Reading 3 Study Guide for 9.1 What is Lifespan Development

Modified: 2024-05-08 3:51 AM CDST

This reading covers the concept of lifespan development as well. Note the three types of development: physical, cognitive, and psychosocial. The reading looks at research methods and the concept of normative development. It examines issues in developmental psychology: nature-nurture, the course of development, and continuity/discontinuity of development. Finally, it takes a closer look at how socioeconomic status has strong and pervasive effects on development of children in different economic strata.

• Physical Development
  • Bodily changes over time: senses, motor skills, health, and wellness
  • Can be improvement or decline
• Cognitive Development
  • FYI: If it happens between your ears, then it's most likely cognitive
  • Includes: learning, attention, memory, language, thinking, reasoning, and creativity
• Psychosocial Development
  • Remember, we are a social species
  • We express emotions, have personalities, and engage in social relationships
• Research Methods
  • Here we go again! :-)
    • Naturalistic observation
    • Case studies
    • Surveys
    • Experiments
• Normative Development
  • Asks "What is normal in developmental progress?"
  • Gesell's developmental milestones
    • Physical: sitting, crawling, walking, running, dressing self, puberty onset
    • Cognitive: first speech, writing, naming colors, speaking using various parts of speech
    • Much variability within and between cultures
• Issues in Developmental Psychology
  • Is Development Continuous or Discontinous?
    • Both and depends on domain
  • Is There One Course of Development or Many?
    • Influenced by culture, so the answer is "It depends."
  • How Do Nature and Nurture Affect Development?
    • Genotype is the genetic characteristics you inherit
      • Examples: eye color, widow's peak hairline, curly or straight hair, final adult height
    • Phenotype is the actual expression of the genotype under the effects of the environment
      • Example: Imagine if Lebron James had been born in an impoverished, war torn country, a place where he barely got enough nutrition as a baby. Would he be 6'9" in that case. No, not very likely. His genotype would have been negatively affected by the environment he was raised.
  • How Does Socioeconomic Status (SES) Affect Development?
    • The easiest way to operationalize SES is by family income
    • Hart and Risley (2006) found that:
      • Middle and High SES parents spoke to their children more starting in their children's infancy
      • High SES children had much larger vocabularies than Low SES children
      • Preschool High SES children scored much higher on achievement tests than Low SES children
    • While their study was not an experiment it said much about the nature-nurture issue and pointed the way to level the developmental field for children of Low SES parents.
      

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