A report on Developmental psychology

In psychology, developmental stage theories are theories that divide psychological development into distinct stages which are characterized by qualitative differences in behavior.

Largely focusing on the development of the human mind through the life span, developmental psychology seeks to understand how people come to perceive, understand, and act within the world and how these processes change as they age.

The theory has been used in areas such as cognitive psychology, human development, and social psychology to explain, for instance, false memory and its development, probability judgments, medical decision making, risk perception and estimation, and biases and fallacies in decision making.

From psychology there are the primary streams of developmental, social and cognitive psychology.

It involves the study of both the genetic and environmental mechanisms that underlie the development of social and cognitive competencies, as well as the epigenetic (gene-environment interactions) processes that adapt these competencies to local conditions.

Mental health providers who work with children and adolescents are informed by research in developmental psychology, clinical child psychology, and family systems.

Esther Thelen (May 20, 1941 – December 29, 2004) was an expert in the field of developmental psychology.

Developmental psychology, and especially the psychology of cognitive development, opens a special perspective for educational psychology.

Cultural psychology research informs several fields within psychology, including social psychology, cultural-historical psychology, developmental psychology, and cognitive psychology.

In developmental psychology, childhood is divided up into the developmental stages of toddlerhood (learning to walk), early childhood (play age), middle childhood (school age), and adolescence (puberty through post-puberty).