9 Lecture: Introduction to Life Span, Growth and Development
9 Lecture: Introduction to Life Span, Growth and Development
Lecture Transcript
Welcome to life span, growth and development. This is the study of how and why people change or remain the same over time.
Although this course is offered in psychology, this is a very interdisciplinary course. Psychologists, nutritionists, sociologists, anthropologists, educators, and health care professionals all contribute to our knowledge of life span. We will look at how we change physically over time from early development through aging and death. We examine cognitive change-or how our ability to think and remember changes over time. We look at how our concerns and psychological state is influenced by age and finally, how our social relationships change throughout life.
There are several goals of those involved in this discipline:
- Describe change-many of the studies we will examine simply involve the first step in investigation, which is description. Arnold Gesell’s study on infant motor skills, for example.
2. Explaining changesis another goal. Theories provide explanations for why we change over time. For example, Erikson offers an explanation about why our two-year-old is temperamental. Levinson offers an explanation about why a 45 year old husband is so concerned with buying a sports car. Freud offers an explanation of why films with sex and violence are such moneymakers.
3. Predict-science offers us the ability to make predictions about what the future holds. In some areas, we can make predictions about the future. For example, we know some about how smoking and drinking can affect prenatal development.
4. Influence change-ultimately, practitioners want to help people lead better, healthier and happier lives.
What is a context? You may think of it as the background or setting in which a person exists. Our lives are impacted by a variety of contexts. We may have different world views depending on life circumstances. For example, people who grew up during the Great Depression of the 1930s in the U. S. suffered economically and sometimes carried that idea of thrift with them throughout their lives.
When and where we live creates this context. Some examples of contexts include cohort, social class, and culture.
A cohort is a group of people born within the same generation in a geographic location. A social class is a category of people who share similar levels of education, income, occupational status, and consumption patterns. Culture refers to a way of life of a group of people. Through culture, we learn what to strive for, what to eat, what to think, how to behave, and so many other things. An interesting story in the news last week was an interview of an Asian student who is studying children’s interpretations of art and how this is influenced by culture. In middle class America, children are taught to look at detail and function. “This is a sturdy car that rides fast.” But in Asia, children are taught to think more abstractly about images. The ways in wh