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The Mysteries of Developmental Psychology: How to Unravel the Mystery of Human Changes Throughout the Lifespan?
Developmental psychology is the science that explores how and why humans grow, change, and adapt over the course of life. Originally focused on infants and children, the field now extends to adolescence, adult development, aging, and across the lifespan. Developmental psychologists aim to explain changes in cognition, emotion, and behavior across the lifespan. This field examines major dimensions of change, including physical development, cognitive development, and socioemotional development.
Developmental psychology examines a variety of topics across three dimensions, including motor skills, executive functions, moral understanding, language acquisition, social change, personality, emotional development, self-concept, and identity formation.
Among these three dimensions, the interaction between individual characteristics, behavior and environmental factors has received widespread attention from researchers, including social environment and built environment. Debates over biological essentialism versus neuroplasticity, developmental stages versus dynamic systems, are of interest to many researchers. Although research in developmental psychology has certain limitations, researchers are currently working to understand how life-stage transitions and biological factors influence our behavior and development.
Developmental psychology covers many fields, including educational psychology, child psychiatry, forensic developmental psychology, child development, cognitive psychology, ecological psychology, and cultural psychology. Some of the influential developmental psychologists of the 20th century include Uri Bronfenbrenner, Erik Erikson, Sigmund Freud, Anna Freud, Jean ·Piaget, Barbara Rogoff, Esther Silen, and Lev Vygotsky. Together, these scholars contribute their wisdom to our understanding of the complexity of human psychological development.
Historical background
Jean-Jacques Rousseau and John B. Watson are often considered the foundations of modern developmental psychology. In the mid-18th century, Rousseau described three stages of development: infancy, childhood and adolescence in his book Emile: On Education. His views were adopted and supported by educators at the time. Developmental psychology is generally concerned with why and how certain changes (e.g., cognitive, social, intellectual, personality) occur over the course of human life.
Erik Erikson created a model of eight stages of psychosocial development, emphasizing that each stage has its developmental crises that shape a person's personality and behavior.
In the late 19th century, psychologists familiar with Darwin's theory of evolution began to seek evolutionary descriptions of psychological development. The pioneering psychologist G. Stanley Hall attempted to correspond the ages of children to previous ages in human history. James Mark Baldwin had a profound influence on the development of theories in developmental psychology.
Development theory
Psychological development theory
Sigmund Freud proposed a theory that the essence of human behavior is the continuous pursuit of happiness. This process goes through different stages as the individual grows, each stage representing a way to obtain happiness, ultimately leading to the person becoming a mature adult. Each stage has its own characteristics, such as: oral stage, anal stage, genital stage, latent stage and reproductive stage.
Freud also proposed three personality structures: id, ego and superego, which respectively represent the tension between basic needs, realistic considerations and moral standards.
Cognitive development theory
Swiss theorist Jean Piaget believed that children actively construct knowledge through interaction with their environment. Each stage of development is shaped by a process of understanding contradictions, a process called "equilibrium." Piaget proposed the sensorimotor stage, preoperational stage, concrete operational stage and formal operational stage, indicating that cognitive development is a continuous process.
Moral development stage
Based on the work of Piaget, Leonard Kohlberg divided the moral development process into three levels: the pre-inertial level, the inertial level and the post-inertial level, emphasizing that moral reasoning changes with age.
Psychosocial development stages
German and American psychologist Eric Erikson proposed eight stages of development influenced by biological, psychological and social factors. Individuals face different challenges at each stage and need to successfully solve these challenges to achieve success. Acquire positive virtues.
Successfully solving challenges will embed positive virtues, while failure will deepen an individual's negative understanding of themselves and the world around them.
Although developmental psychology is based on many theories, continuing research shows that how individuals evolve and change with changes in the environment and themselves is still the focus of current exploration. Moving from the interaction of biology and psychology to social contexts, the subject continues to demonstrate its potential for understanding human behavior.
In such an ever-evolving field, are you also thinking about what factors are the key elements that truly shape your personality and behavior in your life's development process?
