Developmental+Psychology


 * Developmental psychology** is the psychological specialty that documents the course of people’s social, emotional, moral, and intellectual development over the life span. It is concerned with the course and causes of developmental changes over a person’s entire lifetime. It looks at the physical and biological changes we undergo from the moment of conception to late adulthood.


 * Developmental psychologists** research and teach the development of mental processes and behavior with age and experience. They analyze the extent to which development is a product of what we arrive with at birth and the extent to which it is a product of what the world provides.

=Topics in Developmental Psychology= Developmental psychology usually includes courses such as: It also looks at the impact of genes and the environment on the growth and maturation of human beings.
 * Infancy
 * Child development
 * Adolescence
 * Life-span development
 * Social development
 * Cognitive development
 * Death and dying

Some questions can occur when looking into developmental psychology. Here are a few examples:
 * How can the environment effect the development of humans?
 * Why do genes play such a big role in how we develop?
 * How is motivation of one effected by the people one grows up around?
 * How come babies are so attached to their mothers or people that take care of them?
 * When does a baby start thinking?
 * Why do we act the way we do in certain situations?
 * Why do some people grow up to be millionaires and others end up on the streets?
 * How do our brains develop over time?

=History in Developmental Psychology= Developmental psychology basically developed over time. It started out with famous philosophers such as **John Locke (1632-1704)** and **Jean Jacques Rousseau(1712-1778)** in the late 1600’s to the early 1700’s. **Charles Darwin (1809-1882)** had influence on this topic. Just like his theory of evolution, he believed human beings “evolve” over time. From Darwin’s works, a zoologists named **Ernst Heinrich Haekal (1834-1919)** embraced Darwin theory and had an early attempt to tie both evolutionism and psychology together to try and learn how we develop. After Haekal proposed that ontogeny (the origin and history of the individual) recapitulates phylogeny (the origin and history of the species), **William Thierry Preyer (1841-1897)** extended his ideas even further. After the release of one of Preyer’s texts, developmental psychology than began to be looked at more. The founder of the American Psychological Association, **G. Stanley Hall (1844-1924)**, outlined the history of the systematic study of development and discussed specific content areas such as growth norms, language development, and moral development. Two men, **Arnold Gesell (1880-1961)** and **John B. Watson (1878-1958)**, helped shape developmental psychology even more. Gesell suggested that nature plays a role in human development. Later however, Watson disagreed with his views and proposed that the environment had a great impact on how we develop, not nature. He also founded the behaviorists approach to psychology. It wasn’t until soon after, **Sigmund Freud (1856-1939)** had an immense impact on developmental psychology. Freud had a range of studies from studies of personality to the effects of early experiences and psychosexual development. During the same time frame, theorists **Jean Piaget (1896-1980)**, suggested that both nature and nurture work together, and that both influence one another. His ideas influenced this specialty the most out of any other psychologists. It’s necessary for developmental psychology because learning how one develops can help us understand the effects of human behavior on human development and cognitive development as well.

All of the psychologists that are listed above had impacts on developmental psychology. Here are some quotes from magazines about developmental psychology from psychologists:


 * “If we make, for the infant to see, a movement that he has often practiced of his own accord, he can make a successful imitation much earlier than is commonly supposed. Such a movement, which I employed as suitable for early imitation, is the pursing of the mouth, the protruding of the closed lips, which often occurs (even in adults), along with a great strain of the attention.”**

- Preyer, W. (1888). "The Imitative Faculty of Infants." //Popular Science Monthly//, 33, 249-255.


 * “The education of the moral sentiment is, as we have seen, carried out in part by the influence of the child's companions. To surround him with companions is not only necessary for his comfort, but is a condition of developing and strengthening the moral feelings, as the sentiment of justice, the feeling of honor, and so on. The larger community of the school has an important moral function in familiarizing the child's mind with the idea that the moral law is not the imposition of an individual will, but of the community. The standard of good conduct set up and enforced by this community is all authoritative in fixing the early directions of the moral judgment.”**

- Sully, J. (1886). “Development of the Moral Faculty.” //Popular Science Monthly//, 29, 23-33.


 * “…are the distinctive characteristics of man as compared with animals: here is the origin of language and of general ideas. Among animals, man is, what some great and ingenious poet is among laborers and peasants: in a word, he is cognizant of a multitude of shades and tints, even to a whole class of shades, which are unnoticed by them. This is further seen both in the kind and in the degree of man's curiosity. It is easily seen that, commencing with the fifth or sixth month, infants, during the succeeding two years or more, give all their time to making experiments in natural philosophy. There is no animal, not even the cat or the dog, which makes such continual study of all bodies within its reach. Every day, the infant of whom I speak (age twelve months) touches, feels, turns over, lets fall, tastes, and experiments upon, whatever comes under its hand; whatever the object may be a ball, doll, rattle, toy once it is sufficiently known, the infant leaves it alone : it is no longer a novelty ; there is nothing more to be learned from it ; it no longer interests the child. This is simple curiosity; the child's physical wants, its desire of food, have nothing to do with the matter. It would seem as though already in its little brain each group of perceptions tends to complete itself, as in the brain of a child that possesses language.**

- Taine, H.A. (1876). “Lingual Development in Babyhood.” //Popular Science Monthly//, 9, 129-137.

**References:** Bernstein, Douglas. //Essentials Of Psychology//. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 2004. Print.

King, D. Brett, Wayne Viney, and W. Douglas Woody. //A History of Psychology Ideas and Context (4th Edition).// Boston: Allyn & Bacon, 2008. Print.

Kosslyn, Stephen Michael. //Psychology in Context//. Boston, MA: Allyn and Bacon/Pearson Education, 2006. Print.