Unit 4: Developing Throughout the Lifespan

Understanding and valuing what all human beings have in common is important to successfully interacting with people. And without a doubt, understanding and valuing diversity, or what makes individuals different, is also a key, especially in the 21st century. A solid knowledge of psychology goes a long way toward helping you achieve these goals.

We are especially advised to attend to and respect diversity in gender, ethnicity, nationality, religion, and sexual orientation. We absolutely agree that these are extremely important areas of difference. When you think about it, though, diversity in age may be the most pronounced form that you will encounter. Terms like the “generation gap” hint at the scope of the differences between younger people and older people. A great deal of mental effort during childhood and adolescence is spent trying to understand our parents. Then, as adults, we marvel at the inexplicable workings of the minds of children and teenagers.

There is little doubt that our exposure to people who differ from us in age is increasing just as it is for other forms of diversity. For example, if you had been a college student in the early 1980’s, you would be hard pressed to meet a single student over age 25. Today, more than 30% of students at community colleges are over 30.

The significant differences among people at different ages can lead to a serious lack of understanding of other people. For example, parents and teachers are less effective, adolescents are more troubled, and siblings are less tolerant when they are unaware of the ways that different-aged people think and relate to others.

We are not saying that age diversity is the most important kind; that is essentially a value judgment that you should make for yourself. We will say, however, that it may be the most overlooked kind. One reason for this is that we sometimes forget that we are changing over time, too. We have a strong sense of a constant self; for example, every fall, faculty at colleges and universities across the US note how young the students are getting, as if they are staying the same age and the students are getting younger (recall what we said a couple of paragraphs ago; in reality, the students are getting older). For many people, this feeling that “I am the same person I always was,” translates into a lack of understanding of different aged people. A father may complain that he does not understand his teenage children, but it is not simply because they are teenagers; he may think, “I was never like that at that age.”

This unit is about Developmental Psychology, the subfield that examines the changes and the constants throughout our lifespans. You will be able to use your knowledge of Developmental Psychology to understand changes you have undergone, to know what to expect 10, 20, 30, even 50 years from now, and to improve your understanding of and interactions with people who are not the same age as you.

Of course, there are a great many ways that we develop throughout life. In order to examine development, we will focus on thinking, and on social abilities and relationships. This division into cognitive development and social development is consistent with the way the subfield has been organized by developmental psychologists. The cognitive developments include such phenomena as gaining an understanding of the physical world in infancy, learning how to reason and solve problems, and balancing declining abilities with increasing abilities in old age. Social development includes such phenomena as forming emotional bonds between children and parents; making friends in childhood, adolescence and adulthood; and how children are affected by parenting practices. Developmental Psychology actually includes a third topic area in addition to cognitive and social development, namely physical development. Although the three topic areas are somewhat separate, as you will see, they interact profoundly.

There are four Modules in this unit:

• Module 15, Physical Development Throughout the Lifespan, describes the changes that occur in our bodies and brains from conception through late adulthood. You will learn some new information about the nervous system and will be introduced to details about the body system that produces hormones, the endocrine system.
• Module 16, Cognitive Development, covers the remarkable and surprising journey of development in our language, thinking, memory, and reasoning abilities. You will discover that infants are quite a bit more capable than you might guess and the future is not as bleak as you might think for older people.
• Module 17, Social Development, takes off from the prerequisite cognitive developments and shows you how they allow the infant and young child to get along in the social world. You will learn about the infant’s first emotional bonds, the role of parents in their children’s social development, and the effects of these early developments throughout our lives.
• Module 18, Developmental Psychology: The Divide and Conquer Strategy, describes the decisions that scientific psychologists must make when they choose a subfield in which to specialize for their careers. As you will see, developmental psychology, as the most complex subfield, requires budding scientists to pay more attention to its organization and to make more decisions than other subfields do.