Exam 1 Flashcards
What is the cohort effect?
- Individuals born in the same time period are influenced by a particular set of historical and cultural conditions.
- Results based on one cohort may not apply to people developing at other times.
Think about the important realities of lifespan development:
What role does timing play in experiences during lifespan?
Important to consider when people experienced particular events in their life (e.g., losing a parent is different at 2 than it is at 20)
What is a critical period?
Critical periods → finite time spans in which specific experiences must occur for successful development
- Once critical period ends, later experiences would have no impact on this aspect of development.
- Failure to have the necessary experiences during the critical period will result in permanent impairments
What is a sensitive period?
Sensitive periods → require particular experiences during a specific time for development to occur, but experiences after the period ends can support developmental gains later in life
What role do contextual influences play in development?
- The relationship between individuals and their physical, cognitive, and social worlds is important
- Socio-cultural and environmental influences on development
Consider the forces at work during one’s lifespan.
- What are lifecycle forces?
- What are sociocultural forces?
- What are psychological forces?
- Life-cycle forces → things that people can expect to happen over a lifetime; things such as children, illness, and death, are all, or nearly all, expected during a life-cycle.
- Sociocultural forces → group of values, ideas, and beliefs that influence maturity
- Psychological forces → group of thoughts, emotions, and behavioral developments leading to maturity.
What are developmental influences?
Developmental influences → factors that affect the way a person socializes with their environment
What are non-normative life events?
Non-normative life events → any massive, unpredictable, or unforeseeable occurrences that a person may experience which fail to happen according to the developmental life cycle pattern
Do not similarly affect all members of a particular set.
- What are normative age-graded influences?
- What kinds of influences are normative age-graded?
- Normative age-graded influences → life events that fall within the specified life span of a person, in chronological order according to age.
- Normative age-graded influences can be social or biological/environmental
* Social determinants are usually culture-specific, since people relate differently depending on their origin.
* Biological determinants have more to do with the body and its various changes over time.
Occur at huge frequencies in the same fashion for a large portion of the population
What are normative history-graded influences?
Normative history-graded influences → events that, in the course of one’s life, relate to a specific time in history and are felt or were felt by a large portion of the population.
Consider Erik Erikson’s developmental theory.
- According to Erikson, what was the driving force of human development?
- What does it mean for development to be embedded in, and meaningful within, the lifespan?
- Assumed that human development was driven by identity (e.g., Who am I? Why am I here? What’s my purpose? Each stage is a different way of asking “what is my value?”)
- Assumed that development is embedded in, and meaningful within, the lifespan
* In other words, even if you had a negative childhood experience, as an adult, you can look back on it and unlearn some of the negative things you experienced
List the three assumptions of Paul Baltes’ lifespan perspective theory of development.
- Development is lifelong
- Development is multidimensional
- Development is contextual
What does it mean for development to be lifelong in Paul Baltes’ lifespan persepctive theory of development?
Development is not completed in infancy or childhood or at any specific age
