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3 Essential reading and resources

Tuesday, April 13, 2021 12:31 PM

To learn how to search for information in the Online Library, see Information Skills for Psychology, Part 2.
Now read your first Essential reading:
• Leman, P., Bremner, A., Parke, R.D. & Gauvain, M. (2019). Developmental psychology (2nd edition). McGraw-
Hill Education. Chapter 1, pp.3–11.
Remember that all the Essential reading for this programme is provided for you. Click the link to access the reading
via the Kortext platform or find it through your mobile app.

As you’re reading, pay particular attention to the following key points and make notes on them in your study
journal.
• Key themes that have been examined by developmental psychologists, including:
○ origins of behaviour: inheritance and environment
• Nature (Nativism) vs Nurture (Empiricism) debate
• Piaget’s constructivist theory of development in which he argues that infants and children play an
active role themselves in their own development.
• the interaction between inheritance and environment is an active, dynamic process to which the
developing children themselves make an active and vital contribution.

○ developmental change as a continuous or discontinuous process

• development as a continuous process (continuous development) whereby each new event builds on
earlier experiences.
• smooth and gradual accumulation of ability.
• development as discontinuous (discontinuous development). This view likens development to a
series of discrete steps or stages in which behaviours get reorganized into a qualitatively new set of
behaviours.
• Siegler (1996; 2016) who sees development as basically continuous or quantitative, but argues that
because development of a range of abilities and tendencies is happening in parallel, overall
developmental change in ability can appear to be interspersed with sudden or
discontinuous/qualitative shifts.

○ examining critical versus sensitive periods of development

• whether some experiences are particularly important at specific ages
• A critical period of development is an age range during which certain experiences are required for
development to proceed in a typical way.
• A sensitive period is an age range at which specific experiences are optimal for development to
occur in a typical way.
• there are certain things which we can do in order to optimize the environment for fostering the best
outcomes we can for developing children

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 ○ domain-general versus domain-specific development.
• Domain-general development The idea that developments can have an impact on a wide range of
abilities. (Piaget)
• Domain-specific development The idea that the development of various abilities occurs
independently (separately) and has little impact on skills in other domains.

[Leman, Patrick/Bremner, Andy. EBOOK: Developmental Psychology, 2e]

○ Locus of Developmental Change

• Level of explanation The way in which we choose to describe psychological abilities (and the
developments of those abilities). Levels of explanation can include biological, behavioural, social and
emotional.
• Which level of explanation or locus of change is the most informative for us?
One way of answering this question is in trying to determine whether the factors that
influence developmental change are primarily at one level or another (e.g., are biological or
environmental factors more important)

• developmental scientists are increasingly acknowledging that development is probably caused by a

multitude of factors at all levels

• Perspectives (or ‘focus’) on development, including:

○ individual characteristics versus contextual influences
• Individual Variation in Development
□ Occurs within Typical and Atypical Development

Typical and
Atypical C...
• Behavioural Genetics = Genes + Environment ==> Individual Differences
□ One important way in which individual characteristics have been studied is by examining how
different children respond when they are confronted with situational challenges or risks to
healthy development.

Some risks are biological, psychological

Environmental

Permanent Developmental Disruptions

Sleeper Effect (display disruptions later in life)

Resilience (no effect and carry on normally in life)
◊ Learned coping strategies and mechanisms

○ Culture
• Examination of the contribution that context makes to child development has also led to increased
interest in how culture relates to development.
• Examining development across cultures provides information about variation in the range of human
potential and expression that may emerge in different circumstances of growth

○ Biology
• development and the interaction of our inheritance and environment does happen at the level of
neurons and patterns of functional brain activity.
• And because there are certain ways in which brains and neurons behave and develop, these
‘biological constraints’ exert an influence on the development of our behaviour, our social
relationships and our cognitive abilities.

○ Ecology
• A perspective that stresses the importance of understanding not only the relationships between
organisms and various environmental systems but also the relations among such systems
themselves.
• Urie Bronfenbrenner = development involves the interaction of a changing child with the changing
ecological context in all of its complexity

• Environmental systems range from the most direct or immediate settings in the child’s experience,
such as the family or peer group, to more remote contexts of the child’s life, such as the society’s
systems of values and of law.

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 systems of values and of law.
□ The microsystem is the setting in which the child lives and interacts with the people and
institutions closest to her.
□ The mesosystem comprises the interrelations among the components of the microsystem.
Thus, parents interact with teachers and the school system, both family members and peers
may maintain relations with a religious institution, and so forth.
□ The exosystem is composed of settings that impinge on a child’s development but with which
the child has largely indirect contact. For example, a parent’s work may affect the child’s life if
it requires the parent to travel a great deal or work late into the night.
□ The macrosystem represents the ideological and institutional patterns of a particular culture
or subculture.
□ Chronosystem = The above 4 systems change over time

○ lifespan.
Lifespan perspective A view of development as a process that continues throughout the life cycle,
from infancy through adulthood and old age. (Historical Context)
□ Age Cohort Effect

shared experiences may lead to specific and distinctive problems for that cohort, such as
PTSD

From <https://learn.london.ac.uk/mod/page/view.php?id=25112&forceview=1>

• Developmental psychology seeks to identify and describe changes in the way we think and
behave, and to uncover the developmental processes that drive these changes.
• Developmental psychologists are interested in what things change as we get older and how these
changes come about.
• human perception and thought which relied on the influence of experience (Locke, 1960)
• innate understanding brought into the world before experience (Rousseau, 1762)
• Darwin’s ‘biography’ of his son Doddy is the first empirical scientific study in developmental
psychology.
• developmental psychologists have influenced social policy and legislation relevant to children,
families and the care of the elderly
• aspects of development: biological, cognitive, linguistic, emotional and social
• Developmental psychology attempts to uncover the processes that underlie age-related change in
growth, behaviour, knowledge and learning

What themes of development do you think are most important and why?

Social, Behavioural, Neurological/Biological and Emotional

Pick a psychological ability and consider it from the ecological perspective. Can you work out what the
most important ecological systems will be in the context of Bronfenbrenner’s theory?

[Leman, Patrick/Bremner, Andy. EBOOK: Developmental Psychology, 2e]

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