PSY 3128 Lecture Notes - Lecture 2: Telomere, Senescence, Terror Management Theory
5 Jun 2018
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Lecture 2: Nature and Nurture in Adulthood, Key Concepts in Lifespan Study
Life Span Perspective – emphasizes continuity of development from childhood to old age.
Contextual Influences – life span change is a function of nature and nurture.
Developmental Science – Need to look at multiple factors in development.
Environment is always contributing to any phenomena that is contributing to interesting
phenomena in psychology.
Outline
1. Nature vs. Nurture
2. Psychological Models (qualitative changes over stages, steady changes and influences –
there is tension between psychological models which look at big changes vs. gradual
changes).
3. Biological Models: turned to more because they are more objective.
4. Plasticity: neural plasticity, but much broader.
Models of Individual-Environment Interactions
Organismic (ie,
Erikson)
Mechanistic
Interactionist
Nature of Change
Qualitative
Quantitative
Multidirectional/
Multidimensional
Contribution of
Organism
Active
Passive
Active
Main force in
development
Biological (intrinsic)
External
Reciprocal
Hard to be anything but an interactionist when you begin to understand the influences on our
thoughts and behavior.
Chart outlines different things that are emphasized in each perspective.
1. Niche-Picking: make space for yourself in the world. The interaction between you and your
niche can explain a lot of things about you. May be applied too liberally to what happens
to us.
2. Reciprocal Principle: people influence and are influenced by the events in their lives.
Sometimes there are really interesting theories which are not supported by data, often these
theories are relatively vague, difficult to falsify, in cognitive and brain ageing they may be too
broad to too ambitious. Still need a theory between personality, perceptual, and brain ageing.
Epigenetic Principles: each stage unfolds from the previous stage in predestined order, but people
may experience a psychosocial issue at an age other than the one shown in the model.
Eriksson’s Model
- Qualitative changes, eight conflicts that everyone goes through at roughly the same
point in everyone’s life.
- If you don’t solve each of these then you can’t have integrity vs despair.
- People in middle and later years want to generate and contribute to society.
- As you think about getting to the end of your life.
- Critiqued for being a 1950s perspective on what is normal.
- How to test this is difficult for researchers to do, partly because it looks specific but
there are many interpretations.
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