Development over the lifespan

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Development over the lifespan
chapter 3
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Overview
chapter 3

• Conception to year one
• Cognitive development
• Learning to be good
• Gender development
• Adolescence
• Adulthood
• The wellsprings of resilience

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Agents that cross the placenta
chapter 3

• German measles
• X-rays and other radiation
• Sexually transmitted diseases
• Cigarette smoking
• Alcohol and other drugs

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Physical abilities
chapter 3

• Newborn reflexes
• Rooting
• Sucking
• Swallowing
• Moro (startle)
• Babinski
• Grasping
• Stepping

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Perceptual abilities
chapter 3

• Visual abilities
• Quickly develops beyond initial range of eight
  inches
• Can distinguish contrasts, shadows, and edges
• Other senses
• Hearing
• Touch
• Olfaction

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Culture and maturation
chapter 3

• Many aspects of development depend on customs
• Babys ability to sleep alone
• Recommendation to have babies sleep on their back
  has caused many babies to skip crawling.

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Attachment
chapter 3

• A deep emotional bond that an infant develops
  with its primary caretaker
• Contact comfort
• In primates, the innate pleasure derived from
  close physical contact
• The basis of the infants first attachment
• Tested using strange situation
• A parent-infant separation and reunion
  procedure that is staged in a laboratory to test
  the security of a childs attachment

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Types of attachment
chapter 3

• Secure
• A parent-infant relationship in which the baby is
  secure when the parent is present, distressed by
  separation, and delighted by reunion.
• Insecure
• A parent-infant relationship in which the baby
  clings to the parent, cries at separation, and
  reacts with anger or apathy to reunion.

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What causes insecure attachment?
chapter 3

• Abandonment and deprivation in the first two
  years of life
• Parenting that is abusive, neglectful, or erratic
• Childs genetically influenced temperament
• Stressful circumstances in the family

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Language development
chapter 3

• Acquisition of speech begins in the first few
  months.
• Infants are responsive to pitch, intensity, and
  sound.
• By 4-6 months of age children can recognize their
  names and repetitive words.
• By 6-12 months they become familiar with sentence
  structure, start babbling.

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Language development
chapter 3

• By 11 months, infants use symbolic gestures.
• About 12 months, infants use words to label
  objects.
• 18-24 months, toddlers combine 2-3 words into
  telegraphic speech.

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Innate capacity for language
chapter 3

• Language too complex to be learned bit by bit
• Sentences have surface and deep structures.
• Surface structure the way a sentence is spoken
• Deep structure how a sentence is to be
  understood
• To transform surface sentence structures into
  deep ones, children must apply rules of grammar.

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Language acquisition device
chapter 3

• If we dont teach syntax to toddlers, the brain
  must contain a language acquisition device.
• An innate module that allows young children to
  develop language if they are exposed to an
  adequate sampling of conversation
• Children are born with universal grammar, a
  sensitivity to the core features common to all
  languages.
• Nouns and verbs, subjects and objects, negatives

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Evidence supporting the LAD
chapter 3

• Children. . .
• in different cultures go through similar stages
  of linguistic development.
• combine words in ways adults never would.
• learn to speak or sign correctly without adult
  correction.
• not exposed to adult language may invent a
  language of their own.
• as young as 7 months can derive simple linguistic
  rules from a string of sounds.

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Evidence for learning and language
chapter 3

• Children learn the probability that any given
  word or syllable will follow another.
• Parents respond to childrens errors by restating
  or elaborating the phrase. Children imitate
  these adult recasts and expansions.

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Thinking
chapter 3

• According to Piaget, cognitive development
  consists of mental adaptations to new
  observations.
• Two adaptive processes
• Assimilation absorbing new information into
  existing cognitive structures
• Accommodation modifying existing cognitive
  structures in response to new information

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Your turn
chapter 3

• At what age will children recognize that the two
  clay balls on the right have the same amount of
  clay as the two balls on the left?
• 1. Ages 0-2
• 2. Ages 2-7
• 3. Ages 7-12
• 4. Ages 12 and over

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Sensorimotor stage
chapter 3

• Birth2 years
• Major accomplishment is object permanence.
• The understanding that an object continues to
  exist even when you cannot see or touch it

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Preoperational stage
chapter 3

• Ages 27
• Focused on limitations of childrens thinking.
• Children at this age could not reason.
• Unable to perform operations
• Egocentric
• Cannot grasp concept of conservation

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Concrete operations
chapter 3

• Ages 712
• Childrens thinking is still grounded in concrete
  experiences and concepts, but they can now
  understand conservation, reversibility, and
  causation.

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Formal operations stage
chapter 3

• Ages 12adulthood
• Teenagers are capable of abstract reasoning
• Can compare and classify ideas
• Can reason about situations not personally
  experienced
• Can think about the future
• Can search systematically for solutions

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Current views of cognitive development
chapter 3

• Cognitive abilities develop in continuous,
  overlapping waves.
• Preschoolers are not as egocentric as Piaget
  thought.
• Children understand more than Piaget thought.
• Cognitive development is spurred by growing speed
  and efficiency of information processing.
• Cognitive development depends on the childs
  education and culture.

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Moral reasoningKohlbergs theory
chapter 3

• Preconventional level
• Punishment and obedience
• Instrumental relativism
• Conventional level
• Good boynice girl
• Society-maintaining
• Postconventional level
• Social contract
• Universal ethical principles

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Teaching moral behavior
chapter 3

• Power assertion
• Parent uses punishment and authority to correct
  misbehavior.
• Users tend to be authoritarian.
• Induction
• Parent appeals to childs own resources,
  abilities, sense of responsibility, and feelings
  for others in correcting misbehavior.
• Users tend to be authoritative.

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Gender identity and typing
chapter 3

• Gender identity
• The fundamental sense of being male or female,
  independent of whether the person conforms to
  social and cultural rules of gender
• Gender typing
• Process by which children learn the abilities,
  interests, personality traits, and behaviors
  associated with being masculine or feminine in
  their culture

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Influences on gender development
chapter 3

• Biological factors
• Biological researchers believe that early play
  and toy preferences have a basis in prenatal
  hormones, genes, or brain organization.
• Cognitive factors
• Cognitive psychologists suggest that toy
  preferences are based on gender schemas or the
  mental network of knowledge, beliefs, metaphors,
  and expectations about what it means to be male
  or female.
• Learning factors
• Gender appropriate play may be reinforced by
  parents, teachers, and peers.

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Physiology of adolescence
chapter 3

• Adolescence
• Period of life from puberty until adulthood
• Puberty
• The age at which a person becomes capable of
  sexual reproduction
• Menarche
• A girls first menstrual period

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Timing of puberty
chapter 3

• Onset of puberty depends on genetic and
  environmental factors.
• E.g., body fat triggers the hormonal changes
• Early vs. late onset
• Early maturing boys have more positive views of
  their bodies and are more likely to smoke, binge
  drink, and break the law.
• Early maturing girls are usually socially popular
  but also regarded by peer group as precocious and
  sexually active. They are more likely to fight
  with parents, drop out of school, and have a
  negative body image.

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Turmoil and adjustment
chapter 3

• Extreme turmoil and problems with adjustment are
  the exception rather than the rule.
• Three kinds of problems are more likely
• Conflict with parents
• Mood swings and depression
• Higher rates of rule-breaking and risky behavior

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Eriksons eight stages
chapter 3

• Trust vs. mistrust
• Infancy (birth-age 1)
• Autonomy vs. shame doubt
• Toddler (ages 1-2)
• Initiative vs. guilt
• Preschool (ages 3-5)
• Industry vs. inferiority
• Elementary school (ages 6-12)
• Identity vs. role confusion
• Adolescence (ages 13-19)
• Intimacy vs. isolation
• Young adulthood (ages 20-40)
• Generativity vs. stagnation

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Your turn
chapter 3

• At what age, according to Erikson, are people
  likely to wrestle with whether they are able to
  deal with the tasks facing them in life?
• 1. Age 4
• 2. Age 7
• 3. Age 15
• 4. Age 25

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Your turn
chapter 3

• At what age, according to Erikson, are people
  likely to wrestle with whether they are able to
  deal with the tasks facing them in life?
• 1. Age 4
• 2. Age 7
• 3. Age 15
• 4. Age 25

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The transitions of life
chapter 3

• Emerging adulthood (ages 18-25)
• Phase of life distinct from adolescence and
  adulthood
• In some ways an adult, in some ways not
• The middle years (ages 35-65)
• Perceived by many as the prime of life
• Menopause the cessation of menstruation and the
  production of ova, usually a gradual process
  lasting several years

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Are you an adult yet?
chapter 3
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Old age
chapter 3

• Some types of thinking change, others stay the
  same.
• Fluid intelligence the capacity for deductive
  reasoning and the ability to use new information
  to solve problems relatively independent of
  education, declines in old age
• Crystallized intelligence cognitive skills and
  specific knowledge of information acquired over a
  lifetime depends heavily on education, remains
  stable over lifetime.

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Lifespan intellectual changes
chapter 3

• Some intellectual abilities dwindle with age.
• Numerical and verbal abilities relatively stable.

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The wellsprings of resilience
chapter 3

• Research psychologists have questioned the
  psychodynamic assumption that childhood traumas
  have emotional effects that inevitably continue
  into adulthood.
• Considerable evidence disputes this claim.

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Challenging our assumptions
chapter 3

• Recovery from war
• Only 20 of WWII war orphans had problems after
  being adopted and moving to the US. Most of
  these eventually established happy lives.
• Recovery from abusive or alcoholic parents
• Their children are at-risk for developing these
  problems, but most do not.
• Recovery from sexual abuse
• More emotional and behavioral symptoms, but most
  adjust and recover.