Key Issues In Developmental Psychology

MPhil-I TERM PAPER CLINICAL PSYCHOLOGY-7106 KEY ISSUES IN LIFE SPAN DEVELOPMENT

By Name: Mariyam Akram Roll No.: 0513-7-08 Session: 2008-2010

DEPARTMENT OF PSYCHOLOGY GC UNIVERSITY, LAHORE

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CONTENT PAGE Sr. No.

Headings

Page No.

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Introduction

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2

Key issues/Controversies in Human Development

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3

Nature-Nurture Issue

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4

Heredity-Environment Issue

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5

Learning-Maturation Issue

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Continuity-Discontinuity Issue

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Normative-Idiographic Issue

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Active-Passive Learning Issue

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Specificity-Generality Issue

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Conclusion

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References

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Introduction

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Psychology has been defined as a science of behavior. It has been divided into subcategories environmental,

namely:

abnormal,

experimental,

evolutionary,

humanistic,

clinical,

moral,

cognitive,

forensic,

educational,

neuropsychology,

biopsychology, religion, social, child, positive, industrial, counseling, and developmental psychology. Developmental psychology is a science of human lifespan development. It studies how individuals change over time and that processes that create those changes. Basic importance of development psychology is study of life. Development refers to the changes over time in the body and in the thinking or other behavior of a person that are due both to biology and to experience. It studies intra and inter individual changes. Developmental psychologist study behavior at all phases of the life cycle. It is the largest branch of psychology, and contains a lot of books, writers, researchers and practicing psychologists. Human development is commonly described in terms of periods or stages. The most widely used classification of eight developmental periods involve the following sequence: prenatal period (conception-birth), infancy (birth-2years), early childhood (2-6years), middle and late childhood (6-11years), adolescence (12-18years), early adulthood (19-35years), middle adulthood (36-60years) and late adulthood/old age (60-death). Five early scholars John Locke (focuses on child’s environment), Jean-Jacques Rousseau (focuses on child’s cognitive development), Johann Gottfried von Herder (focuses on child’s socio-cultural context), Charles Darwin (focuses on evolutionary origins of behavior) and Stanley Hall (father of child psychology) offered theories of human behavior that are the direct ancestors of the major theoretical traditions found in the child psychology today. The belief that the development of the child is related to the

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evolution of the species gave birth to the science of developmental psychology. People considered as the pioneers of child psychology who gave later theories of developmental psychology are: Sigmund Freud (psychosexual theory of development), Erik Erikson (psychosocial theory of development), J. B. Watson, B. F. Skinner & Bandura (social learning), Jean Piaget (Cognitive development), Arnold Gesell (Evolutionary theory), Lev Vygotsky (socio-cultural cognitive theory), and Urie Bronfenbrenner (ecological theory). In addition to the theories, the scientific study of development also involves research. To obtain information about development psychologists use different methods. Some of the most important and widely used research methods in developmental psychology are: observation (laboratory & naturalistic), survey method (interviews & questionnaires), case studies, standardized tests, life-history records, correlation research, experimental research, cross-sectional method, longitudinal method and sequential approach. Good science requires good scientists. Scientist’s professional competence and integrity are essential for ensuring high quality science. Each scientist has an ethical responsibility to seek knowledge and to strive to improve the quality of life. Psychological research raises many ethical considerations. In developmental research, informed consent, risk/benefit ratio, minimal risk, privacy, deception, debriefing and plagiarism are very important. While describing the views of different pioneers of developmental psychology, a number of issues arouse repeatedly. These issues in particular have run through scientific

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thinking about development almost from the very beginning, and they remain a source of debate today. These issues revolve around the questions of nature versus nurture, continuity versus discontinuity, maturation versus learning, heredity versus environment, active versus passive development, and universal versus context specific.

Key issues/Controversies in Human Development Controversy is a lengthy discussion of an important question in which opposing opinions clash, debate and dispute. Controversy or dispute is a commencement of a conflict between statements of accepted fact and a new or unaccepted proposal that disagrees with, argues against, or debates the accepted knowledge or opinion. Controversies can range in scope from private disputes between two individuals to largescale disagreements between societies. There are a number of important issues that have been debated throughout the history of developmental psychology. In psychology, the controversies arouse from the different theoretical concepts of different theories that they believed were the major parts of child development. The major and most widely debated controversies are:  Nature-Nurture issue  Heredity-Environment issue  Continuity-Discontinuity issue  Learning-Maturation issue  Normative-Individual development

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 Active-Passive learning  Specificity-Generality Nature-Nurture Issue Nature-Nurture is the fundamental question in psychology and involves the debate that whether development is influenced by nature or nurture. Nature is an organism’s biological inheritance on development whereas nurture is an organism’s learning through experience and interaction. Typically developmental psychologists are interested in how these factors interact, rather than trying to decide which is more important. They are interested to see to what extent the qualities we possess are inborn and contain biological factors and to what extent are they acquired as a result of individual socialization? According to the nature advocates, unless treated by the unfriendly environment the human grow in an orderly manner. By contrast, nurture advocates emphasize the importance of nurture or environmental experiences. According to them, experiences run the gamut from the individual’s biological environment (nutrition, medical care, and physical accidents) to the social environment (family, peer group, school, social gatherings, media, and culture). Nature versus nurture controversy importance can be well described in the example that if a wild boy like child would be found today, probably modern psychologists cannot cure him. In recent times there have been children who were rescued after having confined for years in closets and other environments that cut off from other people (Rymers, 1992). These children find it difficult to interact with others.

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These cases highlight the importance of early contacts with other people for normal human development. They underscore the need to know as much as possible about early development and what can help or hinder it. And they bear on nature-nurture debate which is arguably the most salient issue in development (Berstein et al., 1994). Argument about the nature-nurture issue can be traced back in philosopher’s statements centuries ago. This debate has existed at least since Locke and Rousseau first proposed their rather pure environmental and nativistic models of child development. The nurture view was later taken up by Watson and other learning theorists, whereas the nature position formed the basis of the theories of Hall and Gessel. John Locke (1690) argued the dominance of nurture. He proposed that new born child is like a tabula rasa or blank sheet and what happens during childhood has a profound and permanent effect on the individual. According to him, adults teach the child about world and tell him how to behave in this world. Watson (1930) also suggested the environment as the key to development. From his experience, he inferred it that children learn everything, from skills to fears. He also claimed that he can train dozen of children to become any specialist like doctor, lawyer, artist, thief, beggar-man and chef, regardless of his talents, tendencies, vocations, race of ancestors and penchants. His view stimulated much debate and much research. Shortly after the death of John Locke, Jean Jacques Rousseau gave a different idea which established a different point of view. He believed that human development unfolds naturally in positive ways as long as society allows it to do so. He argued that parents should not shape their children forcibly. He said that children are capable of

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discovering how the world operates and how they should behave without instructions of adults. He argued that children should be allowed to grow as nature dictates, with little guidance or pressure from parents. The work of Rousseau was followed by Gesell and made many observations of children of all ages. He demonstrated that motor skills develop in a fixed sequence of stages in all children. The order of stages and the ages at which they develop are determined by nature and relatively unaffected by nurture (Berstein et al., 1994; DeHart, Sroufe, & Cooper, 2004) Later psychologists did not take strong positions about nature or nurture. Freud claimed that development was neither the result of nature, as Gesell claimed, nor the product of environmental experiences alone, as Watson suggested. He said that it is a merge of both internal as well as external conditions, particularly children’s sexual and aggressive urges and how parents handle them. This combine contribution of naturenurture was more thoroughly explored by Jean Piaget. He suggested that nature and nurture are inseparable and interactive. He said that children manipulate and explore the objects around them which are guided by mental images of objects and of their own actions and these experiences with objects modify these images. Nature and nurture contribute together in the development of child like if we consider genes as a roughly defining broad potential range of ability and the environment as pushing the child up or down within this range. How much nature and nurture contributes varies from one characteristic to another. Nature shapes our physical size and appearance which can only be affected by extreme affects of environmental conditions. Nature shapes the motor skills of child during early childhood according to maturational timetable, but nurture plays a larger role in children’s motor abilities only after children

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have acquired all the basic motor skills. For all individual characteristics, the influence of nature and nurture are always inextricably intertwined. This debate shows that the interplay between nature and nurture is a busy twoway street. The nature vs. nurture debate has produced many research advances in the area of human development. I believe that it is not fruitful to keep try in determining which aspect is more important than other. Both are essential in their affects and the development of child. The natural processes of children cannot be changed and the effects of person’s experiences on his development are essential as well. Other issues like heredityenvironment, maturation-learning, specificity-generality, and normative-individual development, all these questions or debates emerged from the debate of nature-nurture. Biological development of species is carried out further by the person’s experiences and interactions in social world and this world teaches a person a lot which is not inborn. So, I believe that nurture nourishes nature.

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Heredity-Environment Issue Nowadays the issue of biology versus experience is more often cast in the context of heredity and environment. The focus shifts: we look more specifically at genetic factors that might underlie and predispose and therefore set the stage for development, in

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interaction with specific effects of the individual’s physical and social environment. Heredity-oriented theorists assume that there are underlying biological structures, citing evidence from experiments with animals and statistical procedures with humans to support their case. They also point out the specific genes underlying development and behavior have been identified, emphasizing those that are known to cause defects such as mental retardation, fragile X syndrome and many more. On the other hand, environmental explanations focus on an individual’s experiences pertaining to thinking and reasoning, plus environmental factors such as nutrition and health, each of which can also contribute to mental retardation. Heredity and environment interact, but theorists still disagree over the relative contributions of each. Heredity is an organism’s biological inheritance, specifically genetic influences on development whereas nurture is an organism’s learning through environment. They were interested to answer the query that to what extent do specific genetic factors set the stage for development, and to what extent do specific factors in the individual’s environment such as conditioning and learning affect development? Heredity is the inborn genetic endowment that people receive from their parents (Papalia & Olds, 1995). The range of environment can be vast, but the heredity approach argues that the genetic blueprint produces commonalities in the growth and development. The heredity proponents acknowledge that extreme environments can depress development. However, they believe that basic growth tendencies are genetically wired into humans.

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A fundamental challenge facing developmental psychologist is to explain how and why developmental changes come about. From the broadest perspective, development depends on three factors; developmental potentials provided by the organisms genes, the organism developmental history, and current environmental conditions. The first two factors may be thought of as existing in the organism. Every human child carries a set of genes that contains the basic guidelines for the unfolding of development. But which genes are turned on at any given time depend on the particular points in development a child has reached that is, on the changes that have gone before. Moreover, the unfolding also depends on current environmental support. Environmental support includes all the nutrients, sensory inputs, circumstances, and challenges the developing organism encounters. Understanding just how genes, past development, and current environmental conditions interact to produce developmental changes is a major task for the field of developmental psychology. Today the developmental psychologists have gone beyond this simple dichotomy to analyze precisely how inheritance and environment influence specific aspects of development. One way of separating these influences is to do correlation study on twins with same genetic structure but brought up in different environments as well as genetically different twins. These studies have demonstrated that heredity-environment issue contribute jointly to development in two ways: 1. Operate together to make all people alike as human beings. 2. Operate to make each person different.

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They make all people alike in this sense that we all experience milestone in motor development in the same order and at roughly the same rate as nutrition. Heredity and environment operates to make each person different as the nature of inherited genes and the environment of widely different family produces differences among individuals in motor abilities, intelligence, motivation, altruism, personality and many more. For all individual characteristics, the influence of nature and nurture are always inextricably intertwined. Heredity and environment interact; the environment encourages or discourages the expression of an individual’s inherited characteristics while at the same time, those inherited characteristics to some extent determine that individual’s environment. Even though evidence proves that there is an interaction between genes and the environment, people will continue to study the effects of each in development. We cannot change the genes of a developing child as well as cannot keep child in solitary to keep him away from environmental effects. Genetic guidelines are important for development and the environmental support is essential to proceed development. Emergence of child’s personality and countless other developmental changes are all joint products of heredity, past development and current environment. So these two poles cannot be separated but can be explained as interplay of these factors are important for human development rather than specifying one out of two. Continuity-Discontinuity Issue A third long-standing issue in child psychology is whether the development is connected and constant (continuous) or uneven and disconnected (discontinuous). At the heart of this debate lies the question of whether the development is solely and evenly

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continuous, or whether it is marked by age specific periods. This debate actually has two components: pattern of development (gradual or abrupt changes) & connectedness of development. This issue basically addresses to what degree we become older renditions of our early existence or whether we can develop into someone different than we were at an earlier point in development. Some developmental changes are clearly gradual and cumulative, resulting in steadily increasing organization and function. Like, at first child starts grasping things, waving hands, responding to voices, and afterward the ability of child to use symbols develops gradually and progresses steadily toward reading, manipulation of number concepts, and eventually higher-level thinking. Continuity in development throughout the lifespan is the prevailing view nowadays. This issue is linked with Paul Baltes’ belief that plasticity or change is an important life-span issue. According to life-span perspective, plasticity or change are possible throughout the life-span, although experts such as Baltes argue that older adults often show less capacity for change than younger adults. An important dimension of this issue is the extent to which early or later experiences are the key determinants of a result of heredity-environment interaction, not heredity or environment alone. For the most part, developmentalists who emphasize nurture usually describe development as a gradual, continuous process. Those who emphasize nature often describe development as a series of the distinct stages. In terms of continuity, when a child speaks first word, though seemingly abrupt, discontinuous event is actually the result of weeks and months of growth and practice. In contrast, at some point a child moves from not being able to think abstractly about the world to being able to, is a qualitative change, not quantitative.

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Developmentalist’s who advocates the continuous model describe development as a relatively smooth process, without sharp or distinct stages, through which an individual must pass. They contend that many of the behaviors and abilities we see in adolescents and adults can be traced directly back to development early in life. Meanwhile, supporters of the discontinuous model describe development as a series of discrete stages, each of which is characterized by at least one task that an individual must accomplish before progressing to the next stage. They also suggest that some aspects of development emerge relatively independently of what has come before and cannot be predicted from child’s previous behavior. As Freud, in his stage model of psychosexual development, theorized that children systematically move through oral, anal, phallic, and latency stages before reaching mature adult sexuality in the genital stage. Proponents of stage theories of development also suggest that individuals go through critical periods, which are times of increased and favored sensitivity to particular aspects of development. For example, early childhood (the first 5 years) is a critical period for language acquisition. Thus, most adults find it difficult or impossible to master a second language during their adult years while young children raised in bilingual homes normally learn second languages easily during childhood. Most of the debate has centered on the pattern of cognitive change. As the information-processing theorists came up with the idea of quantitative change. They based their research on the view that younger children can also perform certain tasks almost as well as older children if they are helped to break down the tasks into simpler steps, or if they are taught the required skills before testing. In contrast,

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Piaget stage theory consist both quantitative (changes in cognitive skills) as well as qualitative (changes in thinking and understanding world) views. Related to the continuity-discontinuity issue is the distinction between quantitative and qualitative change. Quantitative changes are changes by degree whereas qualitative changes are changes in kind. The continuity model is often associated with the belief that human behavior consists of many individual skills that are added one at a time, usually through learning and experience. As children acquire more and more skills, they combine and recombine them to produce increasingly complex abilities. Continuity theorists tend to argue that development is quantitative-simpler elements are essentially added together to produce more advanced capabilities- and tend to characterize environmentalists models of development. In contrast, discontinuity theorists usually hold that development is guided primarily by internal biological factors and tend to argue that development is qualitative. They suggest that people regularly undergo dramatic, qualitative changes in their abilities/person. They argue that children go through uneven development which are relatively stable periods followed by abrupt changes and reflects discontinuous nature of the changes taking place in the underlying structures of the body and brain. In general, the truth seems to lie somewhere in between the extremes of gradual continuity and abrupt discontinuity. There is little evidence that people make rapid, abrupt transitions from one stage to the next, even in theories that emphasize stages. Continuity-discontinuity issue emphasized on the patterns and their connectedness to development. I advocate both poles of development as our development includes physical, emotional, psychological, intellectual, and cognitive; these changes take place

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in every child’s life and we develop in steady manner, but in some circumstances of life like traumatic experiences and milestones of life, abrupt changes takes place in us especially in our emotional, psychological and intellectual which have great impact on our lives. Learning-Maturation Issue Development is not only produced by interplay of biological, cognitive, and social processes. To grasp the meaning of development more fully, we must understand two important processes that underlie developmental change. One of these processes is maturation, which refers to the developmental changes in the body or behavior that result from the aging process rather than from learning, injury, illness, or other life experiences. It is programmed - it will happen regardless of the environment. Things that occur through maturation include reflexes. This issue emphasizes on the impact of timings. Maturation is the orderly sequence of changes dictated by the genetic blueprint we each have, and also include behavior that may improve due to ongoing developmental changes in neuromuscular systems. Maturation is any permanent change in thought or behavior that occurs through the biological process of aging without regard to environmental influences. This shows that human grows in an orderly manner according to maturation view. Maturation approach argues the genetic blueprints that produce commonalities in our growth and development. Maturation is partly responsible for psychological changes such as our increasing ability to concentrate, solve problems, and understand another person’s thoughts or feelings.

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A second critical developmental process is learning, which is any relatively permanent change in thinking or behavior that is a result of one’s practice or experiences. Learning will only take place when an individual have a particular experience. It is the way we learn how to live in this world n how to interact with our world by doing some effort and using our experience. Most of our abilities and habits do not simply unfold as part of nature’s grand plan, we often learn to feel, think, and behave in new ways from our observation of an interaction with parents, teachers, and other important people in our lives, as well as from events that we experience. Maturation-learning issue basically deals with the question: “How does maturation, which is biologically based, interact with learning, which is experiential, to shape development?” The maturationists believe that extreme environments can depress development, but basic growth tendencies are genetically wired into the human. For example, how does skeletal/muscular development, which is biological based, interact with practice, which is experiential? Similar question arises with cognitive and personality development, in which neurological and hormonal maturation interacts with experience. The question of maturation versus learning is an age old debate - but today most psychologists believe that maturation and learning influence cognitive ability. We change in response to our environment particularly in response to the actions and reactions of the people around us. Of course, most developmental changes are the product of both maturation and learning. As when we get older we become more mature, our height and weight increases, skeleton develops, many puberty changes occurs in us as it is a natural process and it is involuntary in nature. But we learn many things as time passes like obedience to authority, altruistic behavior, moral reasoning, social norms and

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values, cultural customs, manners and they are not biological but are learnt by experience. Normative-Individual development In pursuing the goal of description, human developmentalists carefully observe the behavior of people of different ages, seeking to specify how human beings change over time. Though there are typical pathways of development that virtually all people follow, researchers have discovered that no two persons are exactly alike. Even when raised in same home, children often display very different interests, values, abilities, and behaviors. Thus to adequately describe development, it is necessary to focus both on typical patterns of change (normative development) and on individual variations (ideographic development), seeking to identify the important ways that developing humans resemble each other and how they are likely to differ as they proceed through life. Normative development includes developmental changes that characterize most of all members of species; typical patterns of development that are same for all individuals of same species. It refers to the similarities that are followed by almost all the members of species which become norm of that species. It means what children have in common or how development is similar for all children. It is the general change and reorganization in behavior that virtually all children share as they grow older. It is a typical or average behavior of all children during development. Other focuses on ideographic development, which includes individual variations in the rate, extent, or direction of development. It means that differences occur in one

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child to the next. Individual development has two meanings. First, it refers to individual variation around the normative course of development. Second, individual development refers to continuity within each child’s individual developmental pathway over time. Even when dramatic changes in individual personality do take place, logical reasons can generally be found. Just as normative developments is coherent and predictable, so too is individual development. Normative research focuses on the average child, with the primary goal of identifying and describing how normal development proceeds from step to step. A related issue involves the search for universals of development, behaviors or patterns of development that characterize all children everywhere. Idiographic research, in contrast, centers n the individual child and the factors that produce human diversity. Research on language development illustrates these two approaches. Researchers interested in normative development search for common patterns of linguistic development both in children who speak the same language and in children who speak different languages. Theorists who an idiographic perspective are more concerned with identifying ad explaining the individual differences that are evident as children master language. Such differences might result from differences in experiences, such as type of speech, adults use when talking with children, or from biological factors, such as brain trauma or inheritance of a particular genetic disorder. Historically, the normative approach was associated with biological theories of development, such as Gesell’s, whereas the idiographic approach was associated with researchers who emphasized environmental and experiential processes.

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This issue adequately tries to give descriptions that provide us with the facts about development, but it is only the starting point. Ultimately, developmentalists seek to explain the changes they have observed. In pursuing this goal of explanation, researchers hope to determine why humans developed as they typically do and why some individuals turn out differently from others. It is a natural thing that no person is similar to other. Every person contains specific traits but they differ in every person in intensity, and duration. We are similar to people around us like the stages we go through during development, altruistic behavior, stereotypes, identity formation, and many more, and different in the way that the cultures of countries differ not only their religion but there are many differences within the religion of different countries. Like in Pakistan the culture and art and craft of its four provinces are different from each other. Dress, language, marriage ceremonies, education systems and many other things differ and they are part of their society or province. Active-Passive Learning Issue Active-Passive learning issue is a debate among developmental theorists about whether children are active contributors to their own development or, rather, passive recipients of environmental influences. It basically tries to answer the question that “Do individuals actively seek knowledge and self-understanding, or do they passively react to what they experience and are taught?” Active learners are those who play active role in determining their own developmental outcomes, while passive learners are those whose developmental outcomes largely reflect the influences of other people and circumstances beyond their control.

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Theorists who emphasize active development often refer to as organismic theorists and they argue that we are active participants in our own development. Organismic model views children as active entities whose developmental paths are primarily determined by forces within themselves. This model compares humans to their living organisms by viewing them as whole beings that cannot be understood as a simple collection of parts and active in the developmental process, changing under the guidance of internal forces and evolving through distinct stages as they mature. Individuals seek to interact with other individuals as well as with events, and they are changed in the process. In turn, they act on those objects and events, and change them too, all while thinking about what they experience and trying to figure it out and understand it for themselves. Curiosity and the desire to acquire knowledge and understanding our central to development. Theorists who advocates passive process are often referred to as mechanistic theorists, they see human as passively reacting to events in their environment. The mechanistic model views children as passive entities whose developmental paths are primarily determined by external influence. This model likens human beings to machines by viewing them as a collection of behaviors that can be decomposed; passive, changing mostly in response to outside influences; and changing gradually or continuously as their parts are added or subtracted. From this perspective, we are driven primarily by our internal drives and motivations in conjunction with the external incentives provided by others and the environment in general. Development is determined largely by rewards and punishments, which shape and mold us. The word determine here also implies that everything we know or do is a function of past or present conditions.

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Clearly, learning theories such as Watson and Skinner favored the mechanistic world view, for they see human beings as passively shaped by environmental events and they analyze human behavior response by response. Bandura’s social learning theory primarily mechanistic, yet it reflects the important organismic assumption that human beings are active creatures who both influence and are influenced by their environment. By contrast, psychoanalytic theorists, such as Freud and Erikson and cognitive developmentalists from the Piagetian traditions all base their theories primarily on the organismic model. Finally ethologists also portray humans as active, holistic beings with biological predispositions that channel or guide development. However, they are less inclined then other organismic theorists to view the codes of development as discontinuous. According to psychoanalytic perspective, children are active learner as they are driven by inborn instincts that are channeled into socially desirable outlets. Cognitive theory of Piaget also emphasize that children actively construct more sophisticated understanding of the self, others, and the environment to which they adapt. According to information-processing perspective children actively process environmental information to answer questions, solve problems, or otherwise master challenges. Socio-cultural view of Vygotsky studied children as active learner and they processes information that others provide to guide their learning and thinking. However, the perspective of ecological system advocates both, organismic and mechanistic models, which suggests that humans actively influence the environmental contexts that influence their development. But the fact is that much of the time we actively approach the world in all its complexity, and we construct our own view of it to guide us, yet we often has little

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choice except should react towards the physical and social world serves up for us. In other words, our active human minds interact with the forces of society and nature, and that interaction determines what we do and what we become. Many developmentalists who worked on to the learning process of children and tried to investigate that are children active or passive learner. But as the human actively influence the environmental contexts that influence their development, so the passive or experienced ways of learning do. They both are important in many contexts as if we want to learn the arts or how to play any instrument we should be a passive as well as active learner. Passive in a sense that we are driven primarily by our internal drives and motivations in conjunction with the external incentives provided by others and the environment in general, it is related to reward and punishment (appreciation or good grades) and it mold our personality. Active in a sense that curiosity and the desire to acquire knowledge and understanding our central to development. Specificity-Generality Issue This issue consists of two separate questions. The first question is one of domain specificity - are developmental processes specific to particular knowledge or skill domains or do they apply more generally to a broad range of abilities? This question has implications for how broad the scope of developmental theories can be. The second question is one of the cultural specificity - are developmental processes specific to particular social or cultural contexts or is they socially and culturally universal? This issue has implications for developmental theories applicability across social settings and cultures. Extreme Domain Specificity argues that people are effective thinkers only in

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contexts which they have directly experienced, or in which evolution has equipped them with effective solutions. The role of general cognitive abilities is ignored, or denied altogether. Basically this issue operates with specificity and generality of developmental process by answering these questions: “Does everyone go through the same developmental processes/stages/aspects or does development vary across people, and culture?, and To what extent can developmental psychology identify developmental changes that occur to everyone throughout the world and to what extent should it take specific human and cultural contexts into account?” To Piagetians, domain specific knowledge grows out of numerous interactions between the organism’s biologically based domain general abilities (such as assimilation and accommodation), and the environmental context. Underscoring these tenets is the postulation that organisms develop in a discontinuous rather than continuous fashion. Discontinuous development refers to the theory that development occurs in relatively abrupt changes of domain general function over a brief time span, which leads to different, more long-term functional patterns. Continuous development refers to the notion that domain general processes evolve slowly over time and are more domains specific. The issue of domain specificity has been raised most often in connection with cognitive development, where the question is whether a theory attempts to explain cognitive development in general or focuses instead on processes specific to particular domains. Piaget theory was intended as an explanation of cognitive development in general, proposing fundamental cognitive structures and abilities that cut across domains, such as mental representation and logical operations. On the other hand, information

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processing theory focuses on more specific skills and strategies and takes into consideration children’s knowledge in particular domains, such as chess and dinosaurs. The general recent trend in developmental psychology, especially among researchers who study cognitive development, has been away from theories that attempt to account for development in general and toward theories that focus more narrowly on development in specific domains. The cultural specificity issue is relevant to theories in all areas of development. Many theories were formulated in Europe and North America, and all of them reflect the assumptions and concerns of the cultures from which they come. Only socio-cultural approach by Vygotsky explicitly addresses social and cultural context in explaining development. Piaget, Erikson and Freud assumed that their theories were describing culturally universal structures and processes, but a large body of cross-cultural research suggests that only some aspects of their theories apply across Western and non-Western cultures. Piaget stimulated a generation of research by postulating qualitative shifts in the developmental abilities of human organisms. Courage and Howe (2002) refer to this view as epigenetic constructivism, or the belief that infants are born without domain specific knowledge, but acquire such knowledge as a function of domain general processes. They define domain specific knowledge as “specific to a single cognitive domain under the control of more specific brain-mind functions” like processing speed and memory capacity.

They further define domain general abilities as “cognitive abilities that

influence performance across a wide range of situations or domains” like facial recognition.

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Piaget description of infant’s sensorimotor period holds up well across a wide range of cultures, but his assumption that abstract, scientific reasoning is the ultimate outcome of cognitive development does not transfer to cultures in which formal schooling is rare (Dasen & Heron, 1981). Frued’s and Erikson’s emphasis on autonomy in toddlerhood makes sense in most European and North American cultural settings, but not in cultures in which dependency is encouraged. Bowlby’s adaption theory, with its evolutionary roots, was also intended to be culturally universal. The tendency of infants to form attachments to caregivers and the biological adaptiveness of infant-caregiver attachments do seem to be universal, but the ways attachment is manifested appear to be culture-specific. According to Plucker (2007), content general or content specific is one of the most controversial issues in contemporary creativity research. Recent studies provide support for both positions, but the results of these investigations may be influenced by several factors, including the presence of a method effect (i.e., psychometric vs. alternative assessment). This study investigates the method effect by analyzing quantity (psychometric)

and

quality

(alternative

assessment)

of

creative

achievement

simultaneously using structural equation modeling. Although people seem to develop abilities at approximately the same age this view has been called too simplistic. Cultural differences, as well as family differences, may influence development. Development may be much more multifaceted. As the theorists of different countries defined the same processes of development, the worldwide developmental processes. Although the differences in cultures and norms also make the development of children different from other religion. As in western countries, when a child is 18 years

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old he lives separate from his family, he is free from the authority of parents and is in the process to form their identity and make their own decisions, but in eastern countries child is not given permission to live separately, they have to take care of their parents their whole life and their family setups also create changes in their development. As a child who is given permission to make his own decision would differ from the person who depends on his parent’s support. I believe that we cannot generalize all western theories of development on to eastern children; we should be more specific in what we want to explain and in what context. Most developmentalists recognize that it is unwise to take an extreme position on the issues of nature and nurture, continuity and discontinuity, heredity and environment, maturation and learning, idiographic and normative development, active-passive learning, and specificity-generality. They all characterize development through the human life span. Although the developmentalists do not take extreme positions on these important issues, this consensus has not meant the absence of spirited debate about how strongly development is influenced by each of these factors. The answers to these questions also have a bearing on social policy decisions about children and adolescents, and consequently on each of our lives.

Conclusion As psychology is a science of a behavior and developmental psychology is the largest and widely spread branch of psychology which deals with the life span developmental changes that take place throughout the life of an organism / human beings. The human development has been divided into eight periods through which every

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individual go. Different theorists gave their definitions of human development and are known as the pioneers of developmental psychology. Many researchers uses different research method to conduct studies on the development of different factors of children. Some developmental processes, such as growth during the prenatal period or the onset of puberty, are primarily biological. Others depend mainly on experience. Acquiring the speech patterns and accents of the neighborhood you grow up in or learning a new language while in another country are the developmental procedures which are primarily influenced by personal experience. However, most development throughout the life span is a result of interaction between biology and experience. Most development cannot be neatly categorized as either by logical or experiential; instead, it involves an ongoing, dynamic interplay between the two basic sets of causes. Your present personality is also a function of your interaction with other people, the self concept you began to develop in infancy, the social and the cultural contacts you grew up in, and much more. The days have gone when theorists focused on single aspects of development to the exclusion of everything else. The arguments rose over whether aspects of cognition and personality are either a function of biology or a function of experience has ended. We also saw interaction in the relationship between inherited physical characteristics such as body type, skin color, or height, and a person’s self concept and social acceptance. Behavior may also be influenced by expectations based on stereotypes, such as the fat people are jolly, adolescence are awkward etc. Theorists still disagree about how much a given characteristic or behavior is a result of biology versus experience. So the controversies of the past aren’t entirely dead.

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There are a number of important issues that have been debated throughout the history of developmental psychology. In psychology, the controversies arouse from the different theoretical concepts of different theories that they believed were the major parts of child development. •

Nature-Nurture is the fundamental question in psychology and involves the debate that whether development is influenced by nature or nurture. How much nature and nurture contributes varies from one characteristic to another. This debate shows that the interplay between nature and nurture is a busy two-way street. The nature vs. nurture debate has produced many research advances in the area of human development.

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Heredity and environment interact; the environment encourages or discourages the expression of an individual’s inherited characteristics while at the same time, those inherited characteristics to some extent determine that individual’s environment. Even though evidence proves that there is an interaction between genes and the environment, people will continue to study the effects of each in development.

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Long-standing issue in child psychology is whether the development is connected and constant (continuous) or uneven and disconnected (discontinuous). At the heart of this debate lies the question of whether the development is solely and evenly continuous, or whether it is marked by age specific periods. Related to the continuity-discontinuity issue is the distinction between quantitative and

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qualitative change. Quantitative changes are changes by degree whereas qualitative changes are changes in kind. •

Maturation-learning issue basically deals with the question: “How does maturation, which is biologically based, interact with learning, which is experiential, to shape development?” The maturationists believe that extreme environments can depress development, but basic growth tendencies are genetically wired into the human. The question of maturation versus learning is an age old debate - but today most psychologists believe that maturation and learning influence cognitive ability.

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Normative-Idiographic issue adequately tries to give descriptions that provide us with the facts about development, but it is only the starting point. Ultimately, developmentalists seek to explain the changes they have observed. In pursuing this goal of explanation, researchers hope to determine why humans developed as they typically do and why some individuals turn out differently from others.

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Active-Passive learning issue is a debate among developmental theorists about whether children are active contributors to their own development or, rather, passive recipients of environmental influences. But the fact is that much of the time we actively approach the world in all its complexity, and we construct our own view of it to guide us, yet we often has little choice except should react towards the physical and social world serves up for us.

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The issue of domain specificity-generality has been raised most often in connection with cognitive development, where the question is whether a theory

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attempts to explain cognitive development in general or focuses instead on processes specific to particular domains.

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Dasen, P. R., & Heron, A. (1981). Cross-cultural tests of Piaget’s theory. In Triandis, H., & Heron, A. (Eds.), Cross-cultural contributions to psychology (pp. 94-104). Amsterdam: Swets & Zeitlinger. DeHart, G. B., Sroufe, L. A., & Cooper, R. G. (2004). Child development: Its nature & course (5th ed.). New York: McGraw-Hill companies, Inc. Kail, R.V., &Cavanaugh, J. C. (2000). Human development: A lifespan view (2nd ed.). USA: Thomson Learning. Papalia, D. E., & Olds, S. W. (1995). Human development (6th ed.). USA: McGraw-Hill, Inc. Pinel, P. J. (2000). Biopsychology (4th ed.). Boston: Allyn & Bacon. Plucker, J. A. (2007). Generalization of creativity across domains: Examination of the modern effect hypothesis. The Journal of Creative Behavior, 38(1), 1-12. Rymers, R. (1992). A silent childhood. The New Yorker, 41-81. Santrock, J. W. (2002). Life-span development (8th ed.). New York: McGraw-Hill Companies. Santrock, J. W. (2005). Children (8th ed.). New York: McGraw-Hill Companies. Shaffer, D. R. (2002). Developmental psychology: Childhood and adolescence (6th ed.). USA: Thomson Learning. Varta, R., & Miller, S. A. (2005). Child psychology (4th ed.). New York: John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

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