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1 - Introduction To Developmental Psychology

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1 - Introduction To Developmental Psychology

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9ntf8qhfkc
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11/9/2024 2:43 PM 1

• Human development is a branch of


psychology with the goal of understanding
people — how they develop, grow, and
change throughout their lives.

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What Is Development?
• Development : systematic continuities and changes in
the individual over the course of life that occur between
conception (when the father’s sperm penetrates the
mother’s ovum, creating a new organism) and death.

• The complement of change is continuity, or ways in


which we remain the same. Change cannot be properly
understood without understanding the ways we remain
the same and continue to reflect our past.

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Language & thought processes
• Language and thought processes, the capacity to
develop social relationships, and the emergence of a
unique personality are all products of human
development.

• Developmental assessment tools, cognitive abilities


tests, and psychological assessments can measure
changes over time in these areas.

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• If development represents the continuities and changes
an individual experiences from “womb to tomb,”
developmental sciences refers to the study of these
phenomena and is a multidisciplinary enterprise.

• Although developmental psychology is the largest of


these disciplines, many biologists, sociologists,
anthropologists, educators, physicians, and even
historians share an interest in developmental continuity
and change, and have contributed in important ways to
our understanding of both human & animal
development.

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• Because the science of development is multidisciplinary,
we use the term developmentalist to refer to any
scholar—regardless of discipline—who seeks to
understand the developmental process.

• (Developmental psychology branch of


psychology devoted to identifying and
explaining the continuities and changes
that individuals display over time.)

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• Developmentalist any scholar, regardless of
discipline (e.g., psychologist, biologist,
sociologist, anthropologist, educator), who
seeks to understand the developmental process

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Why Do We Develop?

• To grasp the meaning of development, we must


understand two important processes that underlie
developmental change: maturation and learning.

• Maturation developmental changes in the body or


behaviour that result from the aging process rather than
from learning, injury, illness, or some other life
experience

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Why Do We Develop?
• Maturation refers to the biological unfolding of the individual
according to species-typical biological inheritance and an
individual person’s biological inheritance , human beings grow
within the womb.

• Beyond the womb, the human maturational (or species-typical)


biological program calls for us to become capable of walking and
uttering our first meaningful words at about 1 year of age, to reach
sexual maturity between ages 11 and 15, and then to age and die
on a roughly similar schedule

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• Learning relatively permanent change in
behaviour (or behavioural potential) that
results from one’s experiences or practice, —
the process through which our experiences
produce relatively permanent changes in our
feelings, thoughts, and behaviours.

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• Although a certain degree of physical maturation
is necessary before an elementary school child
can become reasonably proficient at dribbling a
basketball, careful instruction and many hours of
practice are essential if this child is ever to
approximate the ball-handling skills of a
professional basketball player.

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• Many of our abilities & habits don’t simply unfold as
part of maturation; we often learn to feel, think, and
behave in new ways from our observations of &
interactions with parents, teachers, and other important
people in our lives, as well as from events that we
experience.

• This means that we change in response to our


environments— particularly in response to the actions
& reactions of the people around us.

• If children were not active individuals, their


development would not happen. Thus, development is
always a joint function of maturation, learning, and the
active individual.
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What Goals Do Developmentalists Pursue?
• Three major goals of the developmental sciences are to
describe, to explain, and to optimize development

• Even identical twins raised in the same home, to some


extent, display different interests, abilities, and
behaviours. Thus, to adequately describe development,
it is necessary to focus both on typical patterns of change
(or normative development) and on individual variations
in patterns of change (or ideographic development). So
developmentalists seek to understand the important ways
that developing humans resemble each other and how
they are likely to differ as they proceed through life.
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• Normative Development developmental changes that
characterize most or all members of a species; typical
patterns of development.

• Ideographic Development individual variations in the


rate, extent, or direction of development

• Description provides us with the “facts” about


development, but it is only the starting point.
Developmentalists next seek to explain the changes they
have observed

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What Goals Do Developmentalists Pursue?
• Explanation centers both on normative changes within
individuals and on variations in development between
individuals.

• Finally, developmentalists hope to optimize development


by applying what they have learned in attempts to help
people develop in positive directions.

• The goal of optimization often appears to be clear and


unproblematic. After all, having children learn how to
walk, talk, read, and count, and to have friends and to be
happy would be endorsed by most of us
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The Nature of Development

• A Continual and Lifelong Process: Developmental


gains/losses occur from conception to death. Continuity
refers to characteristics that are stable over time (e.g.,
biological sex).

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The Nature of Development
• A Holistic Process. humans are physical, cognitive, and
social beings. It was once fashionable to divide
developmentalist into three camps:
(1) those who studied physical growth and development,
including bodily changes and the sequencing of motor
skills;
(2) those who studied cognitive aspects of development,
including perception, language, learning, and thinking;
(3) those who concentrated on psychosocial aspects of
development, including emotions, personality, and the
growth of interpersonal relationships.

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• Plasticity. Plasticity refers to a capacity for change in
response to positive or negative life experiences, a
developmental state that has the potential to be shaped
by experience.

• For example, aggressive children who are disliked by


their peers often improve their social status after
learning and practicing the social skills that popular
children display

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• Historical/Cultural Context: Each culture, subculture,
and social class transmits a particular pattern of beliefs,
values, customs, and skills to its younger generations,
and the content of this cultural socialization has a
strong influence on the attributes and competencies that
individuals display.
• The culture into which one was born shapes eating habits,
physical habits, emotional expression, style, and all other forms of
life experiences

• Development is also influenced by societal changes:


historical events such as wars, technological
breakthroughs such as the increasing portability and
powerfulness of computers,

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