Developmental Psychology Flashcards
Cognitive
thinking, including problem solving, perceiving, remembering, using language and reasoning.
Operations
how we reason and think about things.
Object permanence
knowing something exists even if its out of sight.
Symbolic play
children play using objects and ideas to represent other objects and ideas.
Egocentrism
unable to see the world from any other viewpoint but one’s own.
Animism
believing that objects that are not alive can behave as if they are alive.
Centration
focusing on one feature of a situation and ignoring other relevant features.
Irreversibility
not understanding that an action can be reversed to return to the original state.
Morality
general principles about what is right and wrong, including good and bad behaviour.
Schema/schemata(s)
mental representations of the world based on one’s own experiences.
Adaptation
using assimilation and accommodation to make sense of the world.
Assimilation
incorporating new experiences into existing schemas.
Accommodation
when a schema has to change to deal with a new experience.
Equilibrium
when a child’s schemas can explain all that they experience, a state of mental balance.
Subjective
based on personal opinion or feelings.
Validity
when the results of a study represent the situation they are testing (in real life).
Mindset
a set of beliefs someone has that guides how someone responds to or interprets a situation.
Ability
what someone can do.
Effort
when you try to do better using determination.
Fixed mindset
believing your abilities are fixed and unchangeable.
Growth mindset
believing practice and effort can improve your abilities.
Working memory
has different parts for processing information coming in from our senses.
Short-term memory
our initial memory store that is temporary and limited.
Long-term memory
a memory store that hold potentially limitless amounts of information for up to a lifetime.
Rehearse
repeat information over and over to make it stick.
Motor skills
actions that involve muscles and brain processes, resulting in movement.
Decentration
being able to separate yourself from the world and take different views of a situation.
Social learning
learning by observing and copying others.
Self-regulation
limiting and controlling yourself with out influence from others.
Nature
explanations of behaviour that focus on environmental factors.
Nurture
explanations of behaviour that focus on environmental factors.
Qualitative data
data that is descriptive, such as words or pictures (not numbers)
Reliability
the consistency of an outcome or result of an investigation.
Framework
a basic understanding of ideas and facts that is used when making decisions.
Person praise
someone praises the individual rather than what they are doing.
Process praise
someone praises what is being done, not the individual.
Entity theory/motivational framework
a belief that behaviour or ability results from a person’s nature.
Incremental theory/motivational framework
a belief that effort drives behaviour and ability, which can change.
Ecological validity
the extent to which the finding still explain the behaviour in real life situations.
Ethics
moral principles about how someone should behave in society.
Debrief
after an investigation, participants are given full disclosure of the study.
Generalisability
the extent to which the results of a study represent the whole population, not just the sample used.
Morals
standards of right and wrong behaviour that can differ between cultures and can depend on the situation.
Moral development
children’s growing understanding about right and wrong.
Heteronomous
rules put into place by others.
Autonomous
rules can be decided by the individual person.
Norms
society’s values and customs, which a person in that society would be governed by.
Nativist theories
theories that view morality as part of human nature.
