Chapter 1: Background and theories

Question 1

who is John Locke (1632-1704) and what are his contributions?

Answer 1

• English philosopher “all children are born equal”
• tabula rasa: blank slate, newborns mind is empty of innate abilities, interests or ideas
• Environmentalist model: children are simply the product of their upbringing

Question 2

who is Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712-1778) and his contributions?

Answer 2

Swiss philosopher

• Children are born with knowledge and ideas that unfold naturally with age.
• Nativism: the theory that human development results principally from inborn processes that guide the emergence of behaviors in a predictable manner.
• Development follows predictable series of stages.

Question 3

who is Johann Gottfried Von Herder (1744-1803)

and his contributions?

Answer 3

• account of socialization into a group or community determines behaviour
• cultural relativism: the belief that each culture should be examined and evaluated on its own terms
• importance of language (the means by which cultural practices and values are transmitted from gen to gen)

Question 4

who is charles darwin and his contributions?

Answer 4

• natural selection -evolutionary model of development

- baby biography: method of study in which a parent studies the development of his or her own child.

Question 5

who is G. Stanley Hall?

Answer 5

father of child and developmental psychology

• established journals, professor
• Recapitulation theory: the notion that the development of the individual repeats the development of the species. Liked together genetic psychology and education. Ontology recapitulates phylogeny. -Founded and became the first president of the APA

Question 6

Who is James Mark Balwin?

Answer 6

first psychologist in Canada in 1899 at the University of Toronto

• studied origins of handedness, colour vision, and suggestibility and imitation in infancy
• dev=sequence of stages, interaction of heredity and environment

Question 7

Who is John B. Watson?

Answer 7

Zeitgeist: the spirit of the times or the ideas shared by most scientist during a given period

• Behaviourism: human behaviour can be understood principally in terms of experiences and learning processes
• principles of conditioned behaviours, studied by Pavlov, formed the core of Watson’s behaviouristic theory
• called for objective methods to study behaviours

Question 8

What is a recap of the zeitgeist in time?

Answer 8

-Zeitgeist of the 17th century was Locke’s environmentalist view –>Rousseau’s nativistic view –>evolutionary theories of Darwin–> developmentalists–>20th century we are swaying back to the environmentalist position but now called behaviourism

Question 9

WHo is Arnold gessel?

Answer 9

developmentalist returned to the biological model of development.

• Maturation theory: believed that development is guided primarily by biological processes (eg: growth of motor skills follow a predictable pattern)
• developmental schedule of children: established statistical norms
• underestimated the environmental influence on development

Question 10

who is Sigmund Freud?

Answer 10

• personality and techniques of psychoanalysis
• stage theory of psychosexual development: each child is born with a certain amount of sexual energy=libido, and is directed to certain zones of the body=erogenous zone
• fixation -repression (desires and motivation are driven into the unconscious)
• identification: process through which the child adopts the characteristics of the same-sex parent during the phallic phase
• interactionist perspective: the theory that human development results from the combination of inborn processes and environmental factors
• rejected both purely nativistic and strictly environmentalist explanation of human behavior.

Question 11

Who is Erik Erikson?

Answer 11

• 8 psychosocial stages of development
• most of his work on the positive, healthy aspects of personality
• children progress through a predictable series of stages
• Ultimate goal is the quest for identity
• Identity: the component of personality that develops across 8 stages of life and that motivates progress through the stages
• interactionist (combining both environmental and inborn factors)

Question 12

what is genetic epistemology?

Answer 12

Piaget’s term for the study of children’s knowledge and how it changes with development

Question 13

what is constructivism?

Answer 13

Piaget’s belief that children actively create knowledge, rather than passively receive it from the environnement

Question 14

What is Piaget’s clinical method?

Answer 14

Piaget’s principal research method, which involved a semi-structured interview with questions designed to probe children’s understanding of various concepts

Question 15

What are schemes?

Answer 15

Piaget’s term for the cognitive structures of infancy. A scheme consists of a set of skilled, flexible action patterns through which the child understands the world. Involves 2 elements: an object in the environment and a childs reaction

Question 16

what are Piaget’s 2 general functions of cognitive development?

Answer 16

• organization: tendency to integrate knowledge into interrelated cognitive structures. One of the two biologically based functions stressed in Piaget’s theory.
• adaptation: organisms’ attempt to fit in with its environment in ways to promote survival.

Question 17

What is the information processing model?

Answer 17

a) Info world provides=stimulus input in system through sense (vision, sound, taste)
b) Processes in the brain encode information (storage in memory and retrieval when necessary)
c) System is the output which is our behavior (speech, social interactions, writing, and so on)
- Computer analogy: way of thinking about information flowing through a system where it is processed then re-emerges in a different form
- interested in processes such as attention, memory, problem solving, reading, arithmetic and other cognitive processes.

Question 18

What are the 2 cognitive-developmental approaches?

Answer 18

1. Piaget’s cognitive-development theory

2. Information processing model

Question 19

What are the different theories of development?

Answer 19

A- Cognitive developmental approaches (Piaget’s theory, information-processing model)

B-Sociocultural approaches (vygotsky theory, Bronfenbrenner’s ecological model)

C-Environmental/learning approaches (classical learning theories, social learning theories)

D-Evolutionnary and biological approaches

Question 20

behaviour of an observer that results from and is similar to the behaviour of a model

Answer 20

imitation (observational learning)

Question 21

what is response inhibition (Social-learning theory————–>observational learning)?

Answer 21

not displaying a particular behaviour that has just been modelled often as a result of vicarious punishment

Question 22

What are the reasons why not all behaviours that models depict are imitated?

Answer 22

1. Attentional processes (if child pays attention to what the model is doing)
2. Retention processes (the ability to store the information in memory for later use)
3. Motivational processes (determines who and what a child decide to imitate)
4. productive processes (how well the child can reproduce the model’s response)

Question 23

What is Reciprocal determinism?

Answer 23

It is a type of environmental/learning approach (social-learning theory) elaborated by Bandura in which development is the result of a complex interaction between Person, Environment and Behaviour

Question 24

What is ethology?

Answer 24

The study of development from an evolutionary perspetive

Question 25

Classical ethology focused on ___________________

Answer 25

non-human animal behaviour

Question 26

What are the four qualities that characterize virtually all innate, or inborn, behaviours (innate mechanisms)?

answer: URNE

Answer 26

1. Universal to the species
2. require no learning or experience
3. Normally stereotyped
4. Environmental influences minimally affect the behaviours

Question 27

A sequence of behaviours elicited by a specific stimulus

Answer 27

modal action pattern

Question 28

A stimulus that triggers an innate sequence or pattern of behaviours

Answer 28

innate releasing mechanism

Question 29

A period of development during which certain behaviours are more easily learned.

Answer 29

sensitive period

Question 30

a biological process of some species in which the young acquire an emotional attachement to the mother through following.

Answer 30

imprinting

Question 31

Who is John Bowlby?

Answer 31

He is an English ethologist who stressed an evolutionary influence of child development. His theory is a mix of ehtology an Freudian theory. He observed children reared in institutions without mothers–>children had more difficulty forming close relationships with others–>he explained that this is due to lack of mother-infant bond during infancy and child did not develop attachement

Question 32

A branch of biology that attempts to discover the evolutionary origins of social behaviour. Belief that gene influence not only physical traits, but also social behaviour.

Answer 32

sociobiology

Question 33

A mother risks her life to save her 6 year old child. She could have easily died. Which concept best illustrates her actions.

a) ethological b) sociobiology c) developmentalism
d) nativism

Answer 33

sociobiology

Question 34

A branch of evolutionary psychology that encompasses the evolutionary origins of contemporary cognitive abilities as well as those that underlie social relations and social interactions

Answer 34

Evolutionary developmental psychology