Developmental stage theories
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One of the major controversies in developmental psychology centres around whether development is continuous or discontinuous. Stage theories of development rest on the assumption that development is a discontinuous process involving distinct stages which are characterised by qualitative differences in behaviour. Stage theories can be contrasted with continuous theories, which posit that development is an incremental process
There are many stage (discontinuous) theories in developmental psychology including:
- Jean Piaget's theory of cognitive development described how children represent and reason about the world
- Michael Commons' Model of Hierarchical Complexity.
- Erik Erikson's stages of psychosocial development expanded on Freud's psychosexual stages, he defined eight stages that describe how individuals relate to their social world
- James W. Fowler's stages of faith development theory.
- Sigmund Freud's Psychosexual stages described the progression of an individual's unconscious desires.
- Lawrence Kohlberg's stages of moral development described how individuals developed moral reasoning.
- Jane Loevinger, Stages of ego development.
- Margaret Mahler's psychoanalytic developmental theory contained three phases regarding the child's object relations.
- James Marcia's theory of identity achievement and four identity statuses .
- Maria Montessori's sensitive periods of development.
- Abraham Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs.
- Clare W. Graves' Emergent Cyclic Levels of Existence Theory.
- Judith Rich Harris' Modular theory of social development.
- Don Beck and Chris Cowan, Spiral Dynamics.
While some of these theories focus primarily on the healthy development of children, others propose stages that are characterized by a maturity rarely reached before old age.
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