Chapter 1 Flashcards
Developmental Science
A field of study devoted to understanding constancy and change throughout the lifespan.
Theory
An orderly, integrated set of statements that describes, explains, and predicts behavior.
Continuous
A process of gradually augmenting 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.
Stages
Qualitative changes in thinking, feeling, and behaving that characterize specific periods of development.
Contexts
Unique combinations of personal and environmental circumstances that can results in different paths of change.
Nature-Nurture Controversy
Are genetic or environmental factors more important?
Plasticity
Open to change in response to influential experiences.
Lifespan Perspective
Development is:
- ) Lifelong
- ) Multidimensional & Multidirectional
- ) Highly Plastic
- ) Afftected by Multiple, Interacting Forces
Age-Graded Influences
Events that are strongly related to age and therefor fairly predictable in when they occur and how long they last.
History-Graded Influence
Explain why people born around the same time - called a cohort - tend to be alike in ways that set them apart from people born at other times.
Nonnormative Influences
Events that are irregular: They happen to just one person or a few people and do not follow a predictable timetable.
Normative Approach
Measures of behavior are taken on large numbers of individuals, and age-related averages are computed to represent typical development.
G. Stanley Hall & Arnold Gesell
Psychoanalytic Perspective
People 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.
Two theories: Freud and Erikson
Psychosexual Theory
Which emphasizes that how parens manage their child’s sexual and aggressive drives in the first few years is crucial for healthy personality development.
Sigmund Freud
Psychosocial Theory
Erikson emphasized that in addition to mediating between id impulses and superego demands, the ego makes a positive contribution to development, acquiring attitudes and skills that make the individual an active, contributing members of society.
Erik Erikson
Behaviorism
Directly observable events - stimuli and responses - are the appropriate focus of study.
John Watson
Social Learning Theory
Emphasizes modeling, also known as imitation or observational learning, as a powerful source of development.
Albert Bandura
Applied Behavior Analysis
Consists of careful observations of individual behavior and related environmental events, followed by systematic changes in those event based on procedures of conditioning and modeling. The goal is to eliminate undesirable behaviors and increase desirable responses.
Cognitive-Developmental Theory
Children actively construct knowledge as they manipulate and explore their world.
Piaget
Information Processing
The human mind might also be viewed as a symbol-manipulating system through which information flows.
Developmental Cognitive Neuroscience
Brings together researchers from psychology, biology, neuroscience, and medicine to study the relationship between changes in the brain and the developing person’s cognitive processing and behavior patterns.
Developmental Social Neuroscience
Devoted to studying the relationship between changes in the brain and emotional and social development.
Ethology
Concerned with the adaptive, or survival, value of behavior and its evolutionary history.
Sensitive Period
A time that is biologically optimal for certain capacities to emerge because the individual is especially responsive to environmental influences. However, its boundaries are less well-defined than those of a critical period. Development can occur later, but it is harder to induce.
Evolutionary Developmental Psychology
Seeks to understand the adaptive value of species-wide cognitive, emotional, and social competencies as those competencies change with age.
Sociocultural Theory
Focuses on how culture - the values, beliefs, customs, and skills of a social group - is transmitted to the next generation. According to Vygotsky, social interaction - in particular, cooperative dialogues with more knowledgeable members of society - is necessary for children to acquire the ways of thinking and behaving that make up a community’s culture.
Ecological Systems Theory
Views the person as developing within a complex system of relationship affected by multiple levels of the surrounding environment. 1.) Microsystem 2.) Mesosystem 3.) Exosystem 4.) Macrosystem 5.) Chronosystem Urie Bronfenbrenner
Microsystem
The innermost level of the environment. Consists of activities and interaction patterns in the person’s immediate surroundings.
Mesosystem
Encompasses connections between microsystems
Exosystem
Consists of social settings that do not contain the developing person but nevertheless affect experiences in immediate settings.
Macrosystem
Consists of cultural values, laws, customs, and resources.
Chronosystem
The temporal dimension of the Ecological Systems Theory. Life changes can be imposed externally or, alternatively, can arise from within the person, since individuals select, modify, and create many of their own settings and experiences.
Naturalistic Observation
Method of observation in which you go in the field, or natural environment, and record the behavior of interest.
Structured Observation
Observation method in which the investigator sets up a laboratory situation that evokes the behavior of interest so that every participant has equal opportunity to display the response.
Clinical Interview
Researchers use a flexible, conversational style to probe for the participant’s point of view.
Structured Interview
Including tests and questionnaires in which each participant is asked the same set of questions in the same way.
Clinical/Case Study Method
Brings together a wide ranges of information on one person, including interviews, observations, and test scores.
Ethnography
Research is a descriptive, qualitative technique. But instead of aiming to understand a single individual, it is directed toward understanding a culture or a distinct social group through participant observation.
Correlation Design
Researchers gather information on individuals, generally in natural life circumstances, without altering their experiences. Then they look at relationships between participants’ characteristics and their behavior or development.
Correlation Coefficient
A number that describes how two measures, or variables, are associated with each other.
Experimental Design
Permits inferences about cause and effect because researched use an evenhanded procedure to assign people to two or more treatment conditions.
Random Assignment
Unbiased procedure, such as drawing numbers out of a hat or flipping a coin, investigators increase the chances that participants’ characteristics will be equally distributed across treatment groups.
Longitudinal Design
Participants are studied repeatedly, and changes are noted as they get older.
Cohort Effects
Individuals born in the same time period are influenced by a particular set of historical and cultural conditions. Results based on one cohort may not apply to people developing at other times.
Cross-Sectional Design
Groups of people differing in age are studied at the same point in time.
Sequential Designs
Research design in which they conduct several similar cross-sectional or longitudinal studies.
