Life Span and Human Development

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Life Span andHuman Development
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Prenatal Development
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Prenatal Development

• Germinal Stage
• First two weeks
• Embryonic Stage
• Two weeks to two months
• Fetal Stage
• Two months to birth

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Germinal Stage

• Conception
• fertilization creates a zygote (one-celled
  organism created by the union of a sperm and an
  egg)
• Rapid cell division begins and cell mass migrates
  along fallopian tube to uterine wall
• At one week
• Cell mass implants in uterine wall
• 1 of 5 pregnancies terminate at this point
• Placenta begins to form
• Placenta allows oxygen and nutrients to pass
  into the fetus from the mothers blood stream and
  bodily wastes to pass out to the mother

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Embryonic Stage

• Embryo (2 weeks to 2 months)
• Vital organs and bodily systems begin to form as
  cell division becomes more specialized
• Most miscarriages occur during this period
• Most major structural birth defects are due to
  problems that occur during this stage

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Fetal Stage

• Fetus (2 months to birth)
• Rapid growth as muscles and bones begin to form
• Sex organs develop in the third month
• During final 3 months, brain cells multiply
• 22-26 weeks (age of viability)
• age at which baby could survive if delivered
  prematurely
• 85 survival rate at 26-28 weeks

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Environmental Factors and Prenatal Development

• Maternal nutrition
• maternal malnutrition increases risk of
  neurological deficits, poor motor skills, apathy,
  irritability during infancy.
• Maternal drug use
• Most harmful - sedatives, narcotics, cocaine
• Prescribed and over-the-counter medications also
  pose a risk
• Tobacco
• increased risk for miscarriage, stillbirth, and
  SIDS (sudden infant death syndrome)

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Maternal Alcohol Consumption

• Fetal alcohol syndrome
• congenital problems associated with excessive
  alcohol use during pregnancy
• microcephaly, heart defects, irritability,
  retarded mental and motor development,
  hyperactivity.
• Moderate alcohol consumption
• deficient IQ, reaction time, motor skills,
  attention span, math skills
• increased impulsive, antisocial, and delinquent
  behavior

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Maternal Illness

• Some diseases can interfere with prenatal
  development
• Rubella, syphilis, cholera, smallpox, mumps
• Genital herpes and HIV may be transmitted to
  offspring (typically during delivery)
• About 30 of mothers pass HIV to infants
• Few survive more than one year

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Childhood Motor Development
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Motor Development

• Basic motor skills include grasping/reaching for
  objects, manipulating objects, sitting up,
  crawling
• Cephalocaudal trend
• gain control of upper body before lower body
• Proximodistal trend
• gain control of torso before limbs
• Motor development influenced by
• maturation, infants experimentation, learning,
  and remembering consequences of actions

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Motor Development, Norms, and Cultural Variations

• Norms indicate the average age behaviors and
  abilities will emerge
• Cultural variance can hasten or retard attainment
  of motor milestones
• As children grow older
• maturation becomes less influential
• experience becomes more influential

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Attachment Theory
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Emotional Attachment

• Attachment
• Close emotional bonds of affection that develop
  between infants and their caregivers
• 6-8 months
• Infants begin to show preferential attachment
  around ages 6-8 months
• Separation anxiety
• Emotional distress seen when infants are
  separated from those with whom theyve formed
  attachments (peaks around 14-18 months)

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Emotional Attachment

• INTERPLAY b/t mother and infant
• Role of mother
• sensitivity, responsiveness, consistency
• Role of infant
• temperament, irritability, crying, cooing,
  fussing, smiling, cooperative, tolerance
• Types of attachment
• Ainsworth et al. (1978)
• secure attachment
• anxious-ambivalent attachment
• avoidant attachment

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Secure Attachment

• Attachment figure
• sufficiently near, attentive, responsive,
  approving
• Infant
• feels secure, loved, confident
• Results
• infant - playful, less inhibited,
  exploration-oriented, sociable
• toddler - resilient, competent with high
  self-esteem
• pre-school - more persistence, curiosity,
  self-reliance, leadership, and better peer
  relationships
• childhood/adolescence - advanced cognitive
  development
• adulthood - healthier intimate relationships
  during

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Anxious-Ambivalent Attachment

• Attachment figure
• Over-protective
• Infant
• Fear, anxiety
• Results
• Child becomes very anxious when separated from
  mother
• Tends to engage in visual checking attempts to
  reestablish contact, calling, pleading, clinging

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Avoidant Attachment

• Attachment figure
• inconsistent, punitive, unresponsive
• Infant
• Defensive
• Results
• Infant does not seek contact with mother
• Child tends to maintain proximity while avoiding
  close contact

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Personality Development
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Personality Development

• Is personality firmly established during
  childhood or does it continue to unfold
  throughout the life span?
• Freud
• personality is fixed by age 5
• Erik Erikson
• events of early childhood leave a permanent
  stamp, but personality continues to evolve
  across the life span

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Ericksons Stage Theory ofPersonality Development

• 8 stages
• Each stage characterized by a psychosocial crisis
• Personality
• shaped by how one deals with crises
• Crises
• potential turning points that may yield different
  outcomes

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Ericksons Stage Theory
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Trust vs. Mistrust

• Infant is completely dependent on others to meet
  basic needs
• Trust in others ultimately translates to
  self-trust
• Hope
• the enduring belief that ones wishes are
  attainable despite many irrational impulses an
  infant experiences at birth.
• Failure to establish trust may interfere with
  sense of security and ability to master
  subsequent challenges

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Autonomy vs. Shame Doubt

• Child begins to take responsibility for some
  feeding, toilet-training, dressing, bathing
• Autonomy
• capacity to be independent and self-directed
• Will
• the capacity to freely make choices based on
  realistic knowledge of what is expected and what
  is possible
• Shame
• loss of self-respect due to failure to meet ones
  own standards or those of parents

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Initiative vs. Guilt

• Child explores new activities and ideas with an
  awareness of the social (family/peers) context.
• If conflicting feelings (love/hate), or impulses
  (independence/dependence) are ridiculed or
  ignored, guilt will result
• Sense of purpose develops when child is treated
  respectfully and helped to formulate and pursue
  goals w/o feeling guilty

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Industry vs. Inferiority

• Am I competent to succeed outside my family?
• Need to develop confidence in ability to learn
  and interact as a productive member of social
  group
• Virtue of competence - belief that one can
  successfully initiate and complete tasks

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Cognitive Development
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Piagets Stage Theory of Cognitive Development

• Interested in how children use their intelligence
• Proposed that cognitive processes evolved in
  stages through an interaction between the
  environment and maturation processes
• Sensorimotor period (birth - age 2)
• Preoperational period (2-7)
• Concrete operational period (7-11)
• Formal operational period (11 onward)

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Sensorimotor Period(Birth 2 years)

• Increased ability to coordinate sensory input
• Gradual development of symbolic thought (wheres
  Elmo?) and initiation of language
• Object permanence
• child recognizes that object continues to exist
  even when it is no longer visible
• begins to develop b/t 4-8 months of age
• not mastered until about 18 months of age

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Preoperational Period(2 7 years)

• Water-in-beaker example
• Unable to understand conservation
• awareness that physical quantities remain the
  same in spite of changes in shape
• Unable to solve this type of problem b/c of
  tendency to make certain errors
• Centration
• Irreversibility
• Egocentrism
• Animism

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Preoperational Period(2 7 years)

• Centration
• tendency to focus on just one feature of a
  problem, neglecting other important aspects
• i.e., height of the water line
• Irreversibility
• inability to envision reversing an action
• i.e., what would happen if you poured water back
  in to short beaker

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Preoperational Period(2 7 years)

• Egocentrism
• limited ability to share another persons
  viewpoint
• Asking one of two sisters, does your sister have
  a sister?
• Animism
• Belief that all things are living
• Why does the wind get so mad?

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Concrete Operational Period(7 11 years)

• Development of mental operations
• internal manipulations, reorganizations of mental
  structures
• concrete b/c operations can only be performed
  on images of tangible objects or actual events
• Gain ability of reversibility and decentration

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Concrete Operational Period(7 11 years)

• Reversibility
• Can now mentally undo an action
• Decentration
• Can now focus on more than one aspect of a
  problem
• Leads to decrease in egocentrism and gradual
  mastery of conservation
• Can accomplish hierarchical classifications
• Are there more carnations or flowers?

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Formal Operational Period(11 years through
adulthood)

• Able to apply operations to abstract concepts
  (love, justice)
• Continued development from this point is one of
  degree, not fundamental principles
• Able to systematically solve problems (less
  reliance on trial-and-error)
• Able to hypothesize logical, reflective

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Development of Moral Reasoning
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Kohlbergs Theory of Moral Reasoning

• Developing a sense of right and wrong
• Children asked what to do in thorny moral
  situation and WHY they made that choice.
• Levels of moral development
• Preconventional level
• Conventional level
• Postconventional level

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Heinzs Dilemma

• In Europe, a woman was near death from cancer.
  One drug might save her, a form of radium that a
  druggist in the same town had recently
  discovered. The druggist was charging 2,000,
  ten times what the drug cost him to make. The
  sick womans husband, Heinz, went to everyone he
  knew to borrow the money, but he could only get
  together about half of what it cost. He told the
  druggist that his wife was dying and asked him to
  sell it cheaper or let him pay later. But the
  druggist said, No. the husband got desperate
  and broke into the mans store to steal the drug
  for his wife. Should the husband have done that?
  Why?

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Preconventional Level

• Think in terms of external authority
• Stage 1 Punishment orientation
• Right/wrong determined by what is punished
• Stage 2 Naïve reward orientation
• Right/wrong determined by what is rewarded

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Conventional Level

• Rules are necessary to maintain social order.
• Rules are inflexibly internalized in order to be
  virtuous and win approval from others
• Stage 3 Good boy/girl orientation
• right/wrong determined by close others approval
  disapproval
• Stage 4 Authority orientation
• right/wrong determined by societys rules/laws
  that should be rigidly obeyed

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Postconventional Period

• One begins to develop personal code of ethics
• Moral thinking becomes less rigid, more flexible
• Stage 5 Social contract orientation
• right/wrong determined by societys rules which
  are fallible (not absolute)
• Stage 6 Individual principles and conscience
  orientation
• right/wrong determined by abstract ethical
  principles that emphasize equity and justice

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Transition into Adolescence
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Physical Changes DuringAdolescence

• Pubescence
• 2-year period preceding puberty during which
  changes leading to physical and sexual maturity
  take place
• adolescent growth spurt
• brought on by hormonal changes
• begins around age 11 for females, 13 for males
• secondary sex characteristics
• physical features that distinguish one sex from
  the other, but that are not essential for
  reproduction
• In boys voice change, facial hair, muscle
  growth in torso
• In girls breast growth, widening pelvic bones

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Puberty and Psychosocial Difficulties

• Timing of maturation is related to psychological
  problems and social difficulties
• Most problematic for girls who mature early and
  boys who mature late
• Early maturation
• in general, associated with greater use of
  alcohol/drugs, trouble with law
• in girls, correlated with poorer school
  performance, earlier experience with intercourse,
  more unwanted pregnancy, greater risk for eating
  problems/disorders

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Erikson on AdolescenceIdentity vs. Role Confusion

• Struggle to form a clear sense of self
• Finding values and an ideology that offers
  direction
• Results from changes associated with puberty,
  need to consider vocational goals, cognitive
  sophistication that allows for independent
  thinking about religion
• Fidelity
• Ability to sustain loyalties to certain values
  despite inevitable conflicts or inconsistencies

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Marcias Identity Statuses

• Identity Foreclosure
• Premature commitment to values/roles prescribed
  by parents (circumvent the struggle of identity
  formationmay backfire)
• Identity Moratorium
• Delaying commitment to experiment with
  alternative ideologies/careers self-doubt and
  confusion
• Identity diffusion
• Apathy
• Absence of struggle for identity, but no concern
  about it
• Identity achievement
• Arriving at a sense of self and direction after
  considering alternatives

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Turmoil of Adolescence

• Tend to have increased rates of volatile and
  negative emotions
• Tendency to engage in risky behaviors
• substance abuse, careless sexual practices,
  dangerous driving
• Suicide rates have increased in recent decades
• The Suicide Crisis attempted suicide more
  problematic than completed suicide
• In general pop., attempts outnumber actual
  suicide 81
• Among adolescents, attempts outnumber actual
  suicide 501 to 2001

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Transition to Adulthood
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Expanse of Adulthood

• Ericksons View of Adulthood
• Intimacy vs Isolation
• Promotes love and openness over
  manipulativeness
• Generativity vs Self-Absorption (or Stagnation)
• Hope to achieve virtue of care for others
• Desire to contribute in socially meaningful way
  to future generations
• Integrity vs Despair
• Virtue of wisdomor ability to reflect on ones
  strengths and weaknesses with sense of dignity
  and optimism

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Milestones of Adulthood

• Marriage
• over 90 of adults eventually marry
• Adjusting to Parenthood
• parents rate adolescence as most difficult phase
  of child-rearing
• Adjusting to the Empty Nest
• liberation from child-rearing, but may be
  marked by anxiety and need to reestablish sense
  of identity
• Midlife Crisis
• reappraisal of ones life
• May occur for individuals who experienced
  idenity forclosure

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Milestones of Adulthood

• Aging
• Physical Changes
• hair thins, proportion of body fat increases
• Cognitive Changes
• number of active neurons declines as normal part
  of aging
• Dementia is abnormal condition marked by multiple
  cognitive deficits such as memory impairment
• Death and Dying
• Elisabeth Kubler-Rosss Stages of Coping with
  Death
• Denial - Not me...
• Anger - Why me...
• Bargaining - Yes me, but
• Depression - Mourn loss of self
• Acceptance - My time is close and its all
  right