Читать книгу Developmental Psychopathology - Группа авторов - Страница 54

In this chapter, we focus on “normal development,” although we recognize that this term is misleading as no two people are exactly alike and there are a range of outcomes that may all be considered “normal.” Even so, it is important to examine developmental milestones and the developmental progression of skills that are thought to be within the normal range, so as to better understand and identify what might not be normal. As you learned in Chapter 2, a fundamental principle of developmental psychopathology is that normal and abnormal development inform one another. We learn about how developmental trajectories move towards psychopathology, in part, by studying normal development.

It is critical to begin this chapter with the acknowledgment that human development is an incredibly complex topic to study, as there are a myriad of potential influences and outcomes to consider. In fact, there are too many to count! Researchers have spent over a century studying biological and environmental contributions to human development. In each of the sections below, we highlight how both biology and family, society, culture, and other contextual factors influence various aspects of human development. For example, in normal development, we see a fairly universal pattern of physical development and some cognitive skills, regardless of context, while other aspects of cognition seem to be heavily influenced by our environment. When it comes to social, emotional, and moral development, research indicates that there may be underlying biological determinants of behavior, but that our experiences and culture play a role as well. In developmental psychopathology, we appreciate that all of these factors interact in complex manners to predict an individual’s likelihood of a developmental trajectory that includes psychopathology.

In the first section of this chapter, we discuss the family as a context for development and how aspects of the home affect infants’ and children’s development. In subsequent sections, we focus on specific aspects of development, including physical, cognitive, social‐emotional, moral, and sex‐role identity development across the infancy, childhood, and adolescent years.