Life-Span Human Development

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Without visual input, blind humans have demonstrated that tactile and auditory functions still fully develop and they can use tactile and auditory cues to perceive the world around them. Normative history-graded influences are associated with a specific time period that defines the broader environmental and cultural context in which an individual develops. Urie Bronfenbrenner’s theory stressing the importance of studying a child in the context of multiple environments, or ecological systems. For example, Erikson’s theory that teenagers struggle with identity assumes that all teenagers live in a society in which they have many options and must make an individual choice about their future. Psychosocial development continues across adulthood with similar (and some different) developmental issues of family, friends, parenting, romance, divorce, remarriage, blended families, caregiving for elders, becoming grandparents and great grandparents, retirement, new careers, coping with losses, and death and dying.

Culture is often referred to as a blueprint or guideline shared by a group of people that specifies how to live.Vygotsky’s theory that emphasizes how cognitive development proceeds as a result of social interactions between members of a culture. Baltes states that the development of a particular domain does not occur in a strictly linear fashion but that the development of certain traits can be characterized as having the capacity for both an increase and decrease in efficacy over the course of an individual’s life.

As you may have already noticed, physical, cognitive, and psychosocial development are often interrelated, as with the example of brain development. The kinds of traditions and values that evolve in a particular culture serve to help members function in their own society and to value their own society. I felt I could trust these authors, and their intelligence and perceptiveness shined through, throughout the book.Late adulthood is generally viewed as age 65 and older, but there are incredible variations in health and lifestyle between the “young old” and the “oldest old,” who may be well into their 100s. Early scholars John Locke and Charles Darwin proposed theories of human behavior that are the “direct ancestors of some major theoretical traditions” of developmental psychology today(Vasta et al. The way the authors presented developmental psychology, I also think it brings up some important challenges to the conventional abnormal psychology approach, and abnormal psychology would do well to be more informed by developmental psychology (e. During childhood, however, we begin to become social beings as we learn how to manage our instincts and transform them into socially acceptable behaviors.