Definition, History, Nature Vs Nurture (Intelligence processes of their own experiences rather than by

and Personality) memorizing facts provided by others. Social

constructivism is when individuals construct knowledge
Definition: through an interaction between the knowledge they bring
to a situation and social or cultural exchanges within that
Developmental psychology is the scientific study of how
content. Jean Piaget, a Swiss developmental
and why humans grow, change, and adapt across the
psychologist, proposed that learning is an active process
course of their lives. Originally concerned with infants
because children learn through experience, make
and children, the field has expanded to include
mistakes, and solve problems. Piaget proposed that
adolescence, adult development, aging, and the entire
learning should be whole by helping students understand
lifespan. Developmental psychologists aim to explain
that meaning is constructed.
how thinking, feeling, and behaviours change
throughout life. This field examines change across three
major dimensions, which are physical development,
cognitive development, and social emotional Historical Antecedents of Developmental
development. Within these three dimensions are a broad Psychology:
range of topics including motor skills, executive
Jean-Jacques Rousseau and John B. Watson are typically
functions, moral understanding, language acquisition,
cited as providing the foundation for modern
social change, personality, emotional development, self-
developmental psychology. In the mid-18th century, Jean
concept, and identity formation.
Jacques Rousseau described three stages of
Developmental psychology examines the influences of development: infants (infancy), puer (childhood) and
nature and nurture on the process of human adolescence in Emile: Or, On Education. Rousseau's
development, as well as processes of change in context ideas were adopted and supported by educators at the
across time. Many researchers are interested in the time.
interactions among personal characteristics, the
Developmental psychology generally focuses on how
individual's behaviour, and environmental factors. This
and why certain changes (cognitive, social, intellectual,
includes the social context and the built environment.
personality) occur over time in the course of a human
Ongoing debates in regard to developmental psychology
life. Many theorists have made a profound contribution
include biological essentialism vs. neuroplasticity and
to this area of psychology. One of them, Erik Erikson
stages of development vs. dynamic systems of
developed a model of eight stages of psychological
development. Research in developmental psychology
development. He believed that humans developed in
has some limitations but at the moment researchers are
stages throughout their lifetimes and that this would
working to understand how transitioning through stages
affect their behaviours.
of life and biological factors may impact our behaviours
and development. In the late 19th century, psychologists familiar with the
evolutionary theory of Darwin began seeking an
Developmental psychology involves a range of fields,
evolutionary description of psychological development;
such as educational psychology, child psychopathology,
prominent here was the pioneering psychologist G.
forensic developmental psychology, child development,
Stanley Hall, who attempted to correlate ages of
cognitive psychology, ecological psychology, and
childhood with previous ages of humanity. James Mark
cultural psychology. Influential developmental
Baldwin, who wrote essays on topics that included
psychologists from the 20th century include Urie
Imitation: A Chapter in the Natural History of
Bronfenbrenner, Erik Erikson, Sigmund Freud, Anna
Consciousness and Mental Development in the Child
Freud, Jean Piaget, Barbara Rogoff, Esther Thelen, and
and the Race: Methods and Processes, was significantly
Lev Vygotsky.
involved in the theory of developmental psychology.
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Constructivism: Sigmund Freud, whose concepts were developmental,

Constructivism is a paradigm in psychology that
characterizes learning as a process of actively
constructing knowledge. Individuals create meaning for
themselves or make sense of new information by
selecting, organizing, and integrating information with
other knowledge, often in the context of social
interactions. Constructivism can occur in two ways:
individual and social. Individual constructivism is when
a person constructs knowledge through cognitive
significantly affected public perceptions.
Evolutionary developmental psychology:
Evolutionary developmental psychology is a research
paradigm that applies the basic principles of Darwinian
evolution, particularly natural selection, to understand
the development of human behaviour and cognition. It
involves the study of both the genetic and environmental
mechanisms that underlie the development of social and
cognitive competencies, as well as the epigenetic (gene-
environment interactions) processes that adapt these
competencies to local conditions.
EDP considers both the reliably developing, species-
typical features of ontogeny (developmental
adaptations), as well as individual differences in
behaviour, from an evolutionary perspective. While
evolutionary views tend to regard most individual
differences as the result of either random genetic noise
(evolutionary byproducts) and/or idiosyncrasies (for
example, peer groups, education, neighbourhoods, and
chance encounters) rather than products of natural
selection, EDP asserts that natural selection can favour
the emergence of individual differences via "adaptive
developmental plasticity". From this perspective, human
development follows alternative life-history strategies in
response to environmental variability, rather than
following one species-typical pattern of development.
EDP is closely linked to the theoretical framework of
evolutionary psychology (EP), but is also distinct from
EP in several domains, including research emphasis
(EDP focuses on adaptations of ontogeny, as opposed to
adaptations of adulthood) and consideration of
proximate ontogenetic and environmental factors (i.e.,
how development happens) in addition to more ultimate
factors (i.e., why development happens), which are the
focus of mainstream evolutionary psychology.
Nature vs nurture:
A significant debate 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 and
nurture" or nativism versus empiricism. A nativist
account of development would argue that the processes
in question are innate, that is, they are specified by the
organism's genes. What makes a person who they are? Is
it their environment or their genetics? This is the debate
of nature vs nurture.
An empiricist perspective would argue that those
processes are acquired in interaction with the
environment. Today developmental psychologists rarely
take such polarized 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 this
relationship has been explored in recent years is through
the emerging field of evolutionary developmental
psychology.
One 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 specified
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 general 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
cognitive module suited for learning language, often
called the language acquisition device. Chomsky's
critique of the behaviourist model of language
acquisition is regarded by many as a key turning point in
the decline in the prominence of the theory of
behaviourism generally. But Skinner's conception of
"Verbal Behaviour" has not died, perhaps in part because
it has generated successful practical applications.
Maybe there could be "strong interactions of both nature
and nurture".
Continuity vs discontinuity:
One of the major discussions in developmental
psychology includes whether development is
discontinuous or continuous.
Continuous development is quantifiable and
quantitative, whereas discontinuous development is
qualitative. Quantitative estimations of development can
be measuring the stature of a child and measuring their
memory or consideration span. "Particularly dramatic
examples of qualitative changes are metamorphoses,
such as the emergence of a caterpillar into a butterfly."
Those psychologists who bolster the continuous view of
improvement propose that improvement includes slow
and progressing changes all through the life span, with
behaviour within the prior stages of advancement giving
the premise of abilities and capacities required for the
other stages. "To many, the concept of continuous,
quantifiable measurement seems to be the essence of
science".
Not all psychologists, nevertheless, concur that
advancement could be a continuous process. A few see
advancement as a discontinuous process. They accept
advancement includes unmistakable and partitioned
stages with diverse sorts of behaviour happening in each
organization. This proposes that the development of
certain capacities in each arrange, such as particular
feelings or ways of considering, have a definite
beginning and finishing point. Nevertheless, there's no
correct time at which a capacity abruptly shows up or
disappears. Although some sorts of considering, feeling
or carrying on could seem to seem abruptly, it is more
than likely that this has been developing gradually for
some time.
Stage theories of development rest on the suspicion that
development may be a discontinuous process including
particular stages which are characterized by subjective
contrasts in behaviour. They moreover assume that the
structure of the stages isn't variable concurring to each
person, in any case, the time of each arrangement may
shift separately. Stage theories can be differentiated with
ceaseless hypotheses, which set that development is an
incremental process.
Stability vs change:
This issue involves the degree to which one becomes
older renditions of their early experience or whether they
develop into something different from who they were at
an earlier point in development. It considers the extent to
which early experiences (especially infancy), or later
experiences are the key determinants of a person's
development. Stability is defined as the consistent
ordering of individual differences with respect to some
attribute. Change is altering someone/something.
Most human development lifespan developmentalists
recognize that extreme positions are unwise. Therefore,
the key to a comprehensive understanding of
development at any stage requires the interaction of
distinct factors and not only one.
Mathematical models:
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 underlying these changes.
Psychologists have attempted to better understand these
factors by using models. A model must simply account
for the means by which a process takes place. This is
sometimes done in reference to changes in the brain that
may correspond to changes in behaviour over the course
of the development.
Mathematical modelling is useful in developmental
psychology for implementing theory in a precise and
easy-to-study manner, allowing generation, explanation,
integration, and prediction of diverse phenomena.
Several modelling techniques are applied to
development: symbolic, connectionist (neural network),
or dynamical systems models.
Dynamic systems models illustrate how many distinctive
features of a complex system may interact to yield
emergent behaviours and abilities. Nonlinear dynamics
has been applied to human systems specifically to
address issues that require attention to temporality such
as life transitions, human development, and behavioural
or emotional change over time. Nonlinear dynamic
systems are currently being explored as a way to explain
discrete phenomena of human development such as
affect, second language acquisition, and locomotion.

Theory of mind:
Theory of mind is the ability to attribute mental states to
ourselves and others. It is a complex but vital process in
which children begin to understand the emotions,
motives, and feelings of not only themselves but also
others. Theory of mind allows people to understand that
others have unique beliefs and desires that are different
from our own. This enables people to engage in daily
social interactions as we explain the mental state around
us. If a child does not fully develop theory of mind
within this crucial 5-year period, they can suffer from
communication barriers that follow them into
adolescence and adulthood. Exposure to more people
and the availability of stimuli that encourages social-
cognitive growth is a factor that relies heavily on family.