Developmental psychology is the scientific study of how and why human beings change over the course of their life.
Originally concerned with infants and children, the field has expanded to include adolescence, adult development, aging, and the entire lifespan. This field examines change across three major dimensions: physical development, cognitive development, and socio emotional development. Within these three dimensions are a broad range of topics including motor skills, executive functions, moral understanding, language acquisition, social change, personality, emotional development, self-concept and identity formation.
Developmental psychology examines the influences of nature and nurture on the process of human development, and processes of change in context and across time. Many researchers are interested in the interaction between personal characteristics, the individual's behavior and environmental factors, including social context and the built environment.
Developmental psychology involves a range of fields, such as, educational psychology, child psychopathology, forensic developmental psychology, child development, cognitive psychology, ecological psychology, and cultural psychology. Influential developmental psychologists include Erik Erikson, Sigmund Freud, Jean Piaget, Barbara Rogoff, Esther Thelen, and Lev Vygotsky.
2.2 Concept of Growth and Development:
2.2.1 Factors affecting Growth and Development:
2.2.2 Similarities and Differences between Growth and Development:
2.3 Main Determinants of Development: Heredity and Environment:
2.4 Characteristics/features of human Development:
2.5 Interrelationship among Growth, maturation and learning:
2.6 Developmental issues: nature and nurture; stability and change; continuity and discontinuity:
Nature vs Nurture
A significant issue in developmental psychology is the relationship between innateness and environmental influence in regard to any particular aspect of development. This is often referred to as "nature and nurture" or nativism versus empiricism. A nativist account of development would argue that the processes in question are innate, that is, they are specified by the organism's genes.
An empiricist perspective would argue that those processes are acquired in interaction with the environment. Today developmental psychologists rarely take such polarised positions with regard to most aspects of development; rather they investigate, among many other things, the relationship between innate and environmental influences. One of the ways this relationship has been explored in recent years is through the emerging field of evolutionary developmental psychology.
One area where this innateness debate has been prominently portrayed is in research on language acquisition. A major question in this area is whether or not certain properties of human language are specified genetically or can be acquired through learning. The empiricist position on the issue of language acquisition suggests that the language input provides the necessary information required for learning the structure of language and that infants acquire language through a process of statistical learning. From this perspective, language can be acquired via general learning methods that also apply to other aspects of development, such as perceptual learning.
The nativist position argues that the input from language is too impoverished for infants and children to acquire the structure of language. Linguist Noam Chomsky asserts that, evidenced by the lack of sufficient information in the language input, there is a universal grammar that applies to all human languages and is pre-specified. This has led to the idea that there is a special cognitive module suited for learning language, often called the language acquisition device. Chomsky's critique of the behaviorist model of language acquisition is regarded by many as a key turning point in the decline in the prominence of the theory of behaviorism generally.[33] But Skinner's conception of "Verbal Behavior" has not died, perhaps in part because it has generated successful practical applications.
Nature-nurture
Within psychology, the nature-nurture debate is ongoing. The debate centres on the issue of whether our psychological attributes are part of our biological/genetic makeup, or whether they are formed by a person’s interaction with the environment. The two main concepts here are ‘biological determination’ and ‘environmental influence:
Within psychology, the nature-nurture debate is ongoing. The debate centres on the issue of whether our psychological attributes are part of our biological/genetic makeup, or whether they are formed by a person’s interaction with the environment. The two main concepts here are ‘biological determination’ and ‘environmental influence:
Biological determination is the ‘Nature’ influence. Psychological attributes such as intelligence, addictiveness and depression may be caused by genetic influences (such as a gene passed on by one parent, or the human genetic makeup) or by biological factors (such as a hormonal imbalance, developmental stages, nervous system damage etc.). Hereditary refers to behaviors or characteristics which have been transmitted from parents to offspring. The units of hereditary are genes, which determine the course of development in the growing human embryo.
Environmental influence is the “Nurture’ influence. Nurture refers to all environmental influences that affect the child’s psychology from its birth, from the way a child is raised (socialized) to the food the child eats. Environmental factors can be very difficult to identify, because in order for them to affect the child’s psychology, they must be registered by the child’s awareness in a way that has an impact. For instance, most infants will grow sickly and apathetic of they are deprived of human touch or affection, yet some will be far less affected, perhaps because they do not register the neglect as strongly, or maybe they have stronger inner resources. In general, however, we can include in environmental influences the behavior and attitudes of parents, family and peers, the amount and kind of stimulation provided, what a child learns from parents, society, school etc., social and cultural influences, and the surrounding situation, whether it is predictable and safe or dangerous and unpredictable. Today, most psychologists agree that there is an interaction between nature and nurture. It might be that a child is born, genetically predisposed to be, say, violent, but only with the right environmental triggers (eg. an abusive parent) will that violence occur in the child.
Continuity and Discontinuity:
Since theorists believe that development is a smooth, continuous process. Individuals gradually add more of the same types of skills throughout their lives. Other theorists however think that development takes place in discontinuous stages. People change rapidly add they step up to a new level and then change very little for a while. With each new step, the person interests and responds to the world qualitatively.
Stability vs Change:
This issue involves the degree to which we become older renditions of our early experience or whether we develop into something different from whom we were at an earlier point in development. It considers the extent to which early experiences (especially infancy) or later experiences are the key determinants of a person's development.
Most life span developmentalists recognize that extreme positions are unwise. Therefore the key to comprehensive understanding of development at any stage requires interaction of different factors and not only one.
2.7 Indigenous understanding practices of growth and development:
2.8 Methods of studying human development: concept, basic features and application (Longitudinal, cross-sectional and case study)
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