Chapter 1 Flashcards
What are the 3 fundamental characteristics of human development?
- Nature and nurture
- Continuity and discontinuity
- Universal and context-specific development
Nature and Nurture
Nature:
- biologically given, born
- based on genetic inheritance
Nurture:
-all environmental influences including the physical, social, and cultural world
Both aspects, biological and environmental influences, are intertwined,
Continuity and discontinuity
continuity: do personality characteristics remain the same or progress smoothly
Discontinuity: are personaility characteristics a series of abrupt shifts
EX: whistling (at one time you can’t whistle then BAM you can)
Universal vs. Context-specific
- Is there just one developmental path or several?
- Are developmental changes common to all humans or different across cultures, subcultures, contexts, and individuals?
The US is individualistic culture whereas other countries are more communalistic.
Theory
an organized set of ideas
A good theory produces
testable hypotheses.
Psychodynamic Theory
- Freud
- Central notion: humans have instincts that motivate behavior.
- unconscious motivation
Id
impulsive, selfish part of personality
Ego
rational aspect that seeks to gratify instincts
Superego
internalized moral standards
What did Freud do right?
- publicized psychology
- highlighted impact of unconscious mind
- emphasized importance of early experience
- emphasized importance of emotions and emotional conflicts.
Erikson
- most influential neo-Freudian
- lifespan theory
- successful resolution of crises leads to proper development
strengths of Erikson
- emphasis on rational and adpative nature
- emphasis on interaction between biological and social influences
- influenced research into adolescence and adulthood
Learning Theory
- behaviorism
- social learning theory
behaviorism
- Skinner
- consequences of a behavior determine whether or not that behavior is repeated in the future
social cognitive theory
- Bandura
- learning occurs through imitation or observational learning.
Cognitive-Developmental Theory
- how people think and how thinking changes over time
Piaget’s theory
children create theories about the world and test them out through experience.
information processing theory
human cognition consists of mental hardware (cognitive structures) and mental software (sets of cognitive processes)
Vygotsky’s theory
every aspect of a child’s development must be considered against backdrop of culture.
Ecological and Systems Perspective
- development is inseparable from the environment in which a person develops.
Lifespan Theory
- development cannot be understood in the scope of one framework
- must appreciate an adult’s childhood and adolescence in order to understand them.
Lifespan Development
ontogenic development is a lifelong process. No age period hold supremacy
Multidirectionality
considerable diversity or pluralism is found in the directionality of changes
Gain-Loss dynamic
- the process of development is not a simple movement toward higher efficacy.
- development across consists of the joint occurrence of gain and loss
Plasticity/Constraints
the key developmental agenda is the search for the range of plasticity and its constraints
Historical Embeddedness
age-related development is markedly influenced by sociocultural conditions existing in a given historical period
Contextualism as Paradigm
individual development can be understood as the outcome of the interactions among three systems of developmental influences and variations therein: age-graded, history-graded, and non normative influences
Naturalistic observations
- observing a person in real-life situation
how they started studying aggressive behavior in children
Structured observations
- creating a setting to bring out the behavior of interest
- pitfall is bringing out an unnatural or unrealistic behavior.
Reliability
extent to which a measure provides a consistent index of a characteristic
validity
the extent to which a measure assess what the reachers thinks it is assessing.
correlational studies
relationships between variables that exist naturally in the world
Experimental studies
systematic ways of manipulating the independent variables in order to cause a particular behavior (dependent variables)
experimental studies operate by
randomly assigning people to one condition or the other.
qualitative research
allows the researcher to gain an in-depth understanding of human behavior and what governs it.
qualitative research is helpful if
if you want a generate a quantitative study which is just numbers.
longitudinal studies
- same individuals are tested throughout their lives.
- most direct way to identify change.
cross-sectional studies
- compares the performances of people of different age groups or cohorts (group of individuals born at the same time)
- provides information about age differences
age effects
relationship between age and a particular aspect of development
cohort effects
effects of being born a member of a cohort or a generation in a historical context.
sequential designs
combine the cross-sectional and the longitudinal approach and improve on both
