OVERVIEW

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SYLLABUS

ON LINEARITY AND CONTROVERSY

Perhaps the most intuitive way to organize Lifespan Development materials is by age, e.g., infancy, early childhood, middle childhood, etc. When the intuitive way of organizing the material coincides with how novice learners view the material, it's easier to learn.

And there is some sense in organizing development by chronological age. For example:

• Physical development and/or aging proceeds at different rates at different ages, quite rapid at very early ages, at adolescence, and in many respects among the elderly.

• Physical development is highly dependent upon age, especially among the young. Infants lack the sphincter control to be successfully toilet trained, five year old girls generally can't get pregnant, and few young people worry about the imminent onset of osteoporosis.

• Knowing what an individual does and does not do at a particular age can calm anxious parents or new teachers, and assist counselors or school psychologists. For example, most babies don't show a social smile until age two or three months, and many newborns seem more interested in fans or lights than they do in their parents. Picture the anxiety in a new mother who is told she should "bond" with her infant almost immediately. As the blissfully unaware baby carefully tracks the ceiling fan, mommy is wondering what she did wrong (baby isn't bonding) or what's wrong with her baby. And suppose the "terrible twos" were not legendary and daddy wonders what happened to his previously cooperative toddler?

• Conceptually some stages of development depend on achievements at earlier life stages. For example, Erikson would say that emerging from early stages with a sense of trust is necessary for successful relationships with others as an adult. On-target age speech development assists students in learning to read.

• First of all, arranging lifespan material by age can imply a linearity of development that probably does not exist. Young children believe that the taller you are, the older you are--but we know better! Indeed, past a certain age, we typically become a bit shorter. As noted above, physical, cognitive and social development procede at different rates at different times. And, depending, we can even "regress," whether it is the tragedy of Alzheimer's, stress from role strain or disjuncture, or simply because we don't learn from experience.

• Second, a continuing controversy is how much is "nature" and how much is "nurture", i.e., what we have learned versus some form of genetic or species inheritance . To make things more complicated, recent research indicates that experience can affect brain structure. "Nurture" obviously implies more flexibility in development and also seems more applicable to lifespan development. On the other hand, we are biologically primed to learn a language (some language) and symbolic interactionists among others believe being able to handle symbolism and language are critical in human development. The physical development spurt most of us undergo at puberty is clearly biological (although diet and other environmental aspects influence age at puberty) and the physical and hormonal upheavals of that period clearly can affect cognitive and social development.

Nature and nurture issues continue throughout the entire lifespan (does watching too much talk show TV hasten the onset of Alzheimer's? is it cooking in aluminum pans? or not ingesting enough vitamin E?) and crosscut issues of chronological age.
 

• Third, it often can be difficult to determine what is age-graded and what is experience or life cycle related. A few years back, I worked with Rob Boatright at Clark University on attitudes toward jury duty among nearly 1100 summoned jurors, waiting in a dull room to see if they would be chosen as jurors for a trial. We had found--as has virtually everyone who has worked firsthand with juries--that older summoned jurors were generally much more favorable toward serving on juries than younger summoned jurors.

People have the opportunity to have all sorts of experiences as we age: we marry, divorce, become widowed, have children or not, take courses, volunteer, work in paid jobs, get rich (or richer, anyway), go broke, and many other possible experiences. Whenever possible we need to specify what those experiences are or what we think it is that's associated with age that provides the experiences. And, once again, these can cross-cut chronological age groups. An "older" parent myself, I quickly spotted gray hairs among other pre-school parents in the "elderly parents club." Some of my experiences might be comparable to those who became parents in their 20s and other experiences were conditioned by my "elderly status."
 

• Fourth, when correlational data are gathered at one point in time, it is difficult to ascertain the causal and temporal order of variables. This, in turn, muddies nature versus nurture issues and age stage issues. These issues in causality make it difficult to see the lifespan as a linear progression.  Here are two examples:

2. Several researchers have noted that among men over age 30, married (and cohabiting) men on the average enjoy better mental health than single men over 30. But that brings us back to nature-nurture again. Does marriage (or cohabitation) provide a "protective buffer" effect for men or are men in poor mental health avoided in the romance market?*(see the bottom of this page for one possibility)

 
• Fifth, when data are gathered at one point in time and participants include a variety of ages, there is very grave danger of confounding aging effects with birth cohort ("generational") effects. That's distinctly not linear! See the box below for more and for examples.

• Yet a sixth reason I'm uncomfortable with the age graded way of presenting lifespan development material is because development and developmental stages may not work the same way in different groups.

Why? Fine motor control develops somewhat earlier in girls than boys. So does speech. On the other hand, high school boys are more aware of gender discrepancies in pay and sex discrimination in the workplace than girls. (OPTIONAL:If you like, you can read about the draw-a-scientist study HERE)

Other research finds that children in some cultures physically mature somewhat earlier (e.g., U.S.) than in other cultures (e.g., Asian).

Social development may also differ across groups in non-linear patterns. For example, women are more comfortable being assertive at older ages than men; on the other hand, women are more comfortable expressing joy and sorrow at younger ages than men. Again, these are hardly similar linear progressions for both sexes.
 
 

So, the questions then become:  whose development? whose lifestage? and how do the patterns as well as the rates differ across differ groups?

There are some of my reasons for the discomfort presenting this material in age-graded order. So, why did I return to that presentational order? To be consistent with your readings and virtually all the texts in the lifespan development field, and, once again, because to present material in a manner consistent with one's intuitive beginning grasp is to scaffold and make the material easier to learn. But don't be surprised if I interject these six major points above throughout the semester for different stages of the lifespan.

The main theoretical perspectives you will see this semester address development stage theories, various learning theories, or a combination of the two. In addition, I will present symbolic interactionist approaches pertaining to the development of the self and evolutionary-anticipatory perspectives.

PERSONALITY APPROACHES
 

The nexus of developmental theories juxtaposed with symbolic interactionist approaches actually create a seventh controversy: that of the concept of "personality" versus the "self". The concept of "personality" appears to consist of sets of personal characteristics, traits, or predispositions to respond, such as being honest, confident, adventurous, ambitious, sensitive, and so on. The concept "personality" also conveys CONSISTENCY AND STABILITY, in our predispositions to respond across time and situations. Thus, we expect "honest people" to be honest across many tempting situations, "confident people" to have high self-efficacy across many situations that might make others insecure, adventurous people to take risks on a regular basis, and "funny people," well, to see the humor in almost any situation. Most modern social and behavioral scientists, including developmentalists,  think of personality characteristics such as humor as  largely "nurture," shaped by your envirnoment and personal histories.

Most developmental theorists no longer designate a fixed point at which "personality" stops developing. Erikson, for example, created theoretical stages that lasted from infancy to old age. In common with other developmentalists, however (e.g., Freud, Piaget, Kohlberg), Erikson crams most of his developmental stages into the early part of one's life, with Stage V generally occurring in the mid-teens. There are several reasons why developmentalists see most "personality creation" occurring in the early years and thus we will focus the most on the early years in this course, both in the text and in class:

• Human infants are helpless and highly dependent on their caretakers for several years, and thus highly influenced by these caretakers.

• Furthermore, in societies such as the United States, upbringing is more individualistic than communal, occurring in private homes with private dining arrangements. The influence of caretakers is thus magnified compared with more communal societies (THINK, however: how does the growth of the industrialized child care industry along with nearly universal nursery school for middle class children, plus divorce, remarriage and step/half siblings cross-cut this individualistic upbring?)

• The bulk of physical growth and maturation usually occurs by one's late teens (with some brain maturation in the early 20s), again enlarging the importance of these early years.

Now this may come as a shock: as defined above, which of course is a very common way for psychologists to use the term, there is remarkably little empirical evidence that you "have a personality," or a bundle of consistent personal traits. And this knowledge is hardly new. In the late 1920s, psychologists Hartshorn and May studied children's honesty across different tempting situations. Instead of consistent tendencies to respond in a generally honest or dishonest manner, Hartshorn and May discovered instead that the situation was the primary determinant of "honest" behavior, and children were strikingly inconsistent instead.

How can this be? And what about all those personality tests circulating out there?

• When we look back over our lives, don't we perceive a consistent thread?

• Don't we have a picture of our personality that is so comparatively precise that we can excuse some of our behavior by explaining that we are "not ourselves?"

• Aren't we so recognizable that other people will notice if we  differently?

• Don't psychologists spout impressive reliability coefficients for their "personality tests," indicating that either we describe ourselves consistently when we retake such a test or that our answers at a single sitting are internally consistent? (NOTE: the size of coefficient alpha, probably the most widely used reliability coefficient is highly dependent on the number of items in the "test"--the larger the number of items, the larger alpha generally becomes. What does that tell you about the "internal consistency" of such "personality tests" which often have hundreds of items?)

How can we reconcile the apparent evidence of our senses and the feedback that we receive from others with the notion that we don't "have a personality" as traditionally defined.

So why do we feel we have a "personality"? For all the reasons below:

• We DO have a self.

• We have relative consistency in temperament over time. Temperament almost certainly has some biological basis.

• Over the short term we have relative stability in roles and significant others.

• As adults we have stable responses and scripts.

• We have memories of our own personal history (although memories may be inaccurate; studies of "flashbulb memories," people's schema of where they were and what they were doing at historical or auspicious moments, e.g., September 11 2001--are often erroneous.) But accurate or not, memories are fully and physically stored in our brains. They may be altered, they may be socially constructed in spots but they are REAL.

• We have CHOICES. And our choices are informative.

To symbolic interactionists, the self is a concept, an image or schema of our persona, and it is both subject and object.  That is, the subjective self acts, "the I" initiates action, it dreams, plans and thinks (akin to Freud's notion of "ego." ) At the same time, the self is reflexive or an object: a "me;" we think about our self, plan for our self, and view the self as we do another person. The self is an on-going social construction; it is never finished. We don't think of the self as "being complete" at any particular age.

It is because of the self, or our perception of a unified entity, that we believe that we "have a personality." But, although we view our self as having consistent tendencies to act, the self is not the same kind of construct as a set of personality traits.

We will look more at determinants of one's "self" as we go through the semester.

 The "self" is not simply another word for "personality."The construct of personality is considered to be:

• an internal property
• a collection of stable predispositions to respond
• a product of largely one's personal history (but possibly biology as well), and
• it is considered to be an objective entity.

The self, or more accurately, the collection of selves many symbolic interactionists believe comprise most of us, is:

• an on-going
• life-long
• largely subjective construction
• heavily influenced by feedback from others and
• role and situational familiarity and/or changes.

The idea of "the self" as opposed to "personality" actually opens opportunities and magnifies the importance of the psychological practitioner. This is because the constantly evolving self is more open in theory to clinical practice and suggestions and able to change. It means you shouldn't assume that an adult's career goals are "fixed" or that a psychological problem is necessarily long-standing.
 

Prior to the nineteenth century and even early into the twentieth century, the behavioral and social sciences were dominated by "biology is destiny" theories of personality. Ancient Greek philosophers discussed "bodily humours." Western and Asian astrologers cited the influence of time of the year--or even the very year--of one's birth as bestowing personality traits. Freud's theories of unconscious conflicts among ego, id and superego, the physical, the rational, and societal demands, spread among scholars worldwide.

By the start of the twentieth century, three important streams of thought challenged each other. (1) Social Darwinism, was a somewhat misstated version of Darwin's theories of evolution. The "most fit" were seen as most likely to survive and dominate society. Each human behavior was viewed in terms of how it contributed to the "fittest" of the "human race." These streams of thought led some to conclusions that we now find ludicrous. For example, the disease cholera, an infection spread through poor sanitation (and re-emerging in countries torn by war or natural disaster), was recharacterized as "proof" that the lower classes were less fit. Educated women were depicted as thin and pale, weakened by their studies, and contrasted with supposedly sturdier,more fertile peasant girls. Anticipatory theories also tend to have a biological base and relate to Social Darwinism. For example, it has been pointed out that young boys and girls behave similarly in many ways, so why do they receive such different toys and are often urged to play different games (e.g., sports versus "house")? Such theorists, who often include anthropologists, argue that we are socializing girls and boys to anticipate their adult roles and that children will gravitate on their own to sex-typed toys and games, even if adults do not provide them.

(2) A second important paradigm was emerging that came to dominate twentieth century thought on personality: Pavlov in Russia and Watson in the U.S. felt that in the stimulus-response (S-R) linkage, they had discovered the equivalent of the cell in biology or the atom in physics. From the stimulus-response or behaviorist perspective, the person was a tabula rosa or blank slate. S-R connections were all. Radical in its perspective, behaviorists proposed that occupational destination was a matter of conditioning; the social class differences that exist occurred because of childhood and adult socialization. Cultural differences, often previously defined as biologically based, were redefined as a matter of learning. It was not too much of a hop or a skip to define any sex differences as determined by learning experiences and reinforcement contingencies. We will examine different learning theories later this semester.

(3) The third, or developmental paradigm, partially described above, grew out of Freud's work, as well as research by Jean Piaget in Switzerland, Lev Vygotsky in Russia, and Erickson in the United States.  Biology grounds the individual in particular stages of development, determining what is possible at specific ages.

We are learning that biological development proceeds for longer time periods than once was thought. For example, research over the past several years has discovered that parts of the brain involved with delay of gratification or judgement do not mature until the early 20s--just at a time that many young adults are making decisions about work and family (OPTIONAL: view a synopsis at the National Institute of Mental Health HERE). Furthermore, experiences can reshape brain function (one important reason why working with autistic children should begin as early as possible.)

Developmentalists accept the influence of cultural factors and personal socialization histories. Most propose that stage of development interacts with environment to not only produce behavior, but wishes, motivations, and internal conflicts.

By the mid-1970s, the dominant paradigm was clearly behaviorist, i.e., learning theories. Behavior (perhaps with a bit of developmental modification) was seen as totally shaped by environmental circumstances. Any hint of biological differences was viewed as racist, sexist--and inaccurate.

Then what happened?

DNA happened. Gigantic steps forward in genetic research happened. Pharmaceutical advances in the treatment of schizophrenia, depression and mania happened. We could actually begin to locate genes for alcoholism. Emotional dysfunction, such as obsessive-compulsive disorder or agoraphobia, or bipolar disorder, came to some extent under pharmaceutical influence. Prozac and Zoloft became household words. All these advances have cast doubt on "personality" being solely determined by environmental and stimulus-response causes.

Like other behavioral and social sciences, studies in lifespan development use experiments (somewhat less than other fields), surveys and observation (both somewhat more than other fields). Many of the variables that developmentalists are interested in, such as chronological age, do not lend themselves to experimentation. On the other hand, interest in the development of social interaction, speech, and reasoning mean that developmentalists are often more likely to use structured observation, ethnographies of the life course, or in-depth interviews more than other branches of science.

(OPTIONAL:Want a basic refresher on these basic methods? Click HERE)

There are also methods that lifespan development scholars are much more likely to use that come with their own set of warnings.

For example, lifespan researchers have an obvious interest in archival records which can enable them to track development. What happened to the "at-risk" students in elementary school? How were their grades in high school and what is their rate of high school graduation compared with other students? How many families that go on welfare remain on welfare throughout their working lives? Who is more likely to remarry and for how long: divorce(e)s or widow(er)s?

The biggest caution here is that we often don't know the human factors influencing how the archival records are created. To "spare the family," physicians are reluctant to put "suicide" as a cause of death on official records, thus providing part of the explanation of why unmarried persons are more likely to kill themselves than wives or husbands. Records are often incomplete or go missing. If there are any systematic influences (e.g., better educated persons create more complete records) on the records, these may create a bias.

Lifespan development scholars also are more likely to use longitudinal panel studies. The "longitudinal" part means tracking over time. The "panel" part means that the same people are repeatedly studied. Longitudinal panel data help us understand "net change" over time. We can see what actually happened to the kid with the poor elementary school grades or to the child diagnosed with "attention deficit-hyperactive disorder". We can see how much attitudes remain the same or change as someone undergoes life cycle changes.

However the advantage of longitudinal panel studies carries a major disadvantage: reactivity, which refers to changes that are a result of the study treatment. Being repeatedly observed or interviewed can change participant behavior in ways that have nothing to do with the entities under study, but instead with study procedures themselves. At the least, repeated scrutiny can create or increase self-monitoring among participants. It can also literally change behaviors.

One way to check for possible biases due to repeated scrutiny is to compare longitudinal panel results with repeated cross-sectional studies. In repeated cross-sectional studies, variables of interest are studied over time, but a "fresh" sample from the same population is obtained each time. The General Social Survey noted above is one example using a general population sample of U.S. adults; it now also has a panel study that can be used for comparison purposes. The new sample participants in repeated cross-sectional studies each time are "naive" to the study purposes and should be comparable to individuals of the same age and birth cohort studied during the same period from longitudinal panel studies.

However, many longitudinal panel studies (the Minnesota twins study, the Oakland California study) use relatively specialized populations and samples from those populations. It may be prohibitively expensive to locate and sample comparable popuations using repeated cross-sectional samples. And, any sampling biases in either the panel study or the repeated cross-sectional samples must be noted and described.

Repeated cross-sectional studies only allow us to examine "gross change" in the population as a whole, not the "net change" that occurs among individuals. There may be selective attrition as we track birth cohorts or generations over time that may introduce bias. For example, better educated individuals are more likely to have healthy living habits that enable them to live longer and higher income individuals have better access to good medical care. Selective attrition can occur both in longitudinal panel studies and in repeated cross-sectional designs, making controls for variables involved in such attrition critical.

Lifespan developmentalists are more likely than scholars in many other fields to use cross-cultural research. Results from other countries and from other times are expected to help shed light on what is more "nature" and what is more "nurture". For example, cross-cultural studies indicate that older daughters are more likely to be set in charge of younger siblings than older sons. It is very tough these days to find "untouched cultures"--TV, cell phones and the Internet are virtually everywhere. Thus it is also harder to tease out what is "unique" about a culture. The Human Relations Area Files are one classic source of data about many different cultures.

OPTIONAL:Click HERE for more information about the Human Relations Area Files.

I hope it's clear by this time that this is no ONE method to study lifespan development. The hope is that we will use several methods that will converge or "triangulate" in their findings, thereby adding to the confidence in our findings.
 
 

OVERVIEW

SYLLABUS

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Susan Carol Losh January 6 2014

*Men, marriage/cohabitation and mental health: it took several years of longitudinal panel surveys to be able to disentangle nature and nurture on this one. Notice how one can make a plausible argument for either causal direction. Analyses of the University of Michigan's longitudinal study of high school seniors finds that married or cohabiting men are less likely to go to bars, less likely to drink excessively, and enjoy better mental health than non-married/cohabiting men. When the marriage or relationship breaks up, men are more likely to go to bars and/or drink in the aftermath and their mental health declines.