Chapter Review
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Chapter 10: Life Span Development Chapter Review |
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Developmental Psychology
Prenatal Development
The Newborn Baby
Infancy and Childhood
Adolescence
Adulthood
Late Adulthood
Developmental Psychology
This chapter deals with developmental psychology, the study of the changes that occur in people from birth through old age.
Methods in Developmental Psychology
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To examine changes that take place over time, developmental psychologists use three different methods. In cross-sectional studies, researchers test groups of subjects of different ages. In longitudinal studies, researchers test the same subjects—usually a cohort, or group of people born during the same historical period—as they grow older. For studying adulthood, researchers sometimes use biographical or retrospective studies, in which subjects' lives are examined backward through interviews. Each of these methods has certain advantages and disadvantages.
THE NEWBORN BABY
Neonates (newborn babies) come equipped with a number of reflexes, such as those that help them breathe and nurse. The rooting reflex causes a newborn, when touched on the cheek, to turn its head in that direction and grope around with its mouth. The sucking reflex causes the newborn to suck on anything that is placed in its mouth, and the swallowing reflex enables it to swallow liquids without choking. The grasping reflex causes a newborn to close its fist around anything that is put in its hand. The stepping reflex causes the newborn to make little stepping motions if held upright with its feet just touching a surface.
Temperament
Babies are born with personalities that differ in temperament. The pioneering work of Thomas and Chess identified three basic types of temperament in newborns—easy, difficult, and slow-to-warm-up. A great deal of research has examined the differences among them.
The Perceptual Abilities of Infants
Infants can see as soon as they are born. Vision is fuzzy at first, but visual acuity improves rapidly. Newborns prefer patterns with clear contrasts, so they like looking at black-and-white patterns better than at colored ones. As they grow older they prefer more complex patterns. They also prefer to look at their mother rather than a stranger. A classic experiment using a device called the visual cliff showed that infants of crawling age can perceive depth.
Fetuses can hear sounds in the uterus, and newborns can tell the direction of a sound. Infants can distinguish between some speech sounds that are indistinguishable to an adult. Infants also have clear-cut preferences in taste and smell.
Physical Development
Motor Development
Motor development refers to the acquisition of abilities such as grasping and walking. Developmental norms indicate the ages at which the average child achieves certain developmental milestones. During early motor development, the reflexes of the newborn give way to voluntary action. Maturation—the biological processes that unfold as we grow older—interacts with environmental factors in promoting developmental changes in our early motor skills.
Cognitive Development
Cognitive development refers to changes in the way children think about the world. The Swiss psychologist Jean Piaget saw cognitive development as a way of adapting to the environment and theorized that it proceeds in a series of distinct stages.
During the sensory-motor stage (birth to age 2), infants develop object permanence, the concept that things continue to exist even when they are out of sight. At birth, there is no sign of object permanence, but the concept is fully developed by 18 to 24 months, when the child acquires the ability to form mental representations—mental images or symbols (such as words) used in thinking and remembering. The development of self-recognition also occurs during the sensory-motor stage.
In the preoperational stage (ages 2 through 7), children are able to use mental representations and language assumes an important role in describing, remembering, and reasoning about the world. But preoperational thought is egocentric: Children of this age are unable to see things from another person's point of view. They are also easily misled by appearances and tend to focus on the most striking aspect of an object or event.
Children in the concrete-operational stage (7 to 11) can pay attention to more than one thing at a time and are able to understand someone else's point of view. They grasp the principles of conservation—that basic amounts remain constant despite changes in appearance—and they can understand classification schemes.
When they enter the formal-operational stage (between 11 and 15), adolescents can think in abstract terms and test their ideas internally, using logic. Thus, they can grasp theoretical cause-and-effect relationships and consider possibilities as well as realities.
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Piaget's theory has been criticized for the content of the stages as well as for his assumption that all children proceed through the stages in the same order. Critics also fault Piaget for not taking human diversity into consideration.
Moral Development
Like Piaget, Lawrence Kohlberg developed a stage theory, although his involves moral development. Kohlberg's stages—preconventional, conventional, and postconventional—hinge on the different ways the developing child views morality. The preconventional child sees doing right and wrong as a function of physical consequences; the conventional child sees it as a function of what others think; and the postconventional individual sees right behavior as based on a system of values and justice.
Language Development
Language begins with cooing and progresses to babbling, the repetition of speechlike sounds. The first word is usually uttered at about 12 months; at the same age, infants show signs of understanding what is said to them. In the next 6 to 8 months, children build a vocabulary of one-word sentences, called holophrases. Between 2 and 3, children begin to put words together into simple sentences, though they leave out unimportant parts of speech such as auxiliary verbs. Between 3 and 4, children fill out their sentences and are able to use past and present tenses. By 5 or 6, most children have a vocabulary of over 2,500 words and can create sentences of 6 to 8 words.
There are two different theories of language development. Skinner proposed that parents listen to their infant's babbling and reinforce (reward) the infant for making sounds that most resemble adult speech. Chomsky, on the other hand, maintained that children are born with a language acquisition device, an innate mechanism that enables them to understand the rules of grammar, make sense of the speech they hear, and form intelligible sentences themselves. Most researchers agree with Chomsky's view.
The critical period hypothesis postulates that there is a critical time for the acquisition of language. If language is not acquired during that time, it will be very difficult for the child to master it later.
Social Development
A baby duck or goose follows its mother because of a phenomenon called imprinting, a primitive form of bonding. Bonding in humans is a more complex emotional process called attachment. The first attachment is likely to be to the infant's primary caregiver, usually the mother. It develops during the first year of life, usually along with a wariness of strangers.
Infants who are securely attached to their mothers are better able to develop autonomy, a sense of independence. Children who are insecurely attached to others are less likely to explore an unfamiliar environment.
At about 2 years of age, the child's desire for autonomy clashes with the parents' need for peace and order. These conflicts are a necessary first step in socialization, the process by which children learn the behaviors and attitudes appropriate to their family and culture. Parenting style affects children's behavior and self-image. The most successful parenting style is authoritative, in which parents provide firm guidance but are willing to listen to the child's opinions. However, parents do not act the same way toward every child in the family because children are different from each other and elicit different parental responses.
The earliest kind of play is solitary play—children engaging in some activity all by themselves. The earliest kind of social interaction is parallel play, in which two toddlers play side by side at the same activity but largely ignore each other. By 3 or 3*, they are engaging in cooperative play involving group imagination. As children get older, they develop a deeper understanding of the meaning of friendship and come under the influence of a peer group. By age 3, a child has developed a gender identity, a girl's knowledge that she is a girl and a boy's knowledge that he is a boy. But children that age have little idea of what it means. By 4 or 5, most children develop gender constancy, the realization that gender depends on what kind of genitals one has and cannot be changed.
Gender-role awareness— the knowledge of what behavior is appropriate for each gender—develops as children interact with their society. As a result they develop gender stereotypes, oversimplified beliefs about "typical" males and females. From an early age, children show sex-typed behavior—behavior that is typical of females (for example, playing with dolls) or of males (for example, playing with trucks).
Television and Children
American children spend more time watching television than engaging in any other activity except sleeping. If TV viewing involves constant exposure to scenes of violence, the evidence suggests that children become more aggressive in their behavior. The most convincing theoretical argument linking violent behavior with TV watching is based on social learning theory. Viewing behaviors on television that are violent and characters who are reinforced for such violence leads children to imitate that behavior. Some evidence suggests TV can be an effective teaching tool.
ADOLESCENCE
Adolescence is the period of life when the individual is transformed from a child to an adult between age 10 and 20.
Physical Changes
The growth spurt is a rapid increase in height and weight that begins, on the average, at about age 10 1/2 in girls and 12 1/2 in boys, and reaches its peak at age 12 in girls and 14 in boys. Growth is essentially complete about 6 years after the start of the growth spurt. During this period, changes occur in body shape and proportions as well as in size.
Signs of puberty— the onset of sexual maturation — begin around 11 1/2 in boys. In girls, the growth spurt typically precedes the approaching puberty. Menarche, the first menstrual period, occurs between 12 1/2 and 13 for the average American girl. But individuals vary widely in when they go through puberty.
Teen pregnancy is a serious problem in the United States, with more than 1 million births per year to teenagers, 80 percent of whom are unmarried.
Cognitive Changes
The cognitive abilities of adolescents undergo an important transition to formal-operational thought, allowing them to manipulate abstract concepts, reason hypothetically, and speculate about alternatives. These new mental abilities often make them overconfident and overimpressed with their own importance. Elkind described two patterns of thought characteristic of this age: the imaginary audience, which makes teenagers feel they are constantly being watched and judged; and the personal fable, which gives young people the sense that they are unique and invulnerable and encourages them to take needless risks.
Personality and Social Development
The classical view of adolescence as a period of "storm and stress" fraught with conflict, anxiety, and tension is not borne out in most teenagers' lives, although there is inevitably some stress to handle.
Identity formation is the process by which a person develops a stable sense of self. According to Marcia, identity formation takes place during an intense period of self-exploration called an identity crisis.
Most adolescents rely on a peer group for social and emotional support. They often rigidly conform to the values of their friends. From small unisex cliques in early adolescence, friendship groups change to mixed-sex groups in which short-lived romantic interests are common. Later stable dating patterns emerge.
Parent-child relationships are difficult during adolescence. Teenagers become aware of their parents' faults and question every parental role. Conflicts are most common during early adolescence, though only in a minority of families does the parent-child relationship show a severe deterioration.
Some Problems of Adolescence
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Dissatisfaction with one's body image and one's academic performance can lower an adolescent's self-esteem. A sizable number of adolescents thinks about committing suicide; a much smaller proportion attempt it. Depression, drug abuse, and disruptive behaviors are linked to suicidal thoughts.Unlike childhood and adolescence, adulthood is not marked by clear, predictable milestones. Still, there are certain experiences and changes that nearly everyone goes through and certain needs that nearly everyone tries to fulfill.
Love, Partnerships, and Parenting
Almost every adult forms a long-term loving partnership with at least one other adult at some point during his or her life. More than 90 percent of all Americans eventually get married, although they are waiting longer to do so. Most people select a marriage or cohabitation partner of similar race, religion, education, and background. Heterosexual marriage is the norm, but other relationships include long-term cohabitation and homosexual partnerships.
Almost half of American marriages end in divorce, which has far-reaching effects on children.
The World of Work
Most people desire satisfaction from their jobs. But a married woman who works outside the home is likely to be burdened with child care and housework as well as a job; moreover, her job is likely to be less prestigious than her husband's. The emergence of the dual-career family has also raised many questions concerning the availability of quality child care.
One model of cognitive change maintains that cognitive exercises can minimize the inevitable decline in cognitive functioning as people age.
Personality Changes
Adults become less self-centered and develop better coping skills with age. Some people may experience a midlife crisis, when they feel unfulfilled and ready for a decisive shift in career or lifestyle. More commonly, people go through a midlife transition, a period of taking stock of one's life and formulating new goals.
The "Change of Life"
Middle adulthood brings a decline in the functioning of the reproductive organs. Women go through menopause, the cessation of menstruation accompanied by a sharp drop in estrogen. Men experience a slower decline in testosterone.
LATE ADULTHOOD
Older adults are the fastest-growing segment of the U.S. population. Our stereotypes of "elderly" people are contradicted by research showing people 65 and older are increasingly healthy, productive, and able.
Social Development
Most older adults have an independent and satisfactory lifestyle and engage in social activities that interest them. But they gradually go through a process of disengagement and life assessment and accept necessary limitations on their social involvement.
People's reactions to leaving the world of paid employment differ, depending on their financial status and their feelings about work. Sexual responses are slower in older adults, but most recent information indicates that people continue to enjoy sex.
Cognitive Changes
Cognitive abilities remain largely intact for a sizable number of older adults. Older adults who engage in intellectually stimulating activities remain mentally alert.
Old people who used to be called "senile" are now recognized as having a specific disorder called Alzheimer's disease, which causes progressive losses in memory and cognition and changes in personality. However, it is important to distinguish Alzheimer's disease from other causes of mental impairment that may be treatable.
Facing the End of Life
Elderly people fear death less than younger people. What they do fear are the pain, indignity, depersonalization, and loneliness associated with a terminal illness. They also worry about being a financial burden to their families.
Kübler-Ross described a sequence of five stages that people go through when they are dying: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance.
Widowhood may be the most severe challenge people face as older adults. Loss of a spouse may bring on depression. Men seem to suffer more from loss of a mate but have a better chance of remarrying.
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