Developmental Psych Flashcards
Developmental Psychology
Is a scientific approach which aims to explain how children and adults change over time.
Developmental psychologist study a wide range of theoretical areas, such as biological, social, emotion and cognitive processes.
Stages of Lifespan
Infancy (approx birth to 2yrs) Childhood (approx 2-12yrs) Adolescence (approx 12-18yrs) Early Adulthood (approx 18-40yrs) Middle Age (approx 40-60yrs) Old Age (approx 60+yrs)
Psychical Development:
Changes in size, proportion, appearance, motor skills and coordination.
Cognitive Development:
Involves changes in abilities such as think and reasoning, memory, attention, imagination and language.
Social and Emotional Development:
Includes changes in self-knowledge and understanding of other peoples skills in making and maintain friendships, reasoning about social and ethical matters and behaviours.
Cognitive Development
Refers to the development of perception, language, memory, problem solving, reasoning, learning, information processing and other aspects of brain development compared to an adults capacities.
The emergence of the ability to think and understand.
Siegler (1998) pointed out that there are many approaches that describe and explain children’s cognitive development.
CD regarded as occurring simply as the child gets older and is more or less automatically capable of more complex language and mental abilities.
Other theorists describe CD as occurring through the operation of constraints and biases that limit what is learned and how it’s learnt.
In this view, the child is regarded as an incomplete, inadequate or incompetent version of an adult (Garton 2004).
CD describes the development of knowledge and how children learn under various conditions.
Psychologists study CD through experiments that aim to show how children learn something- concept, word e.g. either with increasing age, by testing children of different ages or within the experiment itself.
CD in summary, an individual progressive acquisition of knowledge, predictable and able to describe accurately (Garton 2004).
Swiss biologist and Psychologist Jean Piaget created a theory of CD that describes the basic stages that children go through as the mature mentally.
Key concepts of Piaget’s theory: use of schemas- cognitive frameworks or concepts that help people organise and interpret info. As experiences happen, this new information is used to modify, add to or completely change previously existing schemas.
4 Stages of Cognitive Development (Piaget’s Theory)
Sensory Motor Stage
Pre-Operational Stage
Concrete Operational Stage
Formal Operational Stage
Sensory Motor Stage
Birth and 2yrs of age.
Infants knowledge of the world is limited to his/her sensory perceptions and motor activities.
Behaviours are limited to simple motor responses caused by sensory stimuli.
Pre-Operational Stage
2-6yrs.
Child learns to use language.
Children do not yet understand concrete logic, cannot mentally manipulate information and are unable to take the point of view of other people.
Concrete Operational Stage
7-11yrs.
Children gain a better understanding of mental operations.
Children begin thinking logically about concrete events but have difficulty understanding abstract or hypothetical concepts.
Formal Operational Stage
12yrs to adulthood when people develop the ability to think about abstract concepts.
Skills such as logical thought, deductive reasoning and systematic planning also emerge during this stage.
Motor Skill Development form Infancy to Adolescence
0-2yrs
2-6yrs
7-10yrs
11-12yrs
0-2yrs:
sitting, crawling, standing, walking
2-6yrs:
running, skipping, throwing, catching, hitting (tennis), swimming, balancing
7-10yrs:
combining movement and skills and higher level performance in balls games, dance, aerobics
11-12yrs:
development of specialised skills for particular sports, such as for gymnastics, athletics, football (goal kicker), netball (GD)
Social Development
Social interaction Social Cognition Lev Vygotsky (1896-1934)
Social interaction
Fundamental to human behaviour and development.
Helps find out their goals, personalities, feelings and thoughts.
Others reactions to our behaviour to judge ourselves.
Social interaction comprises assessing and evaluating others using the information available, such as the way they think talk, use hand gestures, reactions to disasters/funny situations.
Social Cognition
Namely understanding the world around us through watching, interpreting and remembering social information and then using it to assess ourselves and others.
Piaget argued that children generally find about the world alone. He didn’t argue for a role for social interaction in children’s development.
Lev Vygotsky (1896-1934)
Argued that children learn from others who have greater knowledge than themselves.
His theory is about how children take this learning and make it into something that they can use themselves. (instruction and learning 2 key concepts)
Emotional Development
Emotions defend as strong feelings
The experience of emotion includes several components
Psychical response (heart rate, breathing)
Feelings that children recognise and learn to name
Thoughts and judgments associated with feelings
Action signals (a desire to approach, escape or fight)
Social and emotional wellbeing is also linked to enhance academic achievement in school (Dix metal, 2001)
