Key Concepts and Theories in Human Development
Factors Influencing Human Development
Human development is shaped by a complex interplay of various factors:
Inheritance
Inheritance: Innate influences on development, transmitted by genes inherited from parents.
Environment
Environment: All non-genetic influences on development, external to the individual.
Maturity
Maturity: The natural sequence of physical and behavioral patterns, often associated with age, including the speed to master new skills.
Types of Influences on Development
Normative Influences
Normative Influences: Events that occur in a similar way for most people in a specific group (e.g., puberty, starting school).
Non-Normative Influences
Non-Normative Influences: Unusual events that have a major impact on the lives of individuals and can cause stress because they are unexpected (e.g., a natural disaster, a serious illness).
Critical Period in Development
Critical Period: A specific moment in which a given event or its absence produces the greatest impact on development.
Contexts of Development: An Ecological Approach
This model identifies five interconnected external influences or development contexts, ranging from the closest to the broadest:
Microsystem
Microsystem: The immediate everyday environment of the individual (e.g., family, school, peer group).
Mesosystem
Mesosystem: The interaction of several microsystems (e.g., the link between home and school experiences).
Exosystem
Exosystem: Links between two or more settings, at least one of which does not contain the developing child but indirectly affects them (e.g., a parent’s workplace, community resources).
Macrosystem
Macrosystem: Shaped by cultural patterns, values, beliefs, and economic systems that influence the other systems.
Chronosystem
Chronosystem: Adds the dimension of time, encompassing changes over the life course and historical events (e.g., societal changes, personal transitions).
Historical Perspectives on Childhood
Ariès’s View on Childhood
Philippe Ariès noted that only since the seventeenth century did Western societies begin to view children as qualitatively different from adults, rather than miniature adults.
Key Issues and Theoretical Perspectives in Development
Mechanistic Model
Mechanistic Model: A model based on the machine as a metaphor, which views development as a passive and predictable response to internal or external stimuli. It focuses on quantitative development and studies phenomena by analyzing their components.
Organismic Model
Organismic Model: A model that considers development to be internally initiated by an active person or organism. It occurs in a universal sequence of qualitatively different stages of maturity.
Relational Theory (Jean Baker Miller)
Relational Theory: Proposed by Jean Baker Miller, this theory posits that all personality growth occurs within emotional connections, and not separated from them.
Learning Theory
Learning Theory argues that changes in behavior are the result of experience or adaptation to the environment. The two main branches are behaviorism and social learning.
Social Learning Theory (Bandura)
Social Learning Theory (Bandura): Behaviors are learned by observing and imitating models. This theory considers the learner as an active subject.
Psychoanalytic Perspective
The Psychoanalytic Perspective views development as related to unconscious forces that motivate behavior.
Psychosexual Development (Freud)
Psychosexual Development: In Freudian theory, an unvarying sequence of stages of personality development during infancy, childhood, and adolescence, in which the focus of pleasure shifts from the mouth to the anus and then to the genitals.
Piaget’s Cognitive Stage Theory
Jean Piaget’s Cognitive Stage Theory focuses on development with respect to thought processes and the behavior that reflects these processes. He described cognitive development as occurring in a number of qualitatively different stages.
Cognitive growth occurs through three interrelated principles: organization, adaptation, and equilibration.
Organization
Organization: The integration of knowledge within a system to make sense of the environment.
Schemes
Schemes: Integrated basic cognitive structures; organized patterns of behavior used in different kinds of situations.
Adaptation
Adaptation: Adjustment to new information about the environment, through the complementary processes of assimilation and accommodation.
Assimilation
Assimilation: The incorporation of new information into existing cognitive structures.
Accommodation
Accommodation: Cognitive changes in an existing structure to include new information.
Equilibration
Equilibration: A tendency to seek equilibrium (balance) between the cognitive elements within the organization and between it and the outside world.