Introduction to Developmental Psychology Flashcards
What are the different age ranges for development stages?
Prenatal: conception to birth
Infancy: birth - 3 years
Early Childhood: 3 - 6 years
Middle Childhood: 6 - 11
Adolescence: 11-18/19
“Early/Emerging Adulthood”: 19/20-25
Adulthood: 25 and after
Fuzzy boundaries among these stages
What is developmental psychology about?
It is the study of change and stability throughout a lifespan.
Goals:Describe
to identify what development looks like; to understand what humans at different ages do, think, feel, etc.
Explain
to determine what factors contribute to the development
Apply
to utilize findings for programs, policies, and advice that can improve the lives of children and youth
What are the key themes in developmental psychology?
- Human nature
Is who we are determined by experience, or do all humans enter the world with inherent abilities, biases, and tuning?
Example: moral debate, are infants born evil or good? - Nature vs. Nurture
- Continuous or discontinuous
- Mechanisms of change
- what causes the changes - The role of context
What are the research methods used for studying developmental psychology?
- Self/other report
Surveys & questionnaires
Parents may help children who are not proficient in the language understanding yet
Interviews
Standardized tests - Observation
- Physiological Measures
- Relationship between “Heart rate, blood pressure, hormone levels, pupil dilation” and behavior
Neuroimaging
EEG/ERP (event-related Potentials): measures electrical activity in the brain
MRI: measures brain structure using magnetic fields
fMRI: measures blood flow in the brain using magnetic fields
NIRS (near-infrared spectroscopy): measures blood flow in the brain using light
What are the two methods of observation?
- Naturalistic observation: observing the behavior of interest in its natural setting
- e.g., parent-child relationship
- Challenges: so many things happening at the same time; also what defines the variable being observed?
2 ways to observe:
1. Time sampling: record all behaviors during pre-determined periods (e.g., every 5 minutes)
2. Event sampling: record behavior everytime an event of interest occurs, but not other behaviors (e.g., everytime when a child says “I love you” to a parent)
- Challenge: what counts as a behavior? Concepts needs to be defined carefully and pre-operationalizations
- Structured observation: research sets up a situation to evoke the behavior of interest
- Useful for rare behavior, e.g., empathy
What are the advantages of different study methods?
- self/other report:
- can probe inner experience: motivations, emotions, etc
- easy to administer - naturalistic observation:
- reflects real-world behavior
- can be affordable - structured observation:
- useful for rare behavior
- same situation for everyone – more control/equivalence - physiological measures:
- assess biological underpinnings
- does not require language/behavior
What is the difference between reliability and validity?
Reliability is the consistency or repeatability of measures - does the test produce same results every time tested?
Validity: measures what the researcher thinks it is measuring
- internal validity: whether conditions internal to the design of the study allow for accurate measurement, think about confounds
- external validity: generalizability beyond the original assessment
What about correlational designs and experimental designs?
Correlational design:
- Examine the relationship between variables
- Do children who differ on variable 1 also differ on variable 2?
- No manipulation of variables
- Correlation coefficient: measures association between 2 variables (0 to +/- 1)
Experimental design:
- Able to examine cause-effect relations
- Research manipulates the IV – participants are randomly assigned to different groups
Do differences in the IV cause changes in the DV?
Challenges:
- Difficult to conduct
- Ethical concerns (e.g., it is unethical to ask children to drink 5 sodas per week)
What is the difference between longitudinal designs and cross-sectional designs?
- Longitudinal designs: same participants measured repeatedly across time at different ages
- Cross-sectional designs: different groups of participants at different ages measured at the same time
What is a sequential design?
Follow multiple samples of different ages over time (expensive and rare)
What is a microgenetic design?
track development over a short period of time (days or weeks), over closely-spaced sessions
- Primarily to look at training outcomes
What are the challenges in research development?
- Challenges of the population
- Ethics
- Cooperation: (e.g., physiological measures such as fMRI scan can be super loud and rigid for babies to cooperate)
- Selection: (how to get kids to study and who are the particular children?) Usually tend to from a population that is highly educated and have more access to research environments - Challenges in studying changes with age
- Measurement equivalence: (e.g., aggression act through biting at age 2 vs. aggression act through social exclusion at age 12)
- Understanding what causes change: (aggression due to age, due to developmental maturation of age?)
