Life-Span Human Development

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Adolescence, or the age roughly between 12-18, is marked by puberty and sexual maturation, accompanied by major socioemotional changes. In the past I taught Human Develoment from textbooks that approach change in a chronological fashion as the body ages in several domain areas. Brofenbrenner’s ecological theory emphasizes the influence of microsystems, mesosystems, exosystems, and the macrosystems on an individual. It is based on the idea that humans process the information they receive, rather than merely respond to stimuli. According to the process of selective optimization, individuals prioritize particular functions above others, reducing the adaptive capacity of particulars for specialization and improved efficacy of other modalities.

Late teens, twenties, and thirties are often thought of as early adulthood (students who are in their mid to late 30s may love to hear that they are young adults!

This knowledge does not come quickly, however, and preschoolers may initially have interesting conceptions of size, time, space and distance, such as demonstrating how long something will take by holding out their two index fingers several inches apart. Mahncke and colleagues developed a brain plasticity-based training program that induced learning in mature adults experiencing an age-related decline. This is a period in which physiological aging that began earlier becomes more noticeable and a period at which many people are at their peak of productivity in love and work.

Watson was the founder of the field of behaviorism, which emphasized the role of nurture, or the environment, in human development. Learning occurs in a social context; considering the relationship between the environment and a person’s behavior. These could include milestones like earning a master’s degree or getting a certain job offer or other events like going through a divorce or coping with the death of a child.

While there is certainly individual variation, members of a social class tend to share similar lifestyles, patterns of consumption, parenting styles, stressors, religious preferences, and other aspects of daily life. Baltes states that the development of a particular domain does not occur in a strictly linear fashion but that the development of certain traits can be characterized as having the capacity for both an increase and decrease in efficacy over the course of an individual’s life.

Inversely, the ability for adolescents to engage in spontaneous activity and creativity, both domains commonly associated with impulse behavior, decrease over the adolescent period in response to changes in cognition. Now the world becomes one of learning and testing new academic skills and assessing one’s abilities and accomplishments by making comparisons between self and others. Without visual input, blind humans have demonstrated that tactile and auditory functions still fully develop and they can use tactile and auditory cues to perceive the world around them.In the United States, girls in public school often receive information on menstruation around 5th grade, get a kit containing feminine hygiene products, and receive some sort of education about sexual health. Think about the lifespan and make a list of what you would consider the basic periods of development. Cultural relativity is an appreciation for cultural differences and the understanding that cultural practices are best understood from the standpoint of that particular culture.