Life Span Development
Ashley Whitaker
PSY/375
September 20, 2010
Sue Cohen
Life Span Development
The study of the life span of humans has been one that has been studied since the nineteenth century when the English philosopher John Locke came up with his theory of tabula rasa, or blank slate. Studying humans as individuals from the time they are born until the time they die is interesting because, it would seem that no two people develop in the same exact pattern. The life span development perspective delves deep into the different theories on how and why infants develop into the types of adults that they become and what kind of maturation happens throughout their lives until death.
What is Life Span Development?
According to our text book, Life Span Development “is the scientific study of age-related changes in behavior, thinking, emotion, and personality” (Boyd, Pg. 2). What this means is the study of life span development is the study of how people change over time as they progress throughout the years. This branch of psychology starts studying people as infants and continues up until the day that they die. As a whole the life span perspective believes that changes happen throughout all times in a person’s life, not just during childhood and infancy, and that these different changes, or progressions, have to be studied in the terms of the cultures that they occur in as well as in the context of which they happen. Maturation happens at different ages within different cultures. In America we see children become adults at the age of eighteen, however in some other cultures they may consider children adults at as young as thirteen.
Domains of Development
The study of age related changes is broken into three levels or domains of development. Each of these domains explains different areas of development during age-related changes that happen...