Ontologenetic Development Outline

Outline
I. Life span developmental psychology investigates ontogenesis (individual development) of the entire age spectrum (from conception to old age) as it assumes that development happens across life rather than being completed at adulthood.
A. Studies may have begun as early as 1777 in Germany with the two-volume work of Johann Nicolaus Tetens on the development of human nature and with the influence of philosophy as well as biology, yet it took centuries before it reaches North America and other European countries because of a zeitgeist in which biology, genetics, and the study of childhood reign supreme. It eventually took the limelight in the 1960s and 1970s seeing that:
1. There is a growing interest in other social sciences;
2. The

The efficacy of culture decreases with age as the power of material, social, culture, and psychology gets weaker (e.g. cognitive learning in old age).
B. Level 2 involves the dynamics of gains and losses as a regulatory process.
1. Three functions of ontologenetic development are taken into account:
a. Growth, which happens during childhood up until early adulthood to reach higher levels of functioning;
b. Resilience, which occurs sometime during adulthood to maintain or reobtain prior levels of functioning; and
c. Management or the regulation of losses, which arises during advanced adulthood to compensate for lower levels of functioning.
2. Deficits may become a catalyst for progress and change as seen in the existence of cognitive strategies (e.g. memorization techniques) and cultural innovations (e.g. creation and implementation of technological products).
C. Level 3 brings in a family of metatheoretical propositions.
1. Development-wise, there will always be gains in losses and losses in gains (e.g. the shift from cognitive pragmatics to cognitive mechanics; from probability learning to logical problem solving).
a. There are numerous possible courses of development due to plasticity that makes behavior always open and restricted at the same

These components and their respective knowledge frequently interact and work interdependently with one another (e.g. compensation, expertise).
2. Personality Development
a. There are three ways to deal with this study: (1) a traits approach, which discusses fundamental attributes and behavioral dispositions; (2) a self-systems approach, which addresses the dynamics of personality; and (3) a self-regulation process, which tackles the promotion of growth as well as the achievement of psychological equilibrium.
b. It is best represented by trait expression, self-regulation, and the "first in, last out" law that foresees personality only declining in the oldest of the old due to the existence of emotional and motivational tendencies as early as childhood.
III. The gap between life span theories and more age-specialized theories becomes closer.
A. A wave of innovative theoretical approaches to ontogenesis from new sources arrives.
1. Transdisciplinary dialogue with the likes of biologists and anthropologists moved frameworks and models from unilineal, organismic, and deterministic to multilinear, adaptive, and probabilistic.
2. Human development is no longer strictly viewed and explained as biological but rather hand-in-hand with culture where dynamic, interactive, and systematic changes may