Developmental Psychology Flashcards
What is developmental psychology?
Study of how behaviour changes over time
What is the post hoc fallacy?
False assumption that because one event occurred before another event, it must have caused the event
What is a cross-sectional design?
A research design that examines people of different ages at a single point in time
What are cohort effects?
Effects observed in a sample of participants that result from individual’s in the sample growing up at the same time
What is a longitudinal design?
A research design that examines development in the same group of people on multiple occasions over time
What is the infant determinism myth?
The widespread assumption that extremely early experiences are almost always more influential that later experiences in shaping us as adults
What is the childhood fragility myth?
The assumption that children are delicate little creatures who are easily damaged
What is gene-environment interaction?
The situation where the effects of genes depend on the environment in which they are expressed
What is nature via nurture?
The tendency of individuals with certain genetic predispositions to seek out and create environments that permit the expression of those predispositions
What is gene expression?
The activation or deactivation of genes by environmental experiences throughout development
True or False: just because one event precedes a second event does not necessarily mean that it causes it
True
True or False: research shows that most children are passive recipients of their parents’ influence
False
True or False: most children exposed to severe stressors end up with healthy patterns of psychological adjustment
True
True or False: gene expression is predetermined at birth and doesn’t change in response to environmental experiences
False
What is adolescence?
The transition between childhood and adulthood commonly associated with the teenage years
What is puberty?
The achievement of sexual maturation resulting in the potential to reproduce
What are primary sex characteristics?
Physical features, such as the reproductive organs and genitals, that distinguish the sexes
What are secondary sex characteristics?
Sex-differentiating characteristics that do not relate directly to reproduction, such as breast enlargement in females and deepening voices in males
What is menarche?
The start of menstruation
What is spermarche?
A boys’ first ejaculation
What is menopause?
The termination of menstruation, marking the end of a women’s reproductive potential
What is cognitive development?
The study of how children acquire the ability to learn, think, reason, communicate and remember
True or False: androgens cause changes in boys at puberty, whereas oestrogens cause changes in girls
False
True or False: elderly people’s hearing, sight and other senses decline, but their ability to learn new motor skills are still intact
False
Who was the firs psychologist to propose a theory of cognitive development?
Jean Piaget
What is equilibration?
The desire for children to achieve a balance between their experience of the world and their understanding of it
What is assimilation? (Development)
A Piagetian process of absorbing new experience into current knowledge structures
What is accommodation?
The Piagetian process of altering a belief to make it more compatible with experience
What are Piaget’s stages of development?
Sensorimotor
Preoperational
Concrete operational
Formal operational
What is the sensorimotor stage?
The stage in Piaget’s theory characterised by a focus in the here-and-now without the ability to represent experiences mentally
What is object permanence?
The understanding that objects continue to exist even when out of view
What is the preoperational stage?
The stage in Piaget’s theory characterised by the ability to construct mental representations of experience, but not yet perform operations on them
What is egocentrism?
The inability to see the world from others’ perspectives
What is conservation?
A Piagetian task requiring children to understand that despite a transformation in the physical presentation of an amount, the amount remains the same
What is the concrete operational stage?
The stage in Piaget’s theory characterised by the ability to perform mental operations on physical events only
What is the formal operational stage?
The stage is Piaget’s theory characterised by the ability to perform hypothetical reasoning behind the here-and-now