Chapter 3

1. Chapter 3 Voyage Through the Lifespan

2. Prenatal Development • Germinal stage: • the period from conception to implantation. Also known as the “period of the ovum”. • Embryonic stage: • the prenatal period of development from implantation until about the eighth week of development. • XY or XX: • the genetic code that begins to assert itself about the seventh week of development. • Amniotic sac: • The embryo is suspended within this protective sac. • Umbilical cord: • connects the embryo to the placenta.

3. Prenatal Development • Fetal stage: • the period of development beginning in the third month until birth. • Growth and development continue, features and functions develop. • Age 25 weeks: threshold of viability

4. Figure 3.1Embryos and Fetuses at Various Intervals of Prenatal Development . Development of the head (and brain) precedes that of other parts of the body. The development of the organs--heart, lungs and so on--also precedes the development of limbs. The relatively early maturation of the brain and organ systems allows them to participate in the nourishment and further development of the embryo.

5. The Newborn • Newborn reflexes • Simple unlearned, stereotypical responses elicited by specific stimuli. • Essential to survival • Examples include: • Rooting: • Infant turning head toward stimuli that prod or stroke the cheek, chin, or corner of the mouth. • Moro: • startle reflex. • Babinski: • Infants fan their toes when the soles of their feet are stimulated.

6. Perceptual Development in Infancy • Fixation time: • the amount of time spent looking at something. • 2-month old infants prefer human faces. • Visual Cliff experiments: • 6-8 month old infants develop depth perception and avoid crawling off the “cliff”. • 3-day old infants prefer to hear their mother’s voice to those of other women. • Shortly after birth infants can discriminate tastes.

7. Figure 3.3The Classic Visual Cliff Experiment . This young explorer has the good sense not to crawl out onto an apparently unsupported surface, even when mother beckons from the other side. Rats pups, kittens, and chicks also will not try to walk across to the other side.

8. Physical Development: Childhood • Growth is slow and steady. • Gross motor skills improve faster than fine motor skills. • Girls mature more rapidly than boys.

9. Adolescence: A time of transition • Physical Development • Growth spurts last for 2-3 years. Grow 8-12 inches. • Puberty: • a period during which the body becomes sexually mature. • Menarche (menstruation) in women usually occurs between 11 and 14 years.

10. Adolescence (con’t) • Adolescents strive for independence which often leads to: • Fighting with parents and withdrawal from family life • Most adolescents continue to feel love, respect and loyalty toward their parents. • Adolescents who feel close to their parents show: • Greater self reliance • Independence • Fare better in school • Have fewer adjustment problems

11. Adolescent Sexuality • Statistics. • According to the CDC (2000) about half of U.S. high school students have engaged in sexual intercourse. • Fewer than half of those use contraception reliably. • Nearly 800,000 teenage girls get pregnant each year. • Nearly 3 million teenage boys and girls contract a sexually transmitted infection (STI) each year.

12. Adolescent Sexuality (con’t) • Problems: • Adolescents often misunderstand reproduction and contraception. • Top reason for engaging in sex is peer pressure. • Teen mothers are less likely to graduate from high school, have a lower standard of living, and have a greater need for public assistance.

13. Adulthood: Physical Development • Young adulthood characteristics: • Height of physical fitness. • Middle adulthood characteristics: • Minor changes in strength, coordination, and stamina. • Can still maintain excellent cardiorespiratory condition. • Menopause: final phase of the climacteric. • Decline in female sex hormone secretion. • Loss of fertility. • Loss of bone density. • Hot flashes, loss of sleep, some anxiety and depression.

14. Adulthood: Physical Dev. (con’t) • Late adulthood characteristics: • Increased brittleness in the bones. • See and hear less acutely. • Reaction time diminishes. • Immune system functions less efficiently.

15. Theories of Aging • Programmed Senescence: • aging is determined by a biological clock that is governed by our genes. • Evidence to support this is the longevity runs in families. • Wear and Tear Theory: • environmental factors such as pollution, disease and ultra violet light contribute to the wear and tear on the body. • The body is a machine that is going to wear out.

16. Successful Aging • Successful Aging. • Most people in their 70s report general satisfaction with lives. • Three factors are connected with subjective well-being (Pinquart & Sorensen, 2000): • Socioeconomic status. • Social network. • Competence.

17. Successful Aging • Volz (2000) proposes three components for successful aging: • Reshaping one’s life to concentrate on what one finds to be important and meaningful. • A positive outlook. • Self challenge.

18. Jean Piaget’s Cognitive-Developmental Theory • Piaget hypothesized that children’s cognitive processes develop in an orderly sequence of stages. • Scheme: • a pattern of action or a mental structure involved in acquiring or organizing knowledge. • Assimilation: • responding to new stimuli through a reflex or existing habit. • Accommodation: • the creation of new ways of responding to objects or looking at the world.

19. Piaget (con’t) • Sensorimotor Stage • The newborn is capable of assimilation. • By about 8-12 months of age the infant realizes that objects that are removed from sight still exist. • This is called object permanence

20. Piaget (con’t) • The Preoperational Stage • Characterized by the use of words and symbols to represent objects and relationships among them. • Egocentrism: • Cannot take another’s perspective. • Everyone knows and feels what I do. • Animism: • attribute life and consciousness to physical objects like the sun, toys, etc.

21. Piaget (con’t) • Conservation: • Basic properties of substances remain the same (conserve) when you change superficial properties such as shape. • Children in the preoperational stage are developing this ability but do not yet have it mastered.

22. Figure 3.5Conservation. The boy in drawing A agreed that the amount of water in two identical containers is equal. As shown in drawing B, he then watched as water from one container was poured into a tall, thin container. In drawing C, he is examining one of the original; containers and the new container. When asked whether he thinks the amounts of water in the two containers are now the same, he says no. Apparently he is impressed by the height of the new container, and prior to the development of conservation, he focusing on only one dimension of the situation at a time--in this case height of the new container.

23. Piaget (con’t) • The Concrete Operational Stage • Children ages 7-12; show the beginnings of logic. • Children typically do better with tangible (concrete) rather than abstract ideas. • Children can perform “operations” such as • conservervation. • reversibility.

24. Piaget (con’t) • Piaget’s stage of Formal Operations (about 11 or 12). • Abstract thought • Adolescent Egocentrism • Imaginary Audience: • The belief that other people are as concerned with our thoughts, appearance and behavior as we are. • Personal Fable: • The belief that our feelings and ideas are special. • We are unique and invulnerable. • Showing off and taking risks typical beliefs.

25. Cognitive Development in Adulthood • Creativity, memory functioning and intelligence are at their height in adulthood. • People tend to retain their verbal skills and general knowledge into advanced age. • Crystallized versus Fluid Intelligence. • Crystallized intelligence • represents a lifetime of attainment including vocabulary and accumulated facts. • Typically increases over the decades. • Fluid intelligence • represents mental flexibility. • This is the ability to process information rapidly; learning and solving new problems.

26. Cognitive Development in Adulthood • The Seattle Longitudinal Study (Schaie, 1994). • Studied the cognitive development of adults for four decades and found factors that contribute to intellectual functioning: • General health. • Socioeconomic status (SES). • Stimulating activities. • Marriage to a spouse with a high level of intellectual functioning. • Openness to new experience.

27. Cognitive Disease: Dementia • Alzheimer’s Disease. • It is a disease, not a normal part of aging. • Characterized by: • Deterioration in memory, language, and problem solving. • Becoming helpless. • Inability to communicate or walk. • More isolated memory losses. • Serious impairment of vocational and social functioning. • Seems to be a result of reduced levels of acetylcholine (ACh) and the build up of sticky plaque on the brain.

28. Kohlberg’s Moral Development • Kohlberg’s Theory of Moral Development • Kohlberg presented subjects with moral dilemmas. • Interested in how the subject arrived at decision rather than the decision alone. • Proposed that moral reasoning follows a specific sequence. • Preconventional • Conventional • Postconventional

29. Kohlberg (con’t) • The Preconventional Level • Applies to most children through the age of 9. • Stage 1 -Obedience and punishment • Stage 2 -Good behavior allows people to satisfy needs of self and others.

30. Kohlberg (con’t) • The Conventional Level • Moral reasoning is judged by conformity to conventional standards of right and wrong. • Stage 3: moral behavior meets the expectations of others. • Stage 4: moral judgments based on rules that maintain social order.

31. Kohlberg (con’t) • Kohlberg’s Postconventional Level of Moral Reasoning • Highest level is based on person’s own moral standards. • Stage 5: legalistic orientation; law is good for society. • Stage 6: moral reasoning demands adherence to supposed universal universal ethics. • Conscience is the highest moral authority.

32. Erikson’s Theory of Psychosocial Development • Erik Erikson’s Stages of Psychosocial Development • Infancy: Trust versus Mistrust. • Based on interactions with primary caregivers. • Come to expect that our environment will (or will not) meet our needs. • Early/Middle Childhood: • Autonomy vs. shame • Initiative vs. doubt • Industry vs. inferiority

33. Erikson (con’t) • Adolescence: Ego Identity Versus Role Diffusion • Ego Identity: • a firm sense of who one is and what one stands for. • If this isn’t accomplished then role diffusion is experienced. • Young adulthood: intimacy versus isolation. • This is marked by the establishment of intimate relationships.

34. Erikson (con’t) • Middle Adulthood: • Generativity versus stagnation. • Generativity is doing things that we believe are worthwhile which enhances self-esteem and helps shape a new generation. • Stagnation is “treading water” and has powerful destructive effects on self esteem. • Late Adulthood • Erikson proposed a stage of ego integrity versus despair. • Ego integrity derives from wisdom; expert knowledge, balance, and excellence.

35. Social and Emotional Development: Attachment • Attachment • is an emotional tie that is formed between one person and another specific individual. • Behaviors include: • Attempts to maintain contact or nearness • Show anxiety when separated. • Measured using the Strange Situation

36. Attachment (con’t) • Patterns of Attachment • Secure attachment: • Infants seek interaction with and are readily comforted by caregiver. • Children with secure attachment are better off on almost every measure of socioemotional development. • Avoidant attachment • Play by themselves and ignore mothers when they return. • Ambivalent/resistant attachment: • infants show severe distress when their mothers leave • show ambivalence upon reunion by alternately clinging to and pushing their mother away.

37. Attachment (con’t) • Theories of Attachment • Behaviorists believe that attachment is learned through experience. • Harry Harlow suggests that skin contact may be more important than learning experiences. • Harlow Wire v Cloth • Rhesus monkey research with the wire mesh and terrycloth mothers demonstrated that monkeys in danger prefer the terrycloth mother. • Harlow secure base • Concluded that there may be an inborn need for contact comfort.

38. Figure 3.6 Attachment in Infant Monkeys Although this rhesus monkey infant is fed by the wire “mother,” it spends most of its time clinging to the soft, cuddly terry-cloth “mother.” It knows where to get a meal, but contact comfort is apparently more important than food in the development of attachment in infant monkeys (and infant humans?).

39. Social and Emotional Development: Parenting • Parenting styles • Parental behavior researched by Baumrind focused on four aspects of parental behavior: • 1) strictness, • 2) demands for a child to achieve intellectual, emotional and social maturity, • 3) communication ability, and • 4) warmth and involvement. • Based on research in this area four parenting styles have been proposed:

40. Parenting Styles (con’t) • Authoritative: • Strict but are willing to reason with their children. • Most competent children come from this type. • Authoritarian: • Strict and rely on force. • Poor communication. • Permissive: • Easygoing, warm and supportive. • Poor at communicating. • Make few demands. • Uninvolved: • Leave children on their own. • Make few demands. • Show little warmth or encouragement.

41. Table 3.6 Parenting Styles

42. Death and Dying • Kubler-Ross proposed five stages of dying: • Denial. • Anger. • Bargaining. • Depression. • Final acceptance.