Semester 1 Lecture 1 - Developmental Psychology and Research Methods

Question 1

What is Ontogenetic development?

Answer 1

The development of one individual throughout their life

Question 2

What is microgenetic development?

Answer 2

Changes that occur over a very brief period of time

Question 3

What are the ages we classify with the following categories in developmental psychology? 
Prenatal 
Infancy
Preschool
Childhood
Adolescence 
Early Adulthood 
Middle Adulthood
Late Adulthood

Answer 3

Conception to Birth
Birth to 2 years
2 to 4 years
5 to 12 years
12 to 18 years
18 to 40 years
40 to 65 years
65 years and over

Question 4

What are the three main ways we can track development?

Answer 4

Physical, Cognitive and Psychosocial Development

Question 5

What are some quantitative ways we can track development?

Answer 5

vocabulary size, number of friendships, memory capacity

Question 6

What are some qualitative ways we can track development?

Answer 6

changes in beliefs, ability, quality of friendships, etc.

Question 7

What is continuous development?

Answer 7

continuous development suggest that development is gradual and comes in many small and continuous changes

Question 8

What is discontinuous development?

Answer 8

development occurs in abrupt, rapid changes that resemble momentous occasions or events.

Question 9

What are 4 themes of developmental psychology?

Answer 9

• It focuses a lot on nature vs nurture
• Early experience matters, and can affect later development, but children are fundementally resilient, so this can often not be the case.
• Children shape their own development, it is not just external factors.

Question 10

Which ancient Greeks created the basis for developmental psychology?

Answer 10

Plato and Aristotle

They both felt that the future of societal welfare rested on the correct raising of children

Question 11

What did Plato believe? (in relation to kids)

Answer 11

He believed children were born with innate knowledge and understanding

Question 12

What did Aristotle believe? (in relation to kids)

Answer 12

He believed children’s knowledge and understanding came from their surroundings.

Question 13

How did Charles Darwin study developmental psychology?

Answer 13

He observed his son’s emotional development (case study)

Question 14

Who was Piaget?

Answer 14

Developmental psychology’s “founding father”- coined this as he was the first to study developmental psychology empirically and systematically

Question 15

What are the four methods of study we use to study development?

Answer 15

cross sectional studies, microgenetic studies, longitudinal studies and experimental studies

Question 16

What are cross sectional studies?

Answer 16

Studies on samples of different age groups, therefore showing how a factor changes and develops across age.

Question 17

What are longitudinal studies?

Answer 17

Studies that follow one group of individuals over an extended period of time.

Question 18

What are microgenetic studies?

Answer 18

They are a version of a longitudinal study where observed as they occur. This involves individual children, (all the same age while tested) being repeatedly tested over long periods of time. It can therefore help us understand if development is continuous or discontinuous.

Question 19

What are some pros/cons of microgenetic studies?

Answer 19

They are intensive and very precise, must involve small samples and can be prone to practice effects

Question 20

What are some pros/cons of longitudinal studies?

Answer 20

They are expensive to run and withdrawal rates can be quite high. The result can also be affected by practice effect (performing better on tests, not because they have developed/learned, but because of the repeated practice of the tests).

But it can look at change both in individuals and across groups.

Question 21

What are some pros/cons of cross-sectional studies?

Answer 21

It is the least time consuming of all the study types.

It can’t look at how individual children develop, it is therefore nomothetic.

Question 22

What is structured observation?

Answer 22

When behaviour is observed but in a lab where conditions can be manipulated to evoke a desired behaviour.

Question 23

What are cognitive measures?

Answer 23

Tasks specifically desired to measure the process of interest (i.e. IQ tests or memory tasks)

Question 24

What are psychophysical methods?

Answer 24

Methods to measure biological processes that can help us observe changes in perception and cognition i.e. eye tracking and pupil dilations

Question 25

How can we tell if babies are surprised?

Answer 25

Their pupils dilate

Question 26

What are four challenges of working with kids

Answer 26

They have limited language, attention and motor skills
Gathering the sample can involve biases
Parental influence must be considered
Consent is more difficult to obtain

Question 27

What are sequential designs?

Answer 27

Also known as cohort designs, when you use both cross sectional and longitudinal studies to test how a factor develops with age amongst different cohorts. The results are therefore then made up of the cohort effect, how well each cohort (how the samples of different age groups in the cross sectional element of the study) performs and then the longitudinal effect, showing how this factor develops over time within these already tested groups/cohorts.

Question 28

What is the Flynn effect

Answer 28

Refers to the discovery that the average IQ test score increases over generations.

Question 29

What are psychological tests (in terms of developmental psychology)?

Answer 29

They are instruments for the quantitative assessment of some psychological attributes or attributes of personality.

Question 30

What is the clinical method? Who used this method?

Answer 30

Used by Jean Piaget. It is where a behaviour related to development is naturally observed, and then the environment of the individual is changed in order to better understand how and why that behaviour happens/develops (like a less structured and controlled experiment, as it still maintains an element of mundane realism)

Question 31

What personality shows the highest levels of continuity from childhood to adolescence/later life?

Answer 31

Aggression

Question 32

What are the 2 types of correlational study?

Answer 32

Concurrent correlational studies and predictive correlational studies

Question 33

What are concurrent correlational studies?

Answer 33

A concurrent correlational study is where we are interested in the relationship between variables that are measured at the same time (i.e. the IQ of twins, whether there is a correlation between one twin having a high IQ and the other twin having a high IQ)

Question 34

What are predictive correlational studies?

Answer 34

Seeing if a factor of an individual retains it’s relativity to this factors in other over time. For example, can we predict the IQ of a child at 3 based on their problem solving skills at 6 months.

Question 35

What is the catharsis hypothesis?

Answer 35

The argument that watching aggressive tendencies in others will reduce your own feelings of aggression (has pretty much been disproven)

Question 36

What are developmental functions?

Answer 36

They are how we map typical trends in development, for example, we typically get more intelligent as we age.

Question 37

What are continuous functions of increasing ability?

Answer 37

behaviour that improves with age, i.e. quality of friendships. This is often shown on a line graph.

Question 38

What are continuous functions of decreasing ability?

Answer 38

When a behaviour is know for getting worse as we age, such as sound perception.

Question 39

What are discontinuous (step ) functions?

Answer 39

Where development takes place in a series of stages, where each new stage is qualitatively separate- i.e. the stages of development in walking ability/learning to walk. Piaget’s research is based on this.

Question 40

What are u shaped functions?

Answer 40

Behaviours known to increase in ability and the decrease in ability throughout life, such as visual acuity. This will make a u shape on a function graph. You can get inverted u functions, where a behaviour or ability decreases and then increases throughout life.