

• Baby Mathematics
• Shown a numerically impossible outcome, infants
  stare longer (Wynn, 1992)

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Social Development

• Attachment
• an emotional tie with another person
• shown in young children by seeking closeness to
  the caregiver and showing distress on separation
• Stranger Anxiety
• fear of strangers that infants commonly display
• beginning by about 8 months of age

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Social Development

• Harlows Surrogate Mother Experiments
• Monkeys preferred contact with the comfortable
  cloth mother, even while feeding from the
  nourishing wire mother

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Social Development

• Critical Period
• an optimal period shortly after birth when an
  organisms exposure to certain stimuli or
  experiences produces proper development
• Imprinting
• the process by which certain animals form
  attachments during a critical period very early
  in life

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Attachment

• Responsive Parenting
• Sensitive and responsive parents notice what
  babies are doing and respond appropriately
• Leads to secure attachment
• Unresponsive Parenting
• Do notice what their babies are doing and do not
  respond appropriately
• Leads to insecure attachment

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Attachment

• Secure attachment
• In presence of mother play and explore
  environment
• Distressed when parent leaves and happy at her
  return
• Insecure attachment
• Less likely to explore environment
• May cling to mother when she leaves, cry and
  remain upset
• Or may seem indifferent to mothers leaving and
  returning

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Social Development

• Monkeys raised by artificial mothers were
  terror-stricken when placed in strange situations
  without their surrogate mothers

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Attachment

• Secure attachment predicts social competence
• Insecure attachment predicts difficulty with
  social competence
• Deprivation of attachment such as in orphanages
  and during war children often withdrawn,
  frightened, and speechless
• Can impact adult attachments, aggression, abuse,
  etc.

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Social Development

• Groups of infants who had and had not experienced
  day care were left by their mothers in a
  unfamiliar room
• Separation peaks around 13 months

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Parenting Styles

• Authoritarian
• Imposes rules and expects obedience
• Because I said so
• Permissive
• Submit to childs demands
• Very few rules if any
• Very little if any punishment
• Authoritative
• Demanding and responsive
• Have reasonable rules and explain why the rule
  exists
• Punishment is appropriate for breaking rules
• Discuss rules and allow exceptions

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Social Development

• The correlation between authoritative parenting
  and social competence in children

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Adolescence

• Adolescence
• the transition period from childhood to adulthood
• extending from puberty to independence
• Puberty
• the period of sexual maturation
• when one first becomes capable of reproduction

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Adolescence

• Primary Sex Characteristics
• body structures that make sexual reproduction
  possible
• ovaries--female
• testes--male
• external genitalia
• Secondary Sex Characteristics
• nonreproductive sexual characteristics
• female--enlarged breast, hips
• male--voice quality, body hair
• Menarche (meh-NAR-key)
• first menstrual period

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Adolescence

• In the 1890s the average interval between a
  womans menarche and marriage was about 7 years
  now it is nearly 12 years.

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Adolescence

• Throughout childhood, boys and girls are similar
  in height. At puberty, girls surge ahead
  briefly, but then boys overtake them at about age
  14.

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Adolescence
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Kohlbergs Moral Ladder

• As moral development progresses, the focus of
  concern moves from the self to the wider social
  world

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Eriksons Stages of Psychosocial Development
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Eriksons Stages of Psychosocial Development
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Social Development

• Identity
• ones sense of self
• the adolescents task is to solidify a sense of
  self by testing and integrating various roles
• Intimacy
• the ability to form close, loving relationships
• a primary developmental task in late adolescence
  and early adulthood

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Social Development

• The changing parent-child relationship

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Adulthood--Physical Changes

• Menopause
• the time of natural cessation of menstruation
• also refers to the biological changes a woman
  experiences as her ability to reproduce declines
• Alzheimers Disease
• a progressive and irreversible brain disorder
• characterized by a gradual deterioration of
  memory, reasoning, language, and finally,
  physical functioning

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Adulthood--Physical Changes

• The Aging Senses

1.00
0.75
0.50
0.25
0
10
30
50
70
90
Age in years
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Adulthood--Physical Changes

• The Aging Senses

90
70
50
10
30
50
70
90
Age in years
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Adulthood--Physical Changes

• The Aging Senses

90
70
50
10
30
50
70
90
Age in years
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Adulthood--Physical Changes
Fatal accident rate

• Slowing reactions contribute to increased
  accident risks among those 75 and older.

12
10
8
6
4
2
0
16
20
25
30
35
40
45
50
55
60
65
70
75 and over
Age
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Adulthood--Physical Changes

• Incidence of dementia by age

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Adulthood--Cognitive Changes

• Recalling new names introduced once, twice or
  three times is easier for younger adults than for
  older ones (Crook West, 1990).

100
Percent of names recalled
90
80
70
60
50
40
30
20
10
0
18
40
50
60
70
Age group
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Adulthood--Cognitive Changes
Number Of words remembered

• In a study by Schonfield Robertson (1966), the
  ability to recall new information declined during
  early and middle adulthood, but the ability to
  recognize new information did not.

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20
16
12
8
4
0
20
30
40
50
60
70
Age in years
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Adulthood--Cognitive Changes

• Cross-Sectional Study
• a study in which people of different ages are
  compared with one another
• Longitudinal Study
• research in which the same people are restudied
  and retested over a long period

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Adulthood--Cognitive Changes

• Cross-Sectional method suggests decline
• Longitudinal method suggests more stability

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Adulthood

• Crystallized Intelligence
• ones accumulated knowledge and verbal skills
• tends to increase with age
• Fluid Intelligence
• ones ability to reason speedily and abstractly
• tends to decrease during late adulthood
• Social Clock
• the culturally preferred timing of social events
  such as marriage, parenthood, and retirement

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Adulthood
Intelligence (IQ) score

• Verbal intelligence scores hold steady with age,
  while nonverbal intelligence scores decline
  (adapted from Kaufman others, 1989).

105
100
95
90
85
80
75
20
35
55
70
25
45
65
Age group
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Adulthood

• Early-forties midlife crisis?

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Adulthood

• Multinational surveys show that age differences
  in life satisfaction are trivial (Inglehart,
  1990).