Directions

The text discusses five different theories in developmental psychology and how each can attempt to explain various developmental phenomena from a different angle. For this assignment you are going to think about how the different developmental theories might try to understand a specific behavior.

1)  Pick

one

of the following concepts to analyze.

• Gender roles
• Altruism
• Aggression

2)  For

each of the five developmental theories

(psychoanalytic, behavioral, cognitive, sociocultural, and universal perspective/Humanism and Evolutionary Theory), write a brief explanation of the theory and then describe how it might try to understand the concept you chose.

Write your essay in a word processing program ( providing 250 -300 words )  and save the essay to your computer as a

.doc or docx file (Microsoft Word format)

.    This is the format we will use for most essays in this course. Click the link above called Developmental theories assignment submission and attach your file.  View Submitting an Assignment if you need help with this step.   Be sure to click the Submit button or I will not receive your file.

Purpose

This assignment gives you practice applying what you are learning to explain human behavior, and then provides the opportunity to see everyone’s ideas. We can learn a lot from each other comparing our interpretations of what we read.

text book Berger, K. (2014).  The Developing Person, Through the Life Span (

9th ed

.).   New York:  Worth.