1. The Study of Early Development
   1. The Fetus and the Newborn
      1. Prenatal development: Everyone starts life as a fertilized egg cell. Prenatal development refers to development before birth. The fertilized egg cell is known as a zygote, and then proceeds through the stages of blastula, gastrula, and embryo (at 2 to 8 weeks post conception.)
      2. It is referred to as a fetus from 8 weeks after conception up until birth. A growing body receives nutrition from the mother; an undernourished mother gives birth to small babies, and these babies have a much greater risk of later health and behavioral problems.
      3. Low birth weight is related to impaired brain development, but the relationship is complex. Twin studies indicate that low birth weight per se is not necessarily a serious problem.
      4. If a mother drinks alcohol during pregnancy, fetal alcohol syndrome may result. FAS is a pattern of birth defects, usually including stunted growth of the head and body; malformations of the face, heart and ears; and nervous system damage, possibly including seizures, hyperactivity, learning disabilities, and mental retardation.
      5. Women who smoke during pregnancy have an increased probability of having children with conduct disorder. These children exhibit discipline problems both at school and home. Babies born to mothers who smoke also tend to be low birth weight and have an increased risk of SIDS.
      6. Young children can be resilient. High-risk children sometimes overcome the odds and grow up healthy nonetheless.
   2. Behavioral Capacities of the Newborn:
      1. Newborns have very little control of their muscles; they are only able to (productively) make mouth movements and eye movements.
      2. Newborns’ Vision: Eye movement research indicates that infants direct their attention at the same kinds of objects that adults would, however they do not control their visual attention in the same way as adults. They seem to prefer faces to other patterns.
      3. The Development of Visual-Motor Coordination: Infants begin to show a fear of heights shortly after crawling. Visual-motor coordination develops fairly quickly, but there are critical periods early in the development of these abilities.
      4. Newborns’ Hearing: Infants’ hearing can be investigated by looking at the effects of sounds on an infants’ sucking. This response shows decreased responding with repetition of a sound (habituation). If a new stimulus produces an increase in a previously habituated response, the stimulus has produced dishabituation.
   3. Infants’ Learning and Memory:
      1. If infants respond differently to a stimulus because of previous experience with it, we can infer that they remember it. Infants as young as 2 months can remember how to kick their legs to pull an attached ribbon and activate a mobile — they even remember how to do this after several days have elapsed. Some evidence shows that infants can display memory for stimuli heard before birth.
      2. The Infant’s Thought Processes About Object Permanence: Research using staring time as a measure of infant surprise have demonstrated a sense of object permanence in infants as young as 3 _ months old. The precise age depends on the manner of testing.
      3. Further Capacities of the Infant: Staring time research has revealed that as early as five months, infants have some sense that adding should make a total bigger, and subtracting should make it less. Infants recognize their own names. Infants appear to expect that like objects should move together.
2. The Development of Thinking and Reasoning
   1. The Development of Thought and Knowledge:
      1. Piaget’s Contributions: Piaget’s theory is based on certain assumptions. He believed that children’s thought processes are fundamentally different from those of adults, and that a child formulates new mental processes as he or she interacts with the environment.
      2. Intellectual Growth: Some Piagetian Terminology: A child constructs new mental processes as he/she interacts with the environment. Behavior is based on schemata (singular — schema.) These are organized ways of interacting with objects in the world. Assimilation occurs when the child applies an old schema to new objects. Accommodation is when the child changes old schema to fit a new object. Children shift back and forth between the two as their thinking evolves. These processes occur throughout the life cycle.
      3. Piaget’s Stages of Intellectual Development: Piaget proposed a progression through 4 stages of cognitive development. The ages are culture dependent and Piaget gave more importance to the sequence than the ages of the transitions.
      4. The Sensorimotor Stage: Infancy: In the sensorimotor stage (birth to 1_ years) behavior consists primarily of simple motor responses to sensory stimuli. Infants are capable of noticing relationships between stimuli. As children progress through this stage, they gain some sense of self as evidenced by the "rouge test."
      5. The Preoperational Stage: Early Childhood: In the preoperational stage, the child lacks the capacity to perform logical operations. Operations are reversible mental processes. Lack of the Concept of Conservation in the Preoperational Period: According to Piaget, preoperational children lack the concept of conservation. They do not understand that objects conserve such properties as number, length, volume, area, and mass after the shape or arrangement of the objects has changed.
      6. The Concrete-Operations Stage: Later Childhood: Around age 7, children begin to understand the conservation of physical properties. During the stage of concrete operations children can perform logical operations using symbols (numbers for example) and concrete objects, but they still have some trouble with abstract or hypothetical ideas.
      7. The Formal-Operations Stage: Adolescence and Adulthood: Formal operations are the mental processes used in dealing with abstract, hypothetical situations. Logical, deductive reasoning and systematic planning are usually involved in formal operational problem solving. According to Piaget, children reach this stage at around age 11. Research suggests that some people reach this stage later in life and others never attain it.
      8. Are Piaget’s Stages Distinct? Later research cast doubt upon Piaget’s idea of radical reorganization of thinking as a child progresses through stages of thinking. Children’s performance fluctuates within a given stage, and the fluctuation can be increased changing the difficulty of a task. The progression from one stage to another is more gradual than sudden.
      9. Implications for Education: Piaget and Lev Vygotsky: Vygotsky de-emphasized natural progression of children through different stages of thinking and emphasized that children must be taught in order to develop. Instruction should stay within the zone of proximal development. This is the distance between what a child can do independently and what the child can do with the help of others.
      10. Difficulties of Inferring Children’s Concepts: In testing children’s thought processes using the assumptions of the Piagetian model, it becomes evident that concepts appear gradually and may or may not be revealed depending on how a child is tested. Two cognitive abilities that may appear under some testing conditions but not others are the ability to distinguish appearance from reality and the recognition that other people have separate thoughts, perspectives, and minds.
   2. The Development of Moral Reasoning:
      1. Kohlberg’s Method of Evaluating Levels of Moral Reasoning: Kohlberg proposed that moral reasoning is the result of a reasoning process resembling Piaget’s stages. Moral reasoning is judged not by the decisions one makes, but the reasons behind them.
      2. Kohlberg posed moral dilemmas to measure the maturity of a person’s moral judgments. Kohlberg proposes six stages of moral reasoning, grouped into three levels. Evidence indicates that people progress through the stages in order, though not everyone reaches the highest levels. Moral reasoning develops swiftly from age 10 to 16 based on general cognitive growth.
      3. Limitations of Kohlberg’s Views of Moral Development: Some point out that moral reasoning is only one part of moral behavior. Also, some claim that Kohlberg may have misinterpreted lower levels of moral reasoning because children have trouble articulating their views.
      4. Another criticism is the "justice" orientation of Kohlberg’s theory. Gilligan pointed out that a "caring" orientation might be used as a basis for moral decisions, and proposed that the two orientations represented a sex difference. Later research supports the existence of two basic orientations, but has not revealed any consistent sex difference in moral reasoning.
      5. There is also evidence from research that moral understanding does not necessitate moral behavior, that people can exhibit different levels of moral reasoning under different circumstances, and that morality and justice are relatively culture-specific.
      6. Social and Emotional Development Research Designs for Studying Development: There are research designs that are commonly found in developmental research. A cross-sectional study is a comparison of groups of individuals of different ages who are studied simultaneously. A longitudinal study follows a group of individuals over some period of the lifespan. Longitudinal studies face a number of practical difficulties. Selective attrition, or differential survival, is the tendency for some subjects to be more likely than others to drop out of a study — if there is a systematic reason for this attrition, it can bias the results of the research. Also, longitudinal studies present the challenge of distinguishing the effects of age from the effects of changes in society. For certain types of developmental research questions, a longitudinal design is the only logical choice.
      7. If cross-sectional and longitudinal designs produce different results, psychologists analyze cohort effects to determine whether a difference among people of different ages is due to age or to a difference among cohorts. A cohort is a group of people born at a particular time or a group of people who enter a system, process or environment at the same time.
3. Social and Emotional Development
   1. Erikson’s Ages of Human Development:
      1. Erikson divided the lifespan into eight ages, each with its own emotional/social conflicts.
      2. Infants struggle between basic trust and a feeling of mistrust.
      3. A toddler (1-3) faces the conflict over establishing a rudimentary sense of autonomy instead of a feeling of shame and doubt.
      4. The preschool child works to achieve initiative and avoid guilt by learning to respect the rights of others.
      5. During middle childhood industry versus inferiority is the major conflict as the child works to feel competent and productive in the eyes of peers, teachers and family.
      6. During adolescence, teens must establish a sense of identity instead of an ongoing experience of role confusion.
      7. In young adulthood, the major conflict is about establishing intimacy with others instead of increasing isolation.
      8. Middle adulthood is characterized by the conflict generativity instead of stagnation — the middle-aged adult needs to contribute to the world in some way.
      9. During old age the conflict experienced is ego integrity versus despair as we ask ourselves if we really made good use of our time and we struggle with any regrets we may have.
      10. Psychologists find Erikson’s model of development descriptively useful but limited in its power to explain how people change over the lifecycle.
   2. Infancy: Forming the First Attachments:
      1. Studies of Attachment Among Monkeys: Attachment is the long-term feeling of closeness between a child and a caregiver. It is based on both biological and emotional needs.
      2. Harlow’s classic study showed that a monkey’s attachment depended more on contact comfort than on satisfaction of biological needs. However, monkeys "raised" by the preferred cloth mother did not know how to react to other monkeys.
      3. Early Attachment in Humans: Attachment is measured using the Strange Situation, an experiment designed by Mary Ainsworth, in which an infant and mother come into a room with toys and are joined by a stranger; the mother leaves and returns. Then the mother and stranger leave; then the stranger returns, and finally, the mother returns. Infants respond in one of four ways: securely attached, anxiously attached, anxious and avoidant, and disorganized. Behavior in this situation correlates strongly with behavior at home.
      4. Quality of attachment depends on infant temperament, and differs cross-culturally. Infants with a disorganized attachment are at risk for later deviant behaviors.
   3. Social Development in Childhood:
      1. The success that a child has in forming friendships can have a lasting impact on social and emotional development.
      2. In middle childhood some children are popular, some are rejected, and others are "controversial." These statuses tend to be stable over childhood.
   4. Adolescence:
      1. Adolescence is the time of transition from childhood to adulthood. Relationships with parents are changing, often resulting in serious conflict. In western cultures, adolescence is often associated with disruptive behavior.
      2. Identity Development: Many western adolescents, facing conflicting pressures, experiment with several possible identities before they decide the type of person they want to be.
      3. Although adolescence can be a time of stress, the "storm and stress" concept of adolescence is by no means the rule. Adolescents vary in how much turmoil they experience, and some experience very little.
      4. The focus on decisions concerning the future is referred to as the adolescent’s identity crisis. James Marcia devised a four-status model of adolescent identity development. The statuses are: identity diffusion (no clear sense of identity); identity moratorium (actively considering choices); identity foreclosure (commitment without exploration); and identity achievement (commitment after exploration.)
      5. The "Personal Fable" of Teenagers: Teenagers often subscribe to what has been termed the "personal fable"—that "I am special; what is true for everyone else is not true for me"; belief in the fable often leads adolescents to make foolish choices. Adults are also susceptible to this belief.
   5. Adulthood and Aging Job Satisfaction:
      1. There is a positive relationship between general life satisfaction and job satisfaction. Reported job satisfaction depends on how people are asked. The level of satisfaction tends to be lower among younger workers.
      2. The Midlife Transition: Around age 40, some adults experience a midlife transition, a time during which they a re-evaluate their life goals. Many middle-aged adults go through a minor readjustment in which they review their life’s direction. This readjustment can be resolved in a number of ways.
      3. Old Age: The percentage of those living into their 70s and 80s has grown steadily throughout the century. A common concern of old age is maintaining self-esteem and a sense of dignity. People must deal with physical changes, as well as changes in social status. People vary in how they adjust to retirement. It is helpful for old people to maintain some control over their lives, even if they are faced with failing health.
      4. The Psychology of Facing Death: The course of bereavement differs greatly between individuals. Most people tell themselves that death is in the distant future. Terror-management theory proposes that we tend to avoid thinking about our own mortality and frame the world in a positive way. Religious beliefs are often used as part of this defense system.
4. Growing Up the Same and Different: Temperament, Family, Gender, and Cultural Influences
   1. Temperament and Lifelong Development:
      1. People differ in their temperament, a term that refers to a global disposition including the tendency to be active or inactive, outgoing or reserved. Most people are consistent in their temperament throughout development. Infants who seldom kick, cry, or show fears are termed "easy", while those who exhibit these characteristics are termed "difficult." Genetic differences make some contribution to differences in temperament. Heredity and environment can have interactive effects on temperament.
   2. The Family:
      1. Birth Order and Family Size: Despite the popularity of the concept, birth order research has been unconvincing in its conclusions and of generally poor quality. The apparent effects of birth order can be convincingly explained by other factors. The qualities ascribed to being a first, middle, or youngest are usually only seen consistently in the family environment.
      2. Effects of Different Parenting Styles: Different cultures have different expectations of children’s behavior and different standards for parenting. There are three basic forms of parenting. Authoritative parents are characterized by warmth and responsiveness, but exercise firm control and limit-setting. Authoritarian parents set firm controls, but with less explanation; they tend to be less close to the child. Permissive parents are warm and loving, but not demanding. Indifferent or uninvolved parents spend little time with their children. The effects of different parenting styles may differ among different ethnic groups. The work of Judith Harris reviewing a large amount of research on parenting style supports the idea that although parents have influence on their children’s personalities and behavior, that influence may not be nearly as crucial as was once believed. Peers and heredity may be more significant influences over the long run.
      3. Parental Employment and Child Care: Child-rearing customs vary greatly between cultures. Recent research in Western cultures has focused on the effects of day care on a child’s psychological adjustment. Research indicates that adequate quality day care is associated with satisfactory intellectual and social development. Day care can be a superior alternative for children from disadvantaged homes. The most controversial issue has been the effects of beginning day care before a child reaches the age of 1 year. Many psychologists are now convinced that even very early day care is not harmful to a child’s development, as long as the day care is of good quality.
      4. "Nontraditional" Families: A large number of children grow up in families significantly different from the traditional model. What appears to matter most is that the child has at least one stable and positive relationship with an adult over the course of childhood.
      5. Parental Conflict and Divorce: Attitudes towards divorce have changed dramatically over the past few generations. Children whose parents divorce before the child is 16 often show a variety of adjustment problems, relative to children in two-parent households. The main reason seems to be the prolonged conflict and hostility between the parents. Longitudinal studies of divorce’s effects demonstrate considerable post-divorce upheaval, especially in the first year. The degree of distress differed from one child to another. These results vary across racial and ethnic groups. Many children are relatively unaffected. Some research suggests that divorce per se is not as harmful as prolonged exposure to conflict, whatever the marital status of the parents happens to be.
   3. The Influence of Gender Cognitive Differences:
      1. From an early age, females display greater language fluency. Males perform better on mathematical and spatial tasks.
      2. Differences in Self-Esteem: Males tend to report higher levels of self-esteem than females, with the biggest difference occurring at adolescence. Self-report instruments of self-esteem have only modest reliability and validity, so it is unclear what significance these findings have, or whether they have much significance.
      3. Sex Differences in Social Situations: Certain sex differences only emerge in a social context. Girls are more likely than boys to engage in quiet, cooperative play, whereas males are more competitive and more aggressive. It is very likely that biological influences combine with early socialization to perpetuate these differences and it is very hard to untangle the influences or change the behaviors.
      4. Male-Female Relationships: Males and females frequently report difficulties in communication when romantic interest draws them together as adolescence and adults. Men are more demanding and concerned with status, women are more cooperative and concerned with feelings. Misunderstandings are common as the social and interpersonal agendas can be very different. These are differences on average and do not accurately describe all men and all women reliably.
   4. Ethnic and Cultural Influences: Ethnicity has effects on personality and identity development. Immigrants to the United States undergo a period of acculturation, a transition between their culture of origin and the new culture. Some become almost fully members of the new cultures, others adopt a bicultural identity and alternate easily between the two cultures. This increases the bicultural person’s cognitive flexibility in some ways.
      1. All of us need to learn to function in "subcultures" — school, work, home. It is in a sense a normal part of our life experience.