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Chapter 14

Chapter 14: Development

Chapter Review

PRENATAL DEVELOPMENT

  • Organisms grow as they change from a fertilized egg to an embryo, and then to a fetus. Prenatal development is guided by the genome, but environmental factors are also crucial.
  • Some environmental factors are local, such as those that shape cell differentiation in the brain. Other environmental factors are global, such as the presence of teratogens, factors that disrupt development.

INFANCY AND CHILDHOOD

  • In humans, growth and brain maturation continue long after birth, but this lengthy period of development is advantageous for a species whose major specialization is its capacity for learning and whose basic invention is culture.
  • Infants have a number of reflexes that help them through their initial period of helplessness. Examples are the grasp reflex, the rooting reflex, and the sucking reflex. Newborns also have reasonably mature sensory capacities.
  • According to Jean Piaget, the first stage of cognitive development is the sensorimotor period (birth to to age 2). During this period, the infant develops the concept of object permanence. In the preoperational period (age 2 to 7), children are capable of representational thought but lack the ability to organize that thought. This is evident in their inability to conserve number and quantity.Piaget believed that at about age 7, children begin to manipulate mental representations. In his view, they remain in the concrete operational period, which lacks an element of abstractness, until they are about age 12.
  • Studies of visual perception using habituation procedures suggest that—despite Piaget’s claims—infants come equipped with some built-in understanding of the physical world. Infants show appropriate reactions to perceptual occlusion and have some concept of object permanence, although they are rather inept in searching for hidden objects. One reason is that the infant has difficulty in overriding the tendency to reach for an object at a place she had previously seen it, as shown by the A-not-B effect.
  • Further studies show that infants can perceive numerical equivalence if the number of objects in the set is small enough and that they have some rudiments of numerical reasoning.
  • Piaget also underestimated infants’ capacity for social cognition. Infants seem to understand others’ actions in terms of their goals, and not in terms of the specific movements themselves. It also turns out that preschoolers have the rudiments of a theory of mind, although their emerging competence sits side by side with limitations, as can be seen in children’s poor performance with false belief tasks.
  • In the domain of socioemotional development, from a very early age, infants are keenly interested in face-to-face interaction. Between 7 and 9 months, infants begin to crawl, creating the first conflicts between infants and caregivers (if the infant crawls into a dangerous or inappropriate situation), and creating the need for social referencing.
  • Infants begin to feel separation anxiety between 6 and 8 months of age and have a need for contact comfort, which, according to Bowlby, provides the infant with a secure base.
  • Infants differ in their beliefs about the social world—or internal working models —and this is evident in different patterns of attachment. Attachment is usually assessed by observing the behavior of children in the Strange Situation. In this situation, some children are classified as securely attached, others show anxious/resistant or anxious/avoidant attachment, and others show a disorganized pattern of attachment. Styles of attachment are relatively stable, but they can change if the child’s circumstances change. The style of attachment is predictive of many subsequent events in the child’s social and emotional development, but there is debate over the mechanisms behind these correlational findings.
  • Differences in attachment are in part due to differences in temperament, and in part due to differences in caregiver responsiveness.
  • Parents differ in their parenting styles, whether authoritarian, permissive, authoritative, or disengaged. Which style parents adopt depends partly on the parents and partly on the child’s own characteristics. Evidence to date suggests that authoritative parenting is often preferable.
  • Infants’ attachment does not seem to be disrupted by childcare, especially if the childcare is of high quality. However, social development may be disrupted by divorce or separation of the parents. Development is more severely disrupted if there is no attachment at all, as reflected in the tragic evidence from Romanian orphanages.
  • Friendships are important for many reasons, including the support they provide for a child and the various skills and knowledge a child can gain from friendships. For example, children learn how to handle conflict by quarreling—and then making up—with their friends.
  • Children with friends seem better able to handle many stresses. Conversely, rejected children tend to be more aggressive and, in some cases, more anxious.
  • The study of moral development has been strongly affected by Kohlberg’s analysis of progressive stages in moral reasoning. There may, however, also be sex differences in moral orientation and differences among cultural groups.
  • A person’s moral reasoning is clearly tied to his moral behavior, but other factors also matter, including the person’s sense of conscience. The development of a conscience seems to depend on the child’s relationship with his parents and his wish to preserve that relationship.

ADOLESCENCE

  • Puberty is associated with the development of primary and secondary sexual characteristics. For boys, early maturation is generally beneficial. For girls, early maturation appears to be less beneficial.
  • Cognitive development in adolescence is characterized by the shift from concrete operations to formal operations around age 12.
  • Erik Erikson charted socioemotional development during adolescence. For Erikson, the key developmental focus during adolescences is identity versus role confusion. A successful outcome of this stage is a stable sense of ego identity. Less satisfactory outcomes include identity confusion or the emergence of a negative identity.
  • While adolescence is sometimes turbulent, it is not usually so. Adolescence is also often characterized by risk-taking behaviors; these are in turn the result of adolescents’ failing to take dangers seriously and immaturity in the adolescents’ prefrontal cortex. During this period, peer relationships assume an even greater importance than they have previously.

ADULTHOOD AND OLDER AGE

  • Physical changes in adulthood include a general decline in physical and sensory abilities.
  • Cognitive changes are also evident during adulthood and older age. Fluid intelligence refers to the efficiency and speed of intellectual functioning, usually in areas that are new to the person, and this aspect of intelligence declines across the life span. Crystallized intelligence refers to an individual’s accumulated knowledge, including his or her vocabulary, known facts, and learned strategies. This form of intelligence remains relatively stable over the life span and may even grow as the person gains more and more experience. Many hypotheses have been offered for what lies behind this decline. Some emphasize the individual’s biological and/or medical status (including Alzheimer’s disease). Others emphasize the individual’s mental life, so that people who are mentally more active preserve their memory more fully as they age.
  • According to Erikson, socioemotional development during adulthood can be described using three stages: intimacy versus isolation, generativity versus stagnation, and integrity versus despair.
  • One surprising finding concerning older age is that older adults have relatively high levels of well-being. One explanation for these unexpectedly high levels of well-being is provided by socioemotional-selectivity theory, which holds that older adults increasingly prioritize emotion regulation goals, which leads them to feel less negative emotion and more positive emotion.
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