【Psychology and Life】Chapter 10 — Main Points

* All the following abstractions are excerpted from <Psychology and Life>, Richard J. Gerrig & Philip G. Zimbardo, 19th edition


Chapter 10 — Human Development Across The Life Span.


— Studying Development

  • Researchers collect normative, longitudinal, and cross-sectional data to document change.


— Physical Development across the Life Span

  • Environmental factors can affect physical development while a child is still in the womb.

  • Newborns and infants possess a remarkable range of capabilities: They are prewired for survival.

  • Through puberty, adolescents achieve sexual maturity.

  • Some physical changes in late adulthood are consequences of disuse, not inevitable deterioration.


— Cognitive Development across the Life Span

  • Piaget's key ideas about cognitive development include development of schemes, assimilation, accommodation, and the four-stage theory of discontinuous development. The four stages are sensorimotor, pre operational, concrete operational, and formal operational.

  • Many of Piaget's theories are now being altered by ingenious research paradigms that reveal infants and young children to be more competent than Piaget had thought.

  • Researchers suggest that children develop foundational theories that change over time.

  • Cross-cultural research has questioned the universality of cognitive developmental theories.

  • Age-related declines in cognitive functioning are typically evident in only some abilities.


— Acquiring Language

  • Many researchers believe that humans have an inborn language-making capacity. Even so, interactions with adult speakers is an essential part of the language acquisition process.

  • Like scientists, children develop hypotheses about the meanings and grammar of their language. These hypotheses are often constrained by innate principles.


— Social Development across the Life Span

  • Social development takes place in a particular cultural context.

  • Erik Erikson conceptualized the life span as a series of crises with which individuals must cope.

  • Children begin the process of social development with different temperaments.

  • Socialization begins with an infant's attachment to a caregiver.

  • Failure to make this attachment leads to numerous physical and psychological problems.

  • Adolescents must develop a personal identity by forming comfortable social relationships with parents and peers.

  • The central concerns of adulthood are organized around the needs of intimacy and generatively.

  • People become less socially active as they grow older because they selectively maintain only those relationships that matter most to them emotionally.

  • People assess their lives, in part, by their ability to contribute positively to the lives of others.


— Sex and Gender Differences

  • Research has revealed biologically based sex differences between the brains of men and women.

  • Children's gender stereotypes are most rigid between ages 5 and 7.

  • Beginning at birth, parents and peers help bring about the socialization of gender roles.


— Moral Development

  • Kohlberg defined stages of moral development.

  • Subsequent research has evaluated gender and cultural differences in moral reasoning.


— Learning to Age Successfully

  • Successful cognitive aging can be defined as people optimizing their functioning in select domains that are of highest priority to them and compensating for losses by using substitute behaviors.


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