CAS 101 Chapter 1-2 Flashcards
The scientific study of the patterns of growth, change, and stability that occur from conception through adolescence.
Child development
Examining the ways in which the brain, nervous system, muscles, and senses and the need for food, drink, and sleep helps determine behavior.
Physical Development
Seeking to understand how growth and change in intellectual capabilities influence a person’s behavior.
Cognitive Development
The study of stability and change in the enduring characteristics that differentiate one person from another.
Personality Development
The way in which individuals’ interactions with others and their social relationships grow, change, and remain stable over the course of life.
Social Development
Conception to birth
Prenatal period
Birth to age 3
Infancy and toddlerhood
Ages 3-6
Preschool period
Ages 6-12
Middle childhood
Ages 12-20
Adolescence
Shared notion of reality, one that is widely accepted but is a function of society and culture at a given time.
Social construction
A group of people born at around the same time in the same place.
Cohort
Biological and environmental influences associated with a particular historical moment. Ex: 9/11
Cohort effects/history-graded influences
Biological and environmental influences that are similar for individuals in a particular age group, regardless of when/where they are raised. Ex: puberty, menopause
Age-graded influences
Ethnicity, social class, subcultural membership, and other factors.
Sociocultural-graded influences
Specific, atypical events that occur in a particular person’s life at a time when such events don’t happen to most people. Ex: Louise Brown growing up with the knowledge of how she was conceived.
Non-normative life events
Broad categories, “we” cultures, credit mistakes for external factors
Collectivistic orientation
Independent society, “Me” societies, credit mistakes for internal factors
Individualistic orientation
Gradual development, quantitative, basic underlying processes that drive change remain the same over the course of a life span. Ex: Change sin height prior to adulthood, thinking capabilities
Continuous Change
Distinct steps/stages, qualitative behavior is different in each stage.
Discontinuous change
Tabula rasa or “blank slate,” children entirely shaped by their experiences as they grew up
John Locke
Children were noble savages and born with innate sense of right and wrong and morality
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
Pioneered work on children’s intelligence, one of the first people that looked into child development
Alfred Binet
Pioneered use of questionnaires to measure children’s thinking and behavior, targeted adolescence as a period of development, wrote 1st book for adolescence
G. Stanley Hall
One of the first psychologists to focus on child development
Leta Stetter Hollingworth
Specific time during development when a particular event has its greatest consequences. Ex: pregnant woman who takes drugs could cause permanent harm to the child.
Critical period
Organisms are particularly susceptible to certain kinds of stimuli in their environment. Ex: Lack of exposure to language may result in delayed language production in infants and toddlers.
Sensitive period
Developmental growth and change continue during every stage of life.
Life span approach
Infant development is in part a consequence of adult development.
Focus on particular periods
Traits, abilities, and capacities inherited from parents.
Nature
Aspects of nature produced by the predetermined unfolding of genetic information.
Maturation
Environmental influencers that shape behavior. Biological influences such as pregnant mother’s use of drugs, social influences such as parenting styles, and large scale factors such as socioeconomic circumstances.
Nurture
Unconscious forces determine personality and behavior. Unconsciousness is part of personality about which a person is unaware. Contains infantile wishes, desires, demands, and needs that are hidden, because of their disturbing nature.
Freud’s psychoanalytic theory
The belief that behavior is motivated by inner forces, memories, and conflicts that a person ahs no control or little awareness of. Inner forces from childhood influence behavior throughout the lifespan.
Psychodynamic Perspective
Represents primitive drives related to hunger, sex, aggression, and irrational impulses. Falls under the principle in which the goal is to maximize satisfaction and reduce tension.
Id, pleasure principle
Operates on a principle in which instinctual energy is restrained to maintain individual safety and personal societal integration.
Ego, reality principle
Develops around age 5 or 6 and is learned from an individual’s parents, teachers, and other significant figures. Represents a person’s conscience, incorporating distinctions between right and wrong.
Superego
Freud’s developmental stages that focused on particular biological functions and body parts. Without appropriate gratification in a certain stage, that behavior will follow you as a fixation throughout life.
Psychosexual development
Behavior reflecting an earlier stage of development due to unresolved conflict
Fixation
Birth to 12-18 months. Interest in oral gratification from sucking, eating, mouthing, biting
Oral stage
12-18 months to 3 years. Gratification from expelling and withholding feces, coming to terms with society’s controls relating to toilet training.
anal stage
3 to 5-6 years. Interest in the genitals; coming to terms with Oedipal conflict, leading to identification with same sex parent.
Phallic stage
5-6 years to adolescence. Sexual concerns are largely unimportant and remain dormant in this stage.
Latency stage
Adolescence to adulthood. Reemergence of sexual interests and establishment of mature sexual relationships.
Genital stage
Society and culture change us. Changes in the understandings individuals have of their interactions with others, others’ behavior, and of themselves as members of society. Suggested change and growth happen throughout the life span in eight developmental stages.
Erikson’s psychosocial theory
Birth to 12-18 months. Feelings of trust from environmental support or fear and concern regarding others.
Trust vs. Mistrust
12-18 months to 3 years. Self-sufficiency if exploration is encouraged or doubts about self, lack of independence.
Autonomy vs. Shame and Doubt
3 to 5-6 years. Discovery of ways to initiate actions or guilt from actions and thoughts.
Initiative vs. Guilt
5-6 years to adolescence. Development of sense of competence or feelings of inferiority, no sense of mastery.
Industry vs. Inferiority
Adolescence. Awareness of uniqueness of self, knowledge of role to be followed or inability to identify appropriate roles in life.
Identity vs. Role Diffusion
Early adulthood. Development of loving, sexual relationships and close friendships or fear of relationships with others.
Intimacy vs. Isolation
Middle adulthood. Sense of contribution to continuity of life or trivialization of one’s activities.
Generativity vs. Stagnation
Late adulthood. Sense of unity in life’s accomplishments or regret over lost opportunities of life.
Ego-integrity vs. Despair
Keys to understanding development are observable behavior and outside stimuli in the environment. Developmental change viewed in quantitative, rather than qualitative, terms.
The behavioral perspective
Argued that by effectively controlling a person’s environment, it was possible to produce virtually any behavior
John B. Watson
When an organism learns to respond in a particular way to a neutral stimulus that normally does not evoke that type of response. Focuses on involuntary behavior
Classical conditioning
A voluntary response is strengthened or weakened by its association with positive or negative consequences
B.F Skinner’s operant conditioning
A process by which a stimulus is provided that increases the probability that a preceding behavior will be repeated
Reinforcement
Introduction of an unpleasant or painful stimulus or the removal of a desirable stimulus, will decrease the probability that a preceding behavior will occur in the future
Punishment
A formal technique for promoting the frequency of desirable behaviors and decreasing the incidence of unwanted ones. it has been used in a variety of situations, such as teaching people the rudiments of language to helping people stick to diets.
Behavior modification
When we see the behavior of a model being rewarded, we are likely to imitate that behavior.
social-cognitive learning theory
Focuses on processes that allow people to know, understand, and think about the world. Emphasizes how people internally represent and think about the world.
Cognitive perspective
All people pass in a fixed sequence through a series of universal stages of cognitive development.
Piaget’s theory of Cognitive Development
Organized mental patterns that represent behaviors and actions.
Schemes/schemas
Process in which people understand an experience in terms of their current stage of cognitive development and way of thinking
Assimilation
Changes in existing ways of thinking in response to encounters with new stimuli or events.
Accommodation
Birth-2 years. Development of object permanence (idea that people/objects exist even when they can’t be seen); development of motor skills; little or no capacity for symbolic representation
Sensorimotor stage
2-7 years. Development of language and symbolic thinking; egocentric thinking.
Preoperational stage
7-12 years. Development of conservation (idea that quantity is unrelated to physical appearance); mastery of concept of reversibility.
Concrete operational stage
12 years-adulthood. Development of logical and abstract thinking.
Formal operational stage
Identify the ways individuals take in, use, and store information. Children assumed to have limited capacity for processing information. As we age, we increase our capacity to handle information, and process information with more speed and efficiency. Cognitive development is seen as a function of quantitative changes.
Information processing approaches
Considers the relationship between individuals and their physical, cognitive, personality, and social worlds
Contextual perspective
Five levels of environment that simultaneously influence individuals: microsystem, mesosystem, exosystem, macrosystem, and chronosystem
Bronfenbrenner’s bioecological approach
The activities, roles, and interactions of an individual in that person’s immediate setting.
microsystem
The interrelationships among two or more microsystems.
mesosystem
The social settings or organizations beyond the individual’s immediate experience that affect the individual.
Exosystem
The laws, values, and customs of the society in which the individual lives.
macrosystem
The ways in which all of these systems interrelate to each other across time.
chronosystem
Cognitive development proceeds as a result of social interactions between members of a culture. Children’s understanding of the world is acquired through problem-solving interactions with adults and other children.
Vygotsky’s sociocultural theory
Seeks to identify behavior that is the result of our genetic inheritance from our ancestors. Focuses on how genetics and environmental factors combine to influence behavior.
Evolutionary perspectives
The process of posing and answering questions using careful, controlled techniques that include systematic, orderly observation and the collection of data. Three steps: Identifying questions of interest, formulating an explanation, and carrying out research that either lends support to the explanation or refutes it.
Scientific method
Begins when an observer puzzles over some aspect of behavior
Identification of questions of interest
Broad explanations and predictions about phenomena of interest that set developmental researchers apart from casual observers.
Theories
A prediction stated in a way that permits it to be tested.
Hypothesis
The process of translating a hypothesis into specific, testable procedures that can be measured and observed.
Operationalization
Seeks to identify whether an association or relationship between two factors exists. Can’t be used to determine causation.
Correlational research
Designed to discover causal relationships among various factors. Researchers deliberately introduce a change in a carefully structured situation in order to see the consequences of that change.
Experimental research
A mathematical score that represents the strength and direction of a relationship between two factors. Ranges from +1.0 to -1.0. 0 means no correlation.
Correlation coefficient
Value of one factor increases/decreases, value of the other increases/decreases
Positive correlation
Value of one factor increases, value of the other decreases. Value of one factor decreases, the value of the other increases.
Negative correlation
The observation of a naturally occurring behavior without intervention in the situation.
Naturalistic observation
a method borrowed from the field of anthropology and used to investigate cultural questions. A researcher’s goal is to understand a culture’s values and attitudes through careful, extended examination.
Ethnography
researchers choose particular settings of interest and seek to carefully describe, in narrative fashion, what is occurring, and why.
Qualitative researchers
Involve extensive, in-depth interviews with a particular individual or small group of individuals. They are used to learn about the individual being interviewed and to derive broader principles or draw tentative conclusions that might apply to others.
Case studies
A group of individuals chosen to represent some larger populations are asked questions about their attitudes, behavior, or thinking on a given topic.
Survey research
Focus on the relationship between physiological processes and behavior. Electroencephalogram (EEG), Computerized Axial Tomography (CAT) scans, and Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) scans are among the most frequently used measures.
Psychophysiological methods
Records electrical activity within the brain recorded by electrodes placed on the outside of the skull. Brain activity is transformed into a pictorial representation of the brain, permitting the representative of brain wave patterns and diagnosis of disorders such as epilepsy and learning disabilities.
Electroencephalogram (EEG)
A computer constructs an image of the brain by combining thousands of individual X-rays taken at slightly different angles. Doesn’t show brain activity but illuminates the structure of the brain.
Computerized Axial Tomography (CAT) scans
Provides a detailed three-dimensional computer-generated image of brain activity by aiming a powerful magnetic field at the brain. It offers one of the best ways of learning about the operation of the brain, down to the level of individual nerves.
Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) scans
an investigator/experimenter typically devises two different experiences (treatments) for participants/subjects.
Experiment
a procedure applied by an investigator.
Treatment
the group receiving the treatment
Treatment group
The alternative-treatment group or the group that receives no treatment
Control group
Participants are assigned to different experimental groups or conditions based on chance and chance alone.
Random assignment
Permits the combination of results of many studies into one overall conclusion.
Meta-analysis
a research investigation carried out in a naturally occurring setting. They may be carried out in preschool classrooms, at community playgrounds, on school buses, or on street corners. They capture behavior in real-life settings, and research participants may behave more naturally than they would if they were brought into a laboratory.
Field study
a research investigation conducted in a controlled setting explicitly designed to hold events constant. Setting might be a room/building designed for research.
Laboratory study
Designed specifically to test some developmental explanation and expand specific knowledge.
Theoretical research
Meant to provide practical solutions to immediate problems
Applied research
The behavior of one or more study participants is measured as they age. This research measures change over time.
Longitudinal research
People of different ages are compared at the same point in time.
Cross-sectional research
Researchers examine a number of different age groups at several points in time.
Sequential studies
