Intro Flashcards
What is a theory?
A theory is a set of coherent interrelated statements, laws, and principles that describe, define, and predict specific aspects of some phenomenon such as human behavioral development.
Theories seek to identify universal principles governing all development.
Theories both describe phenomena and set limits on them. They also generate new ideas for research and bring together existing data into a logical and integrated system.
Lifespan Development
The sequence of physical and psychological changes that human beings undergo as they grow older, beginning at conception and continuing throughout life.
Developmental psychology focuses on the changes that normally occur in body, thought, language, personality, thinking and learning, emotions, and behavior over the course of a lifetime.
FOUR MAJOR DOMAINS OF DEVELOPMENT
Physical
Cognitive
Personality (sense of self and how we differ from each other)
Social context
THEY ALL INTERACT TOGETHER
Issues that are of particular concern to lifespan researchers
cumulative effects of changes across the lifespan; the overall contexts in which change occurs, including culture. Many interacting factors! (Not just the early years are important!)
What distinguishes developmental psychology from other brands of psychology?
- It looks at the changes that take place in a human being over time.
- The impact of change is cumulative; earlier events affect later development.
- A developmental psychologist applies his/her knowledge to promote healthy development
The central question of developmental psychology:
The two factors that influence who we are - heredity and environment.
- Psychodynamic Theories
: Concerned primarily with the personality and emotional development of individuals. Frued example of people going through stages that involve expressing natural instinct in a social ocntext.
- Erik Erikson:
A series of crises that occur in response to demands that society places on the developing individual to conform to adult expectations about self-expression and self reliance. Erikson expanded Freud. Watched children play, interact.
-Psychodynamic Theories
Cognitive Development:
The orderly changes that occur in the way people intellectually understand and cope with their world.
- Piaget
: Theory of cognitive development: describes several stages of mental reasoning. At each stage, the child “constructs: knowledge differently.
His theory highlights the difference in thought between adults and children.
-Cognitive Development:
Vygotsky’s Sociocultural Theory
Sociocultural theory – how is culture transmitted from one generation to the next.
Emphasizes that cognitive development was a socially-mediated process. Children benefit from peer and parental support to accomplish new things.
-Cognitive Development:
- The behavioral approach:
Human development is the accumulated effect of learning, either through conditioning or through social processes.
No attention is given to biological or unconscious factors.
*In classical conditioning
an automatic involuntary response comes to be associated with a new stimulus that does not normally elicit such a response.
-The behavioral approach:
*Operant conditioning
based on the principle that behavior that produces a pleasant or rewarding consequence for the learner is likely to be repeated.
- positive, negative, punishment
- Conditioning Theories
*Social learning
Emphasizes such processes as imitation of models, such as parents, teachers, peers and TV.
-The behavioral approach:
Observational learning
Observational learning: Observing another person is sufficient for learning to occur.
Conditioning Theories
- Conditioning Theories
Infants demonstrate their ability to learn new behavior through classical and operant conditioning and through observational learning.
Classical conditioning
A stimulus that does not produce a response is paired with a stimulus that does elicit a response.
-Conditioning Theories
Biological view
Emphasized how biological processes influence development – e.g., genes and evolution. and brain development
Doing research in human development
- First: We look for facts that can be universally applied.
In a research study, the investigator must first define the specific question or problem to be explored. then
Once the problem is defined, it must be reformulated into a statement about the relationship between two or more variables. The variables must be clearly defined in ways that will allow the researcher to observe and measure them.
The techniques used by researchers to collect data include:
*** interview techniques, naturalistic observations clinical methods experimental methods standardized tests.
validity
which is the extent to which the scale measures what is supposed to measure.
Three basic designs used in study of human development:
Longitudinal
Cross-sectional
Sequential designs
Longitudinal
Repeated testing of the same group of individuals over an extended period of time.
Look out for the cohort effect. cant tell if developmental differences or other differences.
Cross-sectional
Individuals of different ages are tested at the same point in time
Sequential designs
Combine aspects of both! Cross-sectional and Longitudinal
Doing Research in Child Development- techniques
naturalistic observations (ethnography) and structured observation
clinical interviews and case studies. experimental methods standardized tests.
Freud
pscycho analytic
