Developmental Theories

I. LEARNING OUTCOMES: At the end of the week, the students can:

1. Describe and discuss the fundamental theories of developmental psychology and
how they relate to the real world context
2. To learn about how human development is studied and information is gathered
3. Compare and contrast theories lifespan development theories
II. COURSE CONTENT:

Let’s cover the major theories of cognitive, moral, and personality/ social development. These form the
basis for the specific theories you will cover in the three lessons that follow dealing with periods of life.

The Psychoanalytic Viewpoint

Sigmund Freud (1856–1939) was a theorist who had a great impact on Western thought. He challenged
prevailing notions about human nature by proposing that we are driven by motives and conflicts of
which we are largely unaware and that our personalities are shaped by our early life experiences. In this
section, we will first consider Freud’s psychosexual theory of human development and then compare
Freud’s theory with that of his best-known follower, Erik Erikson.

Freud’s Psychosexual Theory

Freud was a practicing neurologist who formulated his theory of human development from his analyses
of his emotionally disturbed patients’ life histories. Seeking to relieve their nervous symptoms and
anxieties, he relied heavily on such methods as hypnosis, free association (a quick spilling out of one’s
thoughts), and dream analysis, because they gave some indication of unconscious motives that patients
had repressed (that is, forced out of their conscious awareness). By analyzing these motives and the
events that caused their repression, Freud concluded that human development is a conflictual process:
As biological creatures, we have basic sexual and aggressive instincts that must be served; yet society
dictates that many of these drives must be restrained. According to Freud, the ways in which parents
manage these sexual and aggressive urges in the first few years of their child’s life play a major role in
shaping their children’s personalities.

Erikson’s Theory of Psychosocial Development

As Freud became widely read, he attracted many followers. However, Freud’s pupils did not always
agree with him, and eventually they began to modify some of his ideas and became important theorists
in their own right. Among the best known of these scholars was Erik Erikson.

Eight Life Crises (or Psychosocial Stages)

Erikson believed that people face eight major crises, which he labeled psychosocial stages, during the
course of their lives. Each crisis emerges at a distinct time dictated by biological maturation and the
social demands that developing people experience at particular points in life. Each crisis must be
resolved successfully to prepare for a satisfactory resolution of the next life crisis. Erikson’s
developmental stages do not end at adolescence or young adulthood as Freud’s do. Erikson believed
that the problems of adolescents and young adults are very different from those faced by parents who
are raising children or by the elderly who may be grappling with retirement, a sense of uselessness, and
the end of their lives. Most contemporary developmentalists agree (Sheldon &Kasser, 2001; Sigelman&
Rider, 2006).

Comparing Erikson with Freud

Although Erikson (1963, 1982) accepted many of Freud’s ideas, he differed from Freud in two important
respects. First, Erikson (1963) stressed that children are active, curious explorers who seek to adapt to
their environments, rather than passive reactors to biological urges who are molded by their parents. A
second critical difference between Erikson and Freud is that Erikson places much less emphasis on
sexual urges and far more emphasis on social and cultural influences than Freud did. For this reason, we
label Freud’s theory psychosexual and Erikson’s theory psychosocial.

The Learning Viewpoint

John B. Watson was a 20th-century psychologist and developmentalist who claimed thathe could take a
dozen healthy infants and mold them to be whatever he chose—doctor,lawyer, beggar, and so on—
regardless of their backgrounds or ancestry.It implies that nurture is everything and that nature, or
hereditary endowment,counts for nothing. Watson was a strong proponent of the importance of
learning inhuman development and the father of a school of thought known as behaviorism(Horowitz,
1992).

Watson’s Behaviorism

A basic premise of Watson’s (1913) behaviorism is that conclusions about developmentshould be based
on observations of overt behavior rather than on speculationsabout unconscious motives or cognitive
processes that are unobservable. Watson believedthat well-learned associations between external
stimuli and observable responses (calledhabits) are the building blocks of development. Like John Locke,
Watson viewed the infantas a tabula rasa to be written on by experience. Children have no inborn
tendencies;how they turn out depends entirely on their rearing environments and the ways in
whichtheir parents and other significant people in their lives treat them. According to this
perspective,children do not progress through a series of distinct stages dictated by biologicalmaturation,
as Freud (and others) have argued. Instead, development is viewed as acontinuous process of behavioral
change that is shaped by a person’s unique environmentand may differ dramatically from person to
person.Since Watson’s day, several theories have been proposed to explain how we learn from our local
experiences and form the habits Watson proposed. Perhaps the one theorist who did more than anyone
to advance the behaviorist approach was B. F. Skinner.

Skinner’s Operant Learning Theory

Through his research with animals, Skinner (1953) proposed a form of learning he believed is the basis
for most habits. Skinner argued that both animals and humans repeat acts that lead to favorable
outcomes and suppress those that lead to unfavorable outcomes. So a rat that presses a bar and
receives a tasty food pellet is apt to perform that response again. In the language of Skinner’s theory,
the bar-pressing response is called an operant, and the food pellet that strengthens this response (by
making it more probable in the future) is called a reinforcer. Any action that increases the likelihood of a
response is called a reinforcer. Reinforcers can be positive, such as when something pleasant is given to
the actor, or negative, such as when something unpleasant is removed from the actor. Applied to
children, a young girl may form a habit of showing compassion toward distressed playmates if her
parents consistently reinforce her kindly behavior with praise (positive reinforcement). A teenage boy
may become more studious if his efforts are rewarded by a reduction in his chores (negative
reinforcement). Punishers are consequences that suppress a response and decrease the likelihood that
it will recur, and again, they can be positive, as when something unpleasant is given to the actor, or
negative, as when something pleasant is taken away from the actor. Skinner’s theory was that habits
develop as a result of unique operant learning experiences. Today’s developmentalists agree that
human behavior can take many forms and that habits can emerge and disappear over a lifetime,
depending on whether they have positive or negative consequences (Gewirtz &Pelaez-Nogueras, 1992;
Stricker et al., 2001). Yet many believe that Skinner placed too much emphasis on operant behaviors
shaped by external stimuli (reinforcers and punishers) while ignoring important cognitive contributors to
learning. One such critic is Albert Bandura, who proposed a social cognitive theory of development that
is widely respected today.

Bandura’s Social Cognitive Theory

Can human social learning be explained by research with animals? Bandura (1977, 1986, 1992, 2001)
doesn’t think so. He agrees with Skinner that operant conditioning is an important type of learning,
particularly for animals. However, Bandura argues that people are cognitive beings—active information
processors—who, unlike animals, think about the relationships between their behavior and its
consequences. They are often more affected by what they believe will happen than by what they
actually experience. Bandura emphasizes observational learning as a central developmental process.
Observational learning is simply learning that results from observing the behavior of other people (called
models).*

 Cognitive Development

The study of cognitive development—the changes that occur in children’s mental abilities over
the course of their lives—is one of the most diverse and exciting topics in all of the
developmental sciences. Psychologist Jean Piaget, charted what he (and others) believed to be a
universal pattern of intellectual growth that unfolds during infancy, childhood, and adolescence.
Lev Vygotsky’s sociocultural viewpoint—a theory that claims that cognitive growth is heavily
influenced by one’s culture and may be nowhere near as universal as Piaget and his followers
assumed (Wertsch&Tulviste, 1992).

Piaget’s Contributions

Piaget is a giant in the fi eld of human development. As one anonymous scholar quotedby Harry
Beilin (1992) put it, “assessing the impact of Piaget on developmental psychology is like
assessing the impact of Shakespeare on English literature or Aristotle on philosophy—
impossible” (p. 191). It is hard to imagine that we would know even a fraction of what we know
about intellectual development had Piaget pursued his early interests in zoology and never
worked with developing children.
 So what exactly has Piaget contributed to the fi eld of human development? The following list is
a brief assessment of Piaget’s major contributions made by several prominent researchers in
honor of the 100th anniversary of Piaget’s birth (see Brainerd, 1996):

1. Piaget founded the discipline we know today as cognitive development. His interest in
children’s thinking ensured that this fi eld would be “developmental” and not merely apply to
children the ideas and methods from the study of adult thinking.

2. Piaget convinced us that children are curious, active explorers who play an important role in
their own development. Although Piaget’s assumptions that children actively construct their
own knowledge may seem obvious today, this viewpoint was innovative and contrary to the
thinking of his time.

3. Piaget’s theory was one of the first to try to explain, and not just describe, the process of
development. Largely prompted by his theory, many theorists today have taken seriously the
need to explain transitions in children’s thinking (Fischer &Bidell, 1998; Nelson, 1996; Pascual-
Leone, 2000; Siegler, 1996).

4. Piaget’s description of broad sequences of intellectual development provides a reasonably

accurate overview of how children of different ages think. He may have been wrong about some
of the specifics, but, as Robert Siegler (1991, p. 18) notes, “His descriptions feel right. . . . The
general trends . . . appeal to our intuitions and our memories of childhood.”

5. Piaget’s ideas have had a major influence on thinking about social and emotional
development as well as many practical implications for educators.

6. Finally, Piaget asked important questions and drew literally thousands of researchers to the
study of cognitive development. And as often happens when heuristic theories such as Piaget’s
are repeatedly scrutinized, some of this research led to new insights while pointing to problems
with his original ideas.

Contributions and Criticisms of Learning Theories

Perhaps the major contribution of the learning viewpoint is the wealth of information it has
provided about developing children and adolescents. Learning theories are very precise and
testable (Horowitz, 1992). By conducting tightly controlled experiments to determine how
children react to various environmental influences, learning theorists have begun to understand
how and why children form emotional attachments, adopt gender roles, make friends, learn to
abide by moral rules, and change in countless other ways over the course of childhood and
adolescence. As we will see throughout the text, the learning perspective has contributed
substantially to our knowledge of many aspects human development (see also Gewirtz &Pelaez-
Nogueras, 1992; Grusec, 1992).

The Ecological Systems Viewpoint

American psychologist Urie Bronfenbrenner offers an exciting new perspective on child and
adolescent development that addresses many of the shortcomings of earlier “environmentalist”
 approaches. Behaviorists John Watson and B. F. Skinner had defined “environment” as any and all
external forces that shape the individual’s development. Although modern learning theorists such as
Bandura (1986, 1989) have backed away from this view by acknowledging that environments both
influence and are influenced by developing individuals, they continued to provide only vague
descriptions of the environmental contexts in which development takes place. What
Bronfenbrenner’s ecological systems theory (1989, 1993, 2005; Bronfenbrenner & Morris, 2006)
provides is a detailed analysis of environmental influences. This approach also concurs that a
person’s biologically influenced characteristics interact with environmental forces to shape
development, so it is probably more accurate to describe this perspective as a bioecological theory
(Bronfenbrenner, 1995).

A. Bronfenbrenner: According to Cornell psychologist Urie Bronfenbrenner, social environment

exerts both direct and indirect effects on child development. He identified five systems of influence
on development, ranging from fine-grained inputs of direct interactions with social agents to broad-
based inputs of culture. How well these systems interact can greatly affect the development of the
child.
1. The five systems include:
a. Microsystem: Setting in which an individual lives— family, peers, school, neighborhood
b. Mesosystem: Relations between microsystems, connections between contexts, relation of family
experiences to neighborhood, school to church, family to peers, and so on
c. Exosystem: Experiences in a social setting in which an individual does not have an active role but
which nevertheless influences experience in an immediate context
d. Macrosystem: Attitudes and ideologies of the culture in which individuals live content outline
e. Chronosystem: The patterning of environmental events and transitions over the life course;
effects created by time or critical periods in development
2. Examples of cultural diversity should be considered for this theory; for example, for children of
lower socioeconomic status (SES), each of the five systems above might influence children
differently compared to children of higher SES.

Baltes: Life span developmental psychologist Paul Baltes identified three social influences on the course
of development. These interact in ways that result in the patterning of specific life events:
1. Age-graded normative influences: The expectations associated with specific ages reflected in
a given culture.
2. History-graded normative influences: The effects of living in a given time and place that have
similar influences on people within that society.
3. Nonnormative influences: Random, unpredictable influences that are idiosyncratic to each
individual

VI. REFERENCES:
Shaffer, D. R. (2008). By Dr. David R. Shaffer - Developmental Psychology: Childhood
and Adolescence (8th Edition) (8th Edition). Wadsworth Publishing.