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42 Cards in this Set
- Front
- Back
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Developmental psychology
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Developmental psychology describes and explains changes in human behavior over time.
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British empiricist school of thought
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John Locke, Thomas Hobbes, George Berkeley, David Hume, James Mill, and John Stuart Mill formed the British empiricist school of thought. They believed that all knowledge is gained through experience.
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Tabula rasa
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Locke asserted that a child's mind is considered a tabula rasa, or a blank slate, at birth. Children are born without predetermined tendencies and child development is completely reliant on experiences with the environment.
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Jean-Jacques Rousseau
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Rousseau believed that society was not only unnecessary, but also a detriment to optimal development. Rousseau wrote Emile: Concerning Education.
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Baby biographies
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In the late 18th century, it became popular for physicians, loving relatives, and others to keep baby biographies. These contained detailed information concerning the sequence of physical and psychological development. One of the most informative and useful of these diaries was kept by Charles Darwin.
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Evolutionary theory
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Evolutionary theory stressed the importance of studying the mind as it functioned to help the individual adapt to the environment, a central characteristic of the functionalist system of thought. Darwin's theory also caused researchers to become interested in the study of individual differences in abilities such as hearing, seeing, and problem solving.
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G. Stanley Hall
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Influenced by Darwin's evolutionary thought, Hall was one of the first psychologists to do empirical research on children by compiling hundreds of questionnaires on the views and opinions of children and compared them by age. He was one of the founders of the APA, and of child and adolescent psychology.
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John Watson
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Watson was an important early American psychologist who believed in the importance of environmental influences in child development and accepted the view of tabula rasa. Watson's theory placed a great deal of responsibility on parents for raising competent children. Watson also believed that emotions and thought were acquired through learning. Watson was a behaviorist, and maintained tha tthe only useful methods for the study of psychology were objective methods in the study of behavior.
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Arnold Gesell
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Arnold Gesell believed that development occurred as a maturational (or biological) process, regardless of practice or training. Gesell was a "nativist" in that he believed that much of development was biologically based and that the developmental blueprint existed from birth.
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Psychodynamic orientation
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Psychodynamic orientation is a major persepective that arose out of a clinical, rather than academic or research setting, originating in the work of Sigmund Freud. These theories stress the role of subconscious conflicts in the development of functioning and personality.
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Cognitive structuralists
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In contrast to beliefs of psychoanalytic and psychosocial theories, cognitive theories of development emphasize the thinking ability of people. In opposition to the behaviorists were the cognitive structuralists, an orientation most strongly influenced by Jean Piaget.
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Jean Piaget
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Piaget was a cognitive structuralist who saw children as more actively involved in their development--constructing knowledge of the world through their experiences with the environment.
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Cross-sectional studies
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Cross-sectional studies compare groups of subjects at different ages.
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Longitudinal studies
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Longitudinal studies compare a specific group of people over an extended period of time.
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Sequential cohort studies
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Sequential cohort studies combine cross-sectional and longitudinal research methods. In this combined approach, several groups of different ages are studied over several years.
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Clinical/case study method
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When developmental psychologists want to take a more detailed look at the development of a particular child, they use the clinical or case study method. This method attempts to collate facts about a particular child and his or her environment in order to gain a better perspective.
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Nature/nurture controversy
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Much of the discussion about the determinants of behavior has centered on the extent to which hereditary factors versus environmental factors influence cognitive, social, and emotional behavior. On the nature side is the position that human capabilities are innate and that individual differences are an effect of the person's genetic makeup. The nurture side holds that human capabilities are determined by the environment and shaped by experience. Presently, it is generally recognized that development is the result of a dynamic interaction between environmental and genetic forces.
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Gregor Mendel
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Gregor Mendel initiated the study of genetics.
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Genes
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By carefully observing the inheritance of certain traits in pea plants, Mendel hypothesized the existence of the basic unit of heredity, the gene. He suggested that each specific trait was controlled by an alternative form of a gene, called an allele, and that each variation was represented by an allele that was either dominant or recessive. For any given gene there are two alleles.
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Dominant and recessive alleles
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In humans, both parents contribute a gene for each trait. If both parents contribute a dominant allele, or if one contributes a dominant allele and the other a recessive allele, the dominant allele will be expressed. If both parents contribute a recessive allele, the recessive allele will be expressed.
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Genotype and phenotype
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The total genetic makeup (complement) of an individual is called the genotype. The total collection fo expressed traits that is the individual's observable characteristics is called the phenotype.
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Chromosomes
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Genes are located on chromosomes. It is on these chromosomes that we find the genetic information of the individual. The 23rd pair of chromosomes determines the sex of the child. During reproduction, the mother's egg cell always contributes an X chromosome. The father, whose sperm cell contains either the X or the Y chromosome, can therefore contribute either an X or a Y.
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Cells in the human body
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The nucleus of each cell in the human body, except for gametes, holds 23 pairs of chromosomes, 46 total. The cells in the human body are diploid, the chromosomes they contain exist in pairs.
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Gametes
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Gametes are not diploid. These cells are haploid and contain 23 single chromosomes. During conception, the two haploid cells come together to make a full complement diploid of 23 chromosome pairs. Thus, each parent contributes a gene for each trait. This results in a genetic variability that is far greater than in asexual reproduction.
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Heritability of traits
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Children can be said to have an average of 50 percent of their genes in common with each parent. Siblings and fraternal twins also have 50 percent of their genes in common with each other. For identical twins, it's 100 percent.
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R. C. Tryon
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R. C. Tryon studied the inheritance of maze-running ability in laboratory rats. He divided a group of rats by maze-running skill: maze-bright, maze-dull, and intermediate. Using selective breeding over several generations of rats, he found that the difference between the maze-bright and maze-dull rats intensified from generation to generation, providing evidence that learning ability had a genetic basis.
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Methods for determining the degree of genetic influence on individual differences between people
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Family studies, twin studies, and adoption studies are used to determine the degree of genetic influence on individual differences between people.
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Family studies
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Family studies have determined that the risk of developing schizophrenia for children of schizophrenics is 13 times higher than in the general population. For siblings, the rate is 9 times higher. Family studies are limited because they cannot distinguish shared environment factors from genetic factors.
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Twin studies
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Twin studies that compare monozygotic and dizygotic twins are better able to distinguish relative effects of shared environment and genetics. MZ twins are genetically identical, whereas DZ twins share approximately 50 percent of their genes. The assumption is that both MZ and DZ twins share the same environment to the same degree and the differences between MZ and DZ twins are thought to reflect hereditary factors. However, research has found that MZ twins are treated more simliarly by people than DZ twins and that MZ twins tend to imitate each other more than DZ twins. To better measure genetic effects relative to environmental effects, researchers compared personality characteristics in twins who were raised together to twins raised apart. On personality measures, MZ twins raised in the same family are most similar. MZ twins reared apart are more similar on personality characteristics than DZ twins reared together. DZ twins reared apart are the least similar. Based upon this research, it seems that personality characteristics are somewhat heritable.
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Adoption studies
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Adoption studies also help us understand environmental influences and genetic influence on behavior. These studies compare the similarities between the biological parent and the adopted child to similarities between the adoptive parents and the adopted child. Researchers have found that adopted children's IQ is more similar to their biological parents' IQ than their adoptive parents' IQ, suggesting that IQ is heritable.
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Lewis Terman
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Lewis Terman's study compared a group of children with high IQs with groups of children typical of the general population, to discover similarities and differences. This study was important in that it was the first to focus on "gifted" children, and that it was a large-scale longitudinal study that followed the development of the group over time, observing them every five years.
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Genetic disorders
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Genetic effects on intelligence and behavior is evident in people afflicted with mental retardation.
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Down's syndrome
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Down's syndrome is a genetic anomaly in which of the individual has an extra 21st chromosome. Individuals with Down's often have varying levels of mental retardation. One factor affecting the possibility of this genetic mutation is the age of the biological parents. Older parents have an increased risk of having children with Down's.
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Phenylketonuria
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PKU is a degenerative disease of the nervous system, and results when the enzyme needs to digest phenylalanine, an AA found in milk and other foods, is lacking.
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Klinefelter's and Turner's syndromes
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In males, possession of an extra X chromosome is known as Klinefelter's syndrome. These males have an XXY configuration. They're sterile and often have mental retardation. Females with only one X chromosome have Turner's syndrome. Turner's syndrome results in a failure to develop secondary sex characteristics. The individuals often have physical abnormalities such as short fingers and unusually shaped mouths.
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Stages of prenatal development
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In the zygote state, the sperm cell fertilizes the egg cell and forms a single cell--the zygote. In the germinal period, the fertilized egg travels down the fallopian tube and is implanted into the uterine wall. In the embryonic period, the embryo increases in size by 2 million percent in eight weeks. The fetal period begins in the third month with measurable electrical activity in the fetus' brain.
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External threats to prenatal development
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A variety of external influences can have deleterious effects on the development of the fetus. Infants whose mothers contract rubella, or German measles, before the end of the second month run a high risk of cataracts, deafness, heart defects, and mental retardation. Other viral infections, measles, mumps, hepatitis, influenza, chicken pox, and herpes have been linked to various birth defects.
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Reflexes
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A reflex is a behavior that occurs automatically in response to a given stimulus. The rooting reflex is the automatic turning of the head in the direction of a stimulus that touches the cheek. Sucking and swallowing when an object is placed in the mouths are also examples of reflexes related to feeding.
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Assessing infant neural development
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By comparing the point in time at which reflexes appear to the established norms, it is possible to tell whether neural development is taking place in a normal fashion.
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Neonatal reflexes
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Rooting is when infants automatically turn their heads in the direction of stimuli applied to the cheek. Moro is when infants react to abrupt movements of their heads by flinging out their arms, extending their fingers, bringing their arms back to their body and then hugging themselves. Babinski is when infants' toes automatically spread apart when the soles of their feet are stimulated. Grasping is when infants automatically close their fingers around objects placed in their hands.
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Jean Piaget
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Jean Piaget insisted that there are qualitative differences between adult and childhood thought. There are four stages of cognitive development that children pass through.
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Schema
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Piaget refers to organized patterns of behavior and or thought as schema. Infants develop behavioral schemata, characterized by action tendencies; older children develop operational schemata, characterized by more abstract representations of cognition.
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