Handbook of Psychology, Developmental Psychology

Irving B. Weiner, Richard M. Lerner, M. Ann Easterbrooks, Jayanthi Mistry

• Publisher: Wiley
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781118281994
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: History & Theory in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

Psychology is of interest to academics from many fields, as well as to the thousands of academic and clinical psychologists and general public who can't help but be interested in learning more about why humans think and behave as they do. This award-winning twelve-volume reference covers every aspect of the ever-fascinating discipline of psychology and represents the most current knowledge in the field. This ten-year revision now covers discoveries based in neuroscience, clinical psychology's new interest in evidence-based practice and mindfulness, and new findings in social, developmental, and forensic psychology.

Part I

Foundations of Development Across the Life Span

Chapter 1

Developmental Science Across the Life Span

An Introduction

Richard M. Lerner, M. Ann Easterbrooks, and Jayanthi Mistry

The preparation of this chapter was supported in part by grants from the National 4-H Council, the Altria Corporation, the Thrive Foundation for Youth, the John Templeton Foundation, the National Science Foundation, and the Massachusetts Children's Trust Fund.

A Brief History of the Life-Span Study of Human Development

The Plan of This Volume

Conclusions

References

Until the early 1960s, the study of human development was dominated by either descriptions of the behavioral or psychological phenomena presumptively unfolding as a consequence of genetically controlled timetables of maturational change (e.g., see the chapters by Hess and by McClearn in the 1970, 3rd edition of the Handbook of Child Psychology; Mussen, 1970), or by descriptions of the behaviors presumptively elicited in response to stimulation encountered over the course of early life experiences (e.g., see the chapters by Stevenson or by White in the same edition of the Handbook of Child Psychology). Framed within a Cartesian dualism that split nature from nurture (Overton, 2010; Overton & Müller, this volume), scientists studying development focused in the main on the generic human being (Emmerich, 1968) and on the earliest years of life or, at most, the years surrounding the stages of pubertal change. These periods were regarded as the portions of ontogeny wherein the fundamental processes of human development emerged and functioned to shape the subsequent course of human life (Brim & Kagan, 1980).

Today, the study of development has evolved from a field embedded within the domain of developmental psychology to an area of scholarship labeled developmental science (Bornstein & Lamb, 2010; Lerner, 2010a; Magnusson & Stattin, 2006). Substantively, developmental science is a field that conceptualizes the entire span of human life as potentially involving developmental change. The possibility of developmental change across life exists because the basic process of development is seen as involving mutually influential relations between an active organism and a changing, multilevel ecology, a relation represented as individual ← → context relations (Lerner, 2006). These relations provide the fundamental impetus to systematic and successive changes across the life span (Brandtstädter, 1998; Overton, 1973, 2010; Lerner, 2006).

Thus, the contemporary study of human development involves placing post, postmodern, relational models at the cutting-edge of theoretical and empirical interest (Overton, 2010; Overton & Müller, this volume). These models consider all levels of organization—from the inner biological through the physical ecological, cultural, and historical—as involved in mutually influential relationships across the breadth of the entire life course (Bronfenbrenner & Morris, 2006; Riegel, 1975, 1976). Variations in time and place constitute vital sources of systematic changes across ontogeny—even into the 10th and 11th decades of life—and, as such, human life is variegated and characterized by intraindividual change and interindividual differences (Baltes, Lindenberger, & Staudinger, 2006; Elder, 1980; Elder, Modell, & Parke, 1993; Elder & Shanahan, 2006). Accordingly, because ontogenetic change is embodied in its relation to time and place (Overton, 2010), contemporary developmental science regards the temporality represented by historical changes as imbued in all levels of organization, as coacting integratively, and as providing a potential for this systematic change, for plasticity, across the life span.

In short, as a consequence of the relational coactions of changes at levels of organization ranging from the biological, psychological, and behavioral to the sociocultural, designed and natural physical ecological, and through the historical (see Gottlieb, 1997; cf. Overton, 2006), processes of development are viewed in contemporary developmental science through a theoretical and empirical lens that extends the study of change across the human ontogenetic span and, as well, through generational and historical time (Elder, 1998; Elder, et al., 1993). The variations in the actions of individuals on their contexts and contexts on individuals integratively propel and texture the course of life (Baltes, Freund, & Li, 2005; Brandtstädter, 2006; Freund & Baltes, 2000; Freund, Li, & Baltes, 1999). As a result, the breadth of the life span and all levels of organization within the ecology of human development must be considered in order to fully describe, explain, and optimize the course of intraindividual change and of interindividual differences in such change (Baltes, et al., 2006; Baltes, Reese, & Nesselroade, 1977).

There exist both historical (Baltes, 1979, 1983; R. Cairns & Cairns, 2006) and philosophical and theoretical (Lerner, 1984; Overton, 1973, 1975, 2006) accounts of the nature and bases of the evolution of developmental science. These accounts document that the field changed from one dominated by psychological, environmental, or biological reductionist, split, and age-period restricted conceptions of human development processes to become a field focused on relational systems, and life-span developmental models (Lerner, 2010b; Overton, 2010). Edwin G. Boring (1950, p. ix) noted that Hermann Ebbinghaus once remarked that “psychology has a long past, but only a short history.” In many ways, the same statement may be made about the evolution of the study of human development across the life span; that is, of the history of the developmental science of human development.

A Brief History of the Life-Span Study of Human Development

Wilhelm Wundt labeled the science he is typically credited with launching as physiological psychology (Boring, 1950). In turn, at the end of his career Wundt sought to understand the science he had launched within the frame of cultural anthropology (Misiak & Sexton, 1966). Even in its early history, then, psychology was a field whose individual-level scholarship was linked to phenomena at levels of organization either more micro or more macro than its own.

Often, however, mechanistic and reductionist models were used to conceptualize the relations among levels. For example, Homans's (1961) social exchange theory used principles of operant learning to reduce dyadic relationships to psychogenic terms. Wilson (1975), in turn, reduced instances of (seemingly) moral behaviors (labeled as altruistic) to purported biogenic explanations (involving the concepts of inclusive fitness and gametic potential).

The field of developmental science emerged from this general approach in psychology. That is, the origins of developmental science lie in the field of developmental psychology or, even more narrowly, in the field of child psychology when, prior to the 1960s, the portions of the life span beyond early adolescence were markedly understudied by developmental psychologists (e.g., Baltes, 1983; R. Cairns & Cairns, 2006; Dixon & Lerner, 1999). Within these earlier approaches to development there was an orientation to explain the phenomena of one level of organization by reductive reference to terms associated with another level. Bijou and Baer (1961) attempted to explain all phenomena associated with psychological and behavioral development during infancy and childhood by reduction to the principles of classical and operant conditioning. Rowe (1994) sought to reduce parent-child relations and, in fact, all socialization experiences of childhood by reference to genetic inheritance, as represented by estimates of heritability.

The attempts by such developmental psychologists to portray the phenomena of one level of organization as primary, or “real,” and others as derivative, or epiphenomenal, were representative of a more general tendency among developmentalists to split apart the components of the ecology of human life and to treat the bases of development as residing in one or another component, for example, nature or nurture (Overton, 1973, 2006, 2010). Indeed, theoretical controversies and associated empirical activity revolved around whether nativist concepts or experiences associated with learning could explain the development of perception, cognition, language, intelligence, or personality (R. Cairns & Cairns, 2006; Dixon & Lerner, 1999). This split also is illustrated by the tendency to reduce human relationships to interactions among members of dyads, or individual interaction sequences. In addition, split conceptions of development framed debates about whether continuity or discontinuity characterized the course of life; for instance, a key issue was whether early experience, split off from subsequent periods of life, was integral in shaping the context of the person's psychological-behavioral repertoire across ontogeny (Brim & Kagan, 1980).

Levels of Integration in Human Development

An old adage says that “standing on the shoulders of giants we can see forever.” For scholars of human development—especially contemporary developmentalists who eschew the split conceptions of the past—many of these giants came from the fields of evolutionary biology or comparative psychology (e.g., Gottlieb, 1983, 1997, 2004; Gottlieb, Wahlsten, & Lickliter, 2006; Ho, 2010; Jablonka & Lamb, 2005; Kuo, 1976; Lehrman, 1953; Maier & Schneirla, 1935; Novikoff, 1945a, 1945b; Schneirla, 1957; Tobach, 1981; von Bertalanffy, 1933; and see Hood, Halpern, Greenberg, & Lerner, 2010, for reviews). Through the cumulative impact of the theory and research of such scholars, by the early years of the 21st century scientists studying human development have come to view the reductionist and split conceptions that dominated conceptual debates in developmental psychology during the first seven to eight decades of the 20th century as almost quaint historical artifacts. The few contemporary remnants of these split conceptions (e.g., Plomin, 2000; Rushton, 2000; Spelke & Newport, 1998) are regarded as theoretically atavistic and as conceptually and methodologically flawed (e.g., see Garcia Coll, Bearer, & Lerner, 2004; Hirsch, 2004; Keller, 2010; Lerner, 2006; Overton, 2010; Overton & Müller, this volume; Partridge & Greenberg, 2010).

Within the context of the contemporary understanding of the theoretical flaws of past and, in some cases, present (e.g., see Ho, 2010; Jablonka & Lamb, 2005; Rose & Rose, 2000, for reviews), contemporary contributions to the literature of human development derive from ideas that stress that an integrative, reciprocal relation, fusion, or dynamic interaction of variables from multiple levels of organization provides the core process of development. These ideas—summarized in the concepts associated with relational developmental systems models of human development (Overton, 2010; Overton & Müller, this volume) and in the several instantiations of these models in contemporary developmental science (e.g., Ford & Lerner, 1992; Mistry & Wu, 2010; Sameroff, 2009; Thelen & Smith, 2006)—are found in the theoretical ideas associated with the work of the comparative psychologists and evolutionary biologists just noted.

To illustrate, the comparative work of Gilbert Gottlieb (1983, 1997; Gottlieb et al., 2006; and see Hood, et al., 2010, for reviews) has been a central influence on contemporary developmental psychology, providing a rigorous, compelling theoretical and empirical basis for viewing human development as involving changes in a person-context developmental system across the life span. Gottlieb's scholarship has documented the probabilistic epigenetic character of developmental changes; that is, alterations that result from variation in the timing of the integrated or fused relations—or the coactions—among levels of organization ranging from biology through the macroecological influences of culture and history. Using examples drawn from a variety of species—and involving, for instance, variation in morphological outcomes of development in the minute parasitic wasp; the emergence of enameled molar teeth resulting from chick oral epithelial cells being placed in contact with mouse cell mesenchyme; dominant frequencies in the vocalizations of mallard duck embryos and hatchlings; phenotypic variation in the body builds of human monozygotic twins reared apart; and secular trends from 1860 to 1970 in the age at menarche of European and United States females—Gottlieb (1997, 1999) provided evidence of a probabilistic epigenetic view of bidirectional structure-function development. This view (Gottlieb, 1997, 1999) may be summarized as:

Thus, Gottlieb's (1983) theoretical work is coupled with rich and convincing empirical documentation that biology-ecology coactions provide a basis of plasticity—of the potential for systematic change—across the course of life (e.g., see Gottlieb, 1997).

Gottlieb's (1997, 1999; Gottlieb, Wahlsten, & Lickliter, 1998) scholarship underscores the importance of focusing developmental analysis on the multilevel, integrated matrix of covariation—on the dynamic developmental system—that constitutes human development. Moreover, in forwarding a systems view of human development, this scholarship necessitates that developmental psychologists transcend a psychogenic view of their field. This scholarship leads developmentalists to embrace a perspective that includes contributions from the multiple—biological, behavioral, and social—sciences that afford understanding of the several coacting levels of organization integrated in the developmental system.

In a similar vein, scholars building on Vygotsky's (1978) sociocultural perspective on human development also emphasized the need to transcend the boundaries of psychological science. Cole (1990, 1996) and Werstch (1985, 1991) explicated Vygotsky's description of the genetic method for the study of human development, stating that a complete theory of human development must be able to explain development at the phylogenetic, sociohistorical, ontogenetic, and ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Editorial Board
• Handbook of Psychology Preface
• Volume Preface
• Contributors
• Part I: Foundations of Development Across the Life Span
• Part II: Infancy and Early Childhood
• Part III: Childhood
• Part IV: Adolescence
• Part V: Adulthood and Aging
• Part VI: Applied Developmental Psychology Across the Life Span
• Author Index
• Subject Index