a key research in developmental psychology is to

What is Developmental Psychology?

Saul Mcleod, PhD

Editor-in-Chief for Simply Psychology

BSc (Hons) Psychology, MRes, PhD, University of Manchester

Saul Mcleod, PhD., is a qualified psychology teacher with over 18 years of experience in further and higher education. He has been published in peer-reviewed journals, including the Journal of Clinical Psychology.

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BSc (Hons) Psychology, MSc Psychology of Education

Olivia Guy-Evans is a writer and associate editor for Simply Psychology. She has previously worked in healthcare and educational sectors.

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Developmental psychology is a scientific approach that aims to explain growth, change, and consistency though the lifespan. Developmental psychology examines how thinking, feeling, and behavior change throughout a person’s life.

A significant proportion of theories within this discipline focus on development during childhood, as this is the period during an individual’s lifespan when the most change occurs.

Developmental psychologists study a wide range of theoretical areas, such as biological, social, emotion, and cognitive processes.

Empirical research in this area tends to be dominated by psychologists from Western cultures such as North American and Europe, although during the 1980s Japanese researchers began making a valid contribution to the field.

• Maturation in psychology refers to the natural developmental process driven by genetics, leading to physical, behavioral, and psychological growth independent of learning or experience.
• The idiographic approach focuses on understanding unique, individual differences in experiences or behaviors, often using qualitative methods.
• Normative development in psychology refers to the typical sequence and timing of developmental milestones that most people experience within a population.

The three goals of developmental psychology are to describe, explain, and optimize development (Baltes, Reese, & Lipsitt, 1980).

Finally, developmental psychologists hope to optimize development, and apply their theories to help people in practical situations (e.g. help parents develop secure attachments with their children).

Continuity vs. Discontinuity in Human Development 

Think about how children become adults. Is there a predictable pattern they follow regarding thought and language and social development? Do children go through gradual changes or are they abrupt changes?

Normative development is typically viewed as a continual and cumulative process. The continuity view says that development is a smooth and gradual accumulation of abilities, with one stage flowing seamlessly into the next.

Children become more skillful in thinking, talking, or acting much the same way as they get taller.

It assumes that changes are incremental, with skills and knowledge building upon what was previously learned. The analogy often used to describe this perspective is viewing development as a slope or ramp, gradually inclining upwards.

The discontinuity view sees development as a more abrupt-a succession of changes that produce different behaviors in different age-specific life periods called stages. Biological changes provide the potential for these changes.

These stages are believed to be qualitatively different, each bringing a dramatic shift in abilities or behaviors.

Theorists like Jean Piaget and Erik Erikson support this perspective. They argue that children pass through distinct stages at certain ages, and the qualities of each stage are significantly different from those of other stages. This can be visualized as steps on a staircase.

We often hear people talking about children going through “stages” in life (i.e., “sensorimotor stage.”). These are called developmental stages-periods of life initiated by distinct transitions in physical or psychological functioning.

Psychologists of the discontinuity view believe that people go through the same stages, in the same order, but not necessarily at the same rate.

Stability vs. Change in Human Development

Stability implies personality traits present during infancy endure throughout the lifespan. It emphasizes the importance of early experiences on future development, suggesting that early childhood experiences play a significant role in determining adult personality traits and behaviors.

For example, a child who is cheerful and outgoing will likely grow into an adult with similar personality traits. Stability theorists believe that change is relatively difficult once initial personality traits have been established.

In contrast, change theorists argue that family interactions, school experiences, and acculturation modify personalities.

It implies that our behaviors, thoughts, and emotions are malleable and can be influenced by experiences and environments over time. This perspective suggests that it is equally likely for an introverted child to become an extroverted adult, depending on various factors such as life experiences, education, or trauma.

This capacity for change is called plasticity. For example, Rutter (1981) discovered that somber babies living in understaffed orphanages often become cheerful and affectionate when placed in socially stimulating adoptive homes.

Nature vs. Nurture

When trying to explain development, it is important to consider the relative contribution of both nature and nurture . Developmental psychology seeks to answer two big questions about heredity and environment:

• How much weight does each contribute?
• How do nature and nurture interact?

Nature refers to the process of biological maturation, inheritance, and maturation. One of the reasons why the development of human beings is so similar is because our common specifies heredity (DNA) guides all of us through many of the same developmental changes at about the same points in our lives.

Nurture refers to the impact of the environment, which involves the process of learning through experiences.

There are two effective ways to study nature-nurture.

• Twin studies: Identical twins have the same genotype, and fraternal twins have an average of 50% of their genes in common.
• Adoption studies: Similarities with the biological family support nature, while similarities with the adoptive family support nurture.

Historical Origins

Developmental psychology as a discipline did not exist until after the industrial revolution when the need for an educated workforce led to the social construction of childhood as a distinct stage in a person’s life.

The notion of childhood originates in the Western world and this is why the early research derives from this location. Initially, developmental psychologists were interested in studying the mind of the child so that education and learning could be more effective.

Developmental changes during adulthood are an even more recent area of study. This is mainly due to advances in medical science, enabling people to live to old age.

Charles Darwin is credited with conducting the first systematic study of developmental psychology. In 1877 he published a short paper detailing the development of innate forms of communication-based on scientific observations of his infant son, Doddy.

However, the emergence of developmental psychology as a specific discipline can be traced back to 1882 when Wilhelm Preyer (a German physiologist) published a book entitled The Mind of the Child .

In the book, Preyer describes the development of his own daughter from birth to two and a half years. Importantly, Preyer used rigorous scientific procedures throughout studying the many abilities of his daughter.

In 1888 Preyer’s publication was translated into English, by which time developmental psychology as a discipline was fully established with a further 47 empirical studies from Europe, North America and Britain also published to facilitate the dissemination of knowledge in the field.

During the 1900s three key figures have dominated the field with their extensive theories of human development, namely Jean Piaget (1896-1980), Lev Vygotsky (1896-1934) and John Bowlby (1907-1990). Indeed, much of the current research continues to be influenced by these three theorists.

Baltes, P. B., Reese, H., & Lipsett, L. (1980) Lifespan developmental psychology, Annual Review of Pyschology 31 : 65 – 110.

Darwin, C. (1877). A Biographical Sketch of an Infant.   Mind , 2, 285-294.

Preyer, W.T. (1882). Die Seele des Kindes: Beobachtungen über die geistige Entwicklung des Menschen in den ersten Lebensjahren .Grieben, Leipzig,

Preyer, W.T. (1888). The soul of the child: observations on the mental development of man in the first years of life .

Rutter, M. (1981). STRESS, COPING AND DEVELOPMENT: SOME ISSUES AND SOME QUESTIONS*. Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry, 22(4) , 323-356.

Developmental Psychology 101: Theories, Stages, & Research

You can imagine how vast this field of psychology is if it has to cover the whole of life, from birth through death.

Just like any other area of psychology, it has created exciting debates and given rise to fascinating case studies.

In recent years, developmental psychology has shifted to incorporate positive psychology paradigms to create a holistic lifespan approach. As an example, the knowledge gained from positive psychology can enhance the development of children in education.

In this article, you will learn a lot about different aspects of developmental psychology, including how it first emerged in history and famous theories and models.

Before you continue, we thought you might like to download our three Positive Psychology Exercises for free . These science-based exercises explore fundamental aspects of positive psychology, including strengths, values, and self-compassion, and will give you the tools to enhance the wellbeing of your clients, students, or employees.

This Article Contains:

What is developmental psychology, 4 popular theories, stages, & models, 2 questions and research topics, fascinating case studies & research findings, a look at positive developmental psychology, applying developmental psychology in education, resources from positivepsychology.com, a take-home message.

Human beings change drastically over our lifetime.

The American Psychological Association (2020) defines developmental psychology as the study of physical, mental, and behavioral changes, from conception through old age.

Developmental psychology investigates biological, genetic, neurological, psychosocial, cultural, and environmental factors of human growth (Burman, 2017).

Over the years, developmental psychology has been influenced by numerous theories and models in varied branches of psychology (Burman, 2017).

History of developmental psychology

Developmental psychology first appeared as an area of study in the late 19th century (Baltes, Lindenberger, & Staudinger, 2007). Developmental psychology focused initially on child and adolescent development, and was concerned about children’s minds and learning (Hall, 1883).

There are several key figures in developmental psychology. In 1877, the famous evolutionary biologist Charles Darwin undertook the first study of developmental psychology on innate communication forms. Not long after, physiologist William Preyer (1888) published a book on the abilities of an infant.

The 1900s saw many significant people dominating the developmental psychology field with their detailed theories of development: Sigmund Freud (1923, 1961), Jean Piaget (1928), Erik Erikson (1959), Lev Vygotsky (1978), John Bowlby (1958), and Albert Bandura (1977).

By the 1920s, the scope of developmental psychology had begun to include adult development and the aging process (Thompson, 2016).

In more recent years, it has broadened further to include prenatal development (Brandon et al., 2009). Developmental psychology is now understood to encompass the complete lifespan (Baltes et al., 2007).

Each of these models has contributed to the understanding of the process of human development and growth.

Furthermore, each theory and model focuses on different aspects of development: social, emotional, psychosexual, behavioral, attachment, social learning, and many more.

Here are some of the most popular models of development that have heavily contributed to the field of developmental psychology.

1. Bowlby’s attachment styles

The seminal work of psychologist John Bowlby (1958) showcased his interest in children’s social development. Bowlby (1969, 1973, 1980) developed the most famous theory of social development, known as attachment theory .

Bowlby (1969) hypothesized that the need to form attachments is innate, embedded in all humans for survival and essential for children’s development. This instinctive bond helps ensure that children are cared for by their parent or caregiver (Bowlby, 1969, 1973, 1980).

Bowlby’s original attachment work was developed further by one of his students, Mary Ainsworth. She proposed several attachment styles between the child and the caregiver (Ainsworth & Bell, 1970).

This theory clearly illustrates the importance of attachment styles to a child’s future development. Consistent and stable caregiving results in a secure attachment style (Ainsworth, Blehar, Waters, & Wall, 1978). In contrast, unstable and insecure caregiving results in several negative attachment styles: ambivalent, avoidant, or disorganized (Ainsworth & Bell, 1970; Main & Solomon, 1986).

Bowlby’s theory does not consider peer group influence or how it can shape children’s personality and development (Harris, 1998).

2. Piaget’s stage theory

Jean Piaget was a French psychologist highly interested in child development. He was interested in children’s thinking and how they acquire, construct, and use their knowledge (Piaget, 1951).

Piaget’s (1951) four-stage theory of cognitive development sequences a child’s intellectual development. According to this theory, all children move through these four stages of development in the same order (Simatwa, 2010).

The sensorimotor stage is from birth to two years old. Behaviors are triggered by sensory stimuli and limited to simple motor responses. If an object is removed from the child’s vision, they think it no longer exists (Piaget, 1936).

The pre-operational stage occurs between two and six years old. The child learns language but cannot mentally manipulate information or understand concrete logic (Wadsworth, 1971).

The concrete operational stage takes place from 7 to 11 years old. Children begin to think more logically about factual events. Abstract or hypothetical concepts are still difficult to understand in this stage (Wadsworth, 1971).

In the formal operational stage from 12 years to adulthood, abstract thought and skills arise (Piaget, 1936).

Piaget did not consider other factors that might affect these stages or a child’s progress through them. Biological maturation and interaction with the environment can determine the rate of cognitive development in children (Papalia & Feldman, 2011). Individual differences can also dictate a child’s progress (Berger, 2014).

3. Freud’s psychosexual development theory

One of the most influential developmental theories, which encompassed psychosexual stages of development, was developed by Austrian psychiatrist Sigmund Freud (Fisher & Greenberg, 1996).

Freud concluded that childhood experiences and unconscious desires influence behavior after witnessing his female patients experiencing physical symptoms and distress with no physical cause (Breuer & Freud, 1957).

According to Freud’s psychosexual theory, child development occurs in a series of stages, each focused on different pleasure areas of the body. During each stage, the child encounters conflicts, which play a significant role in development (Silverman, 2017).

Freud’s theory of psychosexual development includes the oral, anal, phallic, latent, and genital stages. His theory suggests that the energy of the libido is focused on these different erogenous zones at each specific stage (Silverman, 2017).

Freud concluded that the successful completion of each stage leads to healthy adult development. He also suggested that a failure to progress through a stage causes fixation and developmental difficulties, such as nail biting (oral fixation) or obsessive tidiness (anal fixation; Silverman, 2017).

Freud considered personality to be formed in childhood as a child passes through these stages. Criticisms of Freud’s theory of psychosexual development include its failure to consider that personality can change and grow over an entire lifetime. Freud believed that early experiences played the most significant role in shaping development (Silverman, 2017).

4. Bandura’s social learning theory

American psychologist Albert Bandura proposed the social learning theory (Bandura, Ross, & Ross, 1961). Bandura did not believe that classical or operant conditioning was enough to explain learned behavior because some behaviors of children are never reinforced (Bandura, 1986). He believed that children observe, imitate, and model the behaviors and reactions of others (Bandura, 1977).

Bandura suggested that observation is critical in learning. Further, the observation does not have to be of a live actor, such as in the Bobo doll experiment (Bandura, 1986). Bandura et al. (1961) considered that learning and modeling can also occur from listening to verbal instructions on behavior performance.

Bandura’s (1977) social theory posits that both environmental and cognitive factors interact to influence development.

Bandura’s developmental theory has been criticized for not considering biological factors or children’s autonomic nervous system responses (Kevin, 1995).

Overview of theories of development – Khan Academy

Developmental psychology has given rise to many debatable questions and research topics. Here are two of the most commonly discussed.

1. Nature vs nurture debate

One of the oldest debates in the field of developmental psychology has been between nature and nurture (Levitt, 2013).

Is human development a result of hereditary factors (genes), or is it influenced by the environment (school, family, relationships, peers, community, culture)?

The polarized position of developmental psychologists of the past has now changed. The nature/nurture question now concerns the relationship between the innateness of an attribute and the environmental effects on that attribute (Nesterak, 2015).

The field of epigenetics  describes how behavioral and environmental influences affect the expression of genes (Kubota, Miyake, & Hirasawa, 2012).

Many severe mental health disorders have a hereditary component. Yet, the environment and behavior, such as improved diet, reduced stress, physical activity, and a positive mindset, can determine whether this health condition is ever expressed (Śmigielski, Jagannath, Rössler, Walitza, & Grünblatt, 2020).

When considering classic models of developmental psychology, such as Piaget’s schema theory and Freud’s psychosexual theory, you’ll see that they both perceive development to be set in stone and unchangeable by the environment.

Contemporary developmental psychology theories take a different approach. They stress the importance of multiple levels of organization over the course of human development (Lomas, Hefferon, & Ivtzan, 2016).

2. Theory of mind

Theory of mind allows us to understand that others have different intentions, beliefs, desires, perceptions, behaviors, and emotions (American Psychological Association, 2020).

It was first identified by research by Premack and Woodruff (1978) and considered to be a natural developmental stage of progression for all children. Starting around the ages of four or five, children begin to think about the thoughts and feelings of others. This shows an emergence of the theory of mind (Wellman & Liu, 2004).

However, the ability of all individuals to achieve and maintain this critical skill at the same level is debatable.

Children diagnosed with autism exhibit a deficit in the theory of mind (Baron-Cohen, Leslie, & Frith, 1985).

Individuals with depression (psychotic and non-psychotic) are significantly impaired in theory of mind tasks (Wang, Wang, Chen, Zhu, & Wang, 2008).

People with social anxiety disorder have also been found to show less accuracy in decoding the mental states of others (Washburn, Wilson, Roes, Rnic, & Harkness, 2016).

Further research has shown that the theory of mind changes with aging. This suggests a developmental lifespan process for this concept (Meinhardt-Injac, Daum, & Meinhardt, 2020).

1. Little Albert

The small child who was the focus of the experiments of behavioral psychologists Watson and Rayner (1920) was referred to as ‘Little Albert.’ These experiments were essential landmarks in developmental psychology and showed how an emotionally stable child can be conditioned to develop a phobia.

Albert was exposed to several neutral stimuli including cotton wool, masks, a white rat, rabbit, monkey, and dog. Albert showed no initial fear to these stimuli.

When a loud noise was coupled with the initially neutral stimulus, Albert became very distressed and developed a phobia of the object, which extended to any similar object as well.

This experiment highlights the importance of environmental factors in the development of behaviors in children.

2. David Reimer

At the age of eight months, David Reimer lost his penis in a circumcision operation that went wrong. His worried parents consulted a psychologist, who advised them to raise David as a girl.

David’s young age meant he knew nothing about this. He went through the process of hormonal treatment and gender reassignment. At the age of 14, David found out the truth and wanted to reverse the gender reassignment process to become a boy again. He had always felt like a boy until this time, even though he was socialized and brought up as a girl (Colapinto, 2006).

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Contemporary theories of developmental psychology often encompass a holistic approach and a more positive approach to development.

Positive psychology has intersected with developmental disciplines in areas such as parenting, education, youth, and aging (Lomas et al., 2016).

These paradigms can all be grouped together under the umbrella of positive developmental psychology. This fresh approach to development focuses on the wellbeing aspects of development, while systematically bringing them together (Lomas, et al., 2016).

• Positive parenting is the approach to children’s wellbeing by focusing on the role of parents and caregivers (Latham, 1994).
• Positive education looks at flourishing in the context of school (Seligman, Ernst, Gillham, Reivich, & Linkins, 2009).
• Positive youth development is the productive and constructive focus on adolescence and early adulthood to enhance young people’s strengths and promote positive outcomes (Larson, 2000).
• Positive aging , also known as healthy aging, focuses on the positivity of aging as a healthy, normal stage of life (Vaillant, 2004).

Much of the empirical and theoretical work connected to positive developmental psychology has been going on for years, even before the emergence of positive psychology itself (Lomas et al., 2016).

We recommend this related article Applying Positive Psychology in Schools & Education: Your Ultimate Guide for further reading.

In the classroom, developmental psychology considers children’s psychological, emotional, and intellectual characteristics according to their developmental stage.

A report on the top 20 principles of psychology in the classroom, from pre-kindergarten to high school, was published by the American Psychological Association in 2015. The report also advised how teachers can respond to these principles in the classroom setting.

The top 5 principles and teacher responses are outlined in the table below.

There are many valuable resources to help you foster positive development no matter whether you’re working with young children, teenagers, or adults.

To help get you started, check out the following free resources from around our blog.

• Adopt A Growth Mindset This exercise helps clients recognize instances of fixed mindset in their thinking and actions and replace them with thoughts and behaviors more supportive of a growth mindset.
• Childhood Frustrations This worksheet provides a space for clients to document key challenges experienced during childhood, together with their emotional and behavioral responses.
• What I Want to Be This worksheet helps children identify behaviors and emotions they would like to display and select an opportunity in the future to behave in this ideal way.
• 17 Positive Psychology Exercises If you’re looking for more science-based ways to help others enhance their wellbeing, this signature collection contains 17 validated positive psychology tools for practitioners. Use them to help others flourish and thrive.
• Developmental Psychology Courses If you are interested in a career in Developmental Psychology , we suggest 15 of the best courses in this article.

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Expand your arsenal and impact with these 17 Positive Psychology Exercises [PDF] , scientifically designed to promote human flourishing, meaning, and wellbeing.

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Earlier developmental psychology models and theories were focused on specific areas, such as attachment, psychosexual, cognitive, and social learning. Although informative, they did not take in differing perspectives and were fixed paradigms.

We’ve now come to understand that development is not fixed. Individual differences take place in development, and the factors that can affect development are many. It is ever changing throughout life.

The modern-day approach to developmental psychology includes sub-fields of positive psychology. It brings these differing disciplines together to form an overarching positive developmental psychology paradigm.

Developmental psychology has helped us gain a considerable understanding of children’s motivations, social and emotional contexts, and their strengths and weaknesses.

This knowledge is essential for educators to create rich learning environments for students to help them develop positively and ultimately flourish to their full potential.

We hope you enjoyed reading this article. Don’t forget to download our three Positive Psychology Exercises for free .

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Research in Developmental Psychology

What you’ll learn to do: examine how to do research in lifespan development.

How do we know what changes and stays the same (and when and why) in lifespan development? We rely on research that utilizes the scientific method so that we can have confidence in the findings. How data are collected may vary by age group and by the type of information sought. The developmental design (for example, following individuals as they age over time or comparing individuals of different ages at one point in time) will affect the data and the conclusions that can be drawn from them about actual age changes. What do you think are the particular challenges or issues in conducting developmental research, such as with infants and children? Read on to learn more.

Learning outcomes

• Explain how the scientific method is used in researching development
• Compare various types and objectives of developmental research
• Describe methods for collecting research data (including observation, survey, case study, content analysis, and secondary content analysis)
• Explain correlational research
• Describe the value of experimental research
• Compare the advantages and disadvantages of developmental research designs (cross-sectional, longitudinal, and sequential)
• Describe challenges associated with conducting research in lifespan development

Research in Lifespan Development

How do we know what we know.

An important part of learning any science is having a basic knowledge of the techniques used in gathering information. The hallmark of scientific investigation is that of following a set of procedures designed to keep questioning or skepticism alive while describing, explaining, or testing any phenomenon. Not long ago a friend said to me that he did not trust academicians or researchers because they always seem to change their story. That, however, is exactly what science is all about; it involves continuously renewing our understanding of the subjects in question and an ongoing investigation of how and why events occur. Science is a vehicle for going on a never-ending journey. In the area of development, we have seen changes in recommendations for nutrition, in explanations of psychological states as people age, and in parenting advice. So think of learning about human development as a lifelong endeavor.

Personal Knowledge

How do we know what we know? Take a moment to write down two things that you know about childhood. Okay. Now, how do you know? Chances are you know these things based on your own history (experiential reality), what others have told you, or cultural ideas (agreement reality) (Seccombe and Warner, 2004). There are several problems with personal inquiry or drawing conclusions based on our personal experiences.

Our assumptions very often guide our perceptions, consequently, when we believe something, we tend to see it even if it is not there. Have you heard the saying, “seeing is believing”? Well, the truth is just the opposite: believing is seeing. This problem may just be a result of cognitive ‘blinders’ or it may be part of a more conscious attempt to support our own views. Confirmation bias is the tendency to look for evidence that we are right and in so doing, we ignore contradictory evidence.

Philosopher Karl Popper suggested that the distinction between that which is scientific and that which is unscientific is that science is falsifiable; scientific inquiry involves attempts to reject or refute a theory or set of assumptions (Thornton, 2005). A theory that cannot be falsified is not scientific. And much of what we do in personal inquiry involves drawing conclusions based on what we have personally experienced or validating our own experience by discussing what we think is true with others who share the same views.

Science offers a more systematic way to make comparisons and guard against bias. One technique used to avoid sampling bias is to select participants for a study in a random way. This means using a technique to ensure that all members have an equal chance of being selected. Simple random sampling may involve using a set of random numbers as a guide in determining who is to be selected. For example, if we have a list of 400 people and wish to randomly select a smaller group or sample to be studied, we use a list of random numbers and select the case that corresponds with that number (Case 39, 3, 217, etc.). This is preferable to asking only those individuals with whom we are familiar to participate in a study; if we conveniently chose only people we know, we know nothing about those who had no opportunity to be selected. There are many more elaborate techniques that can be used to obtain samples that represent the composition of the population we are studying. But even though a randomly selected representative sample is preferable, it is not always used because of costs and other limitations. As a consumer of research, however, you should know how the sample was obtained and keep this in mind when interpreting results. It is possible that what was found was limited to that sample or similar individuals and not generalizable to everyone else.

Scientific Methods

The particular method used to conduct research may vary by discipline and since lifespan development is multidisciplinary, more than one method may be used to study human development. One method of scientific investigation involves the following steps:

• Determining a research question
• Reviewing previous studies addressing the topic in question (known as a literature review)
• Determining a method of gathering information
• Conducting the study
• Interpreting the results
• Drawing conclusions; stating limitations of the study and suggestions for future research
• Making the findings available to others (both to share information and to have the work scrutinized by others)

The findings of these scientific studies can then be used by others as they explore the area of interest. Through this process, a literature or knowledge base is established. This model of scientific investigation presents research as a linear process guided by a specific research question. And it typically involves quantitative research , which relies on numerical data or using statistics to understand and report what has been studied.

Another model of research, referred to as qualitative research, may involve steps such as these:

• Begin with a broad area of interest and a research question
• Gain entrance into a group to be researched
• Gather field notes about the setting, the people, the structure, the activities, or other areas of interest
• Ask open-ended, broad “grand tour” types of questions when interviewing subjects
• Modify research questions as the study continues
• Note patterns or consistencies
• Explore new areas deemed important by the people being observed
• Report findings

In this type of research, theoretical ideas are “grounded” in the experiences of the participants. The researcher is the student and the people in the setting are the teachers as they inform the researcher of their world (Glazer & Strauss, 1967). Researchers should be aware of their own biases and assumptions, acknowledge them, and bracket them in efforts to keep them from limiting accuracy in reporting. Sometimes qualitative studies are used initially to explore a topic and more quantitative studies are used to test or explain what was first described.

A good way to become more familiar with these scientific research methods, both quantitative and qualitative, is to look at journal articles, which are written in sections that follow these steps in the scientific process. Most psychological articles and many papers in the social sciences follow the writing guidelines and format dictated by the  American Psychological Association  (APA). In general, the structure follows: abstract (summary of the article), introduction or literature review, methods explaining how the study was conducted, results of the study, discussion and interpretation of findings, and references.

Link to Learning

Brené Brown is a bestselling author and social work professor at the University of Houston. She conducts grounded theory research by collecting qualitative data from large numbers of participants. In Brené Brown’s TED Talk The Power of Vulnerability , Brown refers to herself as a storyteller-researcher as she explains her research process and summarizes her results.

Research Methods and Objectives

The main categories of psychological research are descriptive, correlational, and experimental research. Research studies that do not test specific relationships between variables are called  descriptive, or qualitative, studies . These studies are used to describe general or specific behaviors and attributes that are observed and measured. In the early stages of research, it might be difficult to form a hypothesis, especially when there is not any existing literature in the area. In these situations designing an experiment would be premature, as the question of interest is not yet clearly defined as a hypothesis. Often a researcher will begin with a non-experimental approach, such as a descriptive study, to gather more information about the topic before designing an experiment or correlational study to address a specific hypothesis. Some examples of descriptive questions include:

• “How much time do parents spend with their children?”
• “How many times per week do couples have intercourse?”
• “When is marital satisfaction greatest?”

The main types of descriptive studies include observation, case studies, surveys, and content analysis (which we’ll examine further in the module). Descriptive research is distinct from  correlational research , in which psychologists formally test whether a relationship exists between two or more variables.  Experimental research  goes a step further beyond descriptive and correlational research and randomly assigns people to different conditions, using hypothesis testing to make inferences about how these conditions affect behavior. Some experimental research includes explanatory studies, which are efforts to answer the question “why” such as:

• “Why have rates of divorce leveled off?”
• “Why are teen pregnancy rates down?”
• “Why has the average life expectancy increased?”

Evaluation research is designed to assess the effectiveness of policies or programs. For instance, research might be designed to study the effectiveness of safety programs implemented in schools for installing car seats or fitting bicycle helmets. Do children who have been exposed to the safety programs wear their helmets? Do parents use car seats properly? If not, why not?

Research Methods

We have just learned about some of the various models and objectives of research in lifespan development. Now we’ll dig deeper to understand the methods and techniques used to describe, explain, or evaluate behavior.

All types of research methods have unique strengths and weaknesses, and each method may only be appropriate for certain types of research questions. For example, studies that rely primarily on observation produce incredible amounts of information, but the ability to apply this information to the larger population is somewhat limited because of small sample sizes. Survey research, on the other hand, allows researchers to easily collect data from relatively large samples. While this allows for results to be generalized to the larger population more easily, the information that can be collected on any given survey is somewhat limited and subject to problems associated with any type of self-reported data. Some researchers conduct archival research by using existing records. While this can be a fairly inexpensive way to collect data that can provide insight into a number of research questions, researchers using this approach have no control over how or what kind of data was collected.

Types of Descriptive Research

Observation.

Observational studies , also called naturalistic observation, involve watching and recording the actions of participants. This may take place in the natural setting, such as observing children at play in a park, or behind a one-way glass while children are at play in a laboratory playroom. The researcher may follow a checklist and record the frequency and duration of events (perhaps how many conflicts occur among 2-year-olds) or may observe and record as much as possible about an event as a participant (such as attending an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting and recording the slogans on the walls, the structure of the meeting, the expressions commonly used, etc.). The researcher may be a participant or a non-participant. What would be the strengths of being a participant? What would be the weaknesses?

In general, observational studies have the strength of allowing the researcher to see how people behave rather than relying on self-report. One weakness of self-report studies is that what people do and what they say they do are often very different. A major weakness of observational studies is that they do not allow the researcher to explain causal relationships. Yet, observational studies are useful and widely used when studying children. It is important to remember that most people tend to change their behavior when they know they are being watched (known as the Hawthorne effect ) and children may not survey well.

Case Studies

Case studies  involve exploring a single case or situation in great detail. Information may be gathered with the use of observation, interviews, testing, or other methods to uncover as much as possible about a person or situation. Case studies are helpful when investigating unusual situations such as brain trauma or children reared in isolation. And they are often used by clinicians who conduct case studies as part of their normal practice when gathering information about a client or patient coming in for treatment. Case studies can be used to explore areas about which little is known and can provide rich detail about situations or conditions. However, the findings from case studies cannot be generalized or applied to larger populations; this is because cases are not randomly selected and no control group is used for comparison. (Read The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat by Dr. Oliver Sacks as a good example of the case study approach.)

Surveys  are familiar to most people because they are so widely used. Surveys enhance accessibility to subjects because they can be conducted in person, over the phone, through the mail, or online. A survey involves asking a standard set of questions to a group of subjects. In a highly structured survey, subjects are forced to choose from a response set such as “strongly disagree, disagree, undecided, agree, strongly agree”; or “0, 1-5, 6-10, etc.” Surveys are commonly used by sociologists, marketing researchers, political scientists, therapists, and others to gather information on many variables in a relatively short period of time. Surveys typically yield surface information on a wide variety of factors, but may not allow for an in-depth understanding of human behavior.

Surveys are useful in examining stated values, attitudes, opinions, and reporting on practices. However, they are based on self-report, or what people say they do rather than on observation, and this can limit accuracy. Validity refers to accuracy and reliability refers to consistency in responses to tests and other measures; great care is taken to ensure the validity and reliability of surveys.

Content Analysis

Content analysis  involves looking at media such as old texts, pictures, commercials, lyrics, or other materials to explore patterns or themes in culture. An example of content analysis is the classic history of childhood by Aries (1962) called “Centuries of Childhood” or the analysis of television commercials for sexual or violent content or for ageism. Passages in text or television programs can be randomly selected for analysis as well. Again, one advantage of analyzing work such as this is that the researcher does not have to go through the time and expense of finding respondents, but the researcher cannot know how accurately the media reflects the actions and sentiments of the population.

Secondary content analysis, or archival research, involves analyzing information that has already been collected or examining documents or media to uncover attitudes, practices, or preferences. There are a number of data sets available to those who wish to conduct this type of research. The researcher conducting secondary analysis does not have to recruit subjects but does need to know the quality of the information collected in the original study. And unfortunately, the researcher is limited to the questions asked and data collected originally.

Correlational and Experimental Research

Correlational research.

When scientists passively observe and measure phenomena it is called correlational research . Here, researchers do not intervene and change behavior, as they do in experiments. In correlational research, the goal is to identify patterns of relationships, but not cause and effect. Importantly, with correlational research, you can examine only two variables at a time, no more and no less.

So, what if you wanted to test whether spending money on others is related to happiness, but you don’t have $20 to give to each participant in order to have them spend it for your experiment? You could use a correlational design—which is exactly what Professor Elizabeth Dunn (2008) at the University of British Columbia did when she conducted research on spending and happiness. She asked people how much of their income they spent on others or donated to charity, and later she asked them how happy they were. Do you think these two variables were related? Yes, they were! The more money people reported spending on others, the happier they were.

Understanding Correlation

With a positive correlation , the two variables go up or down together. In a scatterplot, the dots form a pattern that extends from the bottom left to the upper right (just as they do in Figure 1). The r value for a positive correlation is indicated by a positive number (although, the positive sign is usually omitted). Here, the r value is .81. For the example above, the direction of the association is positive. This means that people who perceived the past month as being good reported feeling happier, whereas people who perceived the month as being bad reported feeling less happy.

A negative correlation is one in which the two variables move in opposite directions. That is, as one variable goes up, the other goes down. Figure 2 shows the association between the average height of males in a country (y-axis) and the pathogen prevalence (or commonness of disease; x-axis) of that country. In this scatterplot, each dot represents a country. Notice how the dots extend from the top left to the bottom right. What does this mean in real-world terms? It means that people are shorter in parts of the world where there is more disease. The r-value for a negative correlation is indicated by a negative number—that is, it has a minus (–) sign in front of it. Here, it is –.83.

Experimental Research

Experiments  are designed to test  hypotheses  (or specific statements about the relationship between  variables ) in a controlled setting in an effort to explain how certain factors or events produce outcomes. A variable is anything that changes in value. Concepts are operationalized  or transformed into variables in research which means that the researcher must specify exactly what is going to be measured in the study. For example, if we are interested in studying marital satisfaction, we have to specify what marital satisfaction really means or what we are going to use as an indicator of marital satisfaction. What is something measurable that would indicate some level of marital satisfaction? Would it be the amount of time couples spend together each day? Or eye contact during a discussion about money? Or maybe a subject’s score on a marital satisfaction scale? Each of these is measurable but these may not be equally valid or accurate indicators of marital satisfaction. What do you think? These are the kinds of considerations researchers must make when working through the design.

The experimental method is the only research method that can measure cause and effect relationships between variables. Three conditions must be met in order to establish cause and effect. Experimental designs are useful in meeting these conditions:

• The independent and dependent variables must be related.  In other words, when one is altered, the other changes in response. The independent variable is something altered or introduced by the researcher; sometimes thought of as the treatment or intervention. The dependent variable is the outcome or the factor affected by the introduction of the independent variable; the dependent variable  depends on the independent variable. For example, if we are looking at the impact of exercise on stress levels, the independent variable would be exercise; the dependent variable would be stress.
• The cause must come before the effect.  Experiments measure subjects on the dependent variable before exposing them to the independent variable (establishing a baseline). So we would measure the subjects’ level of stress before introducing exercise and then again after the exercise to see if there has been a change in stress levels. (Observational and survey research does not always allow us to look at the timing of these events which makes understanding causality problematic with these methods.)
• The cause must be isolated.  The researcher must ensure that no outside, perhaps unknown variables, are actually causing the effect we see. The experimental design helps make this possible. In an experiment, we would make sure that our subjects’ diets were held constant throughout the exercise program. Otherwise, the diet might really be creating a change in stress level rather than exercise.

A basic experimental design involves beginning with a sample (or subset of a population) and randomly assigning subjects to one of two groups: the  experimental group or the control group . Ideally, to prevent bias, the participants would be blind to their condition (not aware of which group they are in) and the researchers would also be blind to each participant’s condition (referred to as “ double blind “). The experimental group is the group that is going to be exposed to an independent variable or condition the researcher is introducing as a potential cause of an event. The control group is going to be used for comparison and is going to have the same experience as the experimental group but will not be exposed to the independent variable. This helps address the placebo effect, which is that a group may expect changes to happen just by participating. After exposing the experimental group to the independent variable, the two groups are measured again to see if a change has occurred. If so, we are in a better position to suggest that the independent variable caused the change in the dependent variable . The basic experimental model looks like this:

The major advantage of the experimental design is that of helping to establish cause and effect relationships. A disadvantage of this design is the difficulty of translating much of what concerns us about human behavior into a laboratory setting.

Developmental Research Designs

Now you know about some tools used to conduct research about human development. Remember,  research methods  are tools that are used to collect information. But it is easy to confuse research methods and research design. Research design is the strategy or blueprint for deciding how to collect and analyze information. Research design dictates which methods are used and how. Developmental research designs are techniques used particularly in lifespan development research. When we are trying to describe development and change, the research designs become especially important because we are interested in what changes and what stays the same with age. These techniques try to examine how age, cohort, gender, and social class impact development.

Cross-sectional designs

The majority of developmental studies use cross-sectional designs because they are less time-consuming and less expensive than other developmental designs. Cross-sectional research designs are used to examine behavior in participants of different ages who are tested at the same point in time. Let’s suppose that researchers are interested in the relationship between intelligence and aging. They might have a hypothesis (an educated guess, based on theory or observations) that intelligence declines as people get older. The researchers might choose to give a certain intelligence test to individuals who are 20 years old, individuals who are 50 years old, and individuals who are 80 years old at the same time and compare the data from each age group. This research is cross-sectional in design because the researchers plan to examine the intelligence scores of individuals of different ages within the same study at the same time; they are taking a “cross-section” of people at one point in time. Let’s say that the comparisons find that the 80-year-old adults score lower on the intelligence test than the 50-year-old adults, and the 50-year-old adults score lower on the intelligence test than the 20-year-old adults. Based on these data, the researchers might conclude that individuals become less intelligent as they get older. Would that be a valid (accurate) interpretation of the results?

No, that would not be a valid conclusion because the researchers did not follow individuals as they aged from 20 to 50 to 80 years old. One of the primary limitations of cross-sectional research is that the results yield information about age differences  not necessarily changes with age or over time. That is, although the study described above can show that in 2010, the 80-year-olds scored lower on the intelligence test than the 50-year-olds, and the 50-year-olds scored lower on the intelligence test than the 20-year-olds, the data used to come up with this conclusion were collected from different individuals (or groups of individuals). It could be, for instance, that when these 20-year-olds get older (50 and eventually 80), they will still score just as high on the intelligence test as they did at age 20. In a similar way, maybe the 80-year-olds would have scored relatively low on the intelligence test even at ages 50 and 20; the researchers don’t know for certain because they did not follow the same individuals as they got older.

It is also possible that the differences found between the age groups are not due to age, per se, but due to cohort effects. The 80-year-olds in this 2010 research grew up during a particular time and experienced certain events as a group. They were born in 1930 and are part of the Traditional or Silent Generation. The 50-year-olds were born in 1960 and are members of the Baby Boomer cohort. The 20-year-olds were born in 1990 and are part of the Millennial or Gen Y Generation. What kinds of things did each of these cohorts experience that the others did not experience or at least not in the same ways?

You may have come up with many differences between these cohorts’ experiences, such as living through certain wars, political and social movements, economic conditions, advances in technology, changes in health and nutrition standards, etc. There may be particular cohort differences that could especially influence their performance on intelligence tests, such as education level and use of computers. That is, many of those born in 1930 probably did not complete high school; those born in 1960 may have high school degrees, on average, but the majority did not attain college degrees; the young adults are probably current college students. And this is not even considering additional factors such as gender, race, or socioeconomic status. The young adults are used to taking tests on computers, but the members of the other two cohorts did not grow up with computers and may not be as comfortable if the intelligence test is administered on computers. These factors could have been a factor in the research results.

Another disadvantage of cross-sectional research is that it is limited to one time of measurement. Data are collected at one point in time and it’s possible that something could have happened in that year in history that affected all of the participants, although possibly each cohort may have been affected differently. Just think about the mindsets of participants in research that was conducted in the United States right after the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001.

Longitudinal research designs

Longitudinal   research involves beginning with a group of people who may be of the same age and background (cohort) and measuring them repeatedly over a long period of time. One of the benefits of this type of research is that people can be followed through time and be compared with themselves when they were younger; therefore changes with age over time are measured. What would be the advantages and disadvantages of longitudinal research? Problems with this type of research include being expensive, taking a long time, and subjects dropping out over time. Think about the film, 63 Up , part of the Up Series mentioned earlier, which is an example of following individuals over time. In the videos, filmed every seven years, you see how people change physically, emotionally, and socially through time; and some remain the same in certain ways, too. But many of the participants really disliked being part of the project and repeatedly threatened to quit; one disappeared for several years; another died before her 63rd year. Would you want to be interviewed every seven years? Would you want to have it made public for all to watch?   

Longitudinal research designs are used to examine behavior in the same individuals over time. For instance, with our example of studying intelligence and aging, a researcher might conduct a longitudinal study to examine whether 20-year-olds become less intelligent with age over time. To this end, a researcher might give an intelligence test to individuals when they are 20 years old, again when they are 50 years old, and then again when they are 80 years old. This study is longitudinal in nature because the researcher plans to study the same individuals as they age. Based on these data, the pattern of intelligence and age might look different than from the cross-sectional research; it might be found that participants’ intelligence scores are higher at age 50 than at age 20 and then remain stable or decline a little by age 80. How can that be when cross-sectional research revealed declines in intelligence with age?

Since longitudinal research happens over a period of time (which could be short term, as in months, but is often longer, as in years), there is a risk of attrition. Attrition occurs when participants fail to complete all portions of a study. Participants may move, change their phone numbers, die, or simply become disinterested in participating over time. Researchers should account for the possibility of attrition by enrolling a larger sample into their study initially, as some participants will likely drop out over time. There is also something known as  selective attrition— this means that certain groups of individuals may tend to drop out. It is often the least healthy, least educated, and lower socioeconomic participants who tend to drop out over time. That means that the remaining participants may no longer be representative of the whole population, as they are, in general, healthier, better educated, and have more money. This could be a factor in why our hypothetical research found a more optimistic picture of intelligence and aging as the years went by. What can researchers do about selective attrition? At each time of testing, they could randomly recruit more participants from the same cohort as the original members, to replace those who have dropped out.

The results from longitudinal studies may also be impacted by repeated assessments. Consider how well you would do on a math test if you were given the exact same exam every day for a week. Your performance would likely improve over time, not necessarily because you developed better math abilities, but because you were continuously practicing the same math problems. This phenomenon is known as a practice effect. Practice effects occur when participants become better at a task over time because they have done it again and again (not due to natural psychological development). So our participants may have become familiar with the intelligence test each time (and with the computerized testing administration). Another limitation of longitudinal research is that the data are limited to only one cohort.

Sequential research designs

Sequential research designs include elements of both longitudinal and cross-sectional research designs. Similar to longitudinal designs, sequential research features participants who are followed over time; similar to cross-sectional designs, sequential research includes participants of different ages. This research design is also distinct from those that have been discussed previously in that individuals of different ages are enrolled into a study at various points in time to examine age-related changes, development within the same individuals as they age, and to account for the possibility of cohort and/or time of measurement effects. In 1965, K. Warner Schaie described particular sequential designs: cross-sequential, cohort sequential, and time-sequential. The differences between them depended on which variables were focused on for analyses of the data (data could be viewed in terms of multiple cross-sectional designs or multiple longitudinal designs or multiple cohort designs). Ideally, by comparing results from the different types of analyses, the effects of age, cohort, and time in history could be separated out.

Challenges Conducting Developmental Research

The previous sections describe research tools to assess development across the lifespan, as well as the ways that research designs can be used to track age-related changes and development over time. Before you begin conducting developmental research, however, you must also be aware that testing individuals of certain ages (such as infants and children) or making comparisons across ages (such as children compared to teens) comes with its own unique set of challenges. In the final section of this module, let’s look at some of the main issues that are encountered when conducting developmental research, namely ethical concerns, recruitment issues, and participant attrition.

Ethical Concerns

You may already know that Institutional Review Boards (IRBs) must review and approve all research projects that are conducted at universities, hospitals, and other institutions (each broad discipline or field, such as psychology or social work, often has its own code of ethics that must also be followed, regardless of institutional affiliation). An IRB is typically a panel of experts who read and evaluate proposals for research. IRB members want to ensure that the proposed research will be carried out ethically and that the potential benefits of the research outweigh the risks and potential harm (psychological as well as physical harm) for participants.

What you may not know though, is that the IRB considers some groups of participants to be more vulnerable or at-risk than others. Whereas university students are generally not viewed as vulnerable or at-risk, infants and young children commonly fall into this category. What makes infants and young children more vulnerable during research than young adults? One reason infants and young children are perceived as being at increased risk is due to their limited cognitive capabilities, which makes them unable to state their willingness to participate in research or tell researchers when they would like to drop out of a study. For these reasons, infants and young children require special accommodations as they participate in the research process. Similar issues and accommodations would apply to adults who are deemed to be of limited cognitive capabilities.

When thinking about special accommodations in developmental research, consider the informed consent process. If you have ever participated in scientific research, you may know through your own experience that adults commonly sign an informed consent statement (a contract stating that they agree to participate in research) after learning about a study. As part of this process, participants are informed of the procedures to be used in the research, along with any expected risks or benefits. Infants and young children cannot verbally indicate their willingness to participate, much less understand the balance of potential risks and benefits. As such, researchers are oftentimes required to obtain written informed consent from the parent or legal guardian of the child participant, an adult who is almost always present as the study is conducted. In fact, children are not asked to indicate whether they would like to be involved in a study at all (a process known as assent) until they are approximately seven years old. Because infants and young children cannot easily indicate if they would like to discontinue their participation in a study, researchers must be sensitive to changes in the state of the participant (determining whether a child is too tired or upset to continue) as well as to parent desires (in some cases, parents might want to discontinue their involvement in the research). As in adult studies, researchers must always strive to protect the rights and well-being of the minor participants and their parents when conducting developmental research.

Recruitment

An additional challenge in developmental science is participant recruitment. Recruiting university students to participate in adult studies is typically easy.  Unfortunately, young children cannot be recruited in this way. Given these limitations, how do researchers go about finding infants and young children to be in their studies?

The answer to this question varies along multiple dimensions. Researchers must consider the number of participants they need and the financial resources available to them, among other things. Location may also be an important consideration. Researchers who need large numbers of infants and children may attempt to recruit them by obtaining infant birth records from the state, county, or province in which they reside. Researchers can choose to pay a recruitment agency to contact and recruit families for them.  More economical recruitment options include posting advertisements and fliers in locations frequented by families, such as mommy-and-me classes, local malls, and preschools or daycare centers. Researchers can also utilize online social media outlets like Facebook, which allows users to post recruitment advertisements for a small fee. Of course, each of these different recruitment techniques requires IRB approval. And if children are recruited and/or tested in school settings, permission would need to be obtained ahead of time from teachers, schools, and school districts (as well as informed consent from parents or guardians).

And what about the recruitment of adults? While it is easy to recruit young college students to participate in research, some would argue that it is too easy and that college students are samples of convenience. They are not randomly selected from the wider population, and they may not represent all young adults in our society (this was particularly true in the past with certain cohorts, as college students tended to be mainly white males of high socioeconomic status). In fact, in the early research on aging, this type of convenience sample was compared with another type of convenience sample—young college students tended to be compared with residents of nursing homes! Fortunately, it didn’t take long for researchers to realize that older adults in nursing homes are not representative of the older population; they tend to be the oldest and sickest (physically and/or psychologically). Those initial studies probably painted an overly negative view of aging, as young adults in college were being compared to older adults who were not healthy, had not been in school nor taken tests in many decades, and probably did not graduate high school, let alone college. As we can see, recruitment and random sampling can be significant issues in research with adults, as well as infants and children. For instance, how and where would you recruit middle-aged adults to participate in your research?

Another important consideration when conducting research with infants and young children is attrition . Although attrition is quite common in longitudinal research in particular (see the previous section on longitudinal designs for an example of high attrition rates and selective attrition in lifespan developmental research), it is also problematic in developmental science more generally, as studies with infants and young children tend to have higher attrition rates than studies with adults.  Infants and young children are more likely to tire easily, become fussy, and lose interest in the study procedures than are adults. For these reasons, research studies should be designed to be as short as possible – it is likely better to break up a large study into multiple short sessions rather than cram all of the tasks into one long visit to the lab. Researchers should also allow time for breaks in their study protocols so that infants can rest or have snacks as needed. Happy, comfortable participants provide the best data.

Conclusions

Lifespan development is a fascinating field of study – but care must be taken to ensure that researchers use appropriate methods to examine human behavior, use the correct experimental design to answer their questions, and be aware of the special challenges that are part-and-parcel of developmental research. After reading this module, you should have a solid understanding of these various issues and be ready to think more critically about research questions that interest you. For example, what types of questions do you have about lifespan development? What types of research would you like to conduct? Many interesting questions remain to be examined by future generations of developmental scientists – maybe you will make one of the next big discoveries!

Lifespan development is the scientific study of how and why people change or remain the same over time. As we are beginning to see, lifespan development involves multiple domains and many ages and stages that are important in and of themselves, but that are also interdependent and dynamic and need to be viewed holistically. There are many influences on lifespan development at individual and societal levels (including genetics); cultural, generational, economic, and historical contexts are often significant. And how developmental research is designed and data are collected, analyzed, and interpreted can affect what is discovered about human development across the lifespan.

Lifespan Development Copyright © 2020 by Julie Lazzara is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License , except where otherwise noted.

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6.1: Research Methods in Developmental Psychology

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What do infants know about the world in which they live – and how do they grow and change with age? These are the kinds of questions answered by developmental scientists. This module describes different research techniques that are used to study psychological phenomena in infants and children, research designs that are used to examine age-related changes in development, and unique challenges and special issues associated with conducting research with infants and children. Child development is a fascinating field of study, and many interesting questions remain to be examined by future generations of developmental scientists – maybe you will be among them!

learning objectives

• Describe different research methods used to study infant and child development
• Discuss different research designs, as well as their strengths and limitations
• Report on the unique challenges associated with conducting developmental research

Introduction

A group of children were playing hide-and-seek in the yard. Pilar raced to her hiding spot as her six-year-old cousin, Lucas, loudly counted, “… six, seven, eight, nine, ten! Ready or not, here I come!”. Pilar let out a small giggle as Lucas ran over to find her – in the exact location where he had found his sister a short time before. At first glance, this behavior is puzzling: why would Pilar hide in exactly the same location where someone else was just found? Whereas older children and adults realize that it is likely best to hide in locations that have not been searched previously, young children do not have the same cognitive sophistication. But why not… and when do these abilities first develop?

Developmental psychologists investigate questions like these using research methods that are tailored to the particular capabilities of the infants and children being studied. Importantly, research in developmental psychology is more than simply examining how children behave during games of hide-and-seek – the results obtained from developmental research have been used to inform best practices in parenting, education, and policy.

This module describes different research techniques that are used to study psychological phenomena in infants and children, research designs that are used to examine age-related changes in developmental processes and changes over time, and unique challenges and special issues associated with conducting research with infants and children.

Research Methods

Infants and children—especially younger children—cannot be studied using the same research methods used in studies with adults. Researchers, therefore, have developed many creative ways to collect information about infant and child development. In this section, we highlight some of the methods that have been used by researchers who study infants and older children, separating them into three distinct categories: involuntary or obligatory responses , voluntary responses , and psychophysiological responses . We will also discuss other methods such as the use of surveys and questionnaires. At the end of this section, we give an example of how interview techniques can be used to study the beliefs and perceptions of older children and adults – a method that cannot be used with infants or very young children.

Involuntary or obligatory responses

One of the primary challenges in studying very young infants is that they have limited motor control – they cannot hold their heads up for short amounts of time, much less grab an interesting toy, play the piano, or turn a door knob. As a result, infants cannot actively engage with the environment in the same way as older children and adults. For this reason, developmental scientists have designed research methods that assess involuntary or obligatory responses. These are behaviors in which people engage without much conscious thought or effort. For example, think about the last time you heard your name at a party – you likely turned your head to see who was talking without even thinking about it. Infants and young children also demonstrate involuntary responses to stimuli in the environment. When infants hear the voice of their mother, for instance, their heart rate increases – whereas if they hear the voice of a stranger, their heart rate decreases (Kisilevsky et al., 2003). Researchers study involuntary behaviors to better understand what infants know about the world around them.

One research method that capitalizes on involuntary or obligatory responses is a procedure known as habituation . In habituation studies, infants are presented with a stimulus such as a photograph of a face over and over again until they become bored with it. When infants become bored, they look away from the picture. If infants are then shown a new picture--such as a photograph of a different face-- their interest returns and they look at the new picture. This is a phenomenon known as dishabituation . Habituation procedures work because infants generally look longer at novel stimuli relative to items that are familiar to them. This research technique takes advantage of involuntary or obligatory responses because infants are constantly looking around and observing their environments; they do not have to be taught to engage with the world in this way.

One classic habituation study was conducted by Baillargeon and colleagues (1985). These researchers were interested in the concept of object permanence , or the understanding that objects exist even when they cannot be seen or heard. For example, you know your toothbrush exists even though you are probably not able to see it right this second. To investigate object permanence in 5-month-old infants, the researchers used a violation of expectation paradigm . The researchers first habituated infants to an opaque screen that moved back and forth like a drawbridge (using the same procedure you just learned about in the previous paragraph). Once the infants were bored with the moving screen, they were shown two different scenarios to test their understanding of physical events. In both of these test scenarios, an opaque box was placed behind the moving screen. What differed between these two scenarios, however, was whether they confirmed or violated the solidity principle – the idea that two solid objects cannot occupy the same space at the same time. In the possible scenario, infants watched as the moving drawbridge stopped when it hit the opaque box (as would be expected based on the solidity principle). In the impossible scenario, the drawbridge appeared to move right through the space that was occupied by the opaque box! This impossible scenario violates the solidity principle in the same way as if you got out of your chair and walked through a wall, reappearing on the other side.

The results of this study revealed that infants looked longer at the impossible test event than at the possible test event. The authors suggested that the infants reacted in this way because they were surprised – the demonstration went against their expectation that two solids cannot move through one another. The findings indicated that 5-month-old infants understood that the box continued to exist even when they could not see it. Subsequent studies indicated that 3½- and 4½-month-old infants also demonstrate object permanence under similar test conditions (Baillargeon, 1987). These findings are notable because they suggest that infants understand object permanence much earlier than had been reported previously in research examining voluntary responses (although see more recent research by Cashon & Cohen, 2000).

Voluntary responses

As infants and children age, researchers are increasingly able to study their understanding of the world through their voluntary responses. Voluntary responses are behaviors that a person completes by choice. For example, think about how you act when you go to the grocery store: you select whether to use a shopping cart or a basket, you decide which sections of the store to walk through, and you choose whether to stick to your grocery list or splurge on a treat. Importantly, these behaviors are completely up to you (and are under your control). Although they do not do a lot of grocery shopping, infants and children also have voluntary control over their actions. Children, for instance, choose which toys to play with.

Researchers study the voluntary responses of infants and young children in many ways. For example, developmental scientists study recall memory in infants and young children by looking at voluntary responses. Recall memory is memory of past events or episodes, such as what you did yesterday afternoon or on your last birthday. Whereas older children and adults are simply asked to talk about their past experiences, recall memory has to be studied in a different way in infants and very young children who cannot discuss the past using language. To study memory in these subjects researchers use a behavioral method known as elicited imitation (Lukowski & Milojevich, in press).

In the elicited imitation procedure, infants play with toys that are designed in the lab to be unlike the kinds of things infants usually have at home. These toys (or event sequences, as researchers call them) can be put together in a certain way to produce an outcome that infants commonly enjoy. One of these events is called Find the Surprise. As shown in Figure 6.1.1, this toy has a door on the front that is held in place by a latch – and a small plastic figure is hidden on the inside. During the first part of the study, infants play with the toy in whichever way they want for a few minutes. The researcher then shows the infant how make the toy work by (1) flipping the latch out of the way and (2) opening the door, revealing the plastic toy inside. The infant is allowed to play with the toy again either immediately after the demonstration or after a longer delay. As the infant plays, the researcher records whether the infant finds the surprise using the same procedure that was demonstrated.

Use of the elicited imitation procedure has taught developmental scientists a lot about how recall memory develops. For example, we now know that 6-month-old infants remember one step of a 3-step sequence for 24 hours (Barr, Dowden, & Hayne, 1996; Collie & Hayne, 1999). Nine-month-olds remember the individual steps that make up a 2-step event sequence for 1 month, but only 50% of infants remember to do the first step of the sequence before the second (Bauer, Wiebe, Carver, Waters, & Nelson, 2003; Bauer, Wiebe, Waters, & Bangston, 2001; Carver & Bauer, 1999). When children are 20 months old, they remember the individual steps and temporal order of 4-step events for at least 12 months – the longest delay that has been tested to date (Bauer, Wenner, Dropik, & Wewerka, 2000).

Psychophysiology

Behavioral studies have taught us important information about what infants and children know about the world. Research on behavior alone, however, cannot tell scientists how brain development or biological changes impact (or are impacted by) behavior. For this reason, researchers may also record psychophysiological data, such as measures of heart rate, hormone levels, or brain activity. These measures may be recorded by themselves or in combination with behavioral data to better understand the bidirectional relations between biology and behavior.

One manner of understanding associations between brain development and behavioral advances is through the recording of event-related potentials , or ERPs. ERPs are recorded by fitting a research participant with a stretchy cap that contains many small sensors or electrodes. These electrodes record tiny electrical currents on the scalp of the participant in response to the presentation of particular stimuli, such as a picture or a sound (for additional information on recording ERPs from infants and children, see DeBoer, Scott, & Nelson, 2005). The recorded responses are then amplified thousands of times using specialized equipment so that they look like squiggly lines with peaks and valleys. Some of these brain responses have been linked to psychological phenomena. For example, researchers have identified a negative peak in the recorded waveform that they have called the N170 (Bentin, Allison, Puce, Perez, & McCarthy, 2010). The peak is named in this way because it is negative (hence the N) and because it occurs about 140ms to 170ms after a stimulus is presented (hence the 170). This peak is particularly sensitive to the presentation of faces, as it is commonly more negative when participants are presented with photographs of faces rather than with photographs of objects. In this way, researchers are able to identify brain activity associated with real world thinking and behavior.

The use of ERPs has provided important insight as to how infants and children understand the world around them. In one study (Webb, Dawson, Bernier, & Panagiotides, 2006), researchers examined face and object processing in children with autism spectrum disorders, those with developmental delays, and those who were typically developing. The children wore electrode caps and had their brain activity recorded as they watched still photographs of faces (of their mother or of a stranger) and objects (including those that were familiar or unfamiliar to them). The researchers examined differences in face and object processing by group by observing a component of the brainwave they called the prN170 (because it was believed to be a precursor to the adult N170). Their results showed that the height of the prN170 peak (commonly called the amplitude ) did not differ when faces or objects were presented to typically developing children. When considering children with autism, however, the peaks were higher when objects were presented relative to when faces were shown. Differences were also found in how long it took the brain to reach the negative peak (commonly called the latency of the response). Whereas the peak was reached more quickly when typically developing children were presented with faces relative to objects, the opposite was true for children with autism. These findings suggest that children with autism are in some way processing faces differently than typically developing children (and, as reported in the manuscript, children with more general developmental delays).

Parent-report questionnaires

Developmental science has come a long way in assessing various aspects of infant and child development through behavior and psychophysiology – and new advances are happening every day. In many ways, however, the very youngest of research participants are still quite limited in the information they can provide about their own development. As such, researchers often ask the people who know infants and children best – commonly, their parents or guardians – to complete surveys or questionnaires about various aspects of their lives. These parent-report data can be analyzed by themselves or in combination with any collected behavioral or psychophysiological data.

One commonly used parent-report questionnaire is the Child Behavior Checklist (CBCL; Achenbach & Rescorla, 2000). Parents complete the preschooler version of this questionnaire by answering questions about child strengths, behavior problems, and disabilities, among other things (click here to see sample questions). The responses provided by parents are used to identify whether the child has any behavioral issues, such as sleep difficulties, aggressive behaviors, depression, or attention deficit/hyperactivity problems.

A recent study used the CBCL-Preschool questionnaire (Achenbach & Rescorla, 2000) to examine preschooler functioning in relation to levels of stress experienced by their mothers while they were pregnant (Ronald, Pennell, & Whitehouse, 2011). Almost 3,000 pregnant women were recruited into the study during their pregnancy and were interviewed about their stressful life experiences. Later, when their children were 2 years old, mothers completed the CBCL-Preschool questionnaire. The results of the study showed that higher levels of maternal stress during pregnancy (such as a divorce or moving to a new house) were associated with increased attention deficit/hyperactivity problems in children over 2 years later. These findings suggest that stressful events experienced during prenatal development may be associated with problematic child behavioral functioning years later – although additional research is needed.

Interview techniques

Whereas infants and very young children are unable to talk about their own thoughts and behaviors, older children and adults are commonly asked to use language to discuss their thoughts and knowledge about the world. In fact, these verbal report paradigms are among the most widely used in psychological research. For instance, a researcher might present a child with a vignette or short story describing a moral dilemma, and the child would be asked to give their own thoughts and beliefs (Walrath, 2011). For example, children might react to the following:

“Mr. Kohut’s wife is sick and only one medication can save her life. The medicine is extremely expensive and Mr. Kohut cannot afford it. The druggist will not lower the price. What should Mr. Kohut do, and why?”

Children can provide written or verbal answers to these types of scenarios. They can also offer their perspectives on issues ranging from attitudes towards drug use to the experience of fear while falling asleep to their memories of getting lost in public places – the possibilities are endless. Verbal reports such as interviews and surveys allow children to describe their own experience of the world.

Research Design

Now you know about some tools used to conduct research with infants and young children. Remember, research methods are the tools that are used to collect information. But it is easy to confuse research methods and research design . Research design is the strategy or blueprint for deciding how to collect and analyze information. Research design dictates which methods are used and how.

Researchers typically focus on two distinct types of comparisons when conducting research with infants and children. The first kind of comparison examines change within individuals . As the name suggests, this type of analysis measures the ways in which a specific person changes (or remains the same) over time. For example, a developmental scientist might be interested in studying the same group of infants at 12 months, 18 months, and 24 months to examine how vocabulary and grammar change over time. This kind of question would be best answered using a longitudinal research design. Another sort of comparison focuses on changes between groups . In this type of analysis, researchers study average changes in behavior between groups of different ages. Returning to the language example, a scientist might study the vocabulary and grammar used by 12-month-olds, 18-month-olds, and 24-month-olds to examine how language abilities change with age. This kind of question would be best answered using a cross-sectional research design.

Longitudinal research designs

Longitudinal research designs are used to examine behavior in the same infants and children over time. For example, when considering our example of hide-and-seek behaviors in preschoolers, a researcher might conduct a longitudinal study to examine whether 2-year-olds develop into better hiders over time. To this end, a researcher might observe a group of 2-year-old children playing hide-and-seek with plans to observe them again when they are 4 years old – and again when they are 6 years old. This study is longitudinal in nature because the researcher plans to study the same children as they age. Based on her data, the researcher might conclude that 2-year-olds develop more mature hiding abilities with age. Remember, researchers examine games such as hide-and-seek not because they are interested in the games themselves, but because they offer clues to how children think, feel and behave at various ages.

Longitudinal studies may be conducted over the short term (over a span of months, as in Wiebe, Lukowski, & Bauer, 2010) or over much longer durations (years or decades, as in Lukowski et al., 2010). For these reasons, longitudinal research designs are optimal for studying stability and change over time. Longitudinal research also has limitations, however. For one, longitudinal studies are expensive: they require that researchers maintain continued contact with participants over time, and they necessitate that scientists have funding to conduct their work over extended durations (from infancy to when participants were 19 years old in Lukowski et al., 2010). An additional risk is attrition . Attrition occurs when participants fail to complete all portions of a study. Participants may move, change their phone numbers, or simply become disinterested in participating over time. Researchers should account for the possibility of attrition by enrolling a larger sample into their study initially, as some participants will likely drop out over time.

The results from longitudinal studies may also be impacted by repeated assessments. Consider how well you would do on a math test if you were given the exact same exam every day for a week. Your performance would likely improve over time not necessarily because you developed better math abilities, but because you were continuously practicing the same math problems. This phenomenon is known as a practice effect . Practice effects occur when participants become better at a task over time because they have done it again and again; not due to natural psychological development. A final limitation of longitudinal research is that the results may be impacted by cohort effects . Cohort effects occur when the results of the study are affected by the particular point in historical time during which participants are tested. As an example, think about how peer relationships in childhood have likely changed since February 2004 – the month and year Facebook was founded. Cohort effects can be problematic in longitudinal research because only one group of participants are tested at one point in time – different findings might be expected if participants of the same ages were tested at different points in historical time.

Cross-sectional designs

Cross-sectional research designs are used to examine behavior in participants of different ages who are tested at the same point in time. When considering our example of hide-and-seek behaviors in children, for example, a researcher might want to examine whether older children more often hide in novel locations (those in which another child in the same game has never hidden before) when compared to younger children. In this case, the researcher might observe 2-, 4-, and 6-year-old children as they play the game (the various age groups represent the “cross sections”). This research is cross-sectional in nature because the researcher plans to examine the behavior of children of different ages within the same study at the same time. Based on her data, the researcher might conclude that 2-year-olds more commonly hide in previously-searched locations relative to 6-year-olds.

Cross-sectional designs are useful for many reasons. Because participants of different ages are tested at the same point in time, data collection can proceed at a rapid pace. In addition, because participants are only tested at one point in time, practice effects are not an issue – children do not have the opportunity to become better at the task over time. Cross-sectional designs are also more cost-effective than longitudinal research designs because there is no need to maintain contact with and follow-up on participants over time.

One of the primary limitations of cross-sectional research, however, is that the results yield information on age-related change, not development per se . That is, although the study described above can show that 6-year-olds are more advanced in their hiding behavior than 2-year-olds, the data used to come up with this conclusion were collected from different children. It could be, for instance, that this specific sample of 6-year-olds just happened to be particularly clever at hide-and-seek. As such, the researcher cannot conclude that 2-year-olds develop into better hiders with age; she can only state that 6-year-olds, on average, are more sophisticated hiders relative to children 4 years younger.

Sequential research designs

Sequential research designs include elements of both longitudinal and cross-sectional research designs. Similar to longitudinal designs, sequential research features participants who are followed over time; similar to cross-sectional designs, sequential work includes participants of different ages. This research design is also distinct from those that have been discussed previously in that children of different ages are enrolled into a study at various points in time to examine age-related changes, development within the same individuals as they age, and account for the possibility of cohort effects.

Consider, once again, our example of hide-and-seek behaviors. In a study with a sequential design, a researcher might enroll three separate groups of children (Groups A, B, and C). Children in Group A would be enrolled when they are 2 years old and would be tested again when they are 4 and 6 years old (similar in design to the longitudinal study described previously). Children in Group B would be enrolled when they are 4 years old and would be tested again when they are 6 and 8 years old. Finally, children in Group C would be enrolled when they are 6 years old and would be tested again when they are 8 and 10 years old.

Studies with sequential designs are powerful because they allow for both longitudinal and cross-sectional comparisons. This research design also allows for the examination of cohort effects. For example, the researcher could examine the hide-and-seek behavior of 6-year-olds in Groups A, B, and C to determine whether performance differed by group when participants were the same age. If performance differences were found, there would be evidence for a cohort effect. In the hide-and-seek example, this might mean that children from different time periods varied in the amount they giggled or how patient they are when waiting to be found. Sequential designs are also appealing because they allow researchers to learn a lot about development in a relatively short amount of time. In the previous example, a four-year research study would provide information about 8 years of developmental time by enrolling children ranging in age from two to ten years old.

Because they include elements of longitudinal and cross-sectional designs, sequential research has many of the same strengths and limitations as these other approaches. For example, sequential work may require less time and effort than longitudinal research, but more time and effort than cross-sectional research. Although practice effects may be an issue if participants are asked to complete the same tasks or assessments over time, attrition may be less problematic than what is commonly experienced in longitudinal research since participants may not have to remain involved in the study for such a long period of time.

When considering the best research design to use in their research, scientists think about their main research question and the best way to come up with an answer. A table of advantages and disadvantages for each of the described research designs is provided here to help you as you consider what sorts of studies would be best conducted using each of these different approaches.

Challenges Associated with Conducting Developmental Research

The previous sections describe research tools to assess development in infancy and early childhood, as well as the ways that research designs can be used to track age-related changes and development over time. Before you begin conducting developmental research, however, you must also be aware that testing infants and children comes with its own unique set of challenges. In the final section of this module, we review some of the main issues that are encountered when conducting research with the youngest of human participants. In particular, we focus our discussion on ethical concerns, recruitment issues, and participant attrition.

Ethical concerns

As a student of psychological science, you may already know that Institutional Review Boards (IRBs) review and approve of all research projects that are conducted at universities, hospitals, and other institutions. An IRB is typically a panel of experts who read and evaluate proposals for research. IRB members want to ensure that the proposed research will be carried out ethically and that the potential benefits of the research outweigh the risks and harm for participants. What you may not know though, is that the IRB considers some groups of participants to be more vulnerable or at-risk than others. Whereas university students are generally not viewed as vulnerable or at-risk, infants and young children commonly fall into this category. What makes infants and young children more vulnerable during research than young adults? One reason infants and young children are perceived as being at increased risk is due to their limited cognitive capabilities, which makes them unable to state their willingness to participate in research or tell researchers when they would like to drop out of a study. For these reasons, infants and young children require special accommodations as they participate in the research process.

When thinking about special accommodations in developmental research, consider the informed consent process. If you have ever participated in psychological research, you may know through your own experience that adults commonly sign an informed consent statement (a contract stating that they agree to participate in research) after learning about a study. As part of this process, participants are informed of the procedures to be used in the research, along with any expected risks or benefits. Infants and young children cannot verbally indicate their willingness to participate, much less understand the balance of potential risks and benefits. As such, researchers are oftentimes required to obtain written informed consent from the parent or legal guardian of the child participant, an adult who is almost always present as the study is conducted. In fact, children are not asked to indicate whether they would like to be involved in a study at all (a process known as assent ) until they are approximately seven years old. Because infants and young children also cannot easily indicate if they would like to discontinue their participation in a study, researchers must be sensitive to changes in the state of the participant (determining whether a child is too tired or upset to continue) as well as to parent desires (in some cases, parents might want to discontinue their involvement in the research). As in adult studies, researchers must always strive to protect the rights and well-being of the minor participants and their parents when conducting developmental science.

Recruitment

An additional challenge in developmental science is participant recruitment. Recruiting university students to participate in adult studies is typically easy. Many colleges and universities offer extra credit for participation in research and have locations such as bulletin boards and school newspapers where research can be advertised. Unfortunately, young children cannot be recruited by making announcements in Introduction to Psychology courses, by posting ads on campuses, or through online platforms such as Amazon Mechanical Turk. Given these limitations, how do researchers go about finding infants and young children to be in their studies?

The answer to this question varies along multiple dimensions. Researchers must consider the number of participants they need and the financial resources available to them, among other things. Location may also be an important consideration. Researchers who need large numbers of infants and children may attempt to do so by obtaining infant birth records from the state, county, or province in which they reside. Some areas make this information publicly available for free, whereas birth records must be purchased in other areas (and in some locations birth records may be entirely unavailable as a recruitment tool). If birth records are available, researchers can use the obtained information to call families by phone or mail them letters describing possible research opportunities. All is not lost if this recruitment strategy is unavailable, however. Researchers can choose to pay a recruitment agency to contact and recruit families for them. Although these methods tend to be quick and effective, they can also be quite expensive. More economical recruitment options include posting advertisements and fliers in locations frequented by families, such as mommy-and-me classes, local malls, and preschools or day care centers. Researchers can also utilize online social media outlets like Facebook, which allows users to post recruitment advertisements for a small fee. Of course, each of these different recruitment techniques requires IRB approval.

Another important consideration when conducting research with infants and young children is attrition . Although attrition is quite common in longitudinal research in particular, it is also problematic in developmental science more generally, as studies with infants and young children tend to have higher attrition rates than studies with adults. For example, high attrition rates in ERP studies oftentimes result from the demands of the task: infants are required to sit still and have a tight, wet cap placed on their heads before watching still photographs on a computer screen in a dark, quiet room. In other cases, attrition may be due to motivation (or a lack thereof). Whereas adults may be motivated to participate in research in order to receive money or extra course credit, infants and young children are not as easily enticed. In addition, infants and young children are more likely to tire easily, become fussy, and lose interest in the study procedures than are adults. For these reasons, research studies should be designed to be as short as possible – it is likely better to break up a large study into multiple short sessions rather than cram all of the tasks into one long visit to the lab. Researchers should also allow time for breaks in their study protocols so that infants can rest or have snacks as needed. Happy, comfortable participants provide the best data.

Conclusions

Child development is a fascinating field of study – but care must be taken to ensure that researchers use appropriate methods to examine infant and child behavior, use the correct experimental design to answer their questions, and be aware of the special challenges that are part-and-parcel of developmental research. After reading this module, you should have a solid understanding of these various issues and be ready to think more critically about research questions that interest you. For example, when considering our initial example of hide-and-seek behaviors in preschoolers, you might ask questions about what other factors might contribute to hiding behaviors in children. Do children with older siblings hide in locations that were previously searched less often than children without siblings? What other abilities are associated with the development of hiding skills? Do children who use more sophisticated hiding strategies as preschoolers do better on other tests of cognitive functioning in high school? Many interesting questions remain to be examined by future generations of developmental scientists – maybe you will make one of the next big discoveries!

Outside Resources

Developmental Psychology: Definition and Uses

Categories Development

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Developmental psychology is a field that studies how people grow and change throughout the course of their lifespans. Development is about much more than the physical changes that occur over a lifetime. It also involves cognitive, social, and emotional changes at different ages.

This article discusses some of the major issues in developmental psychology and the historical origins of some of the best-known development theories. It also covers the goals and impact of developmental psychology.

Table of Contents

What Is Developmental Psychology?

Developmental psychology focuses on studying how individuals change and develop throughout their lifespan. It examines the physical, cognitive, emotional, and social changes from infancy to age. Developmental psychologists seek to understand the processes and factors influencing human development, such as genetics, environment, culture, and individual experiences.

Key areas of interest within developmental psychology include:

Child Development

This area focuses on children’s physical, cognitive, and emotional development from infancy through adolescence. Researchers study topics like language acquisition, attachment, moral development , and the development of cognitive abilities.

Adolescent Development

Adolescence is a unique development period marked by physical changes, identity formation, and the development of independence. Researchers in this area examine issues like peer relationships, identity development, and risk-taking behavior.

Adult Development and Aging

This area explores how individuals change and adapt as they move through adulthood and into old age. Researchers study topics like cognitive aging, personality development, and the impact of life events on well-being.

Social and Emotional Development

This field focuses on how individuals develop social skills, emotions, and interpersonal relationships. It examines topics such as attachment theory, empathy, and social cognition.

Cognitive Development

Cognitive development refers to changes in thinking, problem-solving, and reasoning abilities across the lifespan. Researchers study cognitive processes like memory, problem-solving, and language development.

Developmental Disabilities

Some developmental psychologists specialize in studying and working with individuals with developmental disabilities, such as autism spectrum disorder or intellectual disabilities.

Developmental psychology is an interdisciplinary field that draws on research and theories from various domains, including biology, sociology, education, and neuroscience.

The ultimate goal of developmental psychology is to gain a deeper understanding of human growth and change processes, which can have practical applications in fields such as education, counseling, and healthcare.

Issues in Developmental Psychology

There have been several important debates and issues throughout the history of developmental psychology.

The three important developmental psychology issues focus on:

Continuity vs. Discontinuity

The continuity vs. discontinuity debate focuses on the processes through which development occurs, including whether development is a gradual process or occurs in a series of discrete stages.

Continuity suggests that development is a gradual process that takes place continually. On the other hand, discontinuity suggests that development follows a path that often involves abrupt changes during specific life stages.

Stage theories of development are examples of discontinuity. Such theories suggest that children go through the same developmental stages that follow a specific order and usually occur at certain ages.

Stability vs. Chan ge

Stability vs. change refers to the overall importance of early experiences versus later events.

Psychologists have also debated whether certain characteristics, such as personality traits, are largely stable throughout life or whether they develop and change as a result of experience.

The stability approach suggests that many characteristics are present or established during early childhood. The change approach proposes that experiences, including interactions with peers and parents, play the most significant role in development.

Nature vs. Nurture

The classic issue in child development research is the nature vs. nurture debate . Sometimes referred to as the nativism versus empiricism debate, it centers on whether genetic inheritance plays a larger role in influencing development and behavior or whether the environment has a stronger effect.

The nature versus nurture debate is a classic question in psychology that centers on whether genetics or environment plays a greater role in different aspects of human development and behavior.

In the past, nativists have argued that development is controlled almost entirely by genetic inheritance. Due to our shared DNA, certain aspects of development tend to follow a fairly predictable pattern in terms of timing and outcome. The onset of puberty, for example, tends to occur roughly around the same age.

As you might have already guessed, however, environmental factors can also play a role in development.

While empiricists may have argued that development was largely the result of environmental influences, experts today recognize that nature and nurture both have an important role to play and that the interaction between the two forces is also important.

In the case of puberty, genetics plays an important role in determining when it begins, but environmental factors such as receiving adequate nutrition are also critical.

Most psychologists recognize that both elements play an essential role, but the debate continues over many developmental questions about topics ranging from academic aptitude to personality traits.

History of Developmental Psychology

You might be surprised to learn that child development was once a topic of little concern. For much of human history, children were simply viewed as miniature versions of adults. It was not until after the Industrial Revolution that researchers began to recognize and investigate childhood as a unique, distinct, and important period of life.

Perhaps not surprisingly, some of the major theories of development center on the development that occurs during childhood. This is, after all, the time when developmental changes occur most rapidly.

Early investigations into child development began during the late 1800s with the work of naturalist Charles Darwin and physiologist Wilhelm Preyer. It was not until the 20th century with the work of famed psychologist Jean Piaget that concentrated research into child development theories began in earnest.

Other researchers who contributed a great deal of research during this period included Jean Bowlby, Lev Vygotsky, and Erik Erikson.

Developmental Psychology Theories

The modern study of developmental psychology did not emerge until relatively recently in history to address various aspects of how people change and grow over time. Some of these theories focus on how personality develops while others are centered on the cognitive changes that occur over the course of childhood.

Freud’s Developmental Psychology Theory

Freud’s theory of psychosexual development was an early theory that focused on how personality develops during early childhood . Sigmund Freud believed that psychosexual energy became focused on various erogenous zones at different points of development.

He also suggested that failing successfully to address the primary crisis of each stage could lead to a psychological fixation at that point of development.

Erikson’s Developmental Psychology Theory

Erikson’s theory of psychosocial development was similar to Freud’s in that it broke development down into stages and involved a type of developmental crisis during each stage.

Erikson’s theory was different however in that it looked at development throughout the entire course of life, from birth up until death.

Piaget’s Developmental Psychology Theory

Piaget’s theory of cognitive development suggested that there were fundamental differences in how children think versus how adults think. Piaget broke down this development into four distinct stages that typically occur at different stages of development.

The earliest stage is centered on gaining awareness of the self and the world, while later stages build on this knowledge as kids gain an increasingly sophisticated understanding of themselves, others, and the world around them.

Bowlby’s Developmental Psychology Theory

Bowlby’s attachment theory proposed that children are born predisposed to form attachments that aid in their protection, survival, nurturance, and development. Early patterns of attachment with caregivers can have an impact on how children fare as they age.

Those who can form secure attachments as children tend to grow up happier and healthier as adults.

Vygotsky’s Developmental Psychology Theory

Vygotsky’s sociocultural theory stressed the importance of social influences and culture on child cognitive development. While other theories such as Piaget’s suggest that there are universal stages of development, Vygotsky’s approach suggests that how kids learn varies depending upon the culture of their upbringing.

Goals of Developmental Psychology

Like other areas of psychology, the goals of developmental psychology are not only to describe how development occurs but also to explain, predict, and even control the course of development.

By better understanding the many influences contributing to normative development, psychologists can recommend strategies, approaches, and interventions that lead to better outcomes and healthier, happier children.

The Process of Normal Development

Developmental psychology seeks to understand both normal and abnormal development. To describe how children develop, researchers must note both the normative patterns that occur (i.e. how most kids develop) and individual differences (i.e. variations that may occur).

Making Predictions About Development

Predicting developmental events allows parents, teachers, psychologists, and healthcare providers to anticipate the needs of children and respond appropriately. This also applies to later stages of life.

Adults realize that they may face specific health issues that result from the aging process, which allows them to make lifestyle and behavioral changes today that will influence later health and development.

Making Positive Changes

Finally, developmental psychology allows experts to have an influence in the lives of children, adults, and elderly individuals. Understanding the developmental challenges that people face at different points in life makes it possible to design educational programs, public health initiatives, and targeted interventions designed to maximize well-being and overcome potential problems.

For example, developmental psychologists have found that social connections are important for cognitive and mental health later in life. As a result, communities can encourage such social activity by creating senior citizens centers where older adults can find connectivity and social support networks.

Impact of Developmental Psychology

Developmental psychology also significantly shapes how psychologists, educators, and health professionals approach various real-world problems. Developmental psychology can improve the lives of children and families by looking at issues affecting social issues, parenting concerns, educational practices, and physical and mental health.

Research on human development has significantly contributed to our understanding of the parenting approaches that lead to the most successful child outcomes.

For example, psychologist Diana Baumrind suggested that discipline approaches, warmth, communication styles, and parental expectations marked some essential dimensions of parenting.

Today, researchers often identify four distinct parenting styles characterized by how parents interact and nurture their children.

Experts believe the authoritative style, typified by high expectations, strong communication, warmth, and ample support, is the best approach to parenting children. Kids raised by authoritative parents tend to be happier, exhibit better self-regulation, and have stronger social skills.

Developmental psychology has provided a wealth of research on children’s cognitive growth, impacting instructional practices and strategies. Theories of constructivism, for example, have helped teachers and educational designers better understand how children actively construct meaning about the world around them.

Those working in health care fields are generally required to complete at least one course in developmental psychology as part of their education. By better understanding the basics of human development, healthcare providers can be better equipped to help their patients and improve health outcomes.

Neonatal nurses, for example, can use their understanding of infant health and safety to educate new parents about how to best care for their newborns. Those working with elderly patients can empathize with their psychological and physical concerns and provide services that contribute to the best possible palliative care as these individuals face serious health issues.

Developmental psychology is not just a topic of concern to psychologists and researchers, it is a topic that touches on many other fields ranging from education to healthcare. By discovering more about how children grow and how adults age, we can better understand people and the challenges they face at all stages of life.

Baumrind, D. (1967). Child care practices anteceding three patterns of preschool behavior. Genetic Psychology Monographs, 75(1), 43-88.

Erikson, E.H. (1963). Childhood and Society. (2nd ed.). New York: Norton.

Vygotsky, L.S. (1978). Mind in Society. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

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2 History of Research in Developmental Psychology

W. Andrew Collins, Institute of Child Development, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, MN

Willard W. Hartup, Institute of Child Development, University of Minnesota

• Published: 16 December 2013
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This chapter summarizes the emergence and prominent features of a science of psychological development. Pioneering researchers established laboratories in Europe in the mid-nineteenth century to examine the significance of successive changes in the organism with the passage of time. American psychologists, many of whom had studied in the European laboratories, subsequently inaugurated similar efforts in the United States. Scientific theories and methods in the fledgling field were fostered by developments in experimental psychology, but also in physiology, embryology, ethology, and sociology. Moreover, organized efforts to provide information about development to parents, educators, and public policy specialists further propagated support for developmental science. The evolution of the field in its first century has provided a substantial platform for future developmental research.

Developmental psychology encompasses a broad mix of psychological processes ranging from sensation and perception to socialization.

Developmental psychology (once called “genetic psychology”) emerged in the nineteenth century with foundations in both the theory of evolution and philosophical psychology.

Developmental psychology is the product of both societal and scientific changes.

The history of developmental psychology shows both continuity in its basic principles and discontinuities in them.

Developmental psychology, throughout its history, has encompassed studies of both normative change and the origins of individual differences.

Developmental psychology, throughout its history, has been concerned with bothdescribing developmental change and explaining it.

Once concerned with the infant, child, and adolescent in organismic terms, developmental psychology now concerns itself with the development of the organism in context—as a component of dynamical systems.

The child is both a socializing and a socialized creature.

Although the major objective of developmental science was once the construction of “grand theories,” the field is now an eclectic mixture of theoretical viewpoints.

Women have contributed as much to research on developmental psychology as men have.

Introduction

Scientific interest in psychological development rests on the desire to understand change in behavior and consciousness. The history of developmental psychology reflects the diverse goals and strategies of the scientists who have pursued this overarching theme. The earliest indication of an identifiable scientific pursuit emerged in the last decade of the nineteenth century and the first decade of the twentieth. The roots of a psychology of development, though, are much older, springing from enduring traditions in Western thought, as well as from theory and research in related fields such as physiology, embryology, ethology, and sociology ( Cairns, 1998 ; Kessen, 1965 ). Although this heritage is readily apparent, systematic historical accounts of developmental psychology have been rare. Fortunately, one can discern much of the history of the field from fragmentary accounts of particular research topics pursued by developmental researchers (e.g., Eisenberg, 2002 ; Hartup & Laursen, 1999 ; Maccoby, 1992a , b ; Modell & Elder, 2002 ) and the contributions of influential researchers ( Arnett, 2006 ; Cahan, 2003 ; Cairns, 1992 ; Eisenberg, 2002 ; Emde, 1992 ; Grusec, 1992 ; Horowitz, 1992 ; Maccoby, 1992a , b ; Modell & Elder, 2002 ; White, 1992 ). Histories of particular institutions and organizations in the field have appeared as well (e.g., Hartup, Johnson, & Weinberg, 2002 ; Sears, 1975 ; Senn, 1975 ). Nevertheless, several writers have bemoaned the distortions that have resulted from neglecting the past in forging new research directions (e.g., Cairns, 1998 ; Hartup, 2002 ; Parke, Ornstein, Rieser, & Zahn-Waxler, 1994 ).

The vitality of the field today is evident from the breadth and vigor of research described in this handbook. In this chapter we attempt to summarize the dominant intellectual, theoretical, and empirical themes marking this field over the past 110 years. The chapter is divided into two sections. The first section is a brief overview of historical trends, identifying significant shifts in the theoretical and methodological unfolding of developmental psychology. The second part outlines central themes and issues that inform the contemporary significance of the trends outlined in the first section .

Historical Overview

The history of psychology commonly is dated from the establishment of Wundt’s laboratory at the University of Leipzig in 1879. There is little reason to challenge this attribution, even though psychological research was already under way by that point in the laboratories of Helmholtz, Fechner, Weber, Lotze, Galton, and James ( Littman, 1979 ). Interest in behavioral development, however, was nascent at best. The common thread among the dispersed enterprises that eventually converged in the recognition of psychological development was agreement that the focal subject matter is “the stream of activity beginning when the egg is fertilized and ever becoming more complex as age increases” ( Watson, 1926 , p. 33). Among the pioneering figures subscribing to this general view were Alfred Binet, Wilhelm Preyer, William Stern, and Herbert Spencer in Europe, and G. Stanley Hall, John Dewey, James Mark Baldwin, and John B. Watson in North America. All gave more than tacit credence to the significance of successive changes in the organism with the passage of time, although at the same time disagreeing about the relative status of developmental questions among their primary intellectual concerns.

Roots in Biology

The nature of ontogenetic change was far more central to biology than to psychology in the late nineteenth century. Then as now, the core issues were, first, the nature and content of successive states in development and, second, the processes by which an individual moves from one state to another, developmentally different one.

Initially, the primary candidates for specifying processes of ontogenesis were preformism and epigenesis ( Gould, 1977 ). Preformists held that the features of developmental states are already formed at the beginning of ontogenesis. Their essential properties were preset and determined; thus, new and novel properties would not emerge during development. Those favoring epigenesis contended that new and novel behaviors are brought about through progressive transformations from the beginning of life. The important remaining question was how these transformations were governed; for example, what determines the forms that will emerge, and what ends the developmental process when a satisfactory level of functioning has been reached ( Gould, 1977 ). One proposal for filling this gap was recapitulation theory, in which developing organisms “replay” evolutionary history (“ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny”). Thus, the forms that emerge in epigenesis resemble the successive features of earlier evolutionary periods. Once individual functioning reaches the current evolutionary stage of humans, development can be considered complete. The influential German scientist Ernst Haeckel (1866) labeled recapitulation the “biogenetic law,” a term widely accepted among scientists of the time. Recapitulation theory is perhaps best known today for influencing G. Stanley Hall’s (1904) classic formulation of the psychology of adolescence ( Arnett, 2006 ).

The most compelling attempt to grapple with the nature and processes of ontogenetic change came from a leading nineteenth-century biologist, Karl Ernst von Baer, who formulated what is widely known as the developmental principle. He proposed that development is a “continuing process of differentiation and organization followed by integration into reorganized structures” ( von Baer, 1828–1837 ). The descent of these ideas is readily discernible through Herbert Spencer (1886) to James Mark Baldwin, thence to Jean Piaget and Heinz Werner. A second line of von Baer’s influence was the work on animal behavior and comparative psychologists such as Kuo, Schneirla, and Carmichael. According to Cairns (1998 , p. 29):

The modern dynamic systems model, transactional theory, developmental psychobiology, and developmental science have von Baer’s principle of development as a kernel concept…. Moreover, time and timing are central…, consistent with modern concepts of critical periods in embryogenesis and sensitive periods in behavioral development, and with the concepts of neoteny and heterochrony in behavioral evolution ( Gottlieb, 1992 ; Gould, 1977 ).

Perhaps surprisingly for many present-day developmentalists, embryology influenced the foundational principles of the field more strongly than evolutionary views did. For example, historians disagree on both the extent of, and the substance of, Darwin’s impact on early developmental psychology (e.g., Charlesworth, 1992 ; Kessen, 1965 ). In subsequent scholarship, though, it appears most likely that Darwin did influence theory and method in the field, the latter through the example of published observations of his infant son (e.g., Darwin, 1877 ). However, ideas from evolutionary theory informed the developmental formulations of Preyer, Baldwin, and Hall, among others, as well as the concept of heredity ( Cairns, 1998 ). Indeed, the lasting impact of these ideas on developmental thought is evident in the many compelling questions in developmental psychology today concerning the interrelations of evolutionary and ontogenetic issues ( Cairns, 1998 ).

Roots in Experimental Psychology

A sign of the historical distinctiveness of developmental psychology is that the relatively advanced conceptual and empirical work in embryology and evolutionary biology had little impact on the early history of experimental psychology. Founded in philosophical debates about the nature of mind and mental functioning, the purpose of experimental psychology was to explicate the process of apprehending the world and understanding the nature of human responses to environmental stimuli. Experimentalists emphasized devising the most exact methods to answer questions about human behavior generally, rather than seeking to discern transformations in behavior over time. For example, experimental psychologists were greatly interested in the use of reaction time, psychophysical procedures, and introspection to examine the relation between sensation and perception ( Cahan & White, 1992 ; Cairns, 1998 ; Coon, 1992 ).

The concerns of developmental psychologists were not central to this agenda. Wundt (1910–20) , for instance, rejected the suggestion that understanding the child’s mind was an appropriate avenue to understanding the mental life of adults; rather, the functional relation between the two was the other way around, such that adult mental functioning was the most appropriate standard against which to judge children’s behavior. Moreover, developmentalists’ heavy reliance on observational and correlational methods was particularly contrary to the insistence on rigorous experimental manipulation ( Cahan & White, 1992 ; Hall, 1885 ). The practical division between experimental and developmental psychology has been both fundamental and durable. Neither has greatly influenced the history of the other, although the impact of experimental psychology on developmental psychology arguably has been more substantial than the converse.

The Development of the Field

Few scholarly fields yield easily to simple chronological accounts, and developmental psychology is no exception. As a useful heuristic, however, Cairns (1998) divided the first 110 years of developmental psychology (originally called genetic psychology) into three periods: emergence (roughly 1890–1919), the middle period of institutionalization and expansion (1920–1946), and the modern era (from 1947 to the present). Viewing the field in long-term perspective reveals developmental psychologists’ unique interweaving of scientific commitment and societal concerns regarding children, families, mental development, and other aspects of a developing psyche. At the same time, the undulations of scientific interests and activities between 1890 and the present further highlight the distinctiveness of developmental psychology, as compared to general or experimental psychology. This section identifies notable dialectics within each of these periods and their connections to important achievements in the field. We specify the latter two historical epochs somewhat differently than Cairns did, however. The distinctive themes and dominant methods of the middle period extend at least to 1959, well past Cairns’ suggested endpoint for the period (1946). The same is true for the themes and evolving methodologies of the following period. In short, the modern era is best described as the five decades from 1960 to the present.

Emergence (1890–1919)

The empirical corpus from which a new enterprise of developmental psychology arose was thin. Nevertheless, an outpouring of influential works appeared between 1890 and 1910. Many of the significant contributors are well known: James Mark Baldwin (1895 , 1897 ), Alfred Binet ( Binet & Simon, 1905 ), Charles Cooley (1902) , Sigmund Freud (1901/1953 ; 1905/1953 ), John Dewey (1899) , Emile Durkheim (1897/1951 ), Wilhelm Wundt (1910–1920 ), and G. Stanley Hall (1904) . Other influential contributors, a bit earlier, were Francis Galton (1883) and Wilhelm Preyer (1882/1888–1889 ) and a bit later, William Stern (1911) , Arnold Gesell (1928 , laboratory established 1911), and John B. Watson (1914) .

The beginnings of the enterprise are difficult to pin down. Cairns assigns some primacy to the publication of Wilhelm Preyer’s The Mind of the Child in 1882. In this pioneering volume, Preyer divided the child’s mind into three parts: senses, will, and intellect. Besides the sheer scope of his inquiry, however, Preyer’s achievements are admired more for the rigor of his methods than for the originality of his ideas ( Reinert, 1979 ). Cairns (1998) gives Preyer considerable credit for his early proposal that there is feedback between experience and normal structural development in the brain. This early suggestion of bidirectional processes as a fundamental developmental principle and his insightful observations of developmental sequences qualify Preyer as a foundational figure.

In the same period Alfred Binet was beginning a series of studies to dissect behavioral phenomena. Using a remarkable variety of methods to obtain samples of behavior from differing angles and under contrasting circumstances, Binet gave particular attention to memory and perception. Binet and his collaborators favored studying these phenomena by directly assessing children’s performance on ideas and meanings of interest to the children themselves. This approach stands in contrast to the North American preference for testing elementary units of memory and then recombining them in an attempt to predict the integrated process. Binet’s use of typical instances was important in the research that he conducted under the aegis of the emerging child study movement in France. (The term “child study” is used throughout this chapter to refer to efforts to infuse findings from laboratory research in the medical, biological, and social sciences into efforts to better the lives of children.) Binet was invited to design an instrument for identifying children who could benefit from special instruction. The first scale for measuring the intellectual status of children appeared in 1905 ( Binet, 1911 ; Binet & Simon, 1905 ). The task of refining this initial instrument fell largely to American psychologists such as Goddard (1911) and Terman (1916) . Binet is remembered more for devising the test itself than for the functional view of cognitive processing that proved to be the central theme of his work. Cairns (1998) proposes, however, that this guiding view typifies Binet’s major contributions to the field: (1) the insight that individual differences in high-order cognition require a molar rather than molecular assessment strategy and (2) the importance of simultaneously considering both basic processes and individual differences in functioning.

A third major force in the emergence of the field was the intellectual leadership of James Mark Baldwin. His path-breaking books on cognitive and social development appeared in the last decade of the nineteenth century and are widely regarded as having considerable currency today. Baldwin initially hoped to create a synthesis of metaphysics and psychological science but turned his full attention to “the great topic of development itself” ( Wozniak, 1982 , p. 14). Building on the genetic epistemology brought forward from von Baer and Spencer, Baldwin advanced a “biosocial, genetic theory of intelligence, a theory of mind in the broadest sense” ( Wozniak, 1982 , p. 42). He formulated a quite detailed stage theory of mental development that was focused as much on process as on structure ( Baldwin, 1895 ). For example, he used the terms “assimilation,” “accommodation,” and “circular reaction” before Piaget did. Baldwin (1987) extended his creative theorizing to social development as well, depicting the self or the personality as progressively accommodated to other people and the patterns and traditions of society.

Given the strikingly modern tenor of Baldwin’s ideas, it seems surprising that he and his work languished for the better part of 60 years. Cairns (1998) , following several of Baldwin’s biographers (e.g., Broughton, 1981 , p. 402; Wozniak, 1982 ), attributes the neglect of his writings to a notably “uneven” writing style that resulted in many unclear and confusing passages ( Cairns, 1998 , p. 47). Another possible reason is that Baldwin left North America in favor of Europe while still a relatively young man. Although European scholars, such as Janet and Piaget, embraced Baldwin’s genetic epistemology and adopted many of his concepts and terms, American psychologists gave less attention to his ideas. Thus, his theoretical foresight had comparatively little impact in the emergence of developmental psychology in North America.

Not everything important in developmental science was addressed, much less accomplished, during the decades from 1890 to 1920. Jean Piaget, to name one individual, did not begin publishing until the 1920s, and no one has had more influence on the field during the past 100 years than he did. Nevertheless, there is little doubt that the scientific activities conducted at the turn of the century provided the underpinnings for much theory and research in developmental psychology as it is studied today.

Revolutions in scientific thinking alone did not produce modern developmental science, however. Other social forces supported the beginning of a child-oriented developmental science in North America and heightened attention to normative and differential change occurring during childhood and adolescence. By the turn of the twentieth century, physicians, social workers, and teachers alike were struggling to improve the lives of children and families but were discovering that science had little to tell them about optimal growth in children and how to nurture it. Advances in the physical sciences had brought about technological revolution throughout the Western world, and this progress far exceeded the small steps being taken in developmental science. Consequently, many professionals and laypeople alike began to think that a strengthened body of scientific findings on human growth and development might provide information that would be useful in raising children, managing adolescents, and providing for older citizens.

Social and political pressures soon emanated from two main constituencies: mothers and the child guidance community (social workers, mental health workers, and teachers, mostly). These constituencies pressured provincial and state governments for funds to study normal human development. Organized groups of mothers also attracted the interest of great foundations in the United States (e.g., the Laura Spelman Rockefeller Memorial and the Payne Fund), inducing them to invest substantial funds in scientific work in child development and family social science. Mothers even advocated for a series of centers similar to the agricultural experimental stations begun in the mid-nineteenth century as an organizational model for supporting and disseminating research on better child rearing and improved family life. In short, pragmatic concerns about bettering the lives of children converged with the broadening basic research interests of psychologists to form the groundwork for the new field of developmental psychology ( Sears, 1975 ; Senn, 1975 ).

Middle Period (1920;2013;1959)

Challenges to the emerging field from historical and political ferment during the first half of the twentieth century affected both the directions of developmental research and the accumulation of new knowledge. Two world wars, the Great Depression of the 1930s, and the rise of totalitarian governments profoundly altered the physical, financial, and human resources available for research in developmental psychology. At the same time, significant intellectual contributions came from the diverse scientists who fled to the United States from postwar Europe and the rising threat from the regime in Germany. These events and the maturation of scientific understanding and applications gained in previous periods influenced both the research agenda and the infrastructure for research to a degree that is unmatched in other historical periods.

A case in point is the flowering of the desire—nascent around 1910—for greater rigor in research on development. The earliest methods in developmental research were observation and survey questionnaires. G. Stanley Hall especially was known for using these methods to collect descriptive data concerning young children’s preferred activities, their sense of self, outbursts of emotionality, and when and by whom emotions were eventually controlled ( White, 1992 ). Hall was interested particularly in how these early phenomena might foreshadow reactions and behaviors in later life. Early studies of children’s social judgments ( Schallenberger, 1894 ) and peer relations ( Barnes, 1896–1897 , 1902–1903 ; Monroe, 1899 ) were similarly descriptive and drawn from questionnaire responses.

Although description is an essential phase of any natural science, many contemporary scientists regarded early samples as too restricted and the administration of measures too haphazard and error-ridden to serve this purpose for an emergent developmental psychology ( White, 1992 ). John B. Watson’s insistence that psychologists must create an “objective experimental branch of natural science,” characterized by “objectively collected independently verifiable data” ( Horowitz, 1992 , pp. 361–362), implied that considerable change was needed to construct a meaningful body of knowledge from developmental research. Consequently, researchers of the 1920s and 1930s devoted much attention to devising and testing new techniques of measurement and refining methods for producing reliable and valid data in the laboratory and in less controlled settings. These efforts quickly began to yield more rigorous descriptive studies and compelling observational work.

Developmental researchers also began to conduct groundbreaking studies of early development. Leading the way on controlled experimental observations of infants were European émigrés such as Charlotte Bühler (1927 , 1930 , 1931) and Kurt Lewin. Bühler, for example, had observed the babies of poor families at a milk station in Berlin and documented simple social coordinations in the exchanges of 6-month-old infants. Similar advances in the study of infant social behavior did not appear for another 30 years. However, similarly careful observational studies of nursery-school children in the United States revealed age-related patterns during early childhood. For example, coordinated interactions of many different kinds increased with age (e.g., Parten, 1932–1933 ); physical aggression increased and subsequently declined across ages ( Goodenough, 1931 ); and verbal aggression initially increased with age but then stabilized ( Jersild & Markey, 1935 ). Similar methods also revealed that children’s relationships with one another moderated the instigation and management of conflict ( Green, 1933 ). Florence Goodenough (1929 , 1931 ) studied children’s emotional upset during testing and fears by children of different ages. And, in an ambitious empirical effort commissioned by the Payne Fund, two scholars of religion, Hugh Hartshorne and Mark May, produced a series of experimental-observational studies showing that moral behavior was highly situation-specific ( Hartshorne & May, 1928–1930 ). (To the dismay of their funders, they also concluded that religious training and moral instruction made little difference in the behavior of children under conditions of temptation [ Cairns, 1998 ].)

In addition to greater scientific rigor, developmental psychology experienced a distinctive theoretical ferment that was largely missing at the turn of the century. Early researchers generally had shared the view that “nascent…competences were…among the child’s endowments, and the work of the scientist was to chart their unfolding” ( Hartup, 1992 , p. 107). However, especially in the first half of the middle period (roughly, 1913–1930), the research agenda came to encompass a shift from the maturationist orientation of the turn of the century to an environmentalist one. The change was gradual as psychological viewpoints shifted generally and as strong formal theories from other fields (e.g., learning theory) penetrated the study of behavioral development. The common theme among these emerging formulations, however, was that experience, not merely the unfolding of natural endowments, was an essential element in development. The most commanding figure in American psychology, John B. Watson, had declared in Psychology as the Behaviorist Views It (1913) that learning alone accounted for development.

The shift to an environmentalist orientation intensified first as psychoanalytic theory and then as mechanistic learning theory began to influence theory and research on development. Although of greatest interest to clinical and personality psychologists, Freud’s ideas pressed developmentalists to consider socialization, or “the processes through which the child is assimilated into society” ( Hartup, 1992 , p. 107; Maccoby, 1992a , b ), as central to their field of study. Similar pressures emanated from sociological theories (e.g., symbolic interactionism; Cooley, 1909 ; Mead, 1934 ) that were concerned with how developmentally advanced individuals contribute to child growth and development. (Only much later did Vygotsky’s [1934] ideas about the role of expert tutors in collaborative learning infiltrate Western developmental theory [ Wertsch & Tulviste, 1992 ].)

Watson’s conviction that conditioning accounted for the acquisition of all behaviors inspired many developmentalists to grapple with mechanisms of growth and change. Other able psychologists tested key implications of Watson’s ideas with respect to infant behavior (e.g., Jones’ [1931] rigorous demonstration of the counterconditioning of learned fear). Arnold Gesell, best known for normative-descriptive studies of physical and mental growth ( Cairns, 1998 ; Thelen & Adolph, 1992 ), also advanced the view that human infants were endowed with a “pre-eminent sociality” or impulse to seek connection with others. He regarded development as a transactional process: “Growth…is a historical complex which reflects at every stage the past which it incorporates…a continuous self conditioning process, rather than a drama controlled” ( Gesell, 1928 , p. 357). Gesell’s speculations about his findings implied a developmental theory much like that of James Mark Baldwin (1897) before him and many more recent theorists. An ingenious methodologist, Gesell is usually credited with introducing cinematography to the developmentalist’s arsenal of observational techniques.

Although he worked in Europe and wrote in French, Jean Piaget also specifically added to the ferment by challenging associationist accounts of developmental changes and by advocating the use of a “clinical method” ( mèthode clinique ). This technique emphasized the child’s actions with common objects as indicative of the logical qualities of the child’s thought.

Despite the theoretical vigor of the 1920s and early 1930s, not until the 1930s and 1940s did much compelling theory-testing research appear in the literature. Of particular note were the efforts of a group of young psychologists at Yale to reinterpret psychoanalytic predictions in terms of mechanisms central to Hullian learning theory. Soon organized as the Institute of Human Relations, they first tackled Freud’s views on frustration and aggression, reconstruing aggression as a learned response to being thwarted in efforts to reach a goal (frustration) ( Dollard, Miller, Doob, Mowrer, & Sears, 1939 ). Two members of the group then reexplained identification as imitation reinforced by the experience of similarity to a valued other (secondary reinforcement) ( Miller & Dollard, 1941 ). The best known among the few longitudinal studies of the middle period incorporated similar constructs to these pioneering process-oriented efforts ( Baldwin, 1949 ; Kagan & Moss, 1962 ), as did other large-scale studies (e.g., Sears, Maccoby, & Levin, 1957 ; Sears, Rau, & Alpert, 1965 ; Sears, Whiting, Nowlis, & Sears, 1953 ) and laboratory experiments (e.g., Hartup, 1958 ; Parke & Walters, 1967 ). The empirical fallout dominated developmental psychology for more than two decades.

In contrast to the mechanistic arguments of the learning theorists were the ideas of Kurt Lewin (1931 , 1954 ), who emphasized the necessity of studying behavior and development as a function of the total situation. He proposed that to fully understand development, it is essential to examine child behavior in the actual, concrete situations in which it occurs. Moreover, he adopted the goal of considering the persons and the person-related stimuli in the situation in any formulation about the child. “Field theory,” as it came to be known, goes beyond the argument that behavior must be seen in context but, rather, that these factors must be seen as a single collection or constellation of interdependent entities that can be called the “life space” ( Lewin, 1954 ).

Lewin and his students conducted a variety of “field experiments” that differed somewhat from the experiments of traditional experimental psychologists. Among the most famous ones were the studies of “group climate” in which groups of middle-school boys were brought together under real-life conditions to form clubs for engaging in various crafts. The children identified the agenda and work assignments and made progress evaluations, while the behavior of the adult group leaders constituted the experimental manipulation. Results indicated that social interaction among the boys and group output were enhanced by “democratic” leadership more than by other leadership scripts ( Lewin, Lippitt, & White, 1939 ). Broader effects of Lewin’s ideas appeared through the years in studies of parenting ( Baldwin, 1949 ; Baumrind, 1973 ; Maccoby, 1992b ; Radke, 1946 ), teachers’ classroom behavior (e.g., Arnold, McWilliams, & Arnold, 1998 ), and the dynamics of peer groups ( Sherif, Harvey, White, Hood, & Sherif, 1961 ). Field theory itself gradually faded, having provided the foundations for the ecological movement in psychological research that arose later ( Barker & Wright, 1951 ; Bronfenbrenner, 1979 ; Hartup, 1992 ). The field experiment remains an experimental approach much used by contemporary developmentalists, especially in educational and clinical applications.

The middle period thus was an era in which confronting methodological challenges laid a foundation for even more sophisticated methodologies in the future. By mid-century, developmental psychologists had nurtured imaginative and innovative theorizing as well as methodologies, and together the two anticipated the veritable sea change in developmental psychology research that lay just ahead.

The Modern Era (1960–Present)

Scientific characterizations of the child’s development circa 1960 were broadly environmentalist. Although investigators in previous decades had learned a great deal about word learning, motor development, intellectual functioning, and social behavior in the first several years of life, scientific conceptions of the newborn in 1960 were not far advanced from the Jamesian assessment that newborns’ notions of the world were “buzzing confusions.” The baby’s behavioral repertoire was thought to be focused on a number of significant reflexes (e.g., sucking), whereas perceiving, knowing, and communicating were thought to emerge gradually from birth onward through commerce with the environment—through learning, loosely speaking.

Major changes in our understanding of the newborn’s capacities and developmental processes after birth came in a flurry in and around the year 1960. Indeed, the 1960s and 1970s are often regarded as a period of “theoretical revolution,” during which new appraisals showed that the infant and young child were far more competent in most domains than previously thought. Fundamental questions were also raised and new theories formulated about the manner in which change occurs in early perception, language, cognition, and social development.

With new technologies revealing that infants are more competent in many areas than previously thought, the field was ready for theoretical formulations other than the theories of learning. Two occurrences were germinal. First, a “debate” was generated when B. F. Skinner (1957) published his argument that language development could be accounted for in terms of conditioning, and Noam Chomsky (1959) published a counterproposal in the form of his theory of generative transformational grammar. Second, John Flavell (1963) published a detailed synthesis of Jean Piaget’s thinking about intellectual development that was more persuasive and a better fit to the scientific Zeitgeist than earlier piecemeal translations had been. In both instances, attention was directed to the possibility that attributes inherent in the child account for important aspects of development and that environmental inputs alone may not. Still other writings appearing circa 1960 significantly shaped subsequent work on perceptual competence and information processing as well as social development and attachment.

Cognitive development: Piaget. Emanating from the writings of James Mark Baldwin and others in the early part of the century, Piaget’s “genetic epistemology” emphasized the role of the child’s own actions and the feedback stemming from those actions in cognitive development. Interactions involving both the social and nonsocial environments were seen as important in this regard, but the emphasis was placed on the child as an active agent in these events rather than a passive recipient of social modeling or reinforcement. Without denying the role of authority figures in early development, Piaget’s views, as described by Flavell (e.g., 1963) , emphasized the capacity of the child for accommodating understanding to the feedback obtained from interaction with objects and with people—including peers in development later on. A series of “stage-like” accommodations were postulated accounting for changes taking place in children’s thinking as they grow older. Empirical studies demonstrating both the strengths and shortcomings of these notions were mounted with increasing frequency in the 1960s and 1970s. Researchers examined phenomena ranging from object permanence, conservation of physical properties of objects, the decline in egocentrism, and the advent of social role taking, to moral development. Kohlberg’s (1969) germinal chapter on stage and sequence further elaborated the idea that cognitive conflict (induced by the child’s active intercourse with the environment) is a necessary ingredient of movement from one stage to another.

Language development. Until the Skinner–Chomsky “debate,” relatively few investigators questioned the idea that language used by parents and others in the young child’s environment is responsible for language acquisition in nearly all aspects (e.g., word usage, grammar, semantics, and pragmatic functions). Now, the possibility emerged that “language acquisition devices”—what the child is born with that makes language learning possible—are basic to language development, especially in the acquisition of grammar. Investigators immediately began to collect new corpuses of child language used in natural contexts (e.g., the home) that did indeed show disconnects between the nascent grammars used by young children and language used in the environment (cf. Bloom, 1970 ; Brown, 1973 ). Other studies supplementing the initial argument that innate language structures are involved in the acquisition of grammar focused on the child’s use of language in context. Some investigators, for example, sought to articulate information concerning semantic usage with general cognitive development. Attempts to link semantic and syntactical development to Piaget’s theory of cognitive development occurred early on ( Bloom, 1970 ; Slobin, 1973 ). Other attempts were made to link linguistic development to social experience and the social environment with respect to the meanings involved rather than contingencies of reinforcement ( Snow, 1972 ).

Perceptual development. Assessments prior to 1960 revealed that acuity in various perceptual modalities is limited in newborn infants, although differentiation among various types of stimuli is apparent almost immediately. Identifying an infant’s preferences among various types of stimuli was difficult until technologies were developed for tracing and recording eye movements, head movements, and other relevant behaviors. By the turn of this decade, such technologies were appearing, and new studies changed conclusions about perceptual learning in numerous ways ( Bertenthal & Clifton, 1998 ).

Pioneering studies by Fantz (1961) revealed infants’ preferences for patterned versus nonpatterned stimuli, novel versus familiar stimuli, and faces (under some circumstances) versus stimulus patterns of similar complexity. Shape and depth were shown to be apprehended by young infants (e.g., Gibson & Walk, 1960 ), although experience in various modalities (e.g., in crawling) is implicated in these results as well as intrinsic structures in the infant. Research in recent decades has not yielded support for either extreme nativist or extreme empirical views ( Gibson, 1969 ), although it is becoming clear that perceptual systems are linked closely to cognitive and motor development. Indeed, what is now called dynamic systems theory ( Thelen & Smith, 2006 ) regards the various domains of development as functionally linked so that change or maturation in one area requires new modes of adaptation in others. Illustrations of dynamic systems viewpoints currently exist mainly in the area of motor development. The discoveries of the 1960s, however, were propaedeutic. Indeed, findings were so novel that, for the first time, a baby graced the cover of Science ( Rheingold, Stanley, & Cooley, 1963 ).

Cognitive development: Information processing. Still another revolution affecting thinking about cognitive development began in the early 1960s: the formulation of “information processing” views of development. Herbert Simon, the father of this movement, described early how cognitive functioning could be regarded as “computational models of thought” and the developmental process itself could be considered a computer program that takes earlier programs and transforms them into later ones ( Simon, 1962 ). Developmental studies based on these views accelerated in later decades, including work on both production and connectionist models of information processing (see Shultz, this volume 1). Memory (conceived at several different levels), attention, strategy selection, and action have been major components studied. One of the strengths of the information-processing approach has been its precision in refracting cognition into major components so that developmental change can be studied in each separately as well as together. Production theories have been applied to many different areas of cognitive functioning, including language, reasoning, and social behavior, although it can be argued that current models are often difficult to link to real-life learning. Connectionist models, which explicitly posit neural networks in the brain as substrates for cognitive functioning, serve to link information-processing approaches to advances in neuroscience.

Social learning theories. The theoretical hybridizing that yielded social learning theories morphed circa 1960 into two streams: formulations based on operant conditioning in social relations and adaptation ( Gewirtz & Baer, 1958 ) and a theory of observational learning based on contiguity between modeling cues and the observer’s actions ( Bandura & Walters, 1963 ). Pursuing the first of these variants, experimenters demonstrated that many different behaviors displayed by young children are operants that can be brought under the control of external reinforcers. A rich literature emerged showing the behavioral sensitivities of the young child to social reinforcers, as opposed to primary reinforcers; constraints on these effects were also identified ( Stevenson, 1965 ). Observation of children in nursery schools showed that aggressive behavior increases as reinforcement is supplied in peer interaction (e.g., victim’s crying, running to the teacher, etc.) ( Patterson, Littman, & Bricker, 1967 ). Ultimately, the social learning theories based on the operant approach found their clearest support in careful observational studies of aggressive boys in their homes ( Patterson, 1982 ).

A second social learning variant began with a study showing how one unreinforced demonstration of distinctive problem solving and motor behavior could induce the same behaviors in a preschool observer ( Bandura & Huston, 1961 ). Enormous numbers of observational learning studies followed, providing a basis for a volume establishing “social learning theory” as a reasonable basis for social and personality development ( Bandura & Walters, 1963 ). These studies consisted mainly of laboratory simulations of social situations inducing aggressive activity in the child (many involving the eponymous Bobo doll with experimenters standing in for parents or peers). After several decades, however, the external validity of the social learning models constructed on the basis of these experiments could not be demonstrated. Later, Mischel (1973) and Bandura (1986) proposed cognitive social learning formulations, in which such basic processes as reinforcement were reinterpreted as having informational, as well as emotional, significance. In addition, Bandura (1977) advanced the idea that self-efficacy, or subjective beliefs about one’s abilities in a given domain, affects behavior and behavior change in that domain.

Attachment theory. Circa 1960 a new synthesis emerged that offered a highly novel alternative to social learning accounts of how the attachment relationship between the infant and its mother is constructed. John Bowlby’s (1958) contributions were mainly recognizing the functions of this relationship (survival) and its origins in mother–child interaction (which he attributed to contiguity rather than drive reduction). Mary Ainsworth (1967) , drawing from her observations of Ugandan infants and their mothers, concluded that important early differences appear in patterns of contact between infant and mother, vocalizing, response to separation, and reunion—differences that persist over time and reflect variations in the security of the partners and their use of one another as “secure bases.” This view was founded on premises that, to many committed learning theorists, seemed incompatible with traditional views of learning. In retrospect, the ferment stimulated by attachment theory was a major factor in challenging the power of social learning in analyses of social development ( Maccoby, 1992 ).

The history of attachment theory is well documented ( Bretherton, 1992 ), but it is important to note that the invention of the “Strange Situation,” a structured observational procedure for identifying differences in patterns of early attachments, dates from this period ( Ainsworth & Wittig, 1969 ). The Strange Situation remains the gold standard in assessments of early attachments, even though other methods have been devised (Q-sorts) and interviews and questionnaires used for measuring attachments in older persons. Few constructs have retained their validity and the interest of developmental scientists as attachment has. Longitudinal studies spanning the modern era demonstrate that individual differences in attachment relationships represent core features in development and adaptation from infancy through adulthood ( Sroufe, Egeland, Carlson, & Collins, 2005 ).

Parenting . Studies of parental effects were already in decline by 1960, largely because excessive reliance on self-report methods and correlational statistics clouded inferences of causality between parental behavior and child outcomes ( Collins, Maccoby, Steinberg, Hetherington, & Bornstein, 2000 ; Maccoby, 1992a ). Observational studies of parent–child relations accelerated again beginning somewhat later ( Forgatch & DeGarmo, 1992 ; Patterson, 1982 ), as did laboratory analogs ( Kochanska, Aksan, Knaack, & Rhines, 2004 ; Kuczynski, 1984 ). Several more rigorous types of research designs have been identified to specify parental contributions to social development ( Collins et al., 2000 ). Among these are behavior-genetics designs augmented by specific measures of environment; studies distinguishing among children varying in genetically influenced predispositions in terms of their responses to different environmental conditions; experimental and quasi-experimental studies of change in children’s behavior as a result of their exposure to parents’ behavior, after controlling for children’s initial characteristics; and research on interactions between parenting and nonfamilial environmental influences and contexts.

The quality of data from behavioral observations, whether with parents or other partners, has been enhanced in the modern era as relevant technologies become readily available and practical to use. Video recorders greatly facilitated progress in early studies of infant behavior, as well as the behavior of the young child (e.g., Cohn & Tronick, 1987 ). Digital and computer technologies, combined with video recording, have enhanced specificity in observational and laboratory studies from perception to social interaction with families and peers. The role of the high-speed computer in advancing developmental science should not be underestimated. Advances in computer technology and multivariate statistics have made possible new generations of complex, long-term longitudinal studies without which many important developmental hypotheses could not be tested. Techniques to measure brain electrical activity, heart rate, blood pressure, muscle tension, cortisol, and blood chemistry have contributed to studies of temperament and cognitive activity and are likely to be even more widely applied in the decades ahead ( Kagan, 1992 , 1994 ; Rothbart & Bates, 2006 ). And mapping the human genome has made it possible to search for specific genes that, in interaction with relevant experience, underlie the development of both cognition and social behavior.

Central Themes

From its nineteenth-century beginnings to the present day, the coherence of developmental psychology lay in scientific endeavors to understand processes of psychological development. In this section we outline some of the enduring themes and issues across the years from the emergence of the field to today: questions regarding the nature of development, especially the pervasive dialectic of continuity and change; efforts to specify key processes accounting for developmental change; and growing pressure to recognize the significance of context. Inevitably, grappling with these primary challenges has been accompanied by continuing invention and refinement of research methods.

The Nature of Development

Behavior changes with age, but which changes are significant? The child’s use of language, for example, changes within a range extending from vocalization to the understanding of grammar and narrative text. Early investigators were meticulous in charting age changes in vocabulary, sentence length, and grammar (e.g., McCarthy, 1931 ), but attention to the deeper structural coherence of language and to language acquisition emerged relatively later. Although these different levels of analysis each have theoretical and utilitarian significance, it took many years to sort out the aspects of language that are most useful in understanding psycholinguistic development, on the one hand, and social communication and understanding, on the other.

Similarly, early investigators were interested in the young child’s differentiation among social stimuli and the acquisition of a repertoire of adaptive social behaviors. Early studies focused on sociability, dominance, honesty, anger and aggression, and independence. These constructs did not come from developmental theory so much as from commonly held beliefs that these dispositions are important to the growth and development of competent individuals. As it turned out, the range of behaviors examined by investigators during the 1920s and 1930s was immense, and these choices greatly influenced subsequent research directions. Generally, however, the choices among social variables made between 1920 and 1940 were made on the basis of armchair reasoning and practical societal concerns rather than from a theoretical or empirical watershed ( Collins, 2002 ; Kagan, 1992 , 2007 ).

Construct selection still dominates the field and the search for new and more compelling foci for research on developmental change. For example, researchers are still trying to settle on the constructs that best describe memory (e.g., Bauer, 2006 ; Nelson, Thomas, & deHaan, 2006 ; Schneider, 2002 ), personality development (e.g., Caspi & Shiner, 2006 ; Van Lieshout, 2002 ), motor development ( Adolph & Berger, 2006 ; Thelen, 2002 ), aggression (e.g., Dodge, Coie, & Lynam, 2006 ; Tremblay, 2002 ), and gender role development (e.g., Maccoby, 1990 ). In many instances (e.g., temperament), construct selection is tentative and likely to remain so ( Rothbart & Bates, 2006 ). In others (e.g., agency), selection is theory-driven and traditions are relatively well established (e.g., Little, 2002 ).

Normative Change or Individual Differences?

Developmental science encompasses both normative changes and individual differences. The relative degree of emphasis between the two varies across domains of development. Normative changes, in which emphasis is given to age-related changes in groups of individuals rather than to variations within them, commanded much attention throughout the twentieth century. Cognition and language researchers are interested primarily in age-related changes in groups of individuals, whereas investigators in social and personality development and psychopathology give relatively greater attention to individual differences in functioning at any one time ( Maccoby, 1984 ). Studies of early experience and social relationships provide one way in which developmental science has been concerned with individual differences; behavior genetics approaches are another. Given that many aspects of psychopathology represent branchings from normal development rather than orthogonal adaptations, investigators have spent much time examining both genetic and environmental sources of variation across individuals ( Plomin, 2002 ; Schaffer, 2002 ).

Continuity and Discontinuity

Developmental views expressed early in the twentieth century ( Hall, 1904 ) emphasized the need to document the continuities in behavioral adaptation that were believed to exist ( Lerner, 2006 ). Early experience, both cognitive and social, was believed to establish substrates that constrain later intellectual and social functioning; manifestations of temperament in the early years were believed to forecast personality orientation and social relations in later life; intelligence was believed to be relatively stable across time; and so on. The continuity assumption encountered serious challenges, however, from assertions that began to be raised some 40 years ago concerning the extent to which human development is actually marked by consistency across time and contexts (e.g., Mischel, 1969 ). Indeed, hundreds of studies show very modest correlations between traits measured at one time and the same traits measured at other times (e.g., Caspi & Shiner, 2006 ).

Many developmentalists then began to argue that the most important developmental continuities are not revealed in direct carryover from time to time in behavioral traits or cognitive skills but, rather, in the organization and integration of cognitive and social adaptations ( Block & Block, 1980 ; Sroufe & Waters, 1976 ). According to these counterarguments, infant intelligence, as measured by the Bayley Infant Scales, should not be expected to correlate highly with Stanford-Binet IQ scores at age 5 because early experience and orientation are unlikely to have direct effects on later outcome. Similarly, social deprivation is most likely to have long-term effects that are also dependent in some way on the organization of intervening life experience. Current views stress that early social relationships are likely to establish “patterns” of adaptation that dispose the individual toward success or failure in a variety of other relationships and situations; such continuities are not necessarily revealed by phenotypic continuities in any single aspect of functioning. Newer views also allow for the possibility that continuities in human development vary according to behavioral domain and contextual circumstance (e.g., Sroufe & Waters, 1977 ).

Common and Diverse Pathways

Model building in development and psychopathology as well as cognitive and language development has been traditionally concerned more with modal pathways than individually specific ones—that is, with “nomothetic” images rather than “idiographic” ones ( Allport, 1937 ). The objective for the developmental scientist has been to account for more and more of the outcome variance within a single developmental model rather than to posit that development may follow different pathways in different individuals. When mid-twentieth-century developmental psychologists wanted to develop minitheories of dependency, achievement, or aggression, relevant variables (e.g., negative reinforcement in parent–child interaction and exposure to socially unskilled antisocial peers in the case of aggression) were entered into predictive equations and developmental trajectories were modeled upon them (see Patterson, 1982 ). Single-model efforts, however, have never accounted for much more than 40% of the variance in outcomes such as achievement or aggression; the unexplained variation remaining with most developmental models is considerable.

Recently, however, notions about developmental pathways borrowed from developmental biology have taken hold in developmental science. Equifinality, for example, means that (a) individuals who have different early experiences may reach the same adaptational endpoint depending on intervening circumstances and (b) individuals with the same initial status may reach identical endpoints by different routes or pathways ( Driesch, 1908/1929 ). The argument is, indeed, that there are many roads to Rome. When pursuing the origins of problematic behaviors such as delinquency, school failure, or depression, as well as seeking to describe the antecedents of success in romantic relationships or outstanding achievement in science (e.g., Collins, Furman, & Welsh, 2009 ), investigators are thus increasingly challenged to look for multiple developmental pathways. Developmental modeling in almost all areas has become an exercise in seeking alternative trajectories (and the conditions shaping them) rather than modal ones. Strong hints of these “systems” views represent one likely direction of theory building in the developmental sciences over the next several decades (Lickliter, in this volume 1).

Stages and Sequences

Running through the history of developmental thought is the possibility of characterizing behavioral development (whether in cognitive functioning or social/emotional skills) as a progression of “stages”—that is, times in the individual’s life when a particular mode of perceiving, thinking, or feeling dominates adaptation in many different contexts ( Flavell, 1982 ). Sometimes stage theories account for developmental transformations in terms of endogenous force (e.g., the development of the brain or the psychoneuroendocrinological system), and sometimes in terms of exogenous ones (e.g., when conflict occurs between one’s own views of the world and the views of others). Psychoanalytic writers thus sought to account for major transformations in the child’s emotional and social life in terms of psychosexual development driven by biological mechanisms. In contrast, cognitive theories sought to account for major shifts in perception and reasoning in terms of socially induced cognitive conflict (equilibration) (e.g., Kohlberg, 1969 ; Nelson et al., 2006 ).

Increasingly the evidence suggests that development seldom occurs in broad stage-like progressions, even though there may be some regularity from individual to individual in cognitive, emotional, and social changes. Variations across individuals in the order and timing of developmental change, as well as variation within individuals related to task or situation, are too great to support traditional stage notions (e.g., Flavell, 1982 ).

Child Development or Lifespan Development?

Tension has long existed regarding which age periods deserve greatest scientific attention. Many investigators believe strongly that development during the early years has pervasive and long-lasting consequences. Others argue that the proximity of adolescence to the roles and responsibilities of adult functioning justifies particular attention to that age period. By contrast, developmentalists seeking to understand individual differences have tended to adopt a lifespan orientation rather than an exclusively child-oriented view. The latter stance had particular resonance in Western Europe, where many developmental psychologists had been especially influenced by eighteenth- and nineteenth-century writing about lifespan developmental psychology ( Baltes, Lindenberger, & Staudinger, 1998 ). Psychoanalysis, emerging in the late nineteenth century, was a lifespan theory, not a theory of child development, nor was William Stern’s (1911) “differential” psychology. Much later, in the 1960s, a new generation of investigators in the United States as well as Europe began to raise questions about the wisdom of defining developmental science mainly in terms of childhood and adolescence, advocating for the superiority of lifespan approaches (e.g., Baltes et al., 1998 ; Schaie, 2002 ).

Lifespan theorists take two observations as their starting points: (a) human development does not cease at the end of the second decade and (b) understanding human adaptation requires developmental perspectives that extend beyond childhood and adolescence. Attention certainly must be paid to early growth and development, simply because it comes prior to development in other age periods. But although specific age periods are legitimate domains of investigation, lifespan researchers contend that the adaptational coherence of human development can best be understood by attending both to growth and decline in behavioral function.

Some exceptions ( Baltes et al., 1998 ) notwithstanding, most researchers still follow developmental agendas within age periods (e.g., infancy, childhood, adolescence, old age). This parochialism may reflect tradition and a certain inertia. It is also the case, however, that one needs tremendous knowledge about the organism one wishes to study before being able to contribute substantially to new experimentation. Acquiring the necessary experience with that organism, the folk wisdom about it, the contents of the scientific literature, and the “know-how” for simultaneously conducting work with babies, adolescents, newly married couples, and the elderly is a formidable task.

No intrinsic conflict exists, however, between the aims of child development research and lifespan developmental science: both contribute to better understanding of developmental continuity and change; both deal with the mechanisms responsible for developmental change; both are concerned with normative change as well as individual differences; both deal with the relation between events occurring early and later in individual lives. Child development and lifespan developmental science have more in common than one might think. Nevertheless, even though further lifespan integration lies ahead, separate developmental psychologies of childhood, adolescence, adulthood, and old age for heuristic purposes are likely to persist into the long-term future.

Processes of Developmental Change

For many developmental scientists the ultimate goal has been to explain the conditions responsible for normative development. Although the necessity of conducting both descriptive and explanatory studies is generally endorsed, developmental psychology researchers, past and present, can be divided into two groups: (a) those whose efforts are devoted to describing the behavior that changes and (b) those who devote themselves to explaining how and why these changes occur.

Explanation in behavioral science is extraordinarily difficult, however. Not only is most developmental change multidetermined, but causation is buried deeply within the genome and the mind. Moreover, the time separating “cause” from “effect” in human development is frequently decades, not moments, and change within one behavioral domain is entangled with changes in others. Becoming a developmental scientist, especially one who is interested in the determinants of behavioral development, thus requires brashness and intrepidity as well as perseverance.

Determinants of Behavior Change

Classifying the great explanatory principles that have emerged within developmental science is difficult. Although one frequently reads about superordinate categories such as “organismic” principles as opposed to “mechanistic” ones, boundaries are fuzzy. Rather than attempting such classifications, we consider several recurring tensions that have been pervasive in theorizing about developmental process: (a) tensions between nativist and empiricist developmental explanations; (b) tensions between general theories and those that are domain-specific; (c) conflicting accounts for socialization; (d) tensions between views of human development as “person driven” as opposed to “persons in context;” and (e) tensions between frequent attempts to devise “grand theories,” as opposed to “minitheories” or “theories of action,” as integrated explanations for developmental change.

Nativism and Empiricism

Understanding the nature and acquisition of knowledge has preoccupied philosophers and psychologists for centuries. Notions that human beings begin life with “innate ideas” and “inborn receptivities” appeared first in philosophical and religious texts. Common beliefs in classical and medieval times were that native capacities were necessary to the formation of adaptations in earliest infancy, that some of this innate knowledge remains basic to adaptation throughout the lifespan, and that new knowledge is built on these innate structures. Extreme empiricist views, in contrast, are based on the assumption that all knowledge and many capacities (including perceptual and motor ones) are abstracted from the individual’s experience in the world. The newborn mind, this argument goes, is a “blooming, buzzing confusion” ( James, 1890 ).

The nativism–empiricism dialectic has sometimes been framed in terms of the “heredity versus environment” debate. However, this dialogue is better described as occurring between individuals who subscribe to differing beliefs: those on the one hand who believe that intrinsic structures are necessary to the acquisition of knowledge in many domains, and those on the other hand who believe that the main objective is to describe the world in which the individual lives and its bearing on these intrinsic structures. Although the putative debate is far more lively and complex than arguments concerning whether heredity or environment is the more important source of developmental differences among individuals, one frequently encounters views that the contention between nativism and empiricism in developmental science is either (a) a pseudo-debate or (b) a controversy that has been resolved in favor of empiricism because nativism is either “incoherent, empty, unparsimonious, inflexible, false, or socially and politically dangerous” ( Spelke & Newport, 1998 ). Every developmental change is the product of gene–environment interactions, so the argument goes.

Current views, however, are more encompassing and nuanced. Some refinements concern the hypothesis that there is an innate substrate for knowledge acquisition (e.g., some innate capacity for learning language or for learning itself) that is shared by all human beings but, at the same time, makes differences among them possible. Other notions speak to the nature of the processes through which innate structures (whether aspects of perception or capacities for constructing interpersonal relationships) are deployed in behavioral development. According to these views, the task is to specify both nativist and empiricist contributions to developmental acquisitions as well as their interaction ( Maccoby, 2000 ).

From the General to the Specific or From the Specific to the General?

Most models of developmental change include explanations of how particular changes are instigated (e.g., equilibration, observational learning). Associationist theories, for example, have been used to account for the development of higher-order competencies in cognition and language, representing these competencies as buildups of associations or habits. Developmental trajectories described with this model thus usually are progressions from simple stimulus–response sequences to more integrated and holistic structures.

Beginning as early as a century ago, alternative developmental models have emphasized differentiation. Most famously, Werner (1957) depicted developmental change in terms of the “orthogenetic principle”—namely, the notion that development moves from a state of relative globality and lack of differentiation to a state of differentiation through which the capacity for dealing with a vast array of adaptational challenges is achieved. This differentiation, including what is called “hierarchical integration” (a state in which mental and affective processes are organized as integrated “systems”), makes possible higher levels of conceptualization and thought as the individual grows older. Although few developmentalists draw their hypotheses directly from notions like the orthogenetic principle, much of their work is devoted to describing outlines or models of development resembling it.

Buttressed by the “cognitive revolution” in psychology, with its focus on such processes as memory, attention, and inferential thought, and in particular by the influx of Piagetian concepts ( Flavell, 1963 ; Maccoby, 1992a ), researchers specializing in both social development and cognitive development have moved toward examining change processes that contribute to structural reorganizations of thought and action. Such ideas, although far from new in developmental psychology, had been largely forgotten. James Mark Baldwin (1897) had proposed similar dynamic structural processes in his writing at the turn of the century, and his ideas were echoed in the thought of Dewey and Gesell, among others ( Cahan, 2003 ). Piaget’s formulation fell on more fertile ground than the previous views did.

Advanced primarily to account for intellectual development, Piaget’s theory depicted the child as trying to reconcile an expectation, or cognitive schema, and incompatible information from the environment. The resulting intrapsychic conflict motivates the child to adapt the schema to the new experience, thus enlarging his or her capacity to grasp new instances. Development occurs as the child inevitably confronts and adapts to a wide range of experiences. A rapprochement with social development researchers was possible because of an implicit social dimension in Piaget’s formulation and, especially, in Kohlberg’s (1969) more detailed exegesis of some of Piaget’s ideas: many of these conflict-inducing instances inevitably involve other persons. In contrast to the emphasis of learning theorists on parental socialization, Piaget gave special credence to interactions with peers. He reasoned that children encountering a discrepancy between their own schemas and the views of a parent would simply adopt the parent’s view, whereas children disagreeing with persons of equal power would be more likely to engage fully in grappling with discrepant viewpoints and inconsistent events. This effort to adapt to more socially challenging circumstances in turn would foster cognitive growth. Piaget’s description of how and why children’s actions are essential to growth, and especially his linking of this process to peer social interactions, concretized the notion for researchers accustomed to the “molding” accounts of social learning theorists ( Hartup, 2002 ; Hsueh, 2004 ). Kohlberg’s (1969) classic essay elaborated the social ramifications of cognitive change, identifying equilibration following cognitive conflict as a fundamental process in moral development and social development more generally.

The Piagetian-Kohlbergian account received most direct research attention in connection with stage-related hypotheses. However, researchers working on a wide range of developmental problems today, some of them drawn from alternative theoretical models (e.g., information processing), invoke transactional accounts of social development ( Flavell & Miller, 1998 ; Harris, 2006 ). Homeostatic notions such as equilibration following conflict and transactional accounts of behavioral development suffuse the literature in fields such as parent–child relations, peer relations, stress and coping, and the development of prosocial behavior (e.g., Collins, 1995 ).

Grand Theories or Minitheories?

Through three quarters of the twentieth century, a series of comprehensive theories dominated thinking about behavioral development. These so-called grand theories were encompassing, were directed at relevant domains ranging from socioemotional development to cognitive development, were based on interesting assumptions, and sometimes (not always) produced hypotheses that were empirically testable. As mentioned previously, cognitive and maturational theories developed by James Mark Baldwin and Arnold Gesell held sway early in the century; psychoanalytic theory, as developed by Sigmund Freud and various associates, grew steadily in popularity until after World War II. The so-called learning theories were applied to human development, beginning with the work of John Watson in the 1920s, and were modified later by John Dollard, Neal Miller, and their associates in the immediate pre- and post-World War II years ( Bandura & Walters, 1963 ; Dollard, Miller, Doob, Mowrer, & Sears, 1939 ). Although behaviorism is commonly considered the dominant developmental theory between 1940 and 1965, other theories were also vying for attention during those years. Ecological and field theories, formulated by Lewin (1935) , commanded considerable attention ranging from the 1930s to the present. Cognitive developmental theory, as constructed by Piaget, attracted a number of early adherents when introduced in the mid-1920s, and then exploded in full force during the 1960s. The record thus shows that more than one theory has usually been taken seriously at any one time during the century; theoretic hegemony did not exist.

Grand theories now influence developmental science to a much lesser degree than in earlier decades. As they grew to prominence, most of these theories were found to have major limitations. Cognitive-developmental theory depended too rigidly on its “stages” and failed to explain convincingly why stage-to-stage change occurs. Learning theory was regarded by many critics as extremely limited in accounting for language acquisition and other aspects of cognitive development. That sexual vicissitudes undergird socioemotional development (one of the best-known ideas in psychoanalytic theory) now seems greatly overstated. Although revisionists worked long and hard to modify the more questionable aspects of these theories and to extend them to a broader range of phenomena (see, for example, Kohlberg’s [1969] extension of cognitive-developmental theory into the moral and social domains), these efforts have not been entirely successful. Developmental science has gradually moved into an era in which theory construction is directed at more circumscribed issues than to sweeping accounts of diverse developmental phenomena.

Nevertheless, vestiges of the grand theories remain. One cannot thoroughly appreciate today’s interest in children’s “theories of mind” without understanding egocentric thinking and its modifications as enunciated by Piaget. Similarly, to dismiss the contributions of psychoanalytic theory, maturational theory, or learning theory as contributions to contemporary developmental science is naïve. For example, one cannot understand contemporary theories of attachment formation without understanding what Sigmund Freud wrote about object relations and other aspects of relationships and emotion regulation. It is likely that developmental psychology will remain involved with an eclectic series of minitheories for the foreseeable future. Nevertheless, the continuing viability of certain core ideas from earlier theories must be acknowledged.

Domain Generality or Specificity?

With the increasing recognition that the course of development varies across and within individuals, alternatives to stage models of developmental change were needed. Piaget and others struggled to modify their theories to recognize the existence of décalage . Later, however, many investigators argued for abandoning the notion of generalized developmental advance in favor of the notion that psychological processes are not organized to apply to knowledge acquisition universally but within circumscribed “domains” of knowledge or expertise. As various critics have pointed out (cf. Fischer & Bidell, 1998 ), domain-specific theories of knowledge acquisition get around the difficulties of stage theories in accounting for developmental variations simply by arguing that stages do not exist.

However, domain-specific theories have difficulties of their own. First, the problem of variations in developmental change is only superficially solved by these notions since patterns of variation are not explained. Second, specifying domain boundaries is a major problem. How “local” must a domain be in order to reveal developmental process clearly? Must domains always be regarded as specific to content and cultural circumstance? Are any domains universal so as to substantiate what Wundt (1910) called “folk psychology” or what Heider (1958) called “naïve psychology”? Wrestling with these issues has proved daunting, and investigators still argue about the best ways to explain developmental variations on the one hand and developmental generalities on the other.

The Significance of Context

It is generally understood that events in the world instigate changes in mental and behavioral activity in individuals and, consequently, person and environment must be regarded as separate. Given this dualism, traditional cognitive and information-processing theorists attempted to understand qualities of the mind and their development as universals—that is, as common structures that characterize all human beings and that transcend differences in lifestyle and culture. These person-oriented theories dominated research in cognitive development and language through the century until an ecological revolution instigated by Eleanor Gibson (1969) and James Gibson (1979) swept through research on perceptual development.

Across domains of development, environment has been regarded, implicitly if not explicitly, as “impinging” or “molding” the individual’s development, and most investigators concerned themselves with the mother’s influences over the child. Fathers and other family members were largely dismissed as insignificant contextual elements, and family structure was given scant attention except by certain sociologists. Cultural differences in child rearing drew the attention of some anthropologists, but cultural views of human development were rare, even among scholars of developmental psychology. The fact that contexts themselves change over time received virtually no attention until recently ( Dasen & Mishra, 2002 ; Elder, Modell, & Parke, 1993 ; Rogoff, 2006 ) is further evidence of general failure by psychologists to formulate a theoretically coherent view of context in psychological functioning.

Scientists who led the way in expanding an exclusively “individualistic” view of development to encompass a more “contextual” view include early writers like James Mark Baldwin, and major figures whose work dates from the 1930s, including Lewin (1931 , 1935 ), Vygotsky (1939) , and Barker (1968) . In these works, the first contention is that as much attention must be paid to parsing the environment as to the manner in which the mind is structured. This argument has led to extended efforts to map the environment in which psychological growth occurs, although agreement as to how to map and assess it has still not been achieved. Complex models of the “individual-in-environment” have been proposed that include the DNA as well as social relationships, groups, and culture (see, for example, Bronfenbrenner & Crouter, 1983 ; Hinde, 1997 ).

Initially, environmental analysis was undertaken because the environment was thought to support or shape development, including perceptual, cognitive, and social development. Although hardly a revolutionary notion for developmental psychologists, these ideas were somewhat controversial in relation to cognitive development. Is it really the case, for example, that mental structures originate as “gestures” in social interaction ( Mead, 1934 ) or that cognitive function appears first between the child and other persons before appearing psychologically in the child ( Vygotsky, 1939 )? Most cognitive developmentalists seemed to be concerned primarily with mapping out the fundamentals of mind, memory, and language, believing that context can be added later (including both setting or situation and the historical context). As the contents of this book make plain, however, that assumption has turned out to be naïve.

Currently, the most advanced ideas being pursued concerning contextualism and development involve discarding the notion that person and environment should be conceived dualistically. Gone are notions that persons cause environmental change and vice versa. Instead, the modern view treats the person and the environment as integrated or fused; neither is an entity that can be described sensibly without reference to the other, and development is the story of change over time in this integrated system. One must continue to examine development as it involves structures of varying levels of complexity, including psychobiological processes, behavior, dyadic relationships, groups, and cultures. One must consider systems in development, however, rather than development as a property of either individuals or contexts. Until the 1970s, the term “environment” implied varied sources of stimulation, from the proximal social models or social reinforcers encountered by a child to other unspecified sources of influence. Psychological researchers were bent toward demonstrating generality in the effects of certain environmental influences, not appreciating the distinctions among them ( Bronfenbrenner & Morris, 2006 ; Modell & Elder, 2002 ).

An early challenge to this environment-neutral stance was Lewin’s contention that the individual’s psychological environment, as opposed to the physical or objectively determined environment, was composed of both intraindividual forces and external ones (see earlier). Lewin’s emphasis on context has reappeared in a variety of formulations in the ensuing decades. Roger Barker, both in the volume Ecological Psychology and in work documenting children’s “behavior settings,” was one of these. Bronfenbrenner’s (1979) germinal volume, The Ecology of Human Development , provided the best-known organizing framework for diverse potential environmental influences, including those of historical period and cohort. In his now-famous concentric levels diagram, aspects of the environment that the child did not experience directly were pictured as distal, but possibilities for indirect influences were clearly apparent. Research examples of these indirect influences are increasingly familiar (e.g., Elder, 1974 ; McLoyd, 1998 ). Another post-Lewinian manifestation came from developmental anthropologists, many of whom provided reminders of the potency of the experienced, not the presumed, environment (e.g., Super & Harkness, 1986 ).

The impact of contextual variables is felt today in virtually all subfields of developmental psychology and psychology generally. Many psychologists now believe that constructs and reports of empirical findings should be labeled to specify the contexts to which they apply ( Kagan, 1992 ). An example in social development is peer gender segregation ( Maccoby, 1990 ), which refers specifically to the tendency for children to affiliate with same-gender peers in mixed-gender settings. Nevertheless, developmentalists, like other psychologists, face continuing challenges in fully incorporating contexts into studies of development and developmental process (for critiques, see Bronfenbrenner & Morris, 2006 ; Elder, Modell, & Parke, 1993 ; Modell & Elder, 2002 ).

The first century of research in developmental psychology is a story of evolution rather than revolution. The interests underlying the canonical work in the field are present today in more theoretically and methodologically sophisticated forms. For example, research on early learning has been extensively reshaped by greater understanding of infant competencies ( Bertenthal & Clifton, 1998 ); the best contemporary work on parental influences takes account of the nature of the child and the possibility of bidirectionality, as well as the strong likelihood of other socializing influences such as peers, schools, and the mass media ( Collins et al., 2000 ); and studies of individual differences in behaviors (e.g., aggression) and behavioral orientations (e.g., gender) draw broadly on knowledge of social, biobehavioral, cognitive, and emotional processes to formulate hypotheses and interpret research results.

No one embarks on a scientific career or sustains one for any length of time by working on issues and ideas de novo ; it is necessary to know the “roads taken and the roads not taken” by earlier researchers ( Cahan, 1997 ). Accordingly, we have sought to illuminate current work by reviewing some of the prominent intellectual debates and tensions in thinking about developmental issues, providing historical roots for the ideas that have worked and have not worked, and portraying how ideas have been played off against one another. Contemporary scientists who wish to tackle the big, explanatory questions in developmental science will do well to mind the lessons of their scientific forebears. Seldom can one give science a nudge without a good working knowledge of the tensions that surround such growing points. The first century of developmental psychology provided a remarkably broad and substantial platform for the research of tomorrow, as well as today.

Further Reading

Adolph, K. , & Berger, S. E. ( 2006 ). Motor development. In W. Damon & R. M. Lerner (Eds.), D. Kuhn & R. S. Siegler (Vol. Eds.), Handbook of child psychology, Vol. 2: Cognition, perception, and language (6th ed., pp. 161–213). New York: John Wiley.

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Key theories in developmental psychology

Throughout our lifespans, we constantly grow and develop. From when we’re born, through to old age there are many milestones we hit in our psychological development.

What is developmental psychology?

Developmental psychology is the study of human development across the lifespan. It encompasses physical, cognitive, social, intellectual, perceptual, personality and emotional growth, and is key to understanding how we learn, mature and adapt.

Whilst many theories within developmental psychology focus on development during childhood, there are also prominent theories relating to early and late adulthood which look at how thinking, feeling, and behaving changes throughout a person’s life.

The key theories in developmental psychology were coined by Jean Piaget, John Bowlby, and Erik Erikson.

Jean Piaget: The Four Stages of Cognitive Development

Piaget’s child psychology theory, originally published in 1936, focuses on both how children acquire knowledge and on understanding the nature of intelligence. There are four stages, founded on the belief that children take an active role in the learning process and that new knowledge is built upon existing knowledge as children interact with the world around them, and that there is a fundamental change in how a child thinks about the world as opposed to what the child thinks about the world.

Before Piaget’s theory was published, it was believed that children were just smaller versions of adults. Piaget was one of the first to identify that a child’s thought process is different to that of an adult, and proposed that intelligence is something which grows and develops through a series of stages.

The sensorimotor stage – from birth to 2 years

In this earliest stage, children’s experiences occur through basic reflexes, senses and motor responses and they are constantly making new discoveries about how the world works through their movements and sensations. 

They learn object permanence, and discover that things continue to exist even though they can’t be seen, which Piaget believed to be an important element at this point of development, and learn that they are separate beings from the people and objects around them which allows them to begin to attach names and words to objects. During this stage, children also realise that their actions can cause things to happen in the world around them.

The preoperational stage – from 2 to 7 years

During the preoperational stage of child development, the emergence of language acquisition is one of the key features. Building upon the foundations of language development which were introduced in the sensorimotor stage, children begin to think symbolically and learn to use words and pictures to represent objects.

However, at this stage, Piaget suggested that children still tend to think in very concrete terms and they tend to be quite egocentric as they struggle with logic and the ability to see things from the perspective of others.

The concrete operational stage – from 7 to 11 years

Throughout the concrete operational stage, children begin thinking logically and in a more organised way despite still being concrete and literal. They also learn how to view other people’s point of view as the egocentrism from the preoperational stage starts to disappear.

Within this stage, children also understand that their thoughts, feelings and opinions are unique to them, and that not everyone will think and feel the same way they do.

The formal operational stage – from 12 years and up

The last stage of Piaget’s theory sees children develop an increase in logic, the ability to use deductive reasoning from a general principle to specific information, and an understanding of abstract thought and ideas. 

When moving into teenhood, individuals think more about moral, philosophical, ethical, social and political issues, and are more able to think about and plan for the future.

John Bowlby: Attachment theory

Originally focused on understanding the distress that children experience when separated from their primary caregivers, British psychologist John Bowlby was the first attachment theorist. His seminal work was published in 1969. The basis of this work was formed in the 1930s, when Bowlby worked as a psychiatrist in a Child Guidance Clinic in London and treated many emotionally disturbed children.

Bowlby believed there to be a link between early infant separations from their mother and later maladjustment, and proposed that attachment can be understood within an evolutionary context as a caregiver provides safety and security for a child, thus enhancing the child’s chance of survival.

As well as the attachment between a parent and child, this theory has been applied to other long-term relationships, particularly those between romantic partners as Bowlby suggested that the earliest bonds formed between a caregiver and a child can also impact emotional bonds throughout the child’s life.

There have been many research studies that have built upon Bowlby’s original attachment theory , most notable of which may be Mary Ainsworth’s ‘Strange Situation’ study where children between 12 and 18 months were observed as their mothers briefly left them alone and then returned. It was this study which described the three major styles of attachment: secure attachment, insecure-ambivalent attachment, and insecure-avoidant attachment.

Erik Erikson: Stages of Psychosocial Development

Erikson’s theory (1958, 1963) was impacted by the work of psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud, as he also believed that a person’s personality developed in a series of stages. Focused on the impact of social experiences throughout a lifetime, as opposed to Freud’s theory of psychosexual stages, Erikson was interested in how the development and growth of an individual is impacted by social interaction and relationships.

Each stage contains a conflict which Erikson suggested serves as a pivotal moment in development, and each stage builds on the one previous. If conflicts are resolved, Erikson believed a person will emerge from the stage with psychological strengths which will stay with them throughout their lifespan.

1. Trust vs. Mistrust – from birth to 18 months

During this stage, an infant looks to their primary caregiver for stability and consistency of care. If the care is consistent, predictable, and reliable, the infant will develop a sense of trust. If the care needs are not met, the infant may develop mistrust, suspicion and anxiety. 

The outcome of this conflict is hope.

2. Autonomy vs. Shame and Doubt – from 2 to 3 years

Within this stage, children are focused on developing a sense of personal control over physical skills and a sense of independence. If children are encouraged and supported, they will become more confident and secure. If children are criticised, controlled, or not given the opportunity to assert themselves, they begin to feel inadequate, lack self-esteem, and feel a sense of shame and doubt in their abilities.

The outcome of this conflict is will.

3. Initiative vs. Guilt – from 3 to 5 years

This stage focuses on play and the development of initiative. If a child is met with criticism or control in their actions, or if a child’s questions are treated as trivial as their thirst for knowledge grows they may develop a sense of guilt, making them slow to interact with others and limiting their creativity.

The outcome of this conflict is purpose.

4. Industry vs. Inferiority – from 6 to 11 years

A child’s peer group gains greater significance during this stage. If they are encouraged and reinforced for their initiative, they feel confident in their abilities. If initiative is not encouraged or is restricted by caregivers or teachers, they may feel inferior.

The outcome of this conflict is competence.

5. Identity vs. Role Confusion – from 12 to 18 years

During this stage, an adolescent will examine their identity to find out who they are. Erikson suggested that two identities are involved: the sexual and the occupational. It includes a person growing into the changes of their body and feeling comfortable with them, and establishing a sense of identity within a society.

The outcome of this conflict is fidelity.

6. Intimacy vs. Isolation – from 19 to 40 years

This life stage is when relationships are explored, which can result in happy relationships, and a sense of commitment, safety, and care. Avoiding intimacy may result in feelings of isolation and loneliness, and mental health issues such as depression.

The outcome of this conflict is love.

7. Generativity vs. Stagnation – from 40 to 65 years

Generativity refers to a person making their mark on the world, through creating or nurturing things that will outlast them. This allows an individual to develop a sense of being part of a bigger picture, whether through raising children, being productive at work, or being involved in community activities.

The outcome of this conflict is care.

8. Ego Integrity vs. Despair – 65 to death

During this stage, a person will reflect on accomplishments and develop a sense of integrity if they believe they have lived a successful life. Those who reflect on their lives and regret not achieving their goals may experience feelings of bitterness and despair.

The outcome of this conflict is wisdom.

Learn more about developmental psychology

By studying a Master’s in psychology, you can learn more about developmental psychology and how changes differ between cultures and groups, as well as the ways our individual experiences shape how we see the world.

The University of Wolverhampton’s MSc Psychology is accredited by the British Psychological Society and is open to people with or without a psychology background.

Find out more about this part-time postgraduate psychology degree , and apply today.

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Research on Developmental Psychology

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• First Online: 18 October 2017

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• Nathan Kogan 5 ,
• Lawrence J. Stricker 5 ,
• Michael Lewis 6 &
• Jeanne Brooks-Gunn 7  

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Developmental psychology was a major area of research at ETS from the late 1960s to the early 1990s. This work was a natural extension of the programs in cognitive, personality, and social psychology that had begun shortly after the organization’s founding in 1947, consistent with Henry Chauncey’s vision of investigating intellectual and personal qualities. This chapter covers research on representational competence; parental influences, migration, and measurement; cognitive, personality, and social development of infants and young children; and cognitive, personality, and social development from infancy to adolescence.

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• Representational Competence
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Developmental psychology was a major area of research at ETS from the late 1960s to the early 1990s, a natural extension of the work in cognitive, personality, and social psychology that had begun shortly after the organization’s founding in 1947, consistent with Henry Chauncey’s vision of investigating intellectual and personal qualities (see Stricker, Chap. 13 , this volume). For a full understanding of these qualities, it is essential to know how they emerge and evolve. Hence the work in developmental psychology complemented the efforts already under way in other fields of psychology.

A great deal of the research in developmental psychology was conducted at ETS’s Turnbull Hall in the Infant Laboratory , equipped with physiological recording equipment and observation rooms (e.g., Lewis 1974 ), and in a full-fledged Montessori school outfitted with video cameras (e.g., Copple et al. 1984 ). Hence, as Lewis ( n.d .) recalled, the building “had sounds of infants crying and preschool children laughing” (p. 4). Other research was done in homes, schools, and hospitals, including a multisite longitudinal study of Head Start participants (e.g., Brooks-Gunn et al. 1989 ; Laosa 1984 ; Shipman 1972 ).

A handful of investigators directed most of the research, each carrying out a distinct program of extensive and influential work. This chapter covers research by Irving Sigel , on representational competence ; Luis Laosa, on parental influences , migration , and measurement ; Michael Lewis, on cognitive, personality, and social development of infants and young children ; and Jeanne Brooks-Gunn, on cognitive, personality, and social development from infancy to adolescence. Other important research was conducted by Gordon Hale (e.g., Hale and Alderman 1978 ), on attention; Walter Emmerich (e.g., Emmerich 1968 , 1982 ), on sex roles and personality development ; and Nathan Kogan (e.g., Wallach and Kogan 1965 ) and William Ward (e.g., Ward 1968 ), on creativity . (The Kogan and Ward research is included in Kogan, Chap. 14 , this volume.) In the present chapter, Kogan describes Sigel’s research, and Stricker takes up Laosa’s ; Lewis and Brooks-Gunn discuss their own work.

1 Representational Competence and Psychological Distance

Representational competence was the focus of Sigel’s research program. Roughly defined by Sigel and Saunders ( 1983 ), representational competence is the ability to transcend immediate stimulation and to remember relevant past events and project future possibilities. Also indicative of representational competence in preschoolers was the understanding of equivalence in symbol systems, whereby an object could be rendered three-dimensionally in pictorial form and in words.

The level of a child’s representational competence was attributed in large part to parental beliefs and communicative behaviors and to family constellation (number of children and their birth order and spacing). Earlier research by Sigel and collaborators emphasized ethnicity and socioeconomic status (SES ; see Kogan 1976 ). SES was retained in many of the ETS studies in addition to a contrast between typical children and those with communicative–language disabilities .

A conceptual model of the Sigel team’s research approach is presented in a chapter by McGillicuddy-DeLisi et al. ( 1979 ): Mothers’ and fathers’ backgrounds determined their parental belief systems. Belief systems, in turn, influenced parental communication strategies, which then accounted for the child’s level of cognitive development . It was a nonrecursive model, the child’s developmental progress (relative to his or her age) feeding back to alter the parental belief systems. In terms of research design, then, parental background was the independent variable, parental belief systems and child-directed communicative behavior were mediating variables, and children’s representational competence was the dependent variable. The full model was not implemented in every study, and other relevant variables were not included in the model. In most studies, family constellation (e.g., spacing and number of children), SES , the nature of the parent–child interaction task, the child’s communicative status (with or without language disability ), and the gender of the parent and child were shown to yield main or interaction effects on the child’s representational competence.

In the view of Sigel and his associates, the critical component of parental teaching behavior was distancing (Sigel 1993 ). Parental teachings could reflect high- or low-level distancing. Thus, in a teaching context, asking the child to label an object was an example of low-level distancing, for the child’s response was constrained to a single option with no higher-thinking processes invoked in the answer. By contrast, asking the child to consider possible uses of an object was an example of high-level distancing, for the child was forced to go beyond the overt stimulus properties of the object to adopt new perspectives toward it. In brief, the concept of distancing, as reflected in parental teaching behavior, referred to the degree of constraint versus openness that the parent imposed on the child. Sigel’s principal hypothesis was that higher-level distancing in child-directed communication by an adult would be associated with greater representational competence for that child. Correspondingly, low-level distancing by an adult would inhibit the development of a child’s representational competence.

An additional feature of Sigel’s research program concerned the nature of the task in the parent–child interaction. Two tasks were selected of a distinctively different character. For the storytelling task, age-appropriate edited versions of children’s books were used, with parents instructed to go through a story as they typically would do at home. The other task required paper folding, with the parent required to teach the child to make a boat or a plane.

1.1 Influence of Parental Beliefs and Behavior on Representational Competence

Having outlined the conceptual underpinning of Sigel’s research program along with the nature of the variables selected and the research designs employed, we can now proceed to describe specific studies in greater detail. We begin with a study of 120 families in which the target child was 4 years of age (McGillicuddy-DeLisi 1982 ; Sigel 1982 ). Family variables included SES (middle vs. working class) and single-child versus three-child families. For the three-child families, there was variation in the age discrepancy between the first and second sibling (more than 3 years apart vs. less than 3 years apart), with the restriction that siblings be of the same sex. Each mother and father performed the storytelling and paper-folding tasks with their 4-year-old child. Proper controls were employed for order of task presentations. A total of 800 parent and child observations were coded by six raters with satisfactory interrater reliability .

The presentation of the research was divided into two parts, corresponding to the portion of the analytic model under investigation. In the first part (McGillicuddy-DeLisi 1982 ), the influence of the demographic variables, SES and family constellation, on parental beliefs was examined, and in turn the influence of parental beliefs for their prediction of overt parental behaviors in a teaching situation was explored. The second part, the child’s representational competence, was treated separately in the Sigel ( 1982 ) chapter. Note that the assessment of beliefs was focused exclusively on the parents’ views of how a preschool child acquired concepts and abilities, hence making such beliefs relevant to the parental strategies employed in facilitating the child’s performance in a teaching context.

Parental beliefs were assessed in an interview based on 12 vignettes involving a 4-year-old and a mother or father. The interviewer asked the parent whether the child in the vignette had the necessary concepts or abilities to handle the problem being posed. Further inquiry focused more generally on parents’ views of how children acquire concepts and abilities. Analysis of these data yielded 26 parental belief variables that were reliably scored by three coders. ANOVA was then employed to determine the influence of SES, family constellation, gender of child, and gender of parent on each of the 26 belief variables. Beliefs were found to vary more as a function of SES and family constellation than of gender of parent or child. More specifically, parents of three children had views of child development that differed substantially from those of single-child parents. For the parents of three children, development involved attributes more internal to the child (e.g., reference to self-regulation and impulsivity) as opposed to greater emphasis on external attributes (e.g., direct instruction) in single-child parents. The results as a whole constituted an intriguing mosaic, but they were post hoc in the absence of predictions derived from a theoretical framework . Of course, the exploratory nature of such research reflected the dearth at that time of theoretical development in the study of child-directed parental beliefs and behaviors.

Consider next the observed relationships between parental beliefs and teaching behaviors. Having shown that SES and family constellation influenced parental beliefs, the question of interest was whether such beliefs provided useful information about parents’ teaching behaviors beyond what might be predicted from SES and family constellation. To answer the question, stepwise regressions were carried out with SES and family constellation entered into the analysis first, followed by the belief variables. Separate regressions—four in all—were conducted for mothers’ and fathers’ performance on the storytelling and paper-folding tasks, the dependent variables.

Demonstration of belief effects on teaching behaviors would require that multiple correlations show significant increments in magnitude when beliefs were entered into the regression analysis. Such increments were observed in all four regressions, indicating that parents’ beliefs about their children’s competencies were predictive of the way they went about teaching their children on selected tasks. Noteworthy is the evidence that the significant beliefs varied across the two tasks and that this variation was greater for mothers than for fathers. In other words, mothers appeared to be more sensitive to the properties of the task facing the child, whereas fathers appeared to have internalized a set of beliefs generally applied to different kinds of tasks. Mothers would seem to have a more differentiated view of their children’s competencies and hence were more attuned to the nature of the task than were fathers.

Thus far, we have considered the relations among family demographics, parental beliefs, and teaching strategies. The missing link, the child’s cognitive performance, was examined in the Sigel ( 1982 ) chapter, where it was specifically related to parental teaching behaviors. The child’s responses to the storytelling and paper-folding tasks were considered (e.g., extent of engagement and problem solutions), as was the child’s performance on tasks independent of parental instructions. These latter tasks included Piagetian conservation and imagery assessments and the Sigel Object Categorization Task (Sigel and Olmsted 1970 ). The major hypothesis was that the parents’ uses of distancing strategies in their teaching behaviors would be associated with enhanced cognitive performances in their children—representational competence.

To address this hypothesis, stepwise regressions were analyzed. The results confirmed the basic hypothesis linking parental child-directed distancing to the child’s representational competence. This general observation, however, conceals the specificity of the effects. Thus mothers and fathers employed different teaching strategies, and these strategies, in turn, varied across the storytelling and paper-folding tasks. Of special interest are those analyses in which the mothers’ and fathers’ teaching behaviors were entered into the same regression equation. Doing so in sequence often pointed to the complementarity of parental influences . In concrete terms, the multiple correlations sometimes demonstrated significant enhancements when both parents’ teaching strategies entered into the analysis compared to the outcome for the parents considered separately. This result implied that the children could intellectually profit from the different, but complementary, teaching strategies of mothers and fathers.

1.2 Impact of a Communicative Disability

Sigel and McGillicuddy-DeLisi ( 1984 ) were able to recruit families who had a child with a communicative disability (CD), making it possible to compare such families with those where the child was not communicatively disabled (non-CD). It was possible to match the CD and non-CD children on SES , family size, gender, age, and birth order. Again, mothers’ and fathers’ distancing behaviors were examined in the task context of storytelling and paper folding.

In the case of the child’s intellectual ability, assessed by the Wechsler Preschool and Primary School Scale of Intelligence (WPPSI; Wechsler 1949b ), parental effects were largely confined to the CD sample. Low parental distancing strategies were tightly associated with lower WPPSI scores. Of course, we must allow for the possibility that the parent was adjusting his or her distancing level to the perceived cognitive ability of the child. In contrast, the child’s representational competence , as defined by the assessments previously described in Sigel ( 1982 ), was linked with parental distancing behaviors in both CD and non-CD samples, with the magnitude of the relationship somewhat higher in the CD sample.

Of course, these associations could not address the causality question: The parent might be affecting the child or reacting to the child or, more likely, the influence was proceeding in both directions. Sigel and McGillicuddy-DeLisi ( 1984 ) argued that low-level distancing strategies by parents discouraged active thinking in the child; hence it was no surprise that such children did not perform well on representational tasks that required such thinking. They were optimistic about CD children, for high-level parental distancing seemed to encourage the kind of representational thinking that could partially compensate for their communicative disabilities (Sigel 1986 ).

1.3 Belief-Behavior Connection

Working with a subsample of the non-CD families described in the previous section, Sigel ( 1992 ) plunged into the controversial issue of the linkage between an individual’s beliefs and actual behavior instantiating those beliefs. He also developed a measure of behavioral intentions—a possible mediator of the belief–behavior connection. Although the focus was naturally on parental beliefs and behaviors, similar work in social psychology on the belief and behavior connection (e.g., Ajzen and Fishbein 1977 ), where major advances in theory and research had occurred, was not considered.

Three categories of variables were involved: (a) parents’ beliefs about how children acquired knowledge in four distinct domains (physical, social, moral, and self); (b) the strategies that parents claimed they would use to facilitate the children’s acquisition of knowledge in those domains; and (c) the behavioral strategies employed by the parents in a teaching context with their children. The first two categories were assessed with a series of vignettes. Thus, in the vignette for the physical domain, the child asks the parent how to use a yardstick to measure the capacity of their bathtub. The parents’ view about how children learn about measurement constituted the belief measure; the parents’ statements about how they would help their child learn about measurement constituted the self-referent strategy measure. For the third category, the parents taught their child how to tie knots, and the strategies employed in doing so were observed. Note that the knots task involved different content than was used in the vignettes.

Parental beliefs regarding children’s learning were categorized as emphasizing cognitive processing (e.g., children figuring out things on their own) or direct instruction (e.g., children learning from being told things by adults). Parental intended teaching strategies were classified as distancing, rational authoritative (e.g., parent gives reasons with commands), or direct authoritative (e.g., parent offers statement or rule without rationale). Parental behavioral strategies were scored for high-level versus low-level distancing.

The three variable classes—parental beliefs, parental intended teaching strategies, and parental behavioral strategies—were intercorrelated. Substantial relationships were observed between parental beliefs about learning (cognitive processing vs. direct instruction) and the strategies the parent intended to employ. As anticipated, cognitive processing was associated with distancing strategies, and direct instruction was linked to authoritative strategies. Of course, both the beliefs and self-referent strategies were derived from the same vignettes used in the parental interview, suggesting the likely influence of method variance on the correlational outcomes. When the foregoing variables were related to the parents’ behavioral strategies in teaching the knots task, the magnitude of the correlations dropped precipitously, though the marginally significant correlations were in the predicted direction. Sigel ( 1992 ) attributed the correlational decline to variation across domains. Thus the belief–strategy linkages were not constant across physical, social, and moral problems. Aggregation across these domains could not be justified. Obviously, the shifting task content and context were also responsible for the absence of anticipated linkages. Conceivably, an analytic procedure in which parents’ intended strategies were cast as mediators between their beliefs and their behavioral strategies would have yielded further enlightenment.

1.4 Collaborative Research

The large majority of Sigel’s publications were either solely authored by him or coauthored with former or present members of his staff at ETS. A small number of papers, however, were coauthored with two other investigators, Anthony Pellegrini and Gene Brody, at the University of Georgia. These publications are of particular interest because they cast Sigel’s research paradigm within a different theoretical framework , that of Vygotsky ( 1978 ), and they introduced a new independent variable into the paradigm, marital quality.

In the case of marital quality, Brody et al. ( 1986 ) raised the possibility that the quality of the marital relationship would influence mothers’ and fathers’ interactions with their elementary-school age children. More specifically, Brody et al., leaning on clinical reports, examined the assumption that marital distress would lead to compensatory behaviors by the parents when they interact with their children in a teaching context. Also under examination was the possibility that mothers and fathers would employ different teaching strategies when interacting with the children, with the nature of such differences possibly contingent on the levels of marital distress.

Again, storytelling and paper-folding tasks were used with the mothers and fathers. Level of marital distress was assessed by the Scale of Marriage Problems (Swenson and Fiore 1975 ), and a median split was used to divide the sample into distressed and nondistressed subgroups. Observation of parental teaching strategies and the child’s responsiveness was accomplished with an event-recording procedure (Sigel et al. 1977 ) that yielded interrater reliability coefficients exceeding .75 for each of the eight behaviors coded. ANOVAs produced significant Marital Problems × Parent interactions for seven of the eight behavioral indices. Nondistressed mothers and fathers did not differ on any of the behavioral indices. By contrast, distressed mothers and fathers differed in their teaching strategies, the mothers’ strategies being more effective: more questions, feedback, and suggestions and fewer attempts to take over the child’s problem-solving efforts.

Fathers in the distressed group “behave in a more intrusive manner with their school-aged children, doing tasks for them rather than allowing them to discover their own solutions and displaying fewer positive emotions in response to their children’s learning attempts” (p. 295). Mothers in distressed marriages, by contrast, responded with more effective teaching behaviors, inducing more responsive behavior from their children. Hence the hypothesis of compensatory maternal behaviors in a distressed marriage was supported. The psychological basis for such compensation, however, remained conjectural, with the strong likelihood that mothers were compensating for perceived less-than-satisfactory parenting by their husbands. Finally, Brody et al. ( 1986 ) offered the caveat that the outcomes could not be generalized to parents with more meager educational and economic resources than characterized the well-educated parents employed in their study.

In two additional studies (Pellegrini et al. 1985 , 1986 ), the Sigel research paradigm was applied, but interpretation of the results leaned heavily on Vygotsky’s ( 1978 ) theory of the zone of proximal development. Pellegrini et al. ( 1985 ) studied parents’ book-reading behaviors with 4- and 5-year-old children. Families differed in whether their children were communicatively disabled. MANOVA was applied, with the parental interaction behavior as the dependent variable and age, CD vs. non-CD status, and parent (mother vs. father) as the independent variables. Only CD vs. non-CD status yielded a significant main effect. Parental behaviors were more directive and less demanding with CD children. Furthermore, stepwise regression analysis examined the link between the parental interaction variables and WPPSI verbal IQ. For non-CD children, high cognitive demand was significantly associated with higher IQ levels; for CD children, the strongest positive predictor of IQ was the less demanding strategy of verbal/emotional support.

In general, parents seemed to adjust the cognitive demands of their teaching strategies to the level of the children’s communicative competences. In Vygotskyan terms, parents operated within the child’s zone of proximal development. Other evidence indicated that parents engaged in scaffolding to enhance their children’s cognitive–linguistic performances. Thus parents of non-CD children manifested more conversational turns in a presumed effort to elicit more language from their children. Similarly, more parental paraphrasing with non-CD children encouraged departures from the literal text, thereby fostering greater depth of interaction between parent and child. In sum, parental scaffolding of their children’s task-oriented behavior activated the potential for children to advance toward more independent problem solving as outlined in Vygotsky’s theory.

We turn, finally, to the second study (Pellegrini et al. 1986 ) influenced by Vygotsky’s theory . The research paradigm was similar to studies previously described. Again, gender of parent, children’s CD vs. non-CD status, and the tasks of book reading and paper folding constituted the independent variables, and the teaching strategies of the parents comprised the dependent variables. In addition, the extent of task engagement by the child was also examined. MANOVA was employed, and it yielded a significant main effect for the child’s communicative status and for its interaction with the task variable. ANOVAs applied to the separate teaching variables indicated that (a) parents were more directive and less demanding with CD children than with non-CD children; (b) parents were more demanding, gave less emotional support, and asked fewer questions with the paper-folding task than with the book-reading task; and (c) communicative status and task variable interacted: A CD versus non-CD difference occurred only for the book-reading task, with parents of CD children asking more questions and making lower cognitive demands.

The teaching strategy measures were factor analyzed, and the resulting four orthogonal factors became the predictor variables in a regression analysis with children’s rated task engagement as the criterion variable. For the paper-folding task, parents of both CD and non-CD children used high-demand strategies to keep their children engaged. For the book-reading task, parents of CD and non-CD children differed, with the CD parents using less demanding strategies and the non-CD parents using more demanding ones.

Pellegrini et al. ( 1986 ) had shown how ultimate problem-solving outcomes are of less significance than the processes by which such outcomes are achieved. Adult guidance is the key, with non-CD children requiring considerably less of it to remain engaged with the task than was the case for CD children. Hence the children’s competence levels alert the parents to how demanding their teaching strategies should be. Pellegrini et al. further recommended the exploration of the sequence of parental teaching strategies, as parents found it necessary on occasion to switch from more demanding to less demanding strategies when the child encountered difficulty (see Wertsch et al. 1980 ). In sum, the findings strongly support the Vygotsky model of parents teaching children through the zone of proximal development and the adjustment of parental teaching consistent with the competence level of their children.

1.5 Practice

An important feature of Sigel’s research program was linking research to practice (Renninger 2007 ). As Sigel ( 2006 ) noted,

efforts to apply research to practice require acknowledging the inherent tensions of trying to validate theory and research in practical settings. They require stretching and/or adapting the root metaphors in which we have been trained so that collaborations between researchers and practitioners are the basis of research and any application of research to practice. (p. 1022)

The research on representational competence and psychological distance has had widespread impact, notably for early childhood education (Hyson et al. 2006 ) and cognitive behavior therapy (Beck 1967 ).

2 Parental Influences , Migration, and Measurement

Laosa’s empirical work and his position papers spanned the psychological development of children, particularly Hispanics. His methodological contributions included test theory, especially as it relates to the assessment of minority children , and a standardized measure of parental teaching strategies. The major foci of Laosa’s work to be considered here are parental influences on children’s development, the consequences of migration for their adjustment and growth, and the measurement of their ability.

2.1 Parental Influences

Parental influence on children’s intellectual development has been a topic of long-standing interest to developmental psychologists (e.g., Clarke-Stewart 1977 ). A particular concern in Laosa’s work was Hispanic children , given the gap in their academic achievement. His early research concerned maternal teaching. Unlike much of the previous work in that area, Laosa made direct observations of the mothers teaching their children, instead of relying on mothers’ self-reports about interactions with their children, and distinguished between two likely SES determinants of their teaching: education and occupation. In a study of Hispanic mother–child dyads (Laosa 1978 ), mother’s education correlated positively with praising and asking questions during the teaching and correlated negatively with modeling (i.e., the mother working on the learning task herself while the child observes). However, mother’s occupation did not correlate with any of the teaching variables, and neither did father’s occupation. Laosa speculated that the education-linked differences in teaching strategies account for the relationship between mothers’ education and their children’s intellectual development found in other research (e.g., Bradley et al. 1977 ). Subsequently, Laosa ( 1980b ) also suggested that the more highly educated mothers imitate how they were taught in school.

In a follow-up study of Hispanic and non-Hispanic White mother–child dyads (Laosa 1980b ), the two groups differed on most of the teaching variables. Non-Hispanic White mothers praised and asked questions more, and Hispanic mothers modeled, gave visual cues, directed, and punished or restrained more. However, when mothers’ education was statistically controlled, the differences between the groups disappeared; controlling for mothers’ or fathers’ occupation did not reduce the differences.

In a third study, with the Hispanic mother–child dyads (Laosa 1980a ), mother’s field independence, assessed by the Embedded Figure Test (Witkin et al. 1971 ) and WAIS Block Design (Wechsler 1955 ), correlated positively with mother’s asking questions and praising, and correlated negatively with mother’s modeling. The correlations were reduced, but their pattern was similar when mother’s education was statistically controlled. Laosa suggested that asking questions and praising are self-discovery approaches to learning that reflect field independence, whereas modeling is a concrete approach that reflects field dependence; hence mothers were using strategies that foster their own cognitive style in their children. Mother’s teaching strategies, in fact, correlated modestly but inconsistently with the children’s field independence, as measured by the Children’s Embedded Figures Test (Witkin et al. 1971 ), WISC Block Design (Wechsler 1949a ), and Human Figure Drawing (Harris 1963 ), another measure of field independence. Most of the teaching strategies had scattered correlations with the Children’s Embedded Figures Test and Block Design: positive correlations with asking questions and praising (field-independent strategies) and negative correlations with modeling, punishing or restraining, and giving visual cues (field-dependent strategies).

In Laosa’s later research, a recurring topic was the impact of parents’ education on their children’s intellectual development; this line of work was presumably motivated by the influence of education in his maternal-teaching studies. Laosa ( 1982b ) viewed parental education as impacting the parent–child interaction and presented a conceptual model of this interaction as the mediator between parent education and the child’s development. He reported further analyses of the samples of Hispanic and non-Hispanic White mother–child dyads.

In one analysis, non-Hispanic White mothers and fathers read to their children more than did Hispanic parents. When parents’ education was statistically controlled, the group difference disappeared, but controlling for parents’ occupation did not reduce it. In addition, non-Hispanic mothers had higher realistic educational aspirations for their children (“ realistically , how much education do you think your child will receive?”); this difference also disappeared when mothers’ education was controlled but not when their occupation was controlled.

In another analysis, mother’s education correlated positively in both the Hispanic and non-Hispanic White groups with mother’s reading to the child, but father’s education was uncorrelated with father’s reading to the child in either group. Parent’s occupation did not correlate with reading in the two groups. In both groups, mother’s education also correlated positively with mother’s educational aspirations for the child, but mother’s occupation was uncorrelated.

Also, in an analysis of the Hispanic group, mother’s education correlated positively with the child’s ability to read or write before kindergarten, though father’s education was uncorrelated. Parent’s occupation was also uncorrelated with literacy . In addition, parent’s education correlated positively with their use of English with the child; parent’s occupation also correlated positively but weakly with English use.

Laosa argued that the set of findings, in total, suggests that the lower educational level of Hispanic parents produced a discontinuity between their children’s home and school environments that adversely affected academic achievement.

He explored the consequences of these parental influences on the test performance of 3-year-olds in two studies. In the first study (Laosa 1982a ), which targeted non-Hispanic White children , a path analysis was employed to assess the relationships, direct and indirect, between a host of family influences (e.g., mother’s education and occupation, mother’s reading to the child, nonparents in the household reading to the child, mother’s teaching strategies) and performance on the Preschool Inventory (Caldwell 1970 ), a test of verbal, quantitative, and perceptual-motor skills for kindergarten children. A Mother’s Socioeducational Values factor (defined by mother’s education and occupation and mother’s reading to child) was the strongest determinant of test performance. Less powerful determinants included nonparents in the household (probably older siblings) reading to the child and mother’s use of modeling in teaching. Laosa highlighted two important and unanticipated findings: the apparent influence of siblings and the substantial and positive influence of modeling, contrary to the conventional wisdom that verbal teaching strategies, such as asking questions, are superior to nonverbal ones, such as modeling.

In the second study (Laosa 1984 ) of Hispanic and non-Hispanic White children , the groups differed in their means on three of the five scales of the McCarthy Scales of Children’s Abilities (McCarthy 1972 ): Verbal, Quantitative, and Memory. When a Sib Structure/Size factor (later-born child, many siblings) was statistically controlled, the group differences were unaffected. But when either a Language factor (mother uses English with child, child uses English with mother) or an SES factor (parents’ education, father’s occupation, household income) was controlled, the differences were reduced; when both factors were controlled, the differences were eliminated. The findings led Laosa to conclude that these early ethnic-group differences in ability were explainable by differences in SES and English-language usage.

2.2 Migration

In a series of white papers, Laosa reviewed and synthesized the extant research literature on the consequences of migration for children’s adjustment and development, particularly Hispanic children , and laid out the salient issues (Laosa 1990 , 1997 , 1999 ). One theme was the need for—and the absence of—a developmental perspective in studying migration: “what develops, and when, how, and why it develops” (Laosa 1999 , p. 370). The pioneering nature of this effort is underscored by the observation almost two decades later that migration is neglected by developmental psychology (Suárez-Orozco and Carhill 2008 ; Suárez-Orozco et al. 2008 ).

In a 1990 paper, Laosa proposed a multivariate, conceptual model that described the determinants of the adaptation of Hispanic immigrant children to the new society. Key features of the model were the inclusion of variables antedating immigration (e.g., sending community), moderator variables (e.g., receiving community), and mediating variables (e.g., child’s perceptions and expectations) between the stresses of immigration and the outcomes.

In a complex, longitudinal survey of Puerto Rican migrants in New Jersey schools, Laosa ( 2001 ) found that the majority of the student body were Hispanic in 46% of the schools and were native speakers of Spanish in 31%. Additionally, the majority of the student body was eligible for free lunch in 77% of the schools and was from families on public assistance in 46%. Laosa concluded that the migrants faced considerable segregation by ethnicity or race as well as considerable isolation by language in high-poverty schools, factors with adverse consequences for the students’ social and academic development.

2.3 Measurement

The measurement and evaluation of children’s ability and achievement, particularly the unbiased assessment of minority children, has long been beset by controversies (see Laosa 1977 ; Oakland and Laosa 1977 ). These controversies were sparked in the 1960s and 1970s by the Coleman report (Coleman et al. 1966 ), which suggested that average differences in the academic performance of Black and White students are more affected by their home background than by their schools’ resources, and by Jensen’s ( 1969 ) review of research bearing on genetic and environmental influences on intelligence. He concluded that genetics is a stronger influence, which many observers interpreted as suggesting that the well-established disparity between Black and White children in their average scores on intelligence tests is largely genetic in origin. The upshot was widespread concerns that these tests are biased and calls for banning their use in schools. These arguments were reignited by The Bell Curve (Herrnstein and Murray 1994 ), which concluded that intelligence is mainly heritable. As Laosa ( 1996 ) noted, “thus, like a refractory strain of retrovirus, the issues tend to remain latent and from time to time resurge brusquely onto the fore of public consciousness” (p. 155).

In a 1977 paper, Laosa summarized the earlier controversies and other criticisms of testing and discussed alternatives to current testing practices that had been developed in response. The alternatives included constructing “culture-fair” tests “whose content is equally ‘fair’ or ‘unfair’ to different cultural groups” (p. 14), translating tests from English, using norms for subgroups, adjusting scores for test takers with deprived backgrounds, devising tests for subgroups (e.g., the BITCH, a vocabulary test based on Black culture; Williams 1972 ), using criterion-based interpretations of scores (i.e., how well a student achieves a specific objective) instead of norm-based interpretations (i.e., how well he or she does on the test relative to others), employing tests of specific abilities rather than global measures like IQ, and making observations of actual behavior. Laosa cautioned that these alternatives may also be problematic and would need to be carefully evaluated.

In a companion piece, Laosa, joined by Thomas Oakland of the University of Texas, Austin (Oakland and Laosa 1977 ), provided a comprehensive account of standards for minority-group testing that had been formulated by professional organizations, the government, and the courts. They argued for the need to consider these standards in testing minority-group children.

Laosa ( 1982c ), in a subsequent paper on measurement issues in the evaluation of educational programs , specifically Head Start , delineated the concept of population validity and its applicability to program evaluation . Population validity deals with the question, “Do the results yielded by a given assessment technique have the same meaning when administered to persons of different sociocultural backgrounds?” (p. 512). Laosa discussed threats to population validity: familiarity (performance is influenced by familiarity with the task), communication, role relations (performance is influenced by the test taker’s relationship with the tester), and situational (e.g., physical setting, people involved).

In another paper, Laosa ( 1991 ) explicated the links between population validity, cultural diversity, and professional ethics. As an illustration, he described a study by Bradley et al. ( 1989 ) of children in three ethnic groups, Black, Hispanic, and non-Hispanic White, matched on their HOME inventory (Caldwell and Bradley 1985 ) scores, a measure of the home environment. The HOME inventory scores correlated appreciably with performance on the Bayley Scales of Infant Development (Bayley 1969 ) and the Stanford–Binet Intelligence Test (Terman and Merrill 1960 ) for the Black and non-Hispanic White children but not for the Hispanic children . Laosa suggested that this finding highlights the importance of evaluating test results separately for different ethnic groups.

Laosa pointed out that population validity is a scientific concern in basic research and an ethical issue in applied work, given the inability to predict the results in different populations from the one studied. He also noted that when population differences are observed, two questions need to be answered. One, relevant to applied work, is, Which populations react differently? The other question, pertinent to scientific research, but rarely asked, is, Why do they differ?

In his last paper on measurement issues, Laosa ( 1996 ), responding to The Bell Curve controversy, made several general points about test bias. One was that bias reflects the absence of population validity. He noted that this view accords with the Cole and Moss ( 1989 ) definition of bias: “Bias is differential validity of a given interpretation of a test score for any definable, relevant group of test takers” (p. 205).

Another point was that the definition of predictive bias in the then current third edition of the Standards for Educational and Psychological Testing (American Educational Research Association, American Psychological Association, & National Council on Measurement in Education 1985 ) is insufficient. According to the Standards , predictive bias is absent if “the predictive relationship of two groups being compared can be adequately described by a common algorithm (e.g., regression line)” (p. 12). Laosa took up the argument that intelligence tests cannot be considered to be unbiased simply because their predictions are equally accurate for different races or social classes, noting Campbell’s rejoinder that the same result would occur if the tests simply measured opportunity to learn (D. T. Campbell, personal communication, May 18, 1995).

The last point was that the consequences of test use also need to be considered (Messick 1989 ). Laosa cited Linn’s ( 1989 ) example that requiring minimum high school grades and admissions test scores for college athletes to play during their freshman year can affect what courses minority athletes take in high school, whether they will attend college if they cannot play in their freshman year, and, ultimately, their education and employment.

3 Cognitive, Personality, and Social Development of Infants and Young Children

Lewis studied infant’s cognitive attention and language ability, infants’ and young children’s physiological responses during attention, and infants’ social and emotional development . He also formulated theories of development as well as theories about the integration of children’s various competencies.

3.1 Social Development

Social development was a major interest, in particular, the mother–child interaction and the role this interaction played in the child’s development. This work on social development revolved around four themes: (a) the mother–child relationship, (b) the growth of the child’s social knowledge, (c) social cognition or the nature of the social world, and (d) the social network of children.

For example, in a 1979 volume (Lewis and Rosenblum 1979 ), The Child and Its Family , Lewis challenged the idea that the child’s mother was the only important figure in the infant’s early life and showed that fathers and siblings, as well as grandparents and teachers, were also key influences. And in a 1975 volume, on peer friendship in the opening years of life (Lewis and Rosenblum 1975 ), Lewis disputed the Piagetian idea that children could not form and maintain friendships before the age of 4 years. The finding that infants are attracted to and enjoy the company of other infants and young children , and that they can learn from them through observation and imitation, helped open the field of infant daycare (Goldman and Lewis 1976 ; Lewis 1982b ; Lewis and Schaeffer 1981 ; Lewis et al. 1975 ). Because the infant’s ability to form and maintain friends is important for the daycare context, where groups of infants are required to play together, this work also showed that the learning experience of young children and infants involved both direct and indirect interactions, such as modeling and imitation with their social world of peers, siblings, and teachers (Feiring and Lewis 1978 ; Lewis and Feiring 1982 ). This information also had an important consequence on hospital care; until this time, infants were kept far apart from each other in the belief that they could not appreciate or profit from the company of other children.

Another major theme of the research on social development involved infants’ social knowledge. In a series of papers, Lewis was able to show that infants could discriminate among human faces (Lewis 1969 ); that they were learning about their gender (Lewis and Brooks 1975 ); that they were showing sex-role-appropriate behaviors (Feiring and Lewis 1979 ; Goldberg and Lewis 1969 ; Lewis 1975a ); that they were learning about how people look, for example, showing surprise at the appearance of a midget—a child’s height but an adult’s face (Brooks and Lewis 1976 ); and that they were detecting the correspondence between particular faces and voices (McGurk and Lewis 1974 ). All of these results indicated that in the first 2 years, children were learning a great deal about their social worlds (Brooks-Gunn and Lewis 1981 ; Lewis 1981b ; Lewis et al. 1971 ).

The most important aspect of this work on social development was the child’s development of a sense of itself, something now called consciousness, which occurs in the second and third years of life. In the Lewis and Brooks-Gunn ( 1979a ) book on self-recognition, Social Cognition and the Acquisition of Self, Lewis described his mirror self-recognition test, a technique that has now been used across the world. Results with this test revealed that between 15 and 24 months of age, typically developing children come to recognize themselves in mirrors. He subsequently showed that this ability, the development of the idea of “me,” along with other cognitive abilities gives rise to the complex emotions of empathy, embarrassment, and envy as well as the later self-conscious emotions of shame, guilt, and pride (Lewis and Brooks 1975 ; Lewis and Brooks-Gunn 1981b ; Lewis and Michalson 1982b ; Lewis and Rosenblum 1974b ).

These ideas, an outgrowth of the work on self-recognition, led to Lewis’s interest in emotional development . They also resulted in a reinterpretation of the child’s need for others. While children’s attachment to their mothers was thought to be the most important relationship for the children, satisfying all of their needs, it became clear that others played an important role in children’s social and emotional lives. His empirical work on fathers (Lewis and Weinraub 1974 ) and peers (Lewis et al. 1975 ) led to the formulation of a social network theory (Feiring and Lewis 1978 ; Lewis 1980 ; Lewis and Ban 1977 ; Lewis and Feiring 1979 ; Weinraub et al. 1977 ).

3.2 Emotional Development

Lewis’s interest in social development and in consciousness led quite naturally to his research on emotional development, as already noted (Lewis 1973 , 1977b , 1980 ; Lewis and Brooks 1974 ; Lewis et al. 1978 ; Lewis and Michalson 1982a , b ; Lewis and Rosenblum 1978a , b ). Two volumes framed this work on the development of emotional life (Lewis and Rosenblum 1974b , 1978b ) and were the first published studies of emotional development. These early efforts were focused on the emotions of infants in the first year of life, including fear, anger, sadness, joy, and interest. To study emotional life, Lewis created experimental paradigms and devised a measurement system. So, for example, paradigms were developed for peer play (Lewis et al. 1975 ), social referencing (Feinman and Lewis 1983 ; Lewis and Feiring 1981 ), stranger approach (Lewis and Brooks-Gunn 1979a ), mirror recognition (Lewis and Brooks-Gunn 1979a ), and contingent learning (Freedle and Lewis 1970 ; Lewis and Starr 1979 ). A measurement system was created for observing infants’ and young children’s emotional behavior in a daycare situation that provided scales of emotional development (Lewis and Michalson 1983 ). These scales have been used by both American and Italian researchers interested in the effects of daycare on emotional life (Goldman and Lewis 1976 ).

3.3 Cognitive Development

Lewis’s interests in development also extended to the study of infants’ and children’s cognitive development, including attentional processes, intelligence, and language development (Dodd and Lewis 1969 ; Freedle and Lewis 1977 ; Hale and Lewis 1979 ; Lewis 1971b , 1973 , 1975b , 1976a , b , 1977a , 1978a , 1981a , 1982a ; Lewis and Baldini 1979 ; Lewis and Baumel 1970 ; Lewis and Cherry 1977 ; Lewis and Freedle 1977 ; Lewis and Rosenblum 1977 ; Lewis et al. 1969a, 1971 ; McGurk and Lewis 1974 ).

Lewis first demonstrated that the Bayley Scales of Infant Development (Bayley 1969 ), which were—and still are—the most widely used test of infant intelligence, had no predictive ability up to 18 months of age (Lewis and McGurk 1973 ). In an effort to find an alternative, Lewis turned to research on infants’ attentional ability, which he had begun at the Fels Research Institute, and developed it further at ETS. This work used a habituation–dishabituation paradigm where the infant was presented with the same visual stimulus repeatedly and then, after some time, presented with a variation of that stimulus. Infants show boredom to the repeated event, or habituation, and when the new event is presented, the infants show recovery of their interest, or dishabituation (Kagan and Lewis 1965 ; Lewis et al. 1967a , b ). Infants’ interest was measured both by observing their looking behavior and by assessing changes in their heart rate (Lewis 1974 ; Lewis et al. 1966a , b ; Lewis and Spaulding 1967 ). He discovered that the infants’ rate of habituation and degree of dishabituation were both related to their subsequent cognitive competence, in particular to their IQ. In fact, this test was more accurate than the Bayley in predicting subsequent IQ (Lewis and Brooks-Gunn 1981a , c ; Lewis et al. 1969 ; Lewis and McGurk 1973 ).

This research on attentional processes convinced Lewis of the usefulness of physiological measures, such as heart rate changes, in augmenting behavior observation, work which he also began at the Fels Research Institute and continued and expanded at ETS (Lewis 1971a , b , 1974 ; Lewis et al. 1969 , 1970 , 1978 ; Lewis and Taft 1982 ; Lewis and Wilson 1970 ; Sontag et al. 1969 ; Steele and Lewis 1968 ).

3.4 Atypical Development

Lewis’s research on normal development, especially on attentional processes as a marker of central nervous system functioning, led to an interest in atypical developmental processes and a program of research on children with disabilities (Brinker and Lewis 1982a , b ; Brooks-Gunn and Lewis 1981 , 1982a , b , c ; Fox and Lewis 1982a , b ; Lewis 1971c ; Lewis and Fox 1980 ; Lewis and Rosenblum 1981 ; Lewis and Taft 1982 ; Lewis and Wehren 1982 ; Lewis and Zarin-Ackerman 1977 ; Thurman and Lewis 1979 ; Zarin-Ackerman et al. 1977 ). Perhaps of most importance was the development of an intervention strategy based on Lewis’s work with typically developing children, the Learning to Learn Curriculum. Infants with disabilities were given home- and clinic-based interventions where their simple motor responses resulted in complex outcomes and where they had to learn to produce these outcomes, which served as operants—in effect, an applied-behavior-analysis intervention strategy (Brinker and Lewis 1982a , b ; Lewis 1978a , b ; Thurman and Lewis 1979 ).

3.5 Theories

Lewis formulated several influential theories about infant development . These included (a) a reconsideration of attachment theory (Weinraub and Lewis 1977 ) and (b) the infant as part of a social network (Weinraub et al. 1977 ). He also began work on a theory of emotional development (Lewis 1971b ; Lewis and Michalson 1983 ).

3.6 The Origin of Behavior Series

Lewis and Leonard Rosenblum of SUNY Downstate Medical Center organized yearly conferences on important topics in child development for research scientists in both child and animal (primate) development to bring together biological, cultural, and educational points of view. These conferences resulted in a book series, The Origins of Behavior (later titled Genesis of Behavior ), under their editorship, with seven highly cited volumes (Lewis and Rosenblum 1974a , b , 1975 , 1977 , 1978a , 1979 , 1981 ). The initial volume, The Effect of the Infant on the Caregiver (Lewis and Rosenblum 1974a ), was so influential that the term caregiver became the preferred term, replacing the old term caretaker. The book became the major reference on the interactive nature of social development —that the social development of the child involves an interaction between the mother’s effect on the infant and the effect of the infant on the mother. It was translated into several languages, and 15 years after publication, a meeting sponsored by the National Institutes of Health reviewed the effects of this volume on the field.

4 Cognitive, Personality, and Social Development From Infancy to Adolescence

Brooks-Gunn’s work encompassed research on the cognitive, personality, and social development of infants , toddlers, and adolescents , primarily within the framework of social-cognitive theory . Major foci were the acquisition of social knowledge in young children , reproductive processes in adolescence, and perinatal influences on children’s development. These issues were attacked in laboratory experiments, other cross-sectional and longitudinal studies, and experimental interventions . (A fuller account appears in Brooks-Gunn 2013 .)

4.1 Social Knowledge in Infants and Toddlers

In collaboration with Lewis, Brooks-Gunn carried out a series of studies on the development of early knowledge about the self and others in infancy and toddlerhood. They investigated how and when young children began to use social categories, such as gender, age, and relationship, to organize their world and to guide interactions (Brooks and Lewis 1976 ; Brooks-Gunn and Lewis 1979a , b , 1981 ) as well as the development of self-recognition as a specific aspect of social cognition (Lewis and Brooks-Gunn 1979b , c ; Lewis et al. 1985 ). This developmental work was embedded in genetic epistemology theory as well as social-cognitive theory , with a strong focus on the idea that the self (or person) only develops in relation to others and that the self continues to evolve over time, as does the relation to others.

The studies demonstrated that social knowledge develops very early. Infants shown pictures of their parents, strange adults, and 5-year olds and asked, Who is that? were able to label their parents’ pictures as mommy and poppy, labeling their fathers’ pictures more accurately and earlier than their mothers’ (Brooks-Gunn and Lewis 1979b ). Shown pictures of their parents and strange adults, infants smiled more often and looked longer at their parents’ pictures (Brooks-Gunn and Lewis 1981 ). And when infants were approached by strangers—5-year-old boys and girls, adult men and women, and a midget woman—the children discriminated among them on the basis of age and height, smiling and moving toward the children but frowning and moving away from the adults and, compared to the other adults, watching the midget more intently and averting their gaze less (Brooks and Lewis 1976 ).

4.2 Reproductive Events

4.2.1 menstruation and menarche.

Brooks-Gunn’s interest in the emergence of social cognition broadened to its role in the development of perceptions about reproductive events, at first menstruation and menarche. Her focus was on how social cognitions about menstruation and menarche emerge in adolescence and how males’ and females’ cognitions differ. Brooks-Gunn and Diane Ruble, then at Princeton University, began a research program on the salience and meaning of menarche and menstruation, especially in terms of definition of self and other in the context of these universal reproductive events (Brooks-Gunn 1984 , 1987 ; Brooks-Gunn and Ruble 1982a , b , 1983 ; Ruble and Brooks-Gunn 1979b ). They found that menstruation was perceived as more physiologically and psychologically debilitating and more bothersome by men than by women (Ruble et al. 1982 ). In addition, their research debunked a number of myths about reproductive changes (Ruble and Brooks-Gunn 1979a ), including the one that menarche is a normative crisis experienced very negatively by all girls. In fact, most girls reported mixed emotional reactions to menarche that were quite moderate. These reactions depended on the context the girls experienced: Those who were unprepared for menarche or reached it early reported more negative reactions as well as more symptoms (Ruble and Brooks-Gunn 1982 ).

4.2.2 Pubertal Processes

Brooks-Gunn’s research further broadened to include pubertal processes. With Michelle Warren , a reproductive endocrinologist at Columbia University, she initiated a research program on pubertal processes and the transition from childhood to early adolescence. Brooks-Gunn and Warren conducted longitudinal studies of girls to chart their emotional experiences associated with pubertal changes and the socialization practices of families . The work included measurement of hormones to better understand pubertal changes and possible emotional reactions. The investigations followed girls who were likely to have delayed puberty because of exercise and food restriction (dancers training in national ballet companies as well as elite swimmers and gymnasts) and girls attending private schools—many of the girls were followed from middle school through college (Brooks-Gunn and Warren 1985 , 1988a , b ; Warren et al. 1986 , 1991 ).

The private-school girls commonly compared their pubertal development and had no difficulty categorizing their classmates’ development (Brooks-Gunn et al. 1986 ). Relatedly, the onset of breast development for these girls correlated positively with scores on measures of peer relationships, adjustment, and body image, but pubic hair was uncorrelated, suggesting that breast growth may be a visible sign of adulthood, conferring enhanced status (Brooks-Gunn and Warren 1988b ).

The context in which the girls were situated influenced their reactions. In a context where delayed onset of puberty is valued (the dance world—most professional ballerinas are late maturers), dancers with delayed puberty had higher scores (relative to on-time dancers) on a body-image measure (Brooks-Gunn, Attie, Burrow , Rosso , & Warren , Brooks-Gunn et al. 1989 ; Brooks-Gunn and Warren 1985 ). (They also had lower scores on measures of psychopathology and bulimia; Brooks-Gunn and Warren 1985 .) In contrast, in contexts where delayed onset is not valued (swimmers, private-school students/nonathletes), delayed and on-time girls did not differ in their body images (Brooks-Gunn, Attie et al., Brooks-Gunn et al. 1989 ; Brooks-Gunn and Warren 1985 ).

Two publications in this program, in particular, were very widely cited, according to the Social Science Citation Index: Attie and Brooks-Gunn ( 1989 ), on eating problems, and Brooks-Gunn et al. ( 1987 ), on measuring pubertal status, with 389 and 323 citations through 2015, respectively.

4.2.3 Adolescent Parenthood

Given Brooks-Gunn’s research interest in menarche and other pubertal processes , it is not surprising that she moved on to research on pregnancy and parenthood, events that presage changes in self-definition as well as social comparisons with others. Brooks-Gunn joined Frank Furstenberg, a family sociologist at the University of Pennsylvania, in a 17-year follow-up of a group of teenage mothers who gave birth in Baltimore in the early 1970s (Furstenberg et al. 1987a , b , 1990 ). They charted the trajectories of these mothers as well as their children, who were about the age that their mothers had been when they gave birth to them. The interest was in both how well the mothers were doing and how the mothers’ life course had influenced their children.

In brief, the teenage mothers differed widely in their life chances: About one third were on welfare and three quarters had jobs, usually full-time ones. Characteristics of the mothers’ family of origin and of their own families (e.g., higher levels of education) and their attendance at a school for pregnant teenagers predicted the mothers’ economic success.

The outcomes for their teenage children were “strikingly poor” (Brooks-Gunn 1996 , p. 168). About one third were living with their biological father or stepfather. Half had repeated at least one grade in school, and most were sexually active. Maternal characteristics were linked to the children’s behavior. Children of mothers who had not graduated from high school were 2.4 times as likely as other children, and children of unmarried mothers were 2.2 times as likely, to have repeated a grade. And children of unmarried mothers were 2.4 times as likely to have been stopped by the police, according to their mothers.

The Furstenberg et al. ( 1987b ) monograph chronicling this study, Adolescent Mothers in Later Life, won the William J. Goode Book Award from the American Sociological Association’s Sociology of the Family Section and is considered one of the classic longitudinal studies in developmental psychology.

Brooks-Gunn and Lindsay Chase-Lansdale, then at George Washington University, also began a study of low-income, Black multigenerational families (grandmother/grandmother figure–young mother–toddler) in Baltimore to investigate family relationships, via home visits (Chase-Lansdale et al. 1994 ). One issue was the parenting by the grandmother and mother, as observed separately in videotaped interactions of them aiding the child in working on a puzzle. The quality of parenting depended on whether they resided together and on the mother’s age. Mothers’ parenting was lower in quality when they lived with grandmothers. (Residing with the grandmothers and sharing child caring may be stressful for the mothers, interfering with their parenting.) Grandmothers’ parenting was higher in quality when they lived with younger mothers than when they lived apart, but it was lower in quality when they lived with older mothers rather than apart. (Coresiding grandmothers may be more willing to help younger mothers, whom they view as needing assistance in parenting, than older mothers, whom they see as capable of parenting on their own.)

4.3 Perinatal Influences

Another line of research expanded beyond teenage parents to look at perinatal conditions, such as low birth weight and pregnancy behavior (e.g., smoking, no prenatal care), that influence parenting and children’s development. Poor families and mothers with low education were often the focus of this research, given the differential rates of both early parenthood and adverse perinatal conditions as a function of social class.

In a joint venture between ETS, St. Luke’s–Roosevelt Hospital, and Columbia University’s College of Physicians and Surgeons, Brooks-Gunn studied low-birth-weight children and their parents, many from disadvantaged families because of the greater incidence of low-birth-weight children in these families. The work led to her thinking about how to ameliorate cognitive, emotional, and academic problems in these vulnerable children (Brooks-Gunn and Hearn 1982 ).

Brooks-Gunn joined Marie McCormick , a pediatrician then at the University of Pennsylvania, in a 9-year follow-up of low-birth-weight infants from previous multisite studies (Klebanov et al. 1994 ; McCormick et al. 1992 ). The focus was on very low birth weight infants, for more of them were surviving because of advances in neonatal intensive care.

At age 9, the low-birth-weight children did not differ from normal-birth-weight children on most aspects of classroom behavior, as reported by their teachers, but they had lower attention/ language skills and scholastic competence and higher daydreaming and hyperactivity; these differences were most pronounced for extremely low birth weight children. This pattern of differences resembles attention deficit disorder (Klebanov et al. 1994 ). The low-birth-weight children also had lower mean IQs and, at home, more behavioral problems, as reported by their mothers. The adverse health status of these children underscores the importance of efforts to reduce the incidence of premature births (McCormick et al. 1992 ).

4.4 Interventions With Vulnerable Children

4.4.1 low-birth-weight children.

Brooks-Gunn and McCormick also collaborated on two other research programs involving interventions with biologically vulnerable children, the majority of whom were poor. One program focused on reducing the incidence of low-birth-weight deliveries by providing pregnant women with child-rearing and health information. This program used a public health outreach model to locate pregnant women who were not enrolled in prenatal care; the intervention was located at Harlem Hospital. This effort was a logical extension of Brooks-Gunn’s work on adolescent mothers in Baltimore (Brooks-Gunn et al. 1989 ; McCormick et al. 1987 , 1989a , b ).

The women in the program were very disadvantaged: One fifth were adolescents , three quarters were single, and half had not graduated from high school. The birth weight of their infants was unrelated to traditional risk factors: mother’s demographic (e.g., education) and psychosocial characteristics (e.g., social support). This outcome suggests that low birth weight in poor populations is largely due to poverty per se. Birth weight was associated with the adequacy of prenatal care (Brooks-Gunn et al. 1988 ; McCormick et al. 1987 ).

The outreach program was extensive—four local people searching for eligible women over the course of a year, each making roughly 20 to 25 contacts daily—but recruited only 52 additional women, at a cost of about $850 each. The labor-intensive and expensive nature of this outreach effort indicates that more cost-effective alternatives are needed (Brooks-Gunn et al. 1988 , 1989 ).

The other program involved the design and implementation of an early intervention for premature, low-birth-weight infants : enrollment in a child development education center and family support sessions. This program was initiated in eight sites and included almost 1000 children and their families; randomization was used to construct treatment and control groups. These children were followed through their 18th year of life, with the intervention from birth to 3 years of age being evaluated by Brooks-Gunn (Infant Health and Development Program 1990 ). The 3-year-olds in the intervention group had higher mean IQs and fewer maternally reported behavior problems, suggesting that early intervention may decrease low-birth-weight infants’ risk of later developmental disability .

4.4.2 Head Start

Brooks-Gunn also carried out a notable evaluation of Head Start, based on data from an earlier longitudinal study conducted at ETS in the 1970s. The ETS–Head Start Longitudinal Study, directed by Shipman ( 1972 , 1973 ), had canvassed poor school districts in three communities in an effort to identify and recruit for the study all children who were 3 ½ to 4 ½ years old, the Head Start population. The children were then assessed and information about their families was obtained. They were reassessed annually for the next 3 years. After the initial assessment, some children had entered Head Start, some had gone to other preschool programs, and some had not enrolled in any program. Clearly families chose whether to enroll their children in Head Start, some other program, or none at all (by processes that are difficult if not impossible to measure). But, by having the children’s assessments and familial and demographic measures at age 3, it was possible to document and control statistically for initial differences among children and families in the three groups. Children’s gains in ability in these groups could then be compared.

In several studies of two communities (Lee et al. 1988 , 1990 ; Schnur et al. 1992 ), Brooks-Gunn and her collaborators investigated differences in the children’s gains in the Head Start and other groups as well as preexisting group differences in the children’s demographic and cognitive characteristics. Black children enrolled in Head Start made greater gains on a variety of cognitive tests than their Black peers in the other groups by the end of the program (Lee et al. 1988 ) and diminished gains after 2 years (Lee et al. 1990 ). (The gains for the small samples of White children did not differ between the Head Start and other groups in the initial study; these children were not included in the follow-up study.) These findings imply that Head Start may have some efficacy in improving participants’ intellectual status. The Head Start children were the most disadvantaged (Schnur et al. 1992 ), seemingly allaying concerns that Head Start does not take the neediest children (Datta 1979 ).

5 Conclusion

As this review documents, ETS was a major center for basic and applied research in developmental psychology for decades. The number and quality of investigators (and their prodigious output) made for a developmental psychology program that rivaled the best in the academic community.

The research was wide ranging and influential, spanning the cognitive, personality, and social development of infants , children, and adolescents , with an emphasis on minority, working-class, and disabled individuals; addressing key theoretical, substantive, and methodological issues; using research methods that ran the gamut: laboratory and field experiments, correlational studies, surveys, and structured observations; and impacting theory, research, and practice across developmental psychology.

In common with ETS’s research in cognitive, personality, and social psychology (Stricker, Chap. 13 , and Kogan, Chap. 14 , this volume), this achievement was probably attributable to the confluence of ample institutional and financial support, doubtless due to the vision of Chauncey, who saw the value of a broad program of psychological research.

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Kogan, N., Stricker, L.J., Lewis, M., Brooks-Gunn, J. (2017). Research on Developmental Psychology. In: Bennett, R., von Davier, M. (eds) Advancing Human Assessment. Methodology of Educational Measurement and Assessment. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-58689-2_15

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Issues in Developmental Psychology

Some of the Big Questions About How People Develop

Kendra Cherry, MS, is a psychosocial rehabilitation specialist, psychology educator, and author of the "Everything Psychology Book."

Sean is a fact-checker and researcher with experience in sociology, field research, and data analytics.

Nature vs. Nurture

• Early vs. Later Experience

Continuity vs. Discontinuity

Theories of development, abnormal behavior vs. differences.

Throughout the history of psychology, a number of important issues have been debated regarding human development. These issues include:

• Do genetics or does the environment have a larger impact on development?
• Does development occur slowly and smoothly, or do changes happen in stages?
• Do early childhood experiences have the greatest impact on development or are later events equally important?

Keep reading to learn more about these basic questions surrounding developmental psychology and what many psychologists today believe about these issues.

The debate over the relative contributions of inheritance versus environment in development, usually referred to as the nature versus nurture debate , is one of the oldest issues in both philosophy and psychology.

Philosophers such as Plato and Descartes supported the idea that some ideas are inborn. However, thinkers such as John Locke argued for the concept of tabula rasa— a belief that the mind is a blank slate at birth, with experience determining our knowledge.

Today, most psychologists believe an interaction between both of these forces creates development.

Some aspects of development are distinctly biological, such as puberty. However, the onset of puberty can be affected by environmental factors such as diet and nutrition.  

Early Experience vs. Later Experience

A second important consideration in developmental psychology involves the relative importance of early experiences versus those that occur later in life. Are we more affected by events that occur in early childhood, or do later events play an equally important role?  

Psychoanalytic theorists tend to focus on events that occur in early childhood. According to Freud, much of a child's personality is completely established by the age of five. If this is indeed the case, those who have experienced deprived or abusive childhoods might never adjust or develop normally.

In contrast to this view, researchers have found that the influence of childhood events does not necessarily have a dominating effect over behavior throughout life, however there is evidence that childhood adversity may correlate to greater levels of stress in adulthood.   Many people with less-than-perfect childhoods go on to develop normally into well-adjusted adults.

A third major issue in developmental psychology is that of continuity. Does change occur smoothly over time, or through a series of predetermined steps?

Some theories of development argue changes are simply a matter of quantity; children display more of certain skills as they grow older.

Other theories outline a series of sequential stages, with certain skills emerging at certain developmental stages.

Most theories of development fall under three broad areas, including psychoanalytic, learning, and cognitive.

Psychoanalytic Theories

Psychoanalytic theories are inspired by the work of Sigmund Freud, who believed the unconscious mind and childhood experiences were most influential in development. Freud contributed to developmental theory with his proposal that development occurs through a series of psychosexual stages .

Theorist Erik Erikson expanded upon Freud's ideas by proposing a stage theory of psychosocial development. Erikson's theory focused on conflicts that arise at different stages of development and, unlike Freud's theory, Erikson described development throughout the lifespan.

Learning Theories

Learning theories focus on how the environment impacts behavior. Important learning processes include classical conditioning , operant conditioning , and social learning. In each case, behavior is shaped by interactions between the individual and their environment.

Cognitive Theories

Cognitive theories focus on the development of mental processes, skills, and abilities. Examples of cognitive theories include Piaget's theory of cognitive development .  

One of the biggest concerns of many parents is whether or not their child is developing normally. Developmental milestones offer guidelines for the ages at which certain skills and abilities typically emerge, but can create concern when a child falls slightly behind the norm.

While developmental theories have historically focused on deficits in behavior, focusing on individual differences in development is becoming more common.

Psychoanalytic theories have traditionally focused on these abnormal behaviors and deficits while learning theories rely more on an environment's unique impact on an individual. Today, psychologists look at both norms and individual differences when describing and analyzing child development.

Levitt M. Perceptions of nature, nurture and behaviour .  Life Sci Soc Policy . 2013;9(1). doi:10.1186/2195-7819-9-13

Soliman A, De Sanctis V, Elalaily R. Nutrition and pubertal development .  Indian J Endocrinol Metab . 2014;18(Suppl 1):S39‐S47. doi:10.4103/2230-8210.145073

Raby KL, Roisman GI, Fraley RC, Simpson JA. The enduring predictive significance of early maternal sensitivity: social and academic competence through age 32 years .  Child Dev . 2015;86(3):695‐708. doi:10.1111/cdev.12325

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By Kendra Cherry, MSEd Kendra Cherry, MS, is a psychosocial rehabilitation specialist, psychology educator, and author of the "Everything Psychology Book."

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Challenges in developmental psychology, a focus on Sustainable Development

Peter klaver.

1 Centre for Research and Development, University of Teacher Education in Special Needs, Zurich, Switzerland

2 Institute of Psychology, University of Zurich, Zurich, Switzerland

Katharina J. Rohlfing

3 Faculty of Arts and Humanities, Paderborn University, Paderborn, Germany

Introduction

Developmental psychology is traditionally of interdisciplinary nature with the aims to understand mechanisms of normative and individual changes and consistencies throughout the lifespan. The applied fields of developmental psychology target into health and educational sciences. The aims of developmental psychology cannot be reached without understanding and applying the underlying biological, senso-motoric, emotional, social, and cognitive processes that are intertwined with cultural context.

The field changes in dependence on internal and external factors. First, the increase in knowledge, in each of the associated areas can change the focus of interest in subfields or the whole field of developmental psychology. Second, methodological inventions can boost the development of certain subfields or the whole field of developmental psychology. Third, sudden changes in cultural context, by global events, such as strikingly demonstrated recently during the COVID-19 pandemic, affect the focus of interest in certain periods in life, or in interventions. Fourth, there is a solid claim for a bias in research on and from Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich and Democratic (WEIRD) countries (Henrich et al., 2010 ), which affect inferences and impact from research in developmental psychology. Awareness toward the cultural context of research in developmental psychology, its limitations and generalizability, can change perspective and course of the field.

In the following Specialty Grand Challenge, we would like to sketch the most important challenges we observe within the field of developmental psychology, which are dependent on the above-mentioned areas of change: changes in knowledge and methodology, changes or bias in environment by global events and cultural context.

Aims of the Specialty Grand Challenge

One of the key challenges we observe in developmental psychology relate to the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). The Agenda 2030 and the associated SDGs pose new challenges on science as a whole and as such on developmental psychology. The global goals to sustain the resources in the world's biosphere for future generations are balanced across the dimensions of social responsibility, ecological responsibility, and economic growth (United Nations Sustainable Development Group, 2019 ). Local or global actions at each of these dimensions can have an impact on the individual development and potentially on the normative development of people. Thus, they may affect individuals differently in childhood, youth, and adulthood. For example, youth in several countries have shown to take responsibility regarding SDGs to engage against climate change, against poverty, diversity, human rights, and democracy (Plan International UK, 2018 ), while Education for Sustainable Development is part of the curriculum in many countries. The development of youth may be affected alone by the responsibility they take, and the social changes they achieve may affect development of future generations. Participating more actively in a society and being encouraged by children's rights (UNICEF), children might require more support in developing skills that pertains to engagement in active citizenship from early on. The global context and youth's participation put novel requirements on youth's and children's care, caregivers as well as education.

Further, fast economic growth in urban areas as well as political conflicts can lead to migration waves toward these areas, which provides an impact on the health and education infrastructure in both rural and urban areas, which may in turn affect vulnerable populations disproportionally, and particularly children, elderly, and individuals with disabilities. Observations of the kind has been observed in several countries (Jampaklay et al., 2016 ; Holecki et al., 2020 ; Martín-Cano et al., 2020 ).

Actions relating to SDGs

In our view, SDGs require actions in the field of developmental psychology regarding relevant methodologies and topics. We observe two windows of opportunity to take action on the impact of SDGs on developmental psychology. First, global developments in methodology of research, particularly Open Science and Open Research Data help to access, merge, and analyze data in understanding emotion, cognition, and social dynamics in development within cultural context. These approaches initiate new discoveries but require an understanding of the technological functions and their limitations. Second, digitalization has a global impact on the use of knowledge and skills in social, health, and educational systems, which induces challenges and boosts research in the field of developmental psychology.

Regarding the methodologies, we recommend for three levels of actions. First, research in developmental psychology needs to adopt to the principles of Open Science. The movement of Open Science has been seen as an important step toward managing resources at a global scale. Open Access of publications as implemented by Frontiers and other publishers, increases access to knowledge across the globe. However, sharing data by implementing FAIR (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, and Reusable) principles on Open Research Data (ORD) would allow researchers across the globe to reuse data and connect own data to a larger pool of data than ever before. This could increase validation of evidence across different cultural contexts and could diversify and generalize theories on development. Simultaneously, methods can be further developed to adjust to novel contextual circumstances. Furthermore, a reuse of material, measures, procedures, and data contributes to more transparency and works against data loss, fosters collaborations, and generates reproducible workflows (Klein et al., 2018 ). With these methods, key issues relating to development and SDGs can be more easily studied, because contextual differences can be identified in larger datasets. Currently, Frontiers does not have a policy regarding ORD, but in our view, we could and should commit to such a policy within our research communities.

Second, research in developmental psychology should be committed to international standards regarding the adoption of research designs, conducting research, reporting and critical appraisal standards. The EQUATOR network currently provides 529 reporting guidelines for all types of research, which are relevant for social sciences and medicine, such as PRISMA (Page et al., 2021 ). Research communities, for example in neuroscience and medicine, have increased awareness toward such standards and thereby increased the quality of research (O'Brien et al., 2014 ; Song et al., 2017 ). It is important that research communities commit themselves toward such standards to increase reproducibility, transparency, and sustainability of research across the globe. In addition to reporting standards, the reviewing standards should be transparent and compliant with the guidelines. Several valuable critical appraisal tools have been developed, such as CASP or JBI checklists, which can support and standardize reviewing processes. By taking such standards more seriously, and with a higher commitment to them, globally, the rigor in addressing key questions relating to development can be pushed forward, and a sustainable knowledge base can be acquired.

Third, we observe strong innovations and methodological developments in areas, which now affect the field of developmental psychology. It will be important to increase awareness about applying technologies for specific solutions and specific contexts. A recent Research Topic on empirical research at a distance provides a good example of putting together novel and rapid methodical developments driven by COVID-19 pandemic but discussing their limitations thoroughly (Tsuji et al., 2022 ). In our view, it is important for novel methods to be presented in a comprehensive manner to provide informative access not only to procedures but also to its purposes and shortcomings. For this, Frontiers offers formats that might be used more often: Data Report, Technology and Code, Study Protocol, but also Brief Research Report could be used to introduce a technologically innovative method to describe novel possibilities of analysis. It should then involve a reflection about the used technology regarding ethics and privacy, its advantages, and disadvantages by addressing tradeoffs, for example between real world behaviors and in-lab controls. Examples of such technologies, involve techniques to record high resolution spatial and temporal data in more realistic settings such as Real-Time response measurements (Waldvogel and Metz, 2020 ), dyads in Experience Sampling Methods (Xia et al., 2022 ), Near Field Communication (Lorusso et al., 2018 ), Google Trends Research (Jun et al., 2018 ; Mavragani et al., 2018 ), and hyperscanning EEG (Kayhan et al., 2022 ). A debate on the use of these techniques may provide a window of opportunity for global research on development and SDGs.

Regarding topics, we observe a strong impact of digitalization on health and education systems. Health issues have become a global phenomenon. The way in which people at different stages during the life span have access to health care, receive information on health risks and preventions, and are at risk to health problems is not evenly distributed. Industrial pollution, access to nutrients, eating habits, digital literacy and consumption, access to information depend on societal, technological, and climate changes. These potential risk and resources can affect fetal, early development and parenting, as well as later periods in life. The increasing knowledge about the mechanisms and the more widespread possibilities to observe changes longitudinally in several areas around the world lead to a more detailed understanding of the development of health risks and the effect of interventions during life span. In our view, it is important that the knowledge about health risks at all ages and heterogeneous populations is well-documented and (digitally) accessible for use by professional health practitioners.

Along similar lines, we observe that education undergoes changes depending on technological development, particularly digital information technology. Access to information and knowledge about education governance, access to education during political, societal and climate change can all affect the way in which children develop and the way in which communities and families are able to support the development of children. The current access to larger datasets has the potential to facilitate research about the psychological development on these topics. We therefore encourage the research on human development, health, and education specifically concerned with the influence of social and technological change in dynamic cultural contexts.

The main challenges that we observe are related to the global movements in science and society, which affect the course that developmental psychology takes. In the past, developmental psychology has been dominated by European and North American scientists, followed by important research from Japan (Norimatsu, 2018 ). Now, researchers from an increasing number of countries across the world, but particularly China deliver important insights into the field of developmental psychology. Further, the Agenda 2030, the global issues relating to health and education, the Open Science movement, the increasing knowledge about developmental psychology from other counties, the ability to merge greater datasets provide the possibility to understand development at a different level. Our view is indeed in line with these developments, first because we see a chance that normative and individual changes in development can be better understood at both a global and local level. Second, because we trust that applied scientists can address that knowledge. Their task is to improve, for example, health care, health risk prevention and education in cooperation with professionals and providers of social support.

Nevertheless, we are aware of the subjective nature of our view. The foundation of it was mainly based on the set of Research Topics that we evaluate at the Frontiers in Psychology Specialty Section Developmental Psychology, the manuscript we receive in our role as Section Chief Editors, as well as our role we have as professionals at our universities and the research communities we work in. We are also aware of the diversity of ethical and cultural values, which drives our vision of research on developmental psychology and the visions of all researchers in the field. The hope that shared values on the necessity to continue research on developmental psychology in the light of Sustainable Development remains.

Author contributions

All authors listed have made a substantial, direct, and intellectual contribution to the work and approved it for publication.

Conflict of interest

The authors declare that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest.

Publisher's note

All claims expressed in this article are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily represent those of their affiliated organizations, or those of the publisher, the editors and the reviewers. Any product that may be evaluated in this article, or claim that may be made by its manufacturer, is not guaranteed or endorsed by the publisher.

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Research Methods in Developmental Psychology

Angela Lukowski and Helen Milojevich

Learning Objectives

• Describe different research methods used to study infant and child development
• Discuss different research designs, as well as their strengths and limitations
• Report on the unique challenges associated with conducting developmental research

Introduction

A group of children were playing hide-and-seek in the yard. Pilar raced to her hiding spot as her six-year-old cousin, Lucas, loudly counted, “… six, seven, eight, nine, ten! Ready or not, here I come!”. Pilar let out a small giggle as Lucas ran over to find her – in the exact location where he had found his sister a short time before. At first glance, this behavior is puzzling: why would Pilar hide in exactly the same location where someone else was just found? Whereas older children and adults realize that it is likely best to hide in locations that have not been searched previously, young children do not have the same cognitive sophistication. But why not… and when do these abilities first develop?

Developmental psychologists investigate questions like these using research methods that are tailored to the particular capabilities of the infants and children being studied. Importantly, research in developmental psychology is more than simply examining how children behave during games of hide-and-seek – the results obtained from developmental research have been used to inform best practices in parenting, education, and policy.

This module describes different research techniques that are used to study psychological phenomena in infants and children, research designs that are used to examine age-related changes in developmental processes and changes over time, and unique challenges and special issues associated with conducting research with infants and children.

Research Methods

Infants and children—especially younger children—cannot be studied using the same research methods used in studies with adults. Researchers, therefore, have developed many creative ways to collect information about infant and child development. In this section, we highlight some of the methods that have been used by researchers who study infants and older children, separating them into three distinct categories: involuntary or obligatory responses , voluntary responses , and psychophysiological responses . We will also discuss other methods such as the use of surveys and questionnaires. At the end of this section, we give an example of how interview techniques can be used to study the beliefs and perceptions of older children and adults – a method that cannot be used with infants or very young children.

Involuntary or obligatory responses

One of the primary challenges in studying very young infants is that they have limited motor control – they cannot hold their heads up for short amounts of time, much less grab an interesting toy, play the piano, or turn a door knob. As a result, infants cannot actively engage with the environment in the same way as older children and adults. For this reason, developmental scientists have designed research methods that assess involuntary or obligatory responses. These are behaviors in which people engage without much conscious thought or effort. For example, think about the last time you heard your name at a party – you likely turned your head to see who was talking without even thinking about it. Infants and young children also demonstrate involuntary responses to stimuli in the environment. When infants hear the voice of their mother, for instance, their heart rate increases – whereas if they hear the voice of a stranger, their heart rate decreases (Kisilevsky et al., 2003). Researchers study involuntary behaviors to better understand what infants know about the world around them.

One research method that capitalizes on involuntary or obligatory responses is a procedure known as habituation . In habituation studies, infants are presented with a stimulus such as a photograph of a face over and over again until they become bored with it. When infants become bored, they look away from the picture. If infants are then shown a new picture–such as a photograph of a different face– their interest returns and they look at the new picture. This is a phenomenon known as dishabituation . Habituation procedures work because infants generally look longer at novel stimuli relative to items that are familiar to them. This research technique takes advantage of involuntary or obligatory responses because infants are constantly looking around and observing their environments; they do not have to be taught to engage with the world in this way.

One classic habituation study was conducted by Baillargeon and colleagues (1985). These researchers were interested in the concept of object permanence , or the understanding that objects exist even when they cannot be seen or heard. For example, you know your toothbrush exists even though you are probably not able to see it right this second. To investigate object permanence in 5-month-old infants, the researchers used a violation of expectation paradigm . The researchers first habituated infants to an opaque screen that moved back and forth like a drawbridge (using the same procedure you just learned about in the previous paragraph). Once the infants were bored with the moving screen, they were shown two different scenarios to test their understanding of physical events. In both of these test scenarios, an opaque box was placed behind the moving screen. What differed between these two scenarios, however, was whether they confirmed or violated the solidity principle – the idea that two solid objects cannot occupy the same space at the same time. In the possible scenario, infants watched as the moving drawbridge stopped when it hit the opaque box (as would be expected based on the solidity principle). In the impossible scenario, the drawbridge appeared to move right through the space that was occupied by the opaque box! This impossible scenario violates the solidity principle in the same way as if you got out of your chair and walked through a wall, reappearing on the other side.

The results of this study revealed that infants looked longer at the impossible test event than at the possible test event. The authors suggested that the infants reacted in this way because they were surprised – the demonstration went against their expectation that two solids cannot move through one another. The findings indicated that 5-month-old infants understood that the box continued to exist even when they could not see it. Subsequent studies indicated that 3½- and 4½-month-old infants also demonstrate object permanence under similar test conditions (Baillargeon, 1987). These findings are notable because they suggest that infants understand object permanence much earlier than had been reported previously in research examining voluntary responses (although see more recent research by Cashon & Cohen, 2000).

Voluntary responses

As infants and children age, researchers are increasingly able to study their understanding of the world through their voluntary responses. Voluntary responses are behaviors that a person completes by choice. For example, think about how you act when you go to the grocery store: you select whether to use a shopping cart or a basket, you decide which sections of the store to walk through, and you choose whether to stick to your grocery list or splurge on a treat. Importantly, these behaviors are completely up to you (and are under your control). Although they do not do a lot of grocery shopping, infants and children also have voluntary control over their actions. Children, for instance, choose which toys to play with.

Researchers study the voluntary responses of infants and young children in many ways. For example, developmental scientists study recall memory in infants and young children by looking at voluntary responses. Recall memory is memory of past events or episodes, such as what you did yesterday afternoon or on your last birthday. Whereas older children and adults are simply asked to talk about their past experiences, recall memory has to be studied in a different way in infants and very young children who cannot discuss the past using language. To study memory in these subjects researchers use a behavioral method known as e licited imitation (Lukowski & Milojevich, in press).

In the elicited imitation procedure, infants play with toys that are designed in the lab to be unlike the kinds of things infants usually have at home. These toys (or event sequences, as researchers call them) can be put together in a certain way to produce an outcome that infants commonly enjoy. One of these events is called Find the Surprise. As shown in Figure 1, this toy has a door on the front that is held in place by a latch – and a small plastic figure is hidden on the inside. During the first part of the study, infants play with the toy in whichever way they want for a few minutes. The researcher then shows the infant how make the toy work by (1) flipping the latch out of the way and (2) opening the door, revealing the plastic toy inside. The infant is allowed to play with the toy again either immediately after the demonstration or after a longer delay. As the infant plays, the researcher records whether the infant finds the surprise using the same procedure that was demonstrated.

Use of the elicited imitation procedure has taught developmental scientists a lot about how recall memory develops. For example, we now know that 6-month-old infants remember one step of a 3-step sequence for 24 hours (Barr, Dowden, & Hayne, 1996; Collie & Hayne, 1999). Nine-month-olds remember the individual steps that make up a 2-step event sequence for 1 month, but only 50% of infants remember to do the first step of the sequence before the second (Bauer, Wiebe, Carver, Waters, & Nelson, 2003; Bauer, Wiebe, Waters, & Bangston, 2001; Carver & Bauer, 1999). When children are 20 months old, they remember the individual steps and temporal order of 4-step events for at least 12 months – the longest delay that has been tested to date (Bauer, Wenner, Dropik, & Wewerka, 2000).

Psychophysiology

Behavioral studies have taught us important information about what infants and children know about the world. Research on behavior alone, however, cannot tell scientists how brain development or biological changes impact (or are impacted by) behavior. For this reason, researchers may also record psychophysiological data, such as measures of heart rate, hormone levels, or brain activity. These measures may be recorded by themselves or in combination with behavioral data to better understand the bidirectional relations between biology and behavior.

One manner of understanding associations between brain development and behavioral advances is through the recording of event-related potentials , or ERPs. ERPs are recorded by fitting a research participant with a stretchy cap that contains many small sensors or electrodes. These electrodes record tiny electrical currents on the scalp of the participant in response to the presentation of particular stimuli, such as a picture or a sound (for additional information on recording ERPs from infants and children, see DeBoer, Scott, & Nelson, 2005). The recorded responses are then amplified thousands of times using specialized equipment so that they look like squiggly lines with peaks and valleys. Some of these brain responses have been linked to psychological phenomena. For example, researchers have identified a negative peak in the recorded waveform that they have called the N170 (Bentin, Allison, Puce, Perez, & McCarthy, 2010). The peak is named in this way because it is negative (hence the N) and because it occurs about 140ms to 170ms after a stimulus is presented (hence the 170). This peak is particularly sensitive to the presentation of faces, as it is commonly more negative when participants are presented with photographs of faces rather than with photographs of objects. In this way, researchers are able to identify brain activity associated with real world thinking and behavior.

The use of ERPs has provided important insight as to how infants and children understand the world around them. In one study (Webb, Dawson, Bernier, & Panagiotides, 2006), researchers examined face and object processing in children with autism spectrum disorders, those with developmental delays, and those who were typically developing. The children wore electrode caps and had their brain activity recorded as they watched still photographs of faces (of their mother or of a stranger) and objects (including those that were familiar or unfamiliar to them). The researchers examined differences in face and object processing by group by observing a component of the brainwave they called the prN170 (because it was believed to be a precursor to the adult N170). Their results showed that the height of the prN170 peak (commonly called the amplitude ) did not differ when faces or objects were presented to typically developing children. When considering children with autism, however, the peaks were higher when objects were presented relative to when faces were shown. Differences were also found in how long it took the brain to reach the negative peak (commonly called the latency of the response). Whereas the peak was reached more quickly when typically developing children were presented with faces relative to objects, the opposite was true for children with autism. These findings suggest that children with autism are in some way processing faces differently than typically developing children (and, as reported in the manuscript, children with more general developmental delays).

Parent-report questionnaires

Developmental science has come a long way in assessing various aspects of infant and child development through behavior and psychophysiology – and new advances are happening every day. In many ways, however, the very youngest of research participants are still quite limited in the information they can provide about their own development. As such, researchers often ask the people who know infants and children best – commonly, their parents or guardians – to complete surveys or questionnaires about various aspects of their lives. These parent-report data can be analyzed by themselves or in combination with any collected behavioral or psychophysiological data.

One commonly used parent-report questionnaire is the Child Behavior Checklist (CBCL; Achenbach & Rescorla, 2000). Parents complete the preschooler version of this questionnaire by answering questions about child strengths, behavior problems, and disabilities, among other things. The responses provided by parents are used to identify whether the child has any behavioral issues, such as sleep difficulties, aggressive behaviors, depression, or attention deficit/hyperactivity problems.

A recent study used the CBCL-Preschool questionnaire (Achenbach & Rescorla, 2000) to examine preschooler functioning in relation to levels of stress experienced by their mothers while they were pregnant (Ronald, Pennell, & Whitehouse, 2011). Almost 3,000 pregnant women were recruited into the study during their pregnancy and were interviewed about their stressful life experiences. Later, when their children were 2 years old, mothers completed the CBCL-Preschool questionnaire. The results of the study showed that higher levels of maternal stress during pregnancy (such as a divorce or moving to a new house) were associated with increased attention deficit/hyperactivity problems in children over 2 years later. These findings suggest that stressful events experienced during prenatal development may be associated with problematic child behavioral functioning years later – although additional research is needed.

Interview techniques

Whereas infants and very young children are unable to talk about their own thoughts and behaviors, older children and adults are commonly asked to use language to discuss their thoughts and knowledge about the world. In fact, these verbal report paradigms are among the most widely used in psychological research. For instance, a researcher might present a child with a vignette or short story describing a moral dilemma, and the child would be asked to give their own thoughts and beliefs (Walrath, 2011). For example, children might react to the following:

“Mr. Kohut’s wife is sick and only one medication can save her life. The medicine is extremely expensive and Mr. Kohut cannot afford it. The druggist will not lower the price. What should Mr. Kohut do, and why?”

Children can provide written or verbal answers to these types of scenarios. They can also offer their perspectives on issues ranging from attitudes towards drug use to the experience of fear while falling asleep to their memories of getting lost in public places – the possibilities are endless. Verbal reports such as interviews and surveys allow children to describe their own experience of the world.

Research Design

Now you know about some tools used to conduct research with infants and young children. Remember, research methods are the tools that are used to collect information. But it is easy to confuse research methods and research design . Research design is the strategy or blueprint for deciding how to collect and analyze information. Research design dictates which methods are used and how.

Researchers typically focus on two distinct types of comparisons when conducting research with infants and children. The first kind of comparison examines change within individuals . As the name suggests, this type of analysis measures the ways in which a specific person changes (or remains the same) over time. For example, a developmental scientist might be interested in studying the same group of infants at 12 months, 18 months, and 24 months to examine how vocabulary and grammar change over time. This kind of question would be best answered using a longitudinal research design. Another sort of comparison focuses on changes between groups . In this type of analysis, researchers study average changes in behavior between groups of different ages. Returning to the language example, a scientist might study the vocabulary and grammar used by 12-month-olds, 18-month-olds, and 24-month-olds to examine how language abilities change with age. This kind of question would be best answered using a cross-sectional research design.

Longitudinal research designs

Longitudinal research designs are used to examine behavior in the same infants and children over time. For example, when considering our example of hide-and-seek behaviors in preschoolers, a researcher might conduct a longitudinal study to examine whether 2-year-olds develop into better hiders over time. To this end, a researcher might observe a group of 2-year-old children playing hide-and-seek with plans to observe them again when they are 4 years old – and again when they are 6 years old. This study is longitudinal in nature because the researcher plans to study the same children as they age. Based on her data, the researcher might conclude that 2-year-olds develop more mature hiding abilities with age. Remember, researchers examine games such as hide-and-seek not because they are interested in the games themselves, but because they offer clues to how children think, feel and behave at various ages.

Longitudinal studies may be conducted over the short term (over a span of months, as in Wiebe, Lukowski, & Bauer, 2010) or over much longer durations (years or decades, as in Lukowski et al., 2010). For these reasons, longitudinal research designs are optimal for studying stability and change over time. Longitudinal research also has limitations, however. For one, longitudinal studies are expensive: they require that researchers maintain continued contact with participants over time, and they necessitate that scientists have funding to conduct their work over extended durations (from infancy to when participants were 19 years old in Lukowski et al., 2010). An additional risk is attrition . Attrition occurs when participants fail to complete all portions of a study. Participants may move, change their phone numbers, or simply become disinterested in participating over time. Researchers should account for the possibility of attrition by enrolling a larger sample into their study initially, as some participants will likely drop out over time.

The results from longitudinal studies may also be impacted by repeated assessments. Consider how well you would do on a math test if you were given the exact same exam every day for a week. Your performance would likely improve over time not necessarily because you developed better math abilities, but because you were continuously practicing the same math problems. This phenomenon is known as a practice effect . Practice effects occur when participants become better at a task over time because they have done it again and again; not due to natural psychological development. A final limitation of longitudinal research is that the results may be impacted by cohort effects . Cohort effects occur when the results of the study are affected by the particular point in historical time during which participants are tested. As an example, think about how peer relationships in childhood have likely changed since February 2004 – the month and year Facebook was founded. Cohort effects can be problematic in longitudinal research because only one group of participants are tested at one point in time – different findings might be expected if participants of the same ages were tested at different points in historical time.

Cross-sectional designs

Cross-sectional research designs are used to examine behavior in participants of different ages who are tested at the same point in time. When considering our example of hide-and-seek behaviors in children, for example, a researcher might want to examine whether older children more often hide in novel locations (those in which another child in the same game has never hidden before) when compared to younger children. In this case, the researcher might observe 2-, 4-, and 6-year-old children as they play the game (the various age groups represent the “cross sections”). This research is cross-sectional in nature because the researcher plans to examine the behavior of children of different ages within the same study at the same time. Based on her data, the researcher might conclude that 2-year-olds more commonly hide in previously-searched locations relative to 6-year-olds.

Cross-sectional designs are useful for many reasons. Because participants of different ages are tested at the same point in time, data collection can proceed at a rapid pace. In addition, because participants are only tested at one point in time, practice effects are not an issue – children do not have the opportunity to become better at the task over time. Cross-sectional designs are also more cost-effective than longitudinal research designs because there is no need to maintain contact with and follow-up on participants over time.

One of the primary limitations of cross-sectional research, however, is that the results yield information on age-related change, not development per se . That is, although the study described above can show that 6-year-olds are more advanced in their hiding behavior than 2-year-olds, the data used to come up with this conclusion were collected from different children. It could be, for instance, that this specific sample of 6-year-olds just happened to be particularly clever at hide-and-seek. As such, the researcher cannot conclude that 2-year-olds develop into better hiders with age; she can only state that 6-year-olds, on average, are more sophisticated hiders relative to children 4 years younger.

Sequential research designs

Sequential research designs include elements of both longitudinal and cross-sectional research designs. Similar to longitudinal designs, sequential research features participants who are followed over time; similar to cross-sectional designs, sequential work includes participants of different ages. This research design is also distinct from those that have been discussed previously in that children of different ages are enrolled into a study at various points in time to examine age-related changes, development within the same individuals as they age, and account for the possibility of cohort effects.

Consider, once again, our example of hide-and-seek behaviors. In a study with a sequential design, a researcher might enroll three separate groups of children (Groups A, B, and C). Children in Group A would be enrolled when they are 2 years old and would be tested again when they are 4 and 6 years old (similar in design to the longitudinal study described previously). Children in Group B would be enrolled when they are 4 years old and would be tested again when they are 6 and 8 years old. Finally, children in Group C would be enrolled when they are 6 years old and would be tested again when they are 8 and 10 years old.

Studies with sequential designs are powerful because they allow for both longitudinal and cross-sectional comparisons. This research design also allows for the examination of cohort effects. For example, the researcher could examine the hide-and-seek behavior of 6-year-olds in Groups A, B, and C to determine whether performance differed by group when participants were the same age. If performance differences were found, there would be evidence for a cohort effect. In the hide-and-seek example, this might mean that children from different time periods varied in the amount they giggled or how patient they are when waiting to be found. Sequential designs are also appealing because they allow researchers to learn a lot about development in a relatively short amount of time. In the previous example, a four-year research study would provide information about 8 years of developmental time by enrolling children ranging in age from two to ten years old.

Because they include elements of longitudinal and cross-sectional designs, sequential research has many of the same strengths and limitations as these other approaches. For example, sequential work may require less time and effort than longitudinal research, but more time and effort than cross-sectional research. Although practice effects may be an issue if participants are asked to complete the same tasks or assessments over time, attrition may be less problematic than what is commonly experienced in longitudinal research since participants may not have to remain involved in the study for such a long period of time.

When considering the best research design to use in their research, scientists think about their main research question and the best way to come up with an answer. A table of advantages and disadvantages for each of the described research designs is provided here to help you as you consider what sorts of studies would be best conducted using each of these different approaches.

Challenges Associated with Conducting Developmental Research

The previous sections describe research tools to assess development in infancy and early childhood, as well as the ways that research designs can be used to track age-related changes and development over time. Before you begin conducting developmental research, however, you must also be aware that testing infants and children comes with its own unique set of challenges. In the final section of this module, we review some of the main issues that are encountered when conducting research with the youngest of human participants. In particular, we focus our discussion on ethical concerns, recruitment issues, and participant attrition.

Ethical concerns

As a student of psychological science, you may already know that  Institutional Review Boards (IRBs) review and approve of all research projects that are conducted at universities, hospitals, and other institutions. An IRB is typically a panel of experts who read and evaluate proposals for research. IRB members want to ensure that the proposed research will be carried out ethically and that the potential benefits of the research outweigh the risks and harm for participants. What you may not know though, is that the IRB considers some groups of participants to be more vulnerable or at-risk than others. Whereas university students are generally not viewed as vulnerable or at-risk, infants and young children commonly fall into this category. What makes infants and young children more vulnerable during research than young adults? One reason infants and young children are perceived as being at increased risk is due to their limited cognitive capabilities, which makes them unable to state their willingness to participate in research or tell researchers when they would like to drop out of a study. For these reasons, infants and young children require special accommodations as they participate in the research process.

When thinking about special accommodations in developmental research, consider the informed consent process. If you have ever participated in psychological research, you may know through your own experience that adults commonly sign an informed consent statement (a contract stating that they agree to participate in research) after learning about a study. As part of this process, participants are informed of the procedures to be used in the research, along with any expected risks or benefits. Infants and young children cannot verbally indicate their willingness to participate, much less understand the balance of potential risks and benefits. As such, researchers are oftentimes required to obtain written informed consent from the parent or legal guardian of the child participant, an adult who is almost always present as the study is conducted. In fact, children are not asked to indicate whether they would like to be involved in a study at all (a process known as assent ) until they are approximately seven years old. Because infants and young children also cannot easily indicate if they would like to discontinue their participation in a study, researchers must be sensitive to changes in the state of the participant (determining whether a child is too tired or upset to continue) as well as to parent desires (in some cases, parents might want to discontinue their involvement in the research). As in adult studies, researchers must always strive to protect the rights and well-being of the minor participants and their parents when conducting developmental science.

Recruitment

An additional challenge in developmental science is participant recruitment. Recruiting university students to participate in adult studies is typically easy. Many colleges and universities offer extra credit for participation in research and have locations such as bulletin boards and school newspapers where research can be advertised. Unfortunately, young children cannot be recruited by making announcements in Introduction to Psychology courses, by posting ads on campuses, or through online platforms such as  Amazon Mechanical Turk . Given these limitations, how do researchers go about finding infants and young children to be in their studies?

The answer to this question varies along multiple dimensions. Researchers must consider the number of participants they need and the financial resources available to them, among other things. Location may also be an important consideration. Researchers who need large numbers of infants and children may attempt to do so by obtaining infant birth records from the state, county, or province in which they reside. Some areas make this information publicly available for free, whereas birth records must be purchased in other areas (and in some locations birth records may be entirely unavailable as a recruitment tool). If birth records are available, researchers can use the obtained information to call families by phone or mail them letters describing possible research opportunities. All is not lost if this recruitment strategy is unavailable, however. Researchers can choose to pay a recruitment agency to contact and recruit families for them. Although these methods tend to be quick and effective, they can also be quite expensive. More economical recruitment options include posting advertisements and fliers in locations frequented by families, such as mommy-and-me classes, local malls, and preschools or day care centers. Researchers can also utilize online social media outlets like Facebook, which allows users to post recruitment advertisements for a small fee. Of course, each of these different recruitment techniques requires IRB approval.

Another important consideration when conducting research with infants and young children is attrition . Although attrition is quite common in longitudinal research in particular, it is also problematic in developmental science more generally, as studies with infants and young children tend to have higher attrition rates than studies with adults. For example, high attrition rates in ERP studies oftentimes result from the demands of the task: infants are required to sit still and have a tight, wet cap placed on their heads before watching still photographs on a computer screen in a dark, quiet room. In other cases, attrition may be due to motivation (or a lack thereof). Whereas adults may be motivated to participate in research in order to receive money or extra course credit, infants and young children are not as easily enticed. In addition, infants and young children are more likely to tire easily, become fussy, and lose interest in the study procedures than are adults. For these reasons, research studies should be designed to be as short as possible – it is likely better to break up a large study into multiple short sessions rather than cram all of the tasks into one long visit to the lab. Researchers should also allow time for breaks in their study protocols so that infants can rest or have snacks as needed. Happy, comfortable participants provide the best data.

Conclusions

Child development is a fascinating field of study – but care must be taken to ensure that researchers use appropriate methods to examine infant and child behavior, use the correct experimental design to answer their questions, and be aware of the special challenges that are part-and-parcel of developmental research. After reading this module, you should have a solid understanding of these various issues and be ready to think more critically about research questions that interest you. For example, when considering our initial example of hide-and-seek behaviors in preschoolers, you might ask questions about what other factors might contribute to hiding behaviors in children. Do children with older siblings hide in locations that were previously searched less often than children without siblings? What other abilities are associated with the development of hiding skills? Do children who use more sophisticated hiding strategies as preschoolers do better on other tests of cognitive functioning in high school? Many interesting questions remain to be examined by future generations of developmental scientists – maybe you will make one of the next big discoveries!

Discussion Questions

• Why is it important to conduct research on infants and children?
• What are some possible benefits and limitations of the various research methods discussed in this module?
• Why is it important to examine cohort effects in developmental research?
• Think about additional challenges or unique issues that might be experienced by developmental scientists. How would they handle the challenges and issues you’ve addressed?
• Work with your peers to design a study to identify whether children who were good hiders as preschoolers are more cognitively advanced in high school. What research design would you use and why? What are the advantages and limitations of the design you selected?

Achenbach, T. M., & Rescorla, L. A. (2000). Manual for the ASEBA preschool forms and profiles: An integrated system of multi-informant assessment. Burlington, VT: University of Vermont Department of Psychiatry.

Baillargeon, R. (1987). Object permanence in 3½- and 4½-month-old infants. Developmental Psychology, 23, 655-664. doi: 10.1037/0012-1649.23.5.655

Baillargeon, R., Spelke, E., & Wasserman, S. (1985). Object permanence in five-month-old infants. Cognition, 20, 191-208. doi: 10.1016/0010-0277(85)90008-3

Barr, R., Dowden, A., & Hayne, H. (1996). Developmental changes in deferred imitation by 6- to 24-month-old infants. Infant Behavior and Development, 19 , 159-170. doi: 10.1016/s0163-6383(96)90015-6

Bauer, P. J., Wenner, J. A., Dropik, P. L., & Wewerka, S. S. (2000). Parameters of remembering and forgetting in the transition from infancy to early childhood. Monographs of the Society for Research in Child Development, 65 , 1-204. doi: 10.1016/j.imlet.2014.04.001

Bauer, P. J., Wiebe, S. A., Carver, L. J., Waters, J. M., & Nelson, C. A. (2003). Developments in long-term explicit memory late in the first year of life: Behavioral and electrophysiological indices. Psychological Science, 14 , 629-635. doi: 10.1046/j.0956-7976.2003.psci_1476.x

Bauer, P. J., Wiebe, S. A., Waters, J. M., & Bangston, S. K. (2001). Reexposure breeds recall: Effects of experience on 9-month-olds’ ordered recall. Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, 80 , 174-200. doi: 10.1006/jecp.2000.2628

Bentin, S., Allison, T., Puce, A., Perez, E., & McCarthy, G. (2010). Electrophysiological studies of face perception in humans. Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience , 8, 551-565. doi: 10.1162/jocn.1996.8.6.551

Carver, L. J., & Bauer, P. J. (1999). When the event is more than the sum of its parts: 9-month-olds’ long-term ordered recall. Memory, 7 , 147-174. doi: 10.1080/741944070

Cashon, C. H., & Cohen, L. B. (2000). Eight-month-old infants’ perception of possible and impossible events. Infancy, 1 , 429-446. doi: 10.1016/s0163-6383(98)91561-2

Collie, R., & Hayne, H. (1999). Deferred imitation by 6- and 9-month-old infants: More evidence for declarative memory. Developmental Psychobiology, 35 , 83-90. doi: 10.1002/(sici)1098-2302(199909)35:2<83::aid-dev1>3.0.co;2-s

DeBoer, T., Scott, L. S., & Nelson, C. A. (2005). ERPs in developmental populations. In T. C. Handy (Ed.), Event-related potentials: A methods handbook (pp. 263-297) . Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.

Lukowski, A. F., & Milojevich, H. M. (2016). Examining recall memory in infancy and early childhood using the elicited imitation paradigm. Journal of Visualized Experiments, 110 , e53347.

Lukowski, A. F., Koss, M., Burden, M. J., Jonides, J., Nelson, C. A., Kaciroti, N., … Lozoff, B. (2010). Iron deficiency in infancy and neurocognitive functioning at 19 years: Evidence of long-term deficits in executive function and recognition memory. Nutritional Neuroscience, 13 , 54-70. doi: 10.1179/147683010×12611460763689

Ronald, A., Pennell, C. E., & Whitehouse, A. J. O. (2011). Prenatal maternal stress associated with ADHD and autistic traits in early childhood. Frontiers in Psychology, 1 , 1-8. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2010.00223

Walrath, R. (2011). Kohlberg’s theory of moral development. In Encyclopedia of Child Behavior and Development (pp. 859–860).

Webb, S. J., Dawson, G., Bernier, R., & Panagiotides, H. (2006). ERP evidence of atypical face processing in young children with autism. Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders, 36 , 884-890. doi: 10.1007/s10803-006-0126-x

Wiebe, S. A., Lukowski, A. F., & Bauer, P. J. (2010). Sequence imitation and reaching measures of executive control: A longitudinal examination in the second year of life. Developmental Neuropsychology, 35 , 522-538. doi: 10.1080/87565641.2010.494751

attribution

Research Methods in Developmental Psychology by Angela Lukowski and Helen Milojevich is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

Behaviors in which individuals engage that do not require much conscious thought or effort.

Behaviors that a person has control over and completes by choice.

Recording of biological measures (such as heart rate and hormone levels) and neurological responses (such as brain activity) that may be associated with observable behaviors.

A research method in which participants are asked to report on their experiences using language, commonly by engaging in conversation with a researcher (participants may also be asked to record their responses in writing).

The use of thinking to direct muscles and limbs to perform a desired action.

When participants demonstrated decreased attention (through looking or listening behavior) to repeatedly-presented stimuli.

When participants demonstrated increased attention (through looking or listening behavior) to a new stimulus after having been habituated to a different stimulus.

The understanding that objects continue to exist even when they cannot be directly observed (e.g., that a pen continues to exist even when it is hidden under a piece of paper).

A research method in which infants are expected to respond in a particular way because one of two conditions violates or goes against what they should expect based on their everyday experiences (e.g., it violates our expectations that Wile E. Coyote runs off a cliff but does not immediately fall to the ground below).

The idea that two solid masses should not be able to move through one another.

The process of remembering discrete episodes or events from the past, including encoding, consolidation and storage, and retrieval.

A behavioral method used to examine recall memory in infants and young children.

When one variable is likely both cause and consequence of another variable.

The recording of participant brain activity using a stretchy cap with small electrodes or sensors as participants engage in a particular task (commonly viewing photographs or listening to auditory stimuli).

Research methods that require participants to report on their experiences, thoughts, feelings, etc., using language.

A short story that presents a situation that participants are asked to respond to.

The specific tools and techniques used by researchers to collect information.

The strategy (or “blueprint”) for deciding how to collect and analyze research information.

A research design used to examine behavior in the same participants over short (months) or long (decades) periods of time.

A research design used to examine behavior in participants of different ages who are tested at the same point in time.

When a participant drops out, or fails to complete, all parts of a study.

When participants get better at a task over time by “practicing” it through repeated assessments instead of due to actual developmental change (practice effects can be particularly problematic in longitudinal and sequential research designs).

When research findings differ for participants of the same age tested at different points in historical time.

A research design that includes elements of cross-sectional and longitudinal research designs. Similar to cross-sectional designs, sequential research designs include participants of different ages within one study; similar to longitudinal designs, participants of different ages are followed over time.

A committee that reviews and approves research procedures involving human participants and animal subjects to ensure that the research is conducted in accordance with federal, institutional, and ethical guidelines.

The process of getting permission from adults for themselves and their children to take part in research.

When minor participants are asked to indicate their willingness to participate in a study. This is usually obtained from participants who are at least 7 years old, in addition to parent or guardian consent.

Research Methods in Developmental Psychology Copyright © by Angela Lukowski and Helen Milojevich is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License , except where otherwise noted.

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The Autism Self-Harm Connection

How self-harm relates to autism and what we can do about it..

Updated April 22, 2024 | Reviewed by Devon Frye

• What Is Self-Harm?
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• Self-harm affects around 33 percent of autistic individuals.
• Headbanging, scratching, and biting are most common.
• Low self-worth, impulsivity, and depression may predict self-harm in autistic individuals.
• Autistic people tend to have lower self-esteem than neurotypical controls, possibly due to systemic barriers

My first introduction to self-harm in autism was with headbanging. While headbanging is a relatively uncommon version of self-harm in the general population, for autistic individuals, headbanging is much more common; in one study, it represented the most prominent form of self-injury in a sample of autistic youth (Akram et al., 2017).

I had associated headbanging with intellectual disability, yet as a therapist with some specialty in neurodivergence, I have been surprised by the number of autistic folks I have met without an intellectual disability who engage in this kind of self-harm. I wanted to learn more.

Self-Harm in Autism

There is the old trope of a person who reaches a breaking point, snaps, and bashes their head. Sitcoms have pointed fun at this for ages. Yet while overwhelm does appear to play a role in self-harm within autism, when met with the shame and fear of those who engage in behavior, it becomes anything but a joke.

Headbanging can be a dangerous form of self-harm. In addition, many report feeling out of control during these times. It can be scary for all involved.

Self-harm is common in autism, and while estimates of its prevalence vary, studies have indicated that the problem may affect as many as 24 percent (License et al., 2020) to 33 percent of samples (Akram et al., 2017). Low mood and impulsivity have been noted as risk factors for self-harm in at least one autistic sample (License et al., 2020).

In my experience, the patterns of self-harm in autism often differ from how they show up in neurotypicals. In autism, overwhelm, mindstorms (meltdowns), and fatalistic thinking tend to be engaged when self-harm is present. The stress of neurotypical demands, social isolation , sensory overload, and perfectionism can create a perfect storm for overwhelm.

When met with negative self-beliefs—often formed by living in a world set up for neurotypical people—grounds are ripe for self-harm. Research shows that autistic people often carry lower levels of self-esteem and sense of power in their lives than neurotypical controls (Nguyen et al., 2020).

Tragically, this sometimes reaches a level of self-hatred . Repeated interpersonal traumas such as lack of acceptance, pushing away sensory needs, isolation, exclusion, and the need to mask can worsen this already low self-worth while creating extreme, negative beliefs about one's self. When these beliefs are triggered in situations of imperfection, coping can be exceptionally hard. The person may resort to old stories they have told themselves of not being good enough, not belonging, and that this will never change.

Lastly, during these storms, there tends to be a fatalistic quality. It can feel like everything is bad and always will be. The level of upset becomes intense, leading someone to wish for immediate relief. Unfortunately, some find that relief in self-harm.

Emotion Leak

In radically-open DBT (RO-DBT) there is a dialectic balance between under-control and over-control. Under-control involves impulsivity and a dramatic/erratic presentation. Over-control, on the other hand, involves a lot of hypervigilance, black/white (rule-governed) thinking, strong conscientiousness , and control over self.

The person might not come across as openly suffering at first, but inside, the story could be completely different. Overcontrolled individuals have high rates of suicide (Omalan and Lynch, 2018). RO-DBT characterizes most autistics as overcontrolled (Lynch, 2020).

While stereotypically, self-harm has been associated with styles of under-control, such as that often exhibited in borderline personality disorder , RO-DBT points out that self-harm is also common in over-control. For people with a style of over-control, self-harm might represent what RO-DBT calls an " emotion leak," a space wherein after pushing away significant emotion and trying to control everything, the walls break down. Emotion leaks might describe why some autistics may be more apt to self-harm behaviors such as headbanging at the moment as opposed to ones that require gathering tools like cutting.

Still, it should be noted that many autistic people do engage in more traditional forms of self-harm as well. In RO-DBT, it is noted that overcontrolled individuals may be less likely to disclose their self-harm and often take steps to hide it, showing the compounded shame that self-harm can ignite.

Autism, Social Exclusion, and Self-Harm

Loneliness is also a common experience for autistic individuals, which strongly affects mental health. A study of 71 autistic adults found that loneliness was associated with both depression and self-harm (Hedley et al., 2018).

Another qualitative study of autistic adults found that while receiving quality mental health care led to positive outcomes, focus groups indicated that accessing such care was often difficult. They also cited a lack of understanding among mental health professionals of autism-specific needs (Camm-Crosbie et al., 2019).

Navigating a world set up for neurotypical brains creates specific needs for autistic clients in mental health treatment. Yet mental health interventions are not always naturally neurodiversity -affirming.

For example, when a neurotypical client avoids eye contact in a session, this may be an indication of anxiety or withdrawal that prompts a therapist to inquire further. On the contrary, many autistic individuals find it easier to focus when not making eye contact; the same may require nothing more from the therapist than to accept the communication difference without demanding eye contact. This is why there is a strong need for neurodiversity-affirming care.

What Can We Do?

Addressing self-harm in autism is tricky and may involve multiple layers. Most critically, when individuals' needs are heard, and they feel safe to be themselves, self-esteem rises, and the level of risk decreases. Such trends emphasize the need for intervention on a community level through education .

Increasing acceptance of autism and creating communities that are more friendly to the needs of autistic people may help to combat isolation and create spaces of safety. Celebration of neurodiversity to improve the inclusion of neurodivergent people and provision of support in job and education settings to decrease overwhelming demands while giving individuals a chance to show their best in the workplace/school are relevant steps.

Additional prevention measures may include improving access to quality and neurodiversity-affirming autism assessments earlier. While autism onsets close to birth, many do not receive the diagnosis until late childhood , adolescence , or adulthood.

Without the diagnosis of "autism," many youth experience misunderstanding, and exclusion. The weight of neurotypical expectations and pressure to mask can press harder. A study of 396 autistic children found that youth who received an autism diagnosis after the age of 11 were significantly more likely to engage in self-harm (Hosozawa et al., 2021).

Still, psychological assessments traditionally used to diagnose autism are not always covered by health insurance, making access difficult for families without significant means. Even when assessments are accessible, assessment and diagnosis are not always neurodiversity-affirming or precise, particularly for women and those without a comorbid intellectual disability.

For autistic individuals who are engaged in self-harm, there may be an immediate need to readjust stresses and for advocacy. Psychotherapy can also help. Research has shown promising results for the use of dialectical behavioral therapy in autistic individuals struggling with self-harm (Phillips et al., 2024). Approaches such as RO-DBT, which address the fatalistic mind states that often underlie self-harm in autism; acceptance and commitment therapy, which assists with navigating intense emotional states while moving toward one's goals ; and/or approaches bent toward self-compassion are just a few that may be effective.

Self-harm is common in autism, but it doesn't have to be. By addressing the systemic problems that lead to self-harm while also providing necessary mental health support, we can address this under-discussed challenge.

Akram, B., Batool, M., Rafi, Z., & Akram, A. (2017). Prevalence and predictors of non-suicidal self-injury among children with autism spectrum disorder. Pakistan Journal of Medical Sciences , 33 (5), 1225.

Camm-Crosbie, L., Bradley, L., Shaw, R., Baron-Cohen, S., & Cassidy, S. (2019). ‘People like me don’t get support’: Autistic adults’ experiences of support and treatment for mental health difficulties, self-injury and suicidality. Autism , 23 (6), 1431-1441.

Hedley, D., Uljarević, M., Wilmot, M., Richdale, A., & Dissanayake, C. (2018). Understanding depression and thoughts of self-harm in autism: A potential mechanism involving loneliness. Research in Autism Spectrum Disorders , 46 , 1-7.

Hosozawa, M., Sacker, A., & Cable, N. (2021). Timing of diagnosis, depression and self-harm in adolescents with autism spectrum disorder. Autism , 25 (1), 70-78.

Licence, L., Oliver, C., Moss, J., & Richards, C. (2020). Prevalence and risk-markers of self-harm in autistic children and adults. Journal of autism and developmental disorders , 50 (10), 3561-3574.

Lynch, T. (2020). Radically Open Dialectical Behavioral Therapy: Theory and Practice for Treating Disorders of Overcontrol. New Harbinger

Nguyen, W., Ownsworth, T., Nicol, C., & Zimmerman, D. (2020). How I see and feel about myself: Domain-specific self-concept and self-esteem in autistic adults. Frontiers in Psychology , 11 , 913.

O’Mahen, H., & Lynch, T. R. (2018). How to differentiate overcontrol from undercontrol: findings from the RefraMED study and guidelines from clinical practice. RADICALLY OPEN , 41 (3), 132.

Phillips, M. D., Parham, R., Hunt, K., & Camp, J. (2024). Dialectical behaviour therapy outcomes for adolescents with autism spectrum conditions compared to those without: findings from a seven-year service evaluation. Advances in Autism .

Jennifer Gerlach, LCSW, is a psychotherapist based in Southern Illinois who specializes in psychosis, mood disorders, and young adult mental health.

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Research assistant position @ unc chapel hill, chapel hill nc.

The Carolina Institute for Developmental Disabilities (CIDD) is one of the largest programs for developmental disabilities in the country and is UNC-Chapel Hill’s primary source for treatment, education, and research on developmental disabilities. In addition, CIDD provides important, state-of-the-art resources aimed at supporting individuals with developmental disabilities and their families in the state of North Carolina and promotes research on the pathogenesis and treatment of these conditions. The CIDD employs approximately 100 faculty, staff and students and has funding comprised of state, contract and grant, overhead, gift, foundation and receipt generated sources. This will assist with several research projects at the CIDD of UNC School of Medicine, including assisting with recruitment, scheduling, acquiring MRIs in babies in the evening, and assisting with other data collection as needed. The position will require coordination with various researchers and research coordinators here at UNC as well as with research families, in order to achieve project goals in an effective manner. As such, the person filling this position will need to have excellent communication skills and bedside manner with families and child participants, including babies. This position will report to Dr. Mark Shen.

Responsibilities:

• Recruitment and scheduling of young children with developmental disabilities and their families.
• Assisting with MRI scan process: Attend MRI scans in the evening, prepare the MRI suite, meet the family and complete necessary paperwork, assist with getting the subject prepared for the scanner, supply families with any needed training materials for their scan, stay through the completion of the scan to transfer data if needed, and any necessary follow-up (e.g., rescheduling).
• Assisting with other data collection: Assist PI and study team with collecting information for research projects. This involves interviews, either on the phone or in person, with families to guide their entry into projects as well as for general project data collection. Assist with bio sample data collection as needed.

Qualifications:

Required Qualifications

• Bachelor’s degree; or equivalent combination of training and experience. All degrees must be received from appropriately accredited institutions.
• The candidate should have excellent verbal and written communication skills.
• Ability to learn quickly, work independently and efficiently with minimal supervision, prioritize tasks, and work under deadline pressure.
• High level of accuracy and attention to detail.
• Strong computer skills.
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What federal education data shows about students with disabilities in the U.S.

Public K-12 schools in the United States educate about 7.3 million students with disabilities – a number that has grown over the last few decades. Disabled students ages 3 to 21 are served under the federal  Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA) , which guarantees them the right to free public education and appropriate special education services.

For Disability Pride Month , here are some key facts about public school students with disabilities, based on the latest data from the  National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) .

July is both Disability Pride Month and the anniversary of the Americans with Disabilities Act. To mark these occasions, Pew Research Center used federal education data from  the National Center for Education Statistics  to learn more about students who receive special education services in U.S. public schools.

In this analysis, students with disabilities include those ages 3 to 21 who are served under the federal  Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA) . Through IDEA, children with disabilities are guaranteed a “free appropriate public education,” including special education and related services.

The 7.3 million disabled students in the U.S. made up 15% of national public school enrollment during the 2021-22 school year. The population of students in prekindergarten through 12th grade who are served under IDEA has grown in both number and share over the last few decades. During the 2010-11 school year, for instance, there were 6.4 million students with disabilities in U.S. public schools, accounting for 13% of enrollment.

The number of students receiving special education services temporarily dropped during the coronavirus pandemic – the first decline in a decade. Between the 2019-20 and 2020-21 school years, the number of students receiving special education services decreased by 1%, from 7.3 million to 7.2 million. This was the first year-over-year drop in special education enrollment since 2011-12.

The decline in students receiving special education services was part of a 3% decline in the overall number of students enrolled in public schools between 2019-20 and 2020-21. While special education enrollment bounced back to pre-pandemic levels in the 2021-22 school year, overall public school enrollment remained flat.

These enrollment trends may reflect some of the learning difficulties and health concerns students with disabilities and their families faced during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic , which limited or paused special education services in many school districts.

Many school districts struggle to hire special education professionals. During the 2020-21 school year, 40% of public schools that had a special education teaching vacancy reported that they either found it very difficult to fill the position or were not able to do so.

Foreign languages (43%) and physical sciences (37%) were the only subjects with similarly large shares of hard-to-fill teaching vacancies at public schools that were looking to hire in those fields.

While the COVID-19 pandemic called attention to a nationwide teacher shortage , special education positions have long been among the most difficult for school districts to fill .

The most common type of disability for students in prekindergarten through 12th grade involves “specific learning disabilities,” such as dyslexia.  In 2021-22, about a third of students (32%) receiving services under IDEA had a specific learning disability. Some 19% had a speech or language impairment, while 15% had a chronic or acute health problem that adversely affected their educational performance. Chronic or acute health problems include ailments such as heart conditions, asthma, sickle cell anemia, epilepsy, leukemia and diabetes.

Students with autism made up 12% of the nation’s schoolchildren with disabilities in 2021-22, compared with 1.5% in 2000-01.  During those two decades, the share of disabled students with a specific learning disability, such as dyslexia, declined from 45% to 32%.

The percentage of students receiving special education services varies widely across states. New York serves the largest share of disabled students in the country at 20.5% of its overall public school enrollment. Pennsylvania (20.2%), Maine (20.1%) and Massachusetts (19.3%) serve the next-largest shares. The states serving the lowest shares of disabled students include Texas and Idaho (both 11.7%) and Hawaii (11.3%).

Between the 2000-01 and 2021-22 school years, all but 12 states experienced growth in their disabled student populations. The biggest increase occurred in Utah, where the disabled student population rose by 65%. Rhode Island saw the largest decline of 22%.

These differences by state are likely the result of inconsistencies in how states determine which students are eligible for special education services and challenges in identifying disabled children.

The racial and ethnic makeup of the nation’s special education students is similar to public school students overall, but there are differences by sex.  About two-thirds of disabled students (65%) are male, while 34% are female, according to data from the 2021-22 school year. Overall student enrollment is about evenly split between boys and girls.

Research has shown that decisions about whether to recommend a student for special education may be influenced by their school’s socioeconomic makeup, as well as by the school’s test scores and other academic markers.

Note: This is an update of a post originally published April 23, 2020.

About 1 in 4 U.S. teachers say their school went into a gun-related lockdown in the last school year

About half of americans say public k-12 education is going in the wrong direction, what public k-12 teachers want americans to know about teaching, what’s it like to be a teacher in america today, race and lgbtq issues in k-12 schools, most popular.

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6 Common Leadership Styles — and How to Decide Which to Use When

• Rebecca Knight

Being a great leader means recognizing that different circumstances call for different approaches.

Research suggests that the most effective leaders adapt their style to different circumstances — be it a change in setting, a shift in organizational dynamics, or a turn in the business cycle. But what if you feel like you’re not equipped to take on a new and different leadership style — let alone more than one? In this article, the author outlines the six leadership styles Daniel Goleman first introduced in his 2000 HBR article, “Leadership That Gets Results,” and explains when to use each one. The good news is that personality is not destiny. Even if you’re naturally introverted or you tend to be driven by data and analysis rather than emotion, you can still learn how to adapt different leadership styles to organize, motivate, and direct your team.

Much has been written about common leadership styles and how to identify the right style for you, whether it’s transactional or transformational, bureaucratic or laissez-faire. But according to Daniel Goleman, a psychologist best known for his work on emotional intelligence, “Being a great leader means recognizing that different circumstances may call for different approaches.”

• RK Rebecca Knight is a journalist who writes about all things related to the changing nature of careers and the workplace. Her essays and reported stories have been featured in The Boston Globe, Business Insider, The New York Times, BBC, and The Christian Science Monitor. She was shortlisted as a Reuters Institute Fellow at Oxford University in 2023. Earlier in her career, she spent a decade as an editor and reporter at the Financial Times in New York, London, and Boston.

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Key protein regulates immune response to viruses in mammal cells

Researchers have revealed the regulatory mechanism of a specific protein that plays a key role in balancing the immune response triggered by viral infections in mammal cells. These findings could help drive the development of antiviral therapies and nucleic acid medicines to treat genetic disorders.

For cells to protect themselves from viral infections, a series of immune responses typically occur, including programmed cell death called apoptosis and interferon signaling. While apoptosis is a normal process, which occurs with or without the presence of viral molecules, following a cascade of steps to end with the death of a cell -- which might not sound advantageous to the host -- it can help prevent the reproduction of abnormal cells, including those infected by viruses, and eliminate them from the body. Interferons, on the other hand, are proteins produced by animal cells in response to a viral infection to protect the cell against viral attacks and prevent the virus from replicating. The regulatory mechanism of how cells maintain a balance between apoptosis and interferon response to efficiently suppress viral replication during infection, however, remained unclear.

In the current study, a team including researchers from the University of Tokyo focused on a specific protein, TRBP, which is also classified as a type of protein called an RNA silencing factor.

RNA is a nucleic acid, an organic compound found in living cells and viruses, which controls protein synthesis and the genetic makeup of many viruses. RNA synthesizes proteins through a process known as translation, by reading genetic sequences and translating them into instructions for the cells to create proteins, which are mostly responsible for the overall structure and function of the organism, whether it's a plant or animal.

RNA silencing, also known as RNA interference, is a way that plants and invertebrate animals can protect themselves from viruses by cleaving viral RNA to repress viral replication.

"This study provides a significant insight that clearly revealed the protein related to the RNA silencing mechanism, which is known to be an antiviral mechanism in a plant or invertebrate, is strongly related to antiviral response also in mammals by another mechanism," said co-author Tomoko Takahashi, a visiting researcher at the University of Tokyo and assistant professor at Saitama University in Japan.

Though it is widely understood that RNA silencing is a mechanism that operates under normal conditions to control gene expression (if the gene is "turned on" to provide instructions for the cell to assemble the specific protein it encodes), it's still unclear how this process occurs under the stress of viral infection.

So the researchers looked at TRBP (an abbreviation for TAR RNA-binding protein), which has shown a significant role in RNA silencing during a viral infection.

This protein interacts with a virus sensor protein early on in the phases of infection in human cells. In the later stages of viral infection, proteins called caspases are activated, and this type of protein is chiefly responsible for triggering cell death.

"RNA silencing and interferon signaling were previously considered as independent pathways, but multiple reports, including ours, have demonstrated crosstalk between them," said Kumiko Ui-Tei, another co-author and associate professor from the University of Tokyo (at the time of the study).

This functional conversion of TRBP triggered by viral infection is the basis of regulating interferon response and apoptosis, with TRBP irreversibly increasing the programmed cell death of infected cells, while reducing interferon signaling. TRBP works on the cell by inducing cell death, stopping the viral replication entirely, in contrast to the interferon response pathway, which just subdues viral replication instead of eliminating the infected cells.

"The ultimate goal is understanding the molecular mechanism underlying the antiviral defense system, orchestrated through the interplay between internal and external RNA pathways in human cells," said Takahashi.

By gaining a deeper understanding of how defenses against viruses work on a molecular level, the researchers aim to drive the development of nucleic acid medicines. These medicines utilize targeting and inhibition approaches similar to the antiviral response of RNA silencing, and they hold promise of being increasingly useful in treating a wider range of patients afflicted with viral infections, genetic mutations and genetic defects.

This study was conducted in collaboration with Saitama University, Chiba University, Kyoto University and Maebashi Institute of Technology in Japan.

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Materials provided by University of Tokyo . Note: Content may be edited for style and length.

Journal Reference :

• Keiko Shibata, Harune Moriizumi, Koji Onomoto, Yuka Kaneko, Takuya Miyakawa, Shuhei Zenno, Masaru Tanokura, Mitsutoshi Yoneyama, Tomoko Takahashi, Kumiko Ui-Tei. Caspase-mediated processing of TRBP regulates apoptosis during viral infection . Nucleic Acids Research , 2024; DOI: 10.1093/nar/gkae246

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