Understanding Psychology 6 th Edition Charles G. Morris and Albert A. Maisto

1. Understanding Psychology6th EditionCharles G. Morris and Albert A. Maisto PowerPoint Presentation by H. Lynn Bradman Metropolitan Community College ©Prentice Hall 2003

2. Chapter 9 Life-Span Development ©Prentice Hall 2003

3. Enduring Issues and Methods in Developmental Psychology • What are some of the limitations of the methods used to study development? • Cross-sectional studies involve studying different age groups of people • Longitudinal studies test the same group of individuals at different times in their lives. ©Prentice Hall 2003

4. Research Methodologies • Cross-sectional: • Examining groups of subjects who are of different ages. • Longitudinal: • Examining the same group of subjects two or more times as they age. • Biographical: • Studying developmental changes by reconstructing subjects’ past through interviews and investigating the effects of past events on current behaviors. ©Prentice Hall 2003

5. Cross-Sectional Studies • Advantages • Inexpensive • Relatively quick to complete • No high attrition rate ©Prentice Hall 2003

6. Cross-Sectional Studies • Disadvantages • Different age groups may be dissimilar • Age and maturity may not be equivalent • Confounds cohort and age differences ©Prentice Hall 2003

7. Longitudinal Studies • Advantages • Detailed information about subjects • Provides great detail of developmental changes • Follows same cohort groups ©Prentice Hall 2003

8. Longitudinal Studies • Disadvantages • Expensive and time consuming • Potential for high attrition rates • May confound age differences & differences in assessment tools ©Prentice Hall 2003

9. Biographical Studies • Advantages: • Rich detail about one individual’s life • Allows for in-depth study of one individual ©Prentice Hall 2003

10. Biographical Studies • Disadvantages • Individual’s recall is often untrustworthy • Can be very time consuming and expensive ©Prentice Hall 2003

11. Prenatal Development • The period of development from conception to birth. ©Prentice Hall 2003

12. Prenatal Development • Prenatal development: • Development from conception to birth. • Embryo: • 2 weeks after conception to 3 months. • Fetus: • 3 months after conception to birth. ©Prentice Hall 2003

13. Importance of the Placenta • During prenatal development teratogens can pass through the placenta and cause irreparable harm to the embryo or fetus. • This harm is greatest if the drug or other substance is introduced just at the time when some major developmental process is taking place. • If the same substance is introduced outside this critical period, little or even no harm may result. ©Prentice Hall 2003

14. Fetal Alcohol Syndrome (FAS) • Alcohol is a drug most commonly abused by pregnant women. • Heavy alcohol consumption by the mother during pregnancy is characterized by facial deformities, heart defects, stunted growth, and cognitive impairments. • Smaller amounts of alcohol may also cause impairments. ©Prentice Hall 2003

15. The Newborn ©Prentice Hall 2003

16. Reflexes • Rooting reflex: • A baby turns its head toward something touching its cheek and gropes around with its mouth. • Sucking reflex: • Sucking on any object placed in a baby’s mouth. • Swallowing reflex: • Enables the baby to swallow liquids without choking. ©Prentice Hall 2003

17. Reflexes • Grasping reflex: • Closing their fists on anything placed in their hands. • Stepping reflex: • The light stepping motions made by babies if they are held upright with their feet just touching a surface. ©Prentice Hall 2003

18. Temperament • The physical and emotional characteristics of the newborn child and young infant. • Babies are born with individual differences in personality called temperament differences. • Often a baby's temperament remains quite stable over time due to a combination of genetic and environmental influences. ©Prentice Hall 2003

19. Temperament • Stability in temperament is not inevitable; changes in temperament can also take place. • Your own temperament may be both similar to and different from the temperament you displayed as a newborn. ©Prentice Hall 2003

20. Three Types of Temperaments • Easy: • Good-natured and adaptable, easy to care for and please • Difficult: • Moody and intense, reacting to new people and new situations negatively and strongly • Slow-to-warm-up: • Relatively inactive and slow to respond to new things, and when they do react, their reactions are mild ©Prentice Hall 2003

21. Perceptual Abilities • All of a baby's senses are functioning at birth: • Sight • Hearing • Taste • Smell • Touch ©Prentice Hall 2003

22. Vision • A baby’s least developed sense is probably vision, which takes 6 to 8 months to become as good as the average college student's. • Infants prefer: a novel picture or pattern with clear contrasts and their own mother rather than a stranger. ©Prentice Hall 2003

23. Depth Perception • Crawling babies will not cross over onto the deep side during the visual cliff experiments. • Babies too young to crawl: • No anxiety, but do demonstrate depth perception • 2-4 months old: • Begin to perceive patterns, objects, and depth ©Prentice Hall 2003

24. Other Senses • Although it is hard to tell exactly what a baby's sensory world is like, newborns seem particularly adept at discriminating speech sounds; • This suggests that their hearing is quite good. ©Prentice Hall 2003

25. Other Senses • Infants have likes and dislikes with regard to smells. • Infants like sweet flavors, a preference which persists through childhood. ©Prentice Hall 2003

26. Infancy and Childhood ©Prentice Hall 2003

27. Physical Growth • During the first dozen years of life a helpless infant becomes a competent older child. • This transformation encompasses many important kinds of changes, including physical, motor, cognitive, and social developments. ©Prentice Hall 2003

28. Physical Growth • Growth of the body is most rapid during the first year, with the average baby growing approximately 10 inches and gaining about 15 pounds. • It then slows down considerably until early adolescence. • When growth does occur, it happens suddenly, almost overnight, rather than through small, steady changes. ©Prentice Hall 2003

29. Motor Development • Babies tend to reach the major milestones in early motor development at broadly similar ages, give or take a few months. • The average ages are called developmental norms. • Maturation, the biological process that lead to developmental changes, also is shaped by experiences with the environment. ©Prentice Hall 2003

30. Developmental Trends • Cephalocaudal: • Development occurs in areas near the head (cephalo) first and areas farther from the head develop later (caudal means tail). • Proximodistal: • Development occurs near the center of the body (proximal) first and near the extremities (distal) later. ©Prentice Hall 2003

31. Developmental Trends • Gross to specific development: • Children tend to gain control of gross (large muscle) movement before they gain control of specific (or fine motor control) movement. ©Prentice Hall 2003

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33. Cognitive Development • According to the Swiss psychologist Jean Piaget, children undergo qualitative changes in thinking as they grow older. • Piaget depicted these changes as a series of stages. ©Prentice Hall 2003

34. Cognitive Development (Piaget) • Sensory-motor stage (birth-2) • Preoperational stage (2-7) • Concrete operational (7-11) • Formal operational (11-15) ©Prentice Hall 2003

35. Sensory-Motor Stage • Object permanence: • The concept that things continue to exist even when they are out of sight. • Mental representations: • Mental images or symbols (such as words) used to think about or remember an object, a person, or an event. ©Prentice Hall 2003

36. Preoperational Stage • A child becomes able to use mental representations and language to describe, remember, and reason about the world. • Egocentric: • Unable to see things from another person’s point of view. ©Prentice Hall 2003

37. Concrete-Operational Stage • A child can attend to more than one thing at a time and understand someone else’s point of view, though thinking is limited to concrete matters. • A child can understand conservation. ©Prentice Hall 2003

38. Principles of Conservation • The concept that basic amounts remain constant despite superficial changes in appearances. ©Prentice Hall 2003

39. Formal-Operational Stage • Teenagers acquire the ability to think abstractly and test ideas mentally using logic. ©Prentice Hall 2003

40. Criticisms of Piaget’s Theory • Piaget underestimated the cognitive ability of infants. • Cognitive milestones are reached sooner than Piaget believed. • Piaget did not take the role of social interaction into account. • The stage theory does not address human diversity. ©Prentice Hall 2003

41. Kohlberg’s Stages of Moral Development • Preconventional: • Interpreting behavior in terms of its concrete consequences. • Conventional: • Interpreting behavior in terms of social and societal approval. • Postconventional: • Emphasis on abstract principles, for example justice, liberty, and equality. ©Prentice Hall 2003

42. Criticisms of Kohlberg’s Theory • Many people never progress beyond the conventional level. • The theory does not take into account cultural differences in morals. • Carol Gilligan has pointed out that there may be a gender bias in the theory. ©Prentice Hall 2003

43. Language Development • Some psychologists believe that childhood is a critical period for acquiring language. • If so, this would explain why learning a second language is also easier for children than for adults. ©Prentice Hall 2003

44. Language Development • Cooing (around 2 months): • Vowel-like utterances • Babbling (3-4 months): • Meaningless sounds that are the building blocks for later language development. ©Prentice Hall 2003

45. Language Development • Intonation (4-6 months): • The changing of pitch that adults use to distinguish questions from statements. • Holophrases (12-20 months): • One word sentences. ©Prentice Hall 2003

46. Theories of Language Development • B. F. Skinner: • Language develops as a result of reinforcement by the environment. • Language is a learned behavior like any other human behavior. ©Prentice Hall 2003

47. Theories of Language Development • Noam Chomsky: • Humans have an innate ability to acquire language. • We are born with a language acquisition device, an innate, internal mechanism for processing speech. • This device allows children to understand the basic rules of grammar. ©Prentice Hall 2003

48. Social Development • Developing a sense of independence is just one of the tasks that children face in their social development. • During the toddler period, a growing awareness of being a separate person makes developing some autonomy from parents an important issue. ©Prentice Hall 2003

49. Imprinting • A form of primitive bonding seen in some species of animals. • The newborn animal has a tendency to follow the first moving thing it sees after it is born or hatched. • Human infants do not imprint on the first moving objects they see, but they do form attachment. ©Prentice Hall 2003

50. Social Development • Attachment: • The emotional bond that develops in the first year of life that makes human babies cling to their caregivers for safety and comfort. ©Prentice Hall 2003