chapter 1 definitions Flashcards
What is development?
Systematic or orderly changes that occur within the individual from the moment of conception until death.
Define child development.
A field of study devoted to understanding constancy and change from conception through adolescence.
What is developmental science?
An interdisciplinary field devoted to the study of all changes humans experience throughout the lifespan.
What is a theory?
An orderly, integrated set of statements that describes, explains, and predicts behavior.
Define continuous development.
The view that development is a process of gradually adding more of the same type of skills that were there to begin with.
What is discontinuous development?
A view of development as a process in which new ways of understanding and responding to the world emerge at specific times.
What are contexts in development?
Unique combinations of personal and environmental circumstances that can result in different paths of change.
What is the nature-nurture controversy?
Debate among theorists about whether genetic or environmental factors are more important influences on development.
Define plasticity in human development.
Openness of human development to change in response to influential experiences.
What is resilience?
The ability to adapt effectively in the face of threats to development.
Define maturation.
A genetically determined, naturally unfolding course of growth.
What is the normative approach to development?
An approach in which measures of behavior are taken on larger numbers of individuals, computing age-related averages to represent typical development.
What does the psychoanalytic perspective focus on?
Personality development through a series of stages where conflicts are resolved.
What is Freud’s psychosexual theory?
Emphasizes that how parents manage children’s sexual and aggressive drives in early life is crucial for healthy personality development.
What is Erikson’s psychosocial theory?
Emphasizes that at each Freudian stage, individuals develop a unique personality and acquire skills to become active members of society.
Define behaviorism.
An approach that focuses on directly observable events—stimuli and responses—as the appropriate study focus.
What is social learning theory?
An approach that emphasizes modeling, imitation, or observational learning as a powerful source of development.
What is applied behavior analysis?
Observations of behavior and environmental events followed by systematic changes based on conditioning and modeling.
Define cognitive-developmental theory.
An approach introduced by Piaget viewing children as actively constructing knowledge through manipulation and exploration.
What does information processing refer to?
An approach that views the human mind as a symbol-manipulating system through which information flows.
What is developmental cognitive neuroscience?
An investigation area that studies the relationship between brain changes and the developing child’s cognitive processing.
Define developmental social neuroscience.
An investigation area studying the relationship between brain changes and emotional and social development.
What is ethology?
A perspective concerned with the adaptive, or survival, value of behavior and its evolutionary history.
What is a sensitive period?
A time that is biologically optimal for certain capacities to emerge due to heightened responsiveness to environmental influences.
Define evolutionary developmental psychology.
A perspective seeking to understand the adaptive value of cognitive, emotional, and social competencies as they change with age.
What does Vygotsky’s sociocultural theory focus on?
How children acquire the ways of thinking and behaving that constitute a community’s culture through social interaction.
What is Bronfenbrenner’s ecological systems theory?
An approach viewing the child as developing within a complex system of relationships affected by multiple environmental levels.
What is a microsystem in ecological systems theory?
The innermost level of the environment, consisting of activities and interaction patterns in the child’s immediate surroundings.
What is a mesosystem?
Connections between children’s microsystems, or immediate settings.
Define exosystem.
Social settings that do not contain children but affect their experiences, like parents’ workplaces.
What is a macrosystem?
The outermost level of the environment, consisting of cultural values, laws, customs, and resources.
What does the chronosystem refer to?
Temporal changes in environments that produce new conditions affecting development.
What is the dynamic systems perspective?
A view that regards the child’s mind, body, and environments as a dynamic, integrated system.
What are naturalistic observations?
A research method where the researcher observes behavior in the natural environment.
Define structured observations.
A research method where the investigator sets up a situation to evoke the behavior of interest.
What is a clinical interview?
An interview method using a flexible, conversational style to probe for the participant’s point of view.
What is a structured interview?
An interview method in which each participant is asked the same questions in the same way.
Define clinical, or case study, method.
A research method aiming to obtain a complete picture of one individual’s psychological functioning.
What is ethnography?
A research method attempting to understand the values and social processes of a culture through participant observation.
What is a correlational design?
A research design gathering information on individuals without altering their experiences to examine relationships.
Define correlation coefficient.
A number ranging from +1.00 to -1.00 describing the strength and direction of the relationship between two variables.
What is experimental design?
A research design in which the investigator randomly assigns participants to treatment conditions to study effects.
What is an independent variable?
The variable the researcher manipulates in an experiment to cause changes in another variable.
Define dependent variable.
The variable expected to be influenced by the independent variable in an experiment.
What is random assignment?
An unbiased procedure for assigning participants to treatment conditions to ensure equal distribution of characteristics.
What are confounding variables?
A variable closely associated with the independent variable, making it difficult to determine the cause of changes in the dependent variable.
What is longitudinal design?
A research design studying participants repeatedly at different ages to note changes over time.
Define cohort effects.
The effects of cultural-historical change on the accuracy of longitudinal and cross-sectional research findings.
What is cross-sectional design?
A research design studying groups of participants of different ages at the same point in time.
What are sequential designs?
A research design conducting several similar cross-sectional or longitudinal studies at varying times.
Define microgenetic design.
An adaptation of longitudinal design tracking children’s mastery of a novel task over closely spaced sessions.
What is normative age-group influence?
An influence of an experience that everyone within a certain group has at a particular age.
Define normative.
Everyone experiences it.
What is maturation?
A gradual unfolding of biologically determined skills or characteristics.
