Exam 1 Material

Question 1

Child Development

Answer 1

An area of study devoted to understanding constancy and change from conception through adolescence.

Question 2

Domains of Development

Answer 2

Physical, cognitive, and emotional and social

Question 3

Periods of Development

Answer 3

Prenatal period (conception to birth), infancy and toddlerhood (birth to 2 years), early childhood (2-6 years), middle childhood (6-11 years), adolescence (11-18 years)

Question 4

Theory

Answer 4

Orderly, integrated set of statements that describes, explains and predicts behavior.

Question 5

Continuous development

Answer 5

A process of gradually adding more of the same types of skills that were there to begin with

Question 6

Discontinuous development

Answer 6

A process in which new ways of understanding and responding to the world emerge at specific times

Question 7

Stages

Answer 7

(In regards to discontinuous development) qualitative changes in thinking, feeling, and behaving that characterize specific periods of development.

Question 8

Contexts

Answer 8

Unique combinations of personal and environmental circumstances that can result in different paths of change.

Question 9

Plasticity

Answer 9

Open to change in response to influential experiences

Question 10

Psychoanalytic perspective

Answer 10

Children move through a series of stages in which they confront conflicts between biological drives and social expectations. How these conflicts are resolved determines the person’s ability to learn, to get along with others, and to cope with anxiety. Freud and Erikson influential.

Question 11

Psychosexual theory

Answer 11

Emphasizes that how parents manage their child’s sexual and aggressive drives in the first few years is crucial for healthy personality development.

Question 12

Frued’s three part theory

Answer 12

Id, Ego, and Superego

Question 13

Erikson’s Psychosocial Theory

Answer 13

In addition to mediating between id impulses and superego demands, the ego makes a positive contribution to development, acquiring attitudes and skills that make the individual an active, contributing member of society.

Question 14

Behaviorism

Answer 14

Directly observable events – stimuli and responses – are the appropriate focus of study. Began with John Watson

Question 15

Social Learning Theory

Answer 15

Modeling, imitation or observational learning, are powerful sources of development (Bandura)

Question 16

Behavior modification

Answer 16

Consists of procedures that combine conditioning and modeling to eliminate undesirable behaviors and increase desirable responses.

Question 17

Cognitive developmental theory

Answer 17

Children actively construct knowledge as they manipulate and explore their world. (Piaget)

Question 18

Piaget’s Stages

Answer 18

Sensorimotor, Preoperational, Concrete Operational, Formal Operational

Question 19

information processing

Answer 19

the human mind might also be viewed as a symbol-manipulating system through which information flows

Question 20

Developmental Cognitive Neuroscience

Answer 20

Researchers from psychology, biology, and neuroscience, and medicine to study the relationship between changes in the bran and the developing child’s cognitive processing and behavior patterns.

Question 21

Ethology

Answer 21

Concerned with the adaptive, or survival, value of behavior and its evolutionary history

Question 22

Critical Period

Answer 22

It refers to a limited time during which the child is biologically prepared to acquire certain adaptive behaviors but needs the support of an appropriately stimulating environment

Question 23

Sensitive period

Answer 23

A time that is optimal for certain capacities to emerge because the individual is especially responsive to environmental influences. However its boundaries are less well defined than those of a critical period. Development can occur later but it is harder to induce.

Question 24

Evolutionary developmental psychology

Answer 24

It seeks to understand the adaptive value of species wide cognitive, emotional, and social competencies as those competencies change with age.

Question 25

Sociocultural theory

Answer 25

Focuses on how culture is transmitted to the next generation. According to Vygotsky, social interaction is necessary for children to acquire the ways of thinking and behaving that make up a community’s culture

Question 26

Ecological systems theory

Answer 26

views the child as developing within a complex system of relationships affected by multiple levels of the surrounding environment.

Question 27

The Microsystem

Answer 27

The innermost level of the environment, the microsystem, consists of activities and interaction patterns in the child’s immediate surroundings.

Question 28

The Mesosystem

Answer 28

The second level of Bronfenbrenner’s model encompasses connections between microsystems.