developmental psychology Flashcards
What is developmental psychology?
Studies of human growth across life-span
Changes
Factors that affect development
Child psychology vs lifespan psychology
Why study developmental psychology?
Understand human nature
Shape social policy
Enrich human life
Why study child development
Understand human nature: how do genetics and environment affect children’s development
Shape social policy: how can we conduct research with children while protecting their human rights
Enrich human life: what can psychology tell us about effective child-rearing and child mental health
Why study lifespan development
Understand human nature: how do we change across our lifespan? How do we stay the same?
Shape social policy: how to we recover from trauma? What supports are effective, for who?
Enrich human life: to what extent do we actively shape our lives or passively respond to surroundings?
enduring themes
Continuity and discontinuity
Continuity = stability e.g. a person’s name
Discontinuity = change e.g. a person’s title miss, ms, dr
Continuous change = quantitative, reversible e.g. height, capacity for memory
Dis-continous change = qualitative, irreversible e.g. puberty, theory of mind
Mechanisms for change
Changes in species e.g. migration, genetic drift, natural selection
Changes in behaviour e.g. preparation, action, maintenance
University and context specificity
To what extent is the development:
Universal across contexts and cultures
Exclusive to specific contexts and cultures
Individual differences
How do children with a shared background become different from each other?
Research and children’s welfare
How can researchers conduct meaningful research with infants and young people?
How can we protect infants’ and young people’s welfare in research
Nature and nurture
How do nature and nurture together share development
The active child
How do children shape their own development
What is cognitive development?
How children/people think, learn, explore, remember and solve problems
Perception, attention, language, problem solving, reasoning, memory, conceptual understanding, and intelligence
Developmental themes:
- Continuity and discontinuity
- Nature and nurture
- The active child
- Mechanisms of change
Cognitive theories
Concerned with: how out cognitive skills develop
E.g.
Piaget’s cognitive-developmental theory
Vygotsky’s sociocultural theory
Information processing theories
Piaget Theory
Four stages of cognitive development
- Sensorimotor stage
- Preoperational stage
- Concrete operational stage
- Formal operational stage
Vtgotsky’s sociocultural theory
Individuals’ cognitive development is largely shaped by the social and cultural context
1. Infants have basics cognitive skills (attention, sensation, perception, memory)
2. As infants interact with other, these skills become more sophisticated
What is intelligence?
The capacity to learn from experience and adapt to one’s environment
It is a developmental concept
Intelligence means different things at different ages
The definition could vary in different contexts
General intelligence
A person possesses a curtain amount of general intelligence (g), that influences their ability on all intellectual task
Cognitive ability
General mental ability
General intelligence factor
Intelligence
Multiple theories of intelligence
Intelligence can be measured as:
- One dimension e.g. g, IQ
- Two dimension e.g. crystalised and fluid
- A few dimensions e.g. thurstone 7, gardner 7
- Many dimensions e.g. carroll’s 3-stratum model
Intelligence as one dimension: mental age/IA
Mental age (MA)
The average age at which children achieve a given score on Binet and Simon’s test
IQ = mental age/chronological age x 100
problem: a non-changing number that represents a developmental concept
Intelligence as many processes
John Carroll proposed a three-stratum theory of intelligence
A hierarchical integration of:
G
Eight generalised abilities
Many specific processes
Stanford-Binet scales
Five cognitive abilities:
Fluid reasoning
Knowledge
Quantitative reasoning
Visual-spatial processing
Working memory
From fluid intelligence to broad visual perception
Uses MA to calculate IQ
Popular in US, for ages 2-23
British ability scale
Three domains:
Verbal ability
Non-verbal reasoning
Spatial ability
Popular in UK, ages 3-17
Uses g
Fluid intelligence crystallised intelligence + broad visual perception
Issues of measurement
WISC scores differ among ethnic groups:
Average IQ of Euro-American children is higher than that of African-American children
Does this indicate cultural difference in intelligence? NO
E.g. “who discovered America?” is a culturally insensitive question
The WISC-R intelligence test
Wechsler Intelligence test for children (WISC)
The most widely used instrument for children 6+ years
Two main sections:
Verbal: general knowledge, language skills
Performance: spatial + perceptual abilities
Uses MA to calculate IQ
Verbal section
Information: “what is the capital of France?”
Vocabulary: “what is a helicopter?”
Similarities: “How are a hammer and a chisel alike?”
Arithmetic: “If 4 friends divided 20 lollies equally, how many would each person get?”
Comprehension: “Why do we have prisons?”
Digit span: “repeat the following numbers in order when I have finished: 5, 3, 7, 4, 9
Performance section:
Block design: arrange 9 blocks to match a picture
Coding: identifying patterns from series of simple shapes/numbers, each paired with simple symbol
Mazes: a set of increasingingly difficult mazes printed in a response booklet - no pencil lifting or entering blind alleys
Object assembly: assemble puzzle parts to form a meaningful whole
Picture arrangement: arrange cartoon frames to tell a coherent story
Social development
The gradual acquisition of certain skills (e.g. language, interpersonal skills), attitudes, relationships, and behaviour that enable the individual to interact with others and to function as a member of society
Developmental themes:
Continuity and discontinuity
Mechanisms of change
Active child
Nature and nurture
Psychoanalytic theories
Freud’s theory of psychosexual development
Concerned with: the relationship between the conscious and the unconscious
Relevance to development: how personality (and psyche) develop across different stages of psychosexual development (oral, anal etc)
Autism spectrum disorder
Neurodevelopmental disorder
Neuro = brain
DSM-5 definition
- Social communication and interaction deficits
- Social reciprocity
- Nonverbal communication
- Social relationship - Restricted and repetitive behaviour and interests
- Stereotypes or repetitive motor movements
- Insistence on sameness
- Restricted and fixated interests
- Hyper- or hypo- reactivity to sensory input
Neurodiversity model
Autism as a part of brain variation
Strengths-based approach
Current understanding about autism
~1% of the population in the world
More common in males than females
Highly heritable and highly genetically heterogenous
Commonly comorbid with other conditions or disorders
Usually diagnosed after 2-3 years of age
No standard therapies
Erikson’s theory of psychosocial development
Concerned with: how people learn specific behaviours
Relevance to development: learning of behaviour can take place across lifespan and has ongoing consequences for the person’s life
E.g.
Watson’s classical conditioning
Skinner’ operant conditioning
Bandura’s social learning theory
Watson’s classical conditioning
Learn to associate two unrelated stimuli
Skinner’s operant conditioning
Learn by associating behaviours with consequences
Bandura’s social learning theory
Learn by observing other people’s behaviours
Bottema-beutel et al. (2019)
Associatiations between social functioning and cognitive and interpersonal constructus in autistic and non-autistic children
Meta-analysis of 120 studies
Waddington et al. (2023)
Associatiations between atypical development in the first year of life and the age of autism diagnosis
Parent-report survey → parents of autistic children
“Do you recall anything unusual about your child’s development or behaviour during their first 6 months?”
N = 423
Tiede and walton (2019)
Effects of group-designed naturalistic developmental behavioural intervention
Meta-analysis of 29 studies
Wang et al. (2019)
Effects of pivotal response treatment on language development
Randomised controlled trial
PRT = pivotal response treatment
TAU = treatment as usual
What are emotions?
Combination of physiological and cognitive responses to thoughts or experiences
- Neural responses
- Physiological factors
- Subjective feelings
- Emotional expressions
- The desire to take action
Emergence of emotions
Emotions are innate, biologically based, and universal.
Six basic emotions:
- Joy
- Sadness
- Anger
- Disgust
- Fear
- Surprise
Criticism of the basic emotion perspective
- Disagreement about which emotions are the basic ones
- Vagueness of the biological bases
- Problematic cross-linguistic mapping
- Rejection on the assumption that emotions are discrete categories
Constructivist perspective
Emotions are learned through individual experiences, cultural context, and social interactions
- Not innate or universal
Functionalist perspective
Emotions are biologically evolved responses that serve adaptive functions, helping individuals navigate and respond to environmental challenges for survival and well-being
Emotional regulation
A set of both conscious and unconscious processes used to both monitor and modulate emotional experiences and expressions
importance of emotional regulation
- Affects social functioning and relationships
- Affects mental health and overall well-being
- Affects academic and profession success
emotional regulatory strategies
- Self-comforting behaviours, self-distraction, social support, cognitive re-apprasial, mindfulness etc.
- Developmental
Emotion regulation from infancy to toddlerhood (Atkinson et al. 2021)
Aim: examine changes in the use of self-soothing, attentional distraction, and dyadic regulation through infancy to toddlerhood
Methods:
Mothers and their full-term (n=46) and healthy very-low-birthweight preterm (n=56) infants
Dyads participated in free-play interactions at 5.2,12, and 18 months of age. Behaviours were coded using age-appropriate systematic, observational coding systems
Temperament
- Individual differences in emotion, activity level, and attention that are exhibited across contexts
- Influenced by both genes and the environment
Measuring temperament
- Every child has some level of same set of dimensions
- Developed questionnaires to measure temperament from infancy to adulthood
- The Infant Behaviour Questionnaire
- The Child Behaviour Questionnaire
- Temperament can be measured in five dimensions: fear, distress/anger/frustration, attention span, activity level, smiling and laughter
- Rating tend to be stable over time and predict later behavioural problems, anxiety disorders, and social competence
Physiological measures
- Emotional reactions to laboratory situations
1. heart-rate variability
2. electroncephalogram (EEG)
define culture
“a culture is a socially transmitted or socially constructed constellation consisting of practices, competencies (thinking, reasoning and problem solving), ideas, schemas, symbols, values, norms, institutions, goals, constitutive rules, artefacts, and modification of the physical environment”
Bronfenbrenner’s Bioecological model examples
considered the child’s environment as composed of a series of nested structures, ranging from micro to macrosystem
microsystem e.g.
- peers
- childcare setting
- parents and siblings
macrosystem e.g.
- culture/subculture
- social class
- broad ideology
