Introductory Lecture Flashcards
1
Q
Outline
A
- Introduction to the module
- Overview of major themes in developmental psychology: What sorts of things may affect development? How do we test this?
2
Q
Learning outcomes
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- Refresh knowledge from year 1
- Understand the aims and key questions of developmental psychology
- Develop a critical approach of research designs in developmental psychology
3
Q
What is developmental psychology?
A
It is a branch of psychology that studies the physical, cognitive, social and emotional changes that occur throughout the human life span.
4
Q
The most dramatic developmental changes in humans occur….
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In prenatal development, infancy, childhood
Happens earlier in life
5
Q
Aims of developmental psychologists (3)
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- Describe human development (Making observations on what we see)
- Explain human development (Designing experiments to see what drives these developmental changes)
- Optimize human development (uses results of research to drive human development)
6
Q
OMBEA Discussion
Q1. Human development begins at….
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Conception
7
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OMBEA DISCUSSION
Q2. Bowlbly use the term ‘Secure Base’ to refer to:
A
B) The presence of an attachment figure
8
Q
OMBEA DISCUSSION
Q3. The term senescene describes..
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C) Biological ageing
9
Q
What influences development?
A
- Genetic inheritance
- Individual learning: How you interact with your environment as an individual
- Social learning: Learning from others in your enviroment
- Parents
- Culture
- Biology
- Evolution
10
Q
The way we think about the factors that influence development is by asking 3 key questions
What are the 3 key questions..?
A
- Continuity vs Discontinuity
- Stability vs Change
- Nature vs Nurture
11
Q
Continuity vs Discontinuity?
A
- Thinking about the trajectory that development takes place.
- Is it a gradual continuous path with no qualitative leaps or time, but gradual increments of quantitative change
- Or is it discontinuity where you are making the qualitative changes between steps (discrete age-specific periods or stages)
- Most argue it is stage theorist it is a discontinuous process for example Freud, Piaget.
- The difference between qualitative vs quantitative.
- The way we measure plays a role. For example, looking at 6 months vs 2 year old. One walks and one doesn’t, shows qualitative change. but look 6 month vs 9 months old vs 12 months old then more gradual like quantiative.
- Combing step wise vs continuous process.
- Certain behaviours continuous vs discontinous.
- Like measuring behaviour every week or every year like longitudinal feeds the trend.
12
Q
Stability vs Change
A
- The same person you were fundamentally when you were born until you die or do you change in some kind of qualitative l way?
- A lot of researchers talk about this in personality and individual differences as some traits are stable.
- Stability (small tree to big tree)
- Change (cataphiles vs butterfly)
- Does a behaviour or trait stay stable over time or change like shyness
- Importance of early experience (critical period? something has to develop and exposed during that period early on in order for given behaviour or trait to develop, sensitive period is more predisposed to pick up on those).
- Solid evidence of early experiences like romanian adoptees (Rutter et al. 1998), adoptees were deprived, some were adopted into UK and looked compared to control group of UK adoptees adopted into UK family that were not subject to global deprivaiton. Looked age at which Romanian adoptees adopted into those families. Find that if they were adopted before age of 6 months, then no significant difference between both, tells us some hope that some are able to catch up despite early experiences. When adopted later then 6-24 then significant difference with UK population.
13
Q
Batle’s Conceptualisation of Life-Span Development
A
- Baltes is a German psychologist who was influential in emphasising the life-span nature of development and the importance of historical influences
- Baltes pointed that age-related trends of developmental psychology only focus only on one of the 3 influences on development throughout a lifespan of normative age-graded influences.
- Each of these influences is determined by the interaction of biological and environmental factors.
14
Q
Batle’s Conceptualisation of Life-Span Development
Normative age-graded influences
+ Examples
A
- This influences have a strong relationship with chronological age.
- For example, the occurrence of puberty at adolscene is an example of a normative age-graded influence with a strong biological component.
- Another example is starting school at 5 years old would be an example of normative age-graded influence with little biological determination.
15
Q
Batle’s Conceptualisation of Life-Span Development
Normative history-graded influences
+ Examples
A
- These are influences that are linked with historical events that affected entire generations/cohorts.
- For example, COVID-19 pandemic, A famine, earthquakes in Haiti in 2010. The arrival of television in 1950s, Internet and mobile phone use in 1980s and 1990s.
16
Q
Batle’s Conceptualisation of Life-Span Development
Non-Normative life events
+ Examples
A
- These are events that do not happen in any normative age-graded or history-graded influences for most individual.
- For example effects of brain damage in an accident is an example with strong biological determinants.
- Effect of losing a job or moving to a house are examples with less strong biological determinants.
- Thesr are all significant events that can happen across a lifespan of an individual with many age points and at many historical times.
17
Q
- How do we test for these influences?
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- Age
- Cohort
- Tiem of testing
18
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Important of Batle’s Conceputalisation
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- Think development not in restrictive way but including all these influences to change our research design.
19
Q
Research Designs
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- Cross-sectional studies
- Longitudinal studies
- Cohort studies
- Cohort sequential studies
20
Q
Research Design
Cross-sectional studies
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- Studying different age groups simultaenously
- For example, love of cats and test this 12 months old vs 3 years old.
- For example, record language ability in 3 years old and 4 years old
21
Q
Research Design
Cross-sectional studies
Advantages
A
- Advantages:
- It is quick to conduct
- Cost-effective
22
Q
Research Design
Cross-sectional studies
Disadvantages
A
- Can’t control individual differences, overcome of obtaining the large sample.
- Testing 30,60,90 years old, not considering how normative history graded influences affect their performance.
- Individuals differences
- Cannot establish cause and effect due to individual differences of investigating different participants
23
Q
Research Design
Longitudinal
Avoid individual differences from cross-sectional
A
- An investigator will follow certain individuals over a period of time, by measuring their change.
- For example, record language ability of 3 years old sample then year later record the same children and their language ability when they turn 4 years old.
24
Q
Research Design
Longitudinal Design
Advantages
A
- High attribution rate (high drop out rate) as some participants may move away, lose contact or be unable to participate the next time of testing. This can influence the strength of generalizability of conclusions/
- Another limitation is that they are time-consuming
- A limitation of long longitudinal study that go on for a long period of time, a limitation may arise when the original research question may not be viable anymore. For example, some major longitudinal studies in USA and Britian in 1930 and 1940, provide longitudinal data from birth over time span of 20, 30 or 40 years. For example, the effects of parental divorce on child’s later adjustment may be different now as divorce is more frequent and socially acceptable than when it was 50 years ago when the stigma towards divorce in Western societies were much more greater.
*
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Advantages of Longitudinal Design.
* Providing researchers to look at changes across a lifespan.
*
26
Cohort design
* This design is where different cohorts( samples of children born in different years) are compared at the same ages.
* This will inform of the impact historical change has on development
* For example, the effect of the invention of televisions in 7 year olds born in 1930, 1960 and 1990.
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Cohort design
Disadvantages
* Danger of research question become obsolete
* Time consuming
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Cohort sequential design
* Combine the aspects of cohort design, cross-sectional design and longitudinal design to create a powerful analytic tool for study developmental proceses.
* Looking at different and same participants, different and same ages, and different and same historical time.
* For example, looking at effects of compensatory preschool programs on children born in 1970s, 1980s, 1990s following a cohort longitudinally through age of 3 years to 18 years.
* This is time consuming
* High attribution rate
* Quesiton become obsolete.
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Cross-sectional
Common
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What is most commonly used?
Cross-sectional and longitudinal design.
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Nature vs Nurture
* Geesell argue that abilities born with (Exteme view) is the determining factor on how you develop and how you are as an individual. Your biological genetic inheritance affects all of these.
* On the other view.
* Enviromental exposure/experience, culture, parenting and things you are exposed to play a biggest role in development.
32
Nature vs Nurture influeces → Twin studies
* Monozygotic twins are twins who come from a single fertilised egg that has split into two early in development. They are 100% identical.
* Dizygotic/fraternal twins are twins who come from separately fertilised egg cells. They are 50% identical.
33
Example from book
* Identical twins show greater similarity to one another than fraternal twins.
* The extent to which they do is investigated by behavioural geneticists as an indication of heritability in the question
* Heritability is higher for verbal reasoning for MZ than DZ.
34
Genes, and Shared and Non-shared Enviroment
* Heritability is the variation explained by genetic differences.
* Identical twins reared apart
35
Adoption Studies
* Rearing environment from adoptive parents → Nurture
* Genetic inheritance from the biological parents. → Nature
* Whom do they resemble the most?
* Drawbacks on making firm conclusions is that led to biased and skewed sample as the assumption of these studies that adoption is not random. Also that people tend to adopt infant that resemble them physically/temperamentally or who they feel compatible with.
* One way to get around that individuals becoming more similar where cross-fostering where adoptees are chosen for you. Did work with animals in mice, male mice sing, different strand of mice have different songs, one study take mice babies and switch them, expect if nurture then sing song they were around then songs htye inherited, but keep singing song from their original biological stand. Imply it is an innate predisposition. Opposite effect in rats of stress levels.
*
36
Nature AND Nurture
* Genotype-environment interaction
* For example to some extent, children help produce their own rearing environment.
* For example, a child's temperament that appears to be strongly genetically influenced, influences the way parents to behave towards the child and the expectations they have of them.
* The feedback of the environment then shape those genetic predispositions.
*
37
Evolution and Development
* Evolutionary Psychology questions whether human ancestry may tell us about individuals now.
* For example, the nomadic hunter-gather environment led differences in the spatial mapping of hunting and tracking animals and remembering locations of finding and gathering food.
* Maybe mals are more likely to do those things and better at certain things now.
* Evolutionary Developmental Psychology as play differences in girls and boys and non-human animals.
* Evidence young female play material play and rough play in boys.
* Criticisms of neurosexism and binary view.
* Hoffman look at Karbi and Khasi tribes, closely genetically related, one was a matriarchal society and one was a patriarchal society. One thing is men better at solving spatial tasks. They gave the same spatial mapping tasks of two groups, matriarchal run by women and another run by males.
* Difference in matriarchal that everyone had access to education and patriarchal the men had access to education.
* They found that patriarchal of boys solved faster, evidence of innate spatial ability. When given to matriachial both boys and girls had same performance → same kind of exposure and resources.
