Human Growth and Development
What this domain covers
Human Growth and Development tests normative and nonnormative change across the lifespan - physical, cognitive, social, emotional, and moral - and the theories used to describe it.
Core rules
- Erikson's psychosocial stages: trust vs. mistrust (infancy), autonomy vs. shame and doubt (toddlerhood), initiative vs. guilt (preschool), industry vs. inferiority (school age), identity vs. role confusion (adolescence), intimacy vs. isolation (young adulthood), generativity vs. stagnation (midlife), integrity vs. despair (late life).
- Piaget: sensorimotor (0–2; object permanence around 8–9 months), preoperational (2–7; egocentrism, no conservation), concrete operational (7–11; conservation, reversibility, classification), formal operational (11+; abstract, hypothetical reasoning).
- Kohlberg: preconventional (punishment/obedience, instrumental exchange), conventional (good boy/good girl, law and order), postconventional (social contract, universal ethical principles). Gilligan critiqued the male bias and proposed an ethic of care.
- Attachment (Bowlby; Ainsworth's Strange Situation): secure, insecure-avoidant, insecure-ambivalent/resistant, and disorganized (Main & Solomon).
- Bronfenbrenner: microsystem, mesosystem, exosystem, macrosystem, chronosystem. Vygotsky: zone of proximal development and scaffolding.
Worked example
A 9-year-old correctly says the amount of water is unchanged after pouring from a short wide glass into a tall narrow one, but cannot reason hypothetically about an imaginary school. Reasoning: conservation and reversibility are concrete-operational achievements (roughly 7–11), while hypothetical-deductive reasoning belongs to formal operations. The child is on schedule; the counselor should not label the absence of abstract reasoning as a deficit or a disorder.
Traps
Assuming a stage equals a chronological age; confusing Kohlberg's levels with Erikson's stages; treating an attachment classification as a diagnosis; missing developmental screening when behavior looks disordered but is normative.