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PSY 211 – Lifespan Development Chapter 1: Introduction Notes

S1 – The Life-Span Perspective 

Development is the pattern of change that begins at conception and continues through the human life span. o Includes both growth and decline.

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Studying life-span development helps: o Prepare us to take responsibility for children, gives us insight into our own lives, and gives us knowledge about what our lives will be like as we age.

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The life-span perspective includes the following basic concepts: o Development is lifelong, multidimensional, multidirectional, and plastic; o Its study is multidisciplinary; o It is embedded in contexts; o It involves growth, maintenance, and regulation; o And it is a co-construction of biological, sociocultural, and individual factors.

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Three important sources of contextual includes are: o 1. Normative age-graded influences; o 2. Normative history-graded influences; o And 3. Nonnormative life events.

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Contemporary concerns include: health and well-being, parenting, education, sociocultural contexts and diversity, and social policy.

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Important dimensions of the sociocultural context include: culture, ethnicity, socioeconomic status, and gender.

S2 – The Nature of Development 

Three key development processes are biological, cognitive, and socioemotional. Development is influenced by an interplay of these processes.

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The lifespan is commonly divided into the following periods of development: prenatal, infancy, early childhood, middle and late childhood, adolescence, early adulthood, middle adulthood, and late adulthood.

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A full evaluation of age requires consideration of chronological, biological, psychological, and social age.

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Developmental issues: o The nature-nurture issue focuses on the extent to which development is mainly influenced by nature (biological inheritance) or nurture (experience). o The stability-change issue focuses on the degree to which we become older renditions of our early experience or develop into someone different from who we were earlier in development. 

A special aspect is the extent to which development is determined by early versus later experiences.

o Developmentalists describe development as continuous (gradual, a cumulative change) or as discontinuous (abrupt, a sequence of stages). S3 – Theories of Development 2

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Scientific Method o The scientific method involves four main steps: 

1. Conceptualize a problem

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2. Collect data

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3. Analyze data

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4. Draw conclusions

o Theory is often involved in conceptualizing a problem. 

A theory is an interrelated, coherent set of ideas that helps explain phenomena and to make predictions.

o Hypotheses are specific assertions and predictions, often derived from theory, that can be tested. 

Psychoanalytic Theories o According to psychoanalytic theories, development primarily depends on the unconscious mind and is heavily couched in emotion. o Freud argued that individuals go through five psychosexual stages. o Erikson’s theory emphasizes eight psychosocial stages of development: trust versus mistrust, autonomy versus shame and doubt, initiative versus guilt, industry versus inferiority, identity versus identity confusion, intimacy versus isolation, generativity versus stagnation, and integrity versus despair. ‘

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Cognitive Theories o Three main cognitive theories are Piaget’s, Vygotsky’s, and information processing.

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o Cognitive theories emphasize thinking, reasoning, language, and other cognitive processes. o Piaget proposed a cognitive development theory in which children use their cognition to adapt to their world. 

In Piaget’s theory, children go through four cognitive stages: sensorimotor, preoperational, concrete operational, and formal operational.

o Vygotsky’s sociocultural cognitive theory emphasizes how culture and social interaction guide cognitive development. o The information-processing approach emphasizes that individuals manipulate information, monitor it, and strategize about it. 

Behavioral and Social Cognitive Theories o Two main behavioral and social cognitive theories are Skinner’s operant conditioning and social cognitive theory. o In Skinner’s operant conditioning, the consequences of a behavior produce changes in the probability of the behavior’s occurrence. o In social cognitive theory, observational learning is a key aspect of life-span development. 

Bandura emphasizes reciprocal interactions among person/cognition, behavior, and environment.

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Ethological Theory o Ethology stresses that behavior is strongly influenced by biology, is tied to evolution, and is characterized by critical or sensitive periods.

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Ecological Theory o Ecological Theory emphasizes environmental contexts. o Bronfenbrenner’s environmental systems view of development proposes five environmental systems: microsystem, mesosystem, exosystem, macrosystem, and chronosystem.

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An Eclectic Theoretical Orientation o An eclectic theoretical orientation does not follow any one theoretical approach but rather selects from each theory whatever is considered the best in it.

S4 – Research on Life-Span Development 

Methods for collecting data – o Include observation (in a laboratory or a naturalistic setting), survey (questionnaire) or interview, standardized test, case study, and physiological measures.

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Research designs – o Three main research designs are descriptive, correlational, and experimental. o Descriptive research aims to observe and record behavior. o The goal of correlational research is to describe the strength of the relationship between two or more events or characteristics. o Experimental research involves conducting an experiment, which can determine cause and effect. o An independent variable is the manipulated, influential, experimental factor.

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o A dependent variable is a factor that can change in an experiment, in response, to changes in the independent variable. o Experiments can involve one or more experimental groups and control groups. o In random assignment, researchers assign participants to experimental and control groups by chance. 

Time span of research – when researchers decide about the time span of their research, they can conduct cross-sectional or longitudinal studies. Life-span researchers are especially concerned about cohort efforts.

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Conducting ethical research – o Researchers’ ethical responsibilities include seeking participants’ informed consent, ensuring their confidentiality, debriefing them about the purpose and potential consequences of participating, and avoiding unnecessary deception of participants.

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Minimizing bias – o Researchers need to guard against gender, cultural, and ethnic bias in research. Every effort should be made to make research equitable for both females and males. Individuals from varied ethnic backgrounds need to be included as participants in life-span research, and overgeneralization about diverse members within a group must be avoided.

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