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Developmental Psychology Essay

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Development Psychology
Development psychology refers to the scientific study of the systematic psychological changes that normally occur to human beings throughout their growth period from birth to old age. It was originally concerned with children and infants, but it has since expanded to include the entire life span of mankind including adolescence and adulthood. Development psychology covers the extent to which human development occurs through gradual accumulation of knowledge, and the extent to which children born with inmate mental structures learn through experience. Several psychological theories and approaches like the behavioral, humanistic, psychoanalytic, biological, and cognitive approaches have been developed to explain the …show more content…

The ability of an individual to learn from other people’s experience is a unique character associated with conditioning controlled behavior. Children are more likely and willing to repeat certain behaviors in cases where they have been rewarded, as they have developed the feeling that what they did is acceptable.
The cognitive approach to development psychology; developed by Jean Piaget in 1934, deals with nature of knowledge, and how human intelligence is developed and utilized (Piaget, 1983, p. 46). In this theory, Piaget asserts that reality, which is defined in two conditions that explains change brought about by dynamic systems, involves states and transformations. Transformation refers to all kinds of changes a living organism undergoes and state is the condition in which the living organism can be found between the transformers. He further argues that humans should have functions to represent reality and the transformational process if their intelligence is to be adaptive.
In his theory, Piaget proposes two types of intelligence that are responsible for static and dynamic aspects of reality that is, figurative and operative intelligence respectively. Figurative intelligence involves all the means of representation that are used to retain state that appears between transformations, like shape, form, or location. It involves imitation, drawing, perception, language and mental imagery. Operative intelligence on the other hand, involves

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