Development

Development

Type of psychology: Developmental psychology
Fields of study: Adolescence; behavioral and cognitive models; infancy
and childhood
Developmental theories allow psychologists to manage and understand the enormous
body of data on behavioral development from infancy through old age. Theories of development
focus on many different issues and derive from many perspectives and periods
in history. All, however, are concerned with explaining stability and change in
human behavior as individuals progress through their lives.
Key concepts
• behaviorism
• emergent process
• heuristic
• “organic lamp” theory
• psychodynamic theory
Developmental theory has changed greatly over time. The theories of societies
at various times in history have emphasized different aspects of development.
The Puritans of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, for example,
focused on the moral development of the child; they believed that
Original Sin was inherent in children and that children had to be sternly disciplined
in order to make them morally acceptable. In contrast to this view
was the developmental theory of the eighteenth century French philosopher
Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who held that children were born good and
were then morally corrupted by society. Sigmund Freud (1856-1939) was interested
in psychosexual development and in mental illness; his work therefore
focused on these areas. John B. Watson (1878-1958), B. F. Skinner
(1904-1990), and Albert Bandura (born 1925) worked during a period
when the major impetus in psychology was the study of learning; not surprisingly,
this was the focus of their work.
As developmental theorists worked intently within given areas, they often
arrived at extreme positions, philosophically and scientifically. For example,
some theorists focused upon the biology of behavior; impressed by the importance
of “nature” (genetic or other inherited sources) in development,
they may have neglected “nurture” (learning and other resources received
from parents, the world, and society). Others focused upon societal and social
learning effects and decided that nurture was the root of behavior; nature
has often been relegated to subsidiary theoretical roles in physiological
and anatomical development. Similar conflicts have arisen concerning developmental
continuity or discontinuity, the relative activity or passivity of
children in contributing to their own development, and a host of other issues
in the field.

These extreme positions would at first appear to be damaging to the understanding
of development; however, psychologists are now in a position to
evaluate the extensive bodies of research conducted by adherents of the various
theoretical positions. It has become evident that the truth, in general,
lies somewhere in between. Some developmental functions proceed in a relatively
stepwise fashion, as Jean Piaget (1896-1980) or Freud would hold;
others are much smoother and more continuous. Some development results
largely from the child’s rearing and learning; other behaviors appear
to be largely biological. Some developmental phenomena are emergent
processes (any process of behavior or development that was not necessarily
inherent in or predictable from its original constituents) of the way in which
the developing individual is organized, resulting from both nature and nurture
in intricate, interactive patterns that are only beginning to be understood.
These findings, and the therapeutic and educational applications
that derive from them, are only comprehensible when viewed against the existing
corpus of developmental theory. This corpus, in turn, owes its existence
to the gradual construction and modification of developmental theories
of the past. 255