Aspects of Human Development

Part 1 Theoretical connections: philosophy and developmental psychology; evolutionary biology and developmental psychology; social policy influences and developmental psychology; culture and development. Part 2 Ontogeny - the development of the individual: continuity or discontinuity?; genotype and environment - the environment and social learning, maturation, the constructivist perspective. Part 3 Phylogeny - the evolutionary development of different species: language; social understanding. Part 4 Methods in developmental psychology: the central problem - age versus stage differences; Piaget the researcher; the basics of research methods; types of study - observation, experiment, the cross-sectional study; limits of observations and experiments; is there a developmental method?; ethical issues. Part 5 Three areas of research - infant perception, play and moral development: technology and studies of infant perception; play - issues of phylogeny and ontogeny; moral development - are there stages in moral development?.