What is continuous and discontinuous development?

Welcome to the most fascinating journey ever! The journey of YOU! This is the journey of exploration into the many influences that have contributed to your development and growth. A lifespan psychology course explores how we change and grow from conception to death - from the "womb to the tomb". In this course, you may see the terms, "Lifespan Psychology" and "Lifespan Development" used interchangeably and, in fact, in more ways than not, they are. However, please keep in mind that this is a psychology course, so we will mostly (although not exclusively in some areas) be focusing on the psychological aspects of development. In an official context, this field of psychology is studied by developmental psychologists, although we will examine a wide range of topics that are primarily studied by other types of psychologists, medical professionals, sociologists, biologists, and more. In other words, lifespan development is multi-disciplinary (it is studied by many disciplines). While "traditional" developmental psychologists believed that the most important changes happened early in life and there was little development that happened later, lifespan developmental psychologists view development as a lifelong process (from conception to death; "the womb to the tomb") that can be studied scientifically across these three main developmental domains: physical, cognitive, and psychosocial.

Developmental Domains

• Physical (or biological) developmentinvolves growth and changes in the body and brain, the senses, motor skills, and health and wellness.
• Cognitive development involves learning, attention, memory, language, thinking, reasoning, and creativity. Piaget is probably the most influential theorist when it comes to cognitive development. We'll explore how he believed thinking changes as we move from knowing by sensing and doing to, ultimately, being able to understand things that are abstract.
• Psychosocial development involves emotions, personality, and social relationships. Erikson's psychosocial stages will feature prominently in our overview of psychosocial development.

As progress through the lifespan, we will explore each of these domains. We will examine how our lives and psychological states are influenced by experiences and how we interpret those experiences, as well as how our social relationships change throughout life.

Describing and Explaining Change

1. Describing change - Many of the theories we will examine simply involve the first step in investigation, which is description.
2. Explaining change - Theories provide explanations for why we change. For example, Erikson offers an explanation about why two-year-olds can be thought of as little researchers, just trying to figure out if their actions will get reliable and consistent results...or not, as they attempt to make sense of their world.

Think about how you were 5, 10, or even 15 years ago. In what ways have you changed? In what ways have you remained the same? You have probably changed in many realms including in the way you think and solve problems as well as how you relate to those around you. Psychological and cognitive change is especially noticeable when we compare how 6-year-olds, 16-year-olds, and 46-year-olds think and reason, for example. Their thoughts about others and the world are probably quite different from one another. Consider friendship, for instance. The 6-year-old may think that a friend is someone with whom you play and have fun with. A 16-year-old may seek friends who can help them gain status or popularity or with whom they can confide in. The 46-year-old may have many acquaintances but rely more on family members or a very small circle of close friends to do things with and confide in. You may have also experienced psychosocial change. This refers to emotions and psychological concerns as well as social relationships. Psychologist Erik Erikson suggests that as we navigate through life, we grapple with issues of trust vs. mistrust, intimacy vs. isolation, and other struggles at various points in our lives (we will explore this thoroughly throughout the course).

While definitely important, our journeys through life are much more than biological; they are also shaped by personality, experiences, resilience levels, perspectives, culture, economic and social realities as much as they are influenced by physical change. This is a fascinating and practical course because it is about YOU and those around you.

Issues For Consideration

There are many different theoretical approaches regarding lifespan psychology. As we evaluate them, recall that lifespan psychology focuses on how people change, and keep in mind that all the approaches that we present address questions of change: How do we describe the changes, do they involve how, what, r why - or are they changes in amount? Is the change smooth or uneven (continuous versus discontinuous)? Is this pattern of change the same for everyone, or are there many different patterns of change (one course of development versus many courses)? How do genetics and environment interact to influence development (nature versus nurture)?

Is the Change Qualitative or Quantitative?

When we describe a change, we may do so with words (qualitative) or numbers (quantitative). A change in how, why, or what would be a qualitative change. While a change in how long, how tall, or how many would be a quantitative change. We can describe many things in both qualitative and quantitative ways. In discussing friendship at a given age, for example, we can discuss the sort of things that friends do and share (qualities) and we can discuss the amount of time friends spend with one another and how large one's social circle is likely to be (quantities).

Is Development Continuous or Discontinuous?

Continuous development views development as a cumulative process, gradually improving on existing skills. Continuous change refers to a process of adding on to what we are, what we know, and what we can do. With this type of development, there is gradual change. Consider, for example, a child’s physical growth: adding inches to their height year by year. Or adding more words to one's vocabulary. In contrast, theorists who view development as discontinuous believe that development takes place in unique stages, it occurs at specific times or ages and the changes are not gradual. With this type of development, the change is more sudden, such as an infant’s ability to conceive object permanence (the idea that something still exists, even if the infant can't see it). One day playing "peek-a-boo" is exciting and engaging - and the next it isn't. Instead of a change happening through a slow change in thinking, a significant change is suddenly made in how the infant thinks.

The concept of continuous development can be visualized as a smooth slope of progression, whereas discontinuous development sees growth in more discrete stages.

Is There One Course of Development or Many?

Is lifespan development essentially the same, or universal, for all children (i.e., there is one course of development) or does development follow a different course for each child, depending on the child’s specific genetics and environment (i.e., there are many courses of development)? Do people across the world share more similarities or more differences in their development? How much do culture and genetics influence a child’s behavior?

Stage theories hold that the sequence of development is universal. For example, in cross-cultural studies of language development, children from around the world reach language milestones in a similar sequence (Gleitman & Newport, 1995). Infants in all cultures coo before they babble. They begin babbling at about the same age and utter their first word around 12 months old. Yet we live in diverse contexts that have a unique effect on each of us. For example, researchers once believed that motor development follows one course for all children regardless of culture. However, child care practices vary by culture, and different practices have been found to accelerate or inhibit the achievement of developmental milestones such as sitting, crawling, and walking (Karasik, Adolph, Tamis-LeMonda, & Bornstein, 2010).

For instance, let’s look at the Aché society in Paraguay. They spend a significant amount of time foraging in forests. While foraging, Aché mothers carry their young children, rarely putting them down in order to protect them from getting hurt in the forest. Consequently, their children walk much later: They walk around 23–25 months old, in comparison to infants in Western cultures who begin to walk around 12 months old. However, as Aché children become older, they are allowed more freedom to move about, and by about age 9, their motor skills surpass those of U.S. children of the same age: Aché children are able to climb trees up to 25 feet tall and use machetes to chop their way through the forest (Kaplan & Dove, 1987). Our development is influenced by multiple contexts, so the timing of basic motor functions may vary across cultures. While all children are born with the same developmental potential, as established by their biology (nature), how development proceeds is impacted by various aspects of their environment (nurture). Despite the many different contexts in which development occurs, the functions themselves are present in all societies and all children, across the world, love to play.

Nature and Nurture

Nature refers to the biology we are born with, the genes that our parents have passed on to us. Nurture refers to the environments, social as well as physical, that influence our development, everything from the womb in which we develop before birth to the homes in which we grow up, the schools we attend, and the many people with whom we interact. The nature-nurture issue is often presented as an either-or question: Is our intelligence (for example) due to our genes or to the environments in which we live? In fact, however, every aspect of development is produced by the interaction of genes (nature) and environment (nurture). Some aspects of our behavior feel as though they originate in our genetic makeup, while others feel like the result of our upbringing or our own hard work. The scientific field of behavior genetics attempts to study these differences empirically, either by examining similarities among genetic members with different degrees of genetic relatedness or, more recently, by studying differences in the DNA of people with different behavioral traits. The scientific methods that have been developed are clever, but often inconclusive. Many of the difficulties encountered in the science of behavior genetics turn out to be conceptual, and our intuitions about nature and nurture get more complicated the harder we think about them. In the end, it is an oversimplification to ask how “genetic” some particular behavior is. Genes and environments always combine to produce behavior, and the real science is in the discovery of how they combine for a given behavior. Nature establishes our possibilities and nurture determines what we become.

Trying to untangle the various ways nature-nurture influences human behavior can be messy, and often common-sense notions can get in the way of good science. One very significant contribution of behavioral genetics that has changed psychology for good can be very helpful to keep in mind: When the people you study are genetically-related, no matter how clearly a situation may seem to point to environmental influence, it is never safe to interpret behavior as wholly the result of nurture without further evidence. For example, when presented with data showing that children, whose primary caregivers read to them, often are likely to have better reading scores in third grade, it is tempting to conclude that reading to your kids out loud is important to success in school; and this may well be true lots of times, but the study as described is inconclusive because there are genetic as well as environmental pathways between caregiver practices and the abilities of their children. Furthermore, there may be other elements of the environment that determine that may impact success. In this example, we see a correlational relationship that does not allow us to make a causal conclusion. In order to establish that reading aloud causes success, an experiment would have to be conducted that controls for other factors that might impact the results. We'll discuss this further when we consider research methods.

The outcomes of nature-nurture studies have fallen short of our expectations (of establishing clear-cut bases for traits) in many ways. The most disappointing outcome has been the inability to organize traits from more- to less-genetic. As noted earlier, everything has turned out to be at least somewhat heritable (passed down), yet nothing has turned out to be absolutely heritable, and there hasn’t been much consistency as to which traits are more heritable and which are less heritable once other considerations (such as how accurately the trait can be measured) are taken into account (Turkheimer, 2000). The problem is conceptual: The heritability coefficient does not match up with our nature-nurture intuitions. We want to know how “important” the roles of genes and environment are to the development of a trait, but in focusing on “important” maybe we’re emphasizing the wrong thing. Genes and environment are both crucial to every trait; without genes the environment would have nothing to work on, and too, genes cannot develop in a vacuum. Even more important, because nature-nurture questions look at the differences among people, the cause of a given trait depends not only on the trait itself but also on the differences in that trait between members of the group being studied.

So, we take a stance that the lifespan psychology view of development is that both nature and nurture play a role. The extent of which each play a role (some say 50/50) continues to be an interesting topic of discovery.

1.2: Describing and Explaining Development is shared under a not declared license and was authored, remixed, and/or curated by LibreTexts.

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