Chapter 1: The People and the Field Flashcards
Define developmental science and the interests of developmental scientists.
People who study development; changes in human development across the lifespan, including physical, cognitive, social, intellectual, perceptual, personality and emotional growth.
Explain and give examples of the developmental contexts that shape children’s lives.
The essential primary contexts that shape children’s lives are what developmentalists call our cohort, the age group and time in history when we travel through life.
Describe four major changes during the 20th century that have shaped children’s lives.
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An Extension in Life Expectancy:
- The main change revolutionizing childhood relates to health. In addition, as Western nations grew affluent, children no longer had to work to help the family from an early age. Education became essential to constructing a secure adult life.
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An Escalation in Education:
- Education sets the limits of childhood because we must depend on our parents to provide care as long as we are in school. In the nineteenth century in Western Europe and much of the United States, the primary school became mandatory (Aries, 1962). Still, as late as 1915, only 1 in 10 U.S. children attended high school; most people began their work lives after seventh or eighth grade (Mintz, 2004; Gordon, 2015). At the beginning of the twentieth century, psychologist G. Stanley Hall (1904/1969) identified a “storm and stress” stage between childhood and adulthood, which he named adolescence. However, during the Great Depression of the 1930s, when President Franklin Roosevelt signed a bill mandating high school attendance, adolescents became a standard U.S. life stage (Mintz 2004). Developmentalists (see Tanner & Amett, 2010) have identified a new in-between stage of life in affluent countries. Emerging adulthood, lasting from age 18 through the twenties, is devoted to exploring our place in the world.
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A Decrease in Family Size:
- During the past half-century, a similar trend has occurred in poorer regions of the globe. Today, every European nation’s fertility rates (childbirths per female) have slid below the number needed to replace the population (2.1 children). Only 3 percent of the world’s population is still giving birth at rates that greatly exceed the level required to replace the population today.
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A Decline in the Traditional Western Two-Parent Family:
- During the 1950s, women who dared to get pregnant without a wedding ring were forced to give up their babies or endure “shotgun” marriages. Once people got married, gender roles were set in stone. Wives stayed at home to raise children while husbands worked. Then during the 1960s and 1970s, when the mammoth bulge in population called the baby boom (people born from 1946-1961) became teenagers, we rebelled against these rigid gender roles. The women’s movement encouraged wives to have careers. Everyone felt liberated to leave an unhappy marriage. People no longer felt they needed to be married to become parents at all.
Identify the core difference between developed and developing nations.
Developed-world: nations are defined by their affluence, or high median per-persons income. Babies born in these countries have a widespread access to education and state of the art medical care. In these nations, childhood often lasts for decades, family sizes are tiny, and parents assume that their newborns will live to old age. Traditionally, the United States, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and Japan, as well as every Western European nation, are classified in the “most affluent” category, although its ranks are expanding as the Asian economics explode.
Developing-world: countries stand in sharp contrast to these most privileged nations. In the world’s worst-off regions, such as sub-Saharan Africa (recall from figure 1.1 on page 7), fertility remains high. Pregnancy is hazardous and children may die from contaminated foods or normally curable infectious diseases.
Compare and contrast individualistic and collectivist cultural worldviews.
Collectivistic culture: places a premium on social harmony. The family generations live together, even as adults. Children are taught to obey their elders, to suppress their feelings, to value being respectful, and to subordinate their needs to the good of the wider group.
Individualistic cultures: emphasizes independence, competition, and personal success. Children are encouraged to openly express their emotions, to assert themselves, and to stand on their own as self-sufficient and independent adults. Traditionally, Western Nations score high on indices of individualism. Nations in Asia, Africa and South America rank higher on collectivism scales.
In the most individualistic country (no surprise, that’s the United States), people have a mix of collectivist and individualistic worldviews. Due to globalization, traditional collectivistic cultures such as China and Japan have developed more individualistic, Western worldviews.
Summarize the theories developmental scientists use to study childhood and adolescence.
Behaviorism: The Original Blockbuster “Nurture” Theory
Watson and his fellow behaviorist B.F. Skinner (1960, 1974) wanted to pioneer a new rigorous science of human behavior. These theorists argued that, since we could not measure feelings and thoughts, a true science of psychology could focus only on observable responses. Moreover, these traditional behaviorists believed a few general laws of learning could explain behavior from infancy through the teens.
Exploring Reinforcement:
According to Skinner, the general law of learning that causes each voluntary action, from forming our first words to mastering math, is operant conditioning. Responses that we reward, or reinforce, are learned. Responses that are not reinforced go away or are extinguished. According to Skinner, the reinforcements are operating as they should. The problem is that, instead of reinforcing positive behavior, we often reinforce the wrong things. One of Skinner’s most interesting concepts, derived from his work with pigeons, relates to variable reinforcement schedules. This is the type of reinforcement that typically occurs in daily life. We get reinforced unpredictably, so we keep responding, realizing that if we continue, at some point we will be reinforced. Reinforcement (and its opposite process, extinction) is a powerful force for both good and bad. If people did not reinforce you for your actions, wouldn’t you withdraw or act in socially inappropriate ways? Behaviorism makes sense of classic problems that erupt during older childhood and the teens. According to traditional behaviorists, the key to eliminating bullying or reducing teenage delinquency is simple: We need to reinforce the right things. Human beings do think and reason. Children do not need to be personally reinforced to learn.
Taking a Different Perspective: Exploring Cognitions
Enter cognitive behaviorism (social learning theory), launched by Albert Bandura (1977; 1986) and his colleagues in the 1970’s with studies demonstrating the power of modeling, or learning by watching and imitating what other people do. Because we are social species, modeling (both imitating other people, as well as other reciprocally imitating us) is endemic in daily life. Bandura (1986) finds that children model people who are nurturing, or relate to them in a caring way. Children model people whom they categorize as being similar to them. Self-efficacy refers to our belief in our competence, our sense that we can be successful at a given task. According to Bandura (1989, 1992, 1997), efficacy feelings determine goals we set. They predict which activities we engage in as we travel through life. When self-efficacy is low, elementary schoolers decide not to tackle that difficult math problem. Emerging adults shy away from asking a stranger for date. When self-efficacy is high, people not only take action, but also continue to act after the traditional behavioral approach suggests that extinction should occur. How do children develop low or high self-efficacy? What specific strategies stimulate efficacy feelings during elementary school and the teenage years? Be consistent. Don’t reinforce negative behavior. Reinforce positive things (from traditional behaviorism). Draw on the principles of modeling and stimulate efficacy feelings to help children succeed (from cognitive behaviorism). Notice that behaviorism doesn’t address that core question: What really motivates us as people?
Psychoanalytic Theory: Focus on Early Childhood and Unconscious Motivations
Sigmund Freud’s ideas are currently not in vogue in developmental science. However, no one can dispute the fact that Freud (1856-1939) transformed the way we think about human beings. Freud, a Viennese Jewish physician, wrote more than 40 books and monographs in a burst of brilliance during the early twentieth century. Freud’s mission, however, was simple: to decode why his patients were in emotional pain. Freud’s theory is called psychoanalytical because it analyzes the psyche, or our inner life. By listening to his patients, Freud became convinced that our actions are dominated by feelings of which we are not aware. The roots of emotional problems lay in repressed (made unconscious) feelings from early childhood. Moreover, “mothering” during the first five years of life determine adult mental health. During early childhood, the conscious, rational part of our personality—called the ego—emerges. Ego functions involve thinking, reasoning, planning and fulfilling our id desire in realistic ways. Finally, a structure called superego—the moral arm of our personality—exists in opposition to the ids desires. According to Freud and his followers, if children have excellent parents, they will develop a strong ego, which sets them up to master the challenges of life. If parents are insensitive or their caregiving is impaired, adult behavior will be id driven and a person’s life will be out of control. The purpose of Freud’s therapy called psychoanalysis, was to enable his patients to become aware of the repressed early childhood experiences causing their symptoms, thereby liberating them from the tyranny of the unconscious to live rational, productive lives.
According to Freud: (1): Human beings are basically irrational and (2) lifelong mental health depends on the quality of our parents care; and (3) the roots of adult maturity are laid down during the first years of life. Freud argued that sexual feeling (which he called libido) are the motivation the drives human life, and he put forth the shocking idea—especially at the time—that babies are sexual human beings. As the infant develops, he argued, sexual feelings are centered on specific areas of the body, called erogenous zones. During the first year of life the erogenous zone is the mouth (the famous oral stage). Around age two, with toilet training, sexual feelings center on elimination (the anal stage). Finally, around ages 3 and 4, sexual feelings shift to the genitals (the phallic stage). During this time, the child develops sexual fantasies relating to the parent of the opposite sex (the Oedipus complex), and the same-sex parent becomes a rival. Then sexuality is repressed, the child identifies with that parent, the superego is formed, and children enter latency—are asexual stage that lasts through elementary school. Like Freud, contemporary developmentalists believe that self-understanding—fostering children’s ability to reflect on and regulate their emotions—is at the core of raising competent human beings. Like Freud, developmental scientists are passionate to trace the roots of later development to what happens in children’s earliest months and years of life. Moreover, psychoanalytic theory gave birth to that important contemporary perspective called attachment theory.
Attachment Theory: Focus on Nurture, Nature and Love
British psychiatrist John Bowlby formulated attachment theory during the mid-twentieth century. Like Freud, Bowlby believed that children’s early experiences with caregivers shape their adult life, but he focused on what he called the attachment theory. Why did Bowlby’s ideas eclipse psychoanalytic theory? A main reason was that Bowlby agreed with a late-twentieth-century shift in the way developmentalists understood human motivation. Yes, Bowlby did believe in the power of caregiving (nurture), but he firmly anchored his theory in nature (genetics). Bowlby argued that the attachment response is genetically programmed into our species to promote survival. Bowlby was an early evoluntarity psychologist.
Evolutionary Psychology: Theorizing About The “Nature” of Human Similarities
Evolutionary psychologists are the mirror image of behaviorists. They look to nature or inborn biological forces that have evolved to promote survival, to explain how children (and adults) behave. According to evolutionary psychologists, these reactions cannot be changed by modifying the reinforcers. They are based in the human genetic code that we all share. Evolutionary psychologists lacks the practical, action oriented approach of behaviorism, although it does alert us to the fact that we need to pay close attention to basic human needs. What first convinced developmentalists that genetics is important in behavior? A simple set of research techniques.
Describe the research strategy behavioral geneticists use.
Behavioral genetics is the name for research strategies devoted to examining the genetic contribution to the differences we see among human beings. How genetic is the tendency to bite our nails, develop bipolar disorders, have specific attitudes about life? To answer these kinds of questions, scientists typically use twin and adoption studies. In twin studies, researchers typically compare identical (monozygotic) twins and fraternal (dizygotic) twins on a particular trait of interest (such as playing the oboe, obesity, and so on). Identical twins develop from the same fertilized egg (it splits soon after the one-cell stage) and are genetic clones. Fraternal twins, like any brother or sister, develop from the fertilization of two separate eggs and so, on average, share 50 percent of their genes. The idea is that if a given trait is highly influenced by genetics, identical twins should be much more alike in that quality than fraternal twins. Specifically, behavioral geneticists use a statistic called heritability (which ranges from 1 = totally genetic, to 0 = no genetic contribution) to summarize the extent to which a given behavior is shaped by genetic factors.
In adoption studies, researchers compare adopted children with their biological and adoptive parents. Here, too, they evaluate the impact of heredity on a trait by looking at how closely these children resemble their birth parents (with whom they share only genes) and their adoptive parents (with whom they share only environments).Twin studies of children growing up in the same family and adoption studies are fairly easy to carry out. The most powerful evidence for genetics comes from the rare twin/adoption studies, in which identical twins are separated in childhood and reunited in adult life. Consider, for instance, the Swedish Twin/Adoption Study of Aging. Researchers combed national registries to find identical and fraternal twins adopted into different families in that nation—where birth records of every adoptee are kept. Then they reunited these children in late middle age and gave the twins a battery of tests (Finkel & Pedersen, 2004; Kato & Pedersen, 2005). While specific qualities varied in their heritability, you might be surprised to know that the most genetically determined quality was intelligence (Pedersen, 1996). In fact, if one twin took the standard intelligence test, statistically speaking we could predict that the other twin would have an almost identical score, despite living apart for almost an entire lifetime! Behavioral genetic studies such as these have opened our eyes to the role of nature in shaping children’s lives (Turkheimer, 2004). As I will describe throughout this book, scientists now know that genetic forces heavily influence many aspects of children’s development.These studies have given us tantalizing insights into nurture, too. It’s tempting to assume that children growing up in the same family share the same nurture, or environment. We inhabit different life spaces than our brothers and sisters do, even when we eat at the same dinner table and share the same room—environments that are influenced by our genes (Rowe, 2003). The bottom line is that there is no such thing as nature or nurture. To understand development, scientists need to explore how nature and nurture combine.
Explain how nature and nurture interact during development.
Principle 1: Our Nature (Genetic Tendencies)Shapes Our Nurture (Life Experiences)
Developmentalists understand that nature and nurture are not independent entities. Children’s genetic tendencies shape their wider-world experiences in two ways.Evocative forces refer to the fact that children’s inborn talents and temperamental tendencies evoke, or produce, certain responses from the world. Human relationships are bidirectional. Just as you get grumpy when with a grumpy person, fight with your difficult neighbor, or shy away from your colleague who is paralyzingly shy, who children are as people causes others to react in specific ways, driving development for the good and the bad. Active forces refer to the fact that children actively select their environments based on their genetic tendencies.Because we choose activities tailored to fit our biologically based interests and skills, minor differences in early childhood snowball—ultimately producing huge gaps in talents and traits. The high adult heritabilities in the Swedish Twin/Adoption Study for intelligence are lower in comparable behavioral genetic studies conducted during childhood (Plomin & Spinath, 2004). The reason is that, like heat-seeking missiles, our nature causes us to gravitate toward specific life experiences, so children literally become more like themselves genetically as they travel into adult life (Scarr, 1997).
Principle 2: We Need the Right Nurture (Life Experiences) to Fully Express Our Nature (Genetic Talents)
Developmentalists understand that even if a quality is mainly genetic, its expression can be 100 percent dependent on the outside world. Let’s illustrate by returning to the high heritabilities for intelligence. If babies grow up in impoverished developing nations, having genius-level intellectual talents might be irrelevant, as there would be no chance to demonstrate these hereditary gifts.The most fascinating demonstration of how a high-quality environment can bring out children’s genetic potential relates specifically to intelligence. As you will see in Chapter 7, over the past century, scores on the standard intelligence test have been rising. The same correct items a twenty-first-century teenager needs to be ranked as “average” in intelligence would have boosted that same child into the top one-third of the population in 1950. A century ago, having the identical number of items correct would have categorized that child as gifted, in the top 2 percent of his peers (Pinker, 2011)!
What is causing this upward shift? Obviously, our “genetic” intellectual capacities can’t have changed. It’s just that as children have become better nourished, more educated, and more technologically adept, they perform better, especially on the kinds of abstract-reasoning items the standard intelligence test measures (see Flynn, 2007, and Chapter 7). So even when individual differences in a particular ability are “genetic,” the environment makes a dramatic difference in how children perform.This discussion brings home the fact that to promote children’s potential, we need to provide the best possible environment. This is why a core goal of developmental science is to foster the correct person–environment fit—making the wider world bring out children’s human “best.”Epigenetics refers to the study of how the environment—often, but not exclusively, intrauterine and early childhood experiences—alters the outer cover of our DNA, causing effects that last throughout life (see Moore, 2015).
Describe the main developmental science measurement techniques (research measurement techniques).
To answer any question about the impact one condition or entity (called a variable) can have on another, developmentalists use two different research designs: correlational studies and true experiments. In a correlational study, researchers chart the relationships between the dimensions they are interested in exploring as they naturally occur. a representative sample—a group that reflects the characteristics of the population about whom you want to generalize. Then you would face your most important challenge—accurately measuring your variables. without adequate indices of the concepts we are measuring, we can’t conclude anything at all. With regard to the parent dimension, one possibility might be to visit parents and children and observe how they relate. This technique, called naturalistic observation, is appealing because it directly charts behavior as it occurs in “nature,” or real life. This self-report strategy, in which people evaluate their behavior anonymously, is the main approach researchers use with older children and adults. Still, it has biases. Evaluations from expert observers, such as teachers and even peers, are often used to assess concepts such as popularity and personality during the childhood years. Table 1.5 spells out the uses, and the pluses and minuses, of these frequently used ways of measuring concepts: naturalistic observation, self-reports, and observer evaluations.
With correlations, we may be mixing up the result with the cause.
With correlations, there may be another variable that explains the results.
To rule out these confounding forces, the solution is to conduct a true experiment (see Figure 1.4). Researchers isolate their variable of interest by manipulating that condition (called the independent variable), and then randomly assign people to either receive that treatment or another, control intervention. If we randomly assign people to different groups (by, say, tossing a coin), there can’t be any preexisting differences between our participants that would bias our results. If the group does differ in the way we predict, we have to conclude that our intervention caused the particular result.
Experiments are ideal for determining what causes behavior. But to tackle the most compelling questions about children’s lives, we have to conduct correlational research—and control as best we can for competing explanations that might bias our results.
Designs for Studying Development: Cross-Sectional and Longitudinal Studies
Experiments and correlational studies are standard, all-purpose research strategies. In studying development, however, we have a special interest: How do children change with age? To answer this question, scientists also use two research designs—cross-sectional and longitudinal studies.
Cross-Sectional Studies: Getting a One-Shot Snapshot of Groups
Because cross-sectional research is relatively easy to carry out, researchers typically use this strategy to explore changes over long periods of development (Hertzog, 1996). In a cross-sectional study, researchers compare different age groups at the same time on the trait or characteristic they are interested in, be it parenting, personality, or physical health.
The bottom line is that while cross-sectional studies offer snapshots of different age groups taken at a single point in time, they don’t tell us about real changes that occur over years.
Cross-sectional studies have a more basic problem. Because they measure only group differences, they can’t reveal anything about the individual variations that give spice to life. To answer these questions about how individual children develop, it’s vital to be on the scene to measure what is going on. This means doing longitudinal research.
Compare and contrast correlational and experimental methods for studying development.
Two Standard Research Strategies: Correlations and Experiments
To answer any question about the impact one condition or entity (called a variable) can have on another, developmentalists use two different research designs: correlational studies and true experiments. In a correlational study, researchers chart the relationships between the dimensions they are interested in exploring as they naturally occur. a representative sample—a group that reflects the characteristics of the population about whom you want to generalize. Then you would face your most important challenge—accurately measuring your variables. without adequate indices of the concepts we are measuring, we can’t conclude anything at all. With regard to the parent dimension, one possibility might be to visit parents and children and observe how they relate. This technique, called naturalistic observation, is appealing because it directly charts behavior as it occurs in “nature,” or real life. This self-report strategy, in which people evaluate their behavior anonymously, is the main approach researchers use with older children and adults. Still, it has biases. Evaluations from expert observers, such as teachers and even peers, are often used to assess concepts such as popularity and personality during the childhood years. Table 1.5 spells out the uses, and the pluses and minuses, of these frequently used ways of measuring concepts: naturalistic observation, self-reports, and observer evaluations.
With correlations, we may be mixing up the result with the cause.
With correlations, there may be another variable that explains the results.
To rule out these confounding forces, the solution is to conduct a true experiment (see Figure 1.4). Researchers isolate their variable of interest by manipulating that condition (called the independent variable), and then randomly assign people to either receive that treatment or another, control intervention. If we randomly assign people to different groups (by, say, tossing a coin), there can’t be any preexisting differences between our participants that would bias our results. If the group does differ in the way we predict, we have to conclude that our intervention caused the particular result.
Experiments are ideal for determining what causes behavior. But to tackle the most compelling questions about children’s lives, we have to conduct correlational research—and control as best we can for competing explanations that might bias our results.
Designs for Studying Development: Cross-Sectional and Longitudinal Studies
Experiments and correlational studies are standard, all-purpose research strategies. In studying development, however, we have a special interest: How do children change with age? To answer this question, scientists also use two research designs—cross-sectional and longitudinal studies.
Compare and contrast cross-sectional and longitudinal research designs.
Because cross-sectional research is relatively easy to carry out, researchers typically use this strategy to explore changes over long periods of development (Hertzog, 1996). In a cross-sectional study, researchers compare different age groups at the same time on the trait or characteristic they are interested in, be it parenting, personality, or physical health.
The bottom line is that while cross-sectional studies offer snapshots of different age groups taken at a single point in time, they don’t tell us about real changes that occur over years.
Cross-sectional studies have a more basic problem. Because they measure only group differences, they can’t reveal anything about the individual variations that give spice to life. To answer these questions about how individual children develop, it’s vital to be on the scene to measure what is going on. This means doing longitudinal research.
Longitudinal Studies: The Gold-Standard Developmental Science Research Design
In <dfn><strong><a><span>longitudinal studies,</span></a></strong></dfn> researchers typically select a group of children at a particular age and periodically test those boys and girls over many years (the relevant word here is long).
Longitudinal research is tremendously exciting. But, because it demands so much time and effort, these studies are daunting to carry out. In the examples I just mentioned, imagine the hassles of finding and then testing each member of an elementary school class every few years. To account for <dfn><strong><a><span>subject attrition</span></a></strong></dfn>—the reality that people drop out of research—you would need to start with a huge group of children. Longitudinal studies that track development into adulthood have their own bias. Only the most successful participants return.
Describe new advances in developmental science research.
- Researchers are attuned to these research issues. Today, they often use different types of measures and control for other influences that might explain their findings. A dramatic new trend is the explosion of international research, with developmentalists from nations as different as Iran and Ireland or China and Cameroon now exploring children’s lives. Within just a decade, developmental science has become a truly worldwide field! Still, in addition to getting more global, scientists are getting up close and personal, too.
- <dfn><strong><a><span>Quantitative research</span></a></strong></dfn> techniques—the strategies I have described in this section, using groups and statistical tests—are the main approaches that researchers use to study children. In order to make general predictions, we need to examine more than one individual and use numbers to find out the scientific “truth.” But there is another small strand of research in developmental science as well.
- <dfn><strong><a><span>Qualitative researchers</span></a></strong></dfn> go beyond the statistics to conduct personal interviews. Because they bring home the personal experience of development, in this book I will highlight studies quoting real-life parents and children, because stories—not numbers—best convey the magic of human life.
