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proposed that psychological development in childhood takes place in a series of fixed stages.  These are called psychosexual stages because each stage represents the fixation of libido (roughly translated as sexual drives or instincts) on a different area of the body. As a person grows physically certain areas of their body becomes important as sources of potential frustration (erogenous zones), pleasure or both. Freud believed that life was built round tension and pleasure. Freud also believed that all tension was due to the build up of libido (sexual energy) and that all pleasure came from its discharge. In describing human personality development as psychosexual Freud meant to convey that what develops is the way in which sexual energy accumulates and is discharged as we mature biologically. (NB Freud used the term 'sexual' in a very general way to mean all pleasurable actions and thoughts). Freud stress that the first five years of lif

Piaget considered the concrete stage a major turning point in the child's cognitive development, because it marks the beginning of logical or operational thought. The child is now mature enough to use logical thought or operations (i.e. rules) but can only apply logic to physical objects (hence concrete operational).  Children become less egocentric and better at conservation tasks.  This means that the child understands that although the appearance of something changes, the thing itself does not.  For example, if you take two pieces of string that are the same length and scrunch one up, a child will reply that the scrunched one is shorter, if conservation hasn't yet been reached. Definition : Conservation : The understanding that something stays the same in quantity even though its appearance changes.  To be more technical (but you don’t have to be) conservation is the ability to understand th

Psychodynamic Approach If you know very little about psychology, and you have heard of just one psychologist, the chances are that this is Sigmund Freud, the founder of the psychodynamic approach to psychology, or psychoanalysis . If Freud represents your layperson's idea of psychology then you probably have an image of a patient lying on a couch talking about their deepest and darkest secrets. In deliberate contrast to behavioral psychology , psychodynamic psychology ignores the trappings of science and instead focuses on trying to get ' inside the head ' of individuals in order to make sense of their relationships, experiences and how they see the world. The psychodynamic approach includes all the theories in psychology that see human functioning based upon the interaction of drives and forces within the person, particularly unconscious, and between the different structures of the personality. Freud’s psycho

Attitude Measurement Perhaps the most straightforward way of finding out about someone’s attitudes would be to ask them. However, attitudes are related to self-image and social acceptance (i.e. attitude functions). In order to preserve a positive self-image, people’s responses may be affected by social desirability. They may not well tell about their true attitudes, but answer in a way that they feel socially acceptable. Given this problem, various methods of measuring attitudes have been developed.  However, all of them have limitations.  In particular the different measures focus on different components of attitudes – cognitive, affective and behavioral – and as we know, these components do not necessarily coincide. Attitude measurement can be divided into two basic categories Direct Measurement ( likert scale and semantic differential) Indirect Measu

Conformity is a type of social influence involving a change in belief or behavior in order to fit in with a group.  This change is in response to real (involving the physical presence of others) or imagined (involving the pressure of social norms / expectations) group pressure. Conformity can also be simply defined as “ yielding to group pressures ” ( Crutchfield, 1955 ). Group pressure may take different forms, for example bullying, persuasion, teasing, criticism etc.  Conformity is also known as majority influence (or group pressure). The term conformity is often used to indicate an agreement to the majority position, brought about either by a desire to ‘ fit in ’ or be liked (normative) or because of a desire to be correct (informational), or simply to conform to a social role (identification).

Jean Piaget (1896 - 1980) was employed at the Binet Institute in the 1920s, where his job was to develop French versions of questions on English intelligence tests. He became intrigued with the reasons children gave for their wrong answers on the questions that required logical thinking. He believed that these incorrect answers revealed important differences between the thinking of adults and children. Piaget was the first psychologist to make a systematic study of cognitive development.  His contributions include a theory of cognitive child development, detailed observational studies of cognition in children, and a series of simple but ingenious tests to reveal different cognitive abilities. Before Piaget’s work, the common assumption in psychology was that children are merely less competent thinkers than adults.  Piaget showed that young children think in strikingly differen

Developmental psychology is a scientific approach which aims to explain how children and adults change over time. A significant proportion of theories within this discipline focus upon developmental 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. 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

References 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 . How to cite this article: McLeod, S. A. (2012). Developmental Psychology - Simply Psychology. Retrieved from http://www.simplypsychology.org/developmental-psychology.html Further Information Piaget's Cognitive Theory Piaget believed that children think differently than adults

A Adorno (1950) Authoritarian Personality Ainsworth, Mary Asch (1951) Conformity Line Study Atkinson and Shiffrin (1968) Memory Model B Baddeley and Hitch (1974) Memory Model Bandura, Albert Beck, Aaron Bowlby, John Broadbent's (1958) Attention Model Bruce and Young Face Perception Theory Bruner, Jerome C Craik and Lockhart (1972) Memory Model D E Erikson, Erik F Festinger, Leon Freud, Sigmund G H Hodges and Tizard (1989) Attachment Study Hofling (1966) Obedience Study I J K Katz and Braly (1933) Study Kohlberg, Lawrence Kuhn, Thomas Kolb, David L Loftus and Palmer Car Crash Study M Maslow, Abra

There are various different approaches in contemporary psychology.  An approach is a perspective (i.e. view) that involves certain assumptions (i.e. beliefs) about human behavior: the way they function, which aspects of them are worthy of study and what research methods are appropriate for undertaking this study. There may be several different theories within an approach, but they all share these common assumptions. You may wonder why there are so many different psychology perspectives and whether one approach is correct and others wrong.  Most psychologists would agree that no one perspective is correct, although in the past, in the early days of psychology, the behaviorist would have said their perspective was the only truly scientific one. Each perspective has its strengths and weaknesses, and brings something different to our understanding of human behavior.  For this reasons, it is important that psychology does have different perspectives to the un