Lifespan Development and Personality Paper

Lifespan Development and Personality Paper

The human body undergoes many alterations in the length of an individual’s existence, from the moment of conception as a fetus until a person exhales his or her last dying breath. This paper will focus on the adolescent period of an individual’s developmental psychology in an effort to answers questions associated with human development (which includes physical development, cognitive development, social development, moral development, and personality development). This paper will take an educated perspective on the subject of human development in order to answers three important questions. The three main questions in this paper are what factors affect physical development? What factors affect cognitive development? What factors affect social, moral and personality development?

Factors Affecting Physical Development

Adolescence proves to be a critical period in a person’s life. Adolescence is an individual’s transitions out of childhood and into adulthood “Puberty, the period of adolescence when a person becomes capable of reproduction, is a major physical milestone for everyone. It is a clear biological signal of the end of childhood” (Carpenter & Huffman, 2008, Chap. 9). Puberty starts when the brain begins to release large amounts of chemical messengers (hormones) into the bloodstream from endocrine glands like the hypothalamus and pituitary gland. Hormones released from the brain communicate to other hormone producing endocrine glands (pineal gland, thyroid, parathyroid, thymus, adrenals, pancreas, ovaries, and testes) which interact with the body as either protein or steroid molecules to target specific body tissues and organs that support the stages of puberty. This process tells the body to grow and mature into a state where the body is better able to survive environmental changes by inducing an increase in both body size and mass “The clearest and most dramatic physical sign of puberty is the...