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Lifespan Development

Lifespan Development

by BeccaGarz, May 2017

Subjects: developmental psychology, lifespand development, John Santrock

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	Development	The pattern of change that begins at conception and continues through the life span. Most development involves growth, although it also includes decline brought on by ageing and dying.
	Life span perspective	The perspective that development is lifelong, multidimensional, multidirectional, plastic, multidisciplinary, and contextual. Involves growth, maintenance, and regulation and is constructed through biological, sociocultural, and individual factors working together.
	Normative age-graded infleunces	Influences that are similar for individuals in a particular age group.
	Normative history-graded influences	Common to people of a particular generation because of historical circumstances.
	Non-normative life events	Unusual occurrences that have a major impact on an individual's life.
	Culture	Encompasses the behaviour patterns, beliefs, and all other products of a group that are passed on from generation to generation.
	Cross-cultural studies	Comparison of one culture with one or more other cultures. These provide information about the degree to which development is similar, or universal, across cultures and the degree to which it is culture-specific.
	Ethnicity	A characteristic based on cultural heritage, nationality characteristics, race, religion, and language.
	Socioeconomic status	Refers to a grouping of people with similar occupational, educational, and economic characteristics.
	Gender	The characteristics of people as males or females. Few aspects of our development are more central to our identity and social relationships than gender.
	Social policy	A national government's course of action designed to promote the welfare of its citizens
	Biological processes	Changes an individual's physical nature
	Cognitive processes	Changes in an individual's intelligence and language
	Socioemotional processes	Changes in an individual's relationships with other people, emotional and personality
	Nature-nurture issue	Refers to the debate about whether development is primarily influenced by nature or nurture. Nature refers to an organism's biological inheritance, nurture to its environmental experiences. The 'nature proponents' claim biological inheritance is the mist important influence on development; the 'nurture proponents' claim that environmental experiences are the most important.
	Stability-change issues	Involves the degree to which we become older renditions of our early experience (stability) or whether we develop into someone different from who we were at an earlier point in development (change).
	Continuity-discontinuity issue	Focuses on the extent to which development involves gradual, cumulative change (continuity) or distinct stages (discontinuity).
	Scientific method	An approach that can be used to obtain accurate information. It includes these steps: 1) conceptualise the problem. 2) collect data. 3) analyse data. 4) revise research conclusions and theory.
	Theory	An interrelated, coherent set of ideas that helps to explain and make predictions.
	Hypotheses	Specific assumptions and predictions that can be tested to determine their accuracy.
	Psychoanalytic theories	Describe development as primarily unconscious and heavily colored by emotion. Behaviour is merely a surface characteristic and the symbolic workings of the mind have to be analysed to understand behaviour. Early experiences with parents are emphasised.
	Erikson's theory	Includes eight stages of human development. Each stage consists if a unique developmental task that confronts individuals with a crisis that must be resolved.
	Piaget's theory	States that children actively construct their understanding of the world and go through four stages of cognitive development.
	Vygotsky's theory	A sociocultural cognitive theory that emphasises how culture and social interaction guide cognitive development.
	Information processing theory	Emphasises that individuals manipulate information, monitor it, and strategize about it. Central to this theory are the processes of memory and thinking.
	Information processing theory	Emphasises that individuals manipulate information, monitor it, and strategize about it. Central to this theory are the processes of memory and thinking.
	Social cognitive theory	The view of psychologists who emphasize behaviour, environment, and cognition as the key factors in development.
	Ethology	Stresses that behaviour is strongly influenced by biology, is tied to evolution and is characterised by critical or sensitive periods.
	Bronfenbrenner's ecological theory	Bronfenbrenner's environmental systems theory that focuses on five environmental systems: Microsystem, mesosystem, exosystem, macrosystem, chronosystem.
	Eclectic theoretical orientation	An orientation that does not follow any one theoretical approach, but rather selects from each theory whatever is considered the best in it.
	Naturalistic observation	Observing behaviour in real-world settings.
	Standardised test	A test with uniform procedures for administration and scoring. Many standardised tests allow a person's performance to be compared with the performance of other individuals.
	Descriptive research	Has the purpose of observing and recording behaviour.
	Correlational research	The goal is to describe the strength of the relationship between two or more events or characteristics.
	Correlation coefficient	A number based on statistical analysis that is used to describe the degree of association between two variables.
	Cross-sectional approach	A research strategy in which individuals of different ages are compared at one time.
	Longitudinal approach	A research strategy in which the same individuals are studied over a period of time, usually several years or more.
	Cohort effects	Effects due to a person's time of birth, era, or generation but not to actual age.
	Ethnic gloss	Using an ethnic label such as Aboriginal Australian or Arab in a superficial way that portrays an ethnic group as being more homogenous than it really is.
	Germinal period	The period of prenatal development that takes place in the first two weeks after conception. It includes the creation of the zygote, continued cell division, and the attachment of the zygote to the uterine wall.
	Blastocyst	The innerlayer of cells that develops during the germinal period. These cells later develop into the embryo.
	Trophoblast	The outer layer of cells that develops in the germinal period. These cells provide nutrition and support for the embryo.
	Embryonic period	The period of prenatal development 2-8 weeks after conception. During the embryonic period, the rate of cell differentiation intensifies, support systems for the cells form and organs appear.
	Amnion	The life-support system that is a membrane in the form of a sac that contains a clear fluid in which the developing embryo floats.
	Umbilical cord	A life-support system containing two arteries and one vein that connects the baby to the placenta.
	Placenta	A life-support systems that consists of a disc-shaped group of tissues in which small blood vessels from the mother and offspring intertwine.
	Organogenesis	Organ formation that takes place during the first 2 months of prenatal development.
	Fetal period	Lasting about 7 months in typical pregnancies, the period between two months after conception and birth
	First trimester	First three months
	Second trimester	Middle 3 months
	Third trimester	Last 3 months
	Conception to 4 weeks	Is less than .3 centimetres long. Beginning development of spinal cord, nervous system, gastrointestinal system, heart and lungs. Amniotic sac envelopes the preliminary tissues of entire body. Is called a zygote.
	8 weeks	Is just over 1.5 centimetres long. Faces forming with the rudimentary eyes, ears and tooth buds. Arms and legs are moving. Brain is forming. Fetal heartbeat is detectable with ultrasound. Is called an embryo.
	12 weeks	Is about 6 centimetres long and weighs about 14 grams. Can move arms, legs, fingers and toes. Fingerprints are present. Can smile, frown, suck and swallow. Sex is distinguishable. Can urinate. Is called a foetus.
	16 weeks	Is about 12 centimetres long and weighs about 100 grams. Heartbeat is strong. Skin is thin, transparent. Downy hair called lanugo covers body. Fingernails and toenails are forming, has coordinated movements and is able to rollover in amniotic fluid.
	20 weeks	Is about 26 centimetres long and weighs about 300 grams. Heartbeat is audible with ordinary stethoscope, sucks thumb, hiccups, hair eyelashes eyebrows at present.
	24 weeks	Is about 30 centimetres long and weighs about 600 grams. Skin is wrinkled and covered with protective coating called the vernix caseosa, eyes are open, waste matter is collected in bowel, has strong grip.
	28 weeks	Is about 38 centimetres long and weighs about 1005 grams. Is adding body fat, is very active, rudimentary breathing movements are present.
	32 weeks	Is about 42 centimetres long and weighs about 1702 grams. Has periods of sleep and wakefulness, responds to sounds, might assume the birth position, bones of head are soft and flexible, iron is being stored in liver.
	36 to 38 weeks	Is about 49 centimetres long and weighs about 2859 grams. Skin is less wrinkled, vernix caseosa is thick, lanugo is mostly gone, is less active, is gaining immunities from the mother.
	Neurons	Nerve cells, which process and transmit information in the nervous system. During prenatal development, neurons spend time moving to their final destinations. Once there they begin to form tentative connections are synapses. The basic architecture of the human brain is assembled during the first two trimesters of prenatal development.
	Neural tube	Forms about 18-24 days after conception, develops out if the ectoderm. The nervous system begins forming as a long, hollow tube located on the embryo's back. Pear shaped.
	Anencephaly & Spins Bifida	When the head end of the neural tube fails to close, the highest regions of the brain fail to develop. Most foetuses with this do not survive to birth. If they do, they do not survive for long after birth.
	Spina bifida	When the tube fails to close along the back, usually at the lower end. It results in varying degrees of incontinence and paralysis of the lower limbs. Maternal diabetes and obesity are conditions that place the foetus at risk.
	Neuronal migration	Between approximately 6-24 weeks after conception. Neurons moving outward from their point of origin to their genetically determined, final locations, so creating the different levels, structures and regions of the brain.
	Teratogen	From the Greek word tera, meaning monster. Any agent that affects the course of development adversely. The field of study that investigates the causes of birth defects is called teratology.
	Prescription drugs that can function as teratogens	Antibiotics: streptomycin, tetracycline, antidepressants. Some hormones (i.e. progestin and synthetic oestrogen) Retinoic acid (ATRA)
	Teratogens and the timinig of their effects of prenatal development
	Psychoactive drugs	Drugs that can act on the nervous system to alter states of consciousness, modify perceptions and change moods. (Caffiene, alcohol, nicotine, cocaine, methamphetamine, marijuana, herion)
	Foetal alcohol spectrum disorders (FASD)	A cluster of abnormalities that appears in the offspring of mothers who drink alcohol heavily during pregnancy.
	Caffeine as a teratogen	A recent study reveals that pregnant women who consume 200 or more milligrams of caffeine a day, approximately 3 or more cups of coffee, had an increased risk of miscarriage. Large amounts of caffeine do not seem to cause birth defects.
	Alcohol as a teratogen	Heavy drinking by pregnant women comma more than 3 drinks a day, can result in facial deformities and effective limbs, face and heart abnormalities. Memory development.
	Nicotine as a teratogen	Premature births and low birth weight, fetal and neonatal deaths, respiratory problems, sudden infant death syndrome and cardiovascular problems are all more common among the offspring of Mother's who smoke during pregnancy.
	Cocaine as a teratogen	Reduced birth weight, length and head circumference. Lower arousal, less effective self-regulation, higher excitability, poorer reflexes at 1 month. Impaired motor development, language development, information processing, attention deficits.
	Methamphetamine as a teratogen	More likely to show increase emotional reactivity and anxious/depressed problems at both 3-5 year olds and ADHD by 5.
	Emotional states and stress as teratogens	When a pregnant woman experiences intense fears, anxieties, and other emotions or negative mood states, physiological changes occur that might affect her foetus. Emotional or cognitive problems, ADHD and language delay
	Maternal depression	A recent study revealed maternal depression was linked to premature birth and slower prenatal growth rates.
	Paternal factors that affect pre- and postnatal development	Exposure to lead, radiation, certain pesticides and petrochemicals might cause abnormalities in sperm that lead to miscarriage or diseases such as childhood cancer. Heavy paternal smoking was associated with the risk of early pregnancy loss.
	Afterbirth	The third stage of birth, when the placenta, umbilical cord and other membranes are detached and expelled.
	Doula	A caregiver who provides continuous physical, emotional, and educational support for the mother before, during, and after childbirth.
	Medication used for labour	Analgesia: pain relief Anaesthesia: Block sensation in an area of the body or to block consciousness Oxytocin/pitocin: Administered to speed up or slow labour.
	Natural childbirth	This method attempts to reduce the mother's pain by decreasing her fear through education about childbirth and relaxation techniques during delivery.
	Prepared childbirth	Developed by French obstetrician Ferdinand Lamaze, this childbirth strategy is similar to natural childbirth but includes a special breathing technique to control pushing in the final stages of labour and a more detailed anatomy and physiology course.
	Breech Position	The baby's position in the uterus that causes the buttocks to be the first part to emerge from the vagina. (1 in every 25 deliveries)
	Caesarean Delivery	The baby is removed from the mother's uterus through an incision made in her abdomen.
	Apgar Scale	A widely used method to assess the health of newborns at one and five minutes after birth. The Apgar scale evaluates an infant's heart rate, respiratory effort, muscle tone, body color, and reflex irritability. 10 is the highest score. 7/10 = good condition 3/10 or lower = an emergency and indicates the baby may not survive.
	Brazelton Neonatal Behavioural Assessment Scale (NBAS)	Typically performed 24-36 hours after birth. A measure that is used in the first month of life to assess the newborn's neurological development, reflexes and reactions to people and objects.
	Neonatal Intensive Care Unit Network Neurobehavioiural Scale (NNNS)	An 'offspring' of the NBAS, the NNNS provides an assessment of the newborn's behaviour, neurological and stress responses and regulatory capacities. Developed to assess the 'at-risk' infant, esp. premature and substance-exposed infants.
	Low birth weight infants	Infants that weigh less than 2,500g at birth. Very low birth-weight -- < 1500g Extremely low birth-weight -- <1000g
	Premature Infants	Those born before the completion of 37 weeks of gestation (the time between fertilisation and birth).
	Small for Date Infants	Also called small for gestational age infants, these infants' birth weights are below normal when the length of pregnancy is considered. Small for date infants might be premature or full term.
	Consequences of premature and low birth weight	Survival rate has risen. Increases in rates of severe brain damage. More likely to develop learning disabilities, ADHD, breathing problems (asthma).
	Kangaroo Care	Treatment for premature infants that involves skin-to-skin contact. The close physical contact with the parent can help to stabilise heartbeat, temp, and breathing. They tend to gain more weight, and there are decreased pain responses.
	Postpartum Period	The period after childbirth when the mother adjusts, both physically and psychologically, to the process of childbirth. This period lasts for about 6 weeks or until her body has completed its adjustment and returned to a near pre-pregnant state.
	Postpartum Depression	Characteristic of women who have such strong feelings of sadness, anxiety, or despair that they have trouble coping with daily tasks in the postpartum period.
	Bonding	The formation of a close connection, especially a physical bond, between parents and their newborn in the period shortly after birth.
	Cephalocaudal Pattern	The sequence in which the earliest growth always occurs at the top -- the head -- with physical growth in size, weight, and feature differentiation gradually working from top to bottom.
	Proximodistal Pattern	The sequence in which growth starts at the center of the body and moves towards the extermities. Proximal v. distal muscles
	Frontal Lobes	Involved in voluntary movement, thinking, personality and intentionality or purpose. Immature in the newborn, but develops in the first year of life. The prefrontal region has the most prolonged development, with changes detectable at least into emerging adulthood.
	Occipital Lobes	Function in vision.
	Temporal Lobes	An active role in hearing, language processing, and memory.
	Parietal Lobes	Play important roles in registering spatial location, attention, and motor control.
	Cerebral Cortex	Covers the forebrain. Has 2 halves (hemispheres) and has 4 main areas called lobes in each hemisphere.
	Lateralisation	Specialisation of function in one hemisphere of the cerebral cortex or the other. I.e. speech and grammar depend on activity in the left hemisphere while humor and the use of metaphors depend on activity in the right hemisphere.
	Myelin Sheath	A layer of fat cells which encases many axons. It insulates axons and help electrical signals travel faster down the axon.
	Myelination	The process of encasing axons in fat cells, begins prenatally and continues after birth into adolescence. For visual pathways, occurs rapidly after birth and is completed in the first 6 months. Auditory myelination is not complete until 4/5 years.
	Significant changes in neurons in the first years of life	Myelination occurs and connectivity among neurons increases, creating new neural pathways. New dendrites grow, connections among dendrites increase and synaptic connections between axons and dendrites proliferate.
	Changes in Regions of the Brain	"blooming and pruning" vary considerably by brain region. E.g. 4th postnatal month = peach of synaptic overproduction in the visual cortex; followed by a gradual retraction until the mid-end of preschool years.
	Sudden infant death syndrome (SIDS)	A condition that occurs when an infant stops breathing, usually during the night, and suddenly dies without an apparent cause. Remains the highest cause of infant death in Aus. Risk of SIDS is considered highest at 2-4 months of age.
	Where babies sleep	Determined by culture, family, infant-parent biology (what makes babies happy), public health, scientific.
	Recommendations by the National SIDS Council of Australia	• Infants should be put on their back to sleep • The infant's head should be uncovered during sleep • Infants should be in a smoke-free environment • Safe cot, safe mattress, safe bedding, safe sleeping place • In their own cot in the same room as their parents for the first 6-12 months of their life
	Breast Feeding v. Bottle Feeding	Growing consensus is that breast feeding is better for the baby's health.
	Benefits of Breast Feeding in the Infant	Fewer infections: gastrointestinal, respiratory tract, otitis media (middle ear infection). Protects against wheezing in babies and children, particularly in the first 2-3 years. Less likely to have atopic dermatitis (chronic inflammation of the skin). Lowered risk for overweight and obesity for those who are breast-fed for 6+ months. Less likely to develop diabetes type 1 and type 2.
	Benefits of Breast Feeding in the Mother	Lower incidence of breast cancer, ovarain cancer, and small reduction in type 2 diabetes.
	Marasmus	A wasting away of body tissues in the infant's first year, cause by severe protein-calorie deficiency.
	Kwashiorkor	A condition caused by severe protein deficiency in which the child's abdomen and feet become swollen with water; usually appears between 1-3 years of age.
	Dynamic Systems Theory	The perspective on motor development that seeks to explain how motor behaviours are assembled for perceiving and acting.
	Reflexes	Built-in reactions to stimuli that govern the newborn's movements, which are automatic and beyond the newborn's control.
	Rooting Reflex	A newborn's built-in reaction that occurs when the infant's cheek is stroked of the side of the mouth is touched. In response, the infant turns his or her head towards the side that was touched, in an apparent effort to find something to suck.
	Sucking Reflex	A newborn's built-in reaction to automatically suck an object placed in its mouth. The sucking reflex enables the infant to get nourishment before he or she has associated a nipple with food and also serves as a self-soothing or self-regulation mechanism.
	Moro Reflex	A neonatal startle response that occurs in reaction to a sudden, intense noise of movement. When startled, the newborn arches its back, throws its head back and flings out its arms and legs. Then the newborn rapidly closes its arms and legs to the centre of the body.
	Grasping Reflex	A neonatal reflex that occurs when something touches the infant's palms. The infant responds by grasping tightly.
	Gross Motor Skills	Motor skills that involve large-muscle activities such as walking.
	Fine Motor Skills	Motor Skills that involve more finely tuned movements, such as finger dexterity.
	Sensation	The product of the interaction between information and the sensory receptors -- the eyes, ears, tongue, nostrils, and skin.
	Perception	The interpretation of what is sensed.
	Ecological View	The view that perception functions to bring organisms in contact with the environment and to increase adaptation.
	Affordances	Opportunities for interaction offered by objects that fit within our capabilities to perform function activities.
	Habituation	Decreased responsiveness to a stimulus after repeated presentations of the stimulus.
	Dishabituation	The recovery of a habituated response after a change in sounds, smells, or touches.
	Visual Preference Method	A method used to determine whether infants can distinguish one stimulus from another by measuring the length of time they attend to different stimuli.
	Size constancy	The recognition that an object remains the same even though the retinal image of the object changes as you move towards or away from the object.
	Shape Constancy	The recognition that an object's shape remains the same even though its orientation to us changes.
	Intermodal Perception	The ability to relate and integrate information from two or more sensory modalities, such as vision and hearing.
	Charles Nelson	Nelson and colleagues found that even newborns produce distinctive brain waves that reveal they can distinguish their mother's voice from another woman's, even while they are asleep.
	Esther Thelen	The dynamic systems theory -- how infants learn to control their arms to reach and grasp for objects. Infants modulate their movement patterns to fit a new task by exploring and selecting possible configurations.
	T Berry Brazelton	Observed how infants' sucking changed as they grew older. Infants engaged in sucking behaviour unrelated to feeding. By 1 year, most stopped the sucking behaviour, but as much as 40% continued to suck their thumbs.
	Karen Adolph	Found that locomotor experience rather than age was the primary predictor of adaptive responding on slopes of varying steepness. Newly crawling and walking infants could not judge the safety of the various slopes. With experience, they learned to avoid slopes where they would fall. Adolph referred to this as the specificity of learning.
	Eleanor and James Gibson	The main theme of the ecological approach of the Gibsons is to discover how perception guides action. Action can guide perception and perception can guide action. They are coupled.
	William James	Believed the newborn's world was a "blooming, buzzing confusion". However, even the newborn perceives the world with some order, although not the same way the toddler or adult perceives it. The newborn's vision is estimated to be 20/240, so the newborn can see at 20ft what a normal adult can see at 240ft. By 6 months, on avg., the vision is 20/40.
	Robert Fantz	A pioneer in the visual preference method. Infants look at different things for different lengths of time. (Patterns more than plain colored disks).
	Scott Johnson	In his research, learning, experience, and self-directed exploration via eye movements play key roles in the development of perceptual completion in young infants.
	Richard Walk	Constructed a miniature cliff with a dropoff covered by glass. They placed infants on the edge of the visual cliff and had their mothers coax them to crawl onto the glass, but most infants were like "nah" and stayed on the shallow side. This indicated they could see depth. 6-12 month infants had extensive visual experience. 2-4 months show differences in heart rate in the experiment.
	Schemes	In Piaget's theory, actions or mental representations that organise knowledge.
	Assimilation	Piagetian concept of using existing schemes to deal with new information or experiences.
	Accommodation	Piagetian concept of adjusting schemes to fit new information and experiences.
	Organisation	Piaget's concept of grouping isolated behaviours and thoughts into a higher-order, more smoothly functioning cognitive system.
	Equilibration	A mechanism that Piaget proposed to explain how children shift from one stage of thought to the next.
	Sensorimotor Stage	The first of Piaget's stages, which lasts from birth to about 2 years of age; infants construct an understanding of the world by coordinating sensory experiences with motoric actions.
	Simple Reflexes	Piaget's first sensorimotor substage, which coorresponds to the first month after birth. In this substage, sensation and action are coordinated primarily through reflexive behaviours.
	First habits and primary circular reactions	Piaget's second sensorimotor substage, which develops between 1 and 4 months of age. In this substage, the infant coordinates sensation and two types of schemes: habits and primary circular reactions.
	Primary circular reaction	A scheme based on the attempt to reproduce an event that initially occurred by chance.
	Secondary circular reactions	Piaget's third sensorimotor substage, which develops between 4-8 months. In this substage, the infant becomes object-oriented, moving beyond preoccupation with the self.
	Coordination of Secondary Circular Reactions	Piaget's fourth sensorimotor substage, which develops between 8-12 months of age. Actions become more outwardly directed and infants coordinate schemes and act with intentionality.
	Tertiary Circular Reactions, Novelty, and Curiosity	Piaget's fifth sensorimotor substage, which develops between 12-18 months. In this substage, infants become intrigued by the many properties of objects and by the many things that they can make happen to objects.
	Internalisation of Schemes	Piaget's sixth and final sensorimotor substage, which develops between 18-24 months. In this substage, the infant develops the ability to use primitive symbols.
	Object Permanence	The Piagetian term for understanding the objects and events continue to exist, even when they cannot directly be seen, heard, or touched.
	A-not-B Error	Error that occurs when infants make the mistake of selecting the familiar hiding place (A) rather than the new hiding place (B) as they progress to substage 4 in Piaget's sensorimotor stage; also called AB error.
	Core Knowledge Approach	States that infants are born with domain-specific innate knowledge systems, including space, number sense, object permanence, and language.
	Attention	The focusing of mental resources on select information. In the first year of life, attention is dominated by an orienting/investigative process. From 3-9 months, sstained/focused attention. Habituation/Dishabituation
	Joint Attention	Process that occurs when individuals focus on the same object and an ability to track another's behaviour is present, one individual directs another's attention and reciprocal interaction is present.
	Memory	A central feature of cognitive development, pertaining to all situations in which an individual retains information over time.
	Implicit Memory	Memory without conscious recollection; involves skills and routine procedures that are automatically performed.
	Explicit Memory	Memory of facts and experiences that individuals consciously know and can state.
	Deterred Imitation	Imitation that occurs after a delay of hours or days.
	Developmental Quotient (DQ)	An overall score that combines subscores in motor, language, adaptive and personal-social domains in the Gesell assessment of infants.
	Bayley Scales of Infant Development	Scales developed by Nancy Bayley that are widely sed in the assessment of infant development. The current version has three components: a mental scale, a motor scale, and an infant behaviour profile.
	Language	A form of communication, whether spoken, written, or signed, that is based on a system of symbols. Language consists of the words used by a community and the rules for varying and combining them.
	Infinite Generativity	The ability to produce an endless number of meaningful sentences using a finite set of words and rules.
	Phonology	The sound system of the language, including the sounds that are used and how they may be combined. Phoneme - basic unit of sound in language.
	Morphology	Units of meaning involved in word formation. Morpheme - a minimal unit of meaning; it is a word or a part of a word that cannot be broken into smaller meaningful parts.
	Syntax	The ways words are combined to form acceptable phrases and sentences.
	Semantics	The meaning of words and sentences.
	Pragmatics	The appropriate use of language in different contexts.
	Telegraphic Speech	The use of short and precise words without grammatical markers such as articles, auxiliary verbs, and other connectives.
	Broca's area	An area in the brain's left frontal lobe that is involved in speech production
	Wernicke's area	An area in the brain's left hemisphere that is involved in language comprehension.
	Aphasia	A loss or impairment of language ability caused by brain damage.
	Language Acquisition Device (LAD)	Chomsky's term that describes a biological endowment enabling the child to detect the features and rules of language, including phonology, syntax, and semantics.
	Child-directed Speech	Language spoken in a higher pitch than normal with simple words and sentences.
	Jean Piaget	Studied cognitive development in infants and children. Maintained that infants go through 6 substages as they progress in less than 2 short years.
	Elizabeth Spelke	Argues that infants' perceptual abilities are highly developed very early in development. Young infants interpret the world as having predictable occurrences.
	Renée Baillargeon	Documents that infants as young as 3-4 months expect objects to be substantial and permanent. They see objects as bounded, unitary, solid, and separate from their background, possibly at birth or shortly thereafter, but definitely by 3-4 months.
	Andrew Meltzoff	Argues that Spelke's and Baillargeon's research relies on how long infants look at unexpected events and thus assess infants' perceptual expectations about where and when objects will reappear rather than tapping their knowledge about the objects are when they are out of sight.
	Karen Wynn	Infants can distinguish between different numbers of objects, actions, and sounds.
	Mark Johnson	Infants likely come into the world with 'soft biases to perceive and attend to different aspects of the environment and to learn about the world in a particular way'.
	Carolyn Rovee-Collier	Demonstrated how infants can retain information from the experience of being conditioned.
	Jean Mandler	Leading expert on infant cognition. Argues that infants in Rovee-Collier's experiments are displaying only implicit memory (skills and routine procedures that are automatically performed).
	Rachel Barr	Explicit memory improves substantially during the second year of life.
	Arnold Gesell	Developed a measure that helped sort out babies with typical functioning from ones with atypical functioning. Has 4 categories of behaviour: motor, language, adaptive, and personal-social
	Nancy Bayley	Developed the Bayley Scales of Infant Development to assess infant behavior and predict later development.
	Patricia Kuhl	Long before they begin to learn words, infants can make fine distinctions among the sounds of the language. From birth to ~6 months, infants are 'citizens of the world' - they recognize when sounds change most of the time, no matter what language the syllables come from.
	Noam Chomsky	Proposed that humans are biologically prewired to learn language at a certain time and in a certain way. Children are born into the world with a language acquisition device (LAD).
	Roger Brown	Research on the behaviourist view of language - it does not explain how people create novel sentences, and children learn the syntax of their native language even if they are not reinforced for doing so.
	Michael Tomasello	Young children are intensely interested in their social world and that early in their development they can understand the intentions of other people. His interaction view of language emphasises that children learn language in specific contexts.
	Betty Hart and Todd Risely	Compared with the professional parents, the parents on welfare talked much less to their young children, talked less about past events, and provided less elaboration. Children of the professional parents had a much larger vocabulary at 36 months of age.
	Janellen Huttenlocher	Research has linked how much mothers speak to their infants and the infants' vocab. Infants whose mothers spoke more often to them had markedly higher vocabs.
	Emotion	Feeling, or affect, that occurs when a person is in a state or interaction that is important to him or her. Emotion is characterised by behaviour that reflects (expresses) the pleasantness or unpleasantness of the state a person is in or the transactions being experienced.
	Primary Emotions	Emotions that are present in humans and other animals and emerge early in life; examples are joy, anger, sadness, fear, and disgust.
	Self-conscious emotions	Emotions that require self-awareness, especially consciousness and a sense of 'me'; examples include jealousy, empathy, and embarrassment.
	Basic Cry	A rhythmic pattern usually consisting of a cry, a briefer silence, a shorter inspiratory whistle that is higher pitched than the main cry and then a brief rest before the next cry.
	Anger cry	A variation of the basic cry in which more excess air is forced through the vocal cords
	Pain cry	A sudden long, initial loud cry followed by breath holding; no preliminary moaning is present. The pain cry is stimulated by a high-intensity stimulus.
	Reflexive smile	A smile that does not occur in response to external stimuli and appears during the first month after birth, usually during sleep.
	Social smile	A smile that occurs in response to an external stimulus, typically a face in the case of a young infant. Social smiling occurs as early as 2 months of age.
	Stranger Anxiety	An infant's fear and wariness of strangers; it tends to appear in the second half of the first year of life.
	Separation protest	An infant's distressed crying when the caregiver leaves.
	Temperament	Involves individual differences in behavioural styles, emotions, and characteristic ways of responding.
	Easy child	A child who is generally in a positive mood, quickly establishes regular routines in infancy, and adapts easily to new experiences.
	Difficult child	A child who tends to react negatively and cry frequently, engages in irregular daily routines and is slow to accept change.
	Slow-to-warm-up Child	A child who has a low activity level, is somewhat negative and displays a low intensity of mood.
	Adoption	The social and legal process by which a parent-child relationship is established between persons unrelated at birth.
	Behaviour genetics	The field that seeks to discover the influence of heredity and environment on individual differences in human traits and development.
	Twin study	A study in which the behavioural similarity if identical twins is compared with the behavioural similarity of fraternal twins.
	Adoption study	A study in which investigators seek to discover whether, in behaviour and psychological characteristics, adopted children are more like their adoptive parents, who provided a home environment, or more like their biological parents, who contributed their heredity. Another form of the adoption study is to compare adoptive and biological siblings.
	Passive genotype-environment correlations	Correlations that exist when natural parents, who are genetically related to the child, provide a rearing environment do the child. E.g. musically inclined parents usually have musically inclined children.
	Evocative genotype-environment correlations	Correlations that exist when the child's genotype elicits certain types of physical and social environments. E.g. a happy, outgoing child elicits smiles and friendly responses from others.
	Active (niche-picking) genotype-environment correlations	Correlations that exist when children seek out environments they find compatible and stimulating. E.g. libraries, sports fields and a store with musical instruments are examples of environmental niches children might seek out if they have intellectual interests in books, talent in sports or musical talents, respectively.
	Shared environmental experiences	Siblings' common environmental experiences, such as their parents' personalities and intellectual orientation, the family's socioeconomic status and the neighbourhood in which they live.
	Non-shared environmental experiences	The child's own unique experienced, both within the family and outside the family, that are not shared by another sibling. Thus, experiences occurring within the family can be part of the 'non-shared environment'.
	Epigenetic view	Emphasises that development is the result of an ongoing, bidirectional action between heredity and environment. Biochemical processes that are set in motion by environmental influences and that regulate the expression of genes by affecting how easily their instructions can be read.
	G x E interaction (gene x environment)	The interaction between a specific measured variation in the DNA and a specific measured aspect of the environment. Individuals who have a short allele of a gene labelled 5-HTTLPR (a gene involving the neurotransmitter serotonin) have an elevated risk of developing depression, but only if they lead stressful lives. I.e. the gene interacted with environmental exposure to stress to determine whether individuals would develop depression.
	Evolutionary psychology	Emphasises the importance of adaptation, reproduction and survival of the fittest in shaping behaviour.
	Chromosomes	Threadlike structures that come in 23 pairs, one member of each pair coming from each parent. Chromosomes are made up of the genetic substance DNA.
	DNA	A complex molecule that contains genetic information; DNA is organised into chromosomes.
	Genes	Units of hereditary information formed by segments of DNA. Genes direct cells to reproduce themselves and manufacture the proteins that maintain life.
	Mitosis	Cellular reproduction in which the cell's nucleus duplicates itself with 2 new cells being formed, each containing the same DNA WS the parent cell, arranged in the same 23 pairs of chromosomes.
	Meiosis	A specialised form of cell division that occurs to form ova and sperm (or gametes).
	Fertilisation	A stage in reproduction whereby an ovum and a sperm fuse to create a single cell, called a zygote.
	Zygote	A single cell formed through fertilisation.
	Identical twins	Monozygotic twins. Develop from a single zygote that splits into 2 genetically identical replicas.
	Fraternal twins	Dizygotic twins. Develop from separate ova and separate sperm, making them genetically no more similar than ordinary siblings.
	Genotype	A person's genetic heritage; the actual genetic material.
	Phenotype	The way an individual's genotype is expressed in observable and frequently measurable characteristics.
	Goodness of fit	Refers to the match between a child's temperament and the environmental demands with which the child must cope.
	Social referencing	Reading in emotional cues in others to help determine how to act in a particular situation.
	Attachment	A close emotional bond between two people
	Strange situation	And observational measure of infant attachment that requires the Infant to move through a series of introductions, separations and reunions with the caregiver and an adult Stranger in a prescribed order.
	Securely attached babies	Babies that use the caregiver as a secure base from which to explore the environment
	Insecure avoidant babies	Babies that show insecurity by avoiding the caregiver
	Insecure resistant babies	Babies that off and cling to the caregiver, resist the caregiver by fighting against the closeness, perhaps by kicking or pushing away
	Insecure disorganised babies	Babies that show and security by being disorganised and disoriented
	Reciprocal socialisation	Socialisation that is bidirectional. Children socialize parents, just as parents socialise children.
	Scaffolding	Parents time interactions so that infants experience turn taking with the parents
	Maternity leave	In some countries pre-birth leave is compulsory as is a 6 to 10 week leave following birth
	Parental leave	This gender neutral leave usually follows and maternity leave and allows other women or men to share the leave policy or choose which of them will use it
	Paternity leave	This is usually much braver than maternity leave. It may be especially important when a second child is born and the first child requires care
	Child rearing leave	In some countries this is a supplement to maternity leave for a variation on a parental leave. The child rearing leave is usually longer than a maternity leave and is typically paid at a much lower level.
	Family leave	Discovers reasons other than the birth of a new baby and can allowed time off from employment to care for Neil child or other family members, time to accompany a child to school for the first time, or time to visit a child's school.
	Michael Lewis	Leading expert on infant emotional development, distinguishes between primary motions and self conscious emotions
	Joseph Campos	Debate how early and infant and toddler years the emotions that we have described first appear and their sequence. For example some researchers argue that jealousy does not emerge until approximately 18 months of age there as others emphasize that it is displayed much earlier
	John Bowlby	Ethological perspective. Stresses the importance of attachment in the first year of life and the responsiveness of the caregiver. Bowlby maintained both infants and their primary caregivers are biologically predisposed to form attachments. Four stages of attachment.
	Bowlby's first stage of attachment	From birth to 2 months. Infants instinctively direct their attachment to human figures. Strangers, siblings and parents are equally likely to elicit smiling or crying from the infant
	Bowlby's 2nd stage of attachment	From 2 to 7 months. Attachment becomes focused on one figure, usually the primary caregiver, as the baby gradually learns to distinguish familiar from unfamiliar people.
	Bowlby's 3rd stage of attachment	From 7 to 24 months. Specific attachments develop. With increased locomotor skills, babies actively seek contact with regular caregivers, such as a mother or father.
	Bowlby's 4th stage of attachment	From 24 months on. Children become aware of others feelings, goals and plans and begin to take this into account in forming their own actions
	John Watson	Argued that parents spend too much time responding to infant crying. As a result, parents reward crying and increase its incidents.
	Jacob Gewirtz	Found that a caregiver's quick, soothing response to crying increased crying.
	Mary Ainsworth	Stressed that you can't respond to much to infant crying in the first year of life. They believe that a quick, comforting response to the infants cries is an important ingredient in the development of a strong bond between the Infant and caregiver
	Alexander Chess & Stella Thomas	Identify the three basic types of temperament: easy child difficult child and slow-to-warm-up child
	Jerome Kagan	Emotions are influenced both by biological foundations and by a persons experience. Biology importance to emotion is apparent in the changes in a baby's emotional capacities.
	Mary Rothbart and John Bates	Argue that three broad dimensions best represent what research is a found to characterize the structure of temperament: extraversion / surgency, negative affectivity and effortful control
	Extraversion / urgency	Includes positive anticipation, impulsivity, activity level and sensation seeking. Kagan's uninhibited children fit into this category.
	Negative affectivity	Includes fear, frustration, sadness and discomfort. These children I easily distressed. They may fret and cry often. Kagan's inhibited children fit this category
	effortful control	Includes attentional focusing and shifting, inhibitory control, perceptual sensitivity and low intensity pleasure. Infants you are high on effortful control show inability to keep their arousal from getting too high and have strategies for soothing themselves. By contrast, children low on effortful control are often unable to control their arousal. They become easily agitated and intensely emotional.
	Erik Erikson	The first year of life is characterized by the trust vs mistrust stage of development. Following a life of regularity, warmth and protection in the Mother's room, the instant face is a world that is less secure. Erikson propose that infants learn trust when they are cared for in a consistent, warm manner
	Ross Thompson	Twin and adoption studies suggest that heredity has a moderate influence on differences in temperament within a group of people. The contemporary view is that temperament is a biologically based but you holding aspect of behaviour, it involves as the child's experiences are Incorporated into a network of self perceptions and behavioral preferences that characterise a child's personality
	Harry Harlow	Freud emphasized that infants become attached to the person or object that provide oral satisfaction. However a study by Harry Harlow revealed that infants become attached to the person who provides physical comfort
	Jay Belsky	Family subsystems. These systems have reciprocal influences on each other. Emphasises that marital relations, parents in an infant behaviour and development can have both direct and indirect effects on each other
	Kathleen McCartney	Childcare expert, offered this advice: recognise that the quality of your parenting is a key factor in your child's development. Monitor your child's development. Take some time to find the best childcare.
	Myelination	The process by which the nerve cells are covered in insulated with a layer of fat cells, which increases the speed at which information travels through the nervous system.
	Preoperational stage	Piaget's second stage, lasting from about 2 to 7 years of age, during which children begin to represent the world with words, images and drawings, and symbolic thought goes beyond simple connections of sensory information and physical action. Stable concepts are formed, mental reasoning emerges, egocentrism is present and magical beliefs are constructed.
	Operations	In Piaget's theory, these are reversible and mental actions that allow children to do mentally what they formally did physically
	Symbolic function substage	First substage of pre operational thought comma in which the child Gaines the ability to mentally represent an object that is not present. Occurs between 2 and 4 years of age.
	Egocentrism	The inability to distinguish between ones own perspective and someone else's. Salient feature of the first substage of pre operational thought.
	Animism	The belief that inanimate object have life like a qualities and a capable of action
	Intuitive sport substage	Second substage of pre operational thought comma in which children begin to use primitive reasoning and want to know the answers to all sorts of questions. Occurs between 4 and 7 years of age.
	Centration	The focusing of attention on one characteristic to the exclusion of all others
	Conservation	In Piaget's theory, awareness that altering an object or a substances appearance does not change it's basic properties
	Zone of proximal development	Vygotsky's term for tasks too difficult for children to master alone but that can be mastered with the assistance of Adults or more skills children
	Social constructivist approach	An approach that emphasizes the social contexts of learning and that knowledge is mutually built and constructed. Vygotsky's theory reflects this approach.
	Executive attention	Involves action planning, allocating attention to goals, error detection and compensation, monitoring progress on tasks and dealing with novel or difficult circumstances
	Sustained attention	Focused and extended engagement with an object, task, event or other aspect of the environment
	Short term memory	The memory component in which individuals retain information for up to 30 seconds, assuming there is no rehearsal of the information
	Strategies	Deliberate mental activities to improve the processing of information
	Theory of mind	The awareness of one's own mental processes and the mental processes of others
	Child centred kindergarten	Education that involves the whole Child by considering both the child's physical, cognitive and social and emotional development and the child's needs, interests and learning styles
	Montessori approach	And educational philosophy in which children are given considerable freedom and spontaneity in choosing activities and are allowed to move from one activity to another as they Desire
	Developmentally appropriate practice (DAP)	Education that focuses on a typical developmental patterns of children (age-appropriateness) and the uniqueness of each child (individual appropriateness)
	Barbel Inhelder	Initially studied young children's egocentrism by devising the three mountains task.
	Rochel Gelman	Showed that when the tiles attention to relevant aspects of the conservation tasks is improved the child is more likely to conserve
	Lev Vygotsky	Reasons that children's cognitive development is Advanced through social interaction with more skilled individuals embedded in a socio cultural backdrop
	Rothbart and Gartstein	Young children especially make advances in two aspects of attention: executive attention and sustained attention
	Self-understanding	The child's cognitive representation of self, the substance and content of the child self-conceptions
	Moral development	Development that involves thoughts, feelings and behaviours regarding rules and conventions about what people should do in their interactions with other people
	Heteronormous morality	The first stage of moral development in Piaget's, occurring for approximately 4 to 7 years of age. Justice and rules are conceived of as unchangeable properties of the world, removed from the control of people.
	Autonomous morality	In Piaget's theory, displayed by older children about 10 years of age and older. The child becomes aware that rules and laws are created by people and that in judging and action one should consider the actors intentions as well as the consequences
	Immanent Justice	The concept that if a rule is broken punishment will be metered out immediately
	Conscience	An internal regulation of standards of right and wrong that involves an integration of morals thought, feeling, and behaviour
	Gender identity	The sense of being male or female, which most children acquire by the time they are 3 years old
	Gender role	A set of expectations that prescribes have females or males should think, act, and feel
	Gender typing	Acquisition of a traditional masculine or feminine role
	Social role Theory	A theory that gender differences results from the contrasting roles of men and women
	Psychoanalytic theory of gender	A theory deriving from Freud's view that the preschool child develops a sexual attraction to the opposite sex parent, but by approximately 5 or 6 years of age renounces this attraction because of anxious feelings and subsequently identifies with the same sex parent, unconsciously adopting the same sex parents characteristics
	Social cognitive theory of gender	A theory that emphasises that children's gender development occurs through the observation and imitation of gender behaviour and through the rewards and punishments children experience for gender appropriate and gender inappropriate behaviour
	Gender schema Theory	The theory that gender typing emerges as children develop gender schemas of their cultures gender appropriate and gender inappropriate behaviour
	Authoritarian parenting	A restrictive, punitive style in which parents exhort the child to follow their directions and to respect their work and effort. The authoritarian parent places firm limits and controls on the child and allows little verbal exchange. Authoritarian parenting is associated with children's social incompetence
	Authoritative parenting	A parenting style in which parents encourage their children to be independent but still Place limits and controls on their actions. Extensive verbal give and take is allowed and parents are warm and nurturing towards the child. Authoritative parenting is associated with children's social competence
	Neglectful parenting	A style of parenting in which the parent is very uninvolved in the child's life. It is associated with children's social incompetence, especially a lack of self control
	Indulgent parenting	A style of parenting in which parents are highly involved with their children but plays few demands all controls on them. Indulgent parenting is associated with children's social incompetence, especially a lack of self control
	Sensorimotor play	Behaviour engaged in by infants to derive pleasure from exercising their existing sensorimotor schemas
	Practice play	Play that involves repetition of behaviour when new skills are being learnt or when physical or mental Mastery and coordination of skills are required for games all sports
	Pretence / symbolic play	Play in which the child transforms the physical environment into a symbol
	Social play	Play that involves social interactions with peers
	Constructive play	Play that combines sensorimotor and repetitive activity with symbolic representation of ideas. Constructive play occurs when children engage in self-regulated creation or construction of a product or solution
	Games	Activities engaged in for pleasure that include rules and often competition with one or more individuals
	Erik Erikson + Initiative v. Guilt	By now, children have become convinced that they are persons of their own; during early childhood, they begin to discover what kind of person they will become. They identify intensely with their parents, who most of the time appear to them to be powerful and beautiful, although often unreasonable, disagreeable, and sometimes even dangerous.
	Ross Thompson	Both the extensive theory of mind research and the recent research on young children's social understanding underscore that young children are not as egocentric as Piaget envisioned.
	Maayan Davidov & Joan Grusec	A mother's warmth, but not her response to her child's distress, was related to children's regulation of positive emotions (such as being cheerful).
	Freud + Morality	According to Freud, feelings of anxiety and guilt are central to the account of moral development provided by Freud's psychoanalytic theory. To reduce anxiety, avoid punishment, and maintain parental affection, children identify with parents, internalising their standards of right and wrong and thus form the superego, the moral element of personality.
	Diana Baumrind + Parenting Styles	Argues parents should be neither punitive nor aloof. Rather, they should develop rules for their children and be affectionate with them. She described 4 types of parenting styles: authoritarian, authoritative, neglectful, indulgent.
	Ruth Chao + Parenting styles	Argues that the style of parenting used by many Asian American parents is distinct from the domineering control of the authoritarian style. Instead, the control reflects concern and involvement in their children's lives and is best conceptualised as a type of training.
	Laurie Kramer + Siblings	Not intervening and letting sibling conflict escalate are not good strategies. She developed a program titled 'More Fun With Sisters and Brothers' that teaches 4-8 year old siblings social skills for developing positive interactions.
	Ann Crouter + Parents	Parents that have poor working conditions, such as long hours, overtime work, stressful work and lack of autonomy at work are more likey to be more irritable at home and engage in less effective parenting than their counterparts who have better work conditions in their jobs.
	Daniel Berlyne + Play	Play is exciting and pleasurable in itself because it satisfies our exploratory drive. This drive involves curiosity and a desire for information about something new or unusual. Play encourages exploratory behaviour by offering children the possibilities of novelty, complexity, uncertainty, surprise, and incongruity.
	Learning disability	Describes a child who has difficulty in learning that involves understanding or using spoken or written language and the difficulty can appear in listening, thinking, reading, writing and spelling. A learning disability also may involve difficulty in doing mathematics. To be classified as a learning disability, the learning problem is not primarily the result of visual, hearing or motor disabilities; intellectual disabilities; emotional disorders; or due to environmental, cultural or economic disadvantage.
	Dyslexia	is a category reserved for individuals who have a severe impairment in their ability to read and spell
	Dysgraphia	A learning disability that involves difficulty in handwriting.
	Dyscalculia	Also known as developmental arithmetic disorder; a learning disability that involves difficulty in mathematical computation.
	ADHD	A disability in which children consistently show one or more of the following characteristics: (1) inattention, (2) hyperactivity and (3) impulsivity.
	Emotional and Behavioural Disorders	Serious, persistent problems that involve relationships, aggression, depression, fears associated with personal or school matters, as well as other inappropriate socioemotional characteristics.
	Individualised Education Plan (IEP)	A written statement that spells out a program specifically tailored to a child with a disability.
	Least Restrictive Environment (LRE)	A setting that is as similar as possible to the one in which children who do not have a disability are educated.
	Inclusion	Educating a child with special education needs full-time in the regular classroom.
	Seriation	The concrete operation that involves ordering stimuli along a quantitative dimension (such as length).
	Transivity	The ability to logically combine relations to understand certain conclusions.
	Neo-Piagetians	Developmentalists who argue that Piaget got some things right but that his theory needs considerable revision. They have elaborated on Piaget’s theory, giving more emphasis to information processing, strategies and precise cognitive steps.
	Long-Term Memory	A relatively permanent type of memory that holds huge amounts of information for a long period of time.
	Fuzzy Trace Theory	States that memory is best understood by considering two types of memory representations: (1) verbatim memory trace and (2) gist. In this theory, older children’s better memory is attributed to the fuzzy traces created by extracting the gist of information.
	Critical Thinking	Thinking reflectively and productively, as well as evaluating the evidence.
	Mindfulness	Being alert, mentally present and cognitively flexible while going through life’s everyday activities and tasks.
	Creative Thinking	The ability to think in novel and unusual ways and to come up with unique solutions to problems.
	Convergent Thinking	Thinking that produces one correct answer and is characteristic of the kind of thinking tested by standardised intelligence tests.
	Divergent Thinking	Thinking that produces many answers to the same question and is characteristic of creativity.
	Brainstorming	A technique in which individuals are encouraged to come up with creative ideas in a group, play off each other’s ideas and say practically whatever comes to mind.
	Metacognition	Cognition about cognition, or knowing about knowing.
	Intelligence	Problem-solving skills and the ability to learn from and adapt to the experiences of everyday life.
	Individual Differences	The stable, consistent ways in which people are different from each other.
	Mental Age (MA)	Binet’s measure of an individual’s level of mental development, compared with that of others.
	Intelligence Quotient (IQ)	A person’s mental age divided by chronological age, multiplied by 100.
	Normal Distribution	A symmetrical distribution with most scores falling in the middle of the possible range of scores and a few scores appearing towards the extremes of the range.
	Triarchic Theory of Intelligence	Sternberg’s theory that intelligence consists of analytical intelligence, creative intelligence and practical intelligence.
	Culture-Fair Tests	Tests of intelligence that are designed to be free of cultural bias.
	Intellectual Disability	A condition of limited mental ability in which an individual has a low IQ, usually below 70 on a traditional test of intelligence, and has difficulty adapting to everyday life.
	Organic Intellectual Disability	intellectual disability that is caused by a genetic disorder or brain damage.
	Cultural-Familial Disability	intellectual disability that is characterised by no evidence of organic brain damage, but the individual’s IQ is generally between 50 and 70.
	Gifted	Having above-average intelligence (an IQ of 130 or higher) and/or superior talent for something.
	Metalinguistic Awareness	Refers to knowledge about language, such as knowing what a preposition is or the ability to discuss the sounds of a language.
	Whole-Language Approach	An approach to reading instruction based on the idea that instruction should parallel children’s natural language learning. Reading materials should be whole and meaningful.
	Phonics Approach	The idea that reading instruction should teach the basic rules for translating written symbols into sounds.
	Mark Johnson	Recently proposed that the prefrontal cortex likely orchestrates the functions of many other brain regions during development.
	Simon Baron-Cohen + Autism	Recently argued that autism reflects an extreme male brain, especially indicative of males' less effective ability to show empathy and rea facial expressions and gestures than girls.
	James Kauffman + Inclusion	States that inclusion too often has meant making accommodations in the regular classroom that do not always benefit children with disabilities. They advocate a more individualised approach that does not always involve full inclusion but allows options such as special education outside the regular classroom.
	Piaget + Preschool Children	Thought is preoperational. They can form stable concepts and they have begun to reason, but their thinking is flawed by egocentrism and magical belief systems.
	Strategies to Improve learning and remembering	Encourage children to engage in mental imagery. Motivate children to remember material by understanding it rather than by memorising it. Repeat with variation on the instructional information and link early and often. Embed memory-relevant language when instructing children.
	Charles Brainerd & Valeria Reyna + Memory	In the primary years memory improves. Argues that fuzzy traces account for much of this improvement.
	Ellen Langer + Mindfulness	Mindfulness is an important aspect of thinking critically. Mindful children and adults maintain an active awareness of the circumstances in their life and are motivated to find the best solutions to tasks. Mindful individuals create new ideas, are open to new information and operate from a single perspective.
	Deep Understanding	Occurs when students are stimulated to rethink previously held ideas. Schools might spend too much time getting students to give a single correct answer in an imitative way, rather than encouraging them to expand their thinking by coming up with new ideas and rethinking earlier conclusions.
	JP Guilford	Intelligence and creativity are not the same thing. Distinguished between convergent thinking and divergent thinking.
	Strategies for increasing children's creative thinking	Encourage brainstorming, provide environments that stimulate creativity, don't overcontrol children, encourage internal motivation, build children's confidence, guide children to be persistent and delay gratification, encourage children to take intellectual risks, introduce children to creative people.
	Michael Pressley	The key to education is helping students to learn a rich repertoire of strategies that result in solutions to problems.
	Alfred Binet	Binet and his student Theophile Simon developed an intelligence test to identify children who were unable to learn in school. Has been revised since 1905 to the Stanford-Bnet tests to analyse an individual's response in 5 content areas: fluid reasoning, knowledge, quantitative reasoning, visual-spatial reasoning, and working memory.
	David Wechsler	A set of tests widely used to assess students' intelligence. W Preschool and Primary Scale of Intelligence, Third Edition (WPPSI-III). W Intelligence Scale for Children, Fourth Edition (WISC-IV). W Adult Intelligence Scale, Third Edition (WAIS-III).
	W. Preschool and Primary Scale of Intelligence, Third Edition (WPPSI-III)	Tests children from the ages of 2 years 6 months to 7 years 3 months.
	W. Intelligence Scale for Children, Fourth Edition (WISC-IV)	For children and adolescents 6-16 years of age.
	W. Adult Intleligence Scale - Third Edition (WAIS-III)	For adults.
	Robert Sternberg + Triarchic Theory of Intelligence	States that intelligence comes in 3 forms: 1. Analytical intelligence 2. Creative intelligence 3. Practical intelligence
	Howard Gardner + Intelligence	Eight types of intelligence (frames of mind). Verbal, mathematical, spatial, bodily-kinaesthetic, muscial, interpersonal, intrapersonal, naturalistic
	Nathan Brody + Intelligence	Observes that people who excel at one type of intellectual tasks are likely to excel in others.
	Flynn Effect	The worldwide increase in intelligence test scores that has occurred over a short time frame has been called the Flynn effect after the researches James Flynn
	Characteristics of Gifted Children	The idea that gifted children are maladjusted is a myth. Studies support the conclusion that gifted people tend to be more mature than others, have fewer emotional problems than others and grow up in a positive family climate. Precocity, marching to their own drummer, a passion to master.
	Rich Mayer + reading	3 cognitive processes involved in being able to read a printed word: 1. Being aware of sound units in words 2. Decoding words 3. Accessing word meaning
	Perspective Taking	The ability to assume other people’s perspectives and understand their thoughts and feelings.
	Self-Esteem	The global evaluative dimension of the self. Self-esteem is also referred to as self-worth or self-image.
	Self-Concept	Domain-specific evaluations of the self.
	Self-Efficacy	The belief that one can master a situation and produce favourable outcomes.
	Preconventional Reasoning	The lowest level in Kohlberg’s theory of moral development. The individual’s moral reasoning is controlled primarily by external rewards and punishment.
	Heteronormous Morality	Kohlberg’s first stage of preconventional reasoning in which moral thinking is tied to punishment.
	individualism, instrumental purpose and exchange	Kohlberg’s second stage of preconventional reasoning. At this stage, individuals pursue their own interests but also let others do the same.
	Conventional reasoning	is the second, or intermediate, level in Kohlberg’s theory of moral development. At this level, individuals apply certain standards, but they are the standards set by others, such as parents or the government.
	Mutual interpersonal expectations, relationships and interpersonal conformity	Kohlberg’s third stage of moral development. At this stage, individuals value trust, caring and loyalty to others as a basis of moral judgments. Children and adolescents often adopt their parents’ moral standards at this stage, seeking to be thought of by their parents as a ‘good girl’ or a ‘good boy’.
	social systems morality	The fourth stage in Kohlberg’s theory of moral development. Moral judgments are based on understanding the social order, law, justice and duty.
	postconventional reasoning	The highest level in Kohlberg’s theory of moral development. At this level, the individual recognises alternative moral courses, explores the options and then decides on a personal moral code.
	Social contract or utility and individual rights	the fifth Kohlberg stage. At this stage, individuals reason that values, rights and principles undergird or transcend the law. A person evaluates the validity of actual laws and social systems can be examined in terms of the degree to which they preserve and protect fundamental human rights and values.
	Universal ethical principles	The sixth and highest stage in Kohlberg’s theory of moral development. Individuals develop a moral standard based on universal human rights.
	justice perspective	A moral perspective that focuses on the rights of the individual; individuals independently make moral decisions.
	care perspective	The moral perspective of Carol Gilligan, which views people in terms of their connectedness with others and emphasises interpersonal communication, relationships with others and concern for others.
	social conventional reasoning	Thoughts about social consensus and convention, in contrast to moral reasoning, which stresses ethical issues.
	gender stereotype	Broad categories that reflect our impressions and beliefs about females and males.
	androgyny	The presence of positive masculine and feminine characteristics in the same individual.
	popular children	Children who are frequently nominated as a best friend and are rarely disliked by their peers.
	average children	Children who receive an average number of both positive and negative nominations from peers.
	neglected children	Children who are infrequently nominated as a best friend but are not disliked by their peers.
	rejected children	Children who are infrequently nominated as a best friend and are actively disliked by their peers.
	controversial children	Children who are frequently nominated both as a best friend and as being disliked.
	intimacy in friendships	Self-disclosure and the sharing of private thoughts.
	constructivist approach	A learner-centred approach that emphasises the importance of individuals actively constructing their knowledge and understanding with guidance from the teacher.
	direct instruction approach	A structured, teacher-centred approach that is characterised by teacher direction and control, mastery of academic skills, high expectations for students’ progress, maximum time spent on learning tasks and efforts to keep negative effect to a minimum.
	mindset	The cognitive view, either fixed or growth, that individuals develop for themselves.
	Diane Ruble + Self-understanding	Children's self-understanding in the primary school years also includes increasing reference to social comparison. Children are more likely to distinguish themselves from others in comparative rather than in absolute terms.
	Albert Bandura + Social Cognitive Theory	States that self-efficacy is a critical factor in whether or not students achieve.
	Dale Schunk	Applied the concept of self-efficacy to many aspects of students’ achievement. Self-efficacy influences a student’s choice of activities. Students with low self-efficacy for learning may avoid many learning tasks, especially those that are challenging
	Erik Erikson + Industry v Inferiority	The term industry expresses a dominant theme of this period: children become interested in how things are made and how they work. When children are encouraged in their efforts to make, build and work, their sense of industry increases.
	Lawrence Kohlberg + Moral Development	Kohlberg suggested that there are six stages of moral development. These stages, he argued, are universal. Development from one stage to another, said Kohlberg, is fostered by opportunities to take the perspective of others and to experience conflict between one’s current stage of moral thinking and the reasoning of someone at a higher stage.
	Carol Gilligan	Argues that Kohlberg’s theory reflects a gender bias. According to Gilligan, Kohlberg’s theory is based on a male norm that puts abstract principles above relationships and concern for others and sees the individual as standing alone and independently making moral decisions.
	William Damon + Prosocial Behaviour	Described how sharing develops. During their first years, when children share, it is usually not for reasons of empathy but for the fun of the social play ritual or out of imitation. Then, at about 4 years of age a combination of empathic awareness and adult encouragement produces a sense of obligation on the part of the child to share with others. Children’s sharing comes to reflect a more complex sense of what is just and right during middle and late childhood.
	Sandra Bem + Gender-role classification	argue that androgynous individuals are more flexible, competent and mentally healthy than their masculine or feminine counterparts.
	William Pollack + Gender-role Classification	argues that little has been done to change traditional ways of raising boys. He says that the ‘boy code’ tells boys that they should show little if any emotion and should act tough. Boys learn the boy code in many contexts—playgrounds, schoolrooms, camps, hangouts. The result, according to Pollack, is a ‘national crisis of boyhood’. Pollack and others suggest that boys would benefit from being socialised to express their anxieties and concerns and to better regulate their aggression.
	E Mavis Hetherington + Stepfamilies	children and adolescents who had been in a simple stepfamily (stepfather or stepmother) for a number of years were adjusting better than in the early years of the remarried family and were functioning well in comparison to children and adolescents in conflicted non-divorced families and children and adolescents in complex (blended) stepfamilies.
	John Coie	Provided three reasons why aggressive peer-rejected boys have problems in social relationships: The rejected, aggressive boys are more impulsive and have problems sustaining attention. Rejected, aggressive boys are more emotionally reactive. Rejected children have fewer social skills in making friends and maintaining positive relationships with peers.
	Kenneth Dodge + Social Cognition	Argues that children go through five steps in processing information about their social world. They decode social cues, interpret, search for a response, select an optimal response and enact.
	Dan Olweus + Bullying	One of the most promising bullying intervention programs, This program focuses on 6- to 15-year-olds with the goal of decreasing opportunities and rewards for bullying.
	Strategies for improving relationships among ethnically diverse students in the US	1. Turn the class into a jigsaw classroom. 2. Encourage students to have positive personal contact with diverse other students. 3. Reduce bias. 4. View the school and community as a team. 5. Be a competent cultural mediator.
	Carol Dweck + Mindset	described the importance of children’s mindset, which she defines as the cognitive view individuals develop for themselves. She concludes that individuals have one of two mindsets: (1) a fixed mindset, in which they believe that their qualities are carved in stone and cannot change; or (2) a growth mindset, in which they believe their qualities can change and improve through their effort.
	Puberty	A period of rapid physical maturation, occurring primarily in early adolescence, that involves hormonal and bodily changes.
	Menarche	A girl’s first menstruation.
	Hormones	Powerful chemical substances secreted by the endocrine glands and carried through the body by the bloodstream.
	Precocious Puberty	The very early onset and rapid progression of puberty.
	Corpus Callosum	The location where fibres connect the brain’s left and right hemispheres.
	Amygdala	The region of the brain that is the seat of emotions.
	Sexually Transmitted Infections (STIs)	Infections that are contracted primarily through sexual contact, including oral-genital and anal-genital contact.
	Anorexia Nervosa	An eating disorder that involves the relentless pursuit of thinness through starvation.
	Bulimia Nervosa	An eating disorder in which the individual consistently follows a binge-and-purge pattern.
	Hypothetical-Deductive Reasoning	Piaget’s formal operational concept that adolescents have the cognitive ability to develop hypotheses, or best guesses, about ways to solve problems, such as an algebraic equation.
	Adolescent Egocentrism	The heightened self-consciousness of adolescents.
	Imaginary Audience	Involves adolescents’ belief that others are as interested in them as they themselves are, as well as engaging in attention-getting behaviour motivated by a desire to be noticed, visible and ‘on stage’.
	Personal Fable	The part of adolescent egocentrism that involves an adolescent’s sense of uniqueness and invincibility (or invulnerability).
	Dual-Process Model	States that decision making is influenced by two systems—one analytical and one experiential—which compete with each other; in this model, it is the experiential system—monitoring and managing actual experiences—that benefits adolescent decision making.
	Top-Dog Phenomenon	The circumstance of moving from the top position in primary school to the lowest position in secondary school.
	Community Engagement	A form of education that promotes social responsibility and service to the community.
	The Brain	The connections that are used are strengthened and survive, while the unused ones are replaced by other pathways or disappear. That is, in the language of neuroscience, these connections will be ‘pruned’. What results from this pruning is that by the end of adolescence individuals have ‘fewer, more selective, more effective neuronal connections than they did as children’.
	Narcissism	A self-centred and self-concerned approach towards others.
	Crisis	Marcia’s term for a period of identity development during which the adolescent is exploring alternatives.
	Commitment	Marcia’s term for the part of identity development in which adolescents show a personal investment in identity.
	Identity Diffusion	Marcia’s term for the status of individuals who have not yet experienced a crisis (explored meaningful alternatives) or made any commitments.
	Identity Foreclosure	Marcia’s term for the status of individuals who have made a commitment but have not experienced a crisis.
	Identity Moratorium	Marcia’s term for the status of individuals who are in the midst of a crisis, but their commitments are either absent or vaguely defined.
	Identity Achievement	Marcia’s term for the status of individuals who have undergone a crisis and have made a commitment.
	Ethnic Identity	An enduring, basic aspect of the self that includes a sense of membership in an ethnic group and the attitudes and feelings related to that membership.
	Clique	A small group that ranges from 2 to about 12 individuals, averaging about 5 to 6 individuals, and can form because adolescents engage in similar activities.
	Crowds	A crowd is a larger group structure than a clique and is usually formed based on reputation; members may or may not spend much time together.
	Rite of Passage	A ceremony or ritual that marks an individual’s transition from one status to another. Most rites of passage focus on the transition to adult status.
	Juvenile Delinquent	An adolescent who breaks the law or engages in behaviour that is considered illegal.
	Psychosocial Moratorium	The search for identity during adolescence is aided by psychosocial moratorium. Erikson's term for the gap between childhood security and adult autonomy.
	James Marcia + 4 Statuses of Identity	Eriksonian researcher James Marcia (1980, 1994) reasons that Erikson’s theory of identity development contains four statuses of identity, or ways of resolving the identity crisis: identity diffusion, identity foreclosure, identity moratorium and identity achievement.
	Alan Waterman + Identity achieved v identity diffused	from the years preceding high school through the last few years of university, the number of individuals who are identity achieved increases, whereas the number who are identity diffused decreases.
	Harry Sullivan + Adolescent Friendships	friends become increasingly important in meeting social needs. In particular, Sullivan argued that the need for intimacy intensifies during early adolescence, motivating teenagers to seek out close friends. If adolescents fail to develop such close friendships, they experience loneliness and a reduced sense of self-worth.
	Emerging Adulthood	The transition from adolescence to adulthood (approximately 18 to 25 years of age) that involves experimentation and exploration.
	Aerobic Exercise	Sustained exercise (such as jogging, swimming or cycling) that stimulates heart and lung activity.
	Addiction	A pattern of behaviour characterised by an overwhelming involvement with using a drug and securing its supply.
	Sexually Transmitted Infections (STIs)	Diseases that are contracted primarily through sex.
	Gonorrhoea	Commonly called the 'drip' or 'clap'. Caused by the bacterium Neisseria gonorrhoeae. Spread by contact between infected moist membranes (genital, oral-genital or anal-genital) of 2 individuals. Characterised by discharge from penis r vagina and painful urination. Can lead to infertility.
	Syphilis	Caused by the bacterium Treponema pallidum. Characterised by the appearance of a sore where syphilis entered the body. The sore can be on the external genitals, vagina or anus. Later, a skin rash breaks out on the palms of hands and soles of feet. If not treated, can eventually lead to paralysis or even death.
	Chlamydia	A common STI named for the bacterium Chlamydia trachmatis, an organism that spreads by sexual contact and infects the genital organs of both sexes. A special concern is that females with chlamydia may become infertile. It is recommended that adolescent and young adult females have an annual screening for this STI.
	Genital Herpes	Caused by a family of viruses with different strains. Involves an eruption of sores and blisters. Spread by sexual contact.
	AIDS	Caused by a virus, the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV), which destroys the body's immune system. Semen and blood are the main vehicles of transmission. Common symptoms include fevers, night sweats, weight loss, chronic fatigue, and swollen lymph nodes.
	Genital warts	Caused by the human papillomavirus, which does not always produce symptoms. Usually appear as small, hard painless bumps in the vaginal area, or around the anus. Very contagious. Certain high-risk types of this virus cause cervical cancer and other genital cancers. May recur despite treatment. A new HPV preventive vaccine, Gardasil, has been approved for girls and boys.
	Rape	Forcible sexual intercourse with a person who does not consent to it.
	Date or Acquaintance Rape	Coercive sexual activity directed at someone with whom the perpetrator is at least casually acquainted.
	Postformal Thought	A form of thought that is qualitatively different from Piaget’s formal operational thought. It involves understanding that the correct answer to a problem can require reflective thinking, that the correct answer can vary from one situation to another and that the search for truth is often an ongoing, never-ending process. It also involves the belief that solutions to problems need to be realistic and that emotion and subjective factors can influence thinking.
	Ann Masten + Emerging Adulthood	found that emerging adults who became competent after experiencing difficulties while growing up were more intelligent, experienced higher parenting quality and were less likely to grow up in poverty or low-income circumstances than their counterparts who did not become competent as emerging adults
	Jerald Bachman + Substance Abuse	By the time individuals reach their mid-20s, many have reduced their use of alcohol and drugs. As in adolescence, male university students and young adults are more likely to take drugs than their female counterparts.
	Laura Brown + Sexuality	For lesbians and gays, developing a bicultural identity creates new ways of defining themselves. Brown maintains that lesbians and gays adapt best when they don’t define themselves in polarities, such as trying to live in an encapsulated lesbian or gay world completely divorced from the majority culture or completely accepting the dictates and bias of the majority culture.
	Piaget + Cognition	Piaget concluded that an adolescent and an adult think qualitatively in the same way. approximately 11 to 15 years of age, adolescents enter the formal operational stage, which is characterised by more logical, abstract and idealistic thinking than the concrete operational thinking of 7- to 11-year-olds.
	William Perry + Reflective and Relativistic Thinking	Adolescents often view the world in terms of polarities—right/wrong, we/they, good/bad. As youth age into adulthood, they gradually move away from this type of absolutist thinking as they become aware of the diverse opinions and multiple perspectives of others
	Gisela Labouvie-Vief + Reflective and Relativistic Thinking	Recently proposed that the increasing complexity of cultures in the past century has generated a greater need for more reflective, complex thinking that takes into account the changing nature of knowledge and challenges. She also emphasises that the key aspects of cognitive development in emerging adulthood include deciding on a particular worldview, recognising that the worldview is subjective and understanding that diverse worldviews should be acknowledged.
	Mihaly Csikszentmihaly + Creativity	He discovered that creative people regularly experience a state he calls flow, a heightened state of pleasure experienced when we are engaged in mental and physical challenges that absorb us
	Phyllis Moen + Developmental Changes	Described the career mystique, ingrained cultural beliefs that engaging in hard work for long hours through adulthood will produce a path to status, security and happiness.
	William Damon + Finding a path to purpose	Purpose is linked to identity development. Too many youth drift and aimlessly go through their high school and university years, Damon says, engaging in behaviour that places them at risk for not fulfilling their potential and not finding a life pursuit that energises them.
	Secure Attachment Style (Adults)	An attachment style that describes adults who have positive views of relationships, find it easy to get close to others and are not overly concerned or stressed out about their romantic relationships.
	Avoidant Attachment Style (Adults)	An attachment style that describes adults who are hesitant about getting involved i romantic relationships and once in a relationship tend to distance themselves from their partner.
	Anxious Attachment Style (Adults)	An attachment style that describes adults who demand closeness, are less trusting and are more emotional, jealous and possessive.
	Consensual Validation	An explanation of why individuals are attracted to people who are similar to them. Our own attitudes and behaviour are supported and validated when someone else’s attitudes and behaviour are similar to our own.
	Matching Hypothesis	States that although we prefer a more attractive person in the abstract, in the real world we end up choosing someone who is close to our own level.
	Romantic Love	Also called passionate love, or eros, romantic love has strong sexual and infatuation components and often predominates in the early period of a love relationship.
	Affectionate Love	In this type of love, also called companionate love, an individual desires to have the other person near and has a deep, caring affection for the other person.
	Links Between Temperament in Childhood and Personality in Adulthood	Might vary depending on the intervening contexts in individuals’ experience. Studies reveal some continuity between certain aspects of temperament in childhood and adjustment in early adulthood. However, keep in mind that these connections between childhood temperament and adult adjustment are based on only a small number of studies
	Attachment Styles in Adulthood	Revealed that young adults who were securely attached in their romantic relationships were more likely to describe their early relationship with their parents as securely attached.
	The Benefit of Secure Attachment	Individuals who are securely attached have a well-integrated sense of self-acceptance, self-esteem and self-efficacy. They have the ability to control their emotions, are optimistic and are resilient. Facing stress and adversity, they activate cognitive representations of security, are mindful of what is happening around them and mobilise effective coping strategies.
	Intimacy v Isolation	Erikson describes intimacy as finding oneself while losing oneself in another person and it requires a commitment to another person. If a person fails to develop an intimate relationship in early adulthood, according to Erikson, isolation results.
	Ellen Berscheid + Romantic Love	sexual desire is the most important ingredient of romantic love. Obviously, some of these emotions are a source of anguish, which can lead to other issues such as depression.
	Emotion-Motivation Systems	Neuroimaging studies have provided insights into the neurophysiological correlates of love. three distinct emotion-motivation systems that underlie lust, attraction and attachment. Each system is thought to rely on distinct neural systems.
	Sternberg's Triarchic theory of love	A triangle with 3 main dimensions - passion, intimacy, and commitment. Passion - physical and sexual attraction Intimacy - Emotional feelings of warmth, closeness, and sharing in a relationship. Commitment - The cognitive appraisal of the relationship and the intent to maintain the relationship even in the face of problems.
	Consummate Love	The strongest, fullest form of love according to Sternberg, when all three dimensions (passion, intimacy, commitment) are present.
	Infatuation	If passion is the only ingredient in a relationship (with intimacy and commitment low or absent).
	Affectionate Love (Sternberg)	A relationship marked by intimacy and commitment by low or lacking in passion. A pattern often found among couples who have been married for many years.
	Fatuous love	If passion and commitment are present, but intimacy is not.
	John Gottman + Marriage	The most extensive assessment of marital relationships available. Seven main principles: 1. Establish love maps 2. Nurture fondness and admiration 3. Turn towards each other instead of away 4. Let your partner influence you 5. Solve solvable conflicts 6. Overcome gridlock 7. Create shared meaning
	Middle Adulthood	The developmental period that begins at approximately 40 to 45 years of age and extends to about 60 to 65 years of age.
	Chronic Disorders	Disorders that are characterised by slow onset and long duration. They are rare in early adulthood, they increase during middle adulthood and they become common in late adulthood.
	Climacteric	The midlife transition in which fertility declines.
	Menopause	Cessation of a woman's menstrual periods, usually in the late 40s or early 50s.
	Erectile Dysfunction	The inability to adequately achieve and maintain an erection that results in satisfactory sexual performance.
	Crystallised Intelligence	Accumulated information and verbal skills, which increase in middle adulthood, according to Horn.
	Fluid Intelligence	The ability to reason abstractly, which begins to decline from middle adulthood on, according to Horn.
	Working Memory	The mental ‘workbench’, where individuals manipulate and assemble information when decision making, problem solving and comprehending language.
	Leisure	The pleasant times after work when individuals are free to pursue activities and interests of their own choosing.
	Meaning-Making Coping	Involves drawing on beliefs, values, and goals to change the meaning of a stressful situation, especially in times of chronic stress as when a loved one dies.
	Gilbert Brim + Middle Age	middle adulthood is full of changes, twists and turns; the path is not fixed. People move in and out of states of success and failure.
	The Seattle Longitudinal Study	Initiated by K Warner Schaie. Involves extensive evaluation of intellectual abilities in the adulthood years. The main focus: individual change and stability in intelligence. The main mental abilities tested: vocab, verbal memory, number, spatial orientation, inductive reasoning, perceptual speed. The highest level of functioning for four of the six intellectual abilities occurred in the middle adulthood years. Only number and perceptual speed declined in middle age.
	Schaie and Sherry Willis + Seattle Long Study	Examined individual differences and found substantial variations. Decliners, Stable, Gainers for 3 categories - number ability, delayed recall, word fluency.
	Timothy Salthouse + Cognitive Functioning in Adulthood	recently concluded that cross-sectional research on ageing and cognitive functioning should not be dismissed and that this research indicates reasoning, memory, spatial visualisation and processing speed begin declining in early adulthood and show further decline in the 50s. Argued that a lower level of cognitive functioning in early and middle adulthood is likely due to age-related neurobiological decline.
	Viktor Frankl	The 3 most distinct human qualities are spirituality, freedom, and responsibility, where spirituality refers to a human being's uniqueness (spirit, philosophy, and mind)
	The Meaningful Life	Baumeister & Vohs argue that there are 4 main needs: Need for purpose (Goals. Fulfilments) Need for values Need for a sense of efficacy (One can make a difference) Need for self-worth
	Contemporary Life-Events Approach	Approach emphasising that how a life event influences the individual’s development depends not only on the life event, but also on mediating factors, the individual’s adaptation to the life event, the life-stage context and the sociohistorical context.
	Social Clock	The timetable according to which individuals are expected to accomplish life’s tasks, such as getting married, having children, or establishing themselves in a career.
	Big Five factors of personality (OCEAN)	Openness to experience, conscientiousness, extroversion, agreeableness and neuroticism (emotional stability)
	Empty Nest Syndrome	A decrease in marital satisfaction after children leave home, because parents derive considerable satisfaction from their children.
	Generativity v Stagnation	Generativity encompasses adults’ desire to leave legacies of themselves to the next generation. By contrast, stagnation (sometimes called ‘self-absorption’) develops when individuals sense that they have done nothing for the next generation.
	Carol Ryff + Generativity v Stagnation	Examined the views of women and men at different ages and found that middle-aged adults especially were concerned about generativity. In yet another study, generative women with careers found gratification through work; generative women who had not worked in a career experienced gratification through parenting
	Daniel Levinson + Seasons of a Man's Life	The transition to middle adulthood lasts about 5 years (40-45y) and requires the adult male come to grips with 4 major conflicts that have existed in his life since adolescence: 1. Being young v being old 2. Being destructive v being constructive 3. Being masculine v being feminine 4. Being attach v being separated from others Success of the midlife transition rests on how effectively the individual reduces the polarities and accepts each of them as an integral part of his being.
	George Vaillant + Grant Study	Levinson sees midlife as a crisis, Vaillant maintains that only a minority of adults experience a midlife crisis. In midlife, reports of general wellbeing and life satisfaction tend to be high Early adult transition: 17-22 Middle adult transition: 40-45 Late adult transition: 60-65
	Cohort Effects + Neugarten	Argues that our values, attitudes, expectations and behaviours are influenced by the period in which we live. The social environment of a particular age group can alter its social clock. Social clocks provide guides for our lives; individuals whose lives are not synchronised with these social clocks find life to be more stressful than those who are on schedule.
	Costa and McCrae's Baltimore Study	A major study of adult personality development continues to be conducted. Focus on the big 5 factors of personality. (OCEAN). In general, personality traits changed most during early adulthood.
	The Berkeley Longitudinal Studies	Too much attention has been given to discontinuities for all members of the human species, as exemplified in the adult stage theories. He considers that some people experience recurrent crises and change a great deal over the life course, whereas others have more stable, continuous lives and change far less.
	Helson's Mills College Study	Distinguished 3 main groups among the Mills women: family-oriented, career-oriented, and those who followed neither path (women without children who pursued only low-level work). Found shared concerns that Levinson found in men: young v old, introspectiveness, interest in roots, and awareness of limitations and death.
	Cumulative Personality Model	States that with time and age people become more adept at interacting with their environment in ways that promote increased stability in personality. People show more stability in their personality when they reach midlife than when they were younger adults. In general, changes in personality traits across adulthood occur in a positive direction.
	Life span	The upper boundary of life, the maximum number of years an individual can live. The maximum life span of human beings is about 120 to 125 years.
	Life Expectancy	The number of years that will probably be lived by the average person born in a particular year.
	Evolutionary Theory of Ageing	This theory states that natural selection has not eliminated many harmful conditions and non-adaptive characteristics in older adults; thus, the benefits conferred by evolutionary theory decline with age because natural selection is linked to reproductive fitness.
	Cellular Clock Theory	Leonard Hayflick’s theory that the maximum number of times that human cells can divide is about 75 to 80. As we age, our cells have less capability to divide.
	Free-Radical Theory	A microbiological theory of ageing that states that people age because inside their cells normal metabolism produces unstable oxygen molecules known as free radicals. These molecules ricochet around inside cells, damaging DNA and other cellular structures.
	Mitochondrial Theory	The theory that ageing is caused by the decay of mitochondria, tiny cellular bodies that supply energy for function, growth and repair.
	Hormonal Stress Theory	The theory that ageing in the body’s hormonal system can lower resistance to stress and increase the likelihood of disease.
	Neurogenesis	The generation of new neurons.
	Cataracts	A thickening of the lens of the eye that causes vision to become cloudy, opaque and distorted.
	Glaucoma	Damage to the optic nerve because of the pressure created by a buildup of fluid in the eye.
	Macular Degeneration	A disease that involves deterioration of the macula of the retina, which corresponds to the focal centre of the visual field.
	Arthritis	Inflammation of the joints that is accompanied by pain, stiffness and movement problems; especially common in older adults.
	Osteoporosis	A chronic condition that involves an extensive loss of bone tissue and is the main reason many older adults walk with a marked stoop. Women are especially vulnerable to osteoporosis.
	The Ageing Brain	As brains age, they can shift responsibilities for a given task from one region to another. Neurogenesis can occur in human adults, however only in the hippocampus and the olfactory bulb (smell). Brain activity in the prefrontal cortex is lateralised less in older adults than in younger adults when they are engaging in cognitive tasks.
	Judith Rodin + Nursing Homes	Found that an important factor related to health, and even survival, in a nursing home is the patient’s feelings of control and self-determination.
	Cognitive Mechanics	The ‘hardware’ of the mind, reflecting the neurophysiological architecture of the brain. Cognitive mechanics involve the speed and accuracy of the processes involving sensory input, visual and motor memory, discrimination, comparison and categorisation.
	Cognitive Pragmatics	The culture-based ‘software programs’ of the mind. Cognitive pragmatics include reading and writing skills, language comprehension, educational qualifications, professional skills and also the type of knowledge about the self and life skills that help us to master or cope with life.
	Selective Attention	Focusing on a specific aspect of experience that is relevant while ignoring others that are irrelevant.
	Divided Attention	Concentrating on more than one activity at the same time.
	Sustained Attention	Focused and extended engagement with an object, task, event or other aspect of the environment.
	Episodic Memory	The retention of information about the where and when of life’s happenings.
	Semantic Memory	A person’s knowledge about the world—including a person’s fields of expertise, general academic knowledge of the sort learned in school and ‘everyday knowledge.
	Explicit Memory	Memory of facts and experiences that individuals consciously know and can state.
	Implicit Memory	Memory without conscious recollection; involves skills and routine procedures that are automatically performed.
	Source Memory	The ability to remember where one learned something.
	Prospective Memory	Remembering to do something in the future.
	Wisdom	Expert knowledge about the practical aspects of life that permits excellent judgment about important matters.
	Major Depression	A mood disorder in which the individual is deeply unhappy, demoralised, self-derogatory and bored. The person does not feel well, loses stamina easily, has poor appetite and is listless and unmotivated. Major depression is so widespread that it has been called the ‘common cold’ of mental disorders.
	Dementia	A global term for any neurological disorder in which the primary symptoms involve a deterioration of mental functioning.
	Alzheimer's Disease	A progressive, irreversible brain disorder characterised by a gradual deterioration of memory, reasoning, language and eventually physical function.
	Multi-infarct Dementia	Sporadic and progressive loss of intellectual functioning caused by repeated temporary obstruction of blood flow in cerebral arteries.
	Parkinson's Disease	A chronic, progressive disease characterised by muscle tremors, slowing of movement and partial facial paralysis.
	Constructive Episodic Simulation Hypothesis + Donna Rose Addis	In order to imagine the future, one must draw on details from past experiences stored in memory.
	Sternberg + Wisdom	Wisdom is linked to both practical and academic intelligence. In his view, academic intelligence is a necessary but in many cases insufficient requirement for wisdom. Practical knowledge about the realities of life also is needed for wisdom. Balance between self-interest, the interests of others and contexts produces a common good.
	K Warner Schaie + Disease	concluded that although some diseases—such as hypertension and diabetes—are linked to cognitive drop-offs, they do not directly cause mental decline. Rather, the lifestyles of the individuals with the diseases might be the culprits.
	Integrity v Despair	Erikson’s eighth stage of development, which individuals experience in late adulthood. This involves reflecting on the past and either piecing together a positive review or concluding that one’s life has not been well spent.
	Activity Theory	The theory that the more active and involved older adults are, the more likely they are to be satisfied with their lives.
	Socioemotional Selectivity Theory	The theory that older adults become more selective about their social networks. Because they place a high value on emotional satisfaction, older adults often spend more time with familiar individuals with whom they have had rewarding relationships.
	Selective Optimisation with Compensation Thoery	The theory that successful ageing is related to three main factors: selection, optimisation and compensation.
	Possible Selves	What individuals might become, what they would like to become and what they are afraid of becoming.
	Ageism	Prejudice against others because of their age, especially prejudice against older adults.
	Eldercare	Physical and emotional caretaking for older members of the family, whether by giving day-to-day physical assistance or by being responsible for overseeing such care.
	Generational Inequity	The view that our ageing society is being unfair to its younger members because older adults pile up advantages by receiving inequitably large allocations of resources.
	Convoy Model of Social Relations	Model in which individuals go through life embedded in a personal network of individuals to whom they give and from whom they receive support.
	Robert Butler + Life Review	‘there are chances for pain, anger, guilt and grief, but there are also opportunities for resolution and celebration, for affirmation and hope, for reconciliation and personal growth’
	Laura Carstensen + Socioemotional selectivity theory	states that older adults deliberately withdraw from social contact with individuals peripheral to their lives while they maintain or increase contact with close friends and family members with whom they have had enjoyable relationships. This selective narrowing of social interaction maximises positive emotional experiences and minimises emotional risks as individuals become older.
	Brain Death	A neurological definition of death. A person is brain dead when all electrical activity of the brain has ceased for a specified period of time. A flat EEG recording is one criterion of brain death.
	Euthanasia	The act of painlessly ending the lives of persons who are suffering from incurable diseases or severe disabilities; sometimes called ‘mercy killing’.
	Passive Euthanasia	The withholding of available treatments, such as life-sustaining devices, allowing the person to die.
	Active Euthanasia	Death induced deliberately, as by injecting a lethal dose of a drug.
	Hospice Care	A program committed to making the end of life as free from pain, anxiety and depression as possible. The goals of hospice contrast with those of a hospital, which are to cure disease and prolong life.
	Palliative Care	Care emphasised in a hospice, which involves reducing pain and suffering and helping individuals die with dignity.
	Denial and Isolation (Kübler-Ross Stages of Dying)	Kübler-Ross’ first stage of dying, in which the dying person denies that she or he is really going to die.
	Anger (Kübler-Ross' Stages of Dying)	Kübler-Ross’ second stage of dying, in which the dying person’s denial gives way to anger, resentment, rage and envy.
	Bargaining (Kübler-Ross’ third stage of dying)	Kübler-Ross’ third stage of dying, in which the dying person develops the hope that death can somehow be postponed.
	Depression (Kübler-Ross' 4th Stage of Dying)	Kübler-Ross’ fourth stage of dying, in which the dying person comes to accept the certainty of her or his death. A period of depression or preparatory grief may appear.
	Acceptance (Kübler-Ross' 5th Stage of Dying)	Kübler-Ross’ fifth stage of dying, in which the dying person develops a sense of peace, an acceptance of her or his fate and, in many cases, a desire to be left alone.
	Grief	The emotional numbness, disbelief, separation anxiety, despair, sadness and loneliness that accompany the loss of someone we love.
	Dual-Process Model	A model of coping with bereavement that emphasises oscillation between two dimensions: (1) loss-oriented stressors and (2) restoration-oriented stressors.
	Prolonged Grief	Grief that involves enduring despair and is still unresolved over an extended period of time.

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