What Change Means in Psychology
Psychology is not a static science. People grow, adapt, develop disorders, recover from them, and sometimes resist recovery entirely. The concept of change runs through almost every area of the discipline, from how the brain rewires itself after injury to why some patients drop out of therapy.
Understanding change means asking three related questions: what changes, how do we detect it, and what makes it happen (or prevents it)? This subtopic builds answers to all three.
The concept of change connects directly to debates about determinism: whether behaviour is driven by fixed biological or environmental forces, or whether individuals have genuine agency over their own development.
Keep this tension in mind as you work through the material.
Development and Maturation
The process of growth across a person's lifespan, encompassing physical, cognitive, social, and emotional dimensions.
Development is often described through milestones, markers that signal the emergence of a new capacity or stage. In infancy these include crawling, walking, and producing first words. In adolescence, puberty is a widely recognised milestone combining physical and psychological change.
A common assumption is that development ends when someone reaches adulthood. It does not. Growth, adaptation, and decline continue throughout life until death.
Adult development includes changes in cognition, relationships, identity, and biology. Treating adulthood as a fixed endpoint will cost you marks on questions about lifespan development.
This lifelong view of development matters because it frames how psychologists design research: you cannot capture development in a single snapshot.