Lifespan Development Flashcards
appears at the beginning of the formal operational stage. As defined by Elkind, its characteristics include the personal fable and the imaginary audience.
Adolescent Egocentrism (Elkind)
has confirmed a relationship between parents’ own attachment experiences and the attachment patterns of their children. For example, children of adults classified as dismissing on the AAI often exhibit an avoidant attachment pattern in the Strange Situation.
Adult Attachment Interview
The research has found that, for both males and females, this (which combines masculine and feminine characteristics and preferences) and, to a lesser degree, masculinity were associated with higher levels of self-esteem than was femininity. Androgyny has also been linked to greater flexibility when coping with difficult situations, higher levels of life satisfaction, and greater comfort with one’s sexuality.
Androgyny
The cerebral cortex is largely undeveloped at birth but shows dramatic growth during the first two years of life primarily as the result of an increase in interconnections between neurons and myelination of nerve fibers. During the first few months of life, the primary motor and sensory areas of the cortex undergo substantial development, while the prefrontal cortex continues to mature through childhood and adolescence and may not be fully developed until the early or mid-20s. By about age 30, the brain starts to gradually shrink as the result of the atrophy of neurons, and there is an acceleration of this cell death after age 60. However, there is evidence that the brain attempts to compensate for neuronal loss by forming new interconnections between neurons and neural pathways and by creating new neurons (neurogenesis) in the hippocampus and possibly other areas of the brain.
Brain Development (Cerebral Cortex, Neurogenesis)
Bronfenbrenner described development as involving interactions between the individual and his/her context or environment, and his ecological model describes the context in terms of five environmental systems or levels: microsystem, mesosystem, exosystem, macrosystem, and chronosystem.
Bronfenbrenner’s Ecological Model
In terms of the outcomes of child sexual abuse for male and female victims, some studies have found no consistent gender differences; but, when differences are found, the outcomes are worse for females than for males. The research has also found that the effects of sexual abuse tend to be less severe when the abuse was committed by a stranger than by a family member or other familiar person.
Child Sexual Abuse
Studies investigating episodic (autobiographical) memory have found that adults are usually able to recall very few of the events they experienced prior to age three or four. This is referred to as childhood or infantile amnesia.
Childhood (Infantile) Amnesia
Patterson et al.’s ____ ____ ___ model proposes that children initially learn aggressive behaviors from their parents who rarely reinforce prosocial behaviors, rely on harsh discipline to control their children’s behavior, and reward their children’s aggressiveness with approval and attention and that, over time, aggressive parent-child interactions escalate. They developed the Oregon model of parent management training (PMTO)to help stop this coercive cycle by teaching parents effective parenting skills and providing parents with therapy to help them cope more effectively with stress.
Coercive Family Interaction Model (Patterson)
Research evaluating the effects of Head Start and other compensatory preschool programs has found that, while initial IQ test score gains produced by these programs are usually not maintained, children who attend these programs tend to have better attitudes toward school and are less likely to be retained in a grade, be placed in special education classes, and drop out of high school and more likely to attend college than their peers who do not attend such programs.
Compensatory Preschool Programs
As defined by Piaget, this is the ability to understand that the physical characteristics of an object remain the same, even when the outward appearance of that object changes. Conservation depends on the operations of reversibility and decentration and develops gradually during the concrete operational stage, with conservation of number occurring first, followed by conservation of liquid, length, weight, and then displacement volume.
Conservation
Research by Harlow with rhesus monkeys indicated that an infant’s attachment to his/her mother is due, in part, to contact comfort, or the pleasant tactile sensation that is provided by a soft, cuddly parent.
Contact Comfort (Harlow)
is a time during which an organism is especially susceptible to positive and negative environmental influences. A ____ ____ is more flexible than a critical period and is not limited to a specific chronological age. Some aspects of human development may depend on critical periods, but, for many human characteristics and behaviors, sensitive periods are probably more applicable.
Critical And Sensitive Periods
often experience emotional distress and changes in functioning that include a diminished capacity to parent. For example, custodial mothers may be uncommunicative, impatient, and less warm and loving toward their children (especially sons), and they monitor their children’s activities less closely and are less consistent but more authoritarian in terms of punishment.
Divorce and Diminished Capacity to Parent
is caused by an extra number 21 chromosome. It is characterized by intellectual disability, retarded physical growth and motor development, distinctive physical characteristics, and increased susceptibility to Alzheimer’s disease, leukemia, and heart defects.
Down Syndrome
Reflexes are unlearned responses to particular stimuli in the environment. Early reflexes include the Babinski reflex (toes fan out and upward when soles of the feet are tickled) and the Moro reflex (flings arms and legs outward and then toward the body in response to a loud noise or sudden loss of physical support).
Early Reflexes
Several aspects of memory show age-related declines, especially recent long-term (secondary) memory. Deficits in secondary memory are believed to be due primarily to a reduced spontaneous use of effective encoding strategies. The working memory aspect of short-term memory also exhibits substantial age-related decline.
Effects Of Age On Memory
The effects of divorce are moderated by several factors including the child’s age and gender. With regard to age, preschool children exhibit the most problems immediately after the divorce, but long-term consequences may be worse for children who were in elementary school at the time of the divorce. Boys exhibit more problems than girls initially, but there may be a “sleeper effect” for girls who do not exhibit negative consequences immediately after the divorce but exhibit problems in adolescence and early adulthood. The negative consequences of divorce are reduced when the conflict between parents is minimiz
Effects Of Divorce On Children (Child’s Age, Sleeper Effect, Parental Conflict)
Research investigating the effects of maternal employment has found it to be associated with greater personal satisfaction for the working mother (especially when she wants to work) and, in terms of the children, with fewer sex-role stereotypes and greater independence. For lower-SES boys, maternal employment is associated with better performance on measures of cognitive development; but for upper-SES boys, it may result in lower scores on IQ and achievement tests.
Effects Of Maternal Employment
Contrary to what is commonly believed, adults do not usually experience distress and a sense of loss (i.e., the “empty nest syndrome”) when all of their children come of age and leave home. Instead, the studies suggest that they usually experience an increase in marital satisfaction and other positive changes.
Empty Nest Syndrome
Erikson proposes that the individual faces different psychosocial crises at different points throughout the life span. These are: trust vs. mistrust; autonomy vs. shame and doubt; initiative vs. guilt; industry vs. inferiority; identity vs. role confusion; intimacy vs. isolation; generativity vs. stagnation; and integrity vs. despair.
Erikson’s Stages Of Psychosocial Development
Prenatal exposure to alcohol can cause fetal alcohol spectrum disorder (FASD) which encompasses a range of conditions that involve largely irreversible physical, behavioral, and/or cognitive abnormalities. Fetal alcohol syndrome (FAS) is the most severe form of FASD and is characterized by facial anomalies; retarded physical growth; heart, kidney, and liver defects; vision and hearing impairments; cognitive deficits; and behavioral problems. Alcohol-related neurodevelopmental disorder (ARND) is characterized by cognitive deficits and behavioral problems without prominent facial anomalies, retarded physical growth, or physical defects, while alcohol-related birth defects (ARBD) involves physical defects without other prominent symptoms.
Fetal Alcohol Spectrum Disorder
Freud’s theory of personality development proposes that development involves five invariant stages (oral, anal, phallic, latency, and genital), in which the libido shifts from one area of the body to another.
Freud’s Stages of Psychosexual Development
The research on gay and lesbian parenting suggests that the nature of the parent-child relationship is more important than a parent’s sexual orientation. Overall, children of gay and lesbian parents are similar to children of heterosexual parents in terms of social relations, psychological adjustment, cognitive functioning, gender identity development, and sexual orientation.
Gay And Lesbian Parents
According to Kohlberg’s cognitive-developmental theory, the development of a gender identity involves a sequence of stages that parallels cognitive development: By age two or three, children acquire a gender identity; that is, they recognize that they are either male or female. Soon thereafter, they realize that gender identity is stable over time (gender stability). By age six or seven, children understand that gender is constant over situations and know that people cannot change gender by superficially altering their external appearance or behavior (gender constancy). Bem’s gender schema theory attributes the acquisition of a gender identity to a combination of social learning and cognitive development. According to Bem, children develop schemas of masculinity and femininity as the result of their sociocultural experiences. These schemas then organize how the individual perceives and thinks about the world.
Gender Identity (Kohlberg, Bem)
Genotype refers to a person’s genetic make-up; phenotype refers to observable characteristics, which are due to a combination of genetic and environmental factors.
Genotype Versus Phenotype
According to Thomas and Chess’s this model, behavioral and adjustment outcomes are best for children when parents’ caregiving behaviors match their child’s temperament.
Goodness-Of-Fit Model (Thomas And Chess)
