Chapter 1 Flashcards
Developmental science
Which includes all change we experience throughout the lifespan
Child development
An area of study devoted to understanding constancy and change from conception through adolescence
Prenatal period
9 month period where the most rapid change occurs. One called organism is transformed into a human baby, adjusting to the changes of the natural world
Infancy to toddlerhood
Birth to 2. Supports the wide array of changes in motor, perceptual, and intellectual capacities, the beginnings of language and the first intimate ties to others
Early childhood
2-6; body becomes longer and leaner, motor skills are refined and children become more self controlled and self sufficient. Thought and language expand at an astounding rate. Morality becomes evident.
Middle childhood
6-11; improved athletic abilities, more logical thought process, mastery of fundamental reading, writing, and math. Advances in understanding of self, morality and others.
Adolescence
11-18; initiates the transition to adulthood, puberty leads to adult sized bodies and sexual maturity, thought becomes abstract and idealistic. Young people begin to establish autonomy from family and define personal goals and values.
Continuous
A process of adding more of the same types of skills that were there to begin with.
Discontinuous
A process in which new ways of understanding and responding to the world emerge at specific times
Stage theories
In this type development is much like climbing a ladder with each step corresponding to a more mature, reorganized way of functioning.
Contexts
Unique combinations of personal and environmental circumstances that can result in different paths of change.
Resilience
The ability to adapt effectively in the face of threats to development
Maturation
Genetically determined naturally unfolding course of growth
Normative approach
In which measures of behavior are taken on large numbers of individuals and age-related averages are computed to represent typical development
Psychoanalytic perspective
Children move through a series of stages in which they confront conflicts between biological drives and social expectations. How these conflicts are resolved determines the person’s ability to learn, to get along with others, and to cope with anxiety.
Psychosexual theory
Which emphasizes how parents handle their child’s sexual and aggressive drives in the first few years in crucial for healthy personality development
Psychosocial theory
Ericsson emphasized that in addition to mediating between id impulses and superego demands he ego makes a positive contribution to development, acquiring attitudes and skills that make the individual an active, contributing member of society.
Behaviorism
Directly observable events– stimuli and response are the appropriate focus of study
Social learning theory
Most influential, devised by Albert Bandura, emphasized modeling, otherwise known as imitation, or observational learning, as a powerful source of development.
Sense of self-efficacy
The belief that ones own abilities and characteristics will help them succeed
Behavior modification
Consists of procedures that combine conditioning and modeling to eliminate undesirable behavior sand increase desirable responses
Cognitive developmental theory
Children actively construct knowledge as they manipulate and explore the world
Sensorimotor
Birth-2 children “think” by acting on the world and experiencing things that can generate a sensorimotor reaction
Preoperational
2-7 development of language and make believe play takes place
Concrete operational
7-11 become logical and better organized, can organize into classes and subclasses
Formal operational
11 on, capacity for abstract, systematic thinking enables adolescents, when faced with a problem, to start with a hypothesis, deduce testable inferences, and isolate combined variables to see which inferences are confirmed.
Developmental cognitive neuroscience
It brings together researchers from psychology, biology, neuroscience, and medicine to study the relationship between changes in the brain and the developing child’s cognitive processing and behavior patterns.
Ethology
Is concerned with the adaptive, or survival, value of behavior and its evolutionary history.
Ecological systems theory
Views the child as developing within the complex system of relationships affected by multiple levels of the surrounding environment
