Dan & Clarie Learning Pack 2 Flashcards
When does stranger fear develop?
- Emerges at 6 months, increasing throughout infancy
- Remains dominant in toddlerhood
- It is a normal behaviour
What is the evolutionary. perspective on the development of stranger fear?
- Thought to offer balance to infants’ natural inquisitive nature for approach and exploration
- Contributes to healthy attachment systems (Ainsworth, 1973)
What is the strange situation?
Mary Ainsworth
- Designed to assess the quality of attachment between the infant and primary caregiver
- Various stages of the infant being left with both mother and stranger, stranger alone, mother alone, completely alone
- Can also tell us about stranger fear
What happens in the strange situation with stranger anxiety: Secure attachment
Avoidant of stranger when alone, but friendly when the mother is present
What happens in the strange situation with stranger anxiety: Resistant attachment
The infant avoids the stranger –> shows fear of the stranger
What happens in the strange situation with stranger anxiety: Avoidant attachment
The infant is okay with the stranger and plays normally when the stranger is present
Relationship between behavioural inhibition and stranger fear
- Temperament research shows stranger fear to be a clear and reliable marker for heightened behavioural inhibition
- Behavioural inhibition is a risk factor for the development of anxiety (Kagan, 2000; Kagan et al., 1987)
How do children self-regulate stranger fear?
- The ability to self regulate is one of the best early indicators of future socioemotional competence and health
- Includes the ability to regulate fear-related action
- Generally assumed that children expand and use their repertoire of executive processes to regulate prepotent responses
What is self-regulation?
- A fundamental and dynamic process to engage executive processes to reduce prepotent responses - Executive processes refers to emotional/cognitive control
- Prepotent responses refers to automatic emotional reactions
Do prepotent responses decay overtime, or do executive processes develop and become more effective?
Morales et al. (2017)
- Found that there is a critical period between 2-5 years of age where children become faster at reducing their prepotent responses, and more effective at employing their executive processes
Examples of psychological abuse
- Spurning - ridiculing or humiliating
- Terrorising - threatening violence against child or child’s loved one
- Isolating - restricting social interactions
- Corruption/exploitation - involving in illegal activities
- Denying emotional responses - providing no praise
Psychological abuse is difficult for clinicians to detect and assess
What are the conflicting motivational systems for children who experience abuse
Children who grow up with abuse often face conflict between two inborn and powerful dispositions
- The tendency to ask for soothing and help (regulated by the attachment system)
- The impulse to protect themselves through fight-flight responses (regulated by the survival defence system)
- Fright without solution (Main and Hesse, 1990)
What is the polyvagal theory?
Porges (2007)
- Dorsal nucleus of the vagal nerve is activated for both
1. Impending danger when fight/flight is impossible
and
- Attachment system is activated, but help might not come
- Dorsal nucleus activation can lead to symptoms associated with the development of dissociation:
1. collapsed body posture
2. Loose muscular tone
3. Low heart beat
4. Numbing
5. Deep feeling of helplessness
HPA axis functioning in children
- Higher morning cortisol levels in sexually abused girls aged 6-15, within 6 months of trauma
- Elevated salivary cortisol in 6 to 12 year old children raised in orphanages for > 8 months, compared to children 6 and a half years post-adoption
What is theory of mind?
- Our ability to interpret others’ behaviour in terms of mental states (e.g. thoughts, intentions, desires, beliefs)
Relationship between childhood trauma and theory of mind
Children with severe traumatic brain injury show poor executive functions and theory of mind
What is risk?
- Stressors that have proven or presumed effects on increasing the likelihood of maladjustment
What is resiliience?
- The experience of positive outcomes despite experiencing significant risk
Children must experience:
- Exposure to threat or severe adversity
- Achievement of positive adaptation
What is the cumulative risk theory?
- The sum of risks (regardless of context) leads to dysfunction
- Overwhelms adaptive capacities of the child
Protective/Vulnerability factors: Personal characteristics
- Older evidence suggests young boys are at greater risk of maladaptive responding to family issues than young girls
- New evidence suggests that modern fathers are more involved post separation/divorce
- Positive constellation of characteristics appears to counteract risk effects:
1. Easy temperament
2. Social responsiveness
3. Humour
Protective/Vulnerability factors: Family characteristics
- Secure parent-child attachment
- Authoritative parenting with appropriate amounts of structure and discipline
- Family-level resources such as cohesion, positive interactions and support
Protective/Vulnerability factors: External support systems
- Reciprocal, positive friendships
- High-quality child care is a protective factor for children living in low-income areas
- Supportive teachers
- Community extra-curricular actiivities
What are Masten and Powell’s (2003) intervention designs for bolstering resilience?
- Risk-focused programs
- Attempt to reduce the level of risk - Asset-focused programs
- Increase the quality/quantity of assets in children’s lives - Process-orientated programs
- Attempt to improve the most important adaptational systems for children such as key relationships, intellectual functioning, and self-regulation systems
What is the study of ageing called?
Gerontology
What are the 3 major factors that interact to form our own personal experiences throughout life?
- Biological - physiology, genetics
- Psychological - cognition, emotion, personality
- Social - cultural, interpersonal relationships
What are the 4 principles of ageing?
- Continuity - early experiences influence later life
- Survivor - self-selection through healthy behaviour
- Individuality - variation within (intra) and between (inter) age groups
- Health vs. pathology - ‘normal’ and pathological ageing involve fundamentally different processes
What is primary ageing
- Gradual and inevitable
- Biological
- Starts in early adulthood
- Genetic/pre-programmed coding
- Intrinsic
- Progressive deterioration in physical structure and biological function
- Independent of disease and environment
- Skin wrinkling
- Hair loss/greying
- Cardiovascular changes
What is secondary ageing
- Not inevitable or experienced by everyone
- Environmental and disease-related
- Habits/behaviour largely under your own control
- Alters life expectancy
- Skin + eye damage/sun exposure
- Hearing/loud music
- Smoking: cardiovascular disease
- Obesity/diet
- Lack of physical activity: reduced bone density/osteoporosis
- Alcohol/drug use: cognitive decline
- Neurodegenerative diseases: Dementia
Social factors of the ageing process: Sex and Gender
- The prevalence of deficits is often different for males and females
- Oestrogen influences women’s cognition, risk of heart disease and bone loss (minimum pre-menopause)
- Sex differences can produce restricted education and employment opportunities that lead to low earnings
Social factors of the ageing process: Socioeconomic status
- Rank in society: Based on education/occupation
- Lower end is associated with poor health
Social factors of the ageing process: Race/ethnicity
- Minority groups (south asian and Caribbean) have a higher chance of heart attack/stroke
- May be based on culture and socioeconomic factors as opposed to biology
Social factors of the ageing process: Relationships
- Protective value of a support network i.e. family, partner, friends
Social factors of the ageing process: Religion
- Social support extends lifespan
Social models of development: Ecological systems perspective
Bronfenbrenner (1989)
- How you interact with various different types of environmental influence, depending on their proximity to you as an individual
What are the 5 levels of the ‘environment’ in the Ecological systems perspective of development
- Microsystem - daily interactions, most direct impact
- Mesosystem - interactions of one or two more microsystems e.g. difficulty at home affecting work
- Exosystem - workplace, extended family
- Macrosystem - social norms, indirect influence through the exosystem
- Chronosystem - change in systems over time
Social models of development: The life course perspective
Bengston and Allen (1993)
- Increased importance of social context, norms, roles and attitudes
- Reaching age-related milestones is called the ‘social clock’
- It is distressing to be ‘off-time’ and may make it seem like you’re not developing in the appropriate time frame
What is ageism?
- Stereotyping old people
- Negative
- Loss of utility to society
- Can lead younger people to avoid close proximity to older people
- Exposure to ageism can impact upon physical health
What are the psychological factors of the ageing process?
- Memory loss
- Many aspects are largely preserved (procedural and semantic) but others decline (episodic and working memory) - Reaction time
- Slower, intra-individual variation - Attention
- Less efficient inhibitory mechanisms, unable to suppress stimuli that represent distractions
Psychological models of development: Erikson’s psychosocial theory (1963)
- 8 stages which indicate how individuals adapt within the context of events that take place across the lifespan
- Importance in later stages
Stage 6: young adulthood as intimacy vs. isolation, commitment or non-commitment to close relationships and development as a result of that choice
Stage 7: middle adulthood as generativity vs. stagnation, issues of procreation and productivity
Stage 8: later adulthood as ego vs despair, accepting past experiences and the end of life
Psychological models of development: Piaget’s cognitive developmental theory
Cognitive change driven by experience of engaging with the environment
Psychological models of development: Continuity theory
Atchley (1989)
Individuals tackle new challenges with adaptive strategies based on past experiences
Psychological models of development: Disengagement theory
Cumming and Henry (1961)
Turning inwards, distancing from society, old roles/expectations, often triggered by retirement
Biological factors of the ageing process: Appearance
Skin:
- Winkles, discolouration
- Elastin becomes less able to return to normal shape
Hair:
- Greying/loss of pigment
- Melanin production stops
- Thinning, pattern balding/hair loss
Biological factors of the ageing process: Body build
- Loss of lean tissue and increase in body fat
- People get shorter due to loss of bone material in the vertebrae
Biological factors of the ageing process: Cardiovascular system
- Walls of left ventricle lose ability to contract
Biological factors of the ageing process: Respiratory system
- Lung tissue is less able to expand/contract
Biological factors of the ageing process: Endocrine system
- Regulates organ systems and hormones
- Change in body composition e.g. bone, fat, muscle mass
- Due to lack of growth hormone production - Rate of metabolism slows
- Due to lack of thyroid-stimulatiing hormone - Sleep dysregulation
- Due to decline in melatonin
Biological factors of the ageing process: Immune system
- Regulates resilience to illness
- Loss of efficiency in t-cells and b-cells
Biological factors of the ageing process: Central Nervous System
- Change in information processing and responses to stimuli
- Due to volume of hippocampus, deterioration of frontal lobes, white matter hyperintensities
Biological factors of the ageing process: Balance
- Prevalence of falls
- Linked to poor vision and depth perception
Biological factors of the ageing process: Smell and taste
- Number of receptors decreases throughout adulthood
Biological factors of the ageing process: Somatosensory
- Loss of discriminative touch, pressure/location of stimuli
What are the programmed ageing theories of development?
- Ageing and death are part of the genetic code
- Hayflick limit (Hayflick 1977; 1987)
- Ultimate limit on length of life but compensatory factors can be used to alter the timing of events - Autoimmune theory (Waldford, 1969)
- Immune system malfunction
- Eventually ends up attacking cells of our own body - Genetically programmed senescence (Buss, 1999)
- Reduced ability of cells to divide
- Loss of protective part of the chromosome (telomeres) over time, leaving DNA vulnerable - Terminal drop (Kleemeier, 1962)
- Physical and cognitive functions only decline dramatically prior to death
What are the random error theories of development?
- Age reflects unplanned changes, ‘wear and tear’
- Cross-linking theory (Tice and Setlow, 1985)
- Collagen fibres become rigid as strands bind to each other - Free radical theory (Harman, 1956)
- Unstable oxygen molecules are left over from when cells create energy
- Molecules that. bind with these free radicals lose function
What do we mean by young adulthood?
- 18-40
- There is an ‘emerging adulthood’ at late teens-early 20s as a transition period
- Setting up your developmental trajectory
- Compensation through lifestyle choices: attenuating the effects of primary ageing and attempting to prevent aspects of secondary ageing
What are things that lead to good health/ageing in young adulthood?
- Being optimistic
- Experiencing positive emotions and behaviours such as adequate exercise and following medical advice
What are things that lead to bad health/ageing in young adulthood?
- Anger
- Hostility
- Pessimism
- Depression
- Social isolation
- Hopelessness
- Lack of exercise
- Poor diet
- Smoking and substance abuse
Biological changes in young adulthood: Brain changes
- Development of inhibitory processes as frontal lobes become fully formed
- We begin to see volume loss, which produces slower information processing
- Production of new neurons is driven by physical exercise and environmental stimulation
Biological changes in young adulthood: Reproduction
- Reduced ability to conceive
- Higher miscarriage rates
- IVF options
Biological changes in young adulthood: Heart and lungs
VO2 max 1% decline per year rom age 35
Biological changes in young adulthood: Immune system
- Failure to fight off disease
- Linking social support to the immune system/response to stress
Psychological changes in young adulthood: Intimacy vs Isolation
- Engage in a supportive affectionate relationship without losing a sense of self
- New life structure e.g. from child/sibling to husband/wife/ partner
- Single people are less healthy and satisfied
- But perhaps more scope for autonomy/personal growth
Psychological changes in young adulthood: Mental health
- Emotional disturbance is highest at 18-24 years old
- High expectations from spouse, parent worker etc
- Greater fear of failure (bio-psycho-social impact)
- Anxiety and depression are most common
Psychological changes in young adulthood: Decision making
Dealing with abstract concepts as opposed to those that are straightforward
Psychological changes in young adulthood: IQ
- Dip during mid-30s but not in all aspects
- Fluid intelligence declines
- Crystallised intelligence (based on skills) is stable
Psychological changes in young adulthood: Creativity
- Peak productivity at 30-35
- Most innovative/groundbreaking work is conducted at this age
Social changes in young adulthood: Parenthood
- Stressful but emotional high point
- Delayed due to career development
- Single parent –> having a child can prevent career progression
Social changes in young adulthood: Occupation
- Choosing a career
- Committing to a future
- Are you choosing for financial reward or for service to the community
- Job satisfaction rises from early adulthood to retirement
- Dependent on job security/ work-life balance
Social changes in young adulthood: Social network
- New relationships formed
- Detachment from family (based on proximity)
- Familial relationships still remain important, particularly for African Americans
- Reduced number of friends by middle adulthood
