Psychology

Each stage is based on age-appropriate and culturally defined crises, or turning points, which demand that the individual choose between dialectic and opposing developmental outcomes. Each stage outcome provides a contribution to identity formation in the form of ego strengths.

Child development describes the physical, cognitive, emotional, and social growth of the child from birth to adolescence (some definitions include the prenatal period). The field of child development is part of a larger discipline known as developmental psychology (or human development in its interdisciplinary form), which is concerned with identifying and understanding systematic changes in the individual across the lifespan.

The term cognitive development refers to age changes in the ability to acquire, manipulate, or reason about information in particular contexts.

A theory of how children learn by building or constructing knowledge from the inside rather than by internalizing it directly from the environment.

The scientific study of emotional, physical, mental, and behavioral changes over a human's life span. The field of human development comprises various approaches and theories that attempt to explain universal truths of human development, as well as factors that can adversely affect normal human development from conception to death.

Children’s social development refers to the ways in which children grow in terms of their social skills, awareness of others, cooperative behaviors, and ways of approaching and interacting with others. Children’s social development has significant implications for later functioning in numerous areas, including emotional development, educational and employment success, and overall adjustment.

German-born US psychoanalytic theorist who contributed to the understanding of human mental development. Erikson coined the phrase identity crisis, and proposed that the ego is not fixed at birth or during childhood, but continues to be molded throughout life by experience and environment.

Specializing in research on moral education and reasoning, he is best known for his theory about stages of moral development, which first appeared in his 1958 dissertation. Moral development focuses on the emergence, evolution, and understanding of morality in a person's method or structure of thought. A central theme for moral development, and for criminal justice, is whether humans are born good or bad, or whether they become good or bad from life events.

Swiss psychologist whose studies of the development of thought processes in children have been influential in early-childhood research and on school curricula and teaching methods.

Lev Vygotsky (1896–1934) is the most celebrated Russian psychologist, both in Russia and worldwide. His popularity today is so immense that some authors refer to a “Vygotsky boom” or, somewhat skeptically, a “Vygotsky cult.”