Module 2 - principles of developmental psychopathology

Question 1

what is an adaptation/maladaptation? [L2]

Answer 1

frameworks:
adaptation: an ongoing activity, developing in a series, small problems leading to larger problems, we dont usually see children appear with problems out of nowhere
maladaptation: delay in functioning (acquiring language at a slower rate than we expect). could be more disfunction where the skills aren’t being acquired

Question 2

what are the core principles of developmental psychopathology? (roadmap to understanding disorders and how they emerge over time) [L2]

Answer 2

1. interplay between normal development and pathological functioning
2. studying developmental pathways, stability, and change in traits, behaviours, emotions, and disorders
3. evaluating evidence across multiple levels of analyses to include the biological, individual, family, social, and cultural levels
4. incorporating distinct perspectives: clinical. developmental psychology, child/adolescents psychiatry, genetics, neurology, public health, philosophy of science into a multidisciplinary effort
5. examining both risk and protective factors to delineate pathways of risk and resilience
6. involving reciprocal, transactional models of influence in the fields casual models

Question 3

discuss the first principle of developmental psychopathology 1. interplay between normal development and pathological functioning

Answer 3

• consider normal and abnormal developmental process together in the context of development
• all phenomena occur on a continuum (developmentally appropriate to not)
• disorders impact skills
• focusing on why child has failed to learn new adaptive ways (instead of why is this child aggressive)

developmental considerations
- development is cumulative (build upon itself)
- adaptational failure (failure to master or progress in developmental milestones
- development is organized (there is an expected structure to the skills we develop), and there are sensitive and critical periods
- development is best characterized by probabilistic pathways (development is not linear or a specific cause or reaction)

Question 4

what is the difference between sensitive period and critical period? [L2]

Answer 4

sensitive periods - windows of time where environment has much more influence on the development
critical periods - if info hasn’t been received in/by a certain point in time, things don’t develop properly

Question 5

describe the second core principle: developmental pathways, stability, and change [L2]

Answer 5

• continuity/discontinuity: the overall group level of a characteristic/behaviour (e.g., empathy or aggression) (overall group)
• stability/instability: the relative ordering of individuals compared to peers (individual group)

Question 6

what is the difference between equifinality and multifinality ?

Answer 6

equ(ifinality): different starting points/experiences lead to similar outcomes/disorders

mul(tifinality): similar starting points/experiences lead to different outcomes

remember this is probabilistic, not guaranteed

Question 7

describe the third principle: evaluating across multiple levels of analyses to include the biological , individual, family, social, and cultural levels

Answer 7

• integrates information from all of the models of child development (e.g. physiological, behavioural, cognitive model, etc.)

Question 8

explain physiological model

Question 9

explain psychodynamic model

Question 10

explain behavioural model

Question 11

explain cognitive model

Question 12

explain humanistic model

Question 13

explain family model

Question 14

explain sociocultural model

Question 15

describe the 4th principle: incorporating distinct perspectives

Answer 15

(lots of overlap with previous principles)
- multidisciplinary efforts: clinical, developmental psychology, child/adolescent psychiatry, genetics, neurology, public health, philosophy of science into a multidisciplinary effort

Question 16

describe 5th principles: examining both risk and protective factors to delineate pathways of risk and resilience

Answer 16

• risk factors (increase vulnerability to disorder)
• resilience: adaptation (or competence) despite adversity
• protective factors: factors associated with positive adaption

Question 17

what are the 3 (4) types of risk factors?

Answer 17

• individual: child-oriented including things like gender, temperament and intelligence
• family: associated with child’s immediate caretaking environment and include parent characteristics like presence of psychopathology or harsh, punitive styles of parenting, or unusual discord among siblings
• social: risk factors associated with child’s larger environment (like neighborhood and socioeconomic niche, school system, and racial, ethnic and cultural characteristics) : the society and how we react
• complex: type, number, and timing of risk factors

Question 18

what are the 3 types of protective factors?

Answer 18

• individual factors: personality characteristics, kinds of psychological resources
• family factors: cohesion, warmth, supportive, emotionally available, determined parents serve to protect children in difficult situations (impoverished circumstances)
• social factors: children whose lives are embedded in ethnic and cultural religious groups where wellbeing is a communal responsibility

Question 19

what do protective factors do?

Answer 19

influence children’s outcomes by
- reducing impact of risk
- reducing negative chain reactions that follow exposure to risk
- serving to establish/maintain self-esteem and self-efficacy
- opening opportunities for improvement or growth

Question 20

is resilience is a stable or dynamic process that capacity develops over time (less so an individual responsibility and depending largely on resource available at that time)?

Answer 20

dynamic process.

Question 21

describe the 6th core principle: involving reciprocal, transactional models of influence in the field’s causal models

Answer 21

• child and environment are interdependent (don’t function independent of each other)
• nature vs nurture is an oversimplification
• it is interactional (reciprocal and transactional models)
• development is not linear and change can happen at any point
• developmental cascades : cumulative consequences for development of the transaction occurring that results in spreading effects across levels and many other areas

Question 22

what is the difference between cross-sectional and longitudinal approaches?

Answer 22

• the processes are different –> cross-sectional research involves collecting data of a single point in time and comparing to other groups (a snapshot of a picture in time). vs longitudinal research involved collecting data from the same group over time (a video)
• the goals are also different –> cross-sectional focuses on identifying age-related differences/outcomes at a particular point in childhood