Developmental Stage Theories Essay Example for Free

Develop cordial detail Theories EssayDevelopmental psychological science is the scientific guinea pig of changes that clear in gay beings over the course of their life span. Originally concerned with infantsand children, the know takege domain has grow to hold adolescence, adult aiming, aging, and the entire life span. This field examines change across a broad range of topics including drive skills and other psycho-physiological makees cognitive growth involving atomic number 18as much(prenominal)(prenominal) as problem solving, chaste understanding, and conceptual understanding wording acquisition accessible, personality, and ruttish development and self-concept and identity formation. Developmental psychology involves issues such as the extent to which development occurs finished the gradual accumulation of experience versus stage- alike development, or the extent to which children argon born with innate mental structures, versus learning by means of exp erience. Many researchers be interested in the interaction mingled with personal characteristics, the man-to-mans behavior, and environmental factors including hearty context, and their impact on development others meet a much(prenominal) narrowly- center oned approach.Developmental psychology informs some(prenominal) applied fields, including educational psychology, child psychopathology, and forensic developmental psychology. Developmental psychology complements several other primary research fields in psychology including social psychology, cognitive psychology, ecological psychology, and comparative psychology. Theories Attachment possibleness Attachment surmise, theoretical frame work originally developed by John Bowlby, foc practices on open, intimate, turned on(p)ly meaningful relationships. Attachment is described as a biological system or powerful pick impulse that evolved to ensure the survival of the infant.A child who is threatened or stressed will discover toward cargongivers who create a virtuoso of fleshly, emotional and psychological safety for the individual. Attachment feeds on body touch on and familiarity. Later Mary Ainsworth developed the Strange Situation protocol and the concept of the secure base. There are deuce-ace types of attachment styles secure, anxious-avoidant, and anxious-resistant. Secure attachment is a healthy attachment in the midst of the infant and the caregiver. It is characterized by trust. Anxious-avoidant is an insecure attachment between an infant and a caregiver.This is characterized by the infants indifference 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 puke be hindered in its natural tendency to form attachments. Some babies are raised without the stimulation and circumspection of a rhythmical caregiver, or locked a right smart under condition s of abuse or extreme neglect. The possible short effects of this deprivation are anger, despair, detachment, and temporary delay in intellectual development.Long-term effects include increased aggression, clinging behavior, detachment, psychosomatic disorders, and an increased risk of depression as an adult. 23 Constructivism Constructivism is a paradigm in psychology that characterizes learning as a process of actively nameing knowledge. Individuals create meaning for themselves or make sense of unsanded instruction by selecting, organizing, and integrating information with other knowledge, often in the content of social interactions. There are two ways in which constructivism can 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 knowled ge they bring to a situation and social or cultural exchanges within that content. 4 Ecological systems theory The Ecological systems theory, originally formulated by Urie Bronfenbrenner specifies four types of nested environmental systems, with bi-directional influences within and between the systems.The four systems are microsystem, mesosystem, exosystem, and macrosystem. Each system contains types, norms and rules that can powerfully shape development. The microsystem is the nimble environment surrounding and influencing the individual (example school or the home setting). The mesosystem is the combination of two microsystems and how they influence from each one other (example sibling relationships at home vs. peer relationships at school). The exosystem is the interaction among two or more settings that are indirectly linked (example a fathers job requiring more overtime ends up influencing his aughters performance in school because he can no longer help with her homework).Th e macrosystem is broader taking into report social sparing status, culture, beliefs, customs and morals (example a child from a wealthier family externalizes a peer from a less smashed 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 support 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 study of human beings and their environments. As a result of this conceptualization of development, these environmentsfrom the family to economic and political structures permit come to be viewed as part of the life course from childhood through adulthood. 6 Psychosexual development Sigmund Freud believed that we a ll had a conscious, preconscious, and unconscious 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 hold back what the unconscious was trying to express. To explain this he developed troika structures of personality the id, ego, and superego. The id, being the most 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. found on this he proposed five universal stages of development. The first is the oral stage which occurs from birth to 12 months of age, back is the anal stage which occurs from one to three years of age, third is the phallic stage which occurs from three to fi ve years of age (most of a persons personality is formed by this age), the fourth is called latent period which occurs from age five until puberty, and lastly stage five is the genital stage which takes place from puberty until adulthood. 7Stages of moral development Theories of morality that stem from Jean Piagets cognitive-developmental viewpoint emphasize shifts in the type of think that individuals use in making moral decisions. Changes in the content of the decision they reach 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 reason out preconventional moral reasoning, conventional moral reasoning, and postconventional moral reasoning.Preconventional moral reasoning is typical of children and is characterized by reasoning that is based on rewards and punishments associated with different courses of action. Conventional moral reason occurs during la te childhood and premature 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 tend age. Stage four is industry versus inferiority which occurs during school age. Stage five is identity versus identity diffusion which occurs during adolescence. Stage six is in timacy versus isolation which occurs during young adulthood.Stage seven is generativity versus self-absorption which occurs during adulthood. Lastly, stage eight is fairness versus despair which occurs during old age. In each of these stages either one or the other crisis is developed. The ideal function 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 appropriate materials or the child to interact and construct. He would use Socratic questioning 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 c enters across the United States. Piaget believed that intellectual development took place through a serial of stages which caused him to come up with his Theory on Cognitive Development. Each stage consisted of steps which the child had to quash before moving on to the next step.He believe that these stages where not separate from one another(prenominal) but rather each stage built on the previous one, hence learning was continuous. His theory consisted of four stages sensori travel, pre-operational, concrete operational, and formal operational. Though he did not believe these stages occurred at any disposed age, many studies have determine 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 seasonable and sensitive intervention by adults when a chi ld is on the edge of learning a new task (called the zone of proximal development) could help children learn new tasks. Martin Hill stated that The world of creation 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 determine 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 remissness this connection, then this disregard would inhibit the full comprehension of the human consciousness Nature/nurture A significant issue in developmental psychology is the relationship between innateness and environmental influence in rega rd 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 specified by the organisms genes. An empiricist perspective would argue that those processes are acquired in interaction with the environment. Today developmental psychologists rarely take such polarised linear perspectives 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 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 acquire d 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 need 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 refresh of the behaviorist model of language acquisition is regarded by many as a k ey round point in the decline in the prominence of the theory of behaviorism generally. 12 But Skinners conception of literal Behavior 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 upcountry workings underlying 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 done in reference to changes in the mental capacity 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 mechanism s of development. Research areas Cognitive developmentCognitive development is to begin with concerned with the ways in which infants and children acquire, develop, and use internal mental capabilities such as problem solving, keeping, and language. study topics in cognitive development are the study of language acquisition and the development of perceptual and motor skills. Piaget was one of the influential early psychologists to study the development of cognitive abilities. His theory suggests that development proceeds 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 begins 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 meditated, instead of treated as a product to be obtained. K. Warner Schaie has expanded the study 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 processing skill 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 same-age and of the same grade-level. However, oth er theories have moved away from Piagetian stage theories, and are influenced by accounts of domain-specific information processing, which posit that development is guided 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 sustain 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. randy 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 affected by the emotional regulation children observe in parents and caretakers, the emotional climate in the home, and the reaction of parents and caretakers to the childs emotions. 16 somatogenetic 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 other variables of developmental psychology such as information processing speed. Traditional measures of physical maturity using x-rays are less in practice nowadays, compared to simplistic 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.According 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 years-old have verbatim memory, memory for s urface 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.