Unit 4 BSCN

• Developmental psychology is the branch of

psychology that focuses on how people grow
and change over the course of a lifetime.this
field are not just concerned with the physical
changes that occur as people grow; they also
look at the cognitive, emotional, and social
development that occurs throughout life.
• Physical development
Prenatal stages
Embryonic phase:
• After the zygote divides for about 7–10 days and has 150
cells, it travels down the fallopian tubes and implants itself
in the lining of the uterus. Upon implantation, this multi-
cellular organism is called an embryo.
• Now blood vessels grow, forming the placenta. The
placenta is a structure connected to the uterus that
provides nourishment and oxygen from the mother to the
developing embryo via the umbilical cord.
• Basic structures of the embryo start to develop into areas
that will become the head, chest, and abdomen. During
the embryonic stage, the heart begins to beat and organs
form and begin to function.
• The neural tube forms along the back of the embryo,
developing into the spinal cord and brain.
 Fetal Development
• When the organism is about nine weeks old, the embryo is called a fetus. At this
stage, the fetus is about the size of a kidney bean and begins to take on the
recognizable form of a human being as the “tail” begins to disappear.

• From 9–12 weeks, the sex organs begin to differentiate. At about 16 weeks, the
fetus is approximately 4.5 inches long. Fingers and toes are fully developed, and
fingerprints are visible.
• Hearing has developed, so the fetus can respond to sounds. The internal organs,
such as the lungs, heart, stomach, and intestines, have formed enough that a fetus
born prematurely at this point has a chance to survive outside of the mother’s
womb.
• Throughout the fetal stage the brain continues to grow and develop, nearly
doubling in size from weeks 16 to 28. Around 36 weeks, the fetus is almost ready
for birth. It weighs about 6 pounds and is about 18.5 inches long, and by week 37
all of the fetus’s organ systems are developed enough that it could survive outside
the mother’s uterus without many of the risks associated with premature birth. The
fetus continues to gain weight and grow in length until approximately 40 weeks.
 Infancy
Physical development

• The average newborn in the United States weighs about 7.5 pounds
(between 5 and 10 pounds) and is about 20 inches in length. For the first
few days of life, infants typically lose about 5 percent of their body weight
as they eliminate waste and get used to feeding. By age 2, the weight has
quadrupled, so we can expect that a 2-year-old should weigh between 20
and 40 pounds. The average length at one year is about 29.5 inches and at
two years it is around 34.4 inches
• The head initially makes up about 50 percent of our entire length when we
are developing in the womb. At birth, the head makes up about 25 percent
of our length, and by age 25 it comprises about 20 percent our length.
Motor development
• Motor development occurs in an orderly sequence as infants move from reflexive
reactions (e.g., sucking and rooting) to more advanced motor functioning. As
mentioned during the prenatal section, development occurs according to the
Cephalocaudal (from head to tail) and Proximodistal (from the midline outward)
principles.
• Motor Skills refer to our ability to move our bodies and manipulate objects. Fine
motor skills focus on the muscles in our fingers, toes, and eyes, and enable
coordination of small actions
• Newborns cannot grasp objects voluntarily but do wave their arms toward objects of
interest. At about 4 months of age, the infant is able to reach for an object, first with
both arms and within a few weeks, with only one arm. At this age grasping an object
involves the use of the fingers and palm, but no thumbs. This is known as the
Palmer Grasp. The use of the thumb comes at about 9 months of age when the
infant is able to grasp an object using the forefinger and thumb. Now the infant uses
a Pincer Grasp, and this ability greatly enhances the ability to control and
manipulate an object
• Gross motor skills focus on large muscle groups that control our head, torso, arms
and legs and involve larger movements (e.g., balancing, running, and jumping).
These skills begin to develop first. Examples include moving to bring the chin up
when lying on the stomach, moving the chest up, and rocking back and forth on
hands and knees. But it also includes exploring an object with one’s feet as many
babies do as early as 8 weeks of age if seated in a carrier or other device that frees
the hips.
Sensory Development
• Newborns typically cannot see further than 8 to 10 inches away from their faces
(AOA, 2019). An 8-week old’s vision is 20/300. This means an object 20 feet away
from an infant has the same clarity as an object 300 feet away from an adult with
normal vision. By 3-months visual acuity has sharpened to 20/200, which would allow
them the see the letter E at the top of a standard eye chart (Hamer, 2016). As a
result, the world looks blurry to young infants .
• Binocular vision, which requires input from both eyes, is evident around the third
month and continues to develop during the first six months (Atkinson & Braddick,
2003). By six months infants can perceive depth perception in pictures as well .
• The infant’s sense of hearing is very keen at birth, and the ability to hear is evidenced
as soon as the seventh month of prenatal development. Newborns prefer their
mother’s voices over another female
• Infants are innately ready to respond to the sounds of any language, but between six
and nine months they show preference for listening to their native language
• According to the Piagetian perspective, infants learn about the world primarily
through their senses and motor abilities (Harris, 2005). These basic motor and
sensory abilities provide the foundation for the cognitive skills that will emerge during
the subsequent stages of cognitive development.
Cognitive Development
• Newborns learn about their world through the use of their reflexes, such as when
sucking, reaching, and grasping.
• During these next 3 months, the infant begins to actively involve his or her own body in
some form of repeated activity. An infant may accidentally engage in a behavior and
find it interesting such as making a vocalization. This interest motivates trying to do it
again and helps the infant learn a new behavior that originally occurred by chance.
• The infant combines these basic reflexes and simple behaviors and uses planning and
coordination to achieve a specific goal.
• infantile amnesia, the inability to recall memories from the first few years of life.
• In terms of producing spoken language, babies begin to coo almost immediately.
Cooing is a one-syllable combination of a consonant and a vowel sound .
• At about 7 months, infants begin babbling, engaging in intentional vocalizations that
lack specific meaning and comprise a consonant-vowel repeated sequence, such as
ma-ma-ma, da-da- da.
• Children begin using their first words at about 12 or 13 months of age and may use
partial words to convey thoughts at even younger ages. These one-word expressions
are referred to as holophrasic speech.
• At birth, infants exhibit two emotional responses: Attraction and withdrawal.
• Social smiling becomes more stable and organized as infants learn to use
their smiles to engage their parents in interactions. Pleasure is expressed
as laughter at 3 to 5 months of age, and displeasure becomes more
specific as fear, sadness, or anger between ages 6 and 8 months. Anger is
often the reaction to being prevented from obtaining a goal, such as a toy
being removed (Braungart-Rieker, Hill-Soderlund, & Karrass, 2010). In
contrast, sadness is typically the response when infants are deprived of a
caregiver (Papousek, 2007). Fear is often associated with the presence of
a stranger, known as stranger wariness, or the departure of significant
others known as separation anxiety.
• Young infants have very limited capacity to adjust their emotional states
and depend on their caregivers to help soothe themselves. Caregivers can
offer distractions to redirect the infant’s attention and comfort to reduce the
emotional distress.
 Childhood
• Early childhood( 2-6yrs)
– Brain maturation
– Motor development:Better precision and coordination
– Toilet Trainning
– Pre opeperational stage ( Jean Piaget Theory)
• Childs undersyanding of logic a/c to their own knowledge about world
rather than convensional knowledge
• Symbolic function subtage: able to mentaly represebnt a object that is
not actually present. Problem solving based on perception
• Intuitive thought substage: Greater dependence on intuitive thinking
rather than just perception.
• Pretend play
• Egocentrism in early childhood refers to the tendency of young children
not to be able to take the perspective of others, and instead the child
thinks that everyone sees, thinks, and feels just as they do.
• Conservation refers to the ability to recognize that moving or rearranging
matter does not change the quantity.centration or focused on only one
characteristic of an object to the exclusion of others.
 • their reasoning is typically transductive, that is, making faulty inferences from
one specific example to another. For example, Piaget’s daughter Lucienne
stated she had not had her nap, therefore it was not afternoon.
• Animism refers to attributing life-like qualities to objects.
– Attention
• Divided Attention: Young children (age 3-4) have considerable difficulties in
dividing their attention between two tasks, and often perform at levels
equivalent to our closest relative,
• Sustained Attention:The younger the child, the more difficulty he or she had
maintaining their attention.
– Memory
• The capacity of working memory, that is the amount of information someone
can hold in consciousness, is smaller in young children than in older children
and adults
– Executive function:Executive function (EF) refers to self-regulatory processes,
such as the ability to inhibit a behavior or cognitive flexibility, that enable adaptive
responses to new situations or to reach a specific goal. Executive function skills
gradually emerge during early childhood and continue to develop throughout
childhood and adolescence.
– It is in early childhood that we see the start of self-control, a process that takes
many years to fully develop.
•
Middle and late childhood
Two major brain growth spurts occur during middle/late childhood . Between ages 6 and
8, significant improvements in fine motor skills and eye-hand coordination are noted.
• Then between 10 and 12 years of age, the frontal lobes become more developed and
improvements in logic, planning, and memory are evident (van der Molen & Molenaar,
1994). Myelination is one factor responsible for these growths.
• From age 6 to 12, the nerve cells in the association areas of the brain, that is those
areas where sensory, motor, and intellectual functioning connect, become almost
completely myelinated (Johnson, 2005). This myelination contributes to increases in
information processing speed and the child’s reaction time.
• Children in middle to late childhood are also better able to plan, coordinate activity
using both left and right hemispheres of the brain, and to control emotional outbursts.
• Cognitive skills continue to expand in middle and late childhood as thought processes
become more logical and organized when dealing with concrete information.
• Children at this age understand concepts such as past, present, and future, giving them
the ability to plan and work toward goals. Additionally, they can process complex ideas
such as addition and subtraction and cause-and- effect relationships.
• concrete operational stage of cognitive development (Crain, 2005). This involves
mastering the use of logic in concrete ways. The word concrete refers to that which is
tangible; that which can be seen, touched, or experienced directly. The concrete
operational child is able to make use of logical principles in solving problems involving
the physical world.
• The child can use logic to solve problems tied to their own direct experience, but has
trouble solving hypothetical problems or considering more abstract problems. The child
uses inductive reasoning, which is a logical process in which multiple premises
believed to be true are combined to obtain a specific conclusion.
• Identity: One feature of concrete operational thought is the understanding that objects
have qualities that do not change even if the object is altered in some way.
• Reversibility: The child learns that some things that have been changed can be
returned to their original state.
• Conservation:changing one quality (in this example, height or water level) can be
compensated for by changes in another quality (width)
• Decentration: Concrete operational children no longer focus on only one dimension of
any object (such as the height of the glass) and instead consider the changes in other
dimensions too (such as the width of the glass)
• Metacognition: Children in middle and late childhood also have a better understanding
of how well they are performing a task, and the level of difficulty of a task.
Metacognition refers to the knowledge we have about our own thinking and our ability
to use this awareness to regulate our own cognitive processes
• According to Erikson, children in middle and late childhood are very busy or industrious
(Erikson, 1982). They are constantly doing, planning, playing, getting together with
friends, and achieving. This is a very active time, and a time when they are gaining a
sense of how they measure up when compared with peers. Erikson believed that if
these industrious children can be successful in their endeavors, they will get a sense of
confidence for future challenges.
• Children in middle and late childhood have a more realistic sense of self than do
those in early childhood, and they better understand their strengths and
weaknesses.
• Children in middle and late childhood are also able to include other peoples’
appraisals of them into their self-concept, including parents, teachers, peers,
culture, and media. Internalizing others’ appraisals and creating social comparison
affect children’s self- esteem, which is defined as an evaluation of one’s identity.
• Another important development in self- understanding is self-efficacy, which is the
belief that you are capable of carrying out a specific task or of reaching a specific
goal.
• Friendships take on new importance as judges of one's worth, competence, and
attractiveness in middle and late childhood.
•
Adolescence
Adolescence is a period that begins with puberty and ends with the transition to adulthood
(approximately ages 10–18). Physical changes associated with puberty are triggered by hormones.
Changes happen at different rates in distinct parts of the brain and increase adolescents’ propensity for
risky behavior.
• Primary sexual characteristics are changes in the reproductive organs. For males, this includes growth
of the testes, penis, scrotum, and spermarche or first ejaculation of semen. This occurs between 11 and
15 years of age. For females, primary characteristics include growth of the uterus and menarche or the
first menstrual period.
• Secondary sexual characteristics are visible physical changes not directly linked to reproduction but
signal sexual maturity. For males this includes broader shoulders and a lower voice as the larynx grows.
Hair becomes coarser and darker, and hair growth occurs in the pubic area, under the arms and on the
face. For females, breast development occurs around age 10, although full development takes several
years. Hips broaden, and pubic and underarm hair develops and also becomes darker and coarser.
• At about the same time that puberty accentuates gender, role differences also accentuate for at least
some teenagers.
• formal operational stage, adolescents are able to understand abstract principles which have no physical
reference. They can now contemplate such abstract constructs as beauty, love, freedom, and morality.
• adolescents demonstrate hypothetical-deductive reasoning, which is developing hypotheses based on
what might logically occur.
• heightened self-focus. The egocentricity comes from attributing unlimited power to their own thoughts
• personal fable or belief that one is unique, special, and invulnerable to harm.
• they demonstrate greater introspection or thinking about one’s thoughts and feelings. They begin to
imagine how the world could be which leads them to become idealistic or insisting upon high standards
of behavior.
• adolescents demonstrate hypothetical-deductive reasoning, which is
developing hypotheses based on what might logically occur.
• heightened self-focus. The egocentricity comes from attributing unlimited power
to their own thoughts
• personal fable or belief that one is unique, special, and invulnerable to harm.
• they demonstrate greater introspection or thinking about one’s thoughts and
feelings. They begin to imagine how the world could be which leads them to
become idealistic or insisting upon high standards of behavior.
• teens continue to develop their self-concept. Their ability to think of the
possibilities and to reason more abstractly may explain the further
differentiation of the self during adolescence.
• Self-esteem rises from mid to late adolescence for most teenagers, especially if
they feel competent in their peer relationships, their appearance, and athletic
abilities.
• Identity vs. Role Confusion: questions regarding their appearance, vocational
choices and career aspirations, education, relationships, sexuality, political and
social views, personality, and interests. Erikson saw this as a period of
confusion and experimentation regarding identity and one’s life path.
•
Early adulthood
Individuals in this age period have left behind the relative dependency of childhood
and adolescence but have not yet taken on the responsibilities of adulthood.
• It is the age of identity exploration.
• the age of instability (Arnett, 2000; Arnett, 2006). Exploration generates uncertainty
and instability.
• age of self-focus
• age of feeling in- between.
• Emerging adulthood is the age of possibilities. It is a time period of optimism
• physical maturation is complete
• at the peak of their physiological development, including muscle strength, reaction
time, sensory abilities, and cardiac functioning. The reproductive system, motor
skills, strength, and lung capacity are all operating at their best.
• The aging process actually begins during early adulthood.
• They learn to base decisions on what is realistic and practical, not idealistic, and can
make adaptive choices. Adults are also not as influenced by what others think. This
advanced type of thinking is referred to as Postformal Thought
• the adult comes to recognize that there is some right and some wrong in each
position, some good or some bad in a policy or approach, some truth and some
falsity in a particular idea. This ability to bring together salient aspects of two
opposing viewpoints or positions is referred to as dialectical thought and is
considered one of the most advanced aspects of postformal thinking
• In early adulthood the parent-child relationship has to transition toward a
relationship between two adults
• Intimacy vs. Isolation:once identity is established intimate relationships can
be pursued. These intimate relationships include acquaintanceships and
friendships, but also the more important close relationships, which are the
long-term romantic relationships that we develop with another person, for
instance, in a marriage
 Middle adulthood
• Generativity vs Stagnation:generativity encompasses procreativity,
productivity, and creativity. This stage includes the generation of new beings,
new products, and new ideas, as well as self-generation concerned with
further identity development. Erikson believed that the stage of generativity,
during which one established a family and career, was the longest of all the
stages. Individuals at midlife are primarily concerned with leaving a positive
legacy of themselves, and parenthood is the primary generative type.
• those in middle adulthood should “take care of the persons, the products,
and the ideas one has learned to care for” (Erikson, 1982, p. 67). Further,
Erikson believed that the strengths gained from the six earlier stages are
essential for the generational task of cultivating strength in the next
generation.
• The sandwich generation refers to adults who have at least one parent age
65 or older and are either raising their own children or providing support for
their grown children.
• The empty nest, or post-parental period refers to the time period when
children are grown up and have left home
 Late Adulthood
• Cognitive declines
• last psychosocial stage is Integrity vs. Despair. This stage includes, “a retrospective
accounting of one’s life to date; how much one embraces life as having been well
lived, as opposed to regretting missed opportunities,”
• Friendships are not formed in order to enhance status or careers, and may be based
purely on a sense of connection or the enjoyment of being together.
• For those in late adulthood, loneliness can be especially detrimental. Loneliness is the
biggest challenge for those who have lost their spouse
• successful aging
– Relative avoidance of disease, disability, and risk factors, like high blood pressure,
– smoking, or obesity
– Maintenance of high physical and cognitive functioning
– Active engagement in social and productive activities
 Child Psychology
• Aims
– to understand normal growthm and development
– Assessment of growth and development
– Normal and abnormal behaviour of children
– Treatment and management behavioural as well as
other mental health issues.
•
Awareness of dying
Glaser and Strauss (1965) studied the process of dying.
– Closed awareness denotes a context in which patients are not aware of their own
impending death. family members understand that the patient is dying, but
cooperate with each other to maintain the fiction that the dying patient might recover.
They carefully avoid arousing the patient’s suspicions.
– In suspicion awareness patients do not know for certain that they are dying but they
suspect, by varying degrees, that the physicians and nurses believe them to be
dying. When they become suspicious, patients engage in strategies that might
confirm their suspicious, even though they have they have few resources with which
to find out the truth. The state of suspicious awareness places patients, relatives,
and staff under considerable strain and creates an atmosphere of tension.
– Mutual pretence occurs when everyone involved knows the patient is dying, but all
pretend otherwise. There may be some comfort in mutual pretence and all people
involved must be careful to maintain this fragile illusion. Strategies employed to
maintain the illusion include conversations that focus on safe topics and avoid
dangerous ones. If something threatens the fiction, everyone pretend that it did not
happen.
– In the open awareness context, staff and patients acknowledge that the patient’s
condition is terminal. Open awareness is often a stable context. Patients understand
that they are dying, but often remain in closed awareness about other aspects of
death such as mode and time.
 Grief
• The 5 Stages of Grief is a theory developed by psychiatrist Elisabeth Kübler-Ross.
It suggests that we go through five distinct stages after the loss of a loved one.
These stages are denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and finally acceptance
– Denial:Feeling numb is common in the early days after a bereavement. Some people at first
carry on as if nothing has happened. Even if we know with our heads that someone has died
it can be hard to believe that someone important is not coming back. It’s also very common
to feel the presence of someone who has died, hear their voice or even see them.
– Anger is a completely natural emotion, and very natural after someone dies. Death can
seem cruel and unfair, especially when you feel someone has died before their time or you
had plans for the future together. It’s also common to feel angry towards the person who has
died, or angry at ourselves for things we did or didn’t do before their death.
– Bargeinig: When we are in pain, it’s sometimes hard to accept that there’s nothing we can
do to change things. Bargaining is when we start to make deals with ourselves, or perhaps
with God if we’re religious. We want to believe that if we act in particular ways we will feel
better. It’s also common to find ourselves going over and over things that happened in the
past and asking a lot of ‘what if’ questions, wishing we could go back and change things in
the hope things could have turned out differently.
– Depression:Sadness and longing are what we think of most often when we think about grief.
This pain can be very intense and come in waves over many months or years. Life can feel
like it no longer holds any meaning which can be very scary.
– Acceptance:gradually most people find that the pain eases, and it is possible to accept what
has happened. We may never ‘get over’ the death of someone precious, but we can learn to
live again, while keeping the memories of those we have lost close to us.
Grief