Exam 1 Material Flashcards
Child Development
An area of study devoted to understanding constancy and change from conception through adolescence.
Domains of Development
Physical, cognitive, and emotional and social
Periods of Development
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)
Theory
Orderly, integrated set of statements that describes, explains and predicts behavior.
Continuous development
A process of gradually adding more of the same types of skills that were there to begin with
Discontinuous development
A process in which new ways of understanding and responding to the world emerge at specific times
Stages
(In regards to discontinuous development) qualitative changes in thinking, feeling, and behaving that characterize specific periods of development.
Contexts
Unique combinations of personal and environmental circumstances that can result in different paths of change.
Plasticity
Open to change in response to influential experiences
Psychoanalytic perspective
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.
Psychosexual theory
Emphasizes that how parents manage their child’s sexual and aggressive drives in the first few years is crucial for healthy personality development.
Frued’s three part theory
Id, Ego, and Superego
Erikson’s Psychosocial Theory
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.
Behaviorism
Directly observable events – stimuli and responses – are the appropriate focus of study. Began with John Watson
Social Learning Theory
Modeling, imitation or observational learning, are powerful sources of development (Bandura)
Behavior modification
Consists of procedures that combine conditioning and modeling to eliminate undesirable behaviors and increase desirable responses.
Cognitive developmental theory
Children actively construct knowledge as they manipulate and explore their world. (Piaget)
Piaget’s Stages
Sensorimotor, Preoperational, Concrete Operational, Formal Operational
information processing
the human mind might also be viewed as a symbol-manipulating system through which information flows
Developmental Cognitive Neuroscience
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.
Ethology
Concerned with the adaptive, or survival, value of behavior and its evolutionary history
Critical Period
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
Sensitive period
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.
Evolutionary developmental psychology
It seeks to understand the adaptive value of species wide cognitive, emotional, and social competencies as those competencies change with age.
