PSYC2600 treats development as a continuous process spanning an entire life, not something that stops after childhood or adolescence — giving students a comprehensive framework covering every major life stage.
Major developmental theories
PSYC2600 covers the major theoretical frameworks for understanding lifespan development: Piaget's stages of cognitive development, Erikson's psychosocial stages spanning the entire lifespan, and attachment theory's account of early relational patterns and their lasting influence. Students learn to apply these frameworks to explain age-typical behavior and development at different life stages.
Physical, cognitive, and social change across the lifespan
The course surveys the physical, cognitive, and social milestones and changes characteristic of each life stage — infancy, early and middle childhood, adolescence, early/middle/late adulthood — while also examining individual variation within typical developmental trajectories, since development doesn't unfold identically for every person.
Key topics in PSYC2600
- Piaget's stages of cognitive development
- Erikson's psychosocial stages spanning the full lifespan
- Attachment theory: early relational patterns and their lasting influence
- Physical, cognitive, and social milestones across each life stage
- Individual variation within typical developmental trajectories
- Nature vs. nurture debates in developmental psychology
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Worked example: applying Erikson's stages across two life periods
- Adolescence (Identity vs. Role Confusion): A teenager exploring different social groups, values, and future goals to develop a coherent sense of identity
- Late adulthood (Integrity vs. Despair): An older adult reflecting on their life, working to find meaning and acceptance rather than regret
- Connection: Erikson's theory frames both as normal, necessary developmental tasks specific to their life stage — neither is a "problem" to be fixed, but a challenge to be resolved
- Lesson: Understanding which developmental task is salient at a given life stage helps explain behavior that might otherwise seem confusing out of context
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Frequently asked questions
Piaget's theory focuses specifically on cognitive development — how children's thinking and reasoning abilities change qualitatively as they move through distinct stages (sensorimotor, preoperational, concrete operational, formal operational), and it is largely limited to childhood and adolescence, since Piaget believed formal operational thinking represented the endpoint of cognitive development. Erikson's theory focuses on psychosocial development — the social and emotional challenges a person must navigate at each life stage — and spans the entire lifespan across eight stages, from infancy (trust vs. mistrust) through late adulthood (integrity vs. despair), reflecting Erikson's belief that meaningful psychological development and challenge continue throughout adulthood, not just childhood. PSYC2600 teaches both frameworks because they address genuinely different dimensions of development — how thinking changes (Piaget) versus how social and emotional identity develops (Erikson) — and using both together gives a more complete picture of a person's development at any given life stage than either theory alone.
While developmental theories describe general patterns and typical age ranges for reaching various milestones, actual human development shows considerable individual variation influenced by genetics, environment, culture, socioeconomic circumstances, and life experiences — two children of the same age can show meaningfully different rates of language development, or two older adults can experience very different trajectories of cognitive aging, both within the range of normal, healthy development. PSYC2600 emphasizes this variation because presenting developmental milestones as a strict, universal timeline risks pathologizing normal variation (treating a child who reaches a milestone somewhat later than average as having a problem, when this may simply reflect normal individual difference) or, conversely, dismissing genuine developmental concerns that fall outside typical variation as "probably fine." Understanding both the general developmental patterns and the genuine range of normal individual variation is necessary for accurately applying developmental theory to real people rather than an idealized, uniform model of development.