Developmental Psych

Question 1

Nature-Nurture Debate

Answer 1

Critical vs. Sensitive Periods
Genotype vs. Phenotype
Gene-Environment Correlation

Question 2

Huntington’s disease

Answer 2

• degenerative central nervous system disorder that is caused by a single autosomal dominant gene (gene linked abnormality)
• involves cognitive, motor and psychiatric symptoms
• offspring of an afflicted parent have a 50% chance of inheriting the disorder

Question 3

Phenylketonuria (PKU)

Answer 3

gene linked abnormality

recessive gene disorder that causes severe mental retardation unless it is prevented by a diet low in phenylalanine

Question 4

Down syndrome

Answer 4

chromosomal abnormalities

Down syndrome is usually due to an extra number 21 chromosome and is characterized by mental retardation, distinctive physical features, and increased risk for several disorders including congenital heart disease and Alzheimer’s dementia

Question 5

Klinefelter syndrome

Answer 5

Abnormalities of the sex chromosome disorder

• affects males
• caused by an extra X chromosome
• develop a normal male identity but have incomplete development of secondary sex characteristics and are often infertile

Question 6

Turner syndrome

Answer 6

Abnormalities of the sex chromosome disorder

• affects females
• occurs when all or part of an X chromosome is missing
• Females with this disorder do not develop secondary sex characteristics, are infertile, and have a short stature, stubby fingers, and a webbed neck

Question 7

Trader-Willi syndrome

Answer 7

rare chromosomal abnormality
- involves deletion (loss of a segment) on paternal chromosome 15
- symptoms = mental retardation, chronic overeating and obesity, hypogonadism, obsessive-compulsive behaviors, and distinctive physical features (e.g., narrow forehead, small hands and feet, short stature)

Question 8

Fragile X syndrome

Answer 8

• due to a weak site on X chromosome
• occurs in males and females
• negative effects are more evident in males who lack the influence of a normal X chromosome
• disorder characterized by distinct combination of physical, intellectual, and behavioral deficits including moderate to severe mental retardation, facial deformities, and a rapid, staccato speech rhythm

Question 9

Teratogens

Answer 9

substances and conditions that interfere w/ normal prenatal development

e.g., alcohol consumption by a pregnant woman can produce fetal alcohol syndrome (FAS) or fetal alcohol effects (FAE), depending on the amount consumed

prenatal exposure to cocaine can cause spontaneous abortion in the 1st trimester

Malnutrition during the 1st trimester of prenatal development can cause spontaneous abortion, neural tube defects, and structural abnormalities of the heart, kidneys, and other organs; during 3rd trimester can cause low birth weight

Question 10

Bronfenbrenner’s Ecological Model

Answer 10

Describes environmental influences on development in terms of 5 systems

Remember: MICRO MEN EAT MAC n’ CHEESE

(1) microsystem
- child’s immediate environment and includes his/her family, peers, and school

(2) mesosystem
- interconnections between components of the microsystem
- e.g., a crisis in the family might upset the child who, as a result, is disruptive at school

(3) exosystem
- aspects of the environment that the child is not in direct contact with but is affected by and includes each parent’s workplace, neighbors, and community services

(4) macrosystem
- sociocultural context in which the other systems are embedded and includes aspects of society that affect the child’s development
- e.g., racism, socioeconomic conditions, cultural standards for childrearing

(5) chronosystem
- child’s life stages and historical events that impact his/her development
- e.g., the reduced attention a child gets when a sibling is born, the changes in lifestyle when a parent becomes seriously ill or loses his/her job

Question 11

Motor Skills

Answer 11

Major motor milestones
- Stands with help (7 months)
- Creeps on hands and knees (9-10 months)
- Walks without help (12-14 months)
- Walks up stairs alone (24 months)

Question 12

Infant Reflexes

Answer 12

Reflexes are automatic physical responses to specific types of stimulation

• Palmar grasp reflex: The infant grasps a finger that is pressed against the surface of his/her palm
• Babinski reflex: The infant extends his/her big toe and fans out his/her small toe when the sole of the foot is stroked
• Moro (Startle) reflex: When held in a horizontal position, the infant arches his/her back, extends his/her legs outward, and then brings them back toward the body in response to his/her head being allowed to drop or to a sudden loud noise
• Rooting: The infant turns his/her head toward the source of stimulation when his/her cheek is stroked near the corner of the mouth

Most reflexes disappear during the first six months of life

Question 13

Piaget’s Constructivist Theory

Answer 13

Cognitive development involves adaptation, which consists of 2 complementary processes:
(1) assimilation (incorporation of new information into existing cognitive schemas)
(2) accommodation (modification of current schemas to account for new information)

Piaget also identified 4 stages of cognitive development:
(1) sensorimotor stage (birth to 2 years)
- child learns about the world through sensory information and motor activity.
- emergence of representational thought, object permanence, and deferred imitation

(2) preoperational stage (2 to 7 years)
- development of the symbolic function, which leads to increased language use, symbolic play, and the ability to solve problems mentally
- thinking during this stage is limited by transductive reasoning, egocentrism, and an inability to conserve (which is due to a combination of centration and irreversibility)

(3) concrete operational stage (7 to 12 years)
- child is able to conserve due to the development of decentration and irreversibility
- transitivity and hierarchical classification

(4) formal operational stage (12 years +)
- emergence of hypothetical-deductive reasoning, propositional thought, and a renewed egocentrism
- Elkind (1981) adolescent egocentrism is manifested in the imaginary audience and the personal fable.

Question 14

Infantile Amnesia

Answer 14

*More current research suggests that by the end of 1 year of life, children have the capacity to recall at least some aspects of past events

Most adults cannot recall anything that occurred prior to 3 or 4 years old

However, children as young as 2-3 years of age exhibit episodic memory

Question 15

Information Processing Theories

Answer 15

Focus on specific cognitive processes (e.g., memory, attention, comprehension) and emphasize quantitative (rather than qualitative) changes in cognition
- human cognitive processes are comparable to the functioning of a computer – i.e., both process information through logical rules and strategies and have a limited capacity in terms of the nature and amount of information that can be processed
- just as the computer can be improved through changes in hardware and software, children become better information processors through a combination of changes in biological systems and experience – e.g., as the result of faster processing speed due to increasing myelination of nerve fibers and practice performing task

Question 16

Identity Status/Crisis – Marcia (1966)

Answer 16

Marcia’s identity statuses

Identity foreclosure – is characterized by a strong commitment to an identity that was not the outcome of an identity crisis but, instead, was suggested by a parent or other person
*minority adolescents cores higher than white adolescents on this stage of ethnic development

Identity moratorium – occurs when the person is having an identity crisis and is actively exploring different options and beliefs

Identity achievement – occurs when the individual has resolved his/her identity crisis and is committed to a particular identity

Question 17

Parental Styles – Baumrind (1991)

Answer 17

Baumrind (1991) – Parenting behavior on personality development

4 parenting styles:

(1) Authoritative parents
- high acceptance/responsiveness
- high demandingness/control
- Children of these parents have the best outcomes

(2) Authoritarian parents
- low in acceptance/responsiveness
- high in demandingness/control

(3) Permissive parents
- high in acceptance/responsiveness
- low in demandingness/control

(4) Uninvolved parents
- low acceptance/responsiveness
- low demandingness/control
- style is associated w/ delinquency and antisocial behavior

Question 18

Attachment Patterns – Ainsworth (1978)

Answer 18

Ainsworth (1978) studied attachment using Strange Situation
- baby spends time alone, w/ his/her mother, and w/ a stranger

4 patterns of attachment:

Secure Attachment:
- actively explore the environment when alone or with their mother
- friendly to a stranger when their mother is present but clearly prefer their mother to a stranger and may show distress when their mother leaves and seek physical contact with her when she returns
- mothers of securely attached babies are emotionally sensitive and responsive

Anxious/Avoidant Attachment:
- babies uninterested in the environment
- show little distress when their mother leaves and avoid contact with her when she returns
- may or may not be wary of strangers
- mothers of these babies are either impatient and nonresponsive or overly responsive, involved, and stimulating

Anxious/Resistant Attachment:
- anxious even when their mother is present and become very distressed when she leaves
- are ambivalent when she returns and may resist her attempts to make physical contact
- wary of a stranger even when their mother is present
- Mothers of resistant babies are inconsistent in their responses to their child, sometimes being indifferent and other times being enthusiastic

Disorganized/Disoriented Attachment:
- babies have conflicting reactions to their mother that alternate between avoidance/resistance and proximity-seeking
- their overall behavior is best described as dazed, confused, and apprehensive
- pattern is often observed in children who have been maltreated by their caregiver(s)

Question 19

Signs of Attachment

Answer 19

Infants begin to exhibit signs of attachment at around 6months of age
- At 6 months, they exhibit social referencing - i.e., they “read” the emotional reactions of caregivers, especially in uncertain situations, and use that information to guide their own behaviors
- At 6 months also experience separation anxiety and respond with distress to separation from their primary caregiver(s)
- At 8-10 months, they begin to exhibit stranger anxiety

Question 20

Harlow and Zimmerman (1959)

Answer 20

• separated monkeys from their mothers at birth and gave them wire and terrycloth surrogate mothers
• monkeys spent more time w/ terrycloth surrogate and ran to it when frightened even though food provided by wire surrogate
• findings = contact comfort (or pleasant tactile sensation provided by soft cuddly parent) is a more important determinant of attachment than feeding

Question 21

Phoneme/Morphemes

Answer 21

Phonemes are the smallest units of sound that are understood in a language (e.g., p, m, sh)

Morphemes are the smallest units of sound that convey meaning and include simple words, suffixes, and prefixes

Question 22

Nativist Theories of Language Acquisition

Answer 22

Nativist theories emphasize the role of innate, biologically determined factors

E.g., Chomsky’s nativist approach proposes that humans have an innate language acquisition device (LAD) that enables children who have acquired sufficient vocabulary to combine words into novel but grammatically correct utterances

Question 23

Sensation and Perception in Infancy

Answer 23

VISION
- vision is least developed at birth
- infants prefer facial to non-facial images w/ in few days after birth
- by 1 month – can discriminate face of mother or other caregiver from faces of strangers
- by 2-3 months – detect basic colors
- by 6 months – have some depth perception
- 1 yr – have visual acuity that comes close to the normal adult level (20/20)

HEARING
- newborn’s hearing is only somewhat less sensitive than that of an adult
- right afterbirth, infants exhibit auditory localization (turning their head toward the direction of a sound)
* 2-4 months, ability disappears; at 12 months, re-emerges and becomes fully developed

Assessing perceptual abilities in 3-4 month infants could use the following indicators = sucking, reaching, heart rate; head-turning not appropriate until 5.5 months

Question 24

Raven’s Progressive Matrices (SPM)

Answer 24

SPM is a nonverbal measure of general intelligence for examinees ages 6 years and older

can be used with examinees who are non-English speaking OR have a hearing or language impairment or physical disability

Question 25

Coercive Family Interaction Cycle – Patterson

Answer 25

Patterson et al.’s social learning approach

Families of highly aggressive boys –> characterized by a coercive family interaction cycle that becomes increasingly aggressive over time as children imitate their parents’ aggressive behaviors and are reinforced by their parents for acting aggressively

Question 26

Individuals with Disabilities Act (IDEA)

Answer 26

(a) a free and appropriate public education be available to all individuals between the ages of 3 and 21 regardless of their ability
(b) an Individualized Educational Program (IEP) be developed for each disabled student that provides education in the “least restrictive environment” and that has been approved by the child’s parents
(c) while reliable, valid, and nondiscriminatory tests can be used, assignment to special education classes cannot be made on the basis of an IQ test or any other single procedure

Question 27

Age-related decline in memory

Answer 27

Older adults show the greatest declines in recent long-term (secondary) memory followed by the working memory aspect of short-term memory

*also have a decline in fluid reasoning

Question 28

Stages Related to Language Development

Answer 28

Children progress through predictable stages of language development

Milestones:
(1) Cooing (vowel-like sounds when infant is content)
– beginning at 1-2 months

(2) Babbling (repetition of consonant-vowel combos) e.g., “bababa” and “banana”
– beginning at 4-6 months
*by 9 months babbling sounds narrowed to language exposed to

(3) Echolalia and Expressive Jargon (children immitate adult speech sounds/words without an understanding of their meaning (echolalia) – beginning at 9 months

4) First words (usually refer to people, moving objects, social interactions, or actions e.g., “mama,” “ball,” “bye-bye,” “up”)
– 10-15 months

4) Holophrastic speech (combining a single word with gesture and annotation to express a phrase and sentence)
– 12-18 months

(5) Telegraphic speech (2
-word sentences, e.g., “my truck,” “high momy,” “he hit”)
– 18-24 months

(6) Rapid vocabulary growth (1,000 words, children ask questions, use sentences with 3-4 words)
– 30-36 months

(7) Development of complex grammatical forms (children use verb “to be,” possessives and prepositions, and construct longer and more complex sentences)
– 36-48 months

Question 29

Larry P. v. Riles

Answer 29

African American children disproportionately enrolled in special education classes in San Francisco school system

Court concluded “IQ tests are racially and culturally biased, [and] have a discriminatory impact” on African American children and banned San Francisco public schools from using them to place them in special education classes

Question 30

Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test, 4th Edition (PPVT-4)

Answer 30

Measure of receptive vocabulary for examinees ages 2 years, 6 months to 90+ years

Useful for examinees w/ a motor or speech impairment and can be administered to any examinee who can hear the stimulus word, see the pictures, and communicate a response in some way

Question 31

Piaget’s Constructivist Theory

Answer 31

• Children actively construct their understanding of the world
• Depends on both biological maturation and experience

Cognitive development – Involves ADAPTATION which consists of 2 complementary processes
- ASSIMILATION (incorporation of new information into existing cognitive schemas)
– E.g., everything that flies is. aplane or everything that goes down the street is a truck
- ACCOMMODATION (modification of current schemas to account for new information)
– E.g., e.g., a bird is really different from a plane
(b) Involves four universal stages

Question 32

Crystallized/Fluid Intelligence

Answer 32

Horn and Cattell
- Crystallized intelligence (Gc) refers to acquired knowledge and skills and is affected by educational and cultural experiences, while fluid intelligence (Gf) underlies the ability to reason and adapt to new situations and is relatively unaffected by experience
- Gc increases into the 20s and 30s and remains relatively stable thereafter
- Gf peaks in the 20s and then begins to decline

Question 33

Language Errors

Answer 33

During language development, young children exhibit a number of language errors

Age 3, children often use over- and underextensions
- Overextension – occurs when a child uses a word too broadly
E.g., using word “doggie” for all 4 legged animals

• Underextension – occurs when a child uses a word too narrowly
  E.g., using word “duck” for just toy yellow rubber duck

Question 34

Moral Development – Piaget

Answer 34

2 stages:
1. heteronomous (rules are unchangeable, the wrongness of an act depends on its consequences)
- age 7-10
2. autonomous (rules are alterable by consensus, the wrongness of an act depends on the intentions of the actor)
- begins at around age 11

Question 35

Seattle Longitudinal Study (Schaie et al.)

Answer 35

Out of cog abilities, only perceptual speed declined substantially prior to age 60

Question 36

Teacher Behaviors

Answer 36

Sadker and Sadker (1994, 2003) found that, from elementary through graduate school, male students are more likely than female students to receive attention, praise, and feedback from teachers that fosters academic achievement

Question 37

Ethological Theory of Attachment

Answer 37

Bowlby’s (1969)
- infants and their mothers are biologically programmed for attachment (i.e., infants are endowed with innate attachment-related behaviors that serve to keep the mother in close proximity and increase the infant’s chance of survival)
- early attachment experiences – children develop internal working models of the self and attachment figures that influence their future relationships

Question 38

Triarchic Model – Sternberg

Answer 38

3 interacting aspects of intelligence
(1) componential (analytical) – methods that are used to process and analyze information
(2) experiential (creative) – how unfamiliar circumstances and tasks are dealt with
(3) practical (contextual) – how people respond to their environment

Question 39

Adolescent Egocentrism

Answer 39

Formal operational stage of cognitive development

Characterized by an inability to separate one’s own abstract thoughts from those of other people

Elkind, its signs include the imaginary audience and the personal fable

Question 40

Effects of Maternal Employment on Children

Answer 40

• associated with fewer gender-role stereotypes
• higher levels of self-esteem in the children
• greater personal satisfaction for the mother, especially when employment is voluntary

Question 41

Social Referencing

Answer 41

6 months of age

i.e., they “read” the emotional reactions of their mothers and other caregivers, especially in uncertain situations, and use that information to guide their own behaviors

E.g., “visual cliff” has been used to study social referencing and involves having the mother stand on the deep side of the cliff and placing the child on the shallow side. In this situation, when the mother smiles or says something in a soothing voice, her child crosses the visual cliff to be with her. However, when the mother frowns or utters a meaningless phrase in a fearful tone, the child often cries and will not cross the cliff

Question 42

Kohlberg’s Stages of Moral Development

Answer 42

Think of mnemonic:
1) Pre-conventional –> PREACHER (smacking bees with a fish)
2) Conventional –> CONVICT (Norm on paper bib - societal norms of what others do; judge hitting him on the head with gavel to follow the rules in law and order)
3) Postconventional –> POSTMAN (social contract + universe today [moral] magazine)

“Heinz dilemma,” subjects were asked whether they believe it is better to steal a drug to save a person’s life or to obey the law by not stealing the drug and thereby risk the person’s life

Level I, Preconventional
- Stage 1 – Punishment and Obedience Orientation: The correct act is the one that allows the person to avoid punishment.
- Stage 2 – Instrumental Hedonistic Orientation: The correct act is the one that provides the person with rewards or satisfies his/her needs.

Level II, Conventional
- Stage 3 – “Good Boy-Good Girl” Orientation: The correct act is the one that is approved of or liked by others.
- Stage 4 – Law and Order Orientation: The correct act is the one that is consistent with laws and rules set by legitimate authorities.

Level III, Postconventional
- Stage 5 – Social Contract and Individual Rights Orientation: The correct act is the one that is consistent with democratically chosen laws which can be changed for a valid reason.
- Stage 6: Universal Ethical Principles Orientation – The correct act is the one that is consistent with fundamental universal ethical principles (especially justice and fairness).

Question 43

Stanford-Binet Intelligence Scales, Fifth Edition (SB5)

Answer 43

Ages 2-85+

Includes 5 cognitive factors derived from the CHC theory of cognitive abilities
- Fluid Reasoning
- Knowledge
- Working Memory
- Quantitative Reasoning
- Visual-Spatial Processing

Question 44

Columbia Mental Maturity Scale (CMMS)

Answer 44

Measure of general reasoning ability

Children ages 3 years, 6 months through 9 years, 11 months

Originally developed for children with cerebral palsy but is also useful for children with brain damage, a speech or hearing impairment, or limited English proficiency