Lifespan Development, Global Edition

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Integrated examples of Lives in Context illustrate how our biology, cultural, lived experiences all are embedded in multiple layers of context, including family, culture, neighborhood, community, norms, values, and historical events. This key coverage is embedded in all sections throughout the text, linking to learning objectives, related core concepts, and to clear, real-life examples. Adolescent Stage: Adolescence is a phase of rapid physical and socio-emotional transformation brought about by puberty. Also called the "teenager phase" between the ages of 13 to 19 years, the adolescent stage is defined as the transition from childhood to adulthood.

Impactful Career Connections featuring 35 careers rooted in developmental science, cover career pathways for students and highlight career contexts to consider at every stage of life. If the same child sees a horse during his first time visiting the zoo, the child might call it a dog, demonstrating assimilation. Assimilation is piecing new information into an old schema. In this case, the child puts the horse into the dog schema of an animal with four legs and a tail. Are we who we are because of nature (biology and genetics), or are we who we are because of nurture (our environment and culture)? This longstanding question is known in psychology as the nature versus nurture debate. It seeks to understand how our personalities and traits are the product of our genetic makeup and biological factors, and how they are shaped by our environment, including our guardians, peers, and culture. For instance, why do biological children sometimes act like their parents—is it because of genetics or because of early childhood environment and what the child has learned from the parents? What about children who are adopted—are they more like their biological families or more like their adoptive families? And how can siblings from the same family be so different? Please take a few minutes to view this brief video demonstrating different children’s ability to understand object permanence. Like Freud and Erikson, Piaget thought development unfolds in a series of stages approximately associated with age ranges. He proposed a theory of cognitive development that unfolds in four stages: sensorimotor, preoperational, concrete operational, and formal operational ( [link]). Piaget’s Stages of Cognitive Development Age (years)

Piaget developed the Three-Mountain Task to determine the level of egocentrism displayed by children. Children view a 3-dimensional mountain scene from one viewpoint, and are asked what another person at a different viewpoint would see in the same scene. Watch the Three-Mountain Task in action in this short video from the University of Minnesota and the Science Museum of Minnesota. On the other hand, accommodation is creating space in a body of knowledge to insert new information. A child accommodates new words such as horse and cat and understands that not all animals with four legs and a tail are dogs. New schemas are created in the child's mind to organize this information. Assimilating involves using old knowledge to understand new situations, while accommodation involves redesigning old knowledge and understandings to include new knowledge. Critical Periods in Development By multidimensionality, Baltes is referring to the fact that a complex interplay of factors influence development across the lifespan, including biological, cognitive, and socioemotional changes. Baltes argues that a dynamic interaction of these factors is what influences an individual’s development.

Figure 1. Baltes’ lifespan perspective emphasizes that development is lifelong, multidimensional, multidirectional, plastic, contextual, and multidisciplinary. Think of ways your own development fits in with each of these concepts as you read about the terms in more detail. Is development essentially the same, or universal, for all children (i.e., there is one course of development) or does development follow a different course for each child, depending on the child’s specific genetics and environment (i.e., there are many courses of development)? Do people across the world share more similarities or more differences in their development? How much do culture and genetics influence a child’s behavior?

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Discontinuity: Billy struggles to learn how to read and write. Once he finally is able to read and write well, he struggles in math. Once he feels like he is doing well in math, he struggles to understand politics and remember historical facts. Each stage is a crisis or task that Billy has to complete before moving on to the next. Great cultural contexts throughout including videos, references, and discussion in each topic area. There are many different ways to consider how humans develop, but there are a few key ideas in Developmental Psychology that help us understand this better. They are maturation, assimilation, accommodation, and critical periods in development. Maturation Define and distinguish between the three domains of development: physical, cognitive and psychosocial Kohlberg identified three levels of moral reasoning: pre-conventional, conventional, and post-conventional: Each level is associated with increasingly complex stages of moral development.