Question 6 Flashcards
Describe the development of SR across the life span: Children
One of the primary goals in developing self-regulation requires movement away from hot-system-dominated responses and toward responses dominated by the cool system.
Describe the 8 components of the development of SR across the life span: Children
- Attention
- Inhibition
- Regulate pos./neg. arousal
- Play
- Language: Expressive and Receptive communicative competencies develop. Private and inner speech.
- Executive functions: effortful control improves gradually, as a result of development of the prefrontal cortex and the assistance of caregivers.
- Authoritative parenting style
- Temperament
Describe the development of SR across the life span: Adolescence
The self-regulation literature often portrays adolescents as behaviorally underregulated. Our heuristic posits that adolescents are not necessarily poorly regulated but instead often regulate their behavior to different goals than do adults. Adolescents discount risks and attribute less value to long-term goals than do adults.
Describe the development of SR across the life span: Adolescence
- Prefrontal cortex
a. Because the prefrontal cognitive-control network still requires fine-tuning, teenagers’ performance on executive function tasks requiring inhibition, planning, and future orientation is not yet fully mature - Piaget and formal operational thinking
- Changes in the brain’s emotional/social network
a. neurons become more responsive to excitatory neurotransmitters during puberty. As a result, adolescents react more strongly to stressful events and experience pleasurable stimuli more intensely. - Asymmetrical development
- Identity and sense of self
- Personality: conscientious personalities are more competent in SR than Neurotic personalities.
- Intentional SR (SOC)
a. self monitoring
b. self instruction
c. self reinforcement
Describe the development of SR across the life span: Adults
The development of self-regulation during adulthood (excluding old age) primarily involves fine-tuning of the already existent cognitive–affective architecture.
Describe the development of SR across the life span: Adults
- Identity and sense of self
- Personality
- Planfulness
- Reflective capacity
- Self-efficacy
- SOC
- Maintenance-focused goal orientation
- Loss-prevention goal orientation
a. The primary reason for this shift in goal orientations from growth oriented to maintenance-loss-prevention oriented is although crystallized intelligence, or cognitive pragmatics, remains relatively strong and stable throughout adulthood, fluid intelligence, or cognitive mechanics, shows age-related decline throughout middle and late adulthood - Transition from short-term goal orientation to long-term goal orientation
What contributions, if any, to this research base have been made from a longitudinal perspective?
- Subjective well-being
- Children’s social and emotional development
- Increased risky sexual behaviors (Inverse)
- Conscience (internalization of rules)
Describe the limitations of longitudinal designs
- Ability to retain participants (attrition)
- Costly
- Requires a significant amount of time and commitment on the part of the researcher
Describe the advantages of longitudinal designs
Longitudinal research seems to be the gold standard in developmental psychology given its unique ability to measure intraindividual change across time. More specifically, there is more than one time point measured, an advantage not afforded to cross-sectional paradigms.
What contributions, if any, to this research base have been made from a cross-sectional perspective?
- Individuals focus their interests away from play and more toward work during adolescence. Concerns about future leisure activities decrease in early adolescence, and interest in future education increases. Interest in future occupation, family, and property increase during middle and late adolescence
- Before the school transition, family and early environment played a critical role in participants’ observed and rated task persistence. After the transition to school, however, child factors, including genetically related attributes, more strongly predicted task persistence than did family and early environment
Describe the limitations of cross-sectional designs
- Cross sectional studies must remain mute in offering insights on understanding trends or development over time.
- Cross sectional studies can only render a myopic perspective on changes in processes or dynamics of a topic or issue.
Describe the advantages of cross-sectional designs
- Effective for providing a snapshot of the current behaviors, attitudes, and beliefs in a population.
- Time efficient (compared to longitudinal)(This is also worth noting because of publish or perish expectations at some universities)
What contributions to this research base have been made from a microgenetic perspective?
- Problem Solving
a. analyzing transitions from lower to higher levels of problem solving
b. The results indicate that qualitative shifts in children’s representation of the problem space are a crucial aspect of successful performance.
Describe the limitations of a microgenetic design
- It requires significant amounts of time, effort and in some cases technologies to capture the microgenetic process.
- Small sample sizes
- Often lacks a control group
Describe the advantages of a microgenetic design
- Fruitful for exploring and understanding the mechanisms underlying change.
- Researchers are able to hone in on the evolution of a particular developmental phenomena.
- Have proven effective for studying people of all ages—infants to adults
- Proven effective for studying development in highly diverse domains (problem solving, attention, memory, TOM, scientific reasoning, spoken and written language, motor activity, and perception.)
- Applicable in lab settings and naturalistic settings
- Yield surprisingly consistent findings
