Key Concepts in Developmental Psychology

H Rudolph Schaffer

• Publisher: SAGE Publications Ltd
• Year: 2006
• Print ISBN: 9780761943464, 9780761943457
• eBook ISBN: 9781446243428
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Developmental Psychology
• Index: Psychology

Perfect for courses in child development or developmental psychology and arranged thematically in sections corresponding to chapter headings usually found in textbooks, this book is ideal for students wanting an accessible book to enrich their learning experience.

Key Features:

- Provides an overview of the place of each concept in Developmental Psychology under three headings, namely its meaning, origins and current usage.

- Concepts are grouped into sections corresponding to the main themes usually covered in teaching.

- Relevant concepts in the book are emboldened and linked by listing at the end of each concept

- Guidance is provided to further reading on each of the concepts discussed.

The book will be centrally important to undergraduate students who need to learn the language used by developmental psychologists in describing their studies, but will also help more advanced readers in checking their ideas regarding the nature and uSAGE of particular concepts.

CONCEPTIONS OF DEVELOPMENT	1
	ONE

How do we think about psychological development? Initially, the idea may conjure up an image of a curve progessively climbing upwards throughout childhood, levelling off thereafter and then remaining steady until it starts to decline in old age – somewhat along the lines of physical growth. In fact, even physical growth is a rather more complex phenomenon than such an image suggests, and when it comes to psychological development the complications increase greatly, giving rise to all sorts of questions that need to be settled if we are to understand it. For instance, is it right to think of psychological functions as developing in a steadily upward manner, or is it more a matter of spurts and plateaus? Does the pattern of change, as well as its rate, vary from one individual to another and from one function to another? Does development indeed stop once the individual has reached adulthood? And, for that matter, is it justified to see psychological development in terms of quantitative change or are there qualitative changes too?

The core of development is change over age – a change that is not haphazard, not temporary and not easily reversible. To document change it is necessary to accumulate empirical information about such matters as age norms, sequences, trajectories and transitions, and then to discern the patterns which underlie such factual information. For this purpose a variety of concepts have been employed, of which the following are singled out and described below:

LIFE-SPAN DEVELOPMENT

DEVELOPMENTAL CONTINUITY

DEVELOPMENTAL TRAJECTORIES
and: Transition points
Equifinality and Multifinality

DEVELOPMENTAL STAGES

DOMAIN SPECIFICITY
and: Modularity

CONTEXT
and: Ecological systems perspective
Developmental niche

LIFE-SPAN DEVELOPMENT

MEANING

Psychological development is not just something that happens to children, but is a process common to all ages. Additionally, it refers to all types of change – not just to acquisition but also to decline. This is the basic message conveyed by the concept of life-span development, which we can formally define as –

the process of change associated with age which characterizes all human beings from conception to death.

A life-span perspective does not refer to a single, coherent theory but to a particular orientation to the study of psychological development. It draws attention to the importance of not drawing an arbitrary line at some particular age point, such as the transition from adolescence to adulthood. The study of development can be applied to all ages, and it follows that no particular age period is more worthy of our attention than any other: all play some part in individuals’ lives.

ORIGINS

Awareness of development as a life-long process emerged in systematic form only in the second half of the twentieth century. Before then attention was exclusively paid to childhood and adolescence; the idea that development can occur in mature individuals seemed a contradiction in terms. A few exceptions did occur; for example, G. Stanley Hall, one of the founding fathers of developmental psychology, became interested in the possibility of adult change as he himself aged, and in 1922 published a book with the provocative title Senescence: the last half of life. However, it was not till the 1960s that interest in adult development and ageing became systematized and that these topics gradually grew into major areas of research (e.g. Birren & Schaie, 1977); and it was later still that attempts first began to combine findings obtained from separately investigated age periods and integrate them into one coherent body of knowledge about development.

There are several reasons for the growing popularity of a life-span orientation in the past few decades. One is demographic: the population is ageing, and the very fact that there are more elderly people about creates a demand for knowledge about the psychological characteristics found at the end of an increasingly drawn-out life cycle. Initially the field of gerontology developed separately from the study of childhood; however, insofar as both are concerned with the nature of change over age it seemed sense to ask whether lessons learned in one field could be applied to the other and whether it would not be of benefit to develop concepts applicable to all ages. In the second place, there was the opportunity afforded by a number of longitudinal studies launched from the Institute of Human Development at the University of California several decades ago to examine the question of psychological continuity from early childhood into adulthood. The original aim of these studies was confined to providing information about the childhood years; however, the availability of the participants in adulthood tempted a number of investigators (e.g. Block, 1971; Elder, 1974) to follow them up and trace their developmental pathways over a much wider span than had previously been attempted. And finally, a variety of methodological advances (summarized by Schaie, 2002) in conducting longitudinal studies and interpreting their findings have brought increasing sophistication to research on life-span trends, making it possible, for example, to separate out individual patterns of change from the average growth curves that had previously been the sole source of information about developmental phenomena. It is mainly as a consequence of these three sets of influences that life-span issues are now widely recognized as legitimate concerns and as constituting important areas of enquiry.

CURRENT STATUS

In general terms the basic message of the life-span perspective is widely accepted: change occurs at all ages and we should therefore replace child-based accounts of development with models applicable to the total age range. In particular, there is agreement that change is not synonymous with growth (the curve going upward); as has now been amply demonstrated, development is far more varied than suggested by some single index of increase in size or knowledge or competence. Paul Baltes (1987; Smith & Baltes, 1999), who has been one of the major contributors to this field, has proposed the terms multidimensionality and multidirectionality to characterize the nature of development: the former to indicate that different aspects of behaviour (such as various components of memory) may simultaneously show distinct courses of developmental change (see domain specificity); the latter to stress that decline of some functions may go hand in hand with stability or even improvement of other functions (something particularly evident among the aged). Thus development takes many different forms: already in childhood certain aspects of behaviour decline or drop out altogether, such as seen in the palmar reflex which is present only in the early weeks of life, or in the loss of the ability during infancy to detect certain sound contrasts in languages other than those in the child’s native language. Other functions, on the other hand, such as the capacity of the sensory register in the memory store, remain virtually constant throughout life.

Given the comparatively recent origins of the life-span perspective it is perhaps not surprising that more precise theoretical formulations of what happens during the total developmental course are as yet sparse. While the need for concepts of development that have relevance beyond childhood and so perform an integrative function is generally acknowledged, only a few are at present available (though see below for the concepts of developmental trajectories and transition points). However, some useful proposals as to how we may think about the life course as a whole have been put forward; thus Shiner & Caspi (2003) have suggested a threefold classification of the kind of descriptive approach that can be taken:

1 an organizational-adaptive approach, which sees the life course primarily in terms of the various challenges that people encounter at different ages and asks how these are met by individuals with different personalities;
2 a socio-cultural approach, which gives prominence to the sequence of culturally defined, age-graded roles that each person encounters over time;
3 an evolutionary-psychology perspective, which describes the life course in terms of the series of adaptations human beings have had repeatedly to contend with in the history of the species (see evolution).

Such a taxonomy is useful in drawing attention to the complexity of the concept of life-span; equally useful is a classification proposed by Baltes, Linderberger & Standinger (1998) of the factors that steer the course of life-long development, namely age-graded influences, i.e. those that are commonly encountered within a particular age range (e.g. school entry, puberty); history-graded influences, which are specific to certain time periods (e.g. the start of World War II, the advent of television); and non-normative influences, which affect only some individuals and may occur at any age (e.g. an accident, emigration). Age-graded influences have received most attention from developmental psychologists; however, one of the contributions of a life-span perspective is to draw attention to the role that historical events play in people’s lives (see context), and the inclusion of non-normative influences reminds us that the developmental course is far from standardized and that some incidents unique to a specific individual may have considerable implications for that person’s subsequent development.

Research inspired by the life-span perspective has steadily increased in amount and gone through a number of phases. In the first place, it stimulated a considerable number of studies specifically concerned with development at post-childhood ages, in particular among the aged (Schaie, 2002), which set out to trace change at that age but without any attempt to link up with change in earlier periods. Secondly, we have a large number of studies that did investigate such links by examining the continuity of psychological characteristics across age, including some ambitious efforts to follow up individuals from the very early years to maturity in order to determine whether adult characteristics can already be predicted in infancy (see developmental continuity). And finally and more recently, efforts have begun to be made to pinpoint the processes responsible for stability and change, i.e. to go beyond merely establishing continuities and ask how these come about (see, for example, Caspi, Elder & Bem’s 1987 investigation of individuals who both as children and as adults were characterized by an ‘explosive style’, that is, showed excessive temper tantrums and irritability).

Further reading

Baltes, P.B., Lindenberger, U., & Standinger, U. (1998). Life-span theory in developmental psychology. In W. Damon, (Ed.), Handbook of child psychology (5th ed)., vol. 1 (R.M. Lerner, Ed.). New York: Wiley. A detailed and fairly technical account of the ideas behind the life-span perspective and the empirical work it has generated.

Smith, J., & Baltes, P.B. (1999). Life-span perspectives on development. In M.H. Bornstein & M.E. Lamb (Eds.), Developmental psychology: an advanced textbook, (4th ed.). Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum. Somewhat less detailed than the above, but also more geared to readers new to the topic, with an account of the questions asked and methods used by life-span psychologists.

See also developmental continuity; developmental trajectories

DEVELOPMENTAL CONTINUITY

MEANING

One of the major issues in developmental psychology is the extent to which individual characteristics remain constant across age, as opposed to becoming transformed in the course of development. No one can doubt that both trends occur: there must be continuity in some sense, for intuitively at least we feel basically as though we are the same individuals from childhood to old age; at the same time the very notion of development implies that there is change.

Continuity may be defined as –

the preservation of individual characteristics over age.

Let us note, however, that this does not necessarily mean phenomenological sameness: an individual may remain highly aggressive from early childhood to adulthood, yet express aggression in very different ways at older than at younger ages. Continuity is thus not a matter of identical behaviour but rather of the kinds of connections that exist among age points: are these such that we can predict later characteristics from early ones? Prediction is at the core of continuity; if psychological attributes in some sense remain the same over time, expressing identical processes even though in different overt form, it should be possible to foretell the nature of future development, with considerable implications for intervention and help.

ORIGINS

The issue of continuity and change has been of long-standing interest, but in the past was debated more on the basis of dogma than empirical evidence. On the whole a strong belief existed in continuity, based on one of two assumptions. The first was that we are born with certain characteristics fixed once and for all by our genetic endowment: whatever experiences we encounter will not affect what has been handed down to us by our inheritance. This argument was mostly applied to intelligence, which was viewed as an attribute constant over time so that, in theory at least, one should be able to use IQs obtained in infancy to predict intellectual performance in adulthood. Evidence to the contrary was for a long time simply disregarded, and it was only in the middle of the last century, on the basis of a large body of findings, that it was accepted that fluctuations in measured intelligence do occur and that prediction over age is therefore not the simple matter it was formerly thought to be (Hunt, 1961).

The other assumption underlying the belief in continuity was that experience in the earliest years leaves irreversible effects on our personality, and that our individuality is thus shaped for good by whatever events we encounter at that impressionable time. This is an argument put forward by writers as diverse as John B. Watson, the father of behaviourism, and Sigmund Freud, who for different reasons were both convinced that we are victims of our past, in that experiences absorbed in the first few years are of a foundational nature and thus likely to determine the course of personality growth once and for all. Again it follows that one should be able to predict outcome in maturity from infancy on: the impact of trauma and deprivation, for example, was said at that time to have life-long consequences that cannot be changed. However, this view too has had to be changed in the light of subsequent evidence: the effects of early experiences have not been found to be permanent under ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Introduction
• 1 Conceptions of Development
• 2 Mechanisms of Change
• 3 Biological Aspects
• 4 Individuality
• 5 Cognitive Development
• 6 Social Cognition
• 7 Relationship Formation
• 8 Socialization
• 9 Linguistic and Communicative Development
• References
• Index