1. PowerPoint® Presentation by Jim Foley
Chapter 5
Developing Through the Life Span
PowerPoint® Presentation
by Jim Foley
© 2013 Worth Publishers

2. Topics in This Chapter Issues to keep in mind: nature and nurture
continuity and stages
stability and change
Stages/ages covered:
from conception to old age
Types of development:
physical
cognitive
social/emotional
Change and stability: Are there some parts of who we are that remain stable throughout development? Our temperament? Our overall personality? Do some of our attributes change during development (even while we maintain our sense of identity)? Our abilities? Our interests? Our habits? Our traits?

3. Prenatal Development The Zygote Stage: First 10 to 14 Days
After the nuclei of the egg and sperm fuse, the cell divides in 2, 4, 8, 16, 100, 1000…
Milestone of the zygote stage: cells begin to differentiate into specialized locations and structures
Implantation: The Embyro, 2 to 8 weeks
This stage begins with the multicellular cluster that implants in the uterine wall.
Milestone of the implantation stage: differentiated cells develop into organs and bones
Click to reveal bullets.
Instructor: You can ask students if they think that teratogens qualify as a “nurture” factor influencing development. If we recall that “nurture” really means “environmental influences” and not “cuddling,” it should be clear that this is an example of how nature and nurture both operate before birth.
Sometimes, the zygote first fully splits into two; this is the start of identical twins.
The outer layer of cells becomes the placenta, the mechanism for providing nutrients and oxygen to the child and filtering out toxins; it will be more visible on the next slide.
At nine weeks, hands and face have developed; the embryo is now called a fetus (“offspring”). At 4 months, many more features develop.
Milestone of the fetal stage: by six months, the fetus might be able to survive outside the womb
Embryo

4. Fetal Life: The Dangers
Teratogens (“monster makers”) are substances such as viruses and chemicals that can damage the developing embryo or fetus.
Fetal Alcohol Syndrome (FAS) refers to cognitive, behavioral, and body/brain structure abnormalities caused by exposure to alcohol in the fetal stage.
Click to reveal bullets.
Examples of noticeable problems in FAS: hyperactivity, learning problems, emotion control problems, and unusual facial size, shape, and features. The underlying problem of FAS may be that alcohol switches genes on and off, diverting the normal course of development.

5. Fetal life: Responding to Sounds
Fetuses in the womb can respond to sounds.
Fetuses can learn to recognize and adapt to sounds that they previously heard only in the womb.
Fetuses can habituate to annoying sounds, becoming less agitated with repeated exposure.
Click to reveal bullets.
Evidence of learning to recognize sounds from inside the womb: immediately after birth, newborns prefer mother’s voice, and even coo and cry in the tones of her language.
Evidence of habituating to annoying sounds: after birth, newborns can ignore sounds that would agitate other newborns.

6. Inborn Skills The Competent Newborn
Reflexes are responses that are inborn and do not have to be learned.
Newborns have reflexes to ensure that they will be fed.
The rooting reflex--when something touches a newborn’s cheek, the infant turns toward that side with an open mouth.
The sucking reflex can be triggered by a fingertip.
Crying when hungry is the newborn talent of using just the right sounds to motivate parents to end the noise and feed the baby.
Click to reveal bullets.
How do we conclude that these abilities are inborn?...because they are evident within hours of birth.
The rooting reflex triggers the baby to get in position for breastfeeding.

7. More Inborn Abilities
Newborns (one hour old!) will look twice as long at the image on the left.
What can we conclude from this behavior?
Click to show smiley face.
Newborns might have an inborn preference for looking at faces, AND the ability to distinguish a facelike pattern of dots and lines from a less face-like pattern!
You could ask if students can describe a possible survival/evolutionary function of this face preference. Perhaps this preference might help infants seek out and make eye contact with people rather than light bulbs, to assure that others are motivated to care for them.

8. Building and Connecting Neurons
Brain Development:
Building and Connecting Neurons
In the womb, the number of neurons grows by about 750,000 new cells per minute in the middle trimester.
Beginning at birth, the connections among neurons proliferate. As we learn, we form more branches and more neural networks.
In infancy, the growth in neural connections takes place initially in the less complex parts of the brain (the brainstem and limbic system), as well as the motor and sensory strips.
 This enables body functions and basic survival skills.
In early childhood, neural connections proliferate in the association areas.
 This enables advancements in controlling attention and behavior (frontal lobes) and also in thinking, memory, and language.
Click to reveal bullets and images.

9. Motor Development
Maturation takes place in the body and cerebellum enabling the sequence below.
Physical training generally cannot change the timing.
No animation.
Studies on an identical twins have shown that rushing kids to learn to walk, learn to climb stairs, etc. does not seem to do much to make it happen sooner than it would happen anyway.

10. Baby Memory Infantile Amnesia Learning Skills
In infancy, the brain forms memories so differently from the episodic memory of adulthood that most people cannot really recall memories from the first three years of life.
A birthday party when turning three might be a person’s first memory.
Learning Skills
Click to reveal bullets.
Instructor--some details on infantile amnesia: the fourth birthday party is more likely (than the third) to be a real memory, and more accurate. Those memories from early years (like most memories, but even more so at this age) are likely to be reconstructions, built mostly from stories told to them by others when they were older. Yet these memories feel like recalled events; more about this in the chapter on memory.
Learning skills: this skill or “procedural memory” could be seen as an example of operant conditioning. Babies also acquire fear, which of course is classical conditioning. These terms are omitted from the slide because these concepts typically would not have been introduced yet in the course, but you may want to mention it here.
Infants can learn skills (procedural memories).
This three month old can learn, and recall a month later, that specific foot movements move specific mobiles.

11. Cognitive Development
Cognition refers to the mental activities that help us function, including:
problem-solving.
figuring out how the world works.
developing models and concepts.
storing and retrieving knowledge.
understanding and using language.
using self-talk and inner thoughts.
No animation.

12. Cognitive Development: Jean Piaget (1896-1980)
We don’t start out being able to think like adults.
Jean Piaget studied the errors in cognition made by children in order to understand in what ways they think differently than adults.
The error below is an inability to understand scale
(relative size).
Click to reveal bullets and example.
Jean Piaget was originally a biologist but he began observing children, at first mainly his own kids and relatives. He generated novel ideas about development throughout the mid-20th century. Jean Piaget believed that cognitive development:
is a combination of nature and nurture. Children grow by maturation as well as by learning through interacting/playing with the environment.
is not one continuous progression of change. Children make leaps in cognitive abilities from one stage of development to the next.

13. Jean Piaget and Cognitive Development: Schemas
An infant’s mind works hard to make sense of our experiences in the world.
An early tool to organize those experiences is a schema, a mental container we build to hold our experiences.
Schemas can take the form of images, models, and/or concepts.
This child has formed a schema called “COW” which he uses to think about animals of a certain shape and size.
“Cow!”
Click to reveal bullets and example.

14. Jean Piaget and Cognitive Development: Assimilation and Accommodation
How can this girl use her “dog” schema when encountering a cat?
Click to reveal answer/example.
If students want this stated in definition form:
assimilation refers to incorporating new experiences into our existing schema/categories;
accommodation refers to adjusting our schema to better fit our experiences.
Whether the mini-poodle in the picture is categorized as a dog may be subject to debate… 
She can assimilate the experience into her schema by referring to the cat as a “dog” or
she can accommodate her animal schema by separating the cat, and even different types of dogs, into separate schemas.

15. Jean Piaget’s Stages of Cognitive Development
No animation.

16. Sensorimotor Stage (From Birth to Age 2)
In the sensorimotor stage, children explore by looking, hearing, touching, mouthing, and grasping.
Cool cognitive trick learned at 6 to 8 months, coming up next: object permanence.
No animation.

17. Hmm, a bear, should I put it in my mouth?
There’s a game I’ve learned to play all by myself: peekaboo!
Object Permanence
Through games like “peekaboo,” kids learn object permanence--the idea that objects exist even when they can’t be seen.
Click to start animation.
Peekaboo brings out issues of “nature vs. nurture,” as well as “stages of maturation vs. practice at playing.” Since kids develop this ability automatically but also practice to develop it, how much of the development of object permanence is nature/maturation, and how much is nurture/experience?

18. Can Children Think Abstractly?
Jean Piaget felt that kids in the sensorimotor stage did not think abstractly. Yet there is some evidence that kids in this stage can notice violations in physics (such as gravity). Does that mean babies are doing physics?
Click to reveal bullets/animation; see this in slide show mode to see the ball obeying gravity, and not obeying gravity.
“Violations in physics and math” examples: kids look more surprised when they see a ball start to drop and then stop. You might want to simulate this with a ball on a stick.

19. Is This Math? If so, kids in the “sensorimotor” stage do math.
Babies stare longer and with surprise when numbers don’t make sense.
Is this math? Was Jean Piaget wrong?
Click to start animation.
This slide depicts the results of an experiment. In the animation, two toys minus one two should leave one two, but three are there. This would trigger a surprised stare in many babies.
Jean Piaget believed that kids in the sensorimotor stage cannot handle even basic math, seeing this as a concrete operational skill. How can we explain this result? Are the kids doing subtraction, or is it something else?
Narration: One toy comes in, then a second, then the toys are hidden. When the screen is taken away, the baby is less surprised if there is now one toy. However, if there is a different amount, they look more surprised and stare longer.

20. What can kids do in the preoperational stage?
Represent their schema, and even some feelings, with words and images.
Use visual models to represent other places, and perform pretend play.
Picture other points of view, replacing egocentrism with theory of mind.
Use intuition, but not logic and abstraction yet.
Click to reveal bullets.

21. Egocentrism: “I am the World.”
What mistake is the boy making?
Do you have a brother?
Yes. Jim.
Does Jim have a brother?
No.
Click to reveal all text.
Answer to the slide question: this boy is unable to see his brother Jim’s perspective and unable to see himself as a brother rather than just as ME, the center of the world.
Egocentrism is another one of those terms that has a different meaning in psychology than in its more vague popular use. It is not about selfishness, but about being unable to see another person’s perspective, or even to imagine that other people have a perspective that might be different from your own.
Hiding their eyes: If I can’t see, you can’t see, right? If the world has just become dark, how can anyone else see?
Egocentrism is also a hallmark of autism, to such an extent that if you point somewhere, an autistic child might look at the end of your finger or at a point past the finger from their perspective, rather than being able to tell where you are looking.
How does this relate to our definition of egocentrism?

22. Maturing beyond Egocentrism: Developing a “Theory of Mind”
Theory of mind refers to the ability to understand that others have their own thoughts and perspective.
Click through to show the three scenes.
This test is typically called the “false belief test” because the younger child is asked to be able to tell when another person has the wrong idea, or a false belief, about where something is. It is a screening test for autism.
The ability to understand a false belief appears at age 3.5 to 4.5, or much later in children with autism spectrum disorders (including Asperger’s Disorder), although I have had a first-year college male fail this test despite repeated explanation and in-class demonstration.
With a theory of mind, you can picture that Sally will have the wrong idea about where the ball is.

23. Examples of Operations that Preoperational Children Cannot Do…Yet
Conservation refers to the ability to understand that a quantity is conserved (does not change) even when it is arranged in a different shape.
Click to reveal all text.
This child could “conserve” the amount of fluid by mentally reversing the operation of pouring it into a different container, but this is difficult for a child at the start of the preoperational phase.
Click for another example: if objects are arranged on a table in two rows of five, but one row is more spread out, a preoperational child will feel sure that there are more objects in the spread-out row.
Which row has more mice?

24. The Concrete Operational Stage
begins at ages 6-7 (first grade) to age 11
children now grasp conservation and other concrete transformations
they also understand simple mathematical transformations the reversibility of operations (reversing
3 + 7 = 10 to figure out that = 3).
Click to reveal bullets.
Just as toddlers enjoy practicing their newfound understanding of object permanence by playing peekaboo, kids in the concrete operational stage might like playing around with their understanding of conservation with jokes like the one in the book: “don’t cut the pizza into eight pieces, I can only eat six.” Back to the glass of milk example, a kid at this age might laugh at hearing or saying, “could you pour that milk into a taller glass, I’m really thirsty.”

25. Formal Operational Stage (Age 11 +)
Concrete operations include analogies such as “My brain is like a computer.”
Includes arithmetic transformations:
if = 12, 12 – 4 = ?
Formal operations includes allegorical thinking such as “People who live in glass houses shouldn’t throw stones” (understanding that this is a comment on hypocrisy).
Click to reveal text boxes and examples.
The arithmetic transformation only requires reversing the operation, and by this stage, a child should be able to answer “8.”
The algebra problem requires understanding and manipulating symbols, in this case:
If 3y = x, we can substitute “3y” for “x” in the second equation: 3y-2y = 4, or simply y = 4. If x = 3y, then x = 3(4), or 12.
With formal operations thought comes the skill of imagining the realities that might exist rather than the concrete here and now.
Includes algebra:
if x = 3y and x – 2y = 4, what is x?

26. Reassessment of Jean Piaget’s Theory
Although Jean Piaget’s observation and stage theory are useful, today’s researchers believe:
development is a continuous process.
children show some mental abilities and operations at an earlier age than Piaget thought.
formal logic is a smaller part of cognition, even for adults, than Piaget believed.
Using Models:
Symbolic Thinking?
Three-year-olds can use a tiny model of a room as a map, helping them to picture the location of objects in a full-sized room.
Does this 3-year-old ability mean that Piaget was wrong? Do kids use symbolic thought much earlier than he suggested?
Click to reveal all text.
If this is symbolic thought, then adult primates such as bonobos have this too.
There is a great video starring Alan Alda showing a bonobo (a peaceful relative of the chimpanzee) able to do what a two and a half year old cannot do; find the hidden object based on a model.
Is this symbolic thought, or is a visual mental model not the same as an abstract symbol?
Click to reveal sidebar.

27. Lev Vygotsky: Alternative to Jean Piaget
Lev Vygotsky ( ) studied kids too, but focused on how they learn in the context of social communication.
Principle: children learn thinking skills by internalizing language from others and developing inner speech: “Put the big blocks on the bottom, not the top…”
Vygotsky saw development as building on a scaffold of mentoring, language, and cognitive support from parents and others.
Click to reveal bullets and example.
Regarding the first bullet point: by contrast, Jean Piaget was more focused on how children learned through interaction with the physical environment.

28. Social Development: Attachment
Attachment refers to an emotional tie to another person.
In children, attachment can appear as a desire for physical closeness to a caregiver.
Origins of Attachment
Experiments with monkeys suggest that attachment is based on physical affection and comfortable body contact, and not based on being rewarded with food.
Click to reveal all text.
Instructor: The word “tie” here implies something even stronger, tighter, and closer than the word “connection.” Sometimes this attachment includes anxiety/distress when separated from the caregiver, as we will see in upcoming slides.
In experiments by Harry Harlow (in the late 1950s and 1960s) that gave monkeys a choice of surrogate mothers, a baby monkey would cling to a comfortable cloth ‘mother’ rather than the ‘mother’ that provided food. However, there are numerous critiques of these experiments.

29. Attachment Variation: Styles of Dealing with Separation
The degree and style of parent-child attachment has been tested by Mary Ainsworth in the “strange situations” test. In this test, a child is observed as:
a mother and infant child are alone in an unfamiliar (“strange”) room; the child explores the room as the mother just sits.
a stranger enters the room, talks to the mother, and approaches the child; the mother leaves the room.
After a few moments, the mother returns.
Reactions to Separation and Reunion
Secure attachment: most children (60 percent) feel distress when mother leaves, and seek contact with her when she returns
Insecure attachment (anxious style): clinging to mother, less likely to explore environment, and may get loudly upset with mother’s departure and remain upset when she returns
Insecure attachment (avoidant style): seeming indifferent to mother’s departure and return
Click to reveal bullets and sidebar.
The book mixes the descriptions of the two insecure attachment styles together; I have separated them here.
Some theorists have added a fourth type of attachment--disorganized, not forming a coherent or consistent style.

30. What causes these different attachment styles: nature or nurture?
Is the “strange situations” behavior mainly a function of the child’s inborn temperament?
Is the behavior a reaction to the way the parents have interacted with the child previously? If so, is that caused by the parenting behavior?
Temperament refers to a person’s characteristic style and intensity of emotional reactivity.
Some infants have an “easy” temperament; they are happy, relaxed, and calm, with predictable rhythms of needing to eat and sleep.
Some infants seem to be “difficult”; they are irritable, with unpredictable needs and behavior, and intense reactions.
Mary Ainsworth believed that sensitive, responsive, calm parenting is correlated with the secure attachment style.
Monkeys with unresponsive artificial mothers showed anxious insecure attachment.
Training in sensitive responding for parents of temperamentally- difficult children led to doubled rates of secure attachment.
Click to show bullets under each question.
Note: we are later going to take a broader look at different parenting styles and the correlation with child behaviors. Here, the focus is on parent and child behaviors related to attachment.
Child temperament and attachment: there is usually a third style listed when describing temperament, called “slow to warm up.”
As we shall see when discussing personality, these temperamental traits may be genetically based and persist into adulthood in some form.
Parental influences on attachment: the correlational observations are not enough, since the correlation could have been driven either by the child’s temperament or by the parent’s behavior.
The experiment, by Dymphna C. van den Boom, involved random assignment to experimental and control groups. The control group showed 28 percent of infants being securely attached at 12 months. The experimental group showed 68 percent, actually above the average for infants in general, despite beginning with temperamentally difficult infants.

31. Fathers Count Too
Many studies of the impact of parenting have focused on mothers.
Correlational studies show a strong relationship between paternal (father) involvement in parenting and the child’s academic success, health, and overall well-being.
Click to reveal bullets.

32. Attachment Styles… not just about bonding with parents
Are basic trust and attachment styles determined in childhood?
Erik Erikson believed that basic trust is established by relationships with early caregivers.
Are trust and attachment styles:
set by genetics?
formed by early experiences with parents?
reshaped by new relationship experiences?
Erik Erikson’s concept of basic trust resembles the concept of attachment, but extends beyond the family into our feeling of whether the world is predictable and trustworthy.
Attachment style may be relevant to our ability to manage and enjoy adult relationships. It may even be relevant to our motivations to achieve or to avoid risks.
Click to reveal bullets and sidebar.

33. Deprivation of Attachment
If children live without safe, nurturing, affectionate caretaking, they may still be resilient, that is bounce back, attach, and succeed.
However, if the child experiences severe, prolonged deprivation or abuse, he or she may:
have difficulty forming attachments.
have increased anxiety and depression.
have lowered intelligence.
show increased aggression.
Click to reveal bullets.
Genetics and biology still play a role in determining the outcome of prolonged deprivation. Some people’s stress hormone systems seem to be more easily damaged by chronic stress, and some people’s serotonin pathways more easily become inefficient.

34. Childhood: Self-Concept
A major task of infancy may be to form healthy attachments.
A major task of childhood may be to form a healthy self- concept: a stable and positive understanding of identity.
By age 8-10, a child moves from “that’s me in the mirror” to “I have skills, preferences, and goals”; this prepares the child for confident success.
Click to reveal bullets.
Of course, a child isn’t going to say these words in quotes on this slide, but it may come out in different words:
Skills: “I’m good at…”
Preferences: “I like boys… sports… books”
Goals: “I want to be a ____ when I grow up…”

35. Childhood: Hypothetical Parenting Styles
Response to Child’s Behavior
Authoritarian
“Too Hard”
Parents impose rules “because I said so”
and expect obedience.
Permissive
“Too Soft”
Parents submit to kids’ desires, not enforcing
limits or standards for child behavior.
Authoritative
“Just Right”
Parents enforce rules, limits, and standards
but also explain, discuss, listen, and express
respect for child’s ideas and wishes.
No animation.
Instructor: You might note here that we have earlier discussed the influences of parenting behaviors on infant attachment. Now we’re looking at a slightly different picture--the way parents handle the issue of control in childhood.
Response to child’s behavior: how does this style control, manage, or otherwise respond to child behavior?

36. Outcomes with Parenting Styles
Authoritative parenting, more than the other two styles, seems to be associated with:
high self-reliance.
high social competence.
high self-esteem.
low aggression.
But are these a result of parenting style, or are parents responding to a child’s temperament? Or are both a function of culture ? Or genes?
Click to reveal bullets.
There could also be other factors, such as genes or culture, affecting both the child outcomes and the parenting styles.

37. Physical Development
Puberty is the time of sexual maturation (becoming physically able to reproduce).
During puberty, increased sex hormones lead to:
primary and secondary sex characteristics.
some changes in mood and behavior.
Height changes are an early sign of puberty.
Because girls begin puberty sooner than boys, girls briefly overtake boys in height.
Click to reveal bullets.

38. Adolescent Brain Development
Frontal Lobes are Last to Rewire
The emotional limbic system gets wired for puberty before the frontal judgment centers of the brain get wired for adulthood.
As a result, adolescents may understand risks and consequences, but give more weight to potential thrills and rewards.
Teens have developed a mental accelerator, but are not in the habit of using the brakes.
During puberty, the brain stops automatically adding new connections, and becomes more efficient by “rewiring.”
“pruning” away the connections not being used
coating the well-used connections in myelin, in order to speed up nerve conduction
This makes early adolescence a crucial time to learn as much as you can!
Click to reveal bullets.
This puberty pruning may be why it is hard to learn a language or to develop perfect pitch if you haven’t done so by age 13 or so; the necessary brain connections wither away if they haven’t been used by then.
Click to reveal sidebar bullets.
Longer narrative to go with this slide: as with the formation of the brain in early childhood, the brain’s rewiring process (pruning and mylenization) starts with the survival functions and gets to the frontal lobes last (they don’t finish maturing until age 25!). Therefore, adolescents, although intellectually able to judge consequences of an action, assign much more weight to benefits. This is especially true when they are around peers, and don’t use the frontal lobes effectively as a censor for their impulses.

39. Adolescent Cognitive Development
According to Jean Piaget, adolescents are in the formal operational stage. They use this reasoning to:
think about how reality compares to ideals.
think hypothetically about different choices and their consequences.
plan how to pursue goals.
think about the minds of others, including “what do they think of me?”
Click to reveal bullets.
Although adolescents are cognitively able to consider consequences, they may seem like they’re ignoring consequences because they tend to weigh potential benefits much more heavily than potential risks.
Although adolescents are able to make plans to meet goals, they may still tend to make choices based on shorter-term, immediate benefits rather than long-term goals.
Adolescents can picture the minds of others, but they retain some childhood egocentrism; they mainly wonder what others think about them, and assume no one else can understand their experience.

40. Building Toward Moral Reasoning
Adolescents see justice and fairness in terms of merit and equity instead of in terms of everyone getting equal treatment.
Adolescents may strive to advocate for ideals and political causes.
Adolescents think about god, meaning, and purpose in deeper terms than in childhood.
Lawrence Kohlberg’s
Levels of Moral Reasoning
Preconventional morality (up to age 9): “Follow the rules because if you don’t, you’ll get in trouble; if you do, you might get a treat.”
Conventional morality (early adolescence): “Follow the rules because we get along better if everyone does the right thing.”
Click to reveal bullets and Kohlberg’s levels of moral reasoning.
Instructor: You can add that Lawrence Kohlberg ( ) established these categories after studying the way kids of different ages created solutions to moral dilemmas. If you’re going to use the next slide, you can preview here, or wait until that slide has been discussed, to note that we might not agree that these levels of moral reasoning are really a function of age and development. Kohlberg’s levels have also been criticized as culturally determined.
Postconventional morality (later adolescence and adulthood): “Sometimes rules need to be set aside to pursue higher principles.”

41. Example: looting after a natural disaster
Which level of moral reasoning is involved?
Looting is a problem; if everyone did it, there would be escalating chaos and greater damage to the economy.
Looting is generally wrong, yet morally right when your family’s survival seems to depend on it.
Looting is wrong because you might get punished, but if no one is punished, that’s a sign that it’s okay.
Click to reveal bullets.
The goal here is not to have students answer the questions but to have students note that the questions use a variety of levels of moral reasoning. See if they can explain which level of moral reasoning is involved. This may bring out the critique of Lawrence Kohlberg for seeing these levels as stages based on age/development; after all, adults can be found thinking in any of these three ways.
Answers:
conventional morality--this is an example of thinking about rules based on the benefits they bring to society.
postconventional morality--here we put aside rules that benefit society when we decide to invoke a higher moral principle, although it could be argued here that the “higher principle” here is actually selfish. An imperfect example can sometimes generate discussion.
preconventional morality--using punishments and rewards as a cue for deciding what is right and wrong.

42. Moral Intuition
Jonathan Haidt believed moral decisions are often driven by moral intuition, that is, quick, gut-feeling decisions.
This intuition is not just based in moral reasoning but also in emotions such as:
disgust. We may turn away from choosing an action because it feels awful.
elevated feelings. We may get a rewarding delight from some moral behavior such as donating to charity.
An Example of Moral Intuition:
Given a hypothetical choice to save five people from an oncoming trolley by killing one person, many people’s choice is determined not just by reasoning, but by disgust.
Many people would flip a switch to make this choice, but not as many would push a person on the tracks to save five others.
Click to reveal bullets and example.
The emotional areas of the brain, quiet when considering flipping a track switch to have a trolley kill one person instead of five, actually light up when considering pushing someone in the path of a trolley. This supports the idea that emotion is making the difference in the choice.

43. Social Development: Erik Erikson (1902-1994)
Erik Erikson’s model of lifelong psychosocial development sees adolescence as a struggle to form an identity, a sense of self, out of the social roles adolescents are asked to play.
Adolescents may try out different “selves” with peers, with parents, and with teachers.
For Erikson, the challenge in adolescence was to test and integrate the roles in order to prevent role confusion (which of those selves, or what combination, is really me?).
Some teens solve this problem simply by adopting one role, defined by parents or peers.
Click to reveal bullets.

44. Erik Erikson: Stages of Psychosocial Development
No animation.

45. Other Eriksonian stages on the minds of adolescents
While currently in the identity vs. role confusion stage,
adolescents have ideally just finished working through the tension of competence vs. inferiority.
They are ready after adolescence to take on the challenge of intimacy vs. isolation.
Click to reveal bullets.
This is an optional slide, spotlighting material from the two previous slides, and putting the current stage in context of the course of psychosocial development.

46. Adolescence, the sequel… Emerging Adulthood
In some countries, added years of education and later marriage has delayed full adult independence beyond traditional adolescence. This seems to have created a new phase which can be called emerging adulthood, ages
No animation.
The chart at the left shows how the time between the onset of puberty and fully moving on from one’s family of origin has grown to the point that it is not really one single “adolescent” phase anymore. It is now broken into parts, with the departure for college, around age 18, making a natural breaking point.

47. Adulthood
Is the rest of the developmental story just one long plateau of work and possibly raising kids?
Physical Development
physical decline
lifespan and death
sensory changes
Cognitive Development
memory
Social Development
commitments
Click to show box with upcoming topics.
Early on in this section, I highlight that death comes to everyone, so that students will be prepared to shift gears and talk about sensory decline. You can choose to move those lifespan/death slides to the end of the physical development section or to the end of the entire discussion of adulthood.

48. Adult Physical Development
In our mid-20’s, we reach a peak in the natural physical abilities which come with biological maturation:
muscular strength
cardiac output
reaction time
sensory sensitivity
To what extent can training overcome the decline that follows?
Click to reveal bullets.
Answering the last question: with strength and endurance training, you can improve compared to someone not training, but it does not change the decline compared to a younger person doing the same training.
Question (with no correct answer) you can raise with students: does the word “development” still apply if we are talking about a decline?

49. Physical Changes: Middle Adulthood
The end the reproductive years
There is a gradual decline in sexual activity in adulthood, although sexuality can continue throughout life.
Around age 50, women enter menopause (the end of being able to get pregnant).
According to evolutionary psychologists, why might it make sense for women’s fertility to end?
Physical Changes: Middle Adulthood
Between ages 40 and 60, physical vitality (such as endurance and strength) may still be more of a function of lifestyle than of biological decline.
Some changes are still driven by genetic maturation, especially the end of our reproductive years.
Click to reveal bullets and sidebar.
Potential answer to the sidebar question: to ensure the presence of healthy mothers, AND to create a population of back-up help to these mothers (grandmothers).
You might note that is human fertility did not end, evolutionary psychologists would easily explain that too (i.e., to maximize the number of offspring). This might help students understand the limits of evolutionary psychology; explanations cannot almost never be empirically tested.

50. The Aging Body More Aged Women
The rise in life expectancy, combined with declining birth rates, means a higher percentage of the world’s population is old.
More elderly people are women because more men die than women at every age. By age 100, women outnumber men by a ratio of 5 to 1.
Potential lifespan for the human body is estimated to be about 122 years.
Life expectancy refers to the average expected life span.
The worldwide average has increased from 49 in 1950 to 69 in In 2012:
South Africa—49
Cameroon—55
Pakistan—66
Thailand--74
United States--75
Ireland--80
Australia—82
Japan--84
Click to reveal bullets and sidebar bullets.
Although the next few slides leading up to death are here to follow the sequence of the text, I suggest moving them to the end of this “Physical Development” section or even to the end of the chapter.
About the change in life expectancy: picture how adding two more decades of life (on average) changes what a typical life is like, both for individuals and families. (Although actually, much of the rise of this average figure may be due to decreasing infant mortality; not all adults living two decades longer.)
This life expectancy figure may seem low; keep in mind that it averages all countries, and that it is the life expectancy at birth. Figures for life expectancy for those who have survived the infant mortality years is higher, although this was even more true in the past.

51. Why don’t we live forever? Possible biological answers…
Nurture/Environment
An accumulation of stress, damage, and disease wears us down until one of these factors kills us.
Genes
Some people have genes that protect against some kinds of damage.
Even with great genes and environment, telomeres (the tips at the end of chromosomes) wear down with every generation of cell duplication and we stop healing well.
Click to reveal bullets.
Philosophical and evolutionary answers to the question on this slide might speculate about the value of “new blood” but this is highly debatable.
The answers on the slide are biological answers, and more about “how” we don’t live forever, perhaps not a full answer as to “why.”
The wearing down of telomeres is worsened by smoking, obesity, and stress. It happens no matter how life is lived, although researchers are looking into extending the human lifespan by reducing the deterioration of the telomeres.

52. Physical Changes with Age
The following abilities decline as we age:
visual acuity, both sharpness and brightness
hearing, especially sensing higher pitch
reaction time and general motor abilities
neural processing speed, especially for complex and novel tasks
Click to reveal bullets.
The first bullet will shrink to play off the visual acuity issue.

53. Impact of Sensory and Motor Decline
What specific factors and changes might explain the results below?
No animation.
It’s a more minor point, but you could ask students to explain why looking at accidents per mile driven rather than per driver is a more dramatic figure. Which figure is more appropriate in assessing the average risk of letting an older person drive?
Age

54. Health/Immunity Changes with Age
The bad news
The good news
The immune system declines with age, and can have difficulty fighting off major illnesses.
The immune system has a lifetime’s accumulation of antibodies, and does well fighting off minor illnesses.
Click to reveal good news and bad news.

55. Exercise Can Slow the Aging Process
build muscles and bones.
stimulate neurogenesis (in the hippocampus) and new neural connections.
maintain telomeres.
improve cognition.
reduce the risk of dementia.
Click to reveal bullets.

56. Changes in the Brain with Age
Myelin-enhanced neural processing speed peaks in the teen years, and declines thereafter.
Regions of the brain related to memory begin to shrink with age, making it harder to form new memories.
The frontal lobes atrophy, leading eventually to decreased inhibition and self-control.
By age 80, a healthy brain is 5 percent lighter than a brain in middle adulthood.
Click to reveal bullets.

57. Alzheimer’s Disease and Other Dementias
Brain Changes of Alzheimer’s Disease
loss of brain cells and neural network connections
deterioration of neurons that produce acetylcholine, the memory neurotransmitter
shriveled and broken protein filaments forming plaques at the tips of neurons
dramatic shrinking of the brain
Dementia, including the Alzheimer’s type, is NOT a “normal” part of aging.
Dementia Symptoms
decreased ability to recall recent events and the names of familiar objects and people
emotional unpredictability; flat, then uninhibited, then angry
confusion, disorientation, and eventual inability to think or communicate
Click to reveal bullets and sidebar bullets.
Note: when a person has just one of the above symptoms, or general memory problems, it does NOT mean that person has dementia.
There are many other kinds of dementia besides Alzheimer’s, including dementia related to strokes, or “multi-infarct dementia.”
Sidebar: it is not clear which of these brain changes causes dementia and which simply tend to be associated with Alzheimer’s. Some of these changes are evident in people without Alzheimer’s, and some people with Alzheimer’s symptoms do not show these changes. Nonetheless, these brain changes, in addition to some associated genes, and other symptoms such as loss of ability to smell, can form early warning signs of Alzheimer’s.

58. Cognitive Development and Memory
Even without the brain changes of dementia, there are some changes in our ability to learn, process, and recall information.
The ability to recognize information, and to use previous knowledge as expertise, does not decline with age.
Cognitive Development and Memory
Can you describe and explain the differences in performance changes in these charts?
Click to reveal bullets and example. See if students can describe, or even try to explain, the change with age in performance depicted in these two charts. You may need to clarify that the “names recalled” in this study (on the left), refers to the names of people introducing themselves in video clips.

59. More Learning and Memory Changes
Rote memorization ability declines more than ability to learn meaningful information.
Prospective memory, planning to recall, (“I must remember to do…) also declines.
The ability to learn new skills declines less than the ability to learn new information.
Click to reveal bullets.

60. Social Development in Adulthood
Is adult social development driven by biological maturation or by life experiences and roles?
The “midlife crisis”--re-evaluating one’s life plan and success--does not seem to peak at any age.
For the 25 percent of adults who do have this emotional crisis, the trigger seems to be the challenge of major illness, divorce, job loss, or parenting.
Click to reveal bullets.
The sports car is a stereotypical, perhaps mythical, example of purchases by people in their 50’s trying to feel more youthful. You could ask if any students have parents showing this type of behavior.

61. Psychosocial Development
Although the “midlife crisis” may not be a function of age, people do feel pressured by a “social clock” of achievement expectation.
Erik Erikson’s observations of age-related issues:
Click to reveal bullets.

62. Challenges of Healthy Adulthood
Arising first:
Erik Erikson’s intimacy issue (a.k.a. affiliation, attachment, connectedness)
Sigmund Freud used simpler terms, saying that the healthy adult must find ways to love and to work.
Arising later: Erik Erikson’s generativity issue (achievement, productivity, competence)
Click to reveal all text.

63. Commitment to Love Commitment to Work
The desire to commit to a loving relationship may have evolved to help vulnerable human children survive long enough to reproduce.
Couples who go through marriage/union ceremonies tend to stay together more than couples who simply live together.
Marriage, compared to being single, is associated with ‘happiness’ and with fewer social problems such as crime and child delinquency.
Work roles can largely define adult identity, especially in individualistic capitalist societies.
Tough economic times make it difficult to find work, much less follow a career path.
Work satisfaction seems to be a function of having the work fit a person’s interests and providing a sense of competence and accomplishment.
Click to reveal all bullets on each side.
In both examples, it is possible to explain the causation in either direction, (e.g. that ceremonies make commitments last OR that people in relationships that are more likely to last choose to have a ceremony) or even that both factors are explained by a third factor such as culture or socioeconomic status.
Work satisfaction is also caused by other factors such as financial reward and control over work tasks and schedules. However, the factors listed above fit with the challenges of Erik Erikson’s psychosocial crisis of “generativity vs. stagnation.”

64. Why do people claim to be happy even as their body declines?
Older people attend less to negative information and more to positive information.
They are also more likely to have accumulated many mildly positive memories, which last longer than mildly negative memories.
Older people feel an increased sense of competence and control, and have greater stability in mood.
Click to reveal bullets.
The first finding may be related to recent research on the brain: with age, the amygdala responds less actively to negative events, but not less actively to positively events. There is generally less brain wave activity in response to negative images.

65. Coping with Death and Dying
Individual responses to death may vary.
Grief is more intense when death occurs unexpectedly (especially if also too early on the social clock).
There is NO standard pattern or length of the grieving process.
It seems to help to have the support of friends or groups, and to face the reality of death and grief while affirming the value of life.
Click to reveal bullets.

66. The Final Issue in Development: Stability and Change
Are we essentially the same person over long periods?
In general, temperament seems stable.
Traits can vary, especially attitudes, coping strategies, work habits, and styles of socializing.
Personality seems to stabilize with age.
Stability helps us form identity, while the potential for change gives us control over our lives.
Click to reveal bullets.