This video we're going to be talking about developmental psychology which really rose to prominence as a field in the 1930s. So developmental psychology is a field of psychology that focuses on how psychological phenomena develop over the lifespan. And lifespan is an important term to note here because, you know, people often think about just children or adolescents when they hear developmental psychology, but you can study a person at any point during their lifespan. And as long as you're taking a developmental approach then you're doing developmental psychology. So it is a lifespan science.
Now to give you some historical context, at this time in, like, the early 1900, people often thought about children as just kind of like mini adults, just like with less knowledge and experience. But some psychologists began to believe that maybe there is something unique about how children understand the world. So not just the fact that they have less experience or less knowledge but maybe there's something fundamentally different about the way that children think compared to adults. And those psychologists wanted to systematically study this. Additionally, some psychologists began to think, you know, if we want to understand behavior and cognition in adults we should also be looking at how those things are developing in the first place.
So, those two things in combination kind of led to this rise in popularity of the field. Now when we're thinking about developmental psychology you're going to see research questions that ask things like how do people grow and change throughout the lifespan, as well as when, why, or how are those changes taking place. So again, we are considering the entire lifespan. We're thinking about how people change as well as what aspects of a person might stay stable, and we're asking all the questions, the how, when, and why is that happening. Now we have some important founders of developmental psych to go over.
And first up we have G Stanley Hall. And if you remember even just one name from this video, I highly recommend that it be his because he did a lot of very important, like, firsts in psychology, particularly in America. So G Stanley Hall was the first president of the American Psychological Association. He was also the first American to earn a PhD in psychology and he established the first psychology research lab in America at Johns Hopkins and he is also considered the founder of child development in the United States. And G.
Stanley Hall's big contribution to developmental psychology is that he was really the first person to argue that adolescence is a unique stage of development. And we now have decades of research supporting this idea and he was absolutely correct. We now know that adolescence is a pivotal point in development both in terms of, like, cognitive development, social emotional, physical development. It's a really big deal. So he was absolutely correct in that proposition.
Now one thing to note here is that as you can see, G. Stanley Hall was doing his research well before the 1930s. So I do want to clarify, the 1930s is kind of like the period in time when developmental psychology as a field began to take off, but clearly there were some people beginning to do developmental psychology research well before that. For example, G Stanley Hall who did a lot of research in, like, the late 1800s. Alright.
Next up we have a Swiss psychologist, Jean Piaget. And Jean Piaget was very interested in children's cognition, or basically in how children thought. And he asked really cool research questions because he really was not concerned with what children thought. He wanted to know why children thought that way. So for example, he would give kids a bunch of math problems and he didn't care if they got them right or wrong.
He was interested in the thought process that got them to their answer regardless of if it was correct or incorrect. And he did a bunch of research on kids of various ages and what he began to find was that kids who are similar in age tend to think in very similar ways. And that led Piaget to create his very famous theory of cognitive development, which we are going to learn about, quite a bit more in our developmental psych section. So stay tuned for that. And then finally, we have Arnold Gessell.
And Arnold Gessell was a pediatrician from America and he conducted extensive research on typical developmental milestones. So basically looking at what milestones do we expect to see in kids of certain ages. So, you know you know, nowadays, this is we almost take this for granted, like, how accessible this information is. You know, you can easily look up, you know, how many words should my 2-year-old be saying? Should my 6-month-old be able to roll over?
But, you know, back in the early 1900, there was no systematic database of that information, and he is really credited with being the person who built that up. So G Stanley Hall did decades of research on thousands of kids using very innovative cutting-edge techniques at the time like one-way mirrors and video cameras, and he did all this research figuring out what our average typical milestones that we would expect to see. And his research really created a nice solid foundation for both developmental psychology and pediatrics. Alright. So that is our little introduction to developmental psychology, and I will see you guys in our next video.
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