Developmental psychology

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Developmental psychology is the scientific study of progressive psychological changes that occur in human beings as they age. Originally concerned with infants and children, it is often called Child development or Child psychology. As the study of other periods of great change such as adolescence and aging were added, it now encompases the entire life span, and is also referred to as Lifespan psychology. This field examines change across a broad range of topics including: motor skills, problem solving abilities, conceptual understanding, acquisition of language, moral understanding, and identity formation.

Developmental psychology informs several applied fields, including: educational psychology, child psychopathology and forensic psychology. Developmental psychology complements several other basic research fields in psychology including social psychology, cognitive psychology, and comparative psychology.

Goals of developmental psychology

Developmental psychologists study the changes that occur as development proceeds. They examine both the changes themselves, and what causes them. Thus, developmental psychology has two main goals (Vasta et al. 1992):

1. The first is to describe the behavior at each point in the person's development—such as determining the age that babies begin to walk, the social skills of four-year-olds, and so forth.
2. The second is to identify the causal factors involved in producing changes in behavior—such as the importance of genetic or biological factors, the role of various experiences, and the influence of peers, parents, and others.

History of Developmental Psychology

The scientific study of children began in the late nineteenth century, and blossomed in the early twentieth century as pioneering psychologists sought to uncover the secrets of human behavior by studying its development. Developmental psychology made an early appearance in a more literary form, however. William Shakespeare had his melancholy character "Jacques" (in As You Like It) articulate the "seven ages of man": these included three stages of childhood and four of adulthood.

Three early scholars, John Locke, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and Charles Darwin proposed theories of human behavior that are the "direct ancestors of the three major theoretical traditions" (Vasta et al, 1998, p. 10) of developmental psychology today. Locke, a British empiricist, adhered to a strict environmentalist position, that the mind of the newborn as a tabula rasa ("blank slate") on which knowledge is written through experience and learning. Rousseau, a Swiss philosopher who spent much of his life in France, proposed a nativistic model in his famous novel Emile, in which development occurs according to innate processes progressing through three stages: infans (infancy), puer (childhood), and adolescence. Finally, the work of Darwin, the British biologist famous for his theory of evolution, led others to suggest that development proceeds through evolutionary recapitulation, with many human behaviors having their origins in successful adaptations in the past as "ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny."

G. Stanley Hall

G. Stanley Hall, called the "father" of developmental psychology, is credited with conducting the first systematic studies of children. These involved questionnaires, which unfortunately were not structured in a way as to produce useful data. He was also unsuccessful in his research that attempted to show that the child's development recapitulates the evolution of the species. His major contributions to the field are that he taught the first courses in child development, several of his students becoming leading researchers in the field, and he established scientific journals for the publication of child development research.

John B. Watson

John B. Watson originated the Behaviorist approach to psychology at the beginning of the twentieth century. He believed, based on Locke's environmentalist position, that human behavior can be understood in terms of experiences and learning. Determined that experimental psychology follow the scientific method he rejected the introspective approach, which attempted to understand internal mental experiences based on self-reports, and called instead for objective study of observable, measurable behaviors. Watson's 1928 book, Psychological Care of the Infant and Child, presented his view that all behavior is the product of environment and experience with no important contribution by biological factors, and that all learning takes place through a process of association or "conditioning," as proposed by Ivan Pavlov.

Sigmund Freud

Sigmund Freud's model of "psychosexual development" grew out of his psychoanalytic approach to human personality and psychopathology. In sharp contrast to the objective approach espoused by Watson, Freud beased his model of child development on his own and his patients' recollections of their childhood. He developed a stage model of development in which the libido, or sexual energy, of the child focuses on different "zones" or areas of the body as the child grows to adulthood. Freud's model is an "interactionist" one, since he believed that although the sequence and timing of these stages is biologically determined, successful personality development depends on the experiences the child had during each stage. Although the details of Freud's developmental theory have been widely criticized, his emphasis on the importance of early childhood experiences, prior to five years of age, has had a lasting impact.

Arnold Gesell

Arnold Gesell, a student of G. Stanley Hall, carried out the first large-scale detailed study of children's behavior. His research revealed consistent patterns of development, supporting his view that human development depends on biological "maturation," with the environment providing only minor variations in the age at which a skill might emerge but never affecting the sequence or pattern. Gesell's research produced norms, such as the order and the normal age range in which a variety of early behaviors such as sitting, crawling, and walking emerge. In conducting his studies, Gesell developed sophisticated observational techniques, including one-way viewing screens and recording methods that did not disturb the child.

Jean Piaget

Jean Piaget is considered one of the most influential psychologists of the twentieth century, and his stage theory of cognitive development revolutionized our view of children's thinking and learning. His work inspired more research than any other theorist, and many of his concepts are still foundational to developmental psychology. His interest lay in children's knowledge, their thinking, and the qualitative differences in their thinking as it develops. Although he called his field "genetic epistemology," stressing the role of biological determinism, he also assigned great importance to experience. In his view, children "construct" their knowledge through processes of "assimilation", in which they evaluate and try to understand new information, based on their existing knowledge of the world, and "accommodation," in which they expand and modify their cognitive structures based on new experiences.

Research methods

Developmental psychology employs many of the research methods used in other areas of psychology. However, infants and children cannot always be tested in the same ways as adults, and so different methods are often used to study development.

Special methods are required to study infant behavior.

Infant research methods

When studying infants, a method often used to assess their performance is habituation methodology. This method allows researchers to obtain information about what types of stimuli an infant is able to discriminate. In this paradigm, infants are habituated to a particular stimulus and are then tested using different stimuli to evaluate discrimination. The critical measure in habituation is the infants' level of interest. Typically, infants prefer stimuli that are novel relative to those they have encountered previously, and therefore their responses to a stimulus recognized as novel is measurably distinct from their responses to those to which they have already habituated.

Several methods are used to measure infants' preference. These include the high-amplitude sucking procedure, in which infants' level of sucking on a pacifier varies depending on their level of interest, the conditioned foot-kick procedure, in which infants move their legs to indicate preference, and the head-turn preference procedure, in which infants level of interest is measured by the amount of time spent looking in a particular direction. A key feature of all these methods is that the infant controls the stimuli being presented. This gives researchers a means of measuring discrimination. If an infant is able to discriminate between the habituated stimulus and a novel stimulus, they will show a preference for the novel stimulus. If, however, the infant cannot discriminate between the two stimuli, they will not show a preference for one over the other.

Child research methods

When studying older children, especially adolescents, adult measurements of behavior can often be used. However, they may need to be simplified to allow children to perform the tasks successfully.

Aspects of development

Developmental psychology is concerned with many different components of human psychology and how they change over time. These different aspects of development complement many other areas of psychology, including studies of personality, cognitive psychology, and social psychology.

Cognitive development

A variety of toys stimulate development of an infant's sensorimotor skills

Cognitive development is primarily concerned with the ways in which infants and children acquire and advance their cognitive abilities. Major topics in cognitive development are the study of language acquisition and the development of perceptual-motor skills. Piaget was one of the influential early psychologists to study the development of cognitive abilities. His theory suggested that cognitive development proceeds through a set of stages from infancy to adulthood.

Other accounts, however, have suggested that development does not progress through stages that are as clearly defined as those of Piaget's. Rather, developmental processes develop continuously, but often give rise to apparent stages of change in mental structures as Piaget described.

Social development

"Baby kissing mirror image."

Social psychology is the study of the nature and causes of human social behavior, with an emphasis on how people think about each other and how they relate to each other. As the mind is the axis around which social behavior pivots, social psychologists tend to study the relationship between mind(s) and social behaviors. In early-modern social science theory, John Stuart Mill, Auguste Comte, and others, laid the foundation for social psychology by asserting that human social cognition and behavior could, and should, be studied scientifically like any other natural science.

Attachment theory, developed by John Bowlby (Bowlby 1983) and Mary Ainsworth, focuses on close, intimate, emotionally meaningful relationships. This "attachment" is described as a biological system that evolved to ensure the survival of the infant. Attachment behavior is evoked whenever the person is threatened or stressed and involves actions to move toward the person(s) who create a sense of physical, emotional, and psychological safety for the individual. Its methods of study involve such approaches as the "Strange Situation Protocol" developed by Mary Ainsworth, in which an infant's reaction to being reunited with their mother (or primary caregiver) after interaction with a stranger is used as an indicator of the nature of the bond between mother and child.

Theory

Many theoretical perspectives attempt to explain development, among the most prominent are: Jean Piaget's stage theory of development, Lev Vygotsky's social contextualism (and its heir, the development in context or human ecology theory of Urie Bronfenbrenner), and the information processing framework employed by cognitive psychology.

Historical theories continue to provide a basis for additional research, among them are Erik Erikson's eight stages of psychosocial development and John B. Watson's and B. F. Skinner's Behaviorism. Many other theories are prominent for their contributions to particular aspects of development. For example, John Bowlby developed attachment theory to describe kinds of interpersonal relationships and Lawrence Kohlberg described stages in moral reasoning.

Issues

Some examples of questions addressed by developmental psychologists include the following:

• Are children qualitatively different from adults or do they simply lack the experience that adults draw upon?
• Does development occur through the gradual accumulation of knowledge or through shifts from one stage to another?
• Are children born with innate knowledge or do they figure things out through experience?
• Is development driven by external factors or by something inside each child?

The way in which these questions are answered related to three major issues in developmental psychology:

• nature versus nurture or the role of experience
• continuity versus discontinuity or stages of development
• normative versus idiographic development or individual differences

Role of experience

File:Baby happy Sofia SERRES.jpg

A young child exploring her environment

A significant question in developmental psychology is the relation between innateness and environmental influence in regard to any particular aspect of development. This is often referred to as "nature versus nurture" or nativism versus empiricism. A nativist account of development would argue that the processes in question are innate, that is, they are specified by the organism's genes. An empiricist perspective would argue that those processes are acquired in interaction with the environment. Developmental psychologists rarely take such extreme positions with regard to most aspects of development; rather they investigate the relationship between innate and environmental influences on the development of particular processes.

One area where this innateness debate has been prominently portrayed is in research on language acquisition. A major question in this area is whether or not certain properties of human language are specified genetically or can be acquired through learning. The nativist position argues that the input from language is too impoverished for infants and children to acquire the structure of language. Linguist Noam Chomsky has asserted that, evidenced by the lack of sufficient information in the language input, there is a "universal grammar" that applies to all human languages and is pre-specified. This has led to the idea that there is a special cognitive module suited for learning language, often called the "language acquisition device."

The empiricist position on the issue of language acquisition suggested that the language input does provide the necessary information required for learning the structure of language and that infants acquire language through a process of statistical learning. From this perspective, language can be acquired via general learning methods that also apply to other aspects of development, such as perceptual learning. There is a great deal of evidence for components of both the nativist and empiricist position, and this has been a hotly debated research topic in developmental psychology.

Another area that illustrates the role of experience has been gender role development. The finding that there were differences in spatial abilities between males and females (Halpern 1986) suggested several possible explanations. The brains of males and females could be structured differently (nature); boys could receive more encouragement from adults to engage in activities that promote spatial skills (environment); or boys could have an innate preference for such activities and improve their abilities through greater practice than girls, who prefer other activities (interaction).

Stages of development

File:Baby Sofia SERRES.jpg

According to Piaget, this child is in the sensorimotor stage and primarily explores the world with senses rather than through mental operations.

A long-standing debate in developmental psychology is whether development occurs continuously, with one behavior or skill building upon another, such that later development is tied and can be predicted from what occurred early in life, or whether there is discontinuity as new behaviors and skills emerge at certain stages in life. The continuity model regards development as basically quantitative, with new skills learned and added to the previous, simpler set. Such a view is generally found in the work of Behaviorists.

The alternative view is that development occurs in stages, distinct phases in an individual's development. These stages are viewed not as simple accumulation of new skills, but an abrupt, qualitative change in the individual's behavior. Stage theorists generally posit stages that occur in a fixed order, within particular time frames, and that are universal across all individuals (although some may not reach the highest stages).

Many theories in psychology characterize development in terms of stages:

• Jean Piaget developed a complex stage theory of cognitive development to describe how children reason and interact with their surroundings.
• Lawrence Kohlberg applied and extended Piaget's stages to describe how individuals develop moral reasoning.
• James W. Fowler extended Piaget's and Kohlberg's work to studies of stages in faith development.
• Sigmund Freud analyzed the progression of an individual's unconscious desires as occurring through psychosexual stages.
• Erik Erikson expanded on Freud's psychosexual stages, defining eight psychosocial stages that describe how individuals relate to their social world.
• Jane Loevinger, developed a stage theory of ego development.
• Margaret Mahler's psychoanalytic developmental theory contained three phases regarding the child's object relations.

Psychologists generally agree that neither approach is complete—rather, some processes may be better described as continuous and others as occurring through stages.

Individual differences

The issue of whether to study normative development or the individual differences in development is more of a matter of preference than theoretical debate. The normative approach is value in applications such as education, where understanding the normal range of abilities at different age groups allows teachers to prepare appropriate lessons, while studies of sensorimotor skills prove useful clinical diagnostic tools for pediatricians. Researchers such as Arnold Gesell pioneered studies of such normative data.

Studies of differences in development are more attuned to investigations of the underlying processes and the factors that promote and hinder development. Research on development of intelligence and creativity has often focused on studying individual differences, in an attempt to understand the nature of such complex human abilities, whether there are significant innate differences among individuals, and how each person can achieve their full potential in these areas.

Approaches

Developmental psychologists usually focus on a particular age group and the development of particular skills during that time period—perceptual-motor skills during infancy, gender roles during adolescence, and so forth. Additionally, they have a particular theoretical orientation—their view of how development occurs and the factors they believe to be most significant in producing change in children's behavior. While there are many approaches, four of the most significant are described here.

Development in context: The ecological approach

Children playing with marbles

This approach is not so much a different theoretical model as a different way of looking at the factors that influence human development. Psychologists, in their effort to study human behavior scientifically devised complex laboratory settings in which to study children's behavior under experimental control. The problem with this approach, however, is that child development does not occur in the laboratory; rather it takes place in the home with family members, in school with peers, in the neighborhood, and so forth. Development always occurs in a particular social context.

Urie Bronfenbrenner (1979) developed what is known as "Ecological Systems Theory" to describe how human social relationships function in, and are affected by, their various social environments, or "human ecologies." Building on work by Soviet developmental psychologist Lev Vygotsky and German-born psychologist Kurt Lewin, Bronfenbrenner delineated four types of nested systems, with bi-directional influences within and between systems.

1. Microsystem: Immediate environments (family, school, peer group, neighborhood, and childcare environments)
2. Mesosystem: A system comprised of connections between immediate environments (such as a child’s home and school)
3. Exosystem: External environmental settings which only indirectly affect development (such as parent's workplace)
4. Macrosystem: The larger cultural context (Eastern vs. Western culture, national economy, political culture, subculture, and so forth)

This theory had widespread influence on the way psychologists and others approached the study of human beings and their environments. It has been said that before Bronfenbrenner, child psychologists studied the child, sociologists examined the family, anthropologists the society, economists the economic framework of the times, and political scientists the structure. As a result of Bronfenbrenner's groundbreaking work these environments—from the family to economic and political structures—became viewed as part of the life course from childhood to adulthood.

Mechanisms of development

Developmental psychology is concerned not only with describing the characteristics of psychological change over time, but also seeks to explain the principles and internal workings underlying these changes. Understanding these factors is aided by the use of models. Developmental models are often computational, but they do not necessarily need to be. A model must simply account for the means by which a process takes place. This is sometimes done in reference to changes in the brain that may correspond to changes in behavior over the course of the development. Computational accounts of development often use either symbolic, connectionist (neural network), or dynamical systems models to explain the mechanisms of development.

References

ISBN links support NWE through referral fees

• Bowlby, John. 1983. Attachment (Attachment and Loss Series, Volume 1). Basic Books. ISBN 0465005438 ISBN 978-0465005437
• Bronfenbrenner, Urie. 1979. The Ecology of Human Development: Experiments by Nature and Design. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. ISBN 0674224574
• Crain, William. 2000. Theories of Development: Concepts and Applications.Fourth Edition. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall. ISBN 0139554025
• Damon, William (ed.). 1989. Child Development Today and Tomorrow. San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass Publishers. ISBN 1555421032
• Piaget, Jean, Howard E. Gruber, and J. Jacques Voneèche. 1977. The Essential Piaget. New York, NY: Basic Books. ISBN 0465020585 ISBN 978-0465020584
• Miller, Patricia H. 1993. Theories of Developmental Psychology Third Edition. New York, NY: W.H. Freeman. ISBN 0716723093
• Vasta, Ross, Marshall M. Haith, and Scott A. Miller. 1998. Child Psychology: The Modern Science. Third Edition. New York, NY: John Wiley. ISBN 047119221X
• Watson, John B. 1976. Psychological Care of Infant and Child (originally published 1928). Arno Press. ISBN 0405038763

External links

• Developmental Psychology: lessons for teaching and learning developmental psychology
• GMU’s On-Line Resources for Developmental Psychology: a web directory of Developmental Psychology organizations
• Psychology Resources
• Evolutionary developmental psychology (in the journal Child Development): Paper 1, Paper 2

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