Developmental psychology

Developmental psychology, also known as human development, is the scientific study of systematic psychological changes that occur in human beings over the course of their life span. Originally concerned with infants and children, the field has expanded to include adolescence, adult development, aging, and the entire life span. This field examines change across a broad range of topics including motor skills and other psycho-physiological processes; cognitive development involving areas such as problem solving, moral understanding, and conceptual understanding; language acquisition; social, personality, and emotional development; and self-concept and identity formation.

Developmental psychology includes issues such as the extent to which development occurs through the gradual accumulation of knowledge versus stage-like development, or the extent to which children are born with innate mental structures versus learning through experience. Many researchers are interested in the interaction between personal characteristics, the individual's behavior, and environmental factors including social context, and their impact on development; others take a more narrowly focused approach.

Developmental psychology informs several applied fields, including: educational psychology, child psychopathology, and forensic developmental psychology. Developmental psychology complements several other basic research fields in psychology including social psychology, cognitive psychology, ecological psychology, and comparative psychology.

Approaches

Many theoretical perspectives attempt to explain development; among the most prominent are; Jean Piaget's Stage Theory, Lev Vygotsky's Social constructivism (and its heirs, the Cultural Theory of Development of Michael Cole, and the Ecological Systems Theory of Urie Bronfenbrenner), Albert Bandura's Social learning theory, and the information processing framework employed by cognitive psychology.

To a lesser extent, historical theories continue to provide a basis for additional research. Among them are Erik Erikson's eight stages of psychosocial development and John B. Watson's and B. F. Skinner's behaviorism (for more on behaviorism's role see Behavior analysis of child development).

Many other theories are prominent for their contributions to particular aspects of development. For example, attachment theory describes kinds of interpersonal relationships and Lawrence Kohlberg describes stages in moral reasoning.

شبنم می‌گه:شهروندان لیبی و حامیان معمر قذافی توسط شورشیان قتل عام شدند.A grisly scene was deorsviced in Tripoli today, when reporters came across a former Gadhafi camp in central Tripoli where pro-regime fighters were found massacred, including a number that were bound before their execution.چندین نفر از کشته شدگان را در زمین بیمارستان پیدا کردند که برای سازمان ملل شوکه آور بود. اکنون غرب شیاد مکررا اعلام می کند که قذافی و شورشیان هر دو مرتب جنایت علیه بشریت شده اند ولی از جنایت ناتو/آمریکا سخنی بمیان نمی آورد.بنظر می رسد که غرب در نظر دارد از شورشیان تروریست حداکثر استفاده را بکند و بعد از غلبه کامل بر لیبی آنان را مانند طالبان با چسباندن مارک تروریست به قتل رساند. این کار توسط آمریکا ، انگلیس و فرانسه علیه مردم مسلمان مرتب در تاریخ تکرارشده است اما مسلمانان جاهل هنوز دوزاریشان نیافته است و همچنان با غرب علیه منافع خود همکاری دارند.باند مرتجع لاریجانی/توکلی مانند سران نوکرصفت عرب ازعاملین سازمان سیا/ ام آی 6 و موساد – شورشیان حمایت کردند.با وجود بمباران شدید لیبی توسط ناتو/ آمریکا، غرب هنوز نتوانسته است پایتخت را بزیر کنترل کامل خود در آورد.UN spokesman Rupert Colville promised an investigation into the killings, and urged rebel leaders to “take active steps to ensure that no crimes, or acts of revenge, are committed.”به سخنگوی سازمان ملل باید گفت: خفه شوید – خجالت بکشید . شما بیش از آنچه که فکر می کنید در دنیا افشا شده اید. مردم از بازی شما خسته شده اند. گورتان را گم کنید. شما در جنایت علیه بشریت با غرب شریک اید.Yet the growing concern about the behavior of the rebels hardly begins or ends with this single incident. Amnesty International is also reporting that the rebel faction has been conducting mass arrests of black people across the nation, terming all of them “foreign mercenaries” but with growing evidence that a large number were simply migrant workers.

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Research methods

Developmental psychology employs many of the research methods used in other areas of psychology. However, infants and children cannot always be tested in the same ways as adults, so different methods are often used to study their development.

Your interventions will be silmair to that of an adult, for example you will need to assess Neuro status. In an adult you would look at their level of orientation , are they answering questions appropriately, are their pupils equal For an infant, you cannot determine their level of orientation, but you assess their pupils, assess their fontanel (is it bulging or is it flat, etc.), are they eating, are they withdrawing from painful stimuli, etc. Try looking at you care plan for an adult with head injury and see where you can adapt it to meet an infant. Important differences for pediatrics involve the family. Assist the parents in understanding the disease process, and assist with boding. Good luck!

Research design

Developmental psychologists have a number of methods to study changes in individuals over time.

In a longitudinal study, a researcher observes many individuals born at or around the same time (a cohort) and carries out new observations as members of the cohort age. This method can be used to draw conclusions about which types of development are universal (or normative) and occur in most members of a cohort. As an example a longitudinal study of early literacy development examined in detail the early literacy experiences of one child in each of 30 families. Researchers may also observe ways in which development varies between individuals and hypothesize about the causes of variation observed in their data. Longitudinal studies often require large amounts of time and funding, making them unfeasible in some situations. Also, because members of a cohort all experience historical events unique to their generation, apparently normative developmental trends may in fact be universal only to their cohort.

In a cross-sectional study, a researcher observes differences between individuals of different ages at the same time. This generally requires less resources than the longitudinal method, and because the individuals come from different cohorts, shared historical events are not so much of a confounding factor. By the same token, however, cross-sectional research may not be the most effective way to study differences between participants, as these differences may result not from their different ages but from their exposure to different historical events.

An third study design, the cohort study, combines both methodologies. Here, a researcher observes members of different birth cohorts at the same time, and then tracks all participants over time, charting changes in the groups. While much more resource-intensive, the format aids in a clearer distinction between what changes can be attributed to individual or historical environment from those which are truly universal.

Notably, these are all correlational, not experimental, designs, and so one cannot readily infer causation from the data they yield. Nonetheless, correlational research methods are common in the study of development, in part due to ethical concerns. In a study of the effects of poverty on development, for instance, one cannot easily randomly assign certain families to a poverty condition and others to an affluent one, and so observation alone has to suffice.

Stages of development

Pre-natal development

Pre-natal development is of interest to psychologists investigating the context of early psychological development. For example, some primitive reflexes arise before birth and are still present in newborns. One hypothesis is that these reflexes are vestigial and have limited use in early human life. Piaget's theory of cognitive development suggested that some early reflexes are building blocks for infant sensorimotor development. For example the tonic neck reflex may help development by bringing objects into the infant's field of view. Other reflexes, such as the walking reflex disappear to be replaced by more sophisticated voluntary control later in infancy. This may be because the infant gains too much weight after birth to be strong enough to use the reflex, or because the reflex and subsequent development are functionally different. It has also been suggested that some reflexes (for example the moro and walking reflexes) are predominantly adaptations to life in the womb with little connection to early infant development. Primitive reflexes reappear in adults under certain conditions, such as neurological conditions like dementia or traumatic lesions.

Ultrasound has shown that infants are capable of a range of movements in the womb, many of which appear to be more than simple reflexes. By the time they are born, infants can recognise and have a preference for their mother's voice suggesting some pre-natal development of auditory perception. Pre-natal development and birth complications may also be connected to neurodevelopmental disorders, for example in schizophrenia. With the advent of cognitive neuroscience, embryology and the neuroscience of pre-natal development is of increasing interest to developmental psychology research.

Infancy

From birth until the onset of speech, the child is referred to as an infant. Developmental psychologists vary widely in their assessment of infant psychology, and the influence the outside world has upon it, but certain aspects are relatively clear.

The majority of a newborn infant's time is spent in sleep. At first this sleep is evenly spread throughout the day and night, but after a couple of months, infants generally become diurnal.

Infants can be seen to have 6 states, grouped into pairs:

• quiet sleep and active sleep (dreaming, when REM occurs)
• quiet waking, and active waking
• fussing and crying

Infants respond to stimuli differently in these different states.

Habituation (see above) has been used to discover the resolution of perceptual systems, suggesting that infants' basic perceptual abilities develop before acquisition of object permanence.

• Vision is significantly worse in infants than in older children. Infant sight, blurry in early stages, improves over time. Colour perception similar to that seen in adults has been demonstrated in infants as young as four months, using habituation methods.

• Hearing is well-developed prior to birth, however, and a preference for the mother's heartbeat is well established. Infants are fairly good at detecting the direction from which a sound comes, and by 18 months their hearing ability is approximately equal to that of adults.

• Smell and taste are present, with infants showing different expressions of disgust or pleasure when presented with pleasant odors (honey, milk, etc.) or unpleasant odors (rotten egg) and tastes (e.g. sour taste). There is good evidence for infants preferring the smell of their mother to that of others.

• Language : infants of around six months can differentiate between phonemes in their own language, but not between similar phonemes in another language. At this stage infants also start to babble, producing phonemes.

• Touch is one of the better developed senses at birth, being one of the first to develop inside the womb. This is evidenced by the primitive reflexes described above, and the relatively advanced development of the somatosensory cortex.

• Pain : Infants feel pain similarly, if not more strongly than older children but pain-relief in infants has not received so much attention as an area of research.

An early theory of infant development was the Sensorimotor stage of Piaget's Theory of cognitive development. Piaget suggested that an infant's perception and understanding of the world depended on their motor development, which was required for the infant to link visual, tactile and motor representations of objects. According to this view, it is through touching and handling objects that infants develop object permanence, the understanding that objects are solid, permanent, and continue to exist when out of sight.

Piaget's Sensorimotor Stage comprised six sub-stages (see sensorimotor stages for more detail). In the early stages, development arises out of movements caused by primitive reflexes. Discovery of new behaviours results from classical and operant conditioning, and the formation of habits. From eight months the infant is able to uncover a hidden object but will persevere when the object is moved. Piaget's evidence for an incomplete understanding of object permanence before 18 months was the infant's failure to look for an object where it was last seen. Instead infants continue to look for an object where it was first seen, committing the "A-not-B error".

Later researchers have developed a number of other tests which suggest that younger infants understand more about objects than first thought. These experiments usually involve a toy, and a crude barrier which is placed in front of the toy, and then removed, repeatedly. Before the age of eight to nine months, infants inability to understand object permanence extends to people, which explains why infants at this age do not cry when their mothers are gone ("Out of sight, out of mind.").

There are critical periods in infancy and childhood during which development of certain perceptual, sensorimotor, social and language systems depends crucially on environmental stimulation. Feral children such as Genie, deprived of adequate stimulation, fail to acquire important skills which they are then unable to learn in later childhood. The concept of critical periods is also well established in neurophysiology, from the work of Hubel and Wiesel among others. Some feel that classical music, particularly Mozart is good for an infant's mind. While some tentative research has shown it to be helpful to older children, no conclusive evidence is available involving infants.

Babyhood

Intelligence is demonstrated through the use of symbols, language use matures, and memory and imagination are developed. Thinking is done in a nonlogical, nonreversible manner. Egocentric thinking predominates.

Socially, toddlers are little people attempting to become independent at this stage, which they are commonly called the " terrible twos". They walk, talk, use the toilet, and get food for themselves. Self-control begins to develop. If taking the initiative to explore, experiment, risk mistakes in trying new things, and test their limits is encouraged by the caretaker(s) the child will become autonomous, self-reliant, and confident. If the caretaker is overprotective or disapproving of independent actions, the toddler may begin to doubt their abilities and feel ashamed for the desire for independence. The child's autonomic development will be inhibited, and be less prepared to successfully deal with the world in the future.

Early childhood

Also called as "Pre-school age", "Exploratory age" and "Toy age".

When children attend preschool, they broaden their social horizons and become more engaged with those around them. Impulses are channeled into fantasies, which leaves the task of the caretaker to balance eagerness for pursuing adventure, creativity and self expression with the development of responsibility. If caretakers are properly encouraging and consistently disciplinary, children are more likely to develop positive self-esteem while becoming more responsible, and will follow through on assigned activities. If not allowed to decide which activities to perform, children may begin to feel guilt upon contemplating taking initiative. This negative association with independence will lead them to let others make decisions in place of them.

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Old age

This stage generally refers to those over 60–80 years. During old age, people experience a conflict between integrity vs. despair. When reflecting on their life, they either feel a sense of accomplishment or failure.

Physically, older people experience a decline in muscular strength, reaction time, stamina, hearing, distance perception, and the sense of smell. They also are more susceptible to severe diseases such as cancer and pneumonia due to a weakened immune system. Mental disintegration may also occur, leading to Dementia or Alzheimer's Disease. However, partially due to a lifetime's accumulation of antibodies, the elderly are less likely to suffer from common diseases such as the cold.

Whether or not intellectual powers increase or decrease with age remains controversial. Longitudinal studies have suggested that intellect declines, while cross-sectional studies suggest that intellect is stable. It is generally believed that crystallized intelligence increases up to old age, while fluid intelligence decreases with age.

Other findings

Parenting

In Western developed societies, mothers (and women generally) were emphasized to the exclusion of other caregivers, particularly as the traditional role of the father was more the breadwinner, and less the direct caregiver of an infant, he has been traditionally viewed as impacting an infant indirectly through interactions with the mother of the child.

The emphasis of study has shifted to the primary caregiver (regardless of gender or biological relation), as well as all persons directly or indirectly influencing the child (the family system). The roles of the mother and father are more significant than first thought as we moved into the concept of primary caregiver.

Affirming a role for fathers, studies have shown that children as young as 15 months benefit significantly from substantial engagement with their father. In particular, a study in the U.S.A. and New Zealand found the presence of the natural father was the most significant factor in reducing rates of early sexual activity and rates of teenage pregnancy in girls. Covariate factors used included early conduct problems, maternal age at first childbirth, race, maternal education, father's occupational status, family living standards, family life stress, early mother-child interaction, measures of psychosocial adjustment and educational achievement, school qualifications, mood disorder, anxiety disorder, suicide attempts, violent offending, and conduct disorder. Further research has found fathers have an impact on child academic performance, including involved nonresident fathers. However, father absence is associated with a range of negative outcomes for children, including child and later criminal behavior.

Historical antecedents

The modern form of developmental psychology has its roots in the rich psychological tradition represented by Aristotle, Tabari,Template:Verify credibility Rhazes,Template:Verify credibility and Descartes. William Shakespeare had his melancholy character Jacques (in As You Like It) articulate the seven ages of man: these included three stages of childhood and four of adulthood. In the mid-eighteenth century Jean Jacques Rousseau described three stages of childhood: infans (infancy), puer (childhood) and adolescence in Emile: Or, On Education. Rousseau's ideas were taken up strongly by educators at the time.

In the late nineteenth century, psychologists familiar with the evolutionary theory of Darwin began seeking an evolutionary description of psychological development; prominent here was G. Stanley Hall, who attempted to correlate ages of childhood with previous ages of mankind.

A more scientific approach was initiated by James Mark Baldwin, who wrote essays on topics that included Imitation: A Chapter in the Natural History of Consciousness and Mental Development in the Child and the Race: Methods and Processes. In 1905, Sigmund Freud articulated five psychosexual stages. Later, Rudolf Steiner articulated stages of psychological development throughout human life. By the early to mid-twentieth century, the work of Vygotsky and Piaget, mentioned above, had established a strong empirical tradition in the field.

Further reading

• Bjorklund, D. F. & Pellegrini, A. D. (2000). Child Development and Evolutionary Psychology. Child Development, 71, 1687-1708. Full text
• Bornstein, M. H. & Lamb, M. E. (2005). Developmental science: An advanced textbook. Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum, 2005.
• Johnson-Pynn, J., Fragaszy, D.M., & Cummins-Sebree, S. (2003). Common territories in comparative and developmental psychology: The quest for shared means and meaning in behavioral investigations. International Journal of Comparative Psychology, 16, 1-27. Full text
• Lerner, R. M. Concepts and theories of human development. Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum, 2002.
• Reid, V., Striano, T., & Koops, W. Social Cognition During infancy. Psychology Press. 2007

External links

• The Society for Research in Child Development
• The British Psychological Society, Developmental Psychology Section
• Developmental Psychology: lessons for teaching and learning developmental psychology
• GMU’s On-Line Resources for Developmental Psychology: a web directory of developmental psychology organizations
• Home Economics Archive: Research, Tradition, History (HEARTH)
  An e-book collection of over 1,000 books spanning 1850 to 1950, created by Cornell University's Mann Library. Includes several hundred works on human development, child raising, and family studies itemized in a specific bibliography.
• Infants can do more than we think. Research from Uppsala university 2010.