Chapter 1 Flashcards
What is development
Development refers to systematic changes in the individual that occur between conception and death. By describing changes as “systematic,” we imply that they are orderly, patterned, and relatively enduring, so temporary mood swings and other transitory changes in our appearances, thoughts, and behaviours are therefore excluded.
Development is the systematic continuities and changes in the individual over the course of life
What are developmental continuities
Developmental continuities are the ways in which we remain stable over time or continue to reflect our past
What are the most important aspects of development
Maturation and learning
Most developmental changes are the product of these two
What is maturation
Maturation refers to developmental changes in the body or behaviour that result from the ageing process rather than from learning, injury, illness, or some other life experience. A major contributor to this process is one’s genes. Maturation is partly responsible for psychological changes such as our increasing ability to concentrate, solve problems, and understand another person’s thoughts or feelings.
What is learning
The process through which our experiences produce relatively permanent changes in our feelings, thoughts, and behaviour → can only occur once a certain maturation level exists
Ex: Learning how to dribble a basketball
What goals do developmentalists pursue
They have 3 main goals:
- Describe development
- Explain development
- Optimize development
Explain the purpose of description in developmental psychology
To create empirical observations at different ages and their changes across time. To adequately do so, it is necessary to focus on normative and ideographic development.
What is normative development
Normative development encompasses all developmental changes that characterise most people; typical patterns of development.
Typical/universal patterns of change; ex: puberty, menopause, etc
What is ideographic development
Ideographic development encompasses all individual variations in the rate, extent, or direction of development.
Explain the purpose of explanation in developmental psychology
To determine why people develop as they typically do and why some people develop differently from others.
Why do changes occur
This falls under the explanation aspect of a developmentalists goal and it is due to equifinality and multifinality
What is equifinality
The property of allowing or having the same effect or result from different events → people start from different places but end up at the same place
What is multifinality
It is a process where a similar starting state (ex: levels of behaviour, type of attachment, presence of a mental illness) results in multiple pathways that lead to different outcomes
What is the purpose of optimisation in developmental psychology
Developmentalists hope to optimise development by applying what they have learned in attempts to help people develop in positive directions. By doing so are able to: promote stronger affectionate ties between fussy, unresponsive infants and their frustrated parents, assist children with learning difficulties to succeed at school, and help socially unskilled children prevent the emotional difficulties that could result from having no close friends or being rejected by peers.
What type of process is development
Development is a continual and cumulative process
Continual: uninterrupted development
Cumulative: build on earlier stages
What is the critical period for humans
The prenatal period
What is traditional development (as opposed to holistic)
Traditional development emphasizes the division of physical growth, cognitive aspects, and psychosocial aspects
What is holistic development (as opposed to traditional)
The holistic perspective emphasizes that there is a relation between the physical, mental, social and emotional aspects of human development
This is referred to as the Gestalt approach
What is plasticity
Plasticity refers to a capacity for change in response to positive or negative life experiences.
Plasticity: changes due to life events → past events have implications for the future (negative & positive events)
Explain the importance of historical/cultural context
No single portrait of development is accurate for all cultures, social classes or racial and ethnic groups. Each of these groups, transmit a particular pattern of beliefs, values, customs, and skills to its younger generations, and this has a strong influence on the attributes and competencies that individuals display.
What is original sin and who is accredited for this idea
Thomas Hobbes’s doctrine of original sin is an idea that states, children are inherently selfish egoists who must be restrained by society. Proponents argued that parents must actively control their egoistic children.
Hobbes argued that children are passive subjects to be moulded by parents.
What is innate purity and who is accredited for this idea
Jean Jaques Rousseau’s doctrine of innate purity stated that children are born with an intuitive sense of right and wrong that is misdirected/corrupted by society. Innate purists argued that parents should give their children freedom to follow their inherently positive inclination.
Rousseau believed that children are actively involved in the shaping of their own intellects and personalities, they are active agents.
What is tabula rasa and who is accredited for this idea
John Locke argued that the mind of an infant is a tabula rasa (blank slate) and that children have no inborn tendencies. Children are not inherently good or bad and how they turn out depends entirely on their worldly experiences.
Locke believed that the child’s role is passive because the mind of an infant is a blank slate on which experience writes its lessons.
What is a baby biography
It is a detailed record of an infant’s growth and development over a period of time, often created by the parents of the subject (child).
While this was a good first step in systematically studying children there are issues of generalizability and subjectivity.
Conclusions based on a single case or limited sample may not hold true for other children.
Explain Darwin’s curiosity about child development
Darwin’s curiosity about child development stemmed from his theory of evolution. He believed that young, untrained infants share many characteristics with their nonhuman ancestors, and he believed that the development of the individual child retraces the entire evolutionary history of the species. So Darwin and many of his contemporaries viewed the baby biography as a means of answering questions about our evolutionary past.
What is the scientific method
It is the use of objective and replicable methods to gather data for the purpose of testing a theory or hypothesis. It dictates that investigators must be objective and allow their data to decide the merits of their thinking.
What is reliability
Reliability: consistent findings across time and researchers → no matter who is doing the research, the results must be the same
What is validity
Validity: measure what it is supposed to measure → using the correct variables to measure stuff - ex: measuring happiness: you can’t use the number of swear words as a form of measurement
Validity is the extent to which a test measures what it claims to measure
What are self-report methods of getting information
It is when participants provide the data
- Interviews
- Clinical method
- Diary study
- Questionnaires
What is an interview and what form of information acquirement is it
Self-reported method
Participants respond orally to the investigator’s queries. If the procedure is a structured interview or structured questionnaire, all who participate in the study are asked the same questions in the same order
Advantage:
A quick way of getting information
Makes it easier for the researcher to make comparisons
Disadvantage:
Data can be inaccurate
What are questionnaires
A form of self-reported acquirement of information in which the researcher put questions in written or electronic formats and ask participants to respond to them
Advantages:
A quick way of getting information
Disadvantage:
Information can be affected by the participant’s inability to understand the questions
What is the clinical method
A form of self-reported
A type of interview in which a participant’s response to each successive question (or problem) determines what the investigator will ask next
Advantage:
- Quick way of getting information
Disadvantages:
- Can only be used on highly verbal participants
What is a diary study
A form of self-reported information acquirement in which participants respond at a specific time to a set of questions - ex: people are given a pager at a certain time, then sent questions at those given times
What are observational methods of getting information
- Naturalistic observation
- Structured observation
- Case study
- Psychophysiological method
- Ethnography
What is time-sampling
Observing whether a behaviour occurs or does not occur during specified time periods
What is the observer influence
It is when the participants react to the observer’s presence by behaving in unusual ways
What is a naturalistic observation
A form of acquiring information in which the scientist tests hypotheses by observing people as they engage in everyday activities in their natural habitats (ex: at home, at school, or on the playground)
What is a structured observation
An observational method in which the investigator cues the behaviour of interest and observes participants’ responses in a laboratory. Ex: You take a giant toy to a grade 1 class and watch how they share and stuff in their school’s playground.
Advantage:
A good way to observe infrequent or socially undesirable acts
Disadvantage:
It may not always capture the ways children behave in the natural environment
What is a case study and what are some advantages and disadvantages
A research method in which the investigator gathers extensive information about the life of an individual and then tests developmental hypotheses by analyzing the events of the person’s life history
Observational methodology
Advantage: Provides qualitative and detailed information about a particular subject
Disadvantage: Lacks generalizability
What is ethnography
A method in which the researcher seeks to understand the unique values, traditions, and social processes of a culture or subculture by living with its members and making extensive observations and notes
Disadvantage:
Subjective: the researchers’ own values can cause misinterpretation
Generalization: Cannot be generalized to other social groups
What is the psychophysiological method
A method that measures the relationships between physiological processes and aspects of children’s physical, cognitive, social, or emotional behaviour/development
Ex: Looking at EEG, it measures the states of consciousness (in the brain) and event-related potential (regional activity based on the presentation of stimuli or activity)
Advantages:
Useful for assessing biological underpinnings of development and identifying the perceptions, thoughts, and emotions of infants and toddlers, who cannot report them verbally
Disadvantage: Hard to tell which aspect of the stimulus captured the child’s attention
What is a correlation design
In a correlational design, the investigator gathers information to determine whether two or more variables of interest are meaningfully related
Relationships between Variables
Disadvantage:
Does not permit the determination of cause-and-effect relationships among variables
What is an experimental design
A research design, also known as a lab experiment, introduces some change in the participant’s environment and then measures the effect of that change on the participant’s behaviour.
Relationships between Variables
Advantage: Permit a precise assessment of the cause-and-effect relationship that may exist between two variables
Disadvantage:
Data obtained in an artificial laboratory environment may lack generalizability to the real world
What is a field experiment
It is an experiment (manipulation of the independent variable) that takes place in a naturalistic setting such as home, school, or playground
Advantage:
Finds cause and effect
Disadvantage:
Lack of precise control over natural events or the participants exposed to them prevents the investigator from establishing definitive cause-and-effect relationships
What is an independent variable
The suspected cause (ex: number of hours studying in an experiment looking at hours studying and exam grade)
An independent variable is manipulated or controlled by the experimenter
What is a dependent variable
The effect (ex: Grade in a experiment looking at hours studied and grade)
What is an extraneous variable
An extraneous variable is anything in the experiment other than the independent and dependent variables.
What is ecological validity
Does what you do in a lab apply to the real world
What is a natural (or quasi-) experiment
A study in which the investigator measures the impact of some naturally occurring event that is assumed to affect people’s lives
Ex: Locate a group of children who had been raised in impoverished institutions with very limited contact with caregivers, we could compare their intellectual development with that of children raised at home with their families.
What is a cross-sectional design
A research design in which subjects from different age groups are studied at the same point in time. The participants at each age level are different people.
Research design for development
Advantage: Investigator can collect data from children of different ages over a short time
Disadvantage: Provides no data on the development of individuals because each participant is observed at only one point in time.
What is a cohort
A cohort is a group of people of the same age who are exposed to similar cultural environments and historical events as they are growing up
What is the cohort effect
The age-related difference among cohorts that is attributable to cultural/ historical differences in cohorts’ growing-up experiences rather than to true developmental change
Changes may be due to cultural reasons rather than developmental ones
What is a longitudinal design
A research design in which one group of subjects is studied repeatedly over a period of months or years
Research design for development
Advantages:
- Can reveal links between early experiences and later outcomes
- Indicates how individuals are alike and how they are different in the ways they change over time
Disadvantage:
- Time-consuming
- Expensive
- The sample chosen can be non-representative which can limit generalizability
- Cross-generational problem: long-term changes in the environment may limit the conclusions of a longitudinal project to that generation of children who were growing up while the study was in progress → kids growing up in pandemic
What is a sequential design
A research design in which subjects from different age groups are studied repeatedly over a period of months or years
Research design for development
What are microgenetic studies
It is a research design in which participants are studied intensively over a short period of time as developmental changes occur; attempts to specify how or why those changes occur → best of cross-sectional and longitudinal
Children who are thought to be ready for an important developmental change are exposed repeatedly to experiences that are thought to produce the change and their behaviour is monitored as it is changing
Research design for development
Advantages:
- Can explain how or why a particular development occurs
- Determines cohort effect
- More efficient than longitudinal
- Quasi-real-time change
Disadvantage:
- Naturalistic observation mitigate practice effect
- TIme-consuming
- Costly
