HUMAN DEVELOPMENT

As we grow older, our behavior changes in many ways. Developmental psychologists seek to
describe and understand these changes.

Module 5.1 Cognitive Development in Infancy and Childhood

● Research Designs for Studying Development

❑ Cross-Sectional and Longitudinal Designs

▪ A cross-sectional study compares groups of individuals of different ages at the same

time. For example, comparing the memory abilities of 3 years old, 5 years old, and 7
years old.

Advantage: Quick and No risk of confusing age effects with effects of changes in society

Disadvantage: Risk of sampling error by getting different kinds of people at different ages
and Risk of cohort effects

▪ A longitudinal study follows a single group of individuals as they develop. For

example, studying the memory abilities of 3-year-olds, and of the same children
again, the researcher study their memory abilities in 2 and 4 years later.

Advantage: No risk of sampling differences, Can study effects of one experience on later
development and Can study consistency within individuals over time.

Disadvantage: Takes a long time, Some participants quit and Sometimes hard to separate
effects of age from changes in society

⮚ Selective attrition is the tendency for certain kinds of people to drop out of a
study.

▪ A sequential (or cross-sequential) design combines cross-sectional and longitudinal

designs. A sequential design, a researcher starts with people of different ages and
studies them again at later times. For example, one might study 6-year-olds and
8-year-olds and then examine the same children 2 years later

▪ Cohort Effects-People of different generations differ in many ways

▪ A cohort is a group of people born at a particular time or a group of people who
enter an organization at a particular time.
● The Fetus and the Newborn

During prenatal development, everyone starts as a fertilized egg cell, or zygote, that develops
through its first few stages until it becomes a fetus about 8 weeks after conception. As soon as 6
weeks after conception, the nervous system is mature enough to produce a few movements.

If the mother drinks alcohol during pregnancy, the infant may develop fetal alcohol syndrome, a
condition marked by malformations of the face, heart, and ears; and nervous system damage,
including seizures, hyperactivity, and impairments of learning, memory, problem solving, attention,
and motor coordination.

● Infancy
1. . Infants’ Vision
William James, the founder of American psychology, said that as far as an infant can
tell, the world is a “buzzing confusion,” full of meaningless sights and sounds.
We can start by recording an infant’s eye movements. Even 2-day-old infants spend
more time looking at drawings of human faces than at other patterns with similar areas of
light and dark. However, infants do not have the same concept of “face” that adults do
newborns gaze equally at distorted and normal faces. However, they gaze longer at
right-side-up faces than upside-down faces regardless of distortion. Evidently, the newborn’s
concept of face is just an oval with most of its content toward the top. This ability continues
develop for years.
2. Infants’ Hearing
Infants don’t do much, but one thing they do is suck.
In one study, the experimenters played a brief sound and noted how it affected infants’
sucking rate. On the first few occasions, the sound increased the sucking rate. A repeated
sound produced less and less effect. We say that the infant became habituated to the sound.
Habituation is decreased response to a repeated stimulus. When the experimenters
substituted a new sound, the sucking rate increased. Evidently, the infant was aroused by the
unfamiliar sound. When a change in a stimulus increases a previously habituated response,
we say that the stimulus produced dishabituation. This dishabituation has an important
distinction for later language comprehension.
3. Infants’ Learning and Memory
Carolyn Rovee-Collier (1997, 1999) demonstrated that infants can learn a response
and remember it. She attached a ribbon to an ankle so that an infant could activate a mobile
by kicking with one leg. They remembered what to do when the ribbon was reattached
several days later, to the infants’ evident delight. Six-month-old infants remembered the
response for 2 weeks. Even after they forgot it, they quickly relearned it
● Jean Piaget’s View of Cognitive Development
o Piaget’s terminology:
▪ A schema is an organized way of interacting with objects.
▪ Assimilation means applying an old schema to new objects or problems.
▪ Accommodation means modifying an old schema to fit a new object or problem.
 ▪ Equilibration is the establishment of harmony or balance between the
assimilation and accommodation.

Piaget contended that children progress through four major stages of intellectual development:

1. The sensorimotor stage (from birth to almost 2 years)

● (The first 1½ to 2 years) behavior is mostly simple motor responses to sensory stimuli.

● Lack the concept of object permanence, the idea that objects continue to exist even
when we do not see or hear them.

● “Out of sight, out of existence.”

● Sense of Self (Do young children have a concept of “self”? How would we know? Here is
the evidence: Someone puts a spot of unscented rouge on an infant’s nose and then
puts the infant in front of a mirror. Infants younger than 1½ years old either ignore the
red spot on the baby in the mirror or reach out to touch the mirror. At some point after
age 1½ years, infants instead touch themselves on the nose, indicating that they
recognize themselves in the mirror.)
2. The preoperational stage (from just before 2 to 7 years)

● Piaget refers to this period as the preoperational stage because the child lacks
operations, which are reversible mental processes.

● Three typical aspects of preoperational thought are egocentrism, difficulty distinguishing

appearance from reality, and lack of the concept of conservation.

● Egocentrism: Failing to Understand Other People’s Perspective

-Meant that a child sees the world as centered around himself or herself and
cannot easily take another person’s perspective.

● Theory of Mind: Understanding that Different People Know Different Things

-Is an understanding that other people have a mind, too, and that each
person knows some things that other people don’t know.

● Distinguishing Appearance from Reality

-During Piaget’s preoperational stage, children apparently do not distinguish

clearly between appearance and reality.

● Developing the Concept of Conservation

-According to Piaget, preoperational children lack the concept of

conservation. They fail to understand that objects conserve such properties
 as number, length, volume, area, and mass after changes in the shape or
arrangement of the objects. They cannot perform the mental operations
necessary to understand the transformations.

3. The concrete operations stage (from about 7 to 11 years)

▪ During the stage of concrete operations, children perform mental operations on concrete
objects but still have trouble with abstract or hypothetical ideas.

Example: ask this question, “How could you move a mountain of whipped cream from one
side of the city to the other?” Older children enjoy devising imaginative answers, but children
in the concrete operations stage complain that the question is silly.

3. The formal operations stage (from about 11 years onward)

● In Piaget’s stage of formal operations, adolescents develop logical, deductive reasoning
and systematic planning.
● Example: For example, we set up five bottles of clear liquid and explain that it is possible
to mix some combination to produce a yellow liquid. The task is to find that combination.
Children in the concrete operations stage plunge right in with no plan. They try
combining bottles A and B, then C and D, then perhaps A, C, and E. Soon they have
forgotten which combinations they’ve already tried. Adolescents in the formal operations
stage approach the problem more systematically. They may first try all the two-bottle
combinations: AB, AC , AD, AE, BC, and so forth. If those fail, they try three-bottle
combinations: ABC, ABD, ABE, AC D, and so on. By trying every possible combination only
once, they are sure to succeed.

Piaget’s Stages of Concrete Operations and Formal Operations

▪ During the stage of concrete operations, children perform mental operations on concrete objects
but still have trouble with abstract or hypothetical ideas.

Example: ask this question, “How could you move a mountain of whipped cream from one side of
the city to the other?” Older children enjoy devising imaginative answers, but children in the
concrete operations stage complain that the question is silly.

▪ In Piaget’s stage of formal operations, adolescents develop logical, deductive reasoning and
systematic planning.

Example: For example, we set up five bottles of clear liquid and explain that it is possible to mix
some combination to produce a yellow liquid. The task is to find that combination. Children in the
concrete operations stage plunge right in with no plan. They try combining bottles A and B, then
C and D, then perhaps A, C, and E. Soon they have forgotten which combinations they’ve already
tried. Adolescents in the formal operations stage approach the problem more systematically.
They may first try all the two-bottle combinations: AB, AC , AD, AE, BC, and so forth. If those fail,
 they try three-bottle combinations: ABC, ABD, ABE, AC D, and so on. By trying every possible
combination only once, they are sure to succeed.

Module 5.2 Social and Emotional Development

Erikson’s Description of Human Development

● Erik Erikson divided the human life span into eight periods that he called ages or stages.
At each stage, he said, people have specific tasks to master, and each stage generates its
own social and emotional conflicts.
● According to Erikson, failure to master the task of any stage leaves unfortunate
consequences that carry over to later stages. For example, an infant deals with basic
trust versus mistrust. An infant with supportive environment forms strong attachments
that positively influence future relationships with other people (Erikson, 1963). An infant
who is mistreated fails to form a trusting relationship and has trouble developing close
ties with people later.
 Infancy and Childhood

An important aspect of human life is attachment— a feeling of closeness toward another

person. Attachments begin in infancy. John Bowlby (1973) proposed that infants who develop
good attachments have a sense of security and safety, and those without strong attachments
have trouble developing close relations later as well.

Most research on attachment has measured it in the Strange Situation (usually capitalized),
pioneered by Mary Ainsworth (1979). In this procedure, a mother and her infant (typically 12 to
18 months old) come into a room with many toys. Then a stranger enters the room. The mother
leaves and then returns. A few minutes later, both the stranger and the mother leave. Then the
stranger returns, and finally, the mother returns. Through a one-way mirror, a psychologist
observes the infant’s reactions to each coming and going. Observers classify infants’ responses in
the following categories:

▪ Securely attached. The infant shows some distress when the mother leaves but cries
only briefly if at all and when she returns, the infant goes to her with apparent delight,
cuddles for a while, and then returns to the toys.

▪ Anxious (or resistant). The infant clings to the mother and cries profusely when she
leaves, as if worried that she might not return. When she does return, the infant clings
to her again but does not use her as a base to explore the toys.

▪ Avoidant. While the mother is present, the infant does not stay near her and seldom
interacts with her. The infant may or may not cry when she leaves and does not go to her
when she returns.

▪ Disorganized. The infant seems not even to notice the mother or looks away while
approaching her or covers his or her face or lies on the floor. The infant alternates
between approach and avoidance and shows more fear than affection

One reason is that children differ genetically in their temperament—their tendency to

be active or inactive, and to respond vigorously or quietly to new stimuli. Attachment style also
relates strongly to how responsive the parents are to the infants’ needs, including holding,
touching, facial expressions, and so forth.

Social Development in Childhood and Adolescence

▪ Around puberty, the onset of sexual maturity, sexual interest begins to enter into peer
relationships. The status of adolescents varies among cultures and eras.

▪ Adolescence is often described as a time of “storm and stress.” Most adolescents report
occasional periods of moodiness and conflict with their parents in early adolescence, though the
conflicts decrease in later adolescence.
▪ Identity Development

▪ An adolescent’s concern with decisions about the future and the quest for
self-understanding has been called an identity crisis.

▪ Identity diffusion are those who have not yet given any serious thought to making
decisions and who have no clear sense of identity.

▪ Identity moratorium are considering the issues but not yet making decisions.

▪ Identity foreclosure is a state of reaching firm decisions without much thought.

▪ Identity achievement is the outcome of having explored various possible identities and
then making one’s own decisions.

Adulthood

▪ Daniel Levinson (1986) describes adult development in terms of a series of overlapping eras.

▪ During middle adulthood, extending from about age 40 to 65, physical strength begins to
decline, on average, but not enough to be a problem (except for pro athletes).

In middle adulthood, according to Levinson (1986), people go through a midlife transition, a

period of reassessing goals, setting new ones, and preparing for the rest of life. This transition may
occur in response to a divorce, illness, death in the family, a career change, or some other event that
causes the person to question past decisions and current goals

Old Age
 ▪ Finally, people reach late adulthood, beginning around age 65.According to Erikson, people who
feel satisfied with their lives experience “ego integrity,” and those who are not satisfied feel
“despair.”

▪ Psychologists have long noticed a conflict between test results that show older people declining
intellectually and observations showing older people doing well in everyday life.

▪ Your satisfaction in old age will depend largely on how you live while younger.

The Psychology of Facing Death

▪ “Live each day as if it were going to be your last”

▪ According to terror-management theory, we cope with our fear of death by avoiding thoughts
about death and by affirming a worldview that provides self-esteem, hope, and value in life.

▪ People at all ages face the anxieties associated with the inevitability of death. A reminder of
death influences people to defend their worldviews.

Module 5.3 Diversity: Gender, Culture, and Family

● Gender Influences

Men and women differ on average in various aspects of behavior, including interests. However,
researchers have found no clear evidence of differences in intellectual abilities.

● Gender Roles

▪ Gender roles (also known as sex roles), the different activities that society expects of
males and females.

▪ Parents and others convey certain expectations of how boys and girls will act. These
expectations substantially influence behavioral development.

▪ Reasons behind Gender Differences

▪ Gender differences reflect both biological and social influences.

▪ Biological influences include the greater size and strength of males, on average,
as well as the apparent influence of prenatal hormones on a child’s later
interests.

▪ Social influences include the expectations that parents convey to their children.

▪ Gender roles vary significantly across cultures

Cultural and Ethnic Influences

▪ Ethnic Minorities- a group of people who differ in race or color or in national, religious, or
cultural origin from the dominant group- often the majority population- of the country in
which they live.

▪ Achieving ethnic identity is comparable to the process adolescents go through in finding an

individual identity. In most cases, minority-group members who achieve a strong, favorable
ethnic identity have high self-esteem.

Acculturation

▪ Ethnic identity is especially salient for immigrants to a country

▪ Biculturalism, partial identification with two cultures

▪ Example of acculturation are Filipinos who love to eat Korean foods and dress up Korean
style or imitating Korean fashion.

The Family

In early childhood, parents and other relatives are the most important people in a child’s life.
How those early family do experiences mold personality and social behavior?

▪ Birth Order and Family Size

▪ Many studies comparing firstborn versus laterborn children have failed to

separate the effects of birth order from the effects of family size. Much of the
apparent difference between firstborns and later-borns is really a difference
between children of small versus large families.

Effects of Parenting Styles

▪ Parenting style correlates with the behavior of the children.

▪ Authoritative parents: These parents set high standards and impose controls, but
they are also warm and responsive to the child’s communications.

▪ Authoritarian parents: Like the authoritative parents, authoritarian parents set firm
controls, but they tend to be emotionally more distant from the child.

▪ Permissive parents: Permissive parents are warm and loving but undemanding.

▪ Indifferent or uninvolved parents: These parents spend little time with their children
and do little more than provide them with food and shelter.

Non-traditional Families
 ▪ Nontraditional child care. Researchers have found no important differences in
personality development between children reared by gay or lesbian couples and
those reared by heterosexual couples.

Parental Conflict and Divorce

▪ Effects of divorce. Children of divorced parents often show signs of distress, but the
results vary across individuals.