Key Issues in Developmental Psychology
Key Issues in Developmental Psychology
TERM PAPER
CLINICAL PSYCHOLOGY-7106
KEY ISSUES IN LIFE SPAN DEVELOPMENT
By
Name: Mariyam Akram
Roll No.: 0513-7-08
Session: 2008-2010
DEPARTMENT OF PSYCHOLOGY
GC UNIVERSITY, LAHORE
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CONTENT PAGE
3 Nature-Nurture Issue 6
4 Heredity-Environment Issue 11
5 Learning-Maturation Issue 14
6 Continuity-Discontinuity Issue 17
7 Normative-Idiographic Issue 19
9 Specificity-Generality Issue 24
10 Conclusion 29
References 33
Introduction
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Psychology has been defined as a science of behavior. It has been divided into
studies how individuals change over time and that processes that create those changes.
changes over time in the body and in the thinking or other behavior of a person that are
due both to biology and to experience. It studies intra and inter individual changes.
terms of periods or stages. The most widely used classification of eight developmental
origins of behavior) and Stanley Hall (father of child psychology) offered theories of
human behavior that are the direct ancestors of the major theoretical traditions found in
the child psychology today. The belief that the development of the child is related to the
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evolution of the species gave birth to the science of developmental psychology. People
considered as the pioneers of child psychology who gave later theories of developmental
theory).
Some of the most important and widely used research methods in developmental
psychology are: observation (laboratory & naturalistic), survey method (interviews &
approach.
integrity are essential for ensuring high quality science. Each scientist has an ethical
informed consent, risk/benefit ratio, minimal risk, privacy, deception, debriefing and
number of issues arouse repeatedly. These issues in particular have run through scientific
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thinking about development almost from the very beginning, and they remain a source of
debate today. These issues revolve around the questions of nature versus nurture,
conflict between statements of accepted fact and a new or unaccepted proposal that
Controversies can range in scope from private disputes between two individuals to large-
There are a number of important issues that have been debated throughout the
different theoretical concepts of different theories that they believed were the major parts
of child development. The major and most widely debated controversies are:
Nature-Nurture issue
Heredity-Environment issue
Continuity-Discontinuity issue
Learning-Maturation issue
Normative-Individual development
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Active-Passive learning
Specificity-Generality
Nature-Nurture Issue
these factors interact, rather than trying to decide which is more important. They are
interested to see to what extent the qualities we possess are inborn and contain biological
factors and to what extent are they acquired as a result of individual socialization?
the human grow in an orderly manner. By contrast, nurture advocates emphasize the
the gamut from the individual’s biological environment (nutrition, medical care, and
physical accidents) to the social environment (family, peer group, school, social
example that if a wild boy like child would be found today, probably modern
psychologists cannot cure him. In recent times there have been children who were
rescued after having confined for years in closets and other environments that cut off
from other people (Rymers, 1992). These children find it difficult to interact with others.
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These cases highlight the importance of early contacts with other people for normal
human development. They underscore the need to know as much as possible about early
development and what can help or hinder it. And they bear on nature-nurture debate
which is arguably the most salient issue in development (Berstein et al., 1994).
statements centuries ago. This debate has existed at least since Locke and Rousseau first
proposed their rather pure environmental and nativistic models of child development. The
nurture view was later taken up by Watson and other learning theorists, whereas the
nature position formed the basis of the theories of Hall and Gessel.
John Locke (1690) argued the dominance of nurture. He proposed that new born
child is like a tabula rasa or blank sheet and what happens during childhood has a
profound and permanent effect on the individual. According to him, adults teach the child
about world and tell him how to behave in this world. Watson (1930) also suggested the
environment as the key to development. From his experience, he inferred it that children
learn everything, from skills to fears. He also claimed that he can train dozen of children
to become any specialist like doctor, lawyer, artist, thief, beggar-man and chef, regardless
of his talents, tendencies, vocations, race of ancestors and penchants. His view stimulated
Shortly after the death of John Locke, Jean Jacques Rousseau gave a different
idea which established a different point of view. He believed that human development
unfolds naturally in positive ways as long as society allows it to do so. He argued that
parents should not shape their children forcibly. He said that children are capable of
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discovering how the world operates and how they should behave without instructions of
adults. He argued that children should be allowed to grow as nature dictates, with little
guidance or pressure from parents. The work of Rousseau was followed by Gesell and
made many observations of children of all ages. He demonstrated that motor skills
develop in a fixed sequence of stages in all children. The order of stages and the ages at
which they develop are determined by nature and relatively unaffected by nurture
Later psychologists did not take strong positions about nature or nurture. Freud
claimed that development was neither the result of nature, as Gesell claimed, nor the
merge of both internal as well as external conditions, particularly children’s sexual and
aggressive urges and how parents handle them. This combine contribution of nature-
nurture was more thoroughly explored by Jean Piaget. He suggested that nature and
nurture are inseparable and interactive. He said that children manipulate and explore the
objects around them which are guided by mental images of objects and of their own
consider genes as a roughly defining broad potential range of ability and the environment
as pushing the child up or down within this range. How much nature and nurture
contributes varies from one characteristic to another. Nature shapes our physical size and
Nature shapes the motor skills of child during early childhood according to maturational
timetable, but nurture plays a larger role in children’s motor abilities only after children
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have acquired all the basic motor skills. For all individual characteristics, the influence of
This debate shows that the interplay between nature and nurture is a busy two-
way street. The nature vs. nurture debate has produced many research advances in the
more important than other. Both are essential in their affects and the development of
child. The natural processes of children cannot be changed and the effects of person’s
experiences on his development are essential as well. Other issues like heredity-
development, all these questions or debates emerged from the debate of nature-nurture.
Biological development of species is carried out further by the person’s experiences and
interactions in social world and this world teaches a person a lot which is not inborn. So,
Heredity-Environment Issue
Nowadays the issue of biology versus experience is more often cast in the context
of heredity and environment. The focus shifts: we look more specifically at genetic
factors that might underlie and predispose and therefore set the stage for development, in
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interaction with specific effects of the individual’s physical and social environment.
Heredity-oriented theorists assume that there are underlying biological structures, citing
evidence from experiments with animals and statistical procedures with humans to
support their case. They also point out the specific genes underlying development and
behavior have been identified, emphasizing those that are known to cause defects such as
mental retardation, fragile X syndrome and many more. On the other hand,
and reasoning, plus environmental factors such as nutrition and health, each of which can
also contribute to mental retardation. Heredity and environment interact, but theorists still
were interested to answer the query that to what extent do specific genetic factors set the
stage for development, and to what extent do specific factors in the individual’s
Heredity is the inborn genetic endowment that people receive from their parents
(Papalia & Olds, 1995). The range of environment can be vast, but the heredity approach
argues that the genetic blueprint produces commonalities in the growth and development.
development. However, they believe that basic growth tendencies are genetically wired
into humans.
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and why developmental changes come about. From the broadest perspective,
conditions. The first two factors may be thought of as existing in the organism. Every
human child carries a set of genes that contains the basic guidelines for the unfolding of
development. But which genes are turned on at any given time depend on the particular
points in development a child has reached that is, on the changes that have gone before.
support includes all the nutrients, sensory inputs, circumstances, and challenges the
developing organism encounters. Understanding just how genes, past development, and
Today the developmental psychologists have gone beyond this simple dichotomy
They make all people alike in this sense that we all experience milestone in motor
development in the same order and at roughly the same rate as nutrition. Heredity and
environment operates to make each person different as the nature of inherited genes and
For all individual characteristics, the influence of nature and nurture are always
same time, those inherited characteristics to some extent determine that individual’s
environment. Even though evidence proves that there is an interaction between genes and
the environment, people will continue to study the effects of each in development.
We cannot change the genes of a developing child as well as cannot keep child in
solitary to keep him away from environmental effects. Genetic guidelines are important
Emergence of child’s personality and countless other developmental changes are all joint
products of heredity, past development and current environment. So these two poles
cannot be separated but can be explained as interplay of these factors are important for
Continuity-Discontinuity Issue
heart of this debate lies the question of whether the development is solely and evenly
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continuous, or whether it is marked by age specific periods. This debate actually has two
development. This issue basically addresses to what degree we become older renditions
of our early existence or whether we can develop into someone different than we were at
an earlier point in development. Some developmental changes are clearly gradual and
cumulative, resulting in steadily increasing organization and function. Like, at first child
starts grasping things, waving hands, responding to voices, and afterward the ability of
child to use symbols develops gradually and progresses steadily toward reading,
This issue is linked with Paul Baltes’ belief that plasticity or change is an
possible throughout the life-span, although experts such as Baltes argue that older adults
often show less capacity for change than younger adults. An important dimension of this
issue is the extent to which early or later experiences are the key determinants of a result
of heredity-environment interaction, not heredity or environment alone. For the most part,
continuous process. Those who emphasize nature often describe development as a series
of the distinct stages. In terms of continuity, when a child speaks first word, though
seemingly abrupt, discontinuous event is actually the result of weeks and months of
growth and practice. In contrast, at some point a child moves from not being able to think
abstractly about the world to being able to, is a qualitative change, not quantitative.
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individual must pass. They contend that many of the behaviors and abilities we see in
adolescents and adults can be traced directly back to development early in life.
individual must accomplish before progressing to the next stage. They also suggest
that some aspects of development emerge relatively independently of what has come
before and cannot be predicted from child’s previous behavior. As Freud, in his stage
through oral, anal, phallic, and latency stages before reaching mature adult sexuality
in the genital stage. Proponents of stage theories of development also suggest that
individuals go through critical periods, which are times of increased and favored
first 5 years) is a critical period for language acquisition. Thus, most adults find it
difficult or impossible to master a second language during their adult years while
young children raised in bilingual homes normally learn second languages easily
during childhood.
Most of the debate has centered on the pattern of cognitive change. As the
based their research on the view that younger children can also perform certain tasks
almost as well as older children if they are helped to break down the tasks into
simpler steps, or if they are taught the required skills before testing. In contrast,
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Piaget stage theory consist both quantitative (changes in cognitive skills) as well as
quantitative and qualitative change. Quantitative changes are changes by degree whereas
qualitative changes are changes in kind. The continuity model is often associated with
the belief that human behavior consists of many individual skills that are added one
at a time, usually through learning and experience. As children acquire more and
more skills, they combine and recombine them to produce increasingly complex
elements are essentially added together to produce more advanced capabilities- and tend
theorists usually hold that development is guided primarily by internal biological factors
and tend to argue that development is qualitative. They suggest that people regularly
undergo dramatic, qualitative changes in their abilities/person. They argue that children
go through uneven development which are relatively stable periods followed by abrupt
changes and reflects discontinuous nature of the changes taking place in the underlying
In general, the truth seems to lie somewhere in between the extremes of gradual
continuity and abrupt discontinuity. There is little evidence that people make rapid,
abrupt transitions from one stage to the next, even in theories that emphasize stages.
physical, emotional, psychological, intellectual, and cognitive; these changes take place
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in every child’s life and we develop in steady manner, but in some circumstances of life
like traumatic experiences and milestones of life, abrupt changes takes place in us
especially in our emotional, psychological and intellectual which have great impact on
our lives.
Learning-Maturation Issue
processes. To grasp the meaning of development more fully, we must understand two
maturation, which refers to the developmental changes in the body or behavior that result
from the aging process rather than from learning, injury, illness, or other life experiences.
through maturation include reflexes. This issue emphasizes on the impact of timings.
Maturation is the orderly sequence of changes dictated by the genetic blueprint we each
have, and also include behavior that may improve due to ongoing developmental changes
that occurs through the biological process of aging without regard to environmental
influences. This shows that human grows in an orderly manner according to maturation
view. Maturation approach argues the genetic blueprints that produce commonalities in
our growth and development. Maturation is partly responsible for psychological changes
such as our increasing ability to concentrate, solve problems, and understand another
Learning will only take place when an individual have a particular experience. It is the
way we learn how to live in this world n how to interact with our world by doing some
effort and using our experience. Most of our abilities and habits do not simply unfold as
part of nature’s grand plan, we often learn to feel, think, and behave in new ways from
our observation of an interaction with parents, teachers, and other important people in our
shape development?” The maturationists believe that extreme environments can depress
development, but basic growth tendencies are genetically wired into the human. For
with practice, which is experiential? Similar question arises with cognitive and
experience. The question of maturation versus learning is an age old debate - but today
most psychologists believe that maturation and learning influence cognitive ability.
and reactions of the people around us. Of course, most developmental changes are the
product of both maturation and learning. As when we get older we become more mature,
our height and weight increases, skeleton develops, many puberty changes occurs in us as
it is a natural process and it is involuntary in nature. But we learn many things as time
passes like obedience to authority, altruistic behavior, moral reasoning, social norms and
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values, cultural customs, manners and they are not biological but are learnt by
experience.
Normative-Individual development
the behavior of people of different ages, seeking to specify how human beings change
over time. Though there are typical pathways of development that virtually all people
follow, researchers have discovered that no two persons are exactly alike. Even when
raised in same home, children often display very different interests, values, abilities, and
humans resemble each other and how they are likely to differ as they proceed through
life.
all members of species; typical patterns of development that are same for all individuals
of same species. It refers to the similarities that are followed by almost all the members
of species which become norm of that species. It means what children have in common or
how development is similar for all children. It is the general change and reorganization in
behavior that virtually all children share as they grow older. It is a typical or average
in the rate, extent, or direction of development. It means that differences occur in one
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child to the next. Individual development has two meanings. First, it refers to individual
refers to continuity within each child’s individual developmental pathway over time.
Even when dramatic changes in individual personality do take place, logical reasons can
individual development.
Normative research focuses on the average child, with the primary goal of
identifying and describing how normal development proceeds from step to step. A related
centers n the individual child and the factors that produce human diversity.
development both in children who speak the same language and in children who speak
different languages. Theorists who an idiographic perspective are more concerned with
identifying ad explaining the individual differences that are evident as children master
language. Such differences might result from differences in experiences, such as type of
speech, adults use when talking with children, or from biological factors, such as brain
whereas the idiographic approach was associated with researchers who emphasized
This issue adequately tries to give descriptions that provide us with the facts about
explain the changes they have observed. In pursuing this goal of explanation, researchers
hope to determine why humans developed as they typically do and why some individuals
turn out differently from others. It is a natural thing that no person is similar to other.
Every person contains specific traits but they differ in every person in intensity, and
duration. We are similar to people around us like the stages we go through during
development, altruistic behavior, stereotypes, identity formation, and many more, and
different in the way that the cultures of countries differ not only their religion but there
are many differences within the religion of different countries. Like in Pakistan the
culture and art and craft of its four provinces are different from each other. Dress,
language, marriage ceremonies, education systems and many other things differ and they
whether children are active contributors to their own development or, rather, passive
recipients of environmental influences. It basically tries to answer the question that “Do
what they experience and are taught?” Active learners are those who play active role in
determining their own developmental outcomes, while passive learners are those whose
developmental outcomes largely reflect the influences of other people and circumstances
theorists and they argue that we are active participants in our own development.
Organismic model views children as active entities whose developmental paths are
primarily determined by forces within themselves. This model compares humans to their
living organisms by viewing them as whole beings that cannot be understood as a simple
collection of parts and active in the developmental process, changing under the guidance
of internal forces and evolving through distinct stages as they mature. Individuals seek to
interact with other individuals as well as with events, and they are changed in the process.
In turn, they act on those objects and events, and change them too, all while thinking
about what they experience and trying to figure it out and understand it for themselves.
Curiosity and the desire to acquire knowledge and understanding our central to
development.
theorists, they see human as passively reacting to events in their environment. The
mechanistic model views children as passive entities whose developmental paths are
primarily determined by external influence. This model likens human beings to machines
parts are added or subtracted. From this perspective, we are driven primarily by our
internal drives and motivations in conjunction with the external incentives provided by
and punishments, which shape and mold us. The word determine here also implies that
Clearly, learning theories such as Watson and Skinner favored the mechanistic
world view, for they see human beings as passively shaped by environmental events and
they analyze human behavior response by response. Bandura’s social learning theory
primarily mechanistic, yet it reflects the important organismic assumption that human
beings are active creatures who both influence and are influenced by their environment.
developmentalists from the Piagetian traditions all base their theories primarily on the
organismic model. Finally ethologists also portray humans as active, holistic beings with
biological predispositions that channel or guide development. However, they are less
discontinuous.
driven by inborn instincts that are channeled into socially desirable outlets. Cognitive
theory of Piaget also emphasize that children actively construct more sophisticated
understanding of the self, others, and the environment to which they adapt. According to
of Vygotsky studied children as active learner and they processes information that others
provide to guide their learning and thinking. However, the perspective of ecological
system advocates both, organismic and mechanistic models, which suggests that humans
But the fact is that much of the time we actively approach the world in all its
complexity, and we construct our own view of it to guide us, yet we often has little
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choice except should react towards the physical and social world serves up for us. In
other words, our active human minds interact with the forces of society and nature, and
tried to investigate that are children active or passive learner. But as the human actively
influence the environmental contexts that influence their development, so the passive or
experienced ways of learning do. They both are important in many contexts as if we want
to learn the arts or how to play any instrument we should be a passive as well as active
learner. Passive in a sense that we are driven primarily by our internal drives and
motivations in conjunction with the external incentives provided by others and the
grades) and it mold our personality. Active in a sense that curiosity and the desire to
Specificity-Generality Issue
This issue consists of two separate questions. The first question is one of domain
domains or do they apply more generally to a broad range of abilities? This question has
implications for how broad the scope of developmental theories can be. The second
particular social or cultural contexts or is they socially and culturally universal? This
issue has implications for developmental theories applicability across social settings and
cultures. Extreme Domain Specificity argues that people are effective thinkers only in
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contexts which they have directly experienced, or in which evolution has equipped them
with effective solutions. The role of general cognitive abilities is ignored, or denied
altogether. Basically this issue operates with specificity and generality of developmental
changes that occur to everyone throughout the world and to what extent should it take
between the organism’s biologically based domain general abilities (such as assimilation
and accommodation), and the environmental context. Underscoring these tenets is the
abrupt changes of domain general function over a brief time span, which leads to
notion that domain general processes evolve slowly over time and are more domains
specific.
The issue of domain specificity has been raised most often in connection with
general, proposing fundamental cognitive structures and abilities that cut across domains,
such as mental representation and logical operations. On the other hand, information
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processing theory focuses on more specific skills and strategies and takes into
The general recent trend in developmental psychology, especially among researchers who
study cognitive development, has been away from theories that attempt to account for
development in general and toward theories that focus more narrowly on development in
specific domains.
Many theories were formulated in Europe and North America, and all of them reflect the
assumptions and concerns of the cultures from which they come. Only socio-cultural
development. Piaget, Erikson and Freud assumed that their theories were describing
culturally universal structures and processes, but a large body of cross-cultural research
suggests that only some aspects of their theories apply across Western and non-Western
cultures.
developmental abilities of human organisms. Courage and Howe (2002) refer to this view
as epigenetic constructivism, or the belief that infants are born without domain specific
knowledge, but acquire such knowledge as a function of domain general processes. They
define domain specific knowledge as “specific to a single cognitive domain under the
control of more specific brain-mind functions” like processing speed and memory
capacity. They further define domain general abilities as “cognitive abilities that
recognition.
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range of cultures, but his assumption that abstract, scientific reasoning is the ultimate
schooling is rare (Dasen & Heron, 1981). Frued’s and Erikson’s emphasis on autonomy
in toddlerhood makes sense in most European and North American cultural settings, but
not in cultures in which dependency is encouraged. Bowlby’s adaption theory, with its
evolutionary roots, was also intended to be culturally universal. The tendency of infants
culture-specific.
support for both positions, but the results of these investigations may be influenced by
several factors, including the presence of a method effect (i.e., psychometric vs.
alternative assessment). This study investigates the method effect by analyzing quantity
abilities at approximately the same age this view has been called too simplistic. Cultural
processes. Although the differences in cultures and norms also make the development of
children different from other religion. As in western countries, when a child is 18 years
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old he lives separate from his family, he is free from the authority of parents and is in the
process to form their identity and make their own decisions, but in eastern countries child
is not given permission to live separately, they have to take care of their parents their
whole life and their family setups also create changes in their development. As a child
who is given permission to make his own decision would differ from the person who
depends on his parent’s support. I believe that we cannot generalize all western theories
the issues of nature and nurture, continuity and discontinuity, heredity and environment,
and specificity-generality. They all characterize development through the human life
span. Although the developmentalists do not take extreme positions on these important
issues, this consensus has not meant the absence of spirited debate about how strongly
development is influenced by each of these factors. The answers to these questions also
have a bearing on social policy decisions about children and adolescents, and
Conclusion
largest and widely spread branch of psychology which deals with the life span
developmental changes that take place throughout the life of an organism / human beings.
The human development has been divided into eight periods through which every
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individual go. Different theorists gave their definitions of human development and are
Some developmental processes, such as growth during the prenatal period or the
Acquiring the speech patterns and accents of the neighborhood you grow up in or
learning a new language while in another country are the developmental procedures
between the two basic sets of causes. Your present personality is also a function of your
interaction with other people, the self concept you began to develop in infancy, the social
and the cultural contacts you grew up in, and much more. The days have gone when
The arguments rose over whether aspects of cognition and personality are either a
function of biology or a function of experience has ended. We also saw interaction in the
relationship between inherited physical characteristics such as body type, skin color, or
height, and a person’s self concept and social acceptance. Behavior may also be
influenced by expectations based on stereotypes, such as the fat people are jolly,
adolescence are awkward etc. Theorists still disagree about how much a given
There are a number of important issues that have been debated throughout the history of
theoretical concepts of different theories that they believed were the major parts of child
development.
nature and nurture contributes varies from one characteristic to another. This
debate shows that the interplay between nature and nurture is a busy two-way
street. The nature vs. nurture debate has produced many research advances in the
genes and the environment, people will continue to study the effects of each in
development.
heart of this debate lies the question of whether the development is solely and
genetically wired into the human. The question of maturation versus learning is an
age old debate - but today most psychologists believe that maturation and learning
with the facts about development, but it is only the starting point. Ultimately,
they typically do and why some individuals turn out differently from others.
whether children are active contributors to their own development or, rather,
passive recipients of environmental influences. But the fact is that much of the
time we actively approach the world in all its complexity, and we construct our
own view of it to guide us, yet we often has little choice except should react
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