DEV PSYC - General principles

Question 1

How did Chaffer, 2006) define development?

Answer 1

the process of change associated with age which characterises all human beings from conception death”

Question 2

List the 9 periods of development

Answer 2

• parental period
  infancy
  early childhood
  middle/late childhood
  adolescence
  emerging adulthood
  young adulthood
  middle adulthood
  late adulthood

Question 3

What is developmental psychology for?

Answer 3

Applied
- we develop tendencies and psychological mechanisms for looking after children

Theoretical
- to understand what a human being is, one must study its development
-theoretical advances also brings better applications

Question 4

Explain the 1945 study that compared american infants raised in an orphanage with those raised in a prison nursery

Answer 4

• standards of heigine and medical care were very similar
• 37% of orphans were dead before the age of two, compared to none of the prison babies

Question 5

Define attachment in an infant

Answer 5

• the infant’s drive to interact with the care-giver, and the infant’s internal working model of how the care-giver responds

Question 6

What is the buffereing effect of secure attatchment to an additional parent?

Answer 6

that having one secure attachment to mothers, but not fathers, yields equivalent beneficial outcomes to having a secure attachment to both parents.

Question 6

What is the buffereing effect of secure attatchment to an additional parent?

Answer 6

that having one secure attachment to mothers, but not fathers, yields equivalent beneficial outcomes to having a secure attachment to both parents.

Question 7

What is the flynn effect is psychology?

Answer 7

• a secular increase in population intelligence quotient (IQ) observed throughout the 20th century
• the Flynn effect is due to environmental rather than genetic effects, e.g., increasing prosperity leads to more education.

-

Question 8

What is a pseudo experimental design?

Answer 8

nonexperimental designs in which the investigator nonetheless maintains some control over the manipulation and the collection of data.

• Various techniques used to mitigate the consequent threats to validity, e.g., demographic matching of control schools, and removal from sample of children whose parents chose GN school because of GN pedagogy

Question 9

What did the early preschool childhood environments and gender study find?

Answer 9

• girls stereotype more than boys
• older children stereotype more than younger children
• gender neutral school shows intended effect
• the effect is strongest for oldest boys

Question 10

What is an example of a study where puppets are taken out of the equation?

Answer 10

Kenward & Osth, 2015

• Would young children engage in third party punishment towards agents they plausibly regard as real
• Swedish five-year-olds do (probably) want to make something bad happen to someone who did something bad.
• That they apparently didn’t usually dare to do so when told they would assign the negative outcome in person suggests:
  they are taking the situation seriously;
  studies like this one but with puppets don’t tell you much about real situations.

-

Question 10

What is an example of a study where puppets are taken out of the equation?

Answer 10

Kenward & Osth, 2015

• Would young children engage in third party punishment towards agents they plausibly regard as real
• Swedish five-year-olds do (probably) want to make something bad happen to someone who did something bad.
• That they apparently didn’t usually dare to do so when told they would assign the negative outcome in person suggests:
  they are taking the situation seriously;
  studies like this one but with puppets don’t tell you much about real situations.

-

Question 11

How many genes in the human genome?
How many neurons and synapses in the human brain?

Answer 11

human genome: 30,000 genes
Human brain:
20,000,000,000 neurones
100,000,000,000,000 synapses

Question 12

What did Perrin, Berger and Markram (2011) find about initial connectivity?

Answer 12

Initial connectivity patterns are genetically canalised and this could be the basis for some inherited core knowledge.

Question 13

Defiine:
Nature
Nurture

Answer 13

Nature- The role of genetics in forming our behaviour, our personality or any other part of ourselves

Nurture - the role of familiy, society, education and other social factors in forming our behaviour, our personality or any other part of ourselves

Question 14

What are the basic principles of development?

Answer 14

• interplay between genes and environment
• y genes- x environment
• results in phenotype

Question 15

What is heritability?

Answer 15

is a measure of how well differences in people’s genes account for differences in their traits. Traits can include characteristics such as height, eye color, and intelligence, as well as disorders like schizophrenia and autism spectrum disorder.

Question 16

What does heritability of 0 mean?

Answer 16

• means none of the variance in that trait can be attributed to genes

there is either
- no variation
- only variation due to environment e.g choice of religion

Question 17

What did the study on rats by Ronca et al 2008 highlight

Answer 17

• Fetal exposure to gravity is necessary for the development of the vestibular righting “reflex” in rats
• there is no trait so genetically determined that the environment cannot influence it

Question 18

What does canalisation mean?

Answer 18

• the tendency for development of a specific genotype to follow the same trajectory under different conditions (different environments or different genetic backgrounds)

Question 19

What are developmental cascades?

Answer 19

JVA: looking where others look
Responding to others’ attention (a simple behaviour) can provide many opportunities for learning
JVA at 12 months predicts language abilities at 24 months (Mundy et al. 2007)

Question 20

Genetically initiated developmental cascades mean genes can have a very important influence

Answer 20

Genes can have more influence the older you are because of cumulative effects – you really do get more like your parents as you age.

Genes are very important for educational outcomes
E.g., roughly 70% of variation in various English test scoresin school is genetic (heritability estimate).

Question 21

Types of adaptation in development:

Answer 21

Adaptation is an evolutionary concept – a behaviour that improves survival
Ontogenetic adaptation
Behaviours important for survival in the juvenile stage
e.g. babies’ crying is important for eliciting care, in the moment
Deferred adaption
Behaviours whose primary purpose is to improve fitness in the future
e.g. JVA promotes the acquisition of skills for longer term use
Some behaviours are argued to have both functions, e.g. play

Question 22

What is behaviourism?
What is constructivism?
Jean Piaget (1896-1980)

Answer 22

Behaviourism: Individuals learn to repeat rewarded behaviours

Constructivism: individuals seek information that allows them to build new schemas - mental structures that represent the world and model possibilities for action

Question 23

Piagetian constructivist processes of development.
Assimilation?

Answer 23

Acting on or trying to understand a new aspect of the environment using an existing schema.

For example:
An infant picking up a new toy and discovering it works fine to suck it; just like other known toys.
A child meeting a new teacher and behaving towards them as they normally would towards teachers.

Question 24

Piagetian Constructivist processes of development:
Accommodation?

Answer 24

Modifying a schema in the light of new information that doesn’t fit into existing schemas.
For example:
Discovering a penguin and having to modify the bird schema to include flightless birds.
The realisation that the consistent reappearance of objects that went out of sight means they continue to exist even when not visible (object permanence).

Question 25

What are Piaget’s 4 developmental Stages?

Answer 25

1. sensorimotor (birth - 2 years)
2. Preoprepational stage (2-7 years)
3. Concrete Operational stage (7-11 years)
4. Formal Operational Stage (12 and up)

Question 26

What was the Nauty teddy study McGarrigle & Donaldson (1974)

Answer 26

Conservation task with counters, 80 children aged 4 to 6 years old

When the researcher “messes up” the counters, 16% of children are able to conserve
When the naughty teddy “messes up” the counters, 62% are able to conserve

Children in fact able to conserve at 4 years of age
Rather than centration, a tendency to (rather cleverly) misinterpret the experimenter’s intentions can explain why competence is masked in performance

Question 27

What are 2 important theory types that emphasise social information?

Answer 27

• bandura’s social learning theory
• Vygotsky’s socioculteral perspective