Lifespan Development

Module 2: Developmental Theories

 Why It Matters
• Attitudes towards children have evolved over time along with
economic change and social advancement

• Major theoretical perspective emphasize different aspects of

development

• Theories of development provide a framework for thinking about

human growth, development, and learning

• If you have ever wondered about what motivates human thought

and behavior, understanding these theories can provide useful
insight into individuals and society
 Module Learning Outcomes
Describe the major developmental theories in lifespan development

2.1: Use psychodynamic theories (like those from Freud and

Erikson) to explain development
2.2: Explain key principles of behaviorism and cognitive
psychology
2.3: Describe the humanistic, contextual, and evolutionary
perspectives of development
Psychodynamic Theories
 Learning Outcomes:
Psychodynamic Theories
2.1: Use Psychodynamic Theories to Explain Development

2.1.1: Describe theories as they relate to lifespan development

2.1.2: Describe the historical foundations leading to the

development of theories about lifespan development

2.1.3: Describe Freud's theory of psychosexual development

2.1.4: Describe Erikson's eight stages of psychosocial development

 Key Concepts in the
Scientific Approach
• Theory: a well-developed set
of ideas that propose an
explanation for behavior and
events that is used to make
predictions about future
observations

• Hypothesis: a testable
prediction that is arrived at
logically from a theory, often
worded as an if-then
statement
Areas of Disagreement among Theorists
• Three key issues remain among which developmental theorists
often disagree
• Passive versus active: the role of early experiences on later
development versus current behavior reflecting present
experiences
• Continuity versus discontinuity: whether or not development is
best viewed as occurring in stages or as a gradual and
cumulative process of change
• The nature/nurture debate: the role of heredity and the
environment in shaping human development
History of Developmental Psychology
• The scientific study of children began in the late nineteenth
century, and blossomed in the early twentieth century

• Three early scholars:

• John Locke: proposed that the mind of the newborn as a tabula
rasa (“blank slate”) on which knowledge is written through
experience and learning
• Jean-Jacques Rousseau: proposed that development occurs
according to innate processes and progresses through three
stages: infancy, childhood, and adolescence
• Charles Darwin: known for his theory of evolution
 Early Scholars in
Developmental Psychology
• G. Stanley Hall: established scientific journals for publishing child
development research, first president of the American
Psychological Association
• James Mark Baldwin: conducted quantitative and experimental
research on infant development
• John B. Watson: founder of the field of behaviorism
• Sigmund Freud: psychoanalytic approach and model of
psychosexual development
• Arnold Gesell: conducted the first large-scale study of children’s
behavior that revealed consistent patterns of development
focused on biological “maturation”
• Jean Piaget: stage theory of cognitive development
 Freud’s Psychodynamic Perspective
• Dominated the field of psychiatry until the
growth of behaviorism in the 1930s
• Proposed that personality forms during the first
few years of life
• Proposed that the ways in which parents or
other caregivers interact with children have a
long-lasting impact on children’s emotions,
behavior, and personality
• Suggested the first purely psychological
explanation for physical problems and mental
illness
• Proposed that unconscious motives, desires,
fears, and anxieties drive our actions
 Freud’s Theory of Personality
● Three parts to adult personality:
○ Id: includes our instincts and drives,
wants immediate gratification, the
pleasure principle (something is judged
good or bad depending on whether it
feels good or bad)
○ Ego: develops during the first three
years of life, the rational part of our
personality, the reality principle (helps
the id satisfy its desires in a realistic
way), considered the self
○ Superego: emerges around age five,
rule-based, acts as our conscience
● A strong ego to balance the id and
superego -> healthy personality
● Imbalances -> neurosis or a tendency to
experience negative emotions
 Freud’s Theory of Psychosexual
Development
• If we do not have the proper nurturing and parenting during a stage,
we will be stuck, or fixated, in that stage, even as adults

• In each stage, the child’s pleasure-seeking urges, coming from the id,
are focused on a different area of the body, called an erogenous
zone
Stages of Psychosexual Development
• Oral Stage
• Infant meets needs for comfort, warmth, food, and stimulation
primarily through immediate oral gratification

• Psychologically, the infant is all id

• If the caregiver meets oral needs consistently, the child will move
away from this stage and progress further

• Inconsistent or neglectful caregiving can lead to the child

becoming fixated in the oral stage and as an adult this person may
engage in eating, drinking, smoking, nail-biting, or compulsive
talking to feel comfort when afraid or insecure
 Stages of Psychosexual Development
• Anal Stage
• The ego is being developed
• Associated with toddlerhood and potty-training
• The child is learning self-control and taught that some urges must be
contained and some actions postponed

• Fixation at this stage

• Anal retentive (fear of letting go) as a result of overly controlling
caregiving; the person might be extremely neat and clean,
organized, reliable, and controlling of others
• Anal expulsive as a result of the caregiver neglecting to teach
the child to control urges; the person might become an adult
who is messy, irresponsible, and disorganized
Stages of Psychosexual Development
• Phallic Stage
• preschool years (ages 3-5)
• Oedipus complex: refers to a child’s unconscious sexual desire for
the opposite-sex parent and hatred for the same-sex parent
• Castration anxiety: Freud believed that the boy fears that if he
pursues his mother, his father may castrate him
• Electra complex: refers to a girl’s unconscious attraction for her
father, followed by realizing she cannot compete with her mother,
so she gives up that affection and learns to be more like her mother
• Penis envy: Freud believed that the girl feels inferior because she
does not have a penis
• The formation of the superego occurs during the dissolution of the
Oedipus and Electra complexes
Stages of Psychosexual Development
• Latency Stage
• Associated with middle childhood (6-11)

• Attention focused on family and friendships, the biological drives

are temporarily quieted (latent)

• If the child is able to make friends, they will gain a sense of

confidence

• If not, the child may continue to be a loner or shy away from others,
even as an adult
Stages of Psychosexual Development
Genital Stage
• Associated with adolescence throughout adulthood

• A person is preoccupied with sex and reproduction

• The adolescent experiences rising hormone levels and the sex drive
and hunger drives become very strong

• Ideally, according to Freud, the ego is strengthened during this

stage and the adolescent uses reason to manage urges
 Practice Question 1
According to Sigmund Freud’s theory, a person’s problematic
behavior is based on _______.

A.being stuck in the developmental task of trust vs. mistrust

B.unconscious motives, fears, and anxieties
C.observational learning without consequences
D.a classically conditioned response
 Practice Question 2
According to Sigmund Freud’s theory, an infant smiles because
something feels good and cries because something feels bad
because of the _______.

A.Oedipus complex
B.Electra complex
C.reality principle
D.pleasure principle
 Defense Mechanisms
• Denial: not accepting the truth or lying to oneself
• Displacement: taking out frustrations on a safer target
• Projection: attributing unacceptable thoughts to others
• Rationalization: involves a cognitive distortion of “the facts” to make an
event or an impulse less threatening
• Reaction formation: outwardly opposing something you inwardly
desire, but that you find unacceptable
• Regression: going back to a time when the world felt like a safer place,
perhaps reverting to one’s childhood behaviors
• Repression: pushing painful thoughts out of consciousness (in other
words, thinking about something else)
• Sublimation: transforming unacceptable urges into more socially
acceptable behaviors
 Class Activity:
Defense Mechanisms in Everyday Life
1. Get into groups of 3 or 4

2. Identify and share examples of defense mechanisms you observe

being used in everyday life. These examples could come from TV
shows, movies, or your own experience

3. Identify the purpose that the identified defense mechanisms serve

4. Identify how the use of the defense mechanisms might contribute

to more problems (e.g., in thinking, feeling, and relationships)
 Assessing the Psychodynamic
Perspective
• During Freud’s era in Vienna at the turn of the 20th century, there
was a climate of sexual repression, combined with limited
understanding and education surrounding human sexuality, which
heavily influenced Freud’s perspective
• Criticisms:
• Very difficult to test scientifically
• Freud’s theory is considered to be sexist
• Freud suggested that much of what determines our actions is
unknown to us (or unconscious)
• Despite the criticisms, Freud’s assumptions about the importance of
early childhood experiences in shaping our psychological selves
have found their way into child development, education, and
parenting practices
 Erikson’s Psychosocial Theory
• Erikson, as a student of Freud’s, expanded Freud’s theory of
psychosexual development by emphasizing the importance of culture
in parenting practices and motivations and adding three stages of
adult development
• Contrasts with Freud:
• Erikson proposed that an individual’s personality develops
throughout the lifespan, which is a departure from Freud’s view that
personality is fixed in early life
• Erikson emphasized the social relationships that are important at
each stage of personality development, in contrast to Freud’s
emphasis on erogenous zones
• Erikson identified eight stages, each of which includes a conflict or
developmental task.
• The development of a healthy personality and a sense of competence
depend on the successful completion of each task
 Psychosocial Stages of Development
Major psychosocial tasks to accomplish or crises to overcome (with
defining virtues in parentheses)
• Trust vs. Mistrust (Hope): From birth to 12 months of age, infants must
learn that adults can be trusted
• Autonomy vs. Shame (Will): Toddlers (ages 1–3 years) explore their
world and learn that they can control their actions and act on their
environment to get results
• Initiative vs. Guilt (Purpose): Preschoolers (ages 3–6 years) are capable
of initiating activities and asserting control over their world through
social interactions and play
• Industry vs. Inferiority (Competence): Elementary school children (ages
7–12) either develop a sense of pride and accomplishment in their
schoolwork, sports, social activities, and family life, or they feel inferior
and inadequate because they believe they do not measure up
 Psychosocial Stages of Development
Major psychosocial tasks to accomplish or crises to overcome (with
defining virtues in parentheses)
• Identity vs. Role Confusion (Fidelity): Adolescents’ (ages 12–18) main
task is developing a sense of self; they explore various roles and ideas,
set goals, and attempt to discover their adult selves
• Intimacy vs. Isolation (Love): People in early adulthood (20s through
early 40s) are concerned with developing and maintaining successful
relationships with others
• Generativity vs. Stagnation (Care): People in middle adulthood (40s to
the mid-60s) are concerned with finding their life’s work and
contributing to the development of others
• Integrity vs. Despair (Wisdom): People in late adulthood (mid-60s to the
end of life) are concerned with reflecting on their lives and feeling
either a sense of pride and satisfaction or a sense of regret and failure
 Assessing Erikson’s Theory
• Strength
• View that development continues throughout the lifespan

• Weaknesses
• Stages or crises can occur more than once or at different times of life
• Focuses heavily on stages and assumes that the completion of one
stage is a prerequisite for the next stage of development
• Focuses on the social expectations that are found in certain cultures,
but not in all
• Focuses on more men than women
• Difficult to test rigorously because of its vagueness
 Practice Question 3
According to Erikson’s theory, children either develop a sense of
competence, pride, and accomplishment or a sense of inadequacy
during which stage of psychosocial development?

A.Autonomy versus Shame

B.Initiative versus Guilt
C.Industry versus Inferiority
D.Identity versus Role Confusion
Behaviorism and Cognitive Psychology
 Learning Outcomes:
Behaviorism and Cognitive Psychology
2.2: Explain key principles of behaviorism and cognitive psychology

2.2.1: Describe the principles of classical conditioning

2.2.2: Describe the principles of operant conditioning

2.2.3: Describe social learning theory

2.2.4: Describe Piaget's theory of cognitive development

2.2.5: Describe information processing approaches to cognitive

development
 The Behavioral Perspective

• Behaviorism emerged early in the 20th century

• The keys to understanding development are observable behavior

and external stimuli in the environment

• Behaviorism refers to theories of learning that focus on how we

respond to events or stimuli rather than emphasizing internal factors
(e.g., mind or consciousness) that motivate our actions

• Through the scientific study of behavior, it was hoped that laws of

learning could be derived that would promote the prediction and
control of behavior
 Classical Conditioning
● Associated with Ivan Pavlov, a Russian
physiologist studying digestion

● Classical conditioning helps us understand how

our responses to one situation become
attached or connected to new situations

● Classical conditioning explains how we develop

many of our emotional responses to people or
events or our “gut level” reactions to situations
 Pavlov’s Classical Conditioning
Experiments
Before Conditioning:
Unconditioned stimulus (food)
produces an unconditioned
response (salivation)
During Conditioning: Neutral
stimulus (bell) is presented just
before the unconditioned stimulus
(food)
After Conditioning: the neutral
stimulus becomes a conditioned
stimulus (bell) when presented
alone and now produces a
conditioned response (salivation)
 Watson and Behaviorism
• Established the psychological school of behaviorism
• Known for applying classical conditioning principles to human
behavior
• Believed that most of our fears and other emotional responses are
classically conditioned
• Believed that parents could be taught to help shape their
children’s behavior
• Tried to demonstrate the power of classical conditioning with his
famous experiment with an 18-month-old boy named “Little
Albert,” who he conditioned to fear a white rat (which the child did
not initially fear)
 Operant Conditioning
● Associated with B.F. Skinner, who sought to explain how new
behaviors are learned, not just how existing behaviors are reflexively
elicited (as in classical conditioning)

● Behavior is motivated by the consequences we receive for the

behavior: the reinforcements and punishments

● In operant conditioning, we learn to associate a behavior and its

consequence; behaviors are either strengthened or weakened
because of their consequences
 The Law of Effect
• Skinner based his ideas on the law of effect, first proposed by
psychologist Edward Thorndike
• Behaviors followed by consequences that are satisfying are more
likely to be repeated
• Behaviors followed by unpleasant consequences are less likely to
be repeated
• Skinner believed that we learn best when our actions are
reinforced
• A reinforcer is anything following a behavior that makes it more
likely to occur again I
• Intrinsic or primary reinforcers (e.g., food or praise)
• Secondary reinforcers (e.g., money, which can be exchanged
for what one really wants)
 The Skinner Box
• Skinner conducted scientific experiments on animals (mainly rats
and pigeons) to determine how organisms learn through operant
conditioning
• He placed the animals inside an operant conditioning chamber,
also known as a “Skinner box”
• A Skinner box contains a lever (for rats) or disk (for pigeons) that the
animal can press or peck for a food reward via the dispenser
 Social Cognitive Theory
• Associated with Albert Bandura
• Originally known as Social Learning Theory, developed in the 1960s
• Proposes that learning occurs in a social context through a dynamic
and reciprocal interaction of the person, their own behavior, and
the environment
• Reciprocal determinism: the interplay between our personality and
the way we interpret events and how they influence us

• Observational learning: individuals can learn novel responses by

watching the key behavior of others, referred to as social models
• Social models are typically of higher status or authority compared to
the observer, such as parents and teachers
 Observational Learning Process
• The observational learning process consists of four parts
• Attention: one must pay attention to what they are observing in
order to learn
• Retention: to learn one must be able to retain the behavior they
are observing in memory
• Initiation: the learner must be able to execute (or initiate) the
learned behavior
• Motivation: needed to engage in observational learning
• Consequences can play a role in observational learning
• Vicarious reinforcement occurs when people’s behavior is
influenced by observing social models receive reinforcement or
punishment
 Practice Question 4
Which form of learning occurs when a voluntary response is
strengthened or weakened by its association with positive or negative
consequences that occur soon after the response?

A. Classical conditioning
B. Operant conditioning
C. Observational learning
D. Psychosocial learning
 Practice Question 5
Which behavioral theory proposes that we learn new responses by
observing others model the behavior?

A. Social Cognitive Theory

B. Operant conditioning
C. Classical Conditioning
D. Psychosocial Theory
 The Cognitive Perspective
• Cognitive theories focus on how our mental processes or cognitions
change over time
• Jean Piaget developed the theory of cognitive development (a
stage theory) as a comprehensive theory about the nature and
development of human intelligence
• Making sense of the world
• When faced with something new, a child may either fit it into an
existing framework (schema) and match it with something known
(assimilation) or expand the schema to accommodate the new
situation (accommodation) by learning new words and concepts
• The underlying dynamic of cognition: determine whether new
information fits into our old way of thinking or whether we need
to modify our thoughts
 Piaget’s Stages of Cognitive
Development
A series of four stages approximately associated with age ranges

1. Sensorimotor (from birth to about 2 years old)

• Children learn through their senses and motor behavior
• Object permanence: the understanding that even if something is
out of sight, it still exists, develops between 5 and 8 months old
• Stranger anxiety: a fear of unfamiliar people
 Piaget’s Stages of Cognitive
Development
A series of four stages approximately associated with age ranges

2. Preoperational (from about 2 to 7 years old)

• Children can use symbols to represent words, images, and ideas
and engage in pretend play
• Children begin to use language, but they cannot understand adult
logic or mentally manipulate information
• Preoperational children have not developed conservation: even if
you change the appearance of something, it is still equal in size as
long as nothing has been removed or added
• Egocentrism: the child is not able to take the perspective of others
• Theory-of-mind: understanding that people have thoughts,
feelings, and beliefs that are different from one’s own, usually
develops between 3 to 5 years old
 Piaget’s Stages of Cognitive
Development
A series of four stages approximately associated with age ranges

3. Concrete Operational (from about 7 to 11 years old)

• Children can think logically about real (concrete) events
• They have a firm grasp on the use of numbers and start to employ
memory strategies
• Children also master the concept of conservation and
understand that even if something changes shape, its mass,
volume, and number stay the same
• Children understand the principle of reversibility: objects can be
changed and then returned back to their original form or
condition
 Piaget’s Stages of Cognitive
Development
A series of four stages approximately associated with age ranges

4. Formal Operational (from about age 11 to adulthood)

• Children can deal with abstract ideas and hypothetical situations
• Children can use abstract thinking to problem solve, look at
alternative solutions, and test these solutions
• A renewed egocentrism occurs in adolescence
 Piaget’s Stages of Cognitive
Development
Criticisms
• Newer research supports a model of development that is more
continuous than Piaget’s discrete stages
• Other research suggests that children reach cognitive milestones
earlier than Piaget describes
• Across cultures, there is considerable variation in what children are
able to do at various ages, and Piaget may have underestimated
what children are capable of given the right circumstances
• Many developmental psychologists suggest a fifth stage of cognitive
development, known as the postformal stage wherein decisions are
made based on circumstances, and logic is integrated with emotion
as adults develop principles that depend on contexts
• Postformal thinkers are able to draw on past experiences to
help them solve new problems
 Information Processing
Approaches to Development
• Considered an alternative to Piagetian approaches
• Emphasizes a continuous pattern of development
• We do not just respond to stimuli, we process the information we receive
• The model assumes that complex behavior can be broken down into a
series of specific steps, and as we develop strategies for processing
information, we can learn more complex information

• Standard information-processing model includes:

• Attention mechanisms for bringing information in
• Working memory for actively manipulating information
• Long-term memory for passively holding information so that it can be
used in the future
 Neo-Piagetian Theories
• View cognition as a made up of different types of individual skills,
rather than a single system of increasingly sophisticated general
cognitive abilities
• Use the same terminology as information processing approaches
• Cognitive development proceeds quickly in certain areas and
more slowly in others
• Experience plays a greater role in furthering cognitive development
than traditional Piagetian approaches claim
• Adopted principles from other theories, such as social-cognitive
theory, that allow them to consider how culture and interactions
with others influenced cognitive development
Cognitive Neuroscience Approaches
• Cognitive neuroscience: the scientific field that studies the
biological processes that underlie cognition, with a specific focus
on the neural connections and activity in the brain that are
involved in mental processes (e.g., problem solving)
• Cognitive neuroscientists seek to identify actual locations and
functions within the brain that are related to different types of
cognitive activities
• Developmental cognitive neuroscience: examines interrelations
between brain changes and changes in cognitive ability as
children grow up, as well as environmental and biological
influences on the developing mind and brain
 Practice Question 6
_______ is the understanding that even if something is out of sight, it still
exists.

A. Conservation
B. Object permanence
C. Reversibility
D. Theory-of-mind
Humanistic, Contextual, and
Evolutionary Perspectives
 Learning Outcomes: Humanistic,
Contextual, and Evolutionary Perspectives
2.3: Describe the humanistic, contextual, and evolutionary
perspectives of development

2.3.1: Describe the major concepts of humanistic theory as

developed by Carl Rogers
2.3.2: Explain Maslow's hierarchy of needs
2.3.3: Describe Vygotsky's sociocultural theory of cognitive
development
2.3.4: Explain Bronfenbrenner’s ecological systems model
2.3.5: Describe the evolutionary perspective
2.3.6: Contrast the main psychological theories that apply to
human development
 Carl Rogers and Humanism
• Rogers’ emphasized the importance of the self-actualizing tendency
in shaping personality
• Humans are constantly reacting to stimuli with their subjective reality
(phenomenal field), which changes continuously
• Over time, a person develops a self-concept (i.e., our thoughts and
feelings about ourselves) based on feedback from this field of reality
• Ideal self: the person that you would like to be
• Real self: the person you actually are
 Carl Rogers and Humanism
• Human beings develop an ideal self and a real self based on the
conditional status of positive regard

• Congruity: how closely one’s real self matches up with the ideal self
• Our self-concept is accurate when we experience congruence
• High congruence leads to a greater sense of self-worth and a
healthy, productive life
• Incongruence: when there is a great discrepancy between our ideal
and actual selves, which leads to maladjustment

• According to Rogers, parents can help their children achieve their

ideal self by giving them unconditional positive regard or
unconditional love in an environment that is free of preconceived
notions of value and worth
 Carl Rogers and The Good Life
Rogers described life in terms of principles rather than stages of
development
The good life: when a fully functioning person continually aims to fulfill his
or her potential and demonstrate the following traits/tendencies:
• Openness to experience
• Existential lifestyle: living each moment fully
• Trusting one’s own judgment
• Freedom of choice
• High levels of creativity
• Reliability and constructiveness
• A rich full life: experiencing joy and pain, love and heartbreak, fear
and courage more intensely
 Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs
• Abraham Maslow: an
American psychologist best
known for proposing that a
hierarchy of human needs
motivates behavior
• The most basic needs must
be met before people
become motivated to
achieve higher level needs
• The goal in Maslow’s theory
is to attain self-actualization
 Vygotsky’s Sociocultural Theory:
A Contextual Perspective
• Contextual perspective: considers the
relationships between individuals and the
physical, cognitive, personality, social,
cultural, and environmental influences on
development

• Vygotsky believed that social interaction

plays a critical role in children’s learning
 Vygotsky’s Sociocultural Theory:
A Contextual Perspective
Three themes in Vygotsky’s ideas of sociocultural learning:
1. Human development and learning originate in social, historical, and
cultural interactions
• Guided participation: a learner actively acquires new culturally
valuable skills and capabilities through a meaningful,
collaborative activity with an assisting, more experienced person
• Scaffolding: teachers model or demonstrate how to solve a
problem, and then step back, offering support as needed
2. Use of psychological tools, particularly language, mediate
development of higher mental functions
3. Learning occurs within the Zone of Proximal Development, the
difference between what a learner can do without help and what they
cannot do
 Bronfenbrenner’s Ecological
Systems Theory
• Bronfenbrenner’s Ecological Systems
Theory: the qualities of a child and their
environment interact to influence how
they will grow and develop
• Ecological = a natural environment
• Stresses the importance of studying a
child in the context of multiple
environments
• Renamed the theory the bioecological
model to recognize the importance of
biological processes in development
• Chronosystem: the relevant historical
context and timeframe in which all
development occurs
 The Evolutionary Perspective
• The evolutionary perspective seeks to identify behavior that is the
result of our genetic inheritance from our ancestors
• Evolutionary psychology: a theoretical approach in the social and
natural sciences that examines psychological structure from a
modern evolutionary perspective
• It seeks to identify which human psychological traits are evolved
adaptations or the functional products of natural selection or
sexual selection in human evolution
• Evolutionary approaches claim that genetic inheritance not only
determines physical traits such as skin and eye color, but also
certain personality traits and social behaviors
 Behavioral Genetics
• Behavioral genetics: a field of scientific research that uses genetic
methods to investigate the nature and origins of individual
differences in behavior and studies the effects of heredity on
behavior
• Behavioral geneticists strive to understand how we might inherit
certain behavioral traits and how the environment influences
whether we actually display those traits
• It also considers how genetic factors may influence psychological
disorders such as schizophrenia, depression, and substance abuse
 Evaluating Lifespan Theories
• Developmental theories provide a set of guiding principles and
concepts that describe and explain human development

• Theories are based on their own premises and focus on different

aspects of development (e.g., a particular ability or development
across the lifespan)

• Many lifespan developmentalists use an eclectic approach,

drawing on several perspectives simultaneously since the same
developmental phenomenon can be viewed from a number of
perspectives
 Practice Question 7
According to Vygotsky, this gap between what a student can and
cannot do without help is referred to as _______.

A. the zone of proximal development

B. the theory of mind
C. guided participation
D. scaffolding
 Practice Question 8
Which theory stresses the importance of studying a child in the
context of multiple environments?

A. Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs

B. Vygotsky’s Sociocultural Theory
C. Bronfenbrenner’s ecological systems model
D. Rogers’ humanistic theory
 Class Activity:
Ecological Systems in Real Life
1. Get into groups of 3 or 4
2. Select a biographical movie (e.g., The Social Network, Hidden
Figures, Frida) or autobiography and describe the influences on
the main character’s development according to Bronfenbrenner’s
Ecological Systems Model
3. Consider the following:
• Microsystem: parents and siblings with direct, significant impact
• Mesosystem: schools, extended family, religion
• Exosystem: community values, history, economy
• Macrosystem: cultural elements, global economic conditions,
war, technology trends
• Chronosystem: larger historical context and timeframe
4. Share your summary with the class
 Quick Review
What are the historical foundations of lifespan development theories?
What is Freud’s theory of personality, including the three parts of adult personality?
What is Freud’s theory of psychosexual development?
What are defense mechanisms?
What are criticisms of Freud’s psychodynamic perspective?
What is Erikson’s psychosocial theory of development?
What is classical conditioning? What is operant conditioning?
What are social cognitive theory and observational learning?
What are Piaget’s stages of cognitive development?
What is the information processing approach to development?
What is the cognitive neuroscience approach to development?
What are the humanistic approaches to development (Rogers and Maslow)?
What is the contextual perspective, and what is Vygotsky’s sociocultural theory?
What is Bronfenbrenner’s ecological systems theory?
Describe the evolutionary approach to development and behavioral genetics.