CHPT 10: Human Development Flashcards
1
Q
What is developmental psychology?
A
- the study of how behaviour changes over the lifespan
2
Q
What is the post hoc fallacy?
A
- false assumption that because one event occurred before another event, it must have caused that event
3
Q
What is bidirectional influence?
A
- children’s development influences their experiences, but their experiences also influence their development
- change environments by acting in ways that create changes in the behaviours of those around them
4
Q
What is the problem with unidirectional explainations?
A
- doesn’t take into account that events impact each other
5
Q
What are cohort effects?
A
- sets of people who lived during one period can differ in some systematic way from sets of people who lived during a different period
6
Q
What is a cross sectional design?
A
- research design that examines people of different ages at a single point in time
7
Q
What is a longitudinal design?
A
- research design that examines development in the same group of people on multiple occasions over time
8
Q
What are the benefits of the longitudinal design?
A
- ability to examine true developmental effects
9
Q
What are externalizing behaviours?
A
- behaviours such as rule breaking, defying authority figures, and committing crimes
10
Q
What is the myth of infant determinism?
A
- assumption that extremely early experiences (first three years of life) are almost always more influential than later experiences in shaping us as adults
11
Q
What is the myth of childhood fragility?
A
- children are delicate creatures who are easily damaged
- research shows the opposite: they are very resilient to stress
12
Q
What is the gene-environment interaction?
A
- situation in which the effects of genes depend on the environment in which they are expressed
- they are dependent on one another
13
Q
Describe the phenomenon called nature via nurture.
A
- tendency of individuals with certain genetic predispositions to seek out and create environments that permit the expression of those predispositions
14
Q
What is gene expression?
A
- activation or deactivation of genes by environmental experiences throughout development
15
Q
What is a zygote?
A
- a fertilized egg cell
16
Q
What is a blastocyst?
A
- ball of identical cells early in pregnancy that haven’t yet begun to take on any specific function in a body part
17
Q
What is an embryo and what happens during the embryonic stage?
A
- second to eighth week of prenatal development during which limbs, facial features, and major organs of the body take form
18
Q
What is a fetus?
A
- period of prenatal development from ninth week until birth after all major organs are established and physical maturation is the primary change
19
Q
What happens during the germinal stage?
A
- zygote divides over and over again to form a blastocyst
20
Q
When does proliferation occur?
A
- between day 18 and the 6th month, neurons grow at an incredible rate
- up to 250,000 neurons per minute at times
21
Q
What are some obstacles to normal fetal development?
A
- exposure to hazardous environmental influences
- biological influences resulting from genetic disorders or errors in cell duplication during cell division
- premature birth
22
Q
What are teratogens and what impact to they have on fetal health?
A
- teratogens are environmental factors that can exert a negative impact on prenatal development
- smoking, drugs, chicken pox, anxiety, depression
- can affect brain development (specific and general)
23
Q
What is fetal alcohol disorder and what occurs?
A
- condition resulting from high levels of prenatal alcohol exposure, causing learning disabilities, physical growth retardation, facial malformations, and behavioural disorders
24
Q
What are some genetic disruptions of fetal development?
A
- cells copied with some error or break in genetic material
- can result in impaired development of organs or organ systems
- intellectual disabilities, birthmark, facial or boy malformations
25
What is prematurity and what are the risks associated with it?
- babies born fewer than 36 weeks
- can result in physical and cognitive impairments
- underdeveloped lungs and brains, unable to maintain proper body temperature
26
What is the viability point?
- 25 weeks, infants can typically survive on their own
27
What is motor behaviour?
- bodily motion that occurs as a result of self-initiated force that moves the bones and muscles
28
What are infant reflexes?
- survival instincts that are triggers by specific types of stimulation and fulfill important survival needs
29
What are some major motor milestones?
- sitting up, crawling, standing unsupported, and walking.
30
What are some factors influencing motor development?
- depend on physical maturation of the body
- body weight
- cultural and parenting practices
31
Discuss physical development in childhood.
- different parts of the body grow and different rates, and the ultimate proportions of the body are quite different at birth
- head-to-body ratio
32
What is adolescence?
- the transition between childhood and adulthood commonly associated with the teenage years
- time of profound physical change
33
What is puberty?
- the achievement of sexual maturation resulting in the potential to reproduce
34
What is a primary sex characteristic?
- physical feature such as the reproductive organs and genitals that distinguish the sexes
35
What is a secondary sex characteristic?
- a sex-differentiating characteristic that doesn't relate directly to reproduction, such as breast enlargement in women and deepening voices in men
36
What is menarche?
- start of mestruation
37
What is spermarche?
- boys' first ejaculation
38
When is physical peak reached?
- early 20s
39
What happens to the body as it ages?
- decrease in muscle tone, sensory processing, and fertility
40
What is menopause?
- the termination of mensuration, marking the end of a woman's reproductive potential
41
What is cognitive development?
- study of how children acquire the ability to learn, think, reason, communicate, and remember
42
What are the core ways cognitive development theories differentiate?
1. stagelike vs. continuous
2. domain-general vs. domain specific
3. principal source of learning (experience, social, biological maturation)
43
Who is Jean Piaget?
- Swiss psychologist who presented first complete account of cognitive development
- stage theorist who believed skills were domain-general
- thought end point of cognitive development is ability to reason logically about hypotheticals
44
What two processes do children use to acquire knowledge?
- assimilation
| - accomodation
45
What is assimilation?
- Piagetian process of absorbing new experiences into current knowledge structures
- cognitive skills and world views remain unchanged, new knowledge fits into what they already know
46
What is accomodation?
- Piagetian process of altering a belief to make it more compatible with experience
- forcing to take on a new view point
47
What are Piaget's four stages of development?
- sensorimotor
- preoperational stage
- concrete operations
- formal operations
48
What does the sensorimotor stage of Piaget's theory entail?
- from birth to 2 years
- characterized by the focus on the here and now without the ability to represent experiences mentally
- acquire knowledge from physical interactions
- major milestone is mental representation
- lack object permanence
49
What does the preoperational stage of Piaget's theory entail?
- ages 2 to 7 years old
- marked by an ability to construct mental representations of experience (language, drawings, and object representation)
- Hampered by egocentrism and inability to perform mental operations (cant visualize a vase on a table if the vase is not there)
- lack conservation
50
What does the concrete operations stage of Piaget's theory entail?
- ages 7-11 years old
- can perform mental operations, but only for actual physical events
- can perform organizational tasks
51
What does the formal operations stage of Piaget's theory entail?
- age 11 to adulthood
- can understand hypothetical reasoning beyond the here and now
- logical concepts and abstract questions
52
What is mental representation?
- the ability to think about things that are absent from immediate surroundings
53
What is object permanence?
- the understanding that objects continue to exist even when out of view
54
What is ecocentrism?
- inability to see the world from others' perspectives
55
What is conservation?
- Piagetian task requiring children to understand that despite a transformation in the physical presentation of an amount, the amount remains the same
56
What are some cons of Piaget's theory?
- development is more continuous
- probably underestimated children’s competence
- culturally biased methods, westernized
57
What are some pros of Piaget's theory?
- still highly influential, helped change how we think about cognitive development
- children are not small adults
- learning is an active rather than passive process
- exploring general cognitive processes that explain multiple domains of knowledge
58
Who is Lev Vygotsky and what did he propose?
- theory focused on social and cultural influences on cognitive development
- parents structure environments for learning and then gradually remove it (scaffolding)
- zone of proximal development for learning
59
What is scaffolding?
- Vygotskian learning mechanism in which parents provide initial assistance in children's learning but gradually remove structure as children become more competent
60
What is the zone of proximal development?
- phase of learning during which children can benefit from instruction, but not complete the task successfully
61
What is the theory of mind?
- ability to reason about what other people know or believe
62
What are some cognitive landmarks?
- naïve physics and how physical objects behave
- categorizing objects by kind
- concept of self and others and theory of mind
- counting and math
63
Why are their cognitive changes during adolescence?
- frontal lobes don’t fully mature until late adolescence or early adulthood (decision making, impulse control, planning) but teens may just not care about risks
- personal fable and feeling unique and special
- changing attitudes toward knowledge
64
What aspects of cognition experience decline in late adulthood?
- ability to recall information
| - overall speed of processing
65
What aspects of cognition stay stable or increase in late adulthood?
- cued recall and recognition
- remembering pertinent information
- vocabulary and knowledge tasks
66
What is stranger anxiety?
- a fear of strangers, developing at 8 or 9 months of age
| - increases until 12 to 15 months
67
What is temperment?
- basic emotional style that appears early in development and is largely genetic in origin
68
What are "easy infants"?
- adaptable and relaxed
| - 40%
69
What are "difficult infants"?
- fussy and easily frustrated
| - 10%
70
What are What are "slow-to-warm-up infants"?
- disturbed by new stimuli at first but gradually adjust to them
- 15%
71
What is behavioural inhibition?
- reaction to stimuli
- personality type that shows a tendency toward distress and nervousness in new situations
- 10%
72
What is attachment?
- the strong emotional connections we share with those to whom we feel closest
- don't stray too far from those who protect, support, and feed us
73
What is imprinting and when does it occur?
- newborn creature bonds to the people it meets at birth and begins to pattern its behaviour after them
- after birth, unsure time limit
74
What did Rutter's studies of Romanian orphans reveal?
- offered little social interaction and emotional care
- infants adopted older than 6 months of age resulted in negative effects on their early environments, serious emotional problems, and inability to attach to their adopted parents
75
What is contact comfort?
- behaviourists assumed children bonded with those that provided them nourishment
- reassuring physical contact played huge role in developing attachment - preference
- positive emotions afforded by touch
76
What are the four attachment styles?
- secure attachment (60%)
- insecure-avoidant attachment (15%-20%)
- insecure-anxious attachment (15%-20%)
- disorganized attachment (5%-10%)
77
What is secure attachment?
- reacts to moms departure by becoming upset, greets her when she returns
78
What is insecure-avoidant attachment?
- reacts to departure with indifference and shows little reaction upon return
79
What is insecure-anxious attachment?
- reacts to moms departure with panic, upon return shows a mixed emotional reaction
80
What is disorganized attachment?
- confused set of responses upon departure and return
81
What effects some attachment styles?
- show large cultural differences
- subject to the mono-operations bias
- lack of reliability on the Strange Situation
- changing styles over brief times
- different styles for mom vs dad (40% of infants)
82
What is mono-operation bias?
- drawing conclusion on the basis of only a single measure
83
What are the four types of parenting?
- permissive
- authoritarian
- authoritative
- uninvolved
84
What does the permissive parenting style entail?
- tend to be lenient, little discipline, very affectionate
85
What does the authoritarian parenting style entail?
- very strict, punishing, little affection
86
What does the authoritative parenting style entail?
- supportive but set clear and firm limits
| - results in children exhibiting the best social and emotional adjustment and the lowest level of behavioural problems
87
What does the uninvolved parenting style entail?
- neglectful and ignoring
88
What is the average expectable environment?
- environment that provides children with basic needs for affection and discipline
- parenting style doesn't matter if this is provided
89
What is the influence of peers vs. parents?
- more important role than parents
| - group socialization theory (horizontal translation, rather than vertical from parents)
90
How does the father differ from the mother?
- less attentive and affectionate towards babies
- spend less time with babies
- more time in physical play, thus preferred as playmates
91
What is the effect of divorce on children?
- impact of single-parenthood on children is unclear
92
What is gender identity?
- individuals sense of being male or female
93
What are gender roles?
- a set of behaviours that tend to be associated with being male or female
94
What are the biological influences on gender?
- toy preference may reflect differences in biological predisposition
95
What is identity?
- our sense of who we are and our life goals and priorities
96
What is a psychosocial crisis?
- dilemma concerning an individuals relations to other people
97
What is emerging adulthood?
- period of life between the ages of 18 to 25 during which many aspects of emotional development, identity, and personality become solidified
98
What are some criticisms of Kohlberg's work on morals?
- cultural bias
- sex bias
- low correlation with moral behaviour
- confound with verbal intelligence
- casual direction
99
What are some life transitions that can be considered stressful?
- careers
- love and commitment
- parenthood
- midlife transitions
100
What are the four types of ages?
- biological age
- psychological age
- functional age
- social age
