Developmental Psychology

The study of YOU from womb to tomb.

• Nature Versus Nurture
• Nature: The way you were born.
• Nurture: The way you were raised.
• Physical Development: focus on our physical changes over time.
• Prenatal Development: conception begins with the drop of an egg and the release of about 200 million sperms.
• Once the sperm penetrates the egg- we have a fertilized egg called a zygote.
• The first stage lasts about two weeks.
• About 10 days after conception, the zygote will attach itself to the uterine wall.
• The outer part of the zygote becomes the placenta- structure that allows oxygen and nutrients
• After two weeks, the zygote develops into an embryo.
• Last about 6 weeks. Heart begins to beat and organs start to develop.
• By nine weeks we have a fetus.
• Teratogens: chemical agents that can harm the prenatal environmental.
• Reflexes: inborn automatic responses.
• Rooting (cheek): when a newborn infant is touched on the cheek, the infant will turn its head toward the source of simulation.
• Grasping: if an object is placed into a baby's palm, the baby will try to grasp the object with his or her fingers.
• Moro (startle): when startled, a baby will fling his or her limbs out and then quickly retract them.
• Babinski (foot): when a baby's foot is stroked, he or she will spread their toes.
• Maturation: physical growth processes that enable orderly changes in behavior, regardless of the environment.
• Cognition: all mental activities associated with thinking, knowing, and remembering.
• Cognitive Development- Jean Piaget
• Schemas: ways we interpret the world around us (concept)
• Assimulation: incorporation new experiences into existing schemas.
• Accommodation: changing an existing schema to adapt to new information.
• 4 Stages of Cognitive Development

1. Sensorimotor Stage (0-2): experience the work through our senses. Object permanence developed around 6-8 months of age.
2. Preoperational Stage (2-7 years): begin to use language to represent objects and ideas. Egocentric: early in this stage they cannot look at the world through anyone's eyes.
• Conservation refers to the idea that a quantity remains the same despite changes in appearance and it part of logical thinking.
3. Concrete Operational Stage (7-11 years): can demonstrate concept of conservation. Learn to think logically.
4. Formal Operational Stage (12 years and up): abstract reasoning. Hypothesis testing. reasoning with metaphors and analogies.

• Criticisms of Piagets
• Information-Processing Model: says children do not learn in stages but rather in a gradual continuous growth pattern.
• Social Development: at about a year, infants develop stranger anxiety.
• Attachment: attachment (a bond with a caregiver). Konrad Lorenz discovered that some animals form attachment through imprinting.
• Origins of Attachment: Harry Harlow showed that monkeys needed to touch or body contact to form attachment. For many animals that there is a critical period shortly after birth when an organism's exposure to certain stimuli or experiences produce proper development.
• Secure Attachment: children show some distress when parent leaves, seek contact at the reunion, explore when parent gone, play and greet when parent present.
• Stranger Anxiety: fear of strangers, beginning by about 8 months of age.
• Separation Anxiety: distress the infant shows when object of attachment leaves. Peaks between 14 and 18 months.