Psychology and Human Development Related Theories - Essay Example

1. Describe some of the theories that relate to psychology and human development (e.g. reductionism, determinism)? What are the implications of thesefor health care practice? (See Barkway, chapter 2.) Human Development Theories Erik Erikson’s Developmental Theory According to this theory, there is a series of stages where we all travel through. There are conflicts, tasks and issues that we must conquer in order to fairly deal with it. These can be bad or poor outcomes that rely on the environment and the individual’s history.

There are eight stages of Erikson’s developmental theory. Of all the stages that Erikson proposed, the first stage remains to be the most important which is trust versus mistrust. This has been linked to several psychological problems occurring throughout a person’s life whether it be in his familial relationships, work, decisions in life, and outlook in life. A person may never proceed to his life if this stage is not completed (Davis & Clifton, 1995). Sigmund Freud’s Psychosexual Theory of Development Unlike Erikson’s theory, Sigmund Freud focused on the sexual part of development.

This means the development of both males and females may seem quite similar to one another. Freud’s theory is composed of five stages, namely: oral, anal, phallic, latency, and genital. However, his theory only extends up to young adulthood compared to Erikson’s theory lasting up to elderly age (60 years old and above). According to Sigmund Freud, each stage should be passed with balance that means a person going through a stage in his theory must surpass it sufficiently. For example, during the oral stage, when a person becomes orally fixated, he/she uses her mouth to gratify his/her desires.

Whenever he/she becomes anxious or depressed, he turns to alcohol or eating to control his/her emotions. It turns out with this theory that alcoholics or people with eating disorders had a problem during infancy. They already developed insecurities during that stage and never settled them. Jean Piaget’s Cognitive Development Theory According to Jean Piaget, children of various ages think differently from one another. For example, toddlers aren’t thinking the same way like school-aged children.

Young children are cannot understand causality well unlike older children having the ability to explain what caused such events to happen. Piaget argued that children in one stage, if they had not surpassed, will never progress to a more mature thinking. Cognitive theory suggests that not all children will be able to mature in thinking (Barkway, 2009). Bibliography Barkway, P. 2009. Psychology for Health Professionals. Australia: Elsevier. Davis, D. & Clifton, A. 1995. Psychosocial Theory.

Viewed on August 23, 2011.