Developmental Stage Theories Essay

ontogenesisal psychology is the scientific cogitation of adjustments that occur in grown male beings over the function of their behavior span. so aner come to with infantsand children, the field has grow to include adolescence, adult ripening, aging, and the entire vivification span. This field adjudicates change crosswise a broad range of topics including motor skills and some other psycho-physiological workes cognitive developing involving argonas such as problem solving, object lesson understanding, and conceptionual understanding language acquisition genial, personality, and emotional growing and self-concept and personal identity formation.Developmental psychology includes issues such as the extent to which development occurs through and through with(predicate) the gradual accumulation of knowledge versus pegleg-like development, or the extent to which children are natural with innate mental coordinates, versus encyclopaedism through experience. Many exploreers are elicit in the interaction among personal characteristics, the man-to-mans behavior, and environmental factors including genial context, and their impact on development others take a much narrowly-foc workoutd approach.Developmental psychology informs several applied fields, including educational psychology, child psychopathology, and rhetorical developmental psychology. Developmental psychology complements several other prefatorial interrogation fields in psychology including social psychology, cognitive psychology, ecological psychology, and comparative psychology. Theories fastener scheme Attachment theory, theoretical frame work originally developed by John Bowlby, condensees on open, intimate, emotionally meaningful relationships. Attachment is described as a biological system or goodish survival impulse that evolved to ensure the survival of the infant.A child who is be or stressed will move toward caregivers who create a horse sense of carnal, emotional and psychological safety for the single(a). Attachment feeds on body tinge and familiarity. Later Mary Ainsworth developed the Strange Situation protocol and the concept of the secure base. There are three types of accompaniment styles secure, anxious-avoidant, and anxious-resistant. Secure attachment is a healthy attachment surrounded by the infant and the caregiver. It is characterized by send. Anxious-avoidant is an dubious attachment between an infant and a caregiver.This is characterized by the infants in disaccordence toward the caregiver. Anxious-resistant is an insecure attachment between the infant and the caregiver characterized by distress from the infant when separated and anger when reunited. 1 A child move be hindered in its natural t shuttingency to form attachments. Some babies are raised without the stimulation and attention of a regular caregiver, or locked past under conditions of abuse or extreme neglect. The possible short-term personal effects of this deprivation are anger, despair, detachment, and temporary delay in intellectual development. long effects include increased aggression, clinging behavior, detachment, psychosomatic disorders, and an increased risk of feeling as an adult. 23 Constructivism Constructivism is a paradigm in psychology that characterizes learn as a process of actively constructing knowledge. Individuals create meaning for themselves or bewilder sense of new schooling by selecting, organizing, and integrating information with other knowledge, oftentimes in the content of social interactions. There are two ways in which constructivism female genitals occur individual and social.Individual constructivism is when a person constructs knowledge through cognitive processes of their own experiences rather than by memorizing facts provided by others. Social constructivism is when individuals construct knowledge through an interaction between the knowledge they bring to a situation and social or heathenish exchanges within that content. 4 Ecological systems theory The Ecological systems theory, originally formulated by Urie Bronfenbrenner specifies quaternary types of nested environmental systems, with bi-directional makes within and between the systems.The four systems are microsystem, mesosystem, exosystem, and macrosystem. all(prenominal) system contains roles, norms and rules that can power extensivey shape development. The microsystem is the immediate environment ring and influencing the individual (example school or the home setting). The mesosystem is the combination of two microsystems and how they influence each other (example sibling relationships at home vs. peer relationships at school). The exosystem is the interaction among two or to a greater extent settings that are indirectly link (example a fathers job requiring more overtime ends up influencing his aughters performance in school because he can no longer help with her homework).The macrosystem is broa der taking into work out social economic status, gloss, beliefs, springer and honorables (example a child from a wealthier family chitchats a peer from a less wealthy family as inferior for that reason). Lastly, the chronosystem refers to the chronological nature of life events and how they interact and change the individual and their circumstances through transition (example a mother losing her own mother to illness and no longer having that prevail in her life).Since its publication in 1979, Bronfenbrenners major statement of this theory, The ecology of Human Development5 has had widespread influence on the way psychologists and others approach the psychoanalyze of human beings and their environments. As a result of this conceptualization of development, these environmentsfrom the family to economic and political structures im pop out contract to be viewed as part of the life course from childhood through adulthood. 6 Psychosexual development Sigmund Freud believed that w e all had a conscious, preconscious, and unconscious(p) mind level.In the conscious we are aware of our mental process. The preconscious involves information that though we are not currently thinking about can be brought into consciousness. Lastly, the unconscious includes those mental processes which we are unaware of. He believed that the conscious and unconscious had tension because the conscious would try and h sure-enough(a) back what the unconscious was toilsome to express. To excuse this he developed three structures of personality the id, ego, and superego. The id, being the well-nigh primitive of the three functioned according to the pleasure principle.The pleasure principle states that the ids motivation is to seek pleasure and avoid pain. Based on this he proposed five universal stages of development. The first is the oral stage which occurs from birth to 12 months of age, second is the anal stage which occurs from one to three years of age, deuce-ace is the phallic stage which occurs from three to five years of age (most of a persons personality is formed by this age), the fourth is called rotational latency which occurs from age five until puberty, and lastly stage five is the genital stage which takes place from puberty until adulthood. 7 peglegs of moral development Theories of morality that stem from dungaree Piagets cognitive-developmental viewpoint emphasize shifts in the type of logical thinking that individuals use in making moral decisions. Changes in the content of the decision they turn or the actions they take as a result does not occur. dubious discuss Lawrence Kohlberg expanded on this issue specifically during adolescence. He suggested three levels of moral reasoning preconventional moral reasoning, conventional moral reasoning, and postconventional moral reasoning.Preconventional moral reasoning is regular of children and is characterized by reasoning that is base on rewards and punishments associated with different cours es of action. Conventional moral reason occurs during late childhood and previous(predicate) adolescence and is characterized by reasoning that is based on the rules and conventions of society. Lastly, postconventional moral reasoning is the stage during which societys rules and conventions are seen as relative and subjective rather than as authoritative. 1 Stages of psychosocial development Erik Erikson became a child psychoanalyst like his mentor Anna Freud, Sigmond Freuds daughter.He went on to reinterpret Freuds psychosexual stages by incorporating the social aspects of it. He came up with eight stages, each of which has two crisis (a positive and a negative). Stage one is trust versus mistrust, which occurs during infancy. Stage two is autonomy versus shame and doubt which occurs during early childhood. Stage three is initiative versus guilt which occurs during play age. Stage four is industry versus inferiority which occurs during school age. Stage five is identity versus ide ntity diffusion which occurs during adolescence. Stage six is intimacy versus isolation which occurs during young adulthood.Stage seven is generativity versus self-absorption which occurs during adulthood. Lastly, stage eight is integrity versus despair which occurs during old age. In each of these stages either one or the other crisis is developed. The i like matter would be to have the positive crisis more developed than the negative crisis. 7 Theories of cognitive development Jean Piaget was a Swiss theorist who posited that children learn by actively constructing knowledge through hands-on experience. 8He suggested that the adults role in helping the child learn was to provide assume materials or the child to interact and construct. He would use Socratic teasing to get the children to reflect on what they were doing. He would try to get them to see contradictions in their explanations. He also developed stages of development. His approach can be seen in how the curriculum is sequenced in schools, and in the pedagogy of preschool centers across the coupled States. Piaget believed that intellectual development took place through a series of stages which caused him to come up with his Theory on Cognitive Development. Each stage consisted of stairs which the child had to master before moving on to the next step.He believe that these stages where not separate from one another but rather each stage built on the previous one, hence learning was continuous. His theory consisted of four stages sensorimotor, pre-operational, concrete operational, and formal operational. Though he did not believe these stages occurred at any given age, many studies have mark off when these cognitive abilities should take place. 4 Zone of proximal development Lev Vygotsky was a Russian theorist from the Soviet era, who posited that children learn through hands-on experience and social interactions with members of his/her culture. 9Unlike Piaget, he claimed that timely and sensiti ve intervention by adults when a child is on the edge of learning a new task (called the zone of proximal development) could help children learn new tasks. Martin pile stated that The world of reality does not apply to the mind of a child. This technique is called scaffolding, because it builds upon knowledge children already have with new knowledge that adults can help the child learn. 10 Vygotsky was strongly focused on the role of culture in determining the childs pattern of development, arguing that development moves from the social level to the individual level. 10In other words, Vygotsky claimed that psychology should focus on the progress of human consciousness through the relationship of an individual and their environment. 11He felt that if scholars continued to dis moot this connection, then this disregard would inhibit the full comprehension of the human consciousness Nature/nurture A monumental issue in developmental psychology is the relationship between innateness and environmental influence in regard to any particular aspect of development. This is often referred to as nature versus nurture or nativism versus empiricism.A nativist account of development would argue that the processes in question are innate, that is, they are condition by the organisms genes. An empiricist perspective would argue that those processes are pull aheadd in interaction with the environment. Today developmental psychologists rarely take such polarised positions with regard to most aspects of development rather they investigate, among many other things, the relationship between innate and environmental influences. One of the ways in which this relationship has been explored in recent years is through the emerging field of evolutionary developmental psychology.One subject area where this innateness debate has been prominently portrayed is in research on language acquisition. A major question in this area is whether or not certain properties of human language are condition genetically or can be acquired through learning. The empiricist position on the issue of language acquisition suggests that the language input provides the necessary information required for learning the structure of language and that infants acquire language through a process of statistical learning.From this perspective, language can be acquired via usual learning methods that also apply to other aspects of development, such as perceptual learning. The nativist position argues that the input from language is too impoverished for infants and children to acquire the structure of language. Linguist Noam Chomsky asserts that, evidenced by the lack of sufficient information in the language input, there is a universal grammar that applies to all human languages and is pre-specified. This has led to the idea that there is a special cognitivemodule suited for learning language, often called the language acquisition device.Chomskys critique of the behaviorist molding of languag e acquisition is regarded by many as a hear turning point in the decline in the prominence of the theory of behaviorism generally. 12 But Skinners conception of Verbal demeanour has not died, perhaps in part because it has generated successful practical applications. 12 Mechanisms of development Developmental psychology is concerned not only with describing the characteristics of psychological change over time, but also seeks to explain the principles and internal workings implicit in(p) these changes.Psychologists have attempted to better understand these factors by using models. Developmental models are sometimes computational, but they do not need to be. A model must simply account for the means by which a process takes place. This is sometimes through with(p) in reference to changes in the headway that may correspond to changes in behavior over the course of the development. computational accounts of development often use either symbolic, connectionist (neural network), or dynamical systems models to explain the mechanisms of development. Research areas Cognitive developmentCognitive development is primarily concerned with the ways in which infants and children acquire, develop, and use internal mental capabilities such as problem solving, retentiveness, and language. Major topics in cognitive development are the ask of language acquisition and the development of perceptual and motor skills. Piaget was one of the potent early psychologists to strike the development of cognitive abilities. His theory suggests that development payoff through a set of stages from infancy to adulthood and that there is an end point or goal.Other accounts, such as that of Lev Vygotsky, have suggested that development does not progress through stages, but rather that the developmental process that engenders at birth and continues until death is too complex for such structure and finality. Rather, from this viewpoint, developmental processes proceed more continuously, thus development should be analyzed, quite of treated as a product to be obtained. K. Warner Schaie has expanded the remove of cognitive development into adulthood. Rather than being stable from adolescence, Schaie sees adults as progressing in the application of their cognitive abilities. 13Modern cognitive development has integrated the considerations of cognitive psychology and the psychology of individual differences into the interpretation and modeling of development. 14Specifically, the neo-Piagetian theories of cognitive development showed that the successive levels or stages of cognitive development are associated with increasing impact efficiency andworking memory capacity. In addition, children in higher-levels of cognitive development have been observed to have greater mathematical fluency in basic addition and subtraction problems. 15These increases explain differences between stages, progression to higher stages, and individual differences of children who are the sam e-age and of the same grade-level. However, other theories have moved away from Piagetian stage theories, and are influenced by accounts of domain-specific information processing, which posit that development is control by innate evolutionarily-specified and content-specific information processing mechanisms. Social and emotional development Developmental psychologists who are interested in social development examine how individuals develop social and emotional competencies.For example, they study how children form friendships, how they understand and deal with emotions, and how identity develops. Research in this area may involve study of the relationship between cognition or cognitive development and social behavior. Erik Erikson believed we undergo several stages to achieve social and emotional development. These stages were called the Erik Eriksons Stages of Psychosocial Development. The stages were trust vs. mistrust, attachment, parenting style, ego identity, role diffusion, generativity versus stagnation, midlife crisis, and ego integrity versus despair.Emotional regulation or ER refers to an individuals ability to modulate emotional responses across a variety of contexts. In young children, this modulation is in part controlled externally, by parents and other authority figures. As children develop, they take on more and more responsibility for their internal state. Studies have shown that the development of ER is affect by the emotional regulation children observe in parents and caretakers, the emotional humor in the home, and the reaction of parents and caretakers to the childs emotions. 16 personal developmentPhysical development concerns the physical maturation of an individuals body until it reaches the adult stature. Although physical growth is a highly regular process, all children differ tremendously in the timing of their growth spurts. 17 Studies are being done to analyze how the differences in these timings affect and are related to othe r variables of developmental psychology such as information processing speed. Traditional measures of physical maturity using x-rays are less in practice nowadays, compared to unprejudiced measurements of body parts such as height, weight, head circumference, and arm span. 17A few other studies and practices with physical developmental psychology are the phonological abilities of mature 5- to 11-year-olds, and the controversial hypotheses of left-handers being maturationally delayed compared to right-handers. A study by Eaton, Chipperfield, Ritchot, and Kostiuk in 1996 found in three different samples that there was no difference between right- and left-handers. 17 Memory development Researchers interested in memory development look at the way our memory develops from childhood and onward. tally to Fuzzy-trace theory, we have two separate memory processes verbatim and gist. These two traces begin to develop at different times as well as at a different pace. Children as young as 4 y ears-old have verbatim memory, memory for surface information, which increases up to early adulthood, at which point it begins to decline. On the other hand, our capacity for gist memory, memory for semantic information, increases up to early adulthood, at which point it consistent through old age. Furthermore, our reliance on gist memory traces in reasoning increases as we age.