Lifespan and Developmental Psychology
What this domain tests
This domain tests whether you can judge behaviour against age-referenced expectations, separate normal variation from disorder, and adapt assessment across childhood, adolescence, adulthood, and older age.
Core rules
- Development is assessed against milestones and population norms; the same behaviour may be typical at four and disordered at twelve.
- Temperament and attachment style are not diagnoses. Attachment difficulties inform formulation but do not replace a disorder.
- ADHD requires symptoms before age twelve, present across at least two settings, with clear impairment.
- Autism is defined by social communication differences plus restricted, repetitive behaviour and interests, with early onset.
- In older adults, exclude delirium first: acute onset, fluctuating attention, and a medical cause. Cognitive testing during delirium is uninterpretable.
Worked example
A 78-year-old is brought in with two days of confusion, fluctuating attention, and visual hallucinations after a urinary infection and poor fluid intake. Reasoning: acute onset with fluctuating attention points to delirium, not dementia. The correct sequence is to treat the medical cause, reorient, and review medications, then assess cognition weeks later. Calling this dementia at the first interview is the classic error.
Traps that cost marks
Giving adult-normed tests to children; diagnosing dementia during delirium; pathologising normal grief or adolescent experimentation; ignoring hearing and vision loss; and over-diagnosing ADHD in the youngest children in a class, the relative-age effect.