1/22/24

Life Span Development

Developmental psychologists: study physical, mental, and social changes occurring throughout the life cycle, their work centers on three major issues:

• Nature vs nurture/genetics/heredity vs environment: are we genetically influenced or environmentally influenced, 50/50

• Continuity vs stages: as we change is it a continuous process or are we going through distinct stages

  • Prenatal development: stage of development before birth, everything that the mother does during this period has the ability to affect the child

    • Germinal/zygotic: first 2 weeks, the zygote is the result of a fertilized egg, rapid cell division and the zygote implants onto the mothers uterine wall once this attachment occurs the outer cells become the placenta: how the baby will receive nourishment from the mother, and the inner cells are called the embryo

    • embryonic stage/period: third week through eight week, the body organs begin to form and function

    • fetal period: ninth week to birth, when internal organs are sufficiently formed and allows a prematurely born fetus a chance of survival

    • Teratogens: harmful agents or substances that can cause malformations or defects in embryo or fetus

      • ex. radiation, toxic chemicals, diseases, drugs

      • Fetal alcohol syndrome: causes physical and cognitive abnormalities caused by a pregnant woman heavy drinking, is the leading cause of mental retardation

  • Newborn: babies are born with reflexes: in-born responses

    • Rooting reflex: when you rub the baby’s cheek, it opens its mouth and turns its head

    • Sucking reflex: typically touching the baby’s lips cause the baby to start sucking

    • Moro/startle reflex: if you start to lay the baby down-title them backwards, their arms and legs shoot straight out

    • Babinski reflex: when you rub the bottom of a baby’s foot its toes fan out and then curl back in

    • Grasping reflex: if you put your finger in the baby’s palms they will grasp your finger very tightly

    • Stepping reflex: if you hold the baby upright with their feet touching a flat surface they will move their legs like they are trying to walk

  • infancy: after birth the neural networks that enable you to walk, talk, and remember have a wild growth spurt

  • Sigmund Freud:

    • infantile amnesia: infants can’t remember what happened to them or what they did before the age of 3 or 4

  • maturation: biological growth processes that enable orderly changes in behavior and it’s relatively uninfluenced by experience, in order to do the skills we are able to do all the body parts involved have to be mature for that skill to be in place

• Stability vs change: do our individual traits persist or how much do we change

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Plasticity: the brain's capacity for modification, greater in childhood than in adulthood

Use it or lose it: starts from birth and is applied throughout life

Piaget: first proponent of the idea that children think differently than adults, he developed a four-stage theory of cognitive development

• Two primary ways children try to make sense of new information

  • Assimilation: interpreting one's new experiences in terms of their existing schemas: a mental category or a concept that you have about something in your world

  • Accommodation: adapting one's current understandings or schemas to incorporate new information

    • ex. having a dog at home going to park with mom and calling a cat a dog and mom letting you know that they are two different animals

Cognition: all the mental activities associated with thinking, knowing, and remembering

⭐ people used to think children were just miniature adults

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cognitive development

social development: interacting with others, from birth parents and the baby communicate through eye contact, touch, smiles, and voice. The interactions between the parent and child promote the infant’s survival and their emerging sense of self,

• stranger anxiety: fear of strangers usually occurs between 7-9 months (more commonly 8-9 months)

• attachment: an emotional tie with another person babies attach to those with whom they are comfortable, familiar, and responsive to their needs. For baby to feel comfortable with caregiver

  • secure attachment: in their mother's presence, they will play comfortably, explore their environment, and maybe become distressed when the parent leaves.

  • insecure attachment: less likely to explore their surroundings, they may be clingy, likely to become distressed when the mother leaves

  • Harry Harlow: researched attachments, and worked with monkeys, he believed that baby monkeys attach to their mother because the mother is the food source

    • took baby monkeys mad cloth mother monkey that didn’t have a bottle and the other a wired mother monkey that had a bottle, he would place the monkeys with the mother and they found that the baby monkeys preferred the cloth mother monkey, there is more to forming an attachment than just providing food

• temperament: a person's characteristic, emotional reactivity, and intensity

  • Konrad Lorenz: studied imprinting

    • imprinting: rigid attachment process that animals go through early in life

      • Humans are not imprintable

• Daycare: no major impact on the child’s development due to parents working, quality of daycare is the most important factor,

  • good quality: low ratio of kids to workers and stimulating environment

• Divorce: affect children, divorce rate 50%, two doses of stress,

  • first dose: occurs immediately after the divorce-a lot of anger, resentment, and there may be depression

  • second dose: when the custodial parent remarries

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Self-concept: a sense of one's identity and personal worth, starts from an early age affected by things above

• Children with strong self-concept: more confident, independent, optimistic, assertive, and sociable

Parenting patterns:

• Authoritarian: impose rules, and expect obedience

• Permissive: submit to their children's desires, make few demands, and use little punishment

• Rejecting/Neglecting: disengaged, expect little, and invest little, basic needs met but little to no relationship

• Authoritative: (reasonable) demanding and responsive, establish reasonable rules in house and the kid understands why they would be punished if they break the rules, punishments are reasonable, the children would understand why the rules are in place, parents are open to discussion and compromise

Another aspect of life that parents influence

• two ways we look at gender

  • gender identity: one’s sense of being male or female

  • gender typing: the acquisition of a traditional masculine or feminine role

• theories of gender

  • social learning theory: we learn social behaviors by observing and imitating and by being rewarded or punished

  • gender schema theory: that children learn from their cultures, a concept of what it means to be male or female and they adjust their behavior accordingly

Adolescence: period between childhood and adulthood, begins with puberty and ends with the social achievement of independent (emotionally, socially, physically, and financially) adult status t

• roughly corresponds with the teen years, a time of transition, marked by mood swings

• G Stanley Hall: researcher of adolescence says it is a period of storm and stress

• Physical development: key physical change is puberty

• puberty: the period of sexual maturation during which one becomes capable of reproduction, average age for females is 11, and the average age for boys is 13

  • two sex characteristics

    • Primary sex characteristics: ovaries, testes, and external genitalia that make reproduction possible

    • Secondary sex characteristics: non-reproductive sexual characteristics such as female breasts and hips, male voice quality, and body hair, females experience monarchy: first menstrual period

    • Mary Cover Jones: researcher maturation, found that early maturing boys have dividends for girls early maturation is more stressful

• Cognitive Development: the stage according to Piaget is formal operation (adolescence) this developing ability to reason gives them a new level of social awareness and moral judgment

• Lawrence Kohlberg's stages of moral development three levels

  • Preconventionallevel: younger than 10, can consider punishment and obedience, choose right behavior to avoid punishment

    • Mutual benefit or self-interest: choosing right behavior because you're going to get something out of it

  • Conventional level: between around 7 and 11, interpersonal expectations or conformity, do the right thing because you want approval from others

    • Law and order: follow the rules and laws simply because they have been established by the society

  • l Post-conventionalevel: 11 and above, social contract orientation, you choose right behavior based on protecting the basic rights of all members of society, values such as fairness, justice, equality, and democracy ex not playing music late or letting guests go onto neighbors property

    • Universal moral principles: you choose right behavior based on self-chosen ethical principles, if you belive you should never take somebody's life but you take somebody's life or retribution and you can live with that and you feel justified

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Erik Erickson's psychosocial stages of development

• psychosocial: as we interact with others we are processing those interactions

• there is a conflict (crisis) at each stage of life, it will be solved in either a positive way or a negative way

early middle and late adulthood: harder to generalize about stages

• physical changes: physical abilities tend to peak in early adulthood, muscular strength, reaction time, sensory keenness, and cardiac output all crest by the mid-twenties,

  • women mature earlier than men and peak earlier, women experience menopause: the time of natural cessation of menstruation, and their ability to reproduce declines - average age 45 and 50, going through the change can experience depression, changes in sleep, some become very grumpy, hot flashes

  • sensory abilities: visual sharpness diminishes adaptation to changes in light levels slows older people have more accidents, hearing and distance perception diminish

  • health: the body's disease-fighting immune system weakens making elderly people more susceptible to life-threatening ailments such as cancer and pneumonia but a lifetime accumulation of antibodies, older people suffer less often from short-term ailments such as the flu and colds,

  • use it or lose it

caregiving family members: often a diseases exasperated and exhausted victims

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cognitive changes:

• use it or lose it

memory

• prospective memory: memory to do routine stuff, very little decline, ex. taking medication, taking care of body hygiene, items to pick up at the store

• two types of studies that have been conducted to measure how thinking and memory change throughout the lifespan

  • Longitudinal study: the same people are restudied and retested over a long period of time, expensive, takes a lot of work

  • Cross-sectional study: one in which people of different ages are tested and compared to each other, concern - difference in the results could be due to factors other than age

  • Based on studies found 2 types of intelligence

    • Crystallized intelligence: one’s accumulated knowledge and verbal skills, tend to increase with age

    • Fluid intelligence: one’s ability to reason speedily, and abstractly, and this tends to decrease in late adulthood

social changes

• one of the ways adulthood has been described is by using this statement: Adults progress through periods of stability, punctuated by times of upheaval and change

• concept of social clock: a cultures preferred timing of social events such as marriage, parenthood, and retirement

commitment to love in adulthood,

Gottman concludes that a good indicator of likely marital success is at least a 5:1 ratio of positive to negative reactions, 5 times more smiling, touching, complimenting, and laughing than sarcasm, criticism, and insults.

when children are small they absorb your time, money, and emotional energy, which can cause stress for the couple

empty nest syndrome: a feeling of distress focusing on a loss of purpose and relationship

older people report as much happiness and satisfaction with life as younger people do, emotions tend to medal so the highs are less high and the lows are less low

death

• usually, the most difficult separation of one's spouse, suffered mostly by women because men die younger

• accepting death is more severe when it is unexpected and sudden, harder to deal with a younger person's death

• people grieve differently, no right or wrong way

• Elisabeth Kuvler-Ross: known for her 5 stages of death and dying

  • denial: given test results that say there is a terminal condition and they'll say that those aren’t their test results

  • anger: where people question “Why me?”

  • bargaining: with whatever power they believe in, if you let me live till this time I will be in church every day

  • Depression: what the sick person is going to miss out on, family and friends grieving

  • Acceptance: parents become advocates for what the child has died from, plan how they want their end of life to go,

• She was involved in hospice: an organization made up of largely volunteer staff which is for dying people and their families in special facilities or their own homes