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108 Cards in this Set
- Front
- Back
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Developmental Psychology |
The study of how behavior changes over the lifespan. |
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Post Hoc Fallacy |
A challenge that arises when investigating psychological development. The mistake of assuming that because A comes before B, A must cause B. |
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Bidirectional Influences |
Another Challenge. Human development is almost always a two way street. Childrens experiences influence their development, but their development also influences what they experience. |
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Undirectional Explanations |
Popular in pop psychology. Those that attempt to explain development in terms of a one headed arrow. Example parents fight with each other so their children react negatively. |
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Cross sectional design |
A design in which researchers examine people who are of different ages at a single point in time. They obtain a snapshot of each person at a single age. |
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Cohort Effects |
Major problem with cross sectional design. Effects due to the fact that sets of people who lived during during one time period, called cohorts, can differ in some systematic way from sets of people who lived during a different time period. |
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Longitudinal design |
Track the development of the same group of people over time. This design allows us to examine true developmental effects. |
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True developmental effects |
Changes over time with individuals as a consequence of growing older. |
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What would happen without longitudinal design? |
WE can be tricked into concluding that event A come before result B even when it doesnt. |
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Attrition |
Can occur in longitudinal designs. When participants drop out of a study before it is completed. |
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Interact |
Refering to nature and nurture. The effect of one depends on the contribution of the other. |
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Gene Environment Interactions |
The impact on behavior depends on the environment in which the behavior develops. Or the effects on genes depond on the environment, and vice versa. |
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Nature Via Nurture |
Genetic predisposition can drive us to select and create particular environments that influence our behavior, leading us to the mistaken appearance of a pure effect of nature. Gives children the oppertunity to express their genetic tendencies. Example highly fearful children tend to seek out an environment that is safer. |
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Gene Expression |
Some genes, Turn on, only in response to specific environmental events. One of the most significant discoveries to his psychology over the past few decades. Reminds us that nurture affects nature. |
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What are the some intersections of nature versus nurture? |
Gene Environment Interactions Nature via Nurture Gene expression |
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Prenatal period of development |
The human body acquires its basic form and structure. Most dramatic changes occure in the earliest stages of pregnancy. |
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Zygote |
Produced when a sperm cell fertilizes an egg. |
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What are the 3 stages of prenatal physical development? |
Germinal Stage Embryonic Stage Fetal Stage |
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Blastocyst |
A ball of identical cells that havent yet begun to take on any specific function in a body part. |
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The Germinal Stage |
The zygote begins to divide and double, forming a blastocyst, which continues to keep growing. Around the middle of the second week the cells begin to differentiate, taking on different roles as the organs of the body begin to develop. |
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Embryo |
What blastocyst become once cells start to assume different functions. |
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The embryonic Stage |
Second to eighth week of development. Limbs, facial features, and major organs, like the heart, lungs, and brain, begin to take shape. Many things can go wrong during this stage, example misscariges. |
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Fetal Stage |
Final Milestone, the point in which the embryo becomes a fetus. More about fleshing out whats already there than establishing new structures. Bulk up. |
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When does brain development begin to develop? |
18 days after fertilization. |
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Proliferation |
Happens between the 18th day and the end of sixth month. Neurons begin developing at an astronomical rate. Makes far more neurons then it needs. |
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When does migration of cells occur and why? |
Starting in the fourth month and continuing on. The brain must organize them to perform coordinated functions. |
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What are the 3 ways fetal development can be disrupted? |
1) Exposure to hazardous environmental influences. 2) Biological influences resulting from genetic disorders, or errors in the cell duplication during cell division. 3) Premature birth. |
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Teratogens |
Environmental factors that can affect prenatal development negatively. Examples, drugs, alcoho, chicken pox, xrays. Sometimes even anxiety and depression because they alter the fetus's chemical and physiological environment. |
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Fetal alchohol Syndrom |
A result of alcohol exposure. Includes a host of symptoms, such as learning disabilities, physical growth retardation, facial malformations, and behavioral disorders. |
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What are two types of hazardous environmental influences? |
Teratogens and fetal alcohol syndrom. |
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Genetic disorders |
Random errors in cell division. Often happens before fertilization. Cells replicate with the error contained. Resulting in impaired development of organs and organ systems. |
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Premature Birth |
Born fewer then 36 weeks. |
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The Viability Point |
The point in pregnancy at which infants can typically survive on their own is 25 weeks. |
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Reflexes |
Babies are born with a large set of automatic motor behaviors. They are trigger by specific types of stimuli. Fufill important survival needs. Examples are the sucking reflex and rooting reflex. |
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Motor Behaviors |
Bodily motions that occur as a result of self inititated force, that moves the bones and muscles. Major Milestones are sitting up, crawling, standing, Walking. |
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What are some things that play crucial roles in motor development? |
Weight, body development, cultural and parenting practices. |
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Mini Growth Spurts |
Occurring every 30 to 55 days in children ages 3 to 16. |
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Adolescence |
When our bodies reach full maturity. The transitional perid between childhood and adulthood. Also called the teenage years. Many physical and hormonal changes |
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Puberty |
Sexual maturation, the attainment of physical potential for reproduction. |
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Primary sex xharacteristics |
Go through changes during puberty. Include reproductive organs and genitals. |
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Secondary sex characteristics |
Also change during maturation. Sex differentitating characteristics that dont relate directly to reproduction, such as breast enlargement, deeping voices, and pubic hair . |
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Menarche |
In girls, the onset of menstration, tends not to begin until they have achieved full physical maturity. |
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Why is menarche Refered to as the bodies insurance plan? |
Because it makes sure the body cant reproduce before its physically ready. |
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Spermarche |
In boys, the first ejaculation. Occurs around age 13. Ist as closely tied to physical maturity as menarche. |
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When do adults reach their physical peaks? |
Our early twenties. Along with strength, coordination, speed of cognitive processing, and physical flexibility also atain their highest levels. |
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Menopause |
Major milestone of physical aging in women. Termination of menstruation, signaling the end of a womans reproductive potential. Triggered by a reduction in estrogen. |
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Cognitive development |
Study of how children develop the ability to learn, reason, think, communicate, and remember. |
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Differences in theories of cognitive development |
1) Stage like changes in understanding, sudden spurts, others more continuous, or gradual and incremental, changes in understanding. 2) Some adopt a domain general account of development: others a domain specific account. Domain general propose changes in childrens cognitive skills affect most areas of cognitive function. Domain specific, skills develop independently and at different rates. 3) Differ in views of main source of learning. Some physical, some social, and others biological. |
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Piagets insight about children |
Children are not minerature adults. Also children arent passive observers to their worlds, but observers of others. |
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Why was Piaget a stage theorist? |
He proposed that childrens development is marked by radical reorganization of thinking at specific transition points, followed by periods in which their understanding of the world stabalizes. |
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What did piaget think the end point of cognitive development was? |
Achievement of the ability to reason logically about hypothetical problems. |
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Equilibration |
Maintaining a balance between their experience of the world and their understanding of it. Piaget proposed that cognitive change is a result of this. |
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What are the two proccess Piaget says children use to keep their thinking about the world in tune with their experiences? |
Assimilation and accommodation. |
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Assimilation |
The process of absorbing new experience into our current understanding. Cognitive skills and worldviews remain unchanged, so they interpret new experiences to fit with what they already know. Example, If they are told the world is round, when they have been thinking it is flat, they might picture a flat disk, like a coin. |
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Accomodation |
Occurrs when the child can no longer engage in assimulation. The process of altering beliefs about the world to make them more compatiable with experiences. Forces children into a new way of looking at the world. |
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What are Piagets 4 stages of development? |
Sensorimotor Preoperational Concrete operations Formal operations |
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Sensorimotor Stage |
From birth to 2 years. Focus on the here and now. Their main source of knowledge, thinking, and experience are their physical interactions with the world. |
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Mental Representation |
Major milestone in sensorimotor. Forces children to accomodate and enter a new stage. The ability to think about things that are absent from immediate surroundings. |
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Object permanence |
Lacked in the sensorimotor stage. Understanding that objects exist even when out of view. |
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Deferred imitation |
Absent in sensorimotor stage. The ability to perform an action observed earlier. |
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Preoperational stage |
From 2 until 7. Ability to construct mental representations of experience. They can use symbols as language, drawings, and objects as representations of ideas. Holding a banana and pretending its a phone. Or playing house using imagenary roles. |
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Egocentrism |
Inability to see the world from anothers point of view. Preoperational stage. |
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Conservation |
Piagetian task requiring children to understand that despite a transformation in the physical representation of an amount, the amout remains the same. The child can picture a vase on a table when the vase is absent, but they can not picture what would happen if someone were to knock over that vase. |
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Concrete Operations Strage |
7 to 11 years. Ability to perform mental operations, but only for actual physical events. They can now pass conservation tasks, and perform organizational tasks that require mental operations on physical objects. Example sorting coins by size or seting them up as a battle field. |
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Formal Operations Stage |
Fourth and final stage. He believed it did not emerge until adolescence. Children can perfrom the most sophisticated type of thinking, hypothetical reasoning beyond the here and now. They can understand the if and then statements. They can also begin to think about abstract questions like the meaning of life. |
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As a result of Piagets legacy, how have psychologist today reconceptualized cognitive development? |
1) Viewing children as different in kind rather than a degree from adults. 2) Characterizing learning as an active rather than passive process. 3) Exploring general cognitive processes that may cut across multiple domains of knowledge, thereby accounting for cognitive development in terms of fewer, and more parsimonious, underlying processes. |
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Scaffolding |
Vygotskian, learning mechanism in which parents provide initial assistance in childrens learning but gradually remove structure as children become more competent. |
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Zone of Proximal development |
Phase when children are receptive to learning a new skill but arent yet successful at it. They are ready to make use of scaffolding. |
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General Cognitive Accounts |
Loosley based off of piaget. They emphasize genereal cognitive abilities and acquired rather than innate knowledge. |
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Sociocultural Accounts |
Share Vygotskys thinking. Share a focus on the childs interaction with the social world as the primary source of development. |
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Modular Accounts |
Ephasizes the idea of domain specific learning, seperate spheres of knowledge in different domains. Vygotskys. |
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According to renee when do children show an understanding to object permanence? |
5 months and possibly younger. |
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What is one of the most fundamental cognitive accomplishments? |
Learning to categorize objects by kind. Children learn what dogs are even though they come in all different shapes, sizes and colors. |
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Theory of Mind |
Childrens ability to reason about what other people believe. |
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False belief task |
Classic test for theory of mind. Evaluates childrens ability to understand that someone else believes something they know to be wrong. Dont succed until around age 4 or 5. |
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Stranger Anxiety |
A fear of strangers developing at 8 or 9 months of age. |
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Temperament |
Emerges early and appears to be largely genetically influenced. Basic emotional style that appears early in development. |
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Behavioral Inhibition |
Infants become extremely frieghtened by unexpected stimuli |
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Attachment |
Emotional connecton we share with those who we feel closest too. |
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Strange Situation |
Observing 1 year olds and there reactions to being seperated from and then reunited with their caregivers. Then classify the infants reaction into one of 4 categories |
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Secure Attachment |
About 60 percent. Infant explores room but checks to make sure mom is wathing, returns to mom when stranger enters, becomes upset when mom leaves, but is happy when she returns. Infant uses mom as a secure base |
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Insecure avoidant attachment |
15-20 percent. Explores independently without checking in with mom, shows no distress to moms departure, and displays little reaction to her return. |
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Insecure Anxious Attachment |
15-20 percent. Infant does not explore without mom, shows distress when stranger enters, panics when mom leaves, and has mixed emotional reaction upon return, simultaneously reaching for her yet squirming to get away after she picks them up. Reffered to as anxious ambivalent. |
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Disorganized Attachment |
5-10 percent. Rarest of attachments. Wasnt included in original classification but was added later. They react to toys, the stranger, and moms departure and return with an inconsistent and confused set of responses. They may appear dazed when reunited with mom. |
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When do the frontal lobes mature fully? |
Late adolescence or early adulthood |
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Child centered approach to parenting |
Parents should be highly responsive to their childrends needs. |
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Permissive parenting style |
Are more lenient, allowing freedom and use discipline sparingly. Often shower children with affection. |
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Authoritarian parenting style |
Strict giving children little opportunity for free play and exploration, and punishing them when they dont respond appropriately to their demands. Show little affection. |
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Authoritative |
Combined the best features of both permissive and authoritarian worlds. They are supportive but set clear and firm limits. |
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Uninvolved |
Neglectful, tend to ignore their children, paying little attention to their positive or negative behaviors. |
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Average expectable environment |
An environment that provides children with the basic needs for affection and appropriate discipline. With this most children will probably turn out okay. |
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What did Judith Ritch Harris argue about peers versus parents? |
Peers play an even more important role than parents in childrens social development. She argued that that most environmental transmission is horizontal, from children to other children, rather then vertical, from parents to children. |
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The role of the father |
Children benefit from the warm, close relationships with their fathers, regardless of how much time they spend with him. |
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Self control |
Crucial ingredient to social development. The ability to inhibit our impulses. |
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Gender Role |
Behaviors that typically tend to be associated with being male or female, such as mowing the lawn, or nursing. |
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Gender Identity |
Peoples sense of being male or female, whcih may or may not correspond to their biological sex. |
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Sex segregation |
Starting as early as age 3, boys prefering to hang out with other boys, and girls prefering to hang out with other girls. |
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Identity |
Our sense of who we are, as well as our life goals, and priorities. |
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Psychosocial Crisis |
A dilemma concerning our relations to other people, parents, teachers, friends, or even society at large. |
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Emerging Adulthood |
Period of life between 18-25. When many aspects of emotional development, identity, and personality become solidified. Many struggle to find their identities and life goals, which is refered to as role experimentation. |
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Moral Dilemmas |
Situations in which there are no clear right or wrong answers. Begin developing as young as toddlers and preschoolers. |
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Where do they say we can trace the roots of our moral development too? |
Fear. |
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Midlife Crisis |
Emotional distress about the aging process and an attempt to regain their youth. More myth than reality. |
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Empty nest syndrome |
Depression when children leave the home. Specific to caucasian women who dont work outside the home. |
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Biological Age |
The estimate of a persons age in terms of biological functioning. When a doctor say a 65 year old has the heart of a 40 year old. |
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Pychological age |
A persons mental attitudes and agility and the capacity to deal with stress of an ever changing environment. Little change in memory and personality, or big changes. |
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Functional Age |
A persons ability to function in given roles in society. |
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Social age |
Whether people behave in accord with the social behaviors appropriate for their age. Like when people judge a womanfor dressing to young for her age. |
