Essay content Flashcards
What did Plomin et al 1994 find?
Mz twins had higher correlations of personality traits than twins raised together
What happened in the Dutch-Hunger Winter 1944-45
Mothers starved, foetuses followed, those who were born to nourished mothers were normal weight, undernourished mothers had lower birth weight babies. Long term underweight were smaller and had lower obesity rates opposite for normal. Shows transmission of epigenetics
What does Waddington’s epigenetic Landscape show?
Flatter areas show a greater possibility for environmental effects, the study of heritable phenotype changes
What did Plomin and Daniels 1987 find?
That children adopted into the same environment showed little similarity, so effect of environment small .
Names of the twins raised apart and bought back together?
Mark Newman and Gerrard Levey
What did Plomin 1990 find?
That japanese immagrant children were taller than their parents, which could be to do with dietary changes
What did Taylor et al (2000) find?
Heritability of delinquency
18% genes
56% non-shared
26% shared
`what did Caspi et al (2002) find
low MAOA varient in 1 in 8 boys- they were responsible for nearly half of violent crime
What are schemas?
Pockets of knowledge about the world, gained with experience
How are schemas used in development?
They are modified and created to develop understanding of the world . For example the grab and . thrust schema .
What is assimilation?
Fitting new information into existing schemas
What is accommodation?
Modifying/creating new schemas because of new information
What are Piaget’s four stages
Sensori-motor (0-2)
Pre-operational (2-7)
concrete operational (7-11)
Formal operational (11+)
In which stage do false belief tasks take place
pre-operational
What age do children fail false belief tasks (piaget)
under 7
Why do children under 7 fail to pass false belief tests?
because they lack the ability to perform mental operations
Examples of piagetean conservation tasks
Mountain task, clay, coin, water
What are some critiques of piagets’s theory
Sample is biased- white, western, well educated
High language demand on children
Underestimates mental abilities, can pass ToM at 4
Over estimates differences between stages
What did Durkin 1995 find?
Conservation of similar materials over unfamiliar in concrete operational stage
What are some limitations of piaget’s theory
Memory and attention both improve with age, at a young age they do not have the strategies e.g. rehearsal and are easily distracted
What did Case and Siegler (1985) find?
Developmental changes in thinking are due to information processing abilities- younger children use less demanding problem solving tasks
What is prosocial behaviour?
Behaviour directed towards another person that promotes a positive benefit to that person (Radke-Yarrow 1993)
What are Carlo’s (2006) six prosocial tendencies
ADEPAC Altruistic Dire Emotional Public Anonymous Compliance
What did Eisenberg and Fabes (1989) find?
Spontaneous psb in children and adults, suggesting that it is an inboorn thing and that’s why we do it .
What did Zahn-Waxler (2001) ?
Increases in Vocal, facial, gestural expressions of concern with age. Increase in empathy , egocentric empathy
What did Sagi and Hoffman (1967) find?
That there was evidence of empathy in newborns
What year was `meltzoff and moore
1977
What did Pfiefer (2008) find?
Mirror Neuron System- active while watching and observing
What did Preston and DeWaal (2002) find?
Evidence of persuasive empathetic reactions in mammaliam species
What did Warneken, Chen and Tomasello (2006) find?
Evidence of psb in both children and apes
What are the different types of agg?
Instrumental/ hostile
Direct/ Indirect
Proactive/ Reactive
What did Bjorkvist et al 1992 find?
Differences in direct/ indirect agg . Indirect higher in girls when younger but increases for both with age .
Evolutionary explanations for agg .
Seen across species, mating, heirarchy, sticklebacks
What is resource control theory?
social dominance leads to better resources
What did Hawley (2003) study/ find?
Studied social control strategies in children, had them rate play preferences found 5 types
Bistrategic - most successful & most popular
Prosocial
Non-controllers
Typicals
Coercive - least popular
What is Patterson’s (1986) Coercive cycle?
Poor discipline leads to child’s coercion then conduct problems then academic failure/peer rejection then deviant peer group then delinquency
What is Crick and Dodge’s (1996) Social Information Processing Model?
If child is agg towards peers then peers will be anti-social to child this is like a cycle, if continued can lead to long term delinquency .
What did Tremblay et al 2004 find?
3 Trajectories for aggression
14% high
58 % moderate
28% low or none
According to who what is the best predictor of high trajectory aggression at birth?
Tremblay et al 2004
- mothers who had a child young, smoked while pregnant, mother who showed delinquent behaviour at school age
According to who what is the best predictor of high trajectory aggression at 5 months?
Family dysfunction and coercive parenting .
What is differential susceptibility?
Those susceptible are in both positive and negative environments
What is diathesis-stress ?
Vulnerable and resilient function similarly in positive, but diverge in negative with vulnerable showing worse outcomes
What is vantage sensitivity?
Vulnerable and resilient function similarly in negative, but diverge in positive with resilient having better outcomes
What is Harris’ (1998) peer group socialization theory?
Family not important
Peer group helps personality form that is hard to change in adulthood
As you get older the outside behavioural environment becomes increasingly important
Children identify with the group more than adults
What are some criticisms of Harris’ theory?
Difficult to test direction of effects (child joins studious group because they are studious rather than becoming studious because of the group?
How do parents affect child’s social development?
More sociable parents organise more playdates, more sociable children seek out more peers
Is it caused by genetics or parenting?
What did Reich and Vandell (2011) find?
Relationship between children and peers is more horizontal and qualitatively different to that of child-parent
What did Cotterell (2007) find?
Parents are more future orientated (focus on career, education)
What did Reicher 1993 find?
Low parental support and high peer support led to increased problem behaviour, anxiety, depression
What did Crosnoe et al 2002 find?
Those with good parental support were less susceptible to friend’s negative influence in anti-social situations
What is the parent peer pathway? Schneider et al 2001
Those with a secure attachment to their parent will use this as a base for all attachments and will expect the same from peer relationships .
What did behavioural genetics fins about attachment heritability?
Zero heritability in twins using the strange situation, yet twin studies of adults showed 40-50% heritability especially for attachment anxiety
What did Bouchard’s (1990) Minnesota Twin study show?
Significant moderation of both positive and negative qualities of the parent-adolescent relationship .
When is adolescence?
From onset of puberty to when adult roles are taken on
girls 10-17
boys 12-18
Is this changing- societal changes, menstral changes
What biological changes happen to matter of the brain in adolescence?
Develop more grey matter with age (Lenroot & Gedd 2006)
What biological changes happen to the frontal cortex in adolescence?
Neurons grow myelin, speeds up transmission
Lags behind limbic system development - hormonal surges may . explain teens occasional impulsiveness
What is the paradox of adolescence?
A period of rapid physical growth & increase in mental capacity
200% increase in mortality and morbidity during this period according to Dahl (2004) due to difficulties controlling behaviour
Asynchrony between drives, appetites, emotions and cognitive development
What did Steinberg et al 2008 find about the paradox of adolescence?
Binge drinking, smoking, casual sex, fights, car crashes more than adults
What did Crone and Dahl (2012) find?
Pubertal changes in the limbic system lead to increases in sensation seeking, novelty seeking, importance of peer opinion, gradual development of cognitive control system and social brain .
What behavioural and structural changes happen in regards to emotion and social processing in adolescence?
Behavioural- improvement in recognising facial expressions
Structural- fusiform face area increases in size .
How does adolescence affect emotion processing?
Protracted development
Distinct developmental trajectories
Thomas et al 2007
What did Thomas et al 2007 find?
blended emotion recognition - adults had greater sensitivity, anger sharper shift from adolescence
What did Guyer et al 2008 find?
Teens had greater amygdala and fusiform activation to fearful faces (fMRI) and that there was stronger connectivity between the amygdala and the hippocampus in adults
What theories emphasize social and motivation and self regulation?
- A motivational system involved in pursuing reward
- A motivational system involved in escaping threat .
- A self-regulatory system involved in inhibiting inappropriate behaviour
What happens with risk taking and fear processing in adolescence?
Reward reactivity susceptible to positive outcomes
There aren’t cognitive deficits in decision making/decision making-teens actually overestimate chance they will suffer dire consequences
What is the role of testosterone in adolescence?
May be linked to pubertal shifts in threat processing and linked to increases in motivational processing
Testosterone should predict increase in threat . avoidance . system
What is peer influence?
Peers become increasingly important, want to fit in and . avoid . rejection ability . to resist peer influence develops into . early adulthood .
What did Chein et al 2011 do?
Stoplight game- only adolescents took more risks when they thought they were being observed
What did . O’Brian and Bierman (1988) do?
Found that preadolescents said that peers influenced social activity and adolescents said peers influenced feelings of self worth too .
What did Guyer et al (2014) do?
Chatroom task - emotional responses depended on expectation, all significant effects linked to being accepted .
What did Silk et al (2012) do?
Measured pupillary reactivity in chatroom task
Found negative feelings when rejected
When accepted, look at themselves for longer then to the other option
When rejected look at . themselves then look away
What did Sherman et al 2016 find?
Instagram paradigm fMRI
3 categories - neutral, risky, own each given likes
pps had to like pictures
pictures with more likes were liked more often by pps, even ones showing risky . behaviour
Greater social brain activity for photos with more likes
greater visual cortex activity for photos with more likes
What did Livingstone and Smith 2014 find?
62 % of 12-15 . have access to a smart phone/device
positives: wealth of knowledge, communication
negatives: pornography, cyber bullying
What is the distinction between risk and harm
Risk is the probability of harm and harm is the observable negative outcome)
What are the factors of risk and harm?
Early maturing girls- more open to sexual exploration/exploitation
Children already socially excluded- feel victimised by peers - greater effect of violent/agg media
Vulnerable to grooming (Wolack et al 2010)
Lack of parental involvement (Whittle et al 2013)
What is cyber-bullying?
An aggressive, intentional act carried out by a group or . individual using electronic forms of contact, repeatedly over time against a victim who cannot easily defend themselves .
How much cyber bullying is there?
Difficult to measure but estimated 6% - 24%
What is an important factor in cyber bullying
Imbalance of power- judged by 11-17 year olds as most important
What did Lilley et al 2014 (NSPCC) study find?
Over 1 in 4 children 11-16 with a profile have experienced something upsetting on social media in past . year
11% of those experience something upsetting daily
Most . issues caused by trolling, others include pressure to look a certain way and agg language .
What are the percentages for Ainsworth ss (1978)
Secure- 70 %
Ambivalent- 15%
Avoidant - 15% .
Who added the disorganized attachment
Maine and Solomon (1990)
What type of mothering leads to what attachment type?
Sensitive = secure Distant= avoidant Inconsistent= ambivalent
What are the daycare debates?
Clashes with workforce pattern led to daycare
Western - mothers look after child until 3.5
england 750 free hours per year (15 per week)
What did Dench & Ogg find?
Grandparents are helping to look after children 53% at . least monthly
40 % of parents of over 2s use formal provision for care
What did Belsky find in the 1980s ?
“Robust association” between non-maternal care and insecure attachment (43%) if in daycare for more than 20 hours a week
What did Scarr & Thompson (1994) find?
Infants in non-maternal care had no differences in socioemotional or cognitive scores
What did the NICHD study find?
At 2; no effects of amount of daycare on quality of attachment overall- but greater insecure attachments in males with low maternal responsiveness + long/low quality day care .
What is theory of mind?
The ability to infer the full range of mental states that . can cause action and goal directed behaviour
When is theory of mind developed?
By 4
What happens in the Sally-Anne task
Marble transferred from basket to box, ask where other thinks it is under for say box = incorrect, over 4 say basket = correct
Name 2 more false belief tasks?
Crayon
Sponge/Rock
What do children show before 4 that suggests they might have some understanding of mental states?
Pretend play, deception, manipulation, referential word learning
What are two infant research methods?
1- spontaneous preference – which is looked at longer
2- habituation-recovery – present one stimuli until child habituates then present another and see if looking recovers
What are the early theory of mind precursors?
> Preference for social stimuli > Understanding affect and emotion >Goals, desires and intentions > Gaze following > Joint attention
What did Woodward 1998 find?
infants watch arm grabbing objects, surprised when they took the same path to grab different object, infants were expecting the arm to reach towards the same object. 5 month olds infer that human behaviour is goal directed.
What did Bertenthal 1993 find?
3-4 months can discriminate point light walking from control displays, infants prefer point light human motion.
What is the visual cliff
if mum looks happy then child will cross, if mum looks angry then child will not cross. 9-10 months infant uses affective cues from social partner.
What did D-Entremont, Hains & . Muir 1997 find?
Gaze following Present in low level from birth, 6 month olds can follow gaze to a target object
What is joint attention ?
The ability to follow another’s gaze or gesture and share the experience of looking at an object or event.
What did Baldwin 1991 do?
Joint attention
Exp muttered a novel label “look it’s the modi”, 2 conditions 1- follow in condition modi is child’s object 2- discrepant condition experimenter’s object is modi in referential condition only.
• Found that children rarely mapped new labels on to the object that was the focus of their attention (associative) but they consulted speakers face for cues with the experimentors object.
Understanding referential intent may help explain rapid language learning with few mapping errors.
