Developmental Psychology

Attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) is a neurodevelopmental disorder characterized by developmentally inappropriate levels of hyperactivity, impulsivity, and/or inattention. ADHD is chronic, may persist into adulthood, and is associated with impairment in social and academic/work domains across the lifespan. Children and adolescents with ADHD often present with executive function deficits and emotion dysregulation, and these deficits may increase impairment and risk for co-occurring disorders. The etiology of ADHD is not yet understood, though research suggests that biological and environmental factors (e.g., family, community) contribute to its development and course. It should be noted that ADHD commonly co-occurs with additional psychiatric disorders, such as oppositional defiant disorder (ODD), conduct disorder (CD), and major depressive disorder.

Evidence-based assessment of ADHD requires information from multiple informants using multiple assessment methods to determine the presence of ADHD symptoms across settings and any co-occurring disorders. The evidence-based treatment options for ADHD are manifold. Pharmacotherapy for ADHD is common, although numerous behavioral interventions are also effective. Stimulant medications are commonly prescribed and are typically effective in ameliorating core ADHD symptoms. There is also evidence that the nonstimulant medication atomoxetine substantially decreases the symptoms of ADHD. Importantly, medication therapy works to reduce symptoms but typically does not alleviate the impairments associated with the disorder. Combined medication and behavioral interventions are more likely to reduce impairments and normalize behavior.

Aging does not occur in isolation, but often involves significant others such as spouses. Whether such dyadic associations involve gains or losses depends on a myriad of factors, including the time frame under consideration. What is beneficial in the short term may not be so in the long term, and vice versa. Similarly, what is beneficial for one partner may be costly for the other, or the couple unit over time. Daily dynamics between partners involving emotion processes, health behaviors, and collaborative cognition may accumulate over years to affect the longer-term physical and mental health outcomes of either partner or both partners across adulthood and into old age. Future research should move beyond an individual-focused approach to aging and consider the importance of and interactions among multiple time scales to better understand how, when, and why older spouses shape each other’s aging trajectories, both for better and for worse.

The term Awareness of Aging (AoA) incorporates all aspects of individuals’ perceptions, behavioral experiences, and subjective interpretations related to their process of growing older. In this regard, AoA goes beyond objective descriptions of the aging process, such as calendar age or biological age. Commonly used AoA constructs referring to the ongoing experience of the aging process encompass concepts such as subjective age, attitudes toward one’s own aging, self-perceptions of aging, and awareness of age-related change. AoA also incorporates elements that are more pre-conscious in nature, such as age stereotypes and culturally held notions about the aging process. Despite their theoretically broad common foundation, AoA constructs differ according to their specific frames of reference, such as whether and how they take into account the multidimensionality and multi-directionality of development. Examining the existing body of empirical work identifies several antecedents of AoA, such as sociodemographic “background” variables, physical health and physical functioning, cognition, psychological well-being and mental health, psychological variables (e.g., personality, anxiety), and life events. In general, more positive manifestations on these variables are accompanied by a more positive perception and evaluation of the aging process. Moreover, AoA is longitudinally linked to important developmental outcomes, such as health, cognition, subjective well-being, and mortality. Overall, the study of AoA has developed as a promising area of psychological aging research that has grown in its conceptual and empirical rigor during recent years.

This is an advance summary of a forthcoming article in the Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Psychology. Please check back later for the full article.

In ecological sciences, biodiversity is the dispersion of organisms across species and is used to describe the complexity of systems where species interact with each other and the environment. Typically, higher biodiversity is indicative of health and resilience of the ecosystem because each species performs functional roles, which means the ecosystem has greater capability to respond, maintain function, resist damage, and recover quickly from perturbations or disruptions. In behavioral sciences, diversity-type constructs and metrics are being used to describe a broad range of psychological, social, behavioral, physical and environmental phenomena. Emodiversity, for instance, is the dispersion of an individual’s emotion experiences across emotion types (e.g., happy, anger, sad). Although not always explicitly labeled as such, many core propositions in lifespan developmental theory—such as differentiation, dedifferentiation, and integration—imply intraindividual change in diversity and/or interindividual differences in diversity. The relevance of diversity to a broad range of phenomena and the utility of biodiversity metrics for quantifying dispersion across categories in multivariate and/or repeated measures data suggests further use of biodiversity conceptualizations and methods in studies of lifespan development.

This is an advance summary of a forthcoming article in the Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Psychology. Please check back later for the full article.

The assessment of cardiovascular (CV) responses associated with behavioral phenomena has long been an important component of psychological research seeking to better understand the physiological underpinnings of behavior. Within the field of gerontology, there has historically been much interest in CV responses. Much of this work has focused on blood pressure as an important reflection of CV functioning that is relatively simple to assess. An examination of the gerontological literature reveals at least three different ways in which researchers have used blood pressure to examine aging-related processes. One approach is to use blood pressure as a measure of health, either in terms of the level of functioning of the CV system or as a reflection of various disease-related processes, and examine its relationship to other aspects of functioning. For example, blood pressure has been frequently examined in relation to cognitive decline. A second approach has been to examine blood pressure reactivity as a reflection of physiological responses to stress. Aging has been associated with higher levels of reactivity to the emotionally evocative, and thus an examination of normative changes in reactivity may be useful in understanding the impact of aging on the ability to deal with stress. Reactivity is also potentially useful in understanding the impact of stress on health, with high levels of reactivity along with high frequency of such incidences being associated with negative health outcomes. In the field of gerontology, the additional burden associated with elevated levels of reactivity in later life is of particular interest. Finally, recent work has also focused on blood pressure as a measure of an individual’s attempts to actively cope with challenging situations, broadly defined. Building off the active coping model of Obrist, blood pressure responses in a given situation are viewed as direct reflections of active coping as the cardiovascular system is energized to provide the resources needed by the body and nervous system to deal with a given situation. The level of response has been shown to reflect both the difficulty of the task and the individual’s motivation, and thus is a relatively reliable indicator of (a) an individual’s engagement in a particular task and (b) the resources necessary to perform that task. Recent work on aging has focused on the utility of this measure as a reflection of the costs associated with cognitive engagement and the extent to which variation in these costs might predict both between-individual and age-related normative variation in participation in cognitively demanding—but potentially beneficial—activities.

In 2016, Statistics Canada released the results of the most recent census. For the first time ever, the proportion of Canadians aged 65-plus years surpassed the proportion aged 15 and under. The increase in the proportion of older adults was viewed as further evidence of the faster rate of aging of Canada’s population. Such demographic shifts are not unique to Canada; many industrialized nations around the world are experiencing similar changes in their populations. Increases in the older adult population in many countries might produce beneficial outcomes by increasing the potential for intergenerational contact and exposure to exemplars of successful aging. Such positive intergenerational contact could counter prevailing age stereotypes and improve intergenerational relations. On the other hand, such increases in the number of older adults could be viewed as a strain and potential threat to resources shared with younger age groups. The possibility of increased intergenerational conflict makes it more important than ever before to understand how older adults are stereotyped, how those stereotypes can produce different kinds of biased behavior toward them, and what the impact of those stereotypes are on older adults themselves.

Social-cognitive age representations are complex and multifaceted. A common stereotype applied to older people is one of warmth but incompetence, often resulting in paternalistic prejudice toward them. However, such benevolent prejudice, characterized by warm overtones, can change to hostile bias if older adults are perceived to violate prescriptive norms about age-appropriate behavior. In addition to coping with age prejudice, older adults also have to deal with the deleterious effects of negative age stereotypes on their day-to-day function. Exposure to negative aging stereotypes can worsen older adults’ cognitive performance in a number of contexts. As well, age stereotypes can be incorporated into older adults’ own views of aging, also leading to poorer outcomes for them in a variety of domains. A number of interventions to counteract the effects of negative aging stereotypes appear promising, but more work remains to be done to reduce the impact of negative aging stereotypes on daily function in later life.

This is an advance summary of a forthcoming article in the Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Psychology. Please check back later for the full article.

There is a growing appreciation of the importance of understanding the role of culture in children’s psychological development (also called human ontogenesis). In particular, the texts of Lev Vygotsky contributed greatly to a “cultural psychology” in which the study of culture and development is seen as central. At the same time, cross-cultural research in psychology has paid growing attention to developmental issues. Although there continues to be much debate over how to define culture, it is generally agreed that different human social groups have distinct cultures. It is common to assume, in addition, that cultural differences lead to differences in the trajectories of children’s development. This is true, but it is also the case that culture is a universal requirement for development. The interdependence of human communities—which probably had its origins in collaborative hunting and cooperative childrearing—seems to have placed demands on children’s development, selecting for a sensitivity to norms and to other people’s goals and intentions. Every child is born into a family and community with a language, customs, and conventions, and in which people have institutional rights and responsibilities. These define universal requisites of human psychological development: These include the acquisition of language, the development of a social identity, the understanding of community obligations, and the ability to contribute to the reproduction of the community. An open question today is the character of the capacities that children bring to these developmental tasks: the apparently species-unique ability that has made possible vast “cumulative” societies.

Daily diary designs allow researchers to examine processes that change together on a daily basis, often in a naturalistic setting. By studying within-person covariation between daily processes, one can more precisely establish the short-term effects and temporal ordering of concrete daily experiences. Additionally, the daily diary design reduces retrospective recall bias because participants are asked to recall events that occurred over the previous 24-hour period as opposed to a week or even a year. Therefore, a more accurate picture of individuals’ daily lives can be captured with this design. When conclusions are drawn between people about the relationship between the predictors and outcomes, the covariation that occurs within people through time is lost. In a within-person design, conclusions can be made about the simultaneous effects of within-person covariation as well as between-person differences. This is especially important when many interindividual differences (e.g., traits) may exist in within-person relationships (e.g., states).

Daily diary research can take many forms. Diary research can be conducted with printed paper questionnaires, divided into daily booklets where participants mail back each daily booklet at the end of the day or entire study period. Previous studies have called participants on the telephone to respond to interview questions each day for a series of consecutive days, allowing for quantitative as well as qualitative data collection. Online surveys that can be completed on a computer or mobile device allow the researcher to know the specific day and time that the survey was completed while minimizing direct involvement with the collection of each daily survey. There are many opportunities for lifespan developmental researchers to adopt daily diary designs across a variety of implementation platforms to address questions of important daily processes. The benefits and drawbacks of each method along with suggestions for future work are discussed, noting issues of particular importance for aging and lifespan development.

This is an advance summary of a forthcoming article in the Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Psychology. Please check back later for the full article.

Down syndrome (DS; trisomy 21) is the most common genetic disorder associated with intellectual disability. It occurs in one out of every 700 to 1,000 live births. DS is caused by trisomy of human chromosome 21, which results in the altered expression of over 300 genes. This neurodevelopmental syndrome is characterized by distinctive facial dysmorphology and an uneven cognitive phenotype including relative strengths and weaknesses. Relative strengths include visual processing, receptive vocabulary, and social-emotional functioning (though performance in these domains generally falls below the level expected for typically developing individuals). Relative weaknesses include verbal working memory, expressive language, and motor ability. However, the phenotype of individuals with DS is far from homogeneous, and a wide range of individual differences is present at every level of description. On the genetic level, the trisomy can occur through different mechanisms at distinct developmental time points, and the expression of trisomy 21 may be modulated by different genes across individuals. On the level of the brain, individual differences in brain structure and/or function correlate with variation in cognition and behavior, including communication skills. Large individual differences can also be observed on the cognitive level. For example, while some toddlers with DS are nonverbal, others reach expressive vocabulary levels close to those of typically developing children. A wide range of individual differences has also been reported in other areas, including the motor domain, sleep, parent-child interaction, and medical and psychiatric comorbidities.

In order to understand a neurodevelopmental syndrome such as DS, it is crucial to consider individual variations at multiple levels of description and the interactions between them over developmental time. A more complex, dynamic view that goes beyond a description of DS as a homogenous group is thus required.

Dyslexia, or a reading disability, occurs when an individual has great difficulty at the level of word reading and decoding. Comprehension of text, writing, and spelling are also affected. The diagnosis of dyslexia involves the use of reading tests, but the continuum of reading performance means that any cutoff point is arbitrary. The IQ score does not play a role in the diagnosis of dyslexia. Dyslexia is a language-based learning disability. The cognitive difficulties of dyslexics include problems with recognizing and manipulating the basic sounds in a language, language memory, and learning the sounds of letters. Dyslexia is a neurological condition with a genetic basis. There are abnormalities in the brains of dyslexic individuals. There are also differences in the electrophysiological and structural characteristics of the brains of dyslexics. Hope for dyslexia involves early detection and intervention and evidence-based instruction.