CHAPTER 1:

INTRODUCTION TO
LIFESPAN DEVELOPMENT
Brainstorm…
• Did you ever wonder how long you will live?
• The people you will meet and the experiences you will have?
• Did you ever think about how you managed to go from being a young child to the more
experienced person you are now? Or what might lie ahead over the next few years or decades?
• Would you like to break Jeanne Calment’s longevity record (refer to your textbook)?
• What do you think other people would want?

The What Do You Think? →feature provides the results of a poll of Americans, as well as
provocative questions about extending life radically.
In this course…….
• You will have the opportunity to ask some of life’s most basic questions:
➢ How did your life begin?
➢ How did you go from a single cell—about the size of the period at the end of a sentence
in this text—to the fully grown, complex adult person you are today?
➢ Will you be the same or different later in life?
➢ How do you influence other people’s lives?
➢ How do they influence yours?
➢ How do the various roles you play throughout life—child, teenager, partner, spouse,
parent, worker, grandparent—shape your development?
➢ How do you deal with the thought of your own death and the death of others?
Defining Human Development

• Human development → the multidisciplinary study of how people change and how
they remain the same over time.
• Answering these questions requires us to draw on theories and research in the physical
and social sciences, including biology, genetics, neuroscience, chemistry, allied health
and medicine, psychology, sociology, demography, ethnography, economics, and
anthropology.
Recurring Issues In Human Development
i. Nature vs. nurture
• Influence of heredity vs. environment
ii. Continuity vs. discontinuity
• Does development smoothly progress or shift abruptly?
iii. Universal vs. context-specific development
• Is there just one or multiple ways in which development occurs?
What is Lifespan Development?

• Development: changes over time in a person’s body, thought,

and behavior due to biological and environmental influences.

• Lifespan Development: studies the patterns of growth, change,

and stability in behavior that occur through the entire life span.
Focus has shifted from infants
and children to people of all
ages.
Topic areas in lifespan development:
Examining the ways in which the body’s makeup
Physical development (the brain, nervous system, muscles, and the need for food, drink and
sleep).
To understand how growth and change in intellectual capabilities
Cognitive development
influences a person’s behaviour.

Stability and change in the enduring characteristics that differentiate one

Personality development
person from another over the course of life.

Individuals’ interactions with others and their social r/ships grow, change,
Social development
and remain stable over the course of life.
The life span is usually divided into broad age ranges:

The prenatal period: the period from conception to birth.

Infancy & toddlerhood: birth to age 3
The preschool period: age 3-6
Middle childhood: age 6-12
Adolescence: age 12-20
Young adulthood: age 20-40
Middle adulthood: age 40-65
Late adulthood: age 65 to death
• These broad periods: social constructions.
• It focuses on human development.
• Some developmentalists seek to understand:
➢ universal principles of development
➢ focus on how cultural, racial, and ethnic differences affect the
course of development.
• Why study developmental psychology?
➢ knowledge relevant to multiple domains
➢ practical information for your own life (bedwetting, crying babies,
peer pressure, drinking, love, sex, careers, families, healthy aging)
➢ social policy implication (head start, midnight basketball, HPV
vaccine)
➢ critical research skills
Theories of Development

What Is a Theory?
• “An organized set of ideas that is designed to explain development”.
• Essential for developing predictions about behavior.
• Predictions result in research that helps to support or clarify the theory.
• There are no truly comprehensive theories of human development.
• Five theoretical orientations to development:
i. psychoanalytic
ii. cognitive
iii. behavioral and social cognitive
iv. ethological
v. ecological
i. Psychoanalytic Theories
• believe that much of behaviors is motivated by inner forces, memories, and conflicts of which a
person has little awareness/control.
• the inner forces, which may stem from one’s childhood, continually influence behavior throughout the
life span.
• emphasizes that the trek to adulthood is difficult because the path is strewn with challenges.

❖ Erikson’s Psychosocial Theory:

❖ Freud’s Theory: ▪ proposed the first comprehensive life-span
▪ suggests that unconscious forces act to view of psychosocial development.
determine personality and behavior. ▪ Focused on our desire to affiliate with
▪ the unconscious: a part of the personality other people.
about which a person is unaware (eg: ▪ Believed that developmental change
infantile wishes, desires, demands, and occurs throughout the life span.
needs). ▪ Proposed eight stages of development
▪ Personality has 3 aspects (id, ego, superego). ##Each stage comprises a crisis that must be
resolved
• The raw, unorganized, inborn part of personality that is present at birth.
Id
• It represents primitives drives (hunger, sex, aggression).

• Rational and reasonable.

Ego
• Acts as a buffer between the real world outside of us and the primitive id.

• Represents a person’s conscience, incorporating distinctions between right and wrong.

Superego • Begin to develop around age 5 or 6.
• Learned from parents, teachers and other significant figures.

PSYCHOSOCIAL STAGE AGE CHALLENGE

Basic trust vs. mistrust Birth to 1 year To develop a sense that the world is safe, a "good place"
To realize that one is an independent person who can make decisions and
Autonomy vs. shame 1 to 3 years
doubt
Initiative vs. guilt 3 to 6 years To develop the ability to try new things and to handle failure
Industry vs. inferiority 6 years to adolescence To learn basic skills and to work with others
Identity vs. identity confusion Adolescence To develop a lasting, integrated sense of self
Intimacy vs. isolation Young adulthood To commit to another in a loving relationship
To contribute to younger people through child rearing, child care, or other
Generativity vs. stagnation Middle adulthood
productive work
Integrity vs. despair Late life To view one's life as satisfactory and worth living
ii. Cognitive Theories B. Vygotsky’s Sociocultural Cognitive Theory:
Stresses development of thought processes • Children actively construct their knowledge
• Emphasizes how social interaction and culture guide
A. Piaget’s Cognitive Developmental Theory: cognitive development
• Emphasizes the processes of organization • Learning is based upon the inventions of society
and adaptation
• 4 stages of cognitive development in
children
C. Information-Processing Theory:
• Emphasizes that individuals manipulate information,
monitor it, and strategize about it
• Individuals develop a gradually increasing capacity
for processing information
• Development is not stage-like
iii. Behavioral and Social Cognitive Theories:

A. Skinner’s Operant Conditioning:

• Consequences of a behavior produce changes in the probability of the
behavior’s occurrence
• A positive or negative reinforcement increases the chance that a behavior
will be repeated.
• A punishment decreases the chance that a behavior will be repeated.

B. Bandura’s Social Cognitive Theory:

• Behavior, environment, and cognition are key factors in development
• Observational learning: learning through observation
• People cognitively represent the behavior of others
iv. Ethological Theory

A. Ethnology: stresses that behavior is B. Bronfenbrenner’s Ecological Theory:

strongly influenced by biology and is development reflects the influence of 5
tied to evolution environmental systems:
• brought to prominence by Konrad i. Microsystem
Lorenz ii. Mesosystem
• Bowlby stressed the importance of iii. Exosystem
human attachment during the first
year of life iv. Macrosystem
v. Chronosystem
i. Microsystem:
• People and objects in the immediate environment.
• the setting in which the individual lives (family, peers, school,
and neighbourhood).
• The most direct interactions with social agents take place-
parents, peers, and teachers.
• The person helps an individual to construct settings.

ii. Mesosystem:
• Influences of microsystems on each other.
• Involves relations between microsystems/connections between
contexts.
• Ex: the relation of family experiences to school experiences,
school experiences to religion experiences, and family
experiences to peer experiences.

iii. Exosystem:
▪ Social, environmental, governmental forces.
▪ Links between a social setting in which the individual does not
have an active role and the individual’s immediate context.
▪ Ex: a husband’s/child’s experience at home may be influenced
by a mother’s experiences at work. The mother might receive a
promotion that require more travel, which might increase
conflict with the husband and change patterns of interaction
with the child.
iv. Macrosystem:
• Subcultures and cultures in which the
other three systems are embedded.
• Involve the culture in which
individuals live.

v. Chronosystem:
• Consists of the patterning of
environmental events and transitions
over the life course, as well as
sociohistorical circumstances.
Life-Span Perspective
• Aging is a lifelong process from conception to death.
• Many factors influence development; no one factor adequately explains it.
• Key features:
i. Multidirectionality
ii. Plasticity
iii. Historical context
iv. Multiple causation
Selective Optimization With Compensation (SOC)
Choices determine and regulate development
i. Selection:
▪ Elective selection: Reducing one goal to focus on another
▪ Loss-based selection: Reducing involvement because of lack of resources or abilities
ii. Compensation: Find alternate ways of meeting goals
iii. Optimization: Minimizing losses and maximizing gains
The Life-Course Perspective
• Different generations experience/adjust to biological, psychological,
and sociocultural forces within the historical contexts.
i. Individual timing of life events in relation to external
historical events.
ii. Synchronization of individual transitions with collective
familial ones.
iii. The impact of earlier life events, as shaped by historical
events, on subsequent ones.
THE SCIENTIFIC APPROACH TO STUDYING HUMAN
DEVELOPMENT

• Methods include:
i. Descriptive: case studies, observations, surveys, interviews, and
psychological tests
ii. Longitudinal Studies: study people over time
iii. Correlational research: looks at relationships between variables
iv. Experiments: test hypothesis by means of rigid controls
MEASURING DEVELOPMENTAL CHANGE

i. Longitudinal Studies:
• The behavior of one or more study participants is measured as they age.
• Eg: how a child’s moral development changes between the age of 3 and 5,
the most direct approach would be taken a group of 3 year olds and follow
them until they were 5, testing them periodically.
• Can provide a wealth of information about change over time.
• Expensive and a large time commitment
• Allows examination of (dis)continuity, because the same people were tested
across time
ii. Cross-sectional Studies:
• People of different ages are compared at the same point in time.
• Provide information about differences in development between
different age groups.
• Eg: want to consider how children’s moral development, their sense
of right and wrong, changes from ages 3 to 5.
• 3 year olds, 4 year olds, and 5 year olds, perhaps presenting each
group with the same problem, and then seeing how they respond to it
and explain their choices.
iii. Experimental Studies
• Study the possible “cause and effect” relationship between two variables
i. First manipulate exposure to different levels of a factor (IV).
ii. After exposure to the IV, measure how people score on the behavior of
interest (DV).
iii. Main question is whether the DV’s scores differ depending upon the
level of the IV.
Qualitative Studies
• Involve gaining in-depth understanding of behavior and what
governs it by uncovering reasons underlying it.
• Smaller but focused samples.
• Observation over extended periods of time.
• Categorize the data into patterns.
• Can be conducted for its own sake, as a preliminary step, or as a
complement to quantitative research.
Moral Foundations of Ethical Research with Human
Participants
1. Protection from harm: Institutional Review Boards evaluate research projects
with regard to their potential risks to participants
2. Informed consent: a clear statement of the procedures and risks as well as the
obligations of both the participants and the researchers
3. Privacy and confidentiality
4. Knowledge of results
5. Beneficial treatments
Ethics and Research
1. Researchers must protect participants from physical and psychological harm:
their welfare, interests, and right come before those of researchers.
2. Researchers must obtain informed consent from participants before their
involvement in a study: for those under 18, their parents/guardians must also
provide consent.
3. The use of deception in research must be justified and cause no harm.
4. Participants’ privacy must be maintained: they must give their permission for
the videotapes to be viewed.