What is behaviour according yo developmental psychology?
Answers
Human behaviour, the potential and expressed capacity for physical, mental, and social activity during the phases of human life.
Humans, like other animal species, have a typical life course that consists of successive phases of growth, each of which is characterized by a distinct set of physical, physiological, and behavioral features. These phases are prenatal life, infancy, childhood, adolescence, and adulthood (including old age). Human development, or developmental psychology, is a field of study that attempts to describe and explain the changes in human cognitive, emotional, and behavioral capabilities and functioning over the entire life span, from the fetus to old age.
Most scientific research on human development has concentrated on the period from birth through early adolescence, owing to both the rapidity and magnitude of the psychological changes observed during those phases and to the fact that they culminate in the optimum mental functioning of early adulthood. A primary motivation of many investigators in the field has been to determine how the culminating mental abilities of adulthood were reached during the preceding phases. This essay will concentrate, therefore, on human development during the first 12 years of life.
This article discusses the development of human behaviour. For treatment of biological development, see human development. For further treatment of particular facets of behavioral development, see emotion; learning theory; motivation; perception; personality; and sexual behaviour, human. Various disorders with significant behavioral manifestations are discussed in mental disorder.
Theories Of Development
The systematic study of children is less than 200 years old, and the vast majority of its research has been published since the mid-1940s. Basic philosophical differences over the fundamental nature of children and their growth occupied psychologists during much of the 20th century. The most important of such controversies concerned the relative importance of genetic endowment and environment, or “nature” and “nurture,” in determining development during infancy and childhood. Most researchers came to recognize, however, that it is the interaction of inborn biological factors with external factors, rather than the mutually exclusive action or predominance of one or the other force, that guides and influences human development. The advances in cognition, emotion, and behaviour that normally occur at certain points in the life span require both maturation (i.e., genetically driven biological changes in the central nervous system) and events, experiences, and influences in the physical and social environment. Generally, maturation by itself cannot cause a psychological function to emerge; it does, however, permit such a function to occur and sets limits on its earliest time of appearance.
Three prominent theories of human development emerged in the 20th century, each addressing different aspects of psychological growth. In retrospect, these and other theories seem to have been neither logically rigorous nor able to account for both intellectual and emotional growth within the same framework. Research in the field has thus tended to be descriptive, since developmental psychology lacks a tight net of interlocking theoretical propositions that reliably permit satisfying explanations.