Introductory Lecture

Question 1

Outline

Answer 1

• Introduction to the module
• Overview of major themes in developmental psychology: What sorts of things may affect development? How do we test this?

Question 2

Learning outcomes

Answer 2

• Refresh knowledge from year 1
• Understand the aims and key questions of developmental psychology
• Develop a critical approach of research designs in developmental psychology

Question 3

What is developmental psychology?

Answer 3

It is a branch of psychology that studies the physical, cognitive, social and emotional changes that occur throughout the human life span.

Question 4

The most dramatic developmental changes in humans occur….

Answer 4

In prenatal development, infancy, childhood

Happens earlier in life

Question 5

Aims of developmental psychologists (3)

Answer 5

• Describe human development (Making observations on what we see)
• Explain human development (Designing experiments to see what drives these developmental changes)
• Optimize human development (uses results of research to drive human development)

Question 6

OMBEA Discussion

Q1. Human development begins at….

Answer 6

Conception

Question 7

OMBEA DISCUSSION

Q2. Bowlbly use the term ‘Secure Base’ to refer to:

Answer 7

B) The presence of an attachment figure

Question 8

OMBEA DISCUSSION

Q3. The term senescene describes..

Answer 8

C) Biological ageing

Question 9

What influences development?

Answer 9

• Genetic inheritance
• Individual learning: How you interact with your environment as an individual
• Social learning: Learning from others in your enviroment
• Parents
• Culture
• Biology
• Evolution

Question 10

The way we think about the factors that influence development is by asking 3 key questions

What are the 3 key questions..?

Answer 10

• Continuity vs Discontinuity
• Stability vs Change
• Nature vs Nurture

Question 11

Continuity vs Discontinuity?

Answer 11

• Thinking about the trajectory that development takes place.
• Is it a gradual continuous path with no qualitative leaps or time, but gradual increments of quantitative change
• Or is it discontinuity where you are making the qualitative changes between steps (discrete age-specific periods or stages)
• Most argue it is stage theorist it is a discontinuous process for example Freud, Piaget.
• The difference between qualitative vs quantitative.
• The way we measure plays a role. For example, looking at 6 months vs 2 year old. One walks and one doesn’t, shows qualitative change. but look 6 month vs 9 months old vs 12 months old then more gradual like quantiative.
• Combing step wise vs continuous process.
• Certain behaviours continuous vs discontinous.
• Like measuring behaviour every week or every year like longitudinal feeds the trend.

Question 12

Stability vs Change

Answer 12

• The same person you were fundamentally when you were born until you die or do you change in some kind of qualitative l way?
• A lot of researchers talk about this in personality and individual differences as some traits are stable.
• Stability (small tree to big tree)
• Change (cataphiles vs butterfly)
• Does a behaviour or trait stay stable over time or change like shyness
• Importance of early experience (critical period? something has to develop and exposed during that period early on in order for given behaviour or trait to develop, sensitive period is more predisposed to pick up on those).
• Solid evidence of early experiences like romanian adoptees (Rutter et al. 1998), adoptees were deprived, some were adopted into UK and looked compared to control group of UK adoptees adopted into UK family that were not subject to global deprivaiton. Looked age at which Romanian adoptees adopted into those families. Find that if they were adopted before age of 6 months, then no significant difference between both, tells us some hope that some are able to catch up despite early experiences. When adopted later then 6-24 then significant difference with UK population.

Question 13

Batle’s Conceptualisation of Life-Span Development

Answer 13

• Baltes is a German psychologist who was influential in emphasising the life-span nature of development and the importance of historical influences
• Baltes pointed that age-related trends of developmental psychology only focus only on one of the 3 influences on development throughout a lifespan of normative age-graded influences.
• Each of these influences is determined by the interaction of biological and environmental factors.

Question 14

Batle’s Conceptualisation of Life-Span Development

Normative age-graded influences

+ Examples

Answer 14

• This influences have a strong relationship with chronological age.
• For example, the occurrence of puberty at adolscene is an example of a normative age-graded influence with a strong biological component.
• Another example is starting school at 5 years old would be an example of normative age-graded influence with little biological determination.

Question 15

Batle’s Conceptualisation of Life-Span Development

Normative history-graded influences

+ Examples

Answer 15

• These are influences that are linked with historical events that affected entire generations/cohorts.
• For example, COVID-19 pandemic, A famine, earthquakes in Haiti in 2010. The arrival of television in 1950s, Internet and mobile phone use in 1980s and 1990s.

Question 16

Batle’s Conceptualisation of Life-Span Development

Non-Normative life events

+ Examples

Answer 16

• These are events that do not happen in any normative age-graded or history-graded influences for most individual.
• For example effects of brain damage in an accident is an example with strong biological determinants.
• Effect of losing a job or moving to a house are examples with less strong biological determinants.
• Thesr are all significant events that can happen across a lifespan of an individual with many age points and at many historical times.

Question 17

• How do we test for these influences?

Answer 17

• Age
• Cohort
• Tiem of testing

Question 18

Important of Batle’s Conceputalisation

Answer 18

• Think development not in restrictive way but including all these influences to change our research design.

Question 19

Research Designs

Answer 19

• Cross-sectional studies
• Longitudinal studies
• Cohort studies
• Cohort sequential studies

Question 20

Research Design

Cross-sectional studies

Answer 20

• Studying different age groups simultaenously
• For example, love of cats and test this 12 months old vs 3 years old.
• For example, record language ability in 3 years old and 4 years old

Question 21

Research Design

Cross-sectional studies

Advantages

Answer 21

• Advantages:
• It is quick to conduct
• Cost-effective

Question 22

Research Design

Cross-sectional studies

Disadvantages

Answer 22

• Can’t control individual differences, overcome of obtaining the large sample.
• Testing 30,60,90 years old, not considering how normative history graded influences affect their performance.
• Individuals differences
• Cannot establish cause and effect due to individual differences of investigating different participants

Question 23

Research Design

Longitudinal

Avoid individual differences from cross-sectional

Answer 23

• An investigator will follow certain individuals over a period of time, by measuring their change.
• For example, record language ability of 3 years old sample then year later record the same children and their language ability when they turn 4 years old.

Question 24

Research Design

Longitudinal Design

Advantages

Answer 24

• High attribution rate (high drop out rate) as some participants may move away, lose contact or be unable to participate the next time of testing. This can influence the strength of generalizability of conclusions/
• Another limitation is that they are time-consuming
• A limitation of long longitudinal study that go on for a long period of time, a limitation may arise when the original research question may not be viable anymore. For example, some major longitudinal studies in USA and Britian in 1930 and 1940, provide longitudinal data from birth over time span of 20, 30 or 40 years. For example, the effects of parental divorce on child’s later adjustment may be different now as divorce is more frequent and socially acceptable than when it was 50 years ago when the stigma towards divorce in Western societies were much more greater.
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Question 25

Advantages of Longitudinal Design.

Answer 25

• Providing researchers to look at changes across a lifespan.
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Question 26

Cohort design

Answer 26

• This design is where different cohorts( samples of children born in different years) are compared at the same ages.
• This will inform of the impact historical change has on development
• For example, the effect of the invention of televisions in 7 year olds born in 1930, 1960 and 1990.

Question 27

Cohort design

Disadvantages

Answer 27

• Danger of research question become obsolete
• Time consuming

Question 28

Cohort sequential design

Answer 28

• Combine the aspects of cohort design, cross-sectional design and longitudinal design to create a powerful analytic tool for study developmental proceses.
• Looking at different and same participants, different and same ages, and different and same historical time.
• For example, looking at effects of compensatory preschool programs on children born in 1970s, 1980s, 1990s following a cohort longitudinally through age of 3 years to 18 years.
• This is time consuming
• High attribution rate
• Quesiton become obsolete.

Question 29

Cross-sectional

Answer 29

Common

Question 30

What is most commonly used?

Answer 30

Cross-sectional and longitudinal design.

Question 31

Nature vs Nurture

Answer 31

• Geesell argue that abilities born with (Exteme view) is the determining factor on how you develop and how you are as an individual. Your biological genetic inheritance affects all of these.
• On the other view.
• Enviromental exposure/experience, culture, parenting and things you are exposed to play a biggest role in development.

Question 32

Nature vs Nurture influeces → Twin studies

Answer 32

• Monozygotic twins are twins who come from a single fertilised egg that has split into two early in development. They are 100% identical.
• Dizygotic/fraternal twins are twins who come from separately fertilised egg cells. They are 50% identical.

Question 33

Example from book

Answer 33

• Identical twins show greater similarity to one another than fraternal twins.
• The extent to which they do is investigated by behavioural geneticists as an indication of heritability in the question
• Heritability is higher for verbal reasoning for MZ than DZ.

Question 34

Genes, and Shared and Non-shared Enviroment

Answer 34

• Heritability is the variation explained by genetic differences.
• Identical twins reared apart

Question 35

Adoption Studies

Answer 35

• Rearing environment from adoptive parents → Nurture
• Genetic inheritance from the biological parents. → Nature
• Whom do they resemble the most?
• Drawbacks on making firm conclusions is that led to biased and skewed sample as the assumption of these studies that adoption is not random. Also that people tend to adopt infant that resemble them physically/temperamentally or who they feel compatible with.
• One way to get around that individuals becoming more similar where cross-fostering where adoptees are chosen for you. Did work with animals in mice, male mice sing, different strand of mice have different songs, one study take mice babies and switch them, expect if nurture then sing song they were around then songs htye inherited, but keep singing song from their original biological stand. Imply it is an innate predisposition. Opposite effect in rats of stress levels.
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Question 36

Nature AND Nurture

Answer 36

• Genotype-environment interaction
• For example to some extent, children help produce their own rearing environment.
• For example, a child’s temperament that appears to be strongly genetically influenced, influences the way parents to behave towards the child and the expectations they have of them.
• The feedback of the environment then shape those genetic predispositions.
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Question 37

Evolution and Development

Answer 37

• Evolutionary Psychology questions whether human ancestry may tell us about individuals now.
• For example, the nomadic hunter-gather environment led differences in the spatial mapping of hunting and tracking animals and remembering locations of finding and gathering food.
• Maybe mals are more likely to do those things and better at certain things now.
• Evolutionary Developmental Psychology as play differences in girls and boys and non-human animals.
• Evidence young female play material play and rough play in boys.
• Criticisms of neurosexism and binary view.
• Hoffman look at Karbi and Khasi tribes, closely genetically related, one was a matriarchal society and one was a patriarchal society. One thing is men better at solving spatial tasks. They gave the same spatial mapping tasks of two groups, matriarchal run by women and another run by males.
• Difference in matriarchal that everyone had access to education and patriarchal the men had access to education.
• They found that patriarchal of boys solved faster, evidence of innate spatial ability. When given to matriachial both boys and girls had same performance → same kind of exposure and resources.