The Psychology of Infancy and Childhood

Evolutionary and Cross-Cultural Perspectives

Harold D. Fishbein

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2022
• Print ISBN:
  9780367491086
• eBook ISBN:
  9781000573770
• Topic: Psicología
• Subtopic: Historia y teoría en psicología

Originally published in 1984, this book is a developmental psychology text with substantial evolutionary and cross-cultural work. It presents cognitive developmental issues, as well as personality, social and socialization issues, with an emphasis on culture. It also includes education-related research, such as material on schools, reading, mathematics, and IQ.

1Theories and Methods of Developmental Psychology¹

¹This chapter was written by David F. Ricks, Department of Psychology, University of Cincinnati.

THE DEVELOPMENTAL ORIENTATION

Developmental psychology is one part of psychology and shares many methods with experimental, social, and clinical research.

But some of the concerns of developmental psychology are like those of a novelist working out the trajectory of an individual or a family. At other times a developmental psychologist might most resemble a sociologist or anthropologist working to explain kinship systems and their effect on the developing person. In this chapter we try to describe the main characteristics and uses of a developmental orientation to life, the goals of developmental psychology, and some of the ways of studying the context of development. We then describe levels of knowledge, which will involve us in distinguishing between common-sense observation, clinical case studies, and systematic research. Developmental psychology differs from the study of subjects such as astronomy and cell physiology because its subject matter–how we grow up–is already familiar to us before we begin systematic study. Reading about development, and thinking about the implications of what you read for your own life, involves you in a kind of dialogue with the writer of this book. At times you will disagree, and at times you may find your own experience does not support the conclusions reached. Science has developed in just such situations. When we write about the methods of developmental research we describe ways of settling controversy, of appealing to observations and so settling differences of opinion on the basis of empirical fact. Personal experience is the starting point in the quest to understand development. But appreciation for the observations made by experimental pioneers like Piaget, and clinical pioneers like Freud, can help you broaden your own awareness. As you learn more you will see new dimensions in the homely details of life: a baby and mother engaging in a cooing dialogue can take on all the stately regularity of a formal dance; a girl and mother engaged in the push and pull of separation can be as powerfully engaging as a Greek tragedy.

Students often come to a field of study with a hope for facts, each of which is really the answer to a question. Most research scientists believe that it is harder to find the right questions than it is to find the right answers. The developmental orientation to life is first of all a way of asking questions.

Imagine, for example, that you are a camp counselor faced for the first time with a group of 9–11-year-old boys or girls. What would you want to know about them, beyond the obvious things like names and bunks? You might find yourself wondering about skills, interests, friendship groups, who was lonely and who was glad to be at camp, and so on. If you were dealing with girls it would help to know that the physiological events of puberty would already have been well launched in some girls, while others would lag on that developmental path. What main ideas would a developmental psychologist be concerned with?

Change Through Time—Sequence and Stage

Look closely at that question of puberty. Notice that the concern is with change, not static characteristics. In the study of development we will be working with ideas like path, trajectory, and sequence. All of these are ways to describe events through time. The most general goal of developmental psychology is discovery of invariant sequences, so that we identify where an infant or child is on a given developmental path and make predictions about the sequence and timing of coming changes. For example, a child who has developed reasonably secure bowel and bladder control, and who can take some interest in other children and engage in the beginnings of peer play, can be considered ready to begin nursery school (Freud, 1965). We can predict for such a child a growing ability to control bodily functions, a flowering of interest in other children in an environment rich in peer stimulation, and increasing ability to tolerate separation from earlier objects of attachment. In biological sequences, like puberty, the order of physiological changes is highly predictable. Yet children may differ by as much as 3 or 4 years in the age at which they begin or end the process. In general, we might expect that psychological sequences will show the same pattern: relatively unpredictable times of entry and exit from a sequence, but strong predictability in both the order and timing of events once the sequence starts. While this invariance of sequence is most clearly shown in physiological development, it is a questionable characteristic of the stages of cognitive development. Are stages of development really there, or are they only convenient labels that we apply to sections of a growth process that is really continuous? Every junior high boy is likely to notice, for instance, that some of his peers, and particularly some of the girls in his class, have embarked on a growth spurt. Subjectively, a boy may feel like a different person after a growth spurt at 14 has added 6 inches to his height (see Fig. 1.1). But on a long-term chart of his growth, that 6 inches that feels so large is only a small perturbation on a long-term succession of inches added per year. He may take an interest in sports like basketball, where his new 6 inches gives him a gratifying advantage, or he may “discover” girls. All of this may make him feel that he has passed through some kind of portal, and that he is in a new stage of life. The test, for a developmental psychologist, is that of organization. Is his personality organized in a new way? Have old interests been dropped and new interests developed? If growth has resulted in a qualitative reorganization of personality and of relationships–for instance a move from dependence on parents to reliance on peers–we are probably accurate in speaking of a new stage of life. If the change has been continuous–with small quantitative changes gradually accumulating, but with no major reorganization–it is more accurate to speak of a process of growth, or a continuum, than to make arbitrary breaks along the developmental trajectory and call them stages.

FIG. 1.1 Lineargrowth of one boy, expressed as increments per year (below). Note the rapid rate in infancy and adolescence with rather consistent rates in between. (Source: Smith, D.W. & Bierman, E. L. The biologic ages of man. Philadelphia: W. B. Saunders, 1973.)

Another controversial issue is the direction of change. Is there only one direction, as in physical height, in which we grow fairly continuously until adolescence ends and then stay much the same until the minor shrinkage of old age? Or is change in both directions possible? One of the most valuable ideas in the Freudian approach to development is regression, a concept Freudians use to describe the way a person under stress may fall back to ways of life that had been abandoned earlier. Those who believe in regression may point out how a child who has long since given up sucking a thumb may once again adopt that comfort when a baby sister is bom, or how a young man who is frustrated in his sexual life may find comfort in a secret orgy of eating. Those who do not believe in regression may explain these behavior patterns in terms of reinforcements, but the Freudian theory in this instance has the advantage of greater simplicity and clarity.

Trajectory Types

If our concern is with change and sequence, how do we describe differences between people? Much of psychology is concerned with this question of individual differences. Usually, these are described by the adjectives of common sense: John is more intelligent than Bill; Pete is more active than Jerry. The result is a psychology of traits, which are generally thought of as stable. A developmental approach, on the other hand, conceives of people as moving along developmental paths, or trajectories. It asks why people differ at a given time, whether those differences have been characteristic in the past, and whether they will continue in the future. Block (1971) has called the classifications we might make when we take the pattern of development into account trajectory types, consistent patterns of development. In people that Block calls “cognitive copers,” for instance, a pattern changes that shows a slowly cumulative growth of competence. For example, compared to other girls in junior high school, cognitive copers show many characteristics that suggest tension and self-criticism, but by young adult life they are doing spectacularly well. When we talk of individual differences in development, we are concerned with such consistent patterns of development, not with static differences at any one time.

Consider a representative question that has generated a great deal of interest, as the mean life span has increased and new policies regarding retirement age have been debated. Does intelligence decrease with age? If so, which aspects of intelligence decrease and which remain intact? To answer such a question, we must look at changes in intelligence, by age, in groups whose intelligence is at different levels. (Some further questions are taken up later, in relation to developmental research designs.) Most generally, the answer proves to be dependent on the shape of the growth curve in early life. When age changes in intelligence are studied empirically (Baltes & Schaie, 1973) it turns out there are different trajectories for intelligence, with different consequences in old age. Those who develop high intellectual ability in early life have Ways of continuing to learn, and in old age their intellectual abilities (particularly general knowledge and vocabulary) continue to grow rather than decline. Those whose abilities are less developed in youth level off sooner and show more decline in old age. Differences that were apparent in early life not only continue in age, they actually increase. We should not be surprised to see the brilliant scientist or the highly motivated lawyer continue to learn and to lead in old age, for in such people abilities are still growing.

People become less like each other over time; on measures of ability, interest, and so on we find increased dispersion rather than increased similarity. But, with age, each person becomes more consistent, more predictable, and at the extreme, more rigid and resistant to change. One way to think of this is that as we age we become less like other people, but day-to-day and year-to-year, we become more like ourselves. We develop a style, and in time people come to know us by that style: hurried or gracious, narrow or broad-reaching, incisive or vague. How early does a style develop? In extensive studies of American presidents, Barber (1972) has shown the characteristic presidential style could be recognized in adolescence. Hoover was early recognized as a hard-working, steady, reliable plodder, a man who could solve problems given to him but who had trouble recognizing problems when he had to define them for himself. Barber was able to predict the troubles of the Nixon presidency well before they developed. (However, careful study of Barber’s work by Jimmy Carter did not prevent troubles in his presidency-perhaps a style as definite as Carter’s could not be changed a great deal after middle age.)

GOALS OF DEVELOPMENTAL PSYCHOLOGY

At this point our discussion may appear to have moved well beyond the confines of developmental psychology. Nobody expects us to help presidents govern the country. But, what are our goals? At the simplest level, we are concerned with description of development. When do processes start? What sequences do they follow? How do they fit together into patterns of development? Everyone has noticed, for instance, that infants are attached to their mothers, and that mothers reciprocate this feeling. But when does attachment start to develop? What can we do to study the stages of attachment? Are securely attached babies more able to relate to strangers, or do babies who develop less attachment reach out to others more readily? All of these questions are descriptive issues. They tend to be answered by a mixture of field research and experimental work. This research results in a tremendous number of discrete facts being discovered-nowhere else in psychology are there so many detailed bits of knowledge as in developmental psychology. It is hard to remember all of these details, but they have great importance. For instance, a developmental psychologist working with pediatricians might be presented with a child of 28 months, whose only words are “Mommy,” “Daddy,” and “eat.” Is this child developmentally slow? What are the normal patterns of speech development, and what amount of vocabulary and structured speech should we expect at 28 months? Diagnosis, treatment, and advice to the parents will depend on our answers to each question.

It is an enormous help to understanding that observations do not stand alone but fall into patterns and sequences. As soon as we can describe a developmental sequence and locate a child on that sequence we can begin to make some reasonable judgments about his rate of development, whether behind or ahead of other children, and to make some predictions as to what to expect next. When we have physical growth curves and other trajectories laid out and enough data about the person in front of us, we can often estimate what his options are going to be. Suppose that a boy in the 9th grade, asked about his vocational plans, says that he wants “to be either a doctor or a forest ranger.” Is he vocationally mature for a 15-year-old, or ought he to recognize that these two vocations require quite different kinds of preparation and he should be making some choices? Research (Jordaan & Super, 1974) indicates that he is a typical 15-year-old, but that by 18 he is likely to make judgments like “either a doctor or a dentist.” If he is still thinking like a 15-year-old, while other 18-year-olds have matured, he is likely to flounder more than his peers before he finds himself vocationally. In sum, if the first goal of developmental psychology is to describe developmental facts, the second is to fit them together into descriptive patterns, both patterns that occur together and sequences over time.

The third goal is to look beyond the immediately observable patterns and explain why they develop. This question has at least two parts: why does a sequence start to develop and why does it continue to develop? Suppose an 8-year-old boy is slow to learn school work, is restless and rebellious, cannot be taken to the supermarket because he gets into every attractive display, and has no friends. According to one theory, such a child is likely to have a neurological disorder called minimal brain dys-function, and the appropriate treatment is continued maintenance on amphetamines. Other theories emphasize faulty learning history, and a therapist who holds this kind of theory would work toward training such a boy in tolerance for delay, concern for consequences, and other components of skilled living with other people. Still other therapists, noting how this pattern of restless searching and dissatisfaction resembles certain types of behavior after loss, might inquire into the child’s history–has he lost a parent, a brother or sister, or a treasured grandparent? If we can put our facts together into patterns, and if we can find a reason for them, we can feel that we understand development. So great is our need to understand, in fact, that we seem to typically overgeneralize theories. Children like the boy just discussed can be understood only if we consider the biological facts of minimal brain dysfunction, the psychological facts of loss behavior, and the social facts of changing family patterns and increasing frequency of divorce. A student looking for reasonable theories for why things happen as they do in development is likely to ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Original Title
• Original Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• 1. Theories and Methods of Developmental Psychology
• 2. Evolution, Culture, and Socialization
• 3. Personality Development
• 4. Social Development
• 5. Cognitive Development and Social Cognition
• 6. Language, Intelligence, and Symbol use
• 7. Socialization: Schools, Television, and Family
• 8. Recapitulation
• References
• Author Index
• Subject Index