Developmental Psychology Flashcards
What do we gain by taking a developmental perspective?
- important knowledge of: emergence, manifestation and consistency of change across the life span
- better understanding of when, how and why change occurs
- helps us understand normative/non-normative development
What id developmental psychology?
- description, explanation and prediction of age-related changes in behaviour, thinking, emotions and social relationships
- identification of variables that influence development and how they work together to shape an individual’s life
- multi-disciplinary: based in psych but also draws on genetics, neuro, education, sociology and anthropology
How do we characterise development?
- continuity/ discontinuity in development
- stability/ instability in development
(at group level and at individual level) - quantitative/ qualitative
What factors explain development?
- nature-nurture debate
- multi-systems model of development
What are behaviour genetics?
study of how variation in behaviour can be explained by separating environmental and genetic influences
What are epigenetics?
the idea that experience can determine the turning on and off of genes
What are the levels of the multi-systems model of development?
- environment (physical, social, cultural)
- behaviour
- neural activity
- genetic activity
Is development a holistic process?
Yes
Change in one domain will affect change in the other domains
Describe the sensitive periods in development?
There are sensitive periods in development where the organisation of brain structure and function is particularly sensitive to environmental input
Four basic goals for understanding development
- describe
- explain
- predict
- influence
What are the experimental designs used to explore change?
- cross sectional designs
- longitudinal designs
- sequential (cohort) designs
What are cross-sectional designs?
Test different age groups simultaneously
- E.g: Fenson et al (1994): asked parents of toddlers to describe longest sentence used by their child, 1130 ps between 16 and 30 months
- Results: rapid growth of number of words in a sentence during this age period
Advantages of cross sectional designs
- quick and economical
- demonstrate age differences and indicate developmental trend
Disadvantages of cross sectional designs
- age trends may reflect extraneous differences between cohorts (rather than developmental change)
- no data on the development of individuals, therefore provide no info about determinants of change
What are longitudinal designs?
- measure individuals at different time points
- allows some measurement of individual change
- allows an exploration of the dynamic nature of change
Five goals of longitudinal designs
- consider change in individuals
- look at change and differences between individuals
- consider factors that drive change
- look at causes of change
- investigate cause of change
Advantages of longitudinal designs
- explores individual change over time
- explores patterns of continuity and discontinuity
- same cohort
Disadvantages of longitudinal designs
- costly and time consuming
- requires large data sets
- multiple (repeated) testing
- attrition
- equivalence of methods over time
- changing qs
- cohort effects
What is a cohort?
a group of people with a shared charactersitic
What is attrition?
loss of study participants over time
What are microgenetic measures?
- examine changes as they occur
- small samples but dense data collection
- provides valuable info about changes as they occur
What are sequential (cohort) designs?
combines across sectional and longitudinal designs to examine age related change across multiple cohorts
Advantages of sequential design
- discriminates true development from cohort effects
- indicates whether developmental changes experienced by one cohort are similar to those experienced by other cohorts
- often less costly and time consuming than longitudinal approach
Disadvantages of sequential design
- still more costly and time consuming than cross- sectional approach
- attrition and biases