Lifespan Development

1. Lifespan Development Module 1: Lifespan Development

2. Why It Matters • Development is a lifelong process • Learning about the physical, cognitive, and psychosocial changes in each phase of human development across the lifespan helps us to more fully understand people • Examining the influences of gender, generation, race, ethnicity, culture, socioeconomic status, and education level helps us gain a more comprehensive view of the individual within social, cultural, and historical contexts

3. Module Learning Outcomes 1.0 Explain the primary topics of lifespan development and how research is conducted in the field 1.1: Define human development and identify the stages of human development 1.2: Explain the lifespan perspective 1.3: Examine how to do research in lifespan development

4. Introducing Human Development

5. Learning Outcomes: Introducing Human Development 1.1: Define human development and identify the stages of human development 1.1.1: Describe human development and its three domains: physical, cognitive, and psychosocial development 1.1.2: Explain key human development issues about the nature of change: continuous/discontinuous, one course/multiple courses, and nature/nurture 1.1.3: Describe the basic periods of human development

6. Domains in Human Development: Physical • Physical Domain Includes: • Height • Weight • Fine and gross motor skills • Brain development • Puberty • Sexual health • Fertility and menopause • Changes in our senses • Primary and secondary aging

7. Domains in Human Development: Cognitive • Cognitive Domain Includes: • Language development • Thinking (e.g., logical thinking, abstract reasoning) • Learning and understanding • Memory abilities • Moral reasoning • Practical intelligence • Wisdom

8. Domains in Human Development: Psychosocial • Psychosocial Domain Includes: • Psychological and social development • Temperament and attachment • Emotions • Personality • Self-esteem • Relationships • Identity development • Dating, romance, cohabitation, marriage, and having children • Finding work or a career • Caregiving, retirement, coping with losses, and death and dying

9. Key Human Development Issues: Continuous or Discontinuous • Continuous • Development is a cumulative process • Gradually improve on existing skills • Discontinuous • Development occurs in unique stages • Development at specific times or ages

10. Key Human Development Issues: One Course or Many Courses • One Course • Development is essentially the same for all • Development is universal • Stage theories • Many Courses • Development follows a different course for each child, depending on the child’s specific genetics, environment, and culture

11. Key Human Development Issues: Nature versus Nurture • Known in psychology as the Nature versus Nurture Debate • Nature: Biology and genetics • Nurture: Environment (e.g., parents, peers) and culture • Interaction between genes and environment • Both shape who we become • There is continued debate about the relative contributions of each

12. Basic Periods of Human Development • Prenatal Development: germinal, embryonic, and fetal periods • Infancy and Toddlerhood: the first two years • Early Childhood: Ages 2 to 5 or 6 • Middle Childhood: Ages 6 to 11 • Adolescence: Ages 12 to 18 • Early Adulthood: late teens, twenties and thirties • Middle Adulthood: late thirties (or age 40) through the mid-60s • Late Adulthood: • “young old” (65-74 years old) • “old old” (75-84 years old) • “oldest old” (85+ years old)

13. Practice Question 1 The _______ of human development involves one’s feelings, relationships, identity, and personality. • physical domain • cognitive domain • psychosocial domain • lifespan domain

14. Practice Question 2 Which period of development involves developing independence and feeling like an adult? • Adolescence • Early adulthood • Middle adulthood • Late adulthood

15. The Lifespan Perspective

16. Learning Outcomes: The Lifespan Perspective 1.2: Explain the lifespan perspective 1.2.1: Describe Baltes' lifespan perspective with its key principles about development (lifelong, multidimensional, multidirectional, plastic, contextual, and multidisciplinary) 1.2.2: Explain what is meant by development being lifelong, multidimensional, and multidirectional 1.2.3: Explain contextual influences on development

17. Baltes’ Lifespan Perspective • Lifespan development: the biological, cognitive, and psychosocial changes and constancies that occur throughout the entire course of life • Lifespan Perspective: an approach to studying lifespan development attributed to Paul Baltes, a German psychologist and leading expert on lifespan development and aging

18. Baltes’ Lifespan Perspective: Key Principles • Development occurs across one’s entire life or is lifelong • Development is multidimensional • Development is multidirectionaland results in gains and losses throughout life • Development is plastic, meaning that characteristics are malleable or changeable • Development is influenced by contextual and socio-cultural influences • Development is multidisciplinary

19. Development is Lifelong Development occurs across one’s entire life or is lifelong • Development encompasses the entire lifespan, from conception to death • Traditional view: • focused on conception to adolescence and the gradual decline in old age • It was believed that the five or six decades after adolescence yielded little to no developmental change at all • Current view: changes in development can occur later in life, without having been established at birth

20. Development is Multidimensional Development is multidimensional • A complex interaction of biological, cognitive, and socioemotional changes influence development across the lifespan • Example of puberty in adolescence: • Physiological/physical changes in hormone levels, primary and secondary sex characteristics, changes in height and weight • Cognitive changes in terms of the ability to think abstractly • Emotional and social changes involving regulating emotions, interacting with peers, and possibly dating

21. Development is Multidirectional Development is multidirectionaland results in gains and losses throughout life • We have the capacity for both an increase and decrease in the efficacy of certain traits over the course of the lifespan • Selective optimization with compensation: prioritizing and improving the efficacy of particular functions, thereby reducing the adaptive capacity of other functions • Example: • Childhood: difficulty with regulating emotions and impulsive actions • Adolescence: increased ability to regulate emotions and impulses, but they may sacrifice spontaneity, creativity, or fast responding

22. Development is Plastic Development is plastic, meaning that characteristics are malleable or changeable • The nature of human development is more pluralistic than originally thought; there is no single pathway in development • Consider the example of cognitive decline in aging • Dimensions of cognitive decline are partially reversible because the brain retains the lifelong capacity for plasticity and reorganization of cortical tissue • Research suggests that cognitive function, such as memory, can be improved in mature adults with age-related cognitive decline by using brain plasticity-based training methods

23. Development is Contextual Development is influenced by contextual and socio-cultural influences • Development varies from person to person, depending on factors such as a person’s biology, family, school, church, profession, nationality, and ethnicity • Three types of contextual influences operate across the lifespan: • normative age-graded influences • normative history-graded influences • nonnormative influences

24. Normative Age-Graded Influences • Biological and environmental factors that have a strong correlation with chronological age, such as puberty or menopause • Age-based social practices such as beginning school or entering retirement

25. Normative History-Graded Influences • Associated with a specific time period that defines the broader environmental and cultural context in which an individual develops • Development and identity are influenced by historical events that people experience. For example, • Great Depression • WWII • The Vietnam War • The Cold War • The War on Terror • Advances in technology

26. Nonnormative Influences • Unpredictable and not tied to a certain time in a person’s development or to a historical period • The unique experiences of an individual, whether biological or environmental, that shape the development process • Examples of nonnormative influences: • Earning a master’s degree • Getting a certain job offer • Going through a divorce • Coping with the death of a child

27. Class Activity: Contextual Influences on Your Development • Get into groups of four or more and discuss the following three types of contextual influences on your own development, with special attention to cognitive and psychosocial domains: • Age-based social practices, such as when you started college (age-graded influences) • Historical events that have shaped your development (history-graded influences) • Unique life experiences that have influenced your development (nonnormative influences) • Listen for commonalities and differences in your group • Share your observations with the class

28. Other Contextual Influences: Cohort • Cohort: a group of people who are born at roughly the same time period in a particular society • Members of a cohort experience the same historical events and cultural climates which influence their values, priorities, and goals

29. Other Contextual Influences: Socioeconomic Status • Socioeconomic Status or Social Class: a way to identify families and households based on their shared levels of education, income, and occupation • Members of a social class tend to share similar lifestyles, patterns of consumption, parenting styles, stressors, religious preferences, and other aspects of daily life (although there are individual variations)

30. Other Contextual Influences: Culture • Often referred to as a blueprint shared by a group of people that specifies how to live • Culture includes ideas about the following: • what is right and wrong • what to strive for • what to eat • how to speak • what is valued • what kinds of emotions are called for in certain situations • Culture is learned from parents, schools, churches, media, friends, and others throughout a lifetime

31. Other Contextual Influences: Culture continued • Ethnocentrism: the belief that our own culture’s practices and expectations are the right ones or are superior • This is a normal byproduct of growing up in a culture • It becomes a roadblock when it inhibits understanding of cultural practices from other societies • Cultural relativity: an appreciation for cultural differences and the understanding that cultural practices are best understood from the standpoint of that particular culture

32. Development is Multidisciplinary Development is multidisciplinary • Any one discipline would not be able to account for all aspects of lifespan development • Lifespan researchers state that it takes a combination of disciplines to understand development: • Psychologists • Sociologists • Neuroscientists • Anthropologists • Educators • Economists • Historians • Medical researchers

33. Practice Question 3 Brain training programs capitalize on the brain’s lifelong capacity to reorganize cortical tissue, which aligns with Baltes’ key principle of lifespan development that _______. • development is plastic • development is multidimensional • development is multidirectional • development is lifelong

34. Practice Question 4 Millennials, those born between 1982 and 2000, are considered tech-savvy because they grew up with technology and rely on it for daily activities. Which of Baltes’ contextual influences does this represent? • Normative age-graded influences • Normative history-graded influences • Nonnormative influences • Normative contextual influences

35. Research in Lifespan Development

36. Learning Outcomes: Research in Lifespan Development 1.3: Examine how to do research in lifespan development 1.3.1: Explain the value of the scientific method in researching development 1.3.2: Compare various types and objectives of developmental research 1.3.3: Describe methods for collecting research data (including observation, survey, case study, content analysis, and secondary content analysis)

37. Learning Outcomes: Research in Lifespan Development 1.3: Examine how to do research in lifespan development, continued 1.3.4: Explain Correlational Research 1.3.5: Describe the value of experimental research 1.3.6: Compare advantages and disadvantages of developmental research designs (cross-sectional, longitudinal, and sequential) 1.3.7: Describe challenges associated with conducting research in lifespan development

38. How do we know what we know? Experiential reality: knowing based on your own history Agreement reality: knowing based on what others have told you or cultural ideas Problems with personal inquiry or drawing conclusions based on our personal experience: The tendency to see what we believe because of “cognitive blinders” Confirmation bias: the tendency to look for evidence that we are right and in so doing, we ignore contradictory evidence

39. Value of the Scientific Method • Science involves continuously renewing our understanding of topics in question and an ongoing investigation of how and why events occur • Science is falsifiable • Scientific inquiry involves attempts to reject or refute a theory or set of assumptions • A theory that cannot be falsified is not scientific

40. The Scientific Method: Sampling • Science offers a more systematic way to make comparisons and guard against bias • Random sampling of research participants • Techniques used to ensure that all participants have an equal chance of being selected • A randomly selected, representative sample is preferable, but it is not always used because of costs and other limitations • As a consumer of research, you should know how the sample was obtained and keep this in mind when interpreting results • It is possible that the results are limited to that sample or similar individuals and not generalizable to everyone else

41. A Scientific Method for Quantitative Research • Quantitative: quantifying or using statistics to understand phenomena • Determine a research question • Conduct a literature review of previous studies on the topic • Determine a method of gathering information • Conduct the study • Interpret the results • Draw conclusions; state limitations of the study and make suggestions for future research • Make your findings available to others • To share information • To have your work scrutinized by others

42. A Scientific Method for Qualitative Research • Qualitative: theoretical ideas are “grounded” in experiences • Begin with a broad area of interest • Gain entrance into a group to be researched • Gather field notes about the setting, the people, the structure, the activities or other areas of interest • Ask open-ended questions when interviewing participants • Modify research questions as the study continues • Note patterns or consistencies • Explore new areas deemed important by the people being observed • Report findings

43. Research Methods and Objectives • Descriptive studies: objective to describe phenomena • Main types: observation, case studies, surveys, and content analysis • Correlational research: formally test whether a relationship exists between two or more variables • Experimental research: randomly assign people to different conditions, use hypothesis testing to make inferences about how these conditions affect behavior • Explanatory studies: designed to answer the question “why” • Evaluation research: designed to assess the effectiveness of policies or programs

44. Descriptive Research: Observational Studies • Observational Studies (or naturalistic observation): involves watching and recording the actions of participants • Strength: the researcher can see how people behave rather than rely on self-report • Weaknesses: • Do not allow the researcher to explain causal relationships • Hawthorne effect: people tend to change their behavior when they know they are being observed

45. Descriptive Research: Case Studies • Case studies: explore a single case or situation in great detail • Strength: helpful when investigating unusual situations about which little is known • Weakness: findings cannot be generalized or applied to larger populations; this is because cases are not randomly selected and no control group is used for comparison

46. Descriptive Research: Surveys Surveys: used to ask a standard set of questions Strengths: can yield surface information on a variety of factors; useful in examining values, attitudes, and opinions Weaknesses: may not allow for an in-depth understanding of human behavior; self-report may limit accuracy Validity: refers to accuracy of measurement Reliability: refers to consistency of measurement

47. Descriptive Research: Content Analysis • Content analysis involves reviewing media such as old texts, pictures, commercials, lyrics or other materials to explore patterns or themes in culture • Secondary content analysis, or archival research, involves analyzing information that has already been collected or examining documents or media to uncover attitudes, practices or preferences • Strength: do not have to recruit participants • Weakness: limited to the questions asked and the quality of data originally collected

48. Correlational Research Scatterplot: a plot of the relationship between two scores; each dot represents a data point Positive correlation: the variables go up or down together Negative correlation: the variables move in opposite directions, indicated by a negative number The r value of a strong correlation will have a high absolute value If the absolute value is large, it is a strong correlation A perfect correlation has an absolute value of 1.00 Correlational does not equal causation

49. Experimental Research • Experiments are designed to test hypotheses • Hypotheses are specific statements about the relationships between variables • A variable is anything that changes in value • Variables are operationalized, which means the researcher specifies exactly what is going to be measured • Major advantage: the experimental method is the only research method that can measure cause and effect relationships between variables • Major disadvantage: the difficulty translating much of what concerns us about human behavior into a laboratory setting

50. Basic Experimental Design Begin with a sample (or subset of a population) and randomly assign participants to one of two groups: Experimental group: exposed to an independent variable or condition (often a treatment or intervention) the researcher introduces or manipulates as a potential cause of an event or outcome (the dependent variable is the outcome of interest) Control group: used for comparison, will not be exposed to the independent variable After the experimental group is exposed to the independent variable, the two groups are measured again to see if a change occurred