Concept

Developmental psychology

Overview

Developmental psychology is the scientific study of how and why the human mind grows, changes, and adapts over the course of a human lifetime. Originally concerned with infants and children, the field has expanded to include adolescence, adult development, aging, and the entire lifespan. Developmental psychologists aim to explain how thinking, feeling, and behaviors change throughout life. This field examines change across three major dimensions, which are physical development, cognitive development, and social emotional development. Within these three dimensions are a broad range of topics including motor skills, executive functions, moral understanding, language acquisition, social change, personality, emotional development, self-concept, and identity formation.

Developmental psychology explores the influence of both nature and nurture on human development, as well as the processes of change that occur across different contexts over time. Many researchers are interested in the interactions among personal characteristics, the individual's behavior, and environmental factors, including the social context and the built environment. Ongoing debates regarding developmental psychology include biological essentialism vs. neuroplasticity, and stages of development vs. dynamic systems of development. While research in developmental psychology has certain limitations, ongoing studies aim to understand how life stage transitions and biological factors influence human behavior and development.

Developmental psychology involves a range of fields, such as educational psychology, child psychopathology, forensic developmental psychology, child development, cognitive psychology, ecological psychology, and cultural psychology. Influential developmental psychologists from the 20th century include Urie Bronfenbrenner, Erik Erikson, Sigmund Freud, Anna Freud, Jean Piaget, Barbara Rogoff, Esther Thelen, and Lev Vygotsky.

Overview adapted from Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 4.0; see the article history for authors).

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This language is inarticulate, but it has tone, stress, and meaning. The use of our own language has led us to neglect it so far as to forget it altogether. Let us study children and we shall soon learn it afresh from them. Nurses can teach us this language; they understand all their nurslings say to them, they answer them, and keep up long conversations with them; and though they use words, these words are quite…
Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Emile
States what Developmental psychology is; the author is tied to Developmental psychology in the knowledge graph.
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Not all of the individual component urges prove of equal value, in view of the ultimate task they are called upon to serve. Many of them have to be “re-routed,” refashioned, partially subdued. Such a protracted process of development cannot always be pursued smoothly, without obstacles arising here and there and without engendering partial fixations in the course of the earlier stages. Wherever, in later life…
Sigmund Freud, The problem of lay-analyses
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2. The development of the mind, as all other development, is an advance from the indefinite to the definite. In common with the rest of the organism, the brain reaches its finished structure only at maturity; and in proportion as its structure is unfinished, its actions are wanting in precision. Hence like the first movements and the first attempts at speech, the first perceptions and thoughts are extremely vague.
Herbert Spencer, Essays on education and kindred subjects
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Developmental psychology

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