Psychological development occurs throughout the human lifespan from infancy through old age. Infancy is marked by rapid cognitive and social development as babies form attachments, learn to identify faces and speech sounds, and begin to categorize objects. During childhood, language skills advance and logical and moral thinking emerges. Adolescence involves physical changes of puberty and the development of sexual and personal identity. Adulthood represents peak mental functioning but also adjustments as people age, with old age typically involving some physical and mental declines.

1. Introduction to Development
By
MARIA KHALIL
University of Poonch Rawalakot A.K.

2. Psychological Development
• Psychological development, includes
the development of human
beings’ cognitive, emotional, intellectual, and
social capabilities and functioning over the
course of a normal life span,
from infancy through old age.

3. Infancy
• Infancy is the period between birth and the acquisition of
language one to two years later.
• Newborns are equipped with a predilection for certain visual
patterns, including that of the human face, and for certain sounds,
including that of the human voice.
• Within a few months they are able to identify their mothers by
sight, and they show a striking sensitivity to the tones, rhythmic
flow, and individual sounds that make up human speech.
• Even young infants are capable of complex perceptual judgments
involving distance, shape, direction, and depth, and they are soon
able to organize their experience by creating categories for objects
and events (e.g., people, furniture, food, animals) in the same way
older people do.

4. Cont…
• At about 18 months of age, the child starts trying to solve
physical problems by mentally imagining certain events and
outcomes rather than through simple trial-and-error
experimentation.
• New emotional states, including anger, sadness, and fear, all
appear by the first year. Infants’ emotional life is centered on
the attachments they form to their mothers or other primary
caregivers, and through these interactions infants learn to love,
trust, and depend on other human beings.
• Babies begin to smile at other people beginning at about two
months, and their attachments to mothers and caregivers are
developed by about six months.

5. Childhood
• The second major phase in human
development, childhood, extends from one or
two years of age until the onset
of adolescence at age 12 or 13.
• Children begin to comprehend words some
months before they themselves actually speak.
• Infants on average speak their first words by
12–14 months, and by the 18th month they
have a speaking vocabulary of about 50
words.

6. Cont…
• Children begin to use two- and then three-word
combinations and progress from simple noun-verb
combinations to more grammatically complex
sequences, using conjunctions, prepositions,
articles, and tenses with growing fluency and
accuracy.
• By their fourth year most children can speak in
adult like sentences and have begun to master the
more complex rules of grammar and meaning.

7. Cont…
• Between the ages of 7 and 12, the beginnings of logic appear
in the form of classifications of ideas, an understanding of time
and number, and a greater appreciation and other hierarchical
relationships.
• Emotionally, children develop in the direction of greater self-
awareness—i.e., awareness of their own emotional states,
characteristics, and potential for action—and they become
increasingly able to discern and interpret the emotions of other
people as well.
• This contributes to empathy, or the ability to appreciate the
feelings and perceptions of others and understand their points
of view.

8. Cont…
• These new abilities contribute to
children’s moral development, which typically
begins in early childhood as concern over and
avoidance of acts that attract pain and
punishment and progresses to a more general
regulation of conduct so as to maintain
parental regard and approval.

9. Adolescence
• Physically, adolescence begins with the onset
of puberty at 12 or 13 and culminates at age 19 or 20
in adulthood.
• Emotionally, adolescence is the time when
individuals learn to control and direct their sex
urges and begin to establish their own sexual roles
and relationships.
• The second decade of life is also a time when
individuals lessen their emotional (if not physical)
dependence on their parents and develop a mature set
of values and responsible self-direction.

10. Adulthood
• Adulthood is a period of optimum mental functioning
when the individual’s intellectual, emotional, and
social capabilities are at their peak to meet the
demands of career, marriage, and children.
• During the middle 30s people develop a sense of time
limitation, and previous behavior patterns or beliefs
may be given up in favor of new ones.
• Middle age is a period of adjustment between the
potentialities of the past and the limitations of the
future.

11. Cont…
• In women, dramatic shifts in hormone
production lead to the onset of menopause.
• Often women whose children have grown or
left home experience the “empty-nest
syndrome”—feeling unwanted or unneeded.
• Individuals accept the limits of their
accomplishments and either take satisfaction in
them or despair and become anxious over
unachieved goals or unrealized aspirations.

12. Cont…
• During old age, sensory and perceptual skills, muscular
strength, and memory tend to diminish,
though intelligence does not.
• These changes, together with retirement from active
employment, tend to make the elderly more dependent on their
children or other younger people, both emotionally and
physically.
• Adulthood, the period in the human lifespan in which full
physical and intellectual maturity have been attained.
• Adulthood is commonly thought of as beginning at age 20 or
21 years. Middle age, commencing at about 40 years, is
followed by old age at about 60 years.