Developmental psychology is studying how we –humans- develop throughout time. But what most people may ask is, what forces us to change as we pass through life? And there are multiple answers for this question. It could be because of the people we hang around, to the schools we attend. One specific researcher who specialized in developmental psychology is German biologist Konrad Lorenz, he studied imprinting, which is a form of early learning that occurs in some animals during a critical period. Lorenz wanted to know why do baby goose followed their mother around in a single line. He often asked himself “Do they follow mother goose because of an inborn tendency (nature), or do they learn to follow their mothers because of nurture? Which brings …show more content…
In the Developmental psychology field there are stages of personality development, these stages were developed by famous Psychologist Erik H. Erikson, and these stages were developed from the stage theories. Stage theories are based on the idea that elements in systems move through a pattern of distinct stages over time, but there are multiple stages and I’d like to keep it short and simple, so I have narrowed it down to infancy, early childhood, adolescence, early adulthood, and then finally there is adulthood. Up first there is infancy, which is 0-5 years of life. In the 0-1st year we go through the stage called basic trust vs. mistrust, in this stage Erikson says that we learn to feel comfortable and trust our parents care or sometimes distrust a world that is perceived to be unsafe. In 1-5th year we go through autonomy vs. shame and doubt, we learn to sense competence by learning to feed ourselves, use the toilet by ourselves and play alone when no one is around. The next main stage is Early Childhood which are the 5-11 years of our lives, which is industry vs. inferiority. We learn how to cope with school, and demands around home, and sometimes believe that we are inferior to other people. Starting to …show more content…
role confusion. At this stage we acquire a sense of who we are, and what makes us… us, or confused about what we are suppose to be doing in life. As you can guess the next stage is early adulthood, 18-40 years of life. Battling intimacy vs. isolation. Developing relationships and joint identity with our partner, or become isolated from meaningful relationships with other people, pushing people away and becoming essentially meticulous of who to let in. Finally there is Adulthood, 40- the rest of our lives, which is integrity vs. despair. This is perhaps the saddest stage because we would want to return to the earlier stages of our life, and cope with the temporary life that we have, or we try to find the meaning of why are we even alive. I’m sure you are asking yourself “What does this have to do with Nature vs. Nurture?” and the answer to that is pretty much everything, nature and nurture both take part of us human developing into who we are today. We get our facial feature, our voices, our body type, and almost everything from our genetics (nature) but it’s the environment (nurture) who makes us who we really are in the long run. We react to everything in the