1. The Childhood Years: Motor Development
Basic Principles
Cephalocaudal trend – head to foot
Proximodistal trend – center-outward
Maturation – gradual unfolding of genetic blueprint
Developmental norms – median age
Cultural variations
Motor development refers to the progression of muscular coordination required for physical activities.
A basic number of principles are apparent in motor development. The cephalocaudal trend describes the fact that children tend to gain control over the upper part of their bodies before the lower part.
The proximodistal trend describes the fact that children gain control over their torsos before their extremities.
Motor development depends in part on physical growth, as well as on the process of maturation (the gradual unfolding of one’s genetic blueprint), and the infant’s ongoing exploration of the world.
Developmental norms indicate the median age at which individuals display various behaviors and abilities…useful benchmarks only.
Cultural variations in motor development indicate the importance of experience on the development of motor skills. Nevertheless, the similarities across cultures outweigh the differences, illustrating the importance of maturation.

2. Early Emotional Development: Attachment
Separation anxiety
Ainsworth (1979)
The strange situation and patterns of attachment
Secure
Anxious-ambivalent
Avoidant
Developing secure attachment
Bonding at birth
Daycare
Cultural factors
Evolutionary perspectives on attachment
Attachment refers to the close, emotional bonds of affection that develop between infants and their caregivers.
Separation anxiety is emotional distress seen in many infants when they are separated from people with whom they have formed an attachment.
Ainsworth, in the 1970’s, developed a research paradigm to study attachment using separation anxiety as a measure.
She found that most infants have a secure attachment, playing and exploring comfortably when mom is present, becoming visibly upset when she leaves, and calming quickly upon her return.
Some babies, however, show anxiety even when mom is near and protest excessively when she leaves, but are not particularly comforted when she returns…Ainsworth labeled this pattern anxious-ambivalent attachment. Finally, some babies sought little contact with their mothers and were not distressed when she left, a pattern Ainsworth labeled avoidant attachment.
Evidence suggests that securely attached children tend to become resilient, competent toddlers, with high self esteem. In preschool, they show more persistence, curiosity, self-reliance, and leadership…they also get along better with peers. In middle childhood, they display better social skills and have richer friendship networks. Research also suggests that early attachment patterns set the tone for adult romantic relationships.
Factors affecting the development of attachment appear to be related to the quality of interactions between parent and child over time. Bonding during the first few hours after birth does not appear to be crucial to secure attachment. While much concern has focused on the effects of day care on secure attachment, recent research by the NICHD indicates that day care is not harmful to children’s attachment relationships, and there is evidence that there may be beneficial effects of day care on social development in children from deprived backgrounds.
While cross-cultural research shows that attachment is a universal feature of human development, cultural variations in childrearing practices can impact the patterns of attachment seen in a society. Germans, for example, intentionally try to encourage independence, producing more what Ainsworth would call avoidant attachments. Western researchers have demonstrated an ethnocentric slant to their investigations - what represents a secure parent-child attachment may vary culturally.
John Bowlby, who originated the concept of attachment in the late 60s, assumed attachment to be a function of natural selection, with infants programmed to emit behaviors that trigger affectionate, protective responses in adults.
Jay Belsky (1999) asserts that children have been programmed by evolution to respond to sensitive or insensitive care with different attachment patterns.

3. Stage Theories of Development: Personality
Stage theories, three components
progress through stages in order
progress through stages related to age
major discontinuities in development
Erik Erikson (1963)
Eight stages spanning the lifespan
Psychosocial crises determining balance between opposing polarities in personality
Erik Erikson, in the 1960s, proposed a stage theory of personality development based on stages. Many theories of development describe development in terms of stages, or developmental periods during which characteristic patterns of behavior are exhibited and certain capacities become established.
Stage theories assume that individuals must progress through specified stages in a particular order because each stage builds on the previous one. They also assume that progress through the stages is strongly related to age, and that development is marked by major discontinuities that bring about dramatic changes in behavior.
Erikson theorized that there are eight stages, spanning the lifespan, in personality development. He held that there is a specific psychosocial crisis during each stage, the outcome of which determines the balance between opposing polarities in personality.
The eight stages in his theory are depicted on the next slide.

4. Figure 11.10 Stage theories of development

5. Figure 11.11 Erikson’s stage theory

6. Stage Theories: Cognitive Development
Jean Piaget (1920s-1980s)
Assimilation/ Accommodation
4 stages and major milestones
Sensorimotor
Object permanence
Preoperational
Centration, Egocentrism
Concrete Operational
Decentration, Reversibility, Conservation
Formal Operational
Abstraction
Jean Piaget made a landmark contribution to psychology’s understanding of cognitive development, asserting that interaction with the environment and maturation gradually alter the way children think. This progression in thinking occurs through the complementary processes of assimilation (interpreting new experiences in terms of existing mental structures without changing them) and accommodation (changing existing mental structures to explain new experiences).
Piaget proposed that children’s thought processes go through a series of four major stages. (These stages, and the age ranges associated with each, are depicted on the next slide).
Within each stage there are characteristic thinking and reasoning patterns, as well as milestones in development.
In the sensorimotor stage, for example, a child progressively develops object permanence, or the recognition that objects continue to exist even when they are no longer visible.
In the preoperational stage, children engage in symbolic thought, with characteristic flaws in their reasoning such as centration, the tendency to focus on just one feature of a problem, and egocentrism, the limited ability to share another’s viewpoint. This results in animism, the belief that all things are living, just like oneself.
The concrete operational stage is characterized by the ability to perform operations with symbolic thought such as reversing or mentally undoing an action. Children in the concrete operational stage are able to focus on more than one feature of a problem simultaneously, a process called decentration. These new cognitive skills lead to conservation, or recognizing that amount of a substance does not change just because appearance is changed.
The formal operational period is marked by the ability to apply operations to abstract concepts such as justice, love, and free will.
The next slide depicts Piaget’s stages, with associated age ranges.

7. Sensorimotor Intelligence
Sensoritmotor intelligence—active intelligence causing babies to think while using senses and motor skills

8. Figure 11.12 Piaget’s stage theory

9. Sensorimotor Intelligence
Sensoritmotor intelligence—active intelligence causing babies to think while using senses and motor skills

10. Stages 1 and 2: Primary Circular Reactions
The feedback loop involving the infants own body; infant senses motion and tries to make sense of it
Stage 1 = Reflexes
Stage 2 = First Acquired Adaptations
adaptations of reflexes, i.e., sucking—new information taken in by senses and responded to

11. Stages 1 and 2: Primary Circular Reactions, cont.
Assimilation and Accommodation
assimilation—taking in new information by incorporating it into previous knowledge
accommodation— intake of new data to re-adjust, refine, expand prior schema or actions
babies eagerly adapt their reflexes and senses to whatever experiences they have

12. Stages 1 and 2: Primary Circular Reactions, cont.
Sucking as a Stage-Two Adaptation
begin adapting at about one month
reflexive assimilation

13. Stages 3 and 4: Secondary Circular Reactions
feedback loop involving people and objects
Stage 3 = Making Interesting Events Last
repetition
awareness
Stage 4 = New Adaptation and Anticipation
goal-directed behavior
object permanence

14. Stages 5 and 6: Tertiary Circular Reactions
Feedback loop that involves active experimentation and exploration
involves creativity, action, and ideas
Stage 5 = New Means Through Active Experimentation
little scientist

15. Stages 5 and 6: Tertiary Circular Reactions, cont.
Stage 6 = New Means Through Mental Combinations
mental combinations—sequence of mental actions tried out before actual performance
deferred imitation—perception of something someone else does (modeling), then performing action at a later time

16. Figure 11.13 Piaget’s conservation task

17. Figure 11.14 The gradual mastery of conservation

18. Concept Check:
According to Piaget, in what stage would a child be if she could remember where a hidden object is, but doesn’t realize that she is her sister’s sister?
Preoperational

19. Table 10.3 Summary of Piaget’s stages of cognitive development

20. An Overview of Piaget’s Theory
The Formal Operations stage
Formal Operations is Piaget’s term for the mental processes used to deal with abstract, hypothetical situations.
These are processes that demand logical, deductive reasoning and systematic planning.
Piaget proposed that children reach this stage just before adolescence (at about age 11.)
Researchers have found that some people take longer to reach formal operations, and some people never do.

21. An Overview of Piaget’s Theory
The Concrete Operations stage
From about age 7 children begin to exhibit reversible operations and seem to understand the conservation of physical properties.
According to Piaget, during the stage of concrete operations children can perform mental operations on concrete objects.
They may, however, have trouble with abstract or hypothetical ideas.

22. Table 10.2 Typical tasks used to measure conservation

23. Concept Check: Which is the clearest example of egocentric thinking?
1. An exceptionally wealthy man gives no money to charity.
2. A woman assumes that all her friends will want to see the same movie that she does.
3. At student council meeting, a student takes credit for someone else’s ideas.
#2 – selfishness (1) and dishonesty (3) are not the same as egocentrism.

24. Difficulties of Inferring Children’s Concepts
Symbolic thought
Do children in the early preoperational stage lack an ability to think symbolically?
2 ½ year old children cannot use a model room as a “map” when trying to locate a hidden toy in a regular sized room.
But when told that the toy was hidden in the model room, and a special machine has “expanded” the model to a full size room, the children have little difficulty finding the hidden toy.

25. Figure 10.22 If an experimenter hides a small toy in a small room and asks a child to find a larger toy “in the same place” in the larger room, a 21/2-year-old searches haphazardly. (a) However, the same child knows exactly where to look, if the experimenter says this is the same room as before, except that a machine has expanded it (b).

26. Figure 10.21 Then that adult and another (who had not been present initially) point to one of the cups to signal where the surprise is hidden. Many 4-year-olds consistently follow the advice of the informed adult;3-year-olds do not.

27. Figure 10.21 A child sits in front of a screen covering four cups and watches as one adult hides a surprise under one of the cups.

28. Difficulties of Inferring Children’s Concepts
Understanding other people’s thoughts
Are young children more cognitively egocentric than adults are?
What Piaget meant by this is that a child cannot easily understand the perspectives of other people.
Various experiments show that preschool aged children make errors of thought that are typical of egocentric thinking.
However, adults can make the same mistakes according to other studies.

29. Difficulties of Inferring Children’s Concepts
Distinguishing appearance from reality
Do children in the early preoperational stage fail to distinguish appearance from reality?
It’s not entirely clear whether a child’s inability to do so has more to do with lacking a concept or inadequate language skills.
For example children may seem to confuse a rock and a sponge that looks like a rock, but when asked to bring to an adult something to wipe up spilled water, they have no problem identifying the sponge as the correct object for that purpose.

30. Difficulties of Inferring Children’s Concepts
There may be a fundamental weakness in the assumption made by Piaget that a child either “has” or “lacks” a concept.
Concepts develop gradually and may appear using some methods of testing but not others.

31. An Overview of Piaget’s Theory
The Preoperational stage
Another example of a concept that preoperational children lack is conservation.
The inability to conserve results in a failure to recognize that changes in shape and arrangement do not always signify changes in amount or number.

32. An Overview of Piaget’s Theory
The Preoperational stage
Piaget called the second stage of cognitive development the preoperational stage because the child lacks operations.
The term “operations” refers to reversible mental processes.
The lack of operations leads to errors in cognition such as egocentric thinking – the child for example knows that he has a brother, but doesn’t understand that he is his brother’s brother.

33. An Overview of Piaget’s Theory
The Sensorimotor stage
As infants progress through the sensorimotor stage, they seem to develop a concept of self.
At about 1 year of age, they begin to show signs that they recognize themselves.
They also begin to show self-conscious emotions such as embarrassment.

34. An Overview of Piaget’s Theory
The Sensorimotor stage
Recent research by Baillergeon suggests that infants 6-8 months old who are tested differently from methods used by Piaget do have a limited ability to understand object permanence.
Baillergeon’s research results suggest that infants can differentiate between possible and physically impossible events.

35. An Overview of Piaget’s Theory
The sensorimotor stage
Object Permanence
Jean Piaget believed that infants lacked a concept of object permanence during the early months of life.
Object permanence is the idea that objects continue to exist even when one cannot see them or otherwise sense them.
According to Piaget, an infant does not know that a hidden object is still there until about 8-9 months of age.

36. An Overview of Piaget’s Theory
The sensorimotor stage
Piaget called the first stage the sensorimotor stage because at this early age behavior consists primarily of simple motor responses to sensory stimuli.
Examples of these would be the grasping and sucking reflexes.
Piaget believed that infants respond only to what they see and hear, not what they remember or imagine.

37. An Overview of Piaget’s Theory
The four stages of intellectual development
Sensorimotor Birth to 2 years of age
Preoperational 2 to 7 years of age
Concrete Operations 7 to 11 years of age
Formal Operations 11 years of age and older

38. An Overview of Piaget’s Theory
Adaptation of old schemata takes place through two processes.
Through assimilation, a person applies an old schema to a new object.
Through accommodation, a person modifies an old schema to fit a new object.
People in all stages switch back and forth between these two strategies, but ultimately cognitive change is accomplished through accommodation.

39. An Overview of Piaget’s Theory
Piaget believed that a child constructs new mental processes as he or she interacts with the environment.
Behavior is based on schemata (singular - schema.)
A schema is an organized way of interacting with objects in the world.
New schemata are added, and old schemata are changed as the child matures.

40. Jean Piaget’s Views of Development
Piaget came to believe that children think differently from adults, both quantitatively and qualitatively.
He believed that children of different cognitive maturity levels react to the same experience very differently.
Piaget used his own extensive observational studies of children to support his conclusions.

41. Jean Piaget’s Views of Development
Piaget believed that the effect of any experience on a person’s knowledge or thinking depended on the person’s maturity combined with previous experiences.
He began his psychological career administering IQ tests, but found that he was bored with this activity. He was, however, fascinated by the incorrect answers that children would give.

42. The Development of Moral Reasoning
Kohlberg (1976)
Reasoning as opposed to behavior
Moral dilemmas
Measured nature and progression of moral reasoning
3 levels, each with 2 sublevels
Preconventional
Conventional
Postconventional
Lawrence Kohlberg devised a stage theory of moral development based on subjects’ responses to presented moral dilemmas. Kohlberg was interested in a person’s reasoning, not necessarily their answer.
He theorized that people progress through a series of three levels of moral development, each of which can be broken into 2 sublevels. Each stage represents a different way of thinking about right and wrong.
These stages, and the characteristic reasoning patterns associated with each, are presented on the next slide.

44. Figure 11.17 Kohlberg’s stage theory

45. Adolescence: Physiological Changes
Pubescence
Puberty
Secondary sex characteristics
Primary sex characteristics
Menarche
Sperm production
Maturation: early vs. late
Sex differences in effects of early maturation
Pubescence is the term used to describe the two-year span preceding puberty during which the changes leading to physical and sexual maturity take place.
During this period, children grow taller and heavier and develop secondary sex characteristics, physical features that distinguish one sex from the other but that are not essential for reproduction.
Puberty is the stage during which sexual functions reach maturity, marking the beginning of adolescence. It is during puberty that the primary sex characteristics, the structures necessary for reproduction, develop fully.
In females, the onset of puberty is signaled by menarche – the fist occurrence of menstruation. In males, it is signaled by sperm production.
Puberty is occurring at younger ages, compared to previous generations; explanations for this trend include improvements in nutrition and medical care. Some theorists (Belsky) also hypothesize that the quality of a person’s early family relationships may influence earlier onset of puberty.
The timing of puberty varies individually (10-15 for girls is typical, for boys). Studies of early maturers vs. late maturers indicate that there are sex differences in effects of early vs. late maturation, with early maturing girls and late maturing boys having greater risk for psychological problems and social difficulties.

47. What About Spanking? Reasons for parenting variations
culture, religion, ethnicity, national origin
parents’ own upbringing
Developmentalists fear children who are physically punished will learn to be more aggressive
domestic violence of any kind can increase aggression between peers and within families

48. Techniques of Discipline, cont.
In deciding which technique to apply, parents should ask: How does technique relate to child?
child’s temperament, age, and perceptions crucial considerations

49. Techniques of Discipline
Culture is a strong influence
expectations
offenses
punishments
In United States
time-out is used
child stops all activity and sits in corner or stays inside for a few minutes

50. Punishment
Discipline an integral part of parenting

51. Baumrind’s Three Styles of Parenting, cont.
Recent studies have found link between parenting styles and child behavior less direct than Baumrind’s original research indicated
impact of child’s temperament
influence of community and cultural differences on child’s perception of parenting
in poor or minority families, authoritarian parenting tends to be used to produce high-achieving, emotionally regulated children: strict and warm can be successful

53. Baumrind’s Three Styles of Parenting, cont.
authoritarian—high standards and expectations with low nurturance
children likely to become conscientious, obedient, and quiet—but not happy
permissive—little control, but nurturing
children likely to lack self-control and are not happy
authoritative—limits and guidance provided but willing to compromise
children are more likely to be successful, articulate, intelligent, and happy

54. Baumrind’s Three Styles of Parenting
Baumrind’s 4 important dimensions that influence parenting
expression of warmth or nurturance
strategies for discipline
quality of communication
expectations for maturity

55. Figure 11.19 Physical development at puberty

56. Adolescence: Neural Changes
Increasing myelinization
Synaptic pruning
Changes in prefrontal cortex
In recent years, the increasing availability of MRI scans has allowed researchers to study the developing adolescent brain.
The “white matter” increases, reflecting increasing myelinization.
At the same time, there is evidence of increased synaptic pruning.
These changes are thought to reflect maturation in the prefrontal cortex. It appears that the prefrontal cortex is the last area of the brain to mature fully. Some researchers have suggested that this is connected with the increase in risky behaviors during adolescence.

57. The Search for Identity
Erik Erikson (1968)
Key challenge - forming a sense of identity
James Marcia (1988)
4 identity statuses
Foreclosure
Moratorium
Identity Diffusion
Identity Achievement
According to Erikson, the key challenge of adolescence is to form a clear sense of identity.
James Marcia asserts that the presence or absence of crisis and commitment during the identity formation stage can combine in various ways to produce four different identity statuses.
Foreclosure is a premature commitment to a role prescribed by one’s parents.
A moratorium involves delaying commitment and engaging in experimentation with different roles.
Identity diffusion is a state of lack of direction and apathy, where a person does not confront the challenge and commit to an ideology.
Identity achievement involves arriving at a sense of self and direction after some consideration of alternative possibilities.

58. The Expanse of Adulthood
Personality development
Social development
Career development
Physical changes
Cognitive changes
Personality is marked by both stability and change, as adulthood is a period of many transitions. Adults who move successfully through Erikson’s stages develop intimacy, generativity, and integrity.
Many landmarks in adult development involve transitions in family relationships: marriage, parenthood, parent adolescent relations, the empty nest syndrome.
Studies of marriage and marital satisfaction indicate that when spouses have differing role expectations, adjustment to marriage is more difficult. Research also shows highest rates of marital satisfaction at the beginning and end of the family cycle.
Research shows that adjustment to parenthood proceeds more smoothly if unrealistic expectations are not held. Research on later parent/child relations suggests that parent-adolescent relations and the adjustment difficulties that parents may have when children leave home (empty nest syndrome) may not be as stressful as once believed.
Vocational development tends to proceed through stages of exploration of careers, establishment of a career, maintenance, and decline.
Age related physical changes include changes in appearance, neuron loss, sensory loss, and hormonal changes. Research indicates that menopause is not as problematic as once thought.
Cognitive functioning research indicates that general mental ability remains fairly stable, with small declines in IQ after age 60. Fluid intelligence is more likely to decline with age, while crystallized intelligence remains stable or increases.
Mental speed declines in late adulthood, and memory losses have been reported in many studies. These are moderate and variable.