THEORIES AND METHODS OF LIFE-SPAN DEVELOPMENT

 Researchers formulate problems and hypotheses within theories.

(Definition of Theory)
 Theory of theory: A theory is an interrelated, coherent set of statements that
help to explain and to make predictions. Often formalized in the natural
sciences.
 Practice of theory: A theory is a scientific worldview.
(Requirements for a Theory)
 Popper: Falsifiability. A scientific theory should be able to generate predictions
that could be disconfirmed.
HYPOTHESIS-is a specific assumption or prediction that can be tested to determine
its accuracy.
Theories of
Development

Psychoanalytic Ethological
Theories Theory

Cognitive Ecological
Theories Theory

Behavioral and An Eclectic

Social Cognitive Theoretical
Theories Orientation

SIGMUND FREUD (1856-1939)

Medical doctor specializing in neurology -> Dynamic approach
Developed ideas about psychoanalytic theory from work with mental patients
Considered problems to be the result of experiences early in life.

PSYCHOANALYTICAL THEORY
 Mental life is primarily unconscious— beyond awareness.
 Mental life is heavily colored by emotion.
 Early experiences with parents extensively shape behavior.
Freud’s Structures of Personality:
 Id
 Ego
 Superego
PSYCHOSEXUAL DEVELOPMENT
 Five stages
 Each stage focuses on a part of the body for experiencing pleasure.
 How conflicts between sources of pleasure are resolved determines adult
personality.

Five Stages of Psychosexual Development

 The Oral Stage (Birth to 18 months)
 Pleasure centers around the mouth.
 Chewing, sucking, biting are sources of pleasure.
 The Anal Stage (18 months to 3 years)
 Pleasure centers around the anus.
 Eliminative functions are sources of pleasure.
 The Phallic Stage (3 to 6 years)
 Pleasure focuses on the genitals.
 Self-manipulation is a source of pleasure.
 Oedipus Complex appears.
Oedipus Complex is Freud’s term for the young child’s development of
an intense desire to replace the same-sex parent and enjoy the
affections of the opposite-sex parent.
 Children recognize that their same-sex parent might punish them for
their incestuous wishes.
 To reduce this conflict, the child identifies with the same-sex parent,
striving to be like him or her.
 The Latent Stage (6 years to puberty)
 The child represses all interest in sexuality.
 The child develops social and intellectual skills.
 Energy is channeled into emotionally safe areas.
 The child forgets the highly stressful conflicts of the phallic stage.
 The Genital Stage (Puberty on)
 This is a time of sexual reawakening.
 The source of sexual pleasure comes from someone outside the
family.

 When conflict is not resolved Individuals may develop a fixation.

Fixation occurs when the individual remains locked in an earlier developmental

stage because needs are under- or over-gratified.
ERIK ERIKSON (1902-1994)
 Recognized Freud’s contributions
 Believed Freud misjudged some important dimensions of human development
 Developed the Psychosocial Theory of Development

Psychosocial Theory of Development

 The primary motivation for human behavior is social and reflects a desire to
affiliate with other people.
 Eight stages of development unfold throughout the entire life span.
 Each stage consists of a unique developmental task that confronts individuals
with a crisis that must be faced.

(cont’d)
 Crises are not catastrophes but rather turning points of increased vulnerability
and enhanced potential.
 The more an individual resolves the crises successfully, the healthier
development will be.

Stages of Psychosocial Development

 Trust vs. Mistrust
 Autonomy vs. Shame and Doubt
 Initiative vs. Guilt
 Industry vs. Inferiority
 Identity vs. Identity Confusion
 Intimacy vs. Isolation
 Generativity vs. Stagnation
 Integrity vs. Despair

Contributions of Psychoanalytic Theories

 Early experiences play an important part in development.
 Family relationships are a central aspect of development.
 Personality can be better understood if it is examined developmentally.
 The mind is not all conscious; unconscious aspects of the mind need to be
considered.
 Changes take place in the adulthood as well as the childhood years (Erikson).
Criticisms of Psychoanalytic Theories
 The main concepts have been difficult to test.
 Much of the data used to support these theories come from individuals’
reconstruction of the past, often the distant past.
 The sexual underpinnings of development are given too much importance by
Freud.
 Psychoanalytic theories are culture- and gender-biased.

COGNITIVE THEORIES
 Piaget’s cognitive development theory
 Vygotsky’s sociocultural cognitive theory
 The information-processing approach

JEAN PIAGET (1896-1980)

 Swiss psychologist
 Observed his own children to develop theory of cognitive development
 Changed how we think about the development of children’s minds

Piaget’s Cognitive Development Theory

 Children actively construct their understanding of the world.
 Children progress through four stages of cognitive development.

Piaget’s Four Stages of Cognitive Development

 Sensorimotor Stage (0-2 yrs.)
 Infants construct an understanding of the world by coordinating
sensory experiences with physical, motor actions.
 Preoperational Stage (2-7 yrs.)
 Children begin to represent the world with words, images, and
drawings.
 Concrete Operational Stage (7-11 yrs.)
 Children can perform mental operations.
 Logical reasoning replaces intuitive thought, if reasoning can be
applied to concrete examples.

OPERATIONS -Internalized mental actions that allow children to do

mentally what they previously did physically
  Formal Operational Stage (11 and up)
 Individuals move beyond concrete experiences and think in abstract,
more logical terms.
 Problem solving is more systematic and involves hypotheses.

Mechanisms of Development
 Organization- tendency for parts of a system to form and to be integrated into
a whole.
 Adaptation
Assimilation: Incorporating new information into one’s existing
knowledge
Accommodation: Adapting one’s existing knowledge to new information
 Equilibration- every organism tends towards equilibrium with the environment
and equilibrium within itself.

Vygotsky’s Sociocultural Cognitive Theory

 Shares Piaget’s view that children actively construct their knowledge.
 Emphasizes developmental analysis, the role of language, and social
relations.
 Like Piaget, Vygotsky’s ideas were not introduced in America until the 1960s.

Vygotsky’s 3 Basic Claims about Children’s Development

 Cognitive skills have their origins in social relations and are embedded in a
sociocultural backdrop.
 The child’s cognitive skills can be understood only when they are
developmentally analyzed and interpreted.
 Cognitive skills are mediated by words, language, and forms of discourse.

The Information-Processing Approach

 Emphasizes that individuals manipulate, monitor, and strategize about
information.
 Central are the processes of memory and thinking.
 Individuals develop a gradually increasing capacity for processing information.
 This enables the acquisition of increasingly complex knowledge and skills.

Contributions of the Cognitive Theories

 They present a positive view of development, emphasizing individuals’
conscious thinking.
  They emphasize the individual’s active construction of understanding.
 Piaget’s and Vygotsky’s theories underscore the importance of examining
developmental changes in children’s thinking.
 The information-processing approach offers detailed descriptions of cognitive
processes.

Criticisms of the Cognitive Theories

 There is skepticism about the pureness of Piaget’s stages.
 They do not give adequate attention to individual variations in cognitive
development.
 Information processing doesn’t provide adequate description of
developmental changes in cognition.
 Psychoanalytic theorists argue that the cognitive theories do not give enough
credit to unconscious thought.

Behavioral and Social Cognitive Theories

 These theories believe that scientifically we can only study what can be
directly observed and measured.
 They also believe that development is observable behavior that can be
learned through experience with the environment.

CLASSICAL CONDITIONING- In the early 1900s, Russian physiologist Ivan

Pavlov discovered the phenomenon in which a neutral stimulus acquires the ability to
produce a behavioral response originally produced by another stimulus.

OPERANT CONDITIONING- B.F. Skinner demonstrated that the consequences

of a behavior produce changes in the probability of the behavior occurring again.
Consequences can be either rewards (increasing the likelihood of behavior
recurrence), or punishment (decreasing this chance).

Social Cognitive Theory

 Learning occurs through observing what others do, as individuals cognitively
represent what they see and adopt the behavior themselves.
 Albert Bandura and Walter Mischel believe that cognitive processes are
important mediators of environment-behavior connections.

Contributions of Behavioral and Social Cognitive Theories

 They emphasize the importance of scientific research.
 They focus on the environmental determinants of behavior.
  They underscore the importance of observational learning (Bandura).

Criticisms of Behavioral and Social Cognitive Theories

 Pavlov and Skinner neglect cognition.
 They put too much emphasis on environmental determinants.
 They are too mechanical and consider the spontaneity and creativity of
humans.

Ethological Theory
 Behavior is strongly influenced by biology.
 Behavior is tied to evolution.
 Behavior is characterized by critical periods.
 Austrian zoologist Konrad Lorenz (1903-1989) identified imprinting.
 John Bowlby theorizes about attachment.

Critical Period- A fixed time period very early in development during which
certain behaviors optimally emerge.

Imprinting- the rapid, innate learning within a limited critical period that involves
attachment to the first moving object seen

Attachment
 A concept based on principles of ethological theory.
 Attachment to a caregiver over the first year of life has important
consequences:
 Positive and secure attachment results in positive development.
 Negative and insecure attachment results in problematic development.

Contributions of Ethological Theory

 It has an increased focus on the biological and evolutionary basis of
development.
 It uses careful observations in naturalistic settings.
 It emphasizes critical periods of development.

Criticisms of Ethological Theory

 The critical period concept may be too rigid.
 It places too strong an emphasis on biological foundations.
 It gives inadequate attention to cognition.
 It has been better at generating research with animals than with humans.
Ecological Theory
 Developed by Urie Bronfenbrenner.
 Consists of 5 environmental systems:
 The Microsystem
 The Mesosystem
 The Exosystem
 The Macrosystem
 The Chronosystem
CONTRIBUTIONS
 It provides a systematic examination of macro and micro dimensions of
environmental systems.
 It considers sociohistorical influences on development.
CRITICISM
 Even with the added discussion of biological influences in recent years, there
is still too little attention to biological foundations of development.
 It gives inadequate attention to cognitive processes.

Eclectic Theoretical Orientation

 Does not follow any one theoretical approach
 Selects and uses whatever is considered best from each theory

Methods
 Developmental designs
 The Cross-Sectional Approach
 The Longitudinal Approach
 The Sequential Approach
 Correlational versus experimental research

Cross-Sectional Approach- Individuals of different ages are compared at one

time.
Longitudinal Approach- The same individuals are studied over a period of time.

Sequential Approach- combination of the cross-sectional and longitudinal

approach.
 Begins with a cross-sectional study of individuals of different ages.
 Months or years later, the same individuals are tested again along with a new
group of subjects for each age level.

(cont’d)
 Complex, expensive, and time consuming.
 Provides information not obtainable through using either the cross-sectional or
longitudinal designs alone.
 Especially helpful in examining cohort effects in life-span development.

Cohort effects -are due to a person’s time of birth or generation, but not to actual
age.

Correlational Research- the goal is to describe the strength of the relation

between two or more events or characteristics.
 It needs to be used with caution as correlation does not equal causation.

Experimental Research
 This allows researchers to determine the causes of behavior.
 It uses experimentation: carefully regulated procedures in which one or more
significant factors is manipulated, and all others held constant.
 Experimental research involves independent and dependent variables,
experimental groups, control groups, and random assignment.
 KOHLBERG'S SIX STAGES OF MORAL DEVELOPMENT

Level 1. Preconventional Morality

Stage 1. Obedience and Punishment Orientation.

Kohlberg's stage 1 is similar to Piaget's first stage of moral thought. The child
assumes that powerful authorities hand down a fixed set of rules which he or she
must unquestioningly obey.
-The View is "It's against the law," or "It's bad to steal," as if this were all there
were to it. When asked to elaborate, the child usually responds in terms of the
consequences involved, explaining that stealing is bad "because you'll get punished"
(Kohlberg, 1958b).
Stage 2. Individualism and Exchange.
• This stage children recognize that there is not just one right view that is handed
down by the authorities. Different individuals have different viewpoints.

• At stage 1 punishment is tied up in the child's mind with wrongness; punishment

"proves" that disobedience is wrong. At stage 2, in contrast, punishment is simply
a risk that one naturally wants to avoid.

Level II. Conventional Morality

Stage 3. Good Interpersonal Relationships.

• At this stage children--who are by now usually entering their teens--see morality
as more than simple deals. They believe that people should live up to the
expectations of the family and community and behave in "good" ways. Good
behavior means having good motives and interpersonal feelings such as love,
empathy, trust, and concern for others.

Stage 4. Maintaining the Social Order.

• Stage 3 reasoning works best in two-person relationships with family members or
close friends, where one can make a real effort to get to know the other's feelings
and needs and try to help. At stage 4, in contrast, the respondent becomes more
broadly concerned with society as a whole. Now the emphasis is on obeying
laws, respecting authority, and performing one's duties so that the social order is
maintained.

Level III. Postconventional Morality

Stage 5. Social Contract and Individual Rights.

• At stage 5, people begin to ask, "What makes for a good society?" They begin to
think about society in a very theoretical way, stepping back from their own society
and considering the rights and values that a society ought to uphold. They then
 evaluate existing societies in terms of these prior considerations. They are said to
take a "prior-to-society" perspective (Colby and Kohlberg, 1983, p. 22).

• Stage 5 subjects,- then, talk about "morality" and "rights" that take some priority
over particular laws. Kohlberg insists, however, that we do not judge people to be
at stage 5 merely from their verbal labels. We need to look at their social
perspective and mode of reasoning.

Stage 6: Universal Principles.

-Kohlberg believes that there must be a higher stage--stage 6--which defines the
principles by which we achieve justice. Kohlberg's conception of justice follows that
of the philosophers Kant and Rawls, as well as great moral leaders such as Gandhi
and Martin Luther King. According to these people, the principles of justice require
us to treat the claims of all parties in an impartial manner, respecting the basic
dignity, of all people as individuals. The principles of justice are therefore universal;
they apply to all. Thus, for example, we would not vote for a law that aids some
people but hurts others. The principles of justice guide us toward decisions based on
an equal respect for all.
Kohlberg: Summary
 At stage 1 children think of what is right as that which authority says is right.
Doing the right thing is obeying authority and avoiding punishment.
 At stage 2, children are no longer so impressed by any single authority; they
see that there are different sides to any issue. Since everything is relative,
one is free to pursue one's own interests, although it is often useful to make
deals and exchange favors with others.

 At stages 3 and 4, young people think as members of the conventional

society with its values, norms, and expectations. At stage 3, they emphasize
being a good person, which basically means having helpful motives toward
people close to one
 At stage 4, the concern shifts toward obeying laws to maintain society as a
whole.
 At stages 5 and 6 people are less concerned with maintaining society for it
own sake, and more concerned with the principles and values that make for a
good society. At stage 5 they emphasize basic rights and the democratic
processes that give everyone a say, and at stage 6 they define the principles
by which agreement will be most just.
 Vygotsky’s Theory of Cognitive Development
Lev Vygotsky (1896–1934)

 Russian psychologist
 Worked in post-revolutionary Soviet Union to rebuild psychology along Marxist
lines
 Applied psych. to problems confronting the new state, especially in the field of
ed psych.
 Worked to create theories of cognitive development
 Conducted research & writing during the same time as Piaget (1920’s &
1930’s)
 His writings were banned in the Soviet Union in 1936 & only became available
in the west in the 1960’s
 He died of tuberculosis at the age of 38.

Vygotsky & Stalin

 For 20 years after his death, it was forbidden to discuss, disseminate or

reprint any of his writings

 His works could be read only in a single library in Moscow by special

permission of the secret police

 Different than Piaget’s image of the individual constructing understanding

alone

 Everything is social

 Vygotsky saw cognitive development as depending more on interactions with

people & tools in the child’s world.

 Tools are real: pens, paper, computers;

 or Tools are symbols: language, math systems, signs

The Big Ideas…

 Explained complex learning through Guided Participation.

 Explained things that are taught rather than discovered (reading, writing
etc.)

 a way to “share the thinking load”

 Helping a novice accomplish a complex task

 Assistance can be physical or mental & come from adults or peers

  Scaffolding: where the more knowledgeable other provides some type of
structure.

 Vygotsky developed the theory of the Zone of proximal development

(ZPD)

Examples of Guided Participation

 A mother sitting with her toddler singing, “Baa, baa black sheep have you any
wool, yes sir, yes sir ….” at this point the mother pauses and the child sings
loudly, “THREE BAGS FULL!”.
o How is this guided participation?
 A 6-year old lost a toy & asks her father for help. The father asks her where
she last saw the toy; the child says , “I can’t remember.” He asks a series of
questions – “Did you have it in your room? Outside?” To each question the
child answers “No”. When he asks, “In the car?”, she says “I think so” and
finds the toy in the car.
o In this story, who found the toy?

Vygotsky and Schools

 Emphasized social learning

 We can often complete harder tasks with someone else than we could
alone.

 Collaborative learning, group presentations, group work

 Zone of Proximal Development
 The teacher considers how much scaffolding to give a student to help
them learn.
 A push for “authentic learning”.
 Learning is tied to the context it is in.

Motivation & Vygotsky

 This view emphasizes how people’s identities are formed by their participation
in a group

 Students can be motivated to learn by participating in communities

where learning is valued

 Ex: Children want to learn to read & write to become members of the
“literary club”, to be able to participate and interact with the written world

Vygotsky’s Words…

 It is through others that we become ourselves”

  All learning is social

 “What a child can do in co-operation today he can do alone tomorrow”

 Guided participation, ZPD, scaffolding

 PERSONALITY DEVELOPMENT

(ERIK ERIKSON)
 In each stage a person faces certain conflicts and challenges.
 People must modify their personalities in order to adjust successfully to their
social environments
 Begin in childhood
 A child’s success in the early stages depends largely on their parents
 An ongoing process that is never final

Trust vs. Mistrust

Trust
 Respond quickly
 Holding
 Cuddling
 Playing
 Talking to them
 Love them

Autonomy vs. Shame

Autonomy Shame

Initiative vs. Guilt

Initiative Guilt
Industry vs. Inferiority
Industry Inferiority