Introduction to Developmental Psychology

Explore the subject, tasks, and methods of research in developmental psychology, tracing how age-related mental development unfolds from birth to old age, driven by needs, motivation, and social interaction.

Explore how developmental psychology borrows methods from general, differential, and social psychology to study children's cognitive processes, perception, attention, memory, speech, and age-related differences in interpersonal relationships.

Mary Ainsworth's three-category attachment model explains secure, anxious/ambivalent, and avoidant styles in the strange situation of separation, linking secure attachment to sensitive mothers and anxious or avoidant patterns to inconsistency.

Present a four-category model of adult attachment styles by Bartholomew and Horowitz. Identify secure, preoccupied, dismissing, and avoiding patterns built from internal mental and affective models.

Examine how moral development progresses through Kohlberg's three levels and six stages, from obedience and self-interest to universal principles, as children's arguments reveal their reasoning about right and wrong.

Explore Freud's psychosexual stages: oral, anal, phallic, latent, and genital, and how childhood sexuality and unconscious motives shape personality through psychoanalysis.

Explore Erik Erikson's eight psychosocial stages from trust to integrity, linking personality development to social environment, and learning how each crisis shapes identity, intimacy, and care across life.

Explore Piaget's stages of cognitive development from birth to adolescence, including sensorimotor, preoperational, concrete operational, and formal operational. Explain schemas, assimilation, and accommodation, and illustrate conservation via water glass experiment.

Explores theories of adaptation to aging, contrasting withdrawal and assimilation with ongoing social engagement, and examines retirement, social change, and personality types shaping late-life adaptation.

Explore the humanistic tradition in how biographical stages describe the life path of the person, from growth and expansion to restriction and decline, guided by vitality and self-determined goals.

Levinson presents a general life-cycle framework where the life structure, shaped by external roles and internal development, steers stable and transitional periods in men's and women's lives.

Explore the dynamics of romantic and love relationships from early intense arousal to lasting intimacy, through Shaver and Sternberg's models, liking versus love, and institutional versus partnership marriages.

Examine how marital satisfaction shifts through the family life cycle, from honeymoon to parenthood and the empty nest, shaping money, sex, and housework dynamics.

Explore how the individual life structure evolves from ages 17 to 33 across three periods, focusing on ending childhood, anchoring commitments, and balancing stability with openness.

Levinson links the maturing period in the thirties to forties with the midlife transition around forty, centering on establishing a niche, personal enterprise, and the ladder of life.

Navigate the midlife transition by confronting illusions, modify the external and internal life structure, and reintegrate the youth dream into new values and goals while reassessing marital roles.

Explore how retirement affects individuals, outlining three theories on personality, crisis, and ongoing identity, and examine both challenges and positive opportunities like hobbies, friendships, travel, and reflection.

Explore the evolution of mature consciousness and the phases of personal transformation described by Gould, detailing delusions that shape autonomy, boundaries, and self-determination across life stages.

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