Chapter 10 Development

• Developmental psychology: the study of continuity and change across the life span
• Infancy
• Childhood
• Adolescence
• Adulthood

Prenatality: A Womb with a View

• There are three prenatal stages (from conception to birth).
• Germinal stage: the 2-week period that begins at conception
• Zygote: a fertilized egg that contains chromosomes from both a sperm and an
egg
• Embryonic stage: the period that lasts from the 2nd week until about the 8th week
• Fetal stage: the period that lasts from the 9th week until birth
• Myelination: the formation of a fatty sheath around the axons of a neuron
The Embryonic and Fetal Stages

• Embryos have both:

• Wolffian system: leads to male reproductive organs
• Males release androgens which prompt the development of the Wolffian
system and a Mullerian-inhibiting substance.

• Mullerian system: leads to female reproductive organs.

• Mullerian system develops and Wolffian system degenerates. This doesn’t
require a surge of hormones.
Prenatal Environment
• The womb is an environment that affects an unborn baby in many ways.
• The placenta is the organ that links the bloodstreams of the mother to the unborn baby
that permits the exchange of materials.
• Foods, substances a mother intakes affects development
• Teratogens: agents that damage the process of development, such as drugs and
viruses
• Fetal alcohol syndrome: a developmental disorder that stems from heavy alcohol use
by the mother during pregnancy
Infancy and Childhood: Becoming a Person
• Infancy: the stage of development that begins at birth and lasts between 18 and 24
months
• Newborns have poor sight, but habituate to visual stimuli.
• Newborns can mimic facial expressions within the first hour of life.
• Newborns must strengthen their muscles and work on motor development.
• Motor development: the emergence of the ability to execute physical action
• Reflexes: specific patterns of motor response that are triggered by specific patterns of
sensory stimulation; innate
• The development of sophisticated behaviors follows two rules:
 • Cephalocaudal rule: the ‘top-to-bottom’ rule that describes the tendency for motor
skills to emerge in sequence from the head to the feet
• Proximodistal rule: the ‘inside-to-outside’ rule that describes the tendency for motor
skills to emerge in sequence from the center to the periphery

Motor Development
Cognitive Development
• Cognitive development: the emergence of the ability to think and understand
• How the physical world works
• How their minds represent it
• How other minds represent it
• Jean Piaget’s (1896-1980) created stages of cognitive development
• Newer theories see the stages as continuous, not discrete
• Children may acquire abilities earlier than proposed

Sources of Continuity
• Assimilation: The process by which people translate incoming information into a form
they can understand
• Accommodation: The process by which people adapt current knowledge structures in
response to new experiences

Piaget’s Stages of Cognitive Development

• Sensorimotor stage (birth-2 yrs.): infants acquire information about the world by sensing
it and moving around within it
• Schemas: theories about or models of the way the world works
• Assimilation: the process by which infants apply their schemas in novel situations
• Accommodation: the process by which infants revise their schemas in light of new
information
• Object permanence: the idea that objects continue to exist even when they are not
visible
• The impossible event
• Preoperational stage (2-6 yrs.): children have a preliminary understanding of the physical
world
• Concrete operational stage (6-11 yrs.): children learn how various actions or operations
can affect or transform concrete objects
• Conservation: the notion that the quantitative properties of an object are invariant
despite changes in the object’s appearance
• Formal operational stage (11 yrs. +): children can solve non-physical problems; abstract
thinking
 Piaget’s Four Stages of Cognitive Development
Conservation
Piaget’s Three-Mountain Task
Discovering the Mind
• Childhood: the stage of development that begins at about 18-24 months and lasts until
adolescence
• Egocentrism: the failure to understand that the world appears differently to different
observers; observed during preoperational stage
• False belief test (passed at about 4-6 years)
• Children have difficulty understanding different emotional reactions in others, until about
6 years of age.
• Theory of mind: the idea that human behavior is guided by mental representations
• Children with autism and deaf children who do not use ASL have difficulty
• Language is important for development.

Egocentric Conversations
Theory of Mind: human behavior is guided by mental representations
Discovering Our Cultures
• Lev Vygotsky (1896-1934) believed children develop through interactions with members of
his/her own culture.
• Usage of cultural tools
• The ability to learn from others depends on three fundamental skills:
• Joint attention: the ability to focus on what another person is focused on
• Social referencing: the ability to use another person’s reactions as information about
the world
• Imitation: the ability to do what another person does
Lev Vygotsky : Joint Attention

Hot Science: Walk This Way

• Even 18-month-old infants know when to listen to their parents and when to ignore them.
• An experiment with an apparatus (a steep walkway) tested whether babies would walk
down the hill towards their mothers at the bottom.
• The steepness could be adjusted.
• Mothers either encouraged or discourage babies to walk towards them.
• Results showed that when the hill was clearly safe or clearly risky (unambiguous), babies
ignored their mothers; when the hill was in between (ambiguous), babies heeded their
mother’s advice.
Social Development
• Harry Harlow (1905-1981) conducted attachment experiments with baby rhesus monkeys.
• Konrad Lorenz (1903-1989) discovered imprinting in newly hatched goslings.
• John Bowlby (1907-1990) argued that infants innately channel signals to primary
caregivers to form attachment.
• Attachment: the emotional bond that forms between newborns and their primary
caregivers (secure, insecure: avoidant, ambivalent, disorganized attachment styles)
 • Strange situation: a behavioral test developed by Mary Ainsworth that is used to
determine a child’s attachment style
• Cultural differences
• Internal working model of relationships: a set of beliefs about the self, the primary
caregiver, and the relationship between them
• Temperaments: characteristic patterns of emotional reactivity.
• Variable and stable
• Mother sensitivity and responsiveness matter
Harlow’s Monkeys
Attachment
Attachment Categories
 Secure attachment
• An infant or child has a high-quality, relatively unambivalent relationship with his or
her attachment figure (about 2/3 of American middle class)
 Insecure/resistant (or ambivalent) attachment
• Infants or young children (about 9% of American middle class children) are clingy and
stay close to their caregiver rather than explore the environment; but are not easily
comforted and both seek comfort and resist efforts of the caregiver to comfort them

Attachment Categories
 Insecure/avoidant attachment
– Infants or young children (about 15% of infants from middle-class U.S. families)
seem somewhat indifferent toward their caregiver and may even avoid the
caregiver

 Disorganized/disoriented attachment
– Infants have no consistent way of coping with the stress of the Strange Situation.
Their behavior is often confused or even contradictory, and they often appear
dazed or disoriented

Attachment Style and Memory

Working Models
The Real World: When Mom’s Away…
• A majority of mothers now work and entrust their children’s care to someone else.
• Effects on attachment?
• A longitudinal study showed that non-maternal daycare had little effect on mother-child
attachment.
• However, infants who had insensitive or unresponsive mothers and who had poor-
quality daycare for more than 10 hours a week were especially likely to be insecurely
attached.
Moral Development
• Piaget drew several conclusions by investigating children’s moral thinking and behavior.
 Children’s moral thinking shifts from:
• Realism to relativism
• Prescriptions to principles
• Outcomes to intentions
• Lawrence Kohlberg (1927-1987) developed a theory of three stages in moral development
(based on responses to moral dilemmas):
• Preconventional stage (childhood): the morality of an action is primarily determined
by its consequences for the actor
• Conventional stage (adolescence): the morality of an action is primarily determined
by the extent to which it conforms to social rules
• Postconventional stage (adults): the morality of an action is determined by a set of
general principles that reflect core values
• Reasoning may differ based on context.
• Only studied in boys
• Moral thinking may or may not correlate with moral behavior.

•
Feeling What’s Right
• Moral decision making comes with feeling.
• Moral judgments may be the consequence, not the cause, of emotional reactions.
• Moral intuitionist perspective: perceptions of right and wrong are evolutionarily
emotional reactions
• Children do consider transgressions that cause others to be observably distressed.
• Empathy in the brain? The brain responds to other people’s expressions of distress by
causing us the experience of distress.

The Trolley Problem

Adolescence: Minding the Gap

• Adolescence: the period of development that begins with the onset of sexual maturity
(about 11-14 years of age) and lasts until the beginning of adulthood (about 18-21 years of
age)
• Puberty: the bodily changes associated with sexual maturity
• Primary sex characteristics: bodily structures that are directly involved in
reproduction
• Secondary sex characteristics: bodily structures that change dramatically with sexual
maturity but that are not directly involved in reproduction
• The brain also changes (connections between the temporal and parietal lobe, and
proliferation and pruning in the prefrontal cortex).

Your Brain on Puberty

The Protraction of Adolescence
• There exists considerable variation in the onset of puberty (between genders, cultures,
 time periods/eras).
• Improved diet and health
• Chemicals (especially those that mimic estrogen in females)
• The age of puberty has decreased but the age of adulthood responsibility has increased.
• Has this protraction caused adolescent turmoil?

Secondary Sexual Characteristics

Sex and Gender

• Sex – sex assigned at birth biologically male, female, intersex – chromosomes, hormones

• Gender identity is a person’s sense of being man, woman, non-binary.

• Cis gendered a person’s sense of gender matches sex assignment at birth.

• Transgender – identify with a different gender from one’s sex assigned at birth. Includes people
who may or may not want to change their sex or have hormonal treatments.

• Genderqueer – may identify outside the gender binary.

Sexuality
• Effects of early maturation (puberty) are different for boys and girls.
• Tends to be more positive for boys and negative for girls.
• Understanding one’s sexuality is especially stressful during this period (especially if one
does not identify as heterosexual).
• Biology (genes) may contribute to sexual orientation.
• Sibling and identical twin studies, brain studies and androgens
• Environment may also contribute
• Adolescent interest in sex often precedes knowledge about it.
• High teen pregnancy in the U.S.
• Sex education in the U.S. lacking

Early Puberty

Parental Misconceptions About Teenage Sex

Teen Pregnancy
Parents and Peers
• Adolescence marks a shift in emphasis from family relations to peer relations.
• Peer relationships evolve and ‘peel off.’
• Peer pressure forms but has less influence as we age.
• Adolescents struggle for autonomy.
• Erik Erikson (1902-1994) developed stages of human development that all humans go
through.
 • Adolescents go through ‘identity versus role confusion.’
Erikson’s Theory of Development

• Expanded Freud’s views and created his “universal” psychosocial theory that emphasized
internal drives and cultural demands.

• Development continues throughout the lifespan.

• Individuals must successfully resolve a crisis at each of the eight stages of development.

Erikson’s Stages of Human Development

Adulthood: Going Happily Downhill

• Adulthood: the stage of development that begins around 18 to 21years and ends at death.
• Abilities and heath peak in the 20s and begin to deteriorate between 26 and 30 years
onward.
• Physical changes lead to psychological consequences (cognitive decline).
• Yet, older brains compensate by calling on other neural structures.
• Less bilateral asymmetry (prefrontal cortex)

Changing Goals and Roles

• The socio-emotional selectivity theory states that younger adults are oriented toward
future-pertinent (useful) information while older adults focus on (positive) emotional
satisfaction in the present, perhaps because of shortened futures.
• Older adults focus on and remember more positive experiences and emotions.
• Psychological separation from parents begins in adulthood as young adults take on roles in
marriage and parenthood.
• Married people are happier and have better health.
• Marital satisfaction ebbs and flows.
• Women tend to be less happy raising children.