Developmental Psychology Flashcards
Developmental Psychology
A branch of psychology that studies physical, cognitive, and social change throughout the life span.
Zygote
The fertilized egg; it enters a 2 week period of rapid cell division and develops into an embryo
Embryo
The developing human organism from about 2 weeks after fertilization through the second month.
Fetus
The developing human organism 9 weeks after conception to birth.
Teratogens
(literally, “monster makers”) agents, such as chemicals and viruses, that can reach the embryo or fetus during prenatal development and cause harm.
Fetal Alcohol Syndrome
Physical and cognitive abnormalities in children caused by a pregnant woman’s heavy drinking. In severe cases, signs include a small, out of proportion head and abnormal facial features.
Reflex (ex: rooting, startle, and grasping)
Your baby is born with a natural set of reflexes that help them survive their first few weeks and months of life. A reflex is known as an involuntary response that happens without conscious effort.
Habituation
Decreasing responsiveness with repeated stimulation. As infants gain familiarity with repeated exposure to a stimulus, their interest wanes and they look away sooner.
Maturation
Biological growth processes that enable orderly changes in behavior, relatively uninfluenced by experience.
Pruning
Pruning in psychology refers to the removal of synaptic connections, which are the connections between neurons, or brain cells. The synaptic connections are usually removed because they are unnecessary or redundant. The process of pruning serves to help the brain run more efficiently.
Infantile Amnesia
The inability of adults to recollect early episodic memories, is associated with the rapid forgetting that occurs in childhood.
Cognition
All the mental activities associated with thinking, knowing, remembering, and communicating.
Schema
A concept or framework that organizes and interprets information.
Assimilation
Interpreting our new experiences in terms of our existing schemas
Accommodation
Adapting our current understandings (schemas) to incorporate new information.
Sensorimotor Stage
In Piaget’s theory, the stage (from birth to nearly 2 years of age) during which infants know the world mostly in terms of their sensory impressions and motor activities.
Preoperational Stage
In Piaget’s theory, the stage (from about 2 to 6 or 7 years of age) during which a child learns to use language but does not yet comprehend the mental operations of concrete logic.
Concrete Operational Stage
In Piaget’s theory, the stage of cognitive development (from about 7 to 11 years of age) during which children gain the mental operations that enable them to think logically about concrete events.
Formal Operational Stage
In Piaget’s theory, the stage of cognitive development (normally beginning at age 12) during which people begin to think logically about abstract concepts.
Object Permanence
Object permanence means that you know an object or person still exists even when they are hidden and you can’t see or hear them.
Conservation
The principle (which Piaget believed to be a part of concrete operational reasoning) that properties such as mass, volume, and number remain the same despite changes in the forms of objects.
Egocentrism
In Piaget’s theory, the preoperational child’s difficulty taking another’s point of view.
Theory of Mind
People’s ideas about their own and other’s mental states - about their feelings, perceptions, and thoughts,and the behaviors these might predict.
Scaffold
A framework that offers children develop higher levels of thinking.
Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD)
A disorder that appears in childhood and is marked by significant deficiencies in communication and social interaction, and by rigidly fixated interests and repetitive behaviors.
Stranger Anxiety
The fear of strangers that infants commonly displays, beginning by about 8 months of age.
Attachment
An emotional tie with another person; shown in young children by their seeking closeness to their caregiver and showing distress on separation.
Critical Period
An optimal period early in the life of an organism when exposure to certain stimuli or experiences procedures normal development.
Imprinting
The process by which certain animals form strong attachments during early life.
Stage Situation
A procedure for studying child caregiver attachment; a child is placed in an unfamiliar environment while their caregiver leaves and then returns, and the child’s reactions are observed.
Secure Attachment
Demonstrated by infants who comfortably explore environments in the presence of their caregiver, show only temporary distress when the caregiver leaves, and find comfort in the caregiver’s return.
Insecure Attachment
Demonstrated by infants who display either a clinging, anxious attachment or an avoidant attachment that resists closeness.
Temperament
A person’s characteristic emotional reactivity and intensity.
Basic Trust
According to Erik Erikson, a sense that the world is predictable and trustworthy; said to be formed during infancy by appropriate experiences with responsive caregivers.
Self-Concept
All our thoughts and feelings about ourselves in answer the questions, “Who am I?”
Parenting Styles
- Authoritative parenting: Characterized by high responsiveness and high demands, providing warmth, support, and clear boundaries while encouraging independence.
- Authoritarian parenting: High demands and low responsiveness, emphasizing strict rules and discipline with little room for flexibility or negotiation.
- Permissive parenting: High responsiveness and low demands, showing warmth and support with few rules or restrictions, often allowing children significant freedom without much guidance.
- Uninvolved parenting: Low responsiveness and low demands, displaying little emotional involvement or support, and providing minimal guidance or supervision to children.
Sex
In psychology, the biologically influenced characteristics by which people define male and female.
Gender
In psychology, the socially influenced characteristics by which people define, boy, girl, man, woman.
Aggression
Any physical or verbal behavior intended to harm someone physically or emotionally.
Relational Aggression
An act of aggression (physical or verbal) intended to harm a person’s relationship or social standing.
Gender Role
A set of expected behaviors, attitudes, and traits for males or for females.
Gender Identity
Our sense of being male, female, or some combination of the two.
Social Learning Theory
The theory that we learn social behavior by observing and imitating and by being rewarded or punished.
Gender Typing
The acquisition of a traditional masculine or feminine role.
Androgyny
Displaying both masculine and feminine psychological characteristics.
Transgender
An umbrella term describing people whose gender identity or expression differs from that associated with their birth designated sex.
Adolescense
The transition period from childhood to adulthood, extending from puberty to independence.
Puberty
The period of sexual maturation, during which a person becomes capable of reproducing.
Identity
Our sense of self; according to Erikson, the adolescent’s task is to solidify a sense of self by testing and integrating various roles.
Social Identity
The “we” aspect of our self concept; the part of our answer to “Who am I?” that comes from our group memberships.
Emerging Adulthood
A period from about age 18 to the mid twenties, when many in Western cultures are no longer adolescents but have not yet achieved full independence as adults.
X Chromosome
The sex chromosome found in both males and females. Females typically have two X chromosomes; males have only one. An X chromosome from each parent produces a female child.
Y Chromosome
The chromosome typically only found in males. When paired with an X chromosome from the mother, it produces a male child.
Testosterone
The most important male sex hormone. Both males and females have it, but the additional testosterone in males stimulates growth of the male sex organs during the fetal period, and the development of the male sex characteristics during puberty.
Primary Sex Characteristics
The body structures (ovaries, testes, and external genitalia) that make sexual reproduction possible.
Secondary Sex Characteristics
Nonreproductive sexual trait, such as female breasts and hips, male voice quality, and body hair.
Spermarche
The first ejaculation.
Menarche
The first menstrual period.
Intersex
A condition present at birth due to unusual combinations of male and female chromosomes, hormones, and anatomy; possessing biological sexual characteristics of both sexes.
AIDS (acquired immune deficiency syndrome)
A life threatening, sexually transmitted infection caused by the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV). AIDS depletes the immune system, leaving the person vulnerable to infections.
Sexual Orientation
Our enduring sexual attraction, usually toward members of our own sex (homosexual orientation) or the other sex (heterosexual orientation); variations include attraction towards both sexes (bisexual orientation).
Menopause
The time of natural cessation of menstruation; also refers to the biological changes a woman experiences as her ability to produce declines.
Neurocognitive Disorders
Acquired (not lifelong) disorders marked by cognitive deficits; often related to Alzheimer’s disease, brain injury or disease, or substance abuse. In older adults, neurocognitive disorders were formerly called dementia.
Alzheimer’s Disease
A neurocognitive disorder marked by neural plaques, often with onset after age 80, and entailing a progressive decline in memory and other cognitive abilities.
Social Clock
The culturally preferred timing of social events, such as marriage, parenthood, and retirement.
Sigmund Freud
Freud believed that personality develops during early childhood and that childhood experiences shape our personalities as well as our behavior as adults. He asserted that we develop via a series of stages during childhood.
Jean Piaget
He provided support for the idea that children think differently than adults and his research identified several important milestones in the mental development of children.
Lev Vygotsky
Vygotsky’s social development theory asserts that a child’s cognitive development and learning ability can be guided and mediated by their social interactions. His theory (also called Vygotsky’s Sociocultural theory) states that learning is a crucially social process as opposed to an independent journey of discovery.
Harry Harlow
Harry Frederick Harlow (October 31, 1905 – December 6, 1981) was an American psychologist best known for his maternal-separation, dependency needs, and social isolation experiments on rhesus monkeys, which manifested the importance of caregiving and companionship to social and cognitive development.
Mary Ainsworth
Mary Dinsmore Ainsworth (née Salter; December 1, 1913 – March 21, 1999) was an American-Canadian developmental psychologist known for her work in the development of the attachment theory. She designed the strange situation procedure to observe early emotional attachment between a child and their primary caregiver.
Erik Erikson
Much like psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud, Erikson believed that personality develops in a series of stages. Erikson’s theory is important because it marked a shift from Freud’s psychosexual theory in that it describes the impact of social experience across the whole lifespan instead of simply focusing on childhood events.
Diana Buamrind
Diana B Baumrind
Her major contribution was the identification of two central dimensions of parents’ behavior — structured expectations and responsiveness — and the discovery that these dimensions in combination revealed three main parenting styles.
Lawrence Kohlberg
Lawrence Kohlberg is an American psychologist who is most known for his study of moral development in children. Kohlberg’s study of moral development concludes that there are three separate phases of moral development: pre-conventional, conventional, and post-conventional.
