Developmental Psychology E-Book

Connor Whiteley

• Herausgeber: Connor Whiteley
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2019

Beschreibung

Perfect for students, teachers and anyone interested in psychology. <br>
BOOK CONTAINS LINK FOR FREE BOOK! <br>
Want to know how children develop? <br>
Interested in developmental psychology? <br>
Or do you just want to know more about psychology and humans in general? <br>
If the yes answer to any of those questions, then this is the book for you. <br>
As together we explore the amazing world of developmental psychology and investigate the importance of brain, cognitive and social development and more in an engaging conversational tone. <br>
By the end of this book not only will you start to become an expert in developmental psychology, but you will start your journey to understand human behaviour and learn more about yourself as well. <br>
Psychology is a fascinating subject so buy today and discover more about human behaviour! <br>
If you like this book, then you'll love my biological, cognitive and sociocultural books as well or save money today and buy the Psychology Collection! <br>

Leseprobe

An Introductory Series: Developmental Psychology

By Connor Whiteley

Copyright © 2019 Connor Whiteley

All rights reserved.

Content page:

Introduction

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

About the author

Introduction:

What is psychology?

We all must have heard of psychology at some point, right?

However, what actually is psychology? Because I think that we are all rather shock about what psychology actually involves when we know the truth.

Especially, as we believe that psychology is what people onprogrammeslikeNCIS, CSI and Bones do. Profiling people and all that.

But I hate to disappoint you and break your image of psychology because as I found out- that version of psychology isn’t strictly true. Mainly because the majority of forensic psychologists’ work is in prisons rehabilitating inmates. At least that’s what my research into the job market has shown.

Anyway, all that psychology is, is the scientific study of behaviour and yes for anyone of youwho arethinking‘psychology a science you must be joking’but as I will be showing you throughout this series is that there are a number of scientific methods for researching the complex and sometimes unpredictable phenomenon known as human behaviour.

Now inchapters,you will see a section under each case study that we’ll look at called critically thinking. In this small section, we’ll look at a positive and a negative of the study. I will fully admit that some of the negatives or limitations of the study will seem a bit extreme or nit-picky. However, the purpose of this section is to help you start to evaluate and think about what makes a good study- and if there are any IB psychology teachers or students out there. I promise that for my exams I do write more professionally, and my critical thinking points are more fluent.

So please join me throughout this series as I begin to introduce you to the intriguing world of psychology and its many areas of study, as I clearly explain everything to you so you can learn and enjoy psychology.

For knowledge is worth sharing.

Chapter 1: brain development

In this first interesting step on our journey to discover what developmental psychology is, we’ll be looking at brain development.

I must confess that this will be a learning journey for both of us as I’ve never done developmental psychology before, and a reason for writing this book is so I can have a basic understand of developmental psychology before I go to university in September.

Without further a due…

The three approaches; biological, cognitive and sociocultural; that we have looked at previously in the series enable us to look at brain development to give us the end result of psychological development from three different angles.

Biological- enables us to focus on how the structure of the brain helps psychological development.

Cognitive- enables us to explore how cognitive functions develop and in turn how they help with psychological development.

Sociocultural- enables us to look at how the environment influences development.

One of the ways of studying brain development is by the use of structure-function relationship. Which is outlined above.

They can study this relationship by studying the brain over time and comparing the structural changes in the brain compared to the cognitive functions.

If the changes coincide with each other then this could possibly be taken as empirical evidence that brain development and cognitive development are linked.

The process of brain development:

The way how the brain develops can be divided into the following four stages:

Neurogenesis- the creation of new neurons (brain cells) and this part of the process finishes just before birth, as well as these brain cells, are overproduced for the natural process of cell death. This occurs later.

Migration- the brain cells move to their correct location.

Differentiation- networks develop to connect all the different brain cells.

Pruning- this is when brain cells and networks get destroyed and recreated. This allows the brain to become more efficient.

Think pruning as getting rid of millions of old roads and replacing them with one single motorway.

Chugani (1999)

Using 0-12-month-old children that went through a PET scan; brain scan; they investigate glucose metabolism. (chemical reactions involving sugar in the brain)

The result showed that 0-1-month-old children had their glucose metabolism focused in the primary sensory and motor cortex (part of the brain associated with movement) and the behaviour of the babies were mostly limited to exploring the environmental visually.

2-4 months old children had increased metabolism in areas of the brain that focused on more advanced functions and the children’s behaviour developed to be more complex. Like: hand-eye coordination.

8-12 months children had an increased metabolism in the frontal cortex; area of the brain associated with thinking. This, in turn, coincided with the children developing more cognitively complex behaviour.

In conclusion, it seems that there’s a correlation between structural changes in the brain as well as the developmental of psychological functions in the first year.

Critical thinking:

A positive of this study was that it used a wide range of ages for the study so we can effectively examine how structural changes in the brain can impact psychological developmental.

However, this study doesn’t look at older children. We cannot say with any certainty or supporting data that these changes in glucose metabolism continue after the first year. Therefore, it is possible that this idea of structure-function relationships is only limited to the first year of birth? Without more research, we can’t say for sure.

Limitations of developmental brain science (neuroscience):

Now there are a few problems with studying the brain and stating with 100% certainty that its related to development.

These problems include:

The ability/ strategy controversy- this means that the difference or weak performance is shown by a child during an experiment could be down to one of two factors. The first being as a result of underdevelopment. The second being that the child is fully developed but chooses a different strategy to solve the problem. Overall, this is a problem for researchers as its hard to tell which factor is responsible for the weak performance. Possibly leading the researchers to draw the wrong conclusions as they choose that the child is underdeveloped when in fact- they could have chosen a different strategy, for instance.

Maturation/learning controversy- while maturation is the biological process of development. Learning is caused by the child interacting with the environment. This could cause problems for researchers because these two processes are very closely intertwined. It’s hard to say if the structural change in the brain is because of the child’s biology or because the child has learnt and this causes a change in their brain as a result of neuroplasticity, the changes in the brain as a result of environmental demands. (please refer to book 1 of the series for more information)

There are more but this is only an introduction to developmental psychology.

Summary:

The brain develops in four stages:

Neurogenesis- the creation of new neurons (brain cells) and this part of the process finishes just before birth, as well as these brain cells, are overproduced for the natural process of cell death. This occurs later.

Migration- the brain cells move to their correct location.

Differentiation- networks develop to connect all the different brain cells.

Pruning- this is when brain cells and networks get destroyed and recreated. This allows the brain to become more efficient.

Chugani (1996) showed us the relationship between structural brain changes and the development of psychological functions.