Theories of Psychological Development

Developmental psychology is the scientific study of human changes across their life span. It is important to study psychological development to understand how and why people go through certain changes throughout their life. There are many different areas of psychological development. Two main areas are perceptual development and emotional development. They both have theories that can be related, but before you can understand the relations, you must first understand the two theories.

The theory of perceptual development was created by an American Psychologist named Eleanor Gibson. It states that perceptual development is the process of an infant exploring its constantly changing environment and deciding what to do and how to act with the newly found information.

Affordance exploration is also a key feature of perceptual development. Gibson believed that affordances are visual clues to the functions of an object. An example could be a person climbing a ladder. The infant could examine how the ladder needs to have a stable base and lean against a certain object to keep from falling down. When affordances are found, differentiation starts to occur. Gibson’s definition of differentiation is basically the ability to discriminate different environments. If you look back at the ladder example, the infant uses affordances to see the ladder needs support to stay upright. Then the infant uses differentiation to see a person is more safe standing in the middle step of a ladder than the top step. As the infant experiences more and ages, it becomes better at differentiation.

Emotional development is based around a theory called the attachment theory which was created by a British psychiatrist named John Bowlby. The attachment theory is the act of developing an affectional bond with someone who is considered a caregiver (Bowlby’s definition was “a lasting psychological connectedness between human beings”). It is crucial for a child’s behavior in the present and future