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Lifespan Development
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0:00
When people first hear of developmental psychology, Piaget and children are often the first things that come to mind. There’s often a misconception that developmental psychologist only studies the development of young children. In reality, developmental psychology is the study of our physical, cognitive, and social development across the lifespan. Developmental psychologists are known to use some pretty cool research methods to conduct their studies. One method is cross-sectional.
0:31
In a cross-sectional study, we compare people of different ages to each other at the same point in time. This allows us to get a glimpse of developmental differences without having to conduct a longitudinal study. Longitudinal studies involve following people across time. For example, the Grant study is one of the longest longitudinal studies. The participants of this study were Harvard-educated men who graduated between 1942-1944.
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The participants receive a follow-up every 2 years where they receive questionnaires about mental and physical health, career enjoyment, retirement experience, and marital quality. The study’s main aim is to identify predictors of healthy aging. So much data has come out of this study! While longitudinal studies are amazing because we get to see how people differ across their lifespan compared to their younger selves, they’re very hard to conduct because of attrition.
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This means that people stop participating over time for whatever reason. Maybe because they got bored and stopped participating, they didn’t have time, or they died. This is why cross-sectional designs are a bit more common. They’re a bit easier to conduct and require less time and patience. Whatever research a developmental psychologist conducts, they typically focus on three main issues. The first is nature vs. nurture, which we covered a bit last week.
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They want to understand how our biology and experience affect us. The second issue is continuity vs. stages. Do people gradually change over time or do they change abruptly in distinct separate stages? The third issue is stability vs. change. What changes as we develop and what remains the same? Since we spent last week covering nature vs. nurture, let’s take a deeper look at the other two issues. Researchers who emphasize experience and learning tend to see development as a slow, continuous
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process. Those who emphasize biology see development as a sequence of stages. They think that everyone passes through stages in the same order, although possibly at different rates. Most modern developmental psychologist view stages as helpful, but recognize that these stages may develop less distinctly than previously thought. We experience both stability and change across our lifespan. For example, our temperament tends to be very stable.
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However, things like social attitudes may be less stable and change with time. For example, people tend to become more conscientious, agreeable, and self-confident as they age. When you were born, you had most of the brain cells that you’ll ever have. Your brain rapidly developed and increased in size following your birth. From 3-6, your frontal lobe rapidly developed which helped you develop the ability to rationally plan.
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You were also developing the ability to control your attention and behavior. The last areas to develop were those areas of your brain associated with thinking, memory, and language. As they developed, your mental abilities surged. Childhood is a time marked by motor development. As your muscles and nervous system matured, you began to develop physical coordination. By your first birthday, there was a 50% chance that you were walking and a 90% chance that
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you were walking by the time you were 15 months old. Around your first birthday, your body started to develop the physical skills needed to control your bowel and bladder. Around age 4, your chances of forming lasting memories increase. Even though we probably can’t recall memories from before this time, we were still processing and storing information. One of the most universal human experiences is the need to belong. We are born hardwired to connect with others.
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For infants, this need is essential for survival. Infants like familiar faces and do things like coo to get the attention of their caregivers. Around 8 months old, infants develop stranger anxiety. They tend to become distressed by individuals who aren’t familiar to them and form a deep attachment with their caregivers. One way that attachments form is through body contact. Psychologist Harry Harlow demonstrated just how vital body contact is for forming attachments
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and how caregivers do more for infants than merely provide nourishment. Harlow’s lab used monkeys in their studies. He conducted a study where baby monkeys were separated from their mothers. He wanted to understand whether comfort or nourishment was a bigger driving force for attachment. He provided the monkeys with access to two surrogate moms. You can see these moms in the rightmost picture. The mom on the left was a wire mom. She was pretty bare but had a bottle attached to her.
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The mom on the right did not have a bottle, but was covered in terry cloth and looked more like a real monkey mom. Harlow found that when the monkeys had access to both moms, they preferred the comfy mom. If they were scared, they would run to her for comfort. When they explored their environment, they used her as a secure base, meaning that they would only go so far away from her before returning for comfort. If the monkey was hungry, they would still cling to the cloth mother while attempting
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to feed from the wire mother. This shows just how important body contact and comfort are for attachments. For human infants, body contact is so important. It helps boost brain development and later cognitive abilities. We also form attachments through familiarity. We form these attachments during a critical period, meaning that we form them during an optimal period when certain events must take place to facilitate proper development.
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Through mere exposure, we become attached to the people that we know. We get attached to parents, grandparents, siblings, or any other caregiver that we frequently see. When it comes to attachment styles, Mary Ainsworth is one of the field’s most well-known researchers. She designed the strange situation experiment. In the supplemental materials for this week, you can watch the strange situation paradigm. Basically, a mother and child are brought into a novel environment.
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After a few minutes, the mother leaves the room and a stranger comes into the room. Children typically become distressed by this, but what Ainsworth was most interested in was how the child would react once the mother returned to the room. This would help us understand the child’s attachment style. There are two main divisions of attachment styles: secure and insecure. When a child is securely attached, they play comfortably and happily explore their environment in the presence of their mom.
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When mom leaves they become distressed. When mom returns, they go to her for comfort. When a child is insecurely attached they are less likely to explore their surroundings, even when their mom is present. When she leaves, they are either extremely upset or indifferent of her departure and return. Typically, infants develop a secure attachment if they have a sensitive, responding mother. They’re more likely to develop an insecure attachment if their mom is unresponsive and insensitive.
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The temperament of the child also affects attachment styles. Parents of children with difficult temperaments may benefit from things such as positive parenting interventions to help build a secure attachment. Many researchers believe that our early attachments can help form the foundation of our adult relationships. People with secure attachments with their parents tend to form secure friendships. Insecure attachments take on two main forms: anxious and avoidant.
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In an anxious attachment, people crave acceptance but remain vigilant to signs of possible rejection. Interestingly, people with this attachment style tend to be good at poker and are better able to detect lies. In romantic relationships, these individuals may come off as clingy because of their fear of rejection. Those with avoidant attachments tend to experience discomfort with getting close to others and use avoidant strategies to maintain distance from others.
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In romantic relationships, these individuals may be less committed and may have more conflict within their relationships. Having an insecure attachment isn’t a bad thing. It can help us detect and escape danger. In some cultures, insecure attachments are actually preferred and offer benefits. For example, in Germany, an insecure avoidant attachment style is preferred because this culture values independence among children. We’re once again talking about puberty. I promise I’ll keep it short!
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During our adolescence, we become sexually mature during the process known as puberty. That’s it. We’re done because we talked about puberty enough last week, but just know that it’s a big part of your physical development during your teen years. The cooler topic that I wanted to cover is what happens to your brain during this time. Buckle up because the adolescent brain is a wild place! As teens develop their frontal lobe also develops.
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They experience improved judgment, impulse control, and long-term planning. However, our brain doesn’t fully develop until adulthood. You know what does fully develop during our teen years? The limbic system. The place responsible for emotions. So what happens when we get a frontal lobe that isn’t fully mature and fully mature emotional center? We get the teen years. Seriously though, if you don’t have teenagers, reflect on your teen years.
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Every breakup felt like you were losing the love of your life. Every difficult situation you encountered with a friend felt like a soap opera-level emotional event. You probably felt like no one understand your inner emotions. This is because your brain developed to the point where you were able to experience complex emotions, but your frontal lobe had yet to develop to the point where you could logically work through those emotions.
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If you’re the parent of a teen and you’re witnessing them go through an intense emotional outburst, try to remind yourself that their brain isn’t fully formed and sometimes they truly don’t possess the ability to process their emotions in the most healthy way. Then take a deep breath and try and take care of yourself, because yikes. The teen years are rough! Luckily, they don’t last forever. Eventually, that frontal lobe will fully mature and it’ll be better equipped to handle complex emotions.
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Besides emotional processing, there are some other cognitive abilities that teens develop. Teens are fairly egocentric meaning that their reasoning is self-focused. Teens spend a lot of time imagining what others are thinking about them and develop an intense awareness of this imaginary audience. They also develop a personal fable meaning that they think that they are unique and special and that what happens to most people will never happen to them.
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During this time, they also develop reasoning power. They start to use abstract reasoning to understand their world. They may debate things like good and evil or truth and justice. Fairness to them may change from equality to equity. They may search for deeper meanings. They may argue with their family. Teens develop moral reasoning, which is thinking that occurs as we decide what is right and what is wrong. You’ll watch a video this week that goes over Kohlberg’s levels of moral thinking.
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During adolescence, teens experience conventional morality and then shift to post-conventional morality. This means that in the early years, they’re more focused on upholding rules to gain social approval, but by their late teen years, they start to focus on basic rights and self-defined ethical principles. Morality is rooted in moral intuitions which are quick gut feelings. One moral dilemma, the trolley problem, focuses on moral intuition.
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This dilemma says that you see a runaway trolley that’s heading toward 5 people stuck on a railroad track. You have just enough time to flip a switch that diverts the trolley to another track which will kill one person. Do you flip the switch? This problem forces us to ponder what is moral. Do we flip the switch to intentionally kill one person, or do we sit back and do nothing, watching 5 people who could have been saved die?
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To see an example of the Trolley problem in action, I highly recommend watching the Good Place clip that I provided for this week! It’s a fun way to get a better understanding of morality. This week, you’ll learn about Erikson’s stages of psychosocial development. During the teen years, Erikson believes that the main psychosocial issue that people face is identity vs. role confusion. Teens try to figure out who they are by testing roles and then integrating them into a single identity.
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If they don’t test out these different roles, they may become confused about who they are. This means that it’s totally normal for teens to try out different identities. They may become goth for a period or become extra sporty. They might join different clubs or jump around various friend groups. After adolescence, the next issue that individuals face comes during early adulthood which is intimacy vs. isolation.
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During adolescence, we begin to develop the ability to form emotionally close relationships. Those who enjoy high-quality relationships with friends and family tend to enjoy similar high-quality relationships with romantic partners during adolescence. During the teen years, parental influence wanes and peer influence grows. This transition occurs gradually as seen in the graph above. During the teen years, parent-child arguments occur more frequently and these conflicts
15:45
tend to be greater with first born children and between children and their mothers. For teen boys, arguments with parents tend to center around behavioral topics such as hygiene or acting out. For girls, these arguments involve relationships like dating and friendships. In the past, teens entered adulthood almost immediately out of high school. It was pretty normal for them to move out, get married, work, and have children straight out of high school. Our culture is shifting though.
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Today, people are taking more time to establish themselves. The average age of first marriage is now 29 for men and 27 for women. Double the number of individuals 25-35 are living at home with their parents compared to people in that age bracket from the 1980s. This new stage of life is called emerging adulthood. During emerging adulthood, individuals don’t have full adult responsibilities and independence. Instead, they’re kind of in between adulthood and the teen years.
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During our mid twenties, our physical abilities begin to decline, but unless you’re an athlete, you probably won’t notice this for a while longer. Even so, those in middle age can remain active and achieve great things, sometimes even performing better than their inactive younger counterparts. You just might not be able to play sports professionally when you’re 50. There’s a reason athletes retire young. Aging also makes us less fertile. Women typically go through menopause around age 50.
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We tend to become less sexually active as we age although our sex lives don’t cease to exist. In one study 75% of respondents reported being sexually active into their eighties. In another study, most women and half of men reported that it wasn’t until around 75 that they began to experience little sexual desire. Worldwide, life expectancy has increased to age 73. 13% of people worldwide are 60 or older and that percentage is expected to double by 2100. As we age, our vision diminishes.
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Our muscle strength, reaction time, stamina, hearing, smell, and touch also decline. Our disease-fighting immune system weakens, yet because we have accumulated a lifetime’s worth of antibodies, we’re less likely to suffer from cold and flu viruses. As we age, our brain begins to take longer to process information. The brain regions associated with memory start to atrophy. Our frontal lobes also begin to atrophy and we may see impulsivity creep back in like it did during our teen years.
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This might be part of the reason that your grandpa speaks his mind at Thanksgiving. Our brain still retains some of its plasticity though which helps compensate for what it loses. To help slow down the decline associated with aging, we should exercise since it can help keep both our minds and body sharp. Exercise is especially important for our brains. It can ward off cognitive decline and brain shrinkage.
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It may come as no surprise that younger adults tend to have a better memory than older adults. Younger adults vary in their abilities to learn and remember but older adults very more so. Some 70-year-olds remember much less than 20-year-olds on memorization tasks, yet other 70-year-olds can surpass a 20-year-old. Do adults go through a midlife crisis? The research shows that unhappiness, job dissatisfaction, marital dissatisfaction, divorce, anxiety,
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and suicide do not surge during the early forties. Divorce is most common during the twenties and suicide in the seventies and eighties. Distress doesn’t appear to peak in midlife. If they do experience distress it’s usually the result of a major life event and not age. Two main aspects dominate adulthood: love and work. For love, we look for someone whom we can not only bond with, but who earns a wage, is a caregiver, best friend, warm, and responsive.
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People who are well-educated and older than 20 are more likely to have a relationship that lasts. This in part can explain why divorce has been declining. Your book talks about how living together before marriage increases the chances of divorce. It may seem like a test drive is a good idea, but hear me out on this one. The reason that people might be more likely to divorce if they live together first is that living together is a slippery slope to marriage.
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If you live together, even if you aren’t 100% sure that you’re living with your person, you’re more likely to marry them because it’s the next logical step. It’s what’s expected. Additionally, it’s much harder to break up with someone when your lives are so intertwined and you depend on them to help out with finances and labor. It’s not that living together is bad. It’s that if you aren’t 100% sure that this is your forever person, you might wind
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up getting married when you wouldn’t have if you’d never lived together. While love in a romantic sense has a ton of good effects on our well-being, being single is fine. Singles actually have just as high levels of satisfaction with life, happiness, and other well-being outcomes if they form close relationships and they typically have higher well-being outcomes compared to someone who is in a dissatisfying relationship.
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Whatever way you choose to engage in love, make sure that you have high-quality relationships. They’re key to a happy life. Finding meaningful work that fits your interests and makes you feel accomplished is also a major component of our adult commitments. Work may also come in the form of child-rearing or hobbies.
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