Developmental Psychology Concepts and Theories

Posted on May 19, 2025 in Psychology and Sociology

Core Debates and Theories

• Three Core Debates in Developmental Psychology

  • Nature vs. Nurture: The debate about whether development is primarily influenced by nature or nurture. Nature refers to an organism’s biology and genetics. Nurture refers to its environmental experiences and influences.
  • Stability-Change Issue: The debate about the degree to which early personality traits and characteristics persist through life or change. Does the individual (a) become an older version of the early self, with the same traits persisting through life, OR (b) develop into someone different from who they were at an earlier point in development?
  • Continuity-Discontinuity Issue: The debate about the extent to which development involves gradual, cumulative change (continuity), or distinct stages (discontinuity).

• Erikson’s Psychosocial Theory

  • The primary motivation for behavior is social in nature; personality and developmental change occur throughout the life span, and both early and later experiences are important. This theory includes eight stages of human development, and each represents a crisis that must be resolved.
  • Stages of Childhood: Stage 1 – Trust vs. Mistrust, Stage 2 – Autonomy vs. Shame, Stage 3 – Initiative vs. Guilt, Stage 4 – Industry vs. Inferiority.
  • Stages of Adolescence: Stage 5 – Identity vs. Identity Confusion.
  • Stages of Adulthood: Stage 6 – Intimacy vs. Isolation, Stage 7 – Generativity vs. Stagnation/Self-absorption, Stage 8 – Integrity vs. Despair.

• Contributions:

  An emphasis on a developmental framework, family relationships, and unconscious aspects of the mind.

• Criticisms:

  Lack of scientific support, too much emphasis on sexual underpinnings, and an image of people that is too negative.

• Piaget’s Cognitive Development Theory

  • Children go through four stages of cognitive development as they construct their understanding of the world.
  • Stages: Sensorimotor stage, Preoperational stage, Concrete Operational stage, and Formal Operational stage.
  • Underlying Processes: Organization and adaptation.

• Kohlberg’s Moral Development

  • Universal levels of moral development, and progression from one level to another, are fostered by opportunities to take others’ perspectives AND experience conflicts between one’s level of moral thinking and the reasoning of someone else at a higher level.
  • Levels: Level 1 – Preconventional Reasoning, Level 2 – Conventional Reasoning, Level 3 – Postconventional Reasoning.

• The levels occur in sequence and are age-related; development requires experiences dealing with moral questions and moral conflict; and peer interaction and perspective taking are critical.

• James Marcia’s Identity Development

  Perspective: Crisis & Commitment in Identity Development

  • Achievement: High commitment, high crisis; an individual has actively explored different options and made a firm commitment to their identity after a period of exploration.
  • Psychosocial Moratorium: High crisis, low commitment; critical aspect in attaining achievement; thoughtful exploration of values, interests, and goals.
  • Diffusion: Low crisis, low commitment; extreme fluctuations between temporary commitments and identities. Incoherent, disjointed, and incomplete sense of self characteristics, or not having resolved the crisis of identity; disruptions in sense of time; excessive self-consciousness and difficulty making decisions.
    • Can result in: work and school issues, difficulties forming intimate relationships, concerns over sexuality, and sexual experiences.

• Foreclosure: High commitment, low crisis; premature establishment of a sense of identity, before sufficient role experimentation has occurred; some skip the exploration and experimentation that leads to a sense of identity, roles adopted often revolve around goals set by parents or other authority figures, can interfere with people’s discovery of their full range of potential.
  • External pressures at play: family influence and expectations around success.
  • Leads to feelings of uncertainty, diffusion, and later crises.

• Life-Events Approach

  • The influence of a life event depends on:
    • The event itself (non-normative and normative).
    • Mediating variables.
    • Life stage (e.g., middle adulthood) and sociohistorical context (history-graded influences).
    • Individual’s appraisal of the event and coping strategies.
  • How life events influence development depends on:
    • The individual’s adaptation to major life events, not just the events themselves.
    • Sociohistorical context.
    • Mediating factors.
  • Drawbacks of this approach:
    • May overemphasize change, not adequately recognizing stability.
    • Daily hassles rather than major events may be the primary sources of stress.

• Role Continuity Theory

  • Atchley, 1989.
  • Maintaining consistent self-concept across transitions.
  • Adapting roles rather than abandoning them.
  • Bridge employment and phased retirement examples.

• Contextual Influences

  Three key types:

  • Normative Age-Graded Influences: Similar for individuals in a particular age group; ex. starting school, puberty, and menopause.
  • Normative History-Graded Influences: Common generational experiences due to historical events; ex. 1930s Great Depression, 1960s to 1970s civil rights and women’s rights movement, 2001 9/11.
  • Nonnormative Life Events: Unusual occurrences that have a major life impact; ex. early pregnancy, losing a parent as a child, and winning the lottery.

• Differential Susceptibility

  • Certain characteristics make children more vulnerable to setbacks in adverse contexts.
  • These same characteristics also make them more susceptible to optimal growth in very supportive conditions.

Other Key Concepts

• Research Designs

  Different types:

  • Descriptive Research: A research method designed to observe and record behavior.
  • Correlational Research: Attempts to determine the strength of the relationship between two or more events or characteristics.
  • Correlation Coefficient: A number based on statistical analysis that is used to describe the degree of association between two variables.
    • The higher the correlation coefficient (whether positive or negative), the stronger the association between the two variables.
    • Correlation does not equal causation.

• Bilingualism

  • Positive Effects: On language and cognitive development in middle childhood: improved memory, enhanced problem-solving abilities, greater cognitive flexibility, better attention and focus, improved executive function.
  • Education: Second language learners have been taught in one of two ways: instruction in one language only OR a dual-language approach.
    • In support of the dual-language approach, children have difficulty learning a subject when it is taught in a language they do NOT understand; integrating a second language into instructions helps create the immersion effect without children feeling lost. When both languages are integrated in the classroom, children learn the second language more readily and participate more actively.

• Perspective Taking

  • Egocentrism: In early childhood, children have difficulty understanding perspectives other than their own. They assume that others see, think, and feel the same way they do.

• Selection Effects

  • The tendency of individuals with certain pre-existing traits or circumstances to “select into” particular relationship arrangements or life patterns.
    • Research challenge: distinguishing true causal effects from pre-existing differences between groups? Example: Does cohabitation cause marital instability, or do certain traits lead to both cohabitation and marital instability?

• Traditional View: Cohabitation increases divorce risk; initial research showed 50% higher divorce rates among couples who cohabited before marriage. Led to the “cohabitation effect” theory, claiming cohabitation itself harmed relationships.
• Selection Effect Explanation: People who choose cohabitation differ systematically from those who don’t.
  • Key factors that predict both cohabitation and relationship outcomes: age at relationship formation, educational attainment, socioeconomic status, family background, attitudes toward commitment and marriage, and religious and traditional values.

• Neuroplasticity and Novel Experiences

  • Remains robust in early adulthood.
  • The brain continues to reorganize and adapt; the pruning of neural connections becomes more selective.
    • Novel Experiences: Something new, original, or unusual that you haven’t encountered before; it can encompass a variety of situations from trying new foods or activities to visiting new places or learning new skills.

• Autonomy vs. Independence

  • Autonomy: The ability to make informed decisions and act on one’s own choices, often driven by internal motivation and values. Ex. setting personal boundaries, making choices aligned with one’s values, pursuing interests without external pressures.
  • Independence: The state of being free from the control or influence of others. Ex. living independently, performing tasks without assistance, relying on one’s own resources.

• Third Places

  • Wherever you truly feel a sense of community and social spaces, where we relax, socialize, and engage with others outside of work and home, they’re casual, welcoming, and interactive, and vital for cultivating a sense of belonging and enhancing the overall quality of life. Neutral social space separate from home and work, where people build community and connections, evolves to support different social, emotional, and cognitive needs from playgrounds in childhood to senior centers in late adulthood.
  • Examples: Classic (cafes, libraries, parks), Cultural (bookstores, museums, theaters), Casual (barbershops, farmer’s markets, gaming cafes, bars), Outdoor (hiking trails, dog parks), Digital (Reddit, Discord, Twitch).
• Theory: 1980s American sociologist Ray Oldenburg theorized that it was a space for informal, free social interaction, essential to democracy, and strengthening community ties.
• During COVID-19, the third place was lost because it cannot be replaced by ZOOM meetings.
• Benefits: Reduce loneliness, strengthen community bonds, boost creativity & collaboration, encourage informal networking, support culture, economy, and resilience; fosters belonging & creates vibrant communities.
• Creates platforms for meaningful conversations, and people can connect, learn, and build a sense of belonging.

• Developmental Periods:
  • Childhood (0-12 years): playgrounds and libraries.
  • Adolescence (13-18 years): cafes, malls, gaming lounge.
  • Early Adulthood (19-35 years): coffee shops, bars, co-working spaces.
  • Middle Adulthood (36-60 years): community centers, gyms, churches.
  • Late Adulthood (60+): parks, senior centers, local diners.

Developmental Stages

Early Childhood

• Attention and Speech/Language

  • Joint Attention: When two or more people share their focus on an object, event, or activity.
  • Child-Directed Speech: Language is spoken in a higher pitch and slower speed than normal, with simple words and sentences.
    • Captures attention, maintains social interaction, and highlights differences between speech directed to children and adults.
  • Other strategies also enhance the child’s acquisition of language:
    • Recasting: Rephrasing something the child has said, in the form of a fully grammatical sentence.
    • Expanding: Restating something with additional information.
    • Labeling: Naming objects that the child is interested in.

• Zone of Proximal Development

  • The range of tasks too difficult for the child alone, but they can be learned with guidance.

• Autonomy Development

  • Builds as mental and motor abilities develop; children strive for it more in Erikson’s Autonomy vs. Shame & Doubt stage as they learn new skills and explore their surroundings.
  • Ways to help develop autonomy: encourage exploration, provide choices, and encourage self-sufficiency.

• Middle Childhood

  • 6-12ish years old (ish because adolescence starts in puberty – continuity and discontinuity debate).
    • 6-7 years old: Enjoy many activities and stay busy, like to paint and draw, ZPD, jump rope, ride bikes, jump, skip, chase, and can do simple math.
    • 8-9 years old: Organize more complex activities and competitions with peers, dress and groom self completely, and use tools effectively.
    • 10-12 years old: Like to write, draw, and paint, become increasingly competitive, future-oriented, and intentional in skill-building, and initiative and independence.

• Body and Growth Changes:

  Slow but steady, gaining 5-7 pounds a year and growing 2-3 inches per year; proportions become more adult-like; brain reaches adult size around age 7, with significant enhancements to motor skills. Girls puberty: 9-10 and boys 11-12.

• Self-Concept

  • Domain-specific evaluations of the self: “I am artistic” OR “I am Irish Catholic”.

• Social Comparison

  • Self-understanding in middle childhood, becomes more present in self-descriptions along with roles, and they compare themselves to their peers and affects things such as their self-esteem.

Adolescence

• Formal Operational Thought

  • 11 years of age through adulthood; the adolescent reasons in more abstract, idealistic, and logical ways.

• Adolescent Cognitive Development

  Five core aspects:

  • Think about possibilities: Enhanced perspective taking, hypotheticals.
  • Think about abstract concepts: Social cognition, conceptual ideas like democracy, friendship.
  • Think about thinking: Metacognition.
  • Think in multiple dimensions: Recognizing layers, deconstructing binaries.
  • Thinking relatively: Challenging authority, less likely to accept absolutes.

• Contemporary Adolescence

• Period of development from approx. age 10 to 19, covering the physical, emotional, and cognitive changes that occur during this time. Recognizes the importance of social and environmental factors in shaping adolescent development and behavior. Characterized by rapid growth, experimentation, and the transition towards adulthood.

• Puberty Timing

  • Puberty marks the beginning of adolescence; for girls tends to be around 9-10, and for boys tends to be around 10-11; puberty starts earlier on average and people enter into adult roles of work and family later.

• Adult Role Transitions

  • Continuous Transitions: Passages into adulthood in which adult roles and statuses are entered into gradually and in seemingly sensical, scaffolded order.
  • Discontinuous Transitions: Passages into adulthood in which adult roles and statuses are entered into abruptly and seemingly without order, ex. drive at 16, join the military at 18, rent a car at 25?

• Parent-Adolescent Conflict

  • High level of reported strain at other points in the family history, but rarely as much conflict as generally assumed in media, society.
  • When there is conflict, it’s usually about mundane issues (curfews, knowing details of life, social vs. academic priorities, clothing).
  • Families in which there was high conflict in childhood report more conflict in adolescence.

Emerging and Early Adulthood

Postformal Thought

Thinking that is reflective, relativistic, and contextual.

• • • Provisional: Developing understanding of reality as an ongoing process.
    • Realistic: Sometimes there is a right and wrong answer.
    • Integrate logic and emotion to embrace complexity and develop new meaning.

• Changes in Postformal Thought Over Time

  • Young adults become more systematic and sophisticated in this process.
    • Not a different skill set or cognitive change.
    • Experiences and a growing knowledge base lead to more enhanced and systematic ways of engaging in these thought processes.

Middle Adulthood

• Midlife Transitions

  • Career changes, unemployment, and relationship hierarchy.

• Career Reassessment

  • Period of extensive evaluation and reflection.
  • Shift from achievement orientation to finding personal meaning and legacy.

• 40-60% of middle-aged adults consider significant career changes.

• Unemployment Effects

  • Physical Health Effects: Increased risk of cardiovascular issues, stress-related conditions.
  • Psychological Consequences: Depression 3x higher, anxiety, and decreased self-esteem.
  • Social Impacts: Strained relationships, reduced social networks.
  • Financial Stress: Depletion of retirement savings and reduced future security.

• Family Role Changes

  • Primary focus: marital relationships and relationships with children.
  • Secondary connections: friendships, parents, extended family, colleagues.
  • Third places: community connections beyond home and work.

• Types of Intelligence

  • Crystallized Intelligence: The accumulation of information and verbal skills; continues to increase in middle adulthood.
  • Fluid Intelligence: The ability to reason abstractly; may begin to decline in middle adulthood.

• Wisdom

  • A sense of integrity strong enough to withstand physical disintegration; at Joan Erikson’s 9th stage, involves acceptance of limitations while maintaining engagement with life, focusing on being rather than doing.

Later Adulthood

• Types of Aging

  • Normal Aging: Describes most individuals, with psychological functioning peaking early middle age.
  • Pathological Aging: Describes individuals with above-average decline as they age, developing a condition leading to mild cognitive impairment or chronic disease that impairs daily functioning.
  • Successful Aging: Describes individuals maintaining positive physical, cognitive, and socioemotional development longer in life.

• Social Relationships

  Especially with children and grandchildren.

  • Role transitions (retirement, grandparenthood, widowhood) reshape social networks, with the quality of relationships becoming increasingly important for well-being according to Socioemotional Selectivity Theory.

• Self-Concept and Role Continuity

  • Self-Concept: Self-continuity is increasingly important, identity accommodation to changing roles and capacities, life review and autobiographical reasoning intensify.

• Role Continuity: Maintaining consistent self-concept across transitions, adapting roles rather than abandoning them, bridge employment, and phased retirement examples.

Moral Development

• Autonomous Morality

  • Older children become aware that rules and laws are created by people, believe when judging an action, one should consider the actor’s intentions, awareness, as well as the consequences, “she’s just a baby, you know.”

• Heteronomous Morality

  • From approximately 4 to 7 years of age: justice and rules are conceived of as unchangeable properties of the world, removed from the control of people; “obvious right and wrong”, the heteronomous thinker also believes in immanent (inherent) justice: if a rule is broken, punishment is and must be immediate.

• Prosocial Behavior

  • Caregivers acknowledge the environment, how others affected, even when not obvious, other people, ex. sharing toys, offering comfort, helping with a task.

• Perspective Taking (Revisited)

  • Egocentrism: In early childhood, children have difficulty understanding perspectives other than their own. They assume that others see, think, and feel the same way they do. Children are not as egocentric as depicted by Piaget.

Family and Parenting

• Parenting Styles

  • Parental Responsiveness: Degree to which the parent responds to the child’s needs in an accepting, supportive manner.
  • Parental Demandingness: Degree to which the parent expects and insists on mature, responsible behavior from the child.
  • Authoritarian: Restrictive, punitive style; uses punitive and forceful discipline.
  • Authoritative: Best, encourages children to be independent, but still places limits and controls on their actions.
  • Neglectful: The parent is uninvolved in the child’s life, emphasizes independence before ready.
  • Permissive: Highly involved with their children but place few demands or controls on them.

• Emotion-Coaching vs. Emotion-Dismissing

  • Coaching: Parents monitor their children’s emotions; viewing negative emotions as opportunities for teaching, assisting them in labeling emotions, and coaching them in how they deal effectively with emotions.
  • Dismissing: Parents attempt to deny, ignore, or change negative emotions; linked to toddlers’ lower emotional competence.

• Parent-Child Relationships Across Stages

  • Parents spend less time with children during middle childhood, important role in supporting and stimulating children’s academic achievement, emotional growth; coregulation of environment, largely dependent on culture, community, neighborhood – and child; dynamic and bidirectional.
  • Adolescents: Mothers, especially, reported improved mental health and parent-child relationships when the child moves out.
  • Emerging Adulthood: Parents play an important role in guiding and preparing adolescents for emerging and/or early adulthood; provides them with opportunities to be contributors, gives candid, constructive, and quality feedback to adolescents, creates positive adult connections, helping them learn to handle autonomy maturely, and challenges adolescents to become more competent and self-reliant; support autonomy development.

• Familism

  • Orientations toward life in which the needs of the family take precedence over the needs of the individual.

• Developmental Synchronicity

  • Parent midlife identity development occurs simultaneously with adolescent identity formation; two-thirds of caregivers describe adolescence as most challenging parenting stage, “midlife crisis” and “teenage rebellion” may coincide and amplify family tension.

• Sandwich Generation

  • Sandwich & Ambivalent: Love, reciprocal help, and shared values; isolation, family conflicts and problems, and caregivers.
  • Grandparents: Emotional fulfillment, culture transmission, better mental health, more cognitive and physical activity; emotional stress (conflict with adult children and grandchildren), less self-care & sleeping problems, social isolation.
  • Children: More resources (socio-emotional development, education success), culture transmission; ambivalent authority figure, could be spoiled, passive parenting.

Death and Dying

• Historical Trends in Death Rates

  • Demographic research shows that 200 years ago, nearly 50% of children died before age 10, creating different family dynamics and grief patterns.
  • Ariès (2000) documented how death has moved from homes to hospitals, with 73% of American deaths now occurring in institutional settings.
  • Qualitative studies reveal that decreased exposure to death processes has created what researchers call “death anxiety” in contemporary society, meaning, avoiding upsetting kids with discussions about death can lead to experiencing greater anxiety around it.

• Longitudinal analyses demonstrate how improved healthcare has shifted mortality to older ages, fundamentally changing how society experiences death.
• And later adulthood as it extends!

• Death Anxiety Across the Lifespan

  • Maxfield et al. (2007) found through controlled studies that middle-aged adults show higher death anxiety than both younger and older cohorts, correlating with generativity concerns.

• Reminiscence Functions

  • Identity (coherent self-understanding), problem solve (drawing on past solutions), teach/inform (sharing wisdom), death preparation (finding meaning in finitude).

Big Picture Themes

• Age of Transition to Adult Roles
• What is Cognition/Intelligence?
  • Cognition is the process of knowing, while intelligence is the capacity to process effectively.
• Universality of Stages
• Identity
• Legacy
• Erikson!