Psychology throughout life. The life-span approach. Psychology as a science as a conscious experience.

Date: 2015-10-07; view: 453.

Life-span psychology is a psychology section in which questions of development of mentality in development, mechanisms of transition from one period of mental development to another on the basis of change of types of leading activity are studied. The age is characterized by those specific problems of development of forms of culture which are solved by the person, and also by qualitatively new types of activity and psychological new growths corresponding to them which arise at the given step of development and define consciousness of the person and his attitude to the world at all.

Development is the pattern of movement or change that occurs throughout the life-span. Development is influenced by an interplay of biological, cognitive, and socio-emotional processes.

Biological processes include changes in physical characteristics. Cognitive processes include changes in thought, intelligence, and language. Experience alone does not determine one's behavior because it is tempered by how the one's cognitive processes interpret it. Social processes include changes in relationships with other individuals, emotions, and personality.

The periods of childhood development are the prenatal period (conception to birth), infancy (birth to 18-24 months), early childhood (the preschool years), middle and late childhood (the elementary school years), and adolescence (puberty to 18-21 years). Early adulthood begins in the late teens and extends through the thirties. Middle adulthood refers to a period from approximately 35 to 45 years through the fifties. Late adulthood begins in the sixties and lasts until death. Different developmental tasks are important at each of these stages.

The lifespan approach is quite a contrast to the old, traditional type of developmental psychology. For the first seventy years of the twentieth century, both psychologists and society in general tended to assume that almost all of our development happened while we were children or teenagers. By the age of 21, it was thought, the significant parts of development were largely over.

Nowadays, though, we see development quite differently. People continue to. grow and change all of their lives: we are quite different at 30 than we are at 20, at 40 we are different again, at 50 we have changed even more, and so on throughout our whole lives. So developmental psychology now defines itself as being concerned with development throughout life, and not just with child development.

When we start looking back over psychological research into ageing and development, we find that often the evidence which seemed to suggest that people do not change much as they get older was seriously flawed in the way that it was interpreted. When we look at the same things again more carefully, we find quite different outcomes.