1. PSYCHOLOGY (8th Edition) David Myers
PowerPoint Slides
Aneeq Ahmad
Henderson State University
Worth Publishers, © 2006

2. Developing Through the Life Span Chapter 4

3. Developing Through the Life Span
Prenatal Development and the Newborn
Conception
Prenatal Development
The Competent Newborn
Infancy and Childhood
Physical Development
Cognitive Development

4. Developing Through the Life Span
Adolescence
Physical Development
Cognitive Development
Social Development
Emerging Adulthood
Adulthood

5. Developing Through the Life Span
Adulthood (continued)
Cognitive Development
Social Development
Reflections on Two Major Developmental Issues
Continuity and Stages
Stability and Change

6. Developmental Psychologists Study the physical, cognitive and social changes throughout the lifespan.
Issue
Details
Nature/Nurture
How do genetic inheritance (our nature) and experience (the nurture we receive) influence our behavior?
Continuity/Stages
Is developmental a gradual, continuous process or a sequence of separate stages?
Stability/Change
Do our early personality traits persist through life, or do we become different persons as we age.
OBJECTIVE 1| State the three areas of change that developmental psychologists study, and identify the three major issues in developmental psychology.

7. Prenatal Development and the Newborn
How, over time, did we come to be who we are? From zygote to birth, development progresses in an orderly, though fragile, sequence.

8. Conception
A single sperm cell (male) penetrates the outer coating of the egg (female) and fuses to form one fertilized cell.
Lennart Nilsson/ Albert Bonniers Publishing Company
Lennart Nilsson/ Albert Bonniers Publishing Company
OBJECTIVE 2| Describe the union of sperm and egg at conception.

9. Prenatal Development
A zygote is a fertilized egg with 100 cells that become increasingly diverse. At about 14 days the zygote turns into an embryo (a and b).
Lennart Nilsson/ Albert Bonniers Publishing Company
Biophoto Associates/ Photo Researchers, Inc.
OBJECTIVE 3| Define zygote, embryo and fetus, and explain how teratogens can affect development.

10. Prenatal Development
At 9 weeks, an embryo turns into a fetus (c and d). Teratogens are chemicals or viruses that can enter the placenta and harm the developing fetus, causing physical and cognitive abnormalities. Fetal Alcohol Syndrome (FAS) is an example of teratogen poisoning.
Lennart Nilsson/ Albert Bonniers Publishing Company
Lennart Nilsson/ Albert Bonniers Publishing Company

11. The Competent Newborn
Infants are born with reflexes that aid in survival, including rooting reflex which helps them locate food, by directing the baby to turn toward a touch on the cheek, open the mouth, and search for the nipple.
OBJECTIVE 4| Describe some of the abilities of the newborn, and explain how researchers use habituation to assess infant sensory and cognitive abilities.

12. The Competent Newborn
Offspring cries are important signals for parents to provide nourishment. In animals and humans such cries are quickly attended to and relieved.
Lightscapes, Inc. Corbis
Carl and Ann Purcell/ Corbis

13. Cognitive Development in the Newborn
Investigators study habituation, which is, a decreasing responsiveness to objects over a period of time. Infants pay more attention to new objects than habituated ones, which shows they are learning.

14. Infancy and Childhood
Infancy and childhood span from birth to the teenage years. During these years, the individual grows physically, cognitively, and socially.
Stage
Span
Infancy
Newborn to toddler
Childhood
Toddler to teenager

15. Physical Development
Infants’ psychological development depends on their biological development. To understand the emergence of motor skills and memory, we must understand the developing brain.

16. Developing Brain
The developing brain overproduces neurons. Peaking around 28 billion at 7 months, these neurons are pruned (use it or lose it) to 23 billion at birth. The greatest neuronal spurt is in the frontal lobe enabling the individual to think rationally.
OBJECTIVE 5| Describe some developmental changes in the child’s brain, and explain why maturation accounts for many of our similarities.

17. Maturation
The development of the brain unfolds based on genetic instructions, causing various bodily and mental functions to occur in sequence— standing before walking, babbling before talking—this is called maturation (biological growth and changes in behavior relatively uninfluenced by experience).
Maturation sets the basic course of development, while experience adjusts it.

18. Motor Development
First, infants begin to roll over. Next, they sit unsupported, crawl, and finally walk. Experience has little effect on this sequence.
Jim Craigmyle/ Corbis
Renee Altier for Worth Publishers
Phototake Inc./ Alamy Images
Profimedia.CZ s.r.o./ Alamy
OBJECTIVE 6| Outline four events in the motor development sequence from birth to toddlerhood, and evaluate the effects of maturation and experience on that sequence.

19. Maturation and Infant Memory
The earliest age of conscious memory is around 3½ years (Bauer, 2002). A 5-year-old has a sense of self and an increased long-term memory, thus organization of memory is different from 3-4 years.
OBJECTIVE 7| Explain why we have few memories of experiences during our first three years of life.
Amy Pedersen
Courtesy of Carolyn Rovee-Collier

20. Cognitive Development
Jean Piaget, the Swiss developmental psychologists believed that the driving force behind intellectual development is our biological development amidst experiences with the environment. Our cognitive development is shaped by the errors we make.
OBJECTIVE 8| State Piaget’s understanding of how the mind develops, and discuss the importance of assimilation and accommodation in this process.
Both photos: Courtesy of Judy DeLoache

21. Schemas are mental molds into which we pour our experiences.

22. Assimilation and Accommodation
The process of assimilation involves trying to interpret new experiences into our current understanding (existing schemas). So a child may incorrectly call a cow, “doggie.”
The process of adjusting a schema and modifying it is called accommodation. Mommy corrects the child, and he now has a new schema (cow).
Bill Anderson/ Photo Researchers, Inc.
Jean Piaget with a subject

23. Piaget’s Theory and Current Thinking Cognition – Thinking, knowing, remembering, understanding, and communicating
OBJECTIVE 9| Outline Piaget’s four main stages of cognitive development, and comment on how children’s thinking changes during these four stages.

24. Sensorimotor Stage
In the sensorimotor stage (birth – about 2) babies take in the world, using the senses (looking, hearing, touching, mouthing, and grasping) and motor skills to learn. Children younger than 6 months of age do not grasp object permanence, i.e., objects that are out of sight still exist.
Doug Goodman

25. Sensorimotor Stage: Criticisms
Piaget believed children in the sensorimotor stage could not think —they do not have any abstract concepts or ideas.
However, recent research shows that children in the sensorimotor stage can think and count.
Children understand the basic laws of physics. They are amazed at how a ball can stop in midair or disappear.

26. Sensorimotor Stage: Criticisms
2. Children can also count. Wynn (1992, 2000) showed that children stared longer at the wrong number of objects than the right ones.

27. Ontario Science Center
Preoperational Stage
Piaget suggested that from 2 years old to about 6-7 years old, children are in the preoperational stage, able to use symbols, but too young to perform mental operations or think logically. When they can grasp conservation (objects retain their mass, volume and number regardless of the shape of the container) the child leaves the preoperational stage
Ontario Science Center

28. Preoperational Stage: Criticism
DeLoache (1987) showed that children as young as 3 years of age are able to use metal operations. When shown a model of a dog’s hiding place behind the couch, a 2½-year-old could not locate the stuffed dog in an actual room, but the 3-year-old did.

29. Egocentrism
Piaget concluded that preschool children are egocentric. They cannot perceive things from another’s point of view.
While speaking on the telephone, young children often do not say, “yes/no” in response to query from the other side, but just nod their heads. They feel that the other person should be able to see them. Also, they usually have created a mental image of the other person and feel that he or she looks the way they have imagined.

30. Peoples’ ideas about their own and others’ mental states.
Theory of Mind
Peoples’ ideas about their own and others’ mental states.
Autism is characterized by deficient communication, social interaction, and impaired theory of mind. Asperger’s Syndrome is often characterized by exceptional skill or talent in a specific area, but deficient social and communication skills

31. Concrete Operational Stage
In concrete operational stage, 6- to 7-year-olds grasp mathematical functions. So, if = 12, then a trans-formation, 12 – 4 = 8, is also easily doable.
Another example might be a child who is able to recognize that his or her dog is a Labrador, that a Labrador is a dog, and that a dog is an animal.

32. Formal Operational Stage
Around age 12, our reasoning ability expands from concrete thinking to abstract thinking. We can now use symbols and imagined realities to systematically reason. Piaget called this formal operational thinking.

33. Criticisms of Piaget’s Formal Operational Stage
Rudiments of such thinking begin earlier (age 7) than what Piaget suggested, since 7-year-olds can solve the problem below (Suppes, 1982).
If John is in school, Mary is in school. John is in school. What can you say about Mary?

34. Reflecting on Piaget’s Theory
Piaget’s stage theory has been influential globally, validating a number of ideas regarding growth and development in many cultures and societies. However, today’s researchers believe the following:
Development is a continuous process.
Children express their mental abilities and operations at an earlier age.
Formal logic is a smaller part of cognition.
OBJECTIVE 10| Discuss psychologists’ current views on Piaget’s theory of cognitive development.

35. © Christina Kennedy/ PhotoEdit
Social Development
Stranger anxiety is the fear of strangers that develops at around 8 months. This is the age at which infants form schemas for familiar faces and cannot assimilate a new face.
OBJECTIVE 11| Define stranger anxiety.
© Christina Kennedy/ PhotoEdit

36. Attachment
The central theme of attachment theory is that mothers who are available and responsive to their infant's needs establish a sense of security. The infant knows that the caregiver is dependable, which creates a secure base for the child to then explore the world.
OBJECTIVE 13| Contrast secure and insecure attachment, and discuss the roles of parents and infants in the development of attachment and an infant’s feelings of basic trust.

37. Harlow Primate Laboratory, University of Wisconsin
Origins of Attachment
Harry & Margaret Harlow (1971) showed that infants bond with surrogate mothers because of bodily contact and not because of nourishment.
OBJECTIVE 12| Discuss the effects of nourishment, body contact, and familiarity on infant social attachment.
Harlow Primate Laboratory, University of Wisconsin

38. Other Causes of Attachment
A critical period - an optimum period shortly after birth when certain events must take place to facilitate proper development – allows familiarity to form attachment. In some animals imprinting (forming attachments in the critical period) happens when the animals see a parent shortly after birth. Researcher, Konrad Lorenz, studied whether ducklings would imprint on him, if he was the first moving object they saw after birth. They did.
Konrad Lorenz

39. Secure Attachment
Relaxed and attentive caregiving becomes the backbone of secure attachment. Placed in a strange situation, 60% of children express secure attachment
Berry Hewlett

40. Harlow Primate Laboratory, University of Wisconsin
Insecure Attachment
Harlow’s studies showed that monkeys experience great anxiety if their terry-cloth mother is removed. Insecure attachment can lead to anxiety, and other disorders.
Harlow Primate Laboratory, University of Wisconsin

41. Erik Ericson
Developmental researcher, who categorized the Stages for Psycho-Social Development, said that securely attached children approach life with basic trust – a sense that the world is predictable and reliable.

42. Attachment Differences: Why?
Why do these attachment differences exist?
Factor
Explanation
Mother
Both rat pups and human infants develop secure attachments if the mother is relaxed and attentive.
Father
In many cultures where fathers share the responsibility of raising children, similar secure attachments develop.

43. Separation Anxiety
Separation anxiety peaks at 13 months of age, regardless of whether the children are home or sent to day care.

44. Deprivation of Attachment
What happens when circumstances prevent a child from forming attachments?
In such circumstances children become:
Withdrawn
Frightened
Unable to develop speech
OBJECTIVE 14| Assess the impact of parental neglect, family disruption, and day care on attachment patterns and development.

45. Disruption of Attachment
If parental or caregiving support is disrupted for an extended period of time, children are at risk for physical, psychological, and social problems, including alterations in brain serotonin levels.

46. Day Care and Attachment
Quality day care that consists of responsive adults interacting with children does not harm children’s thinking and language skills.
However, some studies suggest that extensive time in day care can increase aggressiveness and defiance in children.

47. Self-Concept
Self-concept, a sense of one’s identity and personal worth, emerges gradually around 6 months. Around months, children can recognize themselves in the mirror. By 8-10 years, their self-image is stable.
OBJECTIVE 15| Assess the impact of parental neglect, family disruption, and day care on attachment patterns and development.
Laura Dwight

48. Child-Rearing Practices
Description
Authoritarian
Parents impose rules and expect obedience. “It’s my way or the highway. My house, my rules”
Permissive
Parents submit to children’s demands. “Whatever you want dear.”
Authoritative
Parents are demanding but responsive to their children. “No, you can’t have that, and here’s why.”
Neglectful/
Absent
The parent is not around.
“ “
OBJECTIVE 16| Describe three parenting styles, and offer three potential explanations for the link between authoritative parenting and social competence.

49. Authoritative Parenting
Authoritative parenting correlates with social competence — other factors like common genes may lead to an easy-going temperament and may invoke an authoritative parenting style.

50. Adolescence
Many psychologists once believed that our traits were set during childhood. Today psychologists believe that development is a lifelong process. Adolescence is defined as a life between childhood (approx. 13) and adulthood (approx. 20).
OBJECTIVE 17| Define adolescence.
AP Photo/ Jeff Chiu

51. Physical Development
Adolescence begins with puberty (sexual maturation). Puberty occurs earlier in females (11 years) than males (13 years). Thus height in females increases before males.
OBJECTIVE 18| Identify the major physical changes during adolescence.

52. Primary Sexual Characteristics
During puberty primary sexual characteristics — the reproductive organs and external genitalia — develop rapidly.
Ellen Senisi/ The Image Works

53. Secondary Sexual Characteristics
The non-reproductive traits such as breasts and hips in girls, and facial hair and deepening of voice in boys develop. Pubic hair and armpit hair grow in both sexes. Menarche is the onset of menstruation in women, while spermarche is the beginning of sperm production in men.

54. The Adolescent Brain
Until puberty, neurons increase their connections. However, at adolescence, selective pruning of the neurons begins. Unused neuronal connections are lost to make other pathways more efficient.

55. Pre-Frontal Cortex
During adolescence, neurons in the frontal cortex grow myelin, which speeds up nerve conduction. The frontal cortex lags behind the limbic system’s development. Hormonal surges and the limbic system may explain occasional teen impulsiveness.

56. Cognitive Development
Adolescents’ ability to reason gives them a new level of social awareness. In particular, they may think about the following:
Their own thinking.
What others are thinking.
What others are thinking about them.
How ideals can be reached. They criticize society, parents, and even themselves.

57. Developing Reasoning Power
According to Piaget, adolescents can handle abstract problems, i.e., they can perform formal operations. Adolescents can judge good from evil, truth and justice, and think about God in deeper terms.
OBJECTIVE 19| Describe the changes in reasoning abilities that Piaget called formal operations.
William Thomas Cain/ Getty Images
AP/Wide World Photos

58. Developing Morality
Lawrence Kohlberg (1981, 1984) sought to describe the development of moral reasoning by posing moral dilemmas to children and adolescents, such as “Should a person steal medicine to save a loved one’s life?” He found stages of moral development.
OBJECTIVE 20| Discuss moral development from the perspectives of moral thinking, moral feeling, and moral action.
AP Photo/ Dave Martin

59. Moral Thinking
Preconventional Morality: Before age 9, children show morality to avoid punishment or gain reward.
Conventional Morality: By early adolescence, social rules and laws are upheld for their own sake.
Postconventional Morality: Affirms people’s agreed-upon rights or follows personally perceived ethical principles.
(like the movie, John Q)

60. Moral Feeling
Jonathon Haidt’s, social institutionalist theory is the concept that - moral feelings precede moral action. It’s a gut instinct, or quick cognitive process which then triggers moral reasoning and influences you into action.
Like commercials for saving abandoned/abused animals. You see the ad, you feel awful, you send in some $.

61. Erik Erikson
Developmental researcher who formulated the, Stages of Psychosocial Development. Erikson contended that each stage of life has its own psychosocial task, a crisis that needs to be resolved.

62. Social Development
OBJECTIVE 21| Identify Erickson’s eight stages of psychosocial development and their accompanying issues.

63. Forming an Identity
The sense of self. Erikson said that the task of adolescence is to solidify the sense of self. In Western cultures, many adolescents try out different selves before settling into a consistent and comfortable identity.
OBJECTIVE 22| Explain how search for identity affects us during adolescence, and discuss how forming an identity prepares us for intimacy.
Leland Bobble/ Getty Images
Matthias Clamer/ Getty Images

64. Parent and Peer Influence
Although teens become independent of their parents as they grow older, they nevertheless relate to their parents on a number of things, including religiosity and career choices. Peer approval and relationships are also very important. Erikson stated that intimacy, the ability to form close, loving relationships, is the task of young adulthood that must be conquered.
OBJECTIVE 23| Contrast parental and peer influences during adolescence.

65. Delayed (Emerging) Adulthood
Emerging adulthood spans ages During this time, young adults may live with their parents and attend college or work. On average, emerging adult women marry in their mid-twenties, and men in their later 20’s.
OBJECTIVE 24| Discuss the characteristics of emerging adulthood.
Ariel Skelley/ Corbis

66. Adulthood
Although adulthood begins sometime after a person’s mid-twenties, defining adulthood into stages is more difficult than defining stages during childhood or adolescence. Development continues throughout our adult lives
Rick Doyle/ Corbis

67. Middle Adulthood Physical Development
The peak of physical performance occurs around 20 years of age, after which it declines imperceptibly for most of us. Physical decline gradually accelerates the more we age, although physical vigor has more to do with how fit you are, regardless of how old you are.

68. Middle Adulthood (con’t)
Muscular strength, reaction time, sensory abilities and cardiac output begin to decline after the mid-twenties. Around age 50, women go through menopause, the biological changes that women experience, including the cessation of menstruation, as their ability to reproduce declines. Men also experience decreased levels of hormones and fertility.
OBJECTIVE 25| Identify major physical changes that occur in middle adulthood.
Bettman/ Corbis

69. Old Age: Life Expectancy
Life expectancy at birth increased from 49% in 1950 to 67% in 2004 and to 80% in developed countries. Women outlive men and outnumber them at most ages. Currently women live to an average age of 80.5 years, and men, 75.5 years.
OBJECTIVE 26| Compare life expectancy in the mid-twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, and discuss changes in sensory abilities and health (including frequency of dementia) in older adults.
Gorges Gobet/ AP Photo

70. Old Age: Sensory Abilities
After age 70, hearing, distance perception, and the sense of smell diminish, as do muscle strength, reaction time, and stamina. After 80, neural processes slow down, especially for complex tasks.
Michael Newman/ PhotoEdit

71. Old Age: Motor Abilities and Health
At age 70, our motor abilities also decline. A 70-year-old is no match for a 20-year-old individual. Fatal accidents also increase around this age.
As for health, a lifetime of antibodies make the elderly less susceptible to the common flu and colds. However, the weakened immune system means they are more likely to contract pneumonia and cancer.

72. Old Age: Dementia
With increasing age, the risk of dementia also increases. Dementia is not a normal part of growing old.
Alan Oddie/ PhotoEdit

73. Old Age: Alzheimer’s and Dementia
Dementia is any degenerative brain disease, that typically involves a loss of cognitive abilities. Alzheimer’s is a form of dementia. Individuals who are in the early stages of this disease show more MRI activity in the brain than do normal individuals of the same age.
Susan Bookheimer

74. Cognitive Development
Do cognitive abilities like memory, creativity, and intelligence decline with age the same way physical abilities do?

75. Aging and Memory
As we age, we remember some things well. These include recent past events and events that happened a decade or two back. However, recalling names becomes increasingly difficult. We remember things that have meaning to us, or an emotional connection
OBJECTIVE 27| Assess the impact of aging on recall and recognition in adulthood.

76. Aging and Memory
Recognition memory does not decline with age, and material that is meaningful is recalled better than meaningless material. The same is true for prospective memory, the memories that involve skills or tasks that have been rehearsed and practiced.
David Myers

77. Aging and Intelligence
Cross-Sectional studies (comparing people of different ages against one another) suggest a decline in intelligence, but Longitudinal studies (studying the same people over time) suggest that intelligence remains relative as we age. It is believed today that fluid intelligence (ability to reason speedily) declines with age, but crystallized intelligence (accumulated knowledge and skills) does not.
OBJECTIVE 28| Summarize the contribution of cross-sectional and longitudinal studies to our understanding of the normal effects of aging on adult intelligence.

78. Aging and Other Abilities
A number of cognitive abilities decline with age. However, vocabulary and general knowledge increase with age. As does social intelligence (common sense and/or worldly knowledge).

79. Social Development
Many differences between the young and old are not simply based on physical and cognitive abilities, but may instead be based on life events associated with family, relationships, and work.

80. Adulthood’s Ages and Stages
Psychologists doubt that adults pass through an orderly sequence of age-bound stages. Mid-life transitions (a desire to recapture some of the freedom of youth and single-life) at 40 are less likely to occur than crises triggered by major events (divorce, new marriage).
OBJECTIVE 29| Explain why the path of adult development need not be tightly linked to one’s chronological age.

81. The Social Clock
Society has memes and norms that establish commonly accepted times for certain life events.
Natural disasters, family rearrangement (divorce), change of job, or any other event that causes mass disruption in the normal flow of life’s progression, can delay the social clock.

82. Life Events and Chance Encounters
Marriage, parenthood, job and career changes, divorce, nest emptying, relocation and retirement mark new life stage transitions regardless of when they occur. Chance events can have lasting significance because they often deflect us down one road instead of another.
Love, as a developmental issue, may assist or hinder normal psychosocial development. Work responsibilities, or a lack of a job, could also have a profound effect on traditional development.
OBJECTIVE 30| Discuss the importance of love, marriage, and children in adulthood, and comment on the contribution of one’s feelings of self-satisfaction.

83. Well-Being Across the Life Span
Well-being and people’s feelings of satisfaction are stable across the life span.
OBJECTIVE 31| Describe trends in people’s life satisfaction across the life span.

84. Chris Steele-Perkins/ Magnum Photos
Death and Dying
There is no “normal” reaction or series of grief stages after the death of a loved one. Grief is more sudden if death occurs unexpectedly. People who reach a sense of integrity in life (in Erikson’s terms) see life as meaningful and worthwhile.
Chris Steele-Perkins/ Magnum Photos
OBJECTIVE 32| Describe the range of reactions to the death of a loved one.

85. Developmental Issues Continuity and Stages
Researchers who view development as a slow, continuous process are generally those who emphasize experience and learning (Nurture). Biologists, on the other hand, view maturation and development as a series of genetically predisposed steps or stages. These include psychologists like Piaget, Kohlberg and Erikson.
OBJECTIVE 33| Summarize current views on continuity versus stages and stability versus change in lifelong development.

86. Stability vrs. Change Researchers who have followed lives through time have found evidence for both stability and change. There is continuity to personality, and yet life is a continuing process. The struggles of today lay the foundation for tomorrow.