Semester 1 Lecture 1 - Developmental Psychology and Research Methods Flashcards
What is Ontogenetic development?
The development of one individual throughout their life
What is microgenetic development?
Changes that occur over a very brief period of time
What are the ages we classify with the following categories in developmental psychology? Prenatal Infancy Preschool Childhood Adolescence Early Adulthood Middle Adulthood Late Adulthood
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
What are the three main ways we can track development?
Physical, Cognitive and Psychosocial Development
What are some quantitative ways we can track development?
vocabulary size, number of friendships, memory capacity
What are some qualitative ways we can track development?
changes in beliefs, ability, quality of friendships, etc.
What is continuous development?
continuous development suggest that development is gradual and comes in many small and continuous changes
What is discontinuous development?
development occurs in abrupt, rapid changes that resemble momentous occasions or events.
What are 4 themes of developmental psychology?
- 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.
Which ancient Greeks created the basis for developmental psychology?
Plato and Aristotle
They both felt that the future of societal welfare rested on the correct raising of children
What did Plato believe? (in relation to kids)
He believed children were born with innate knowledge and understanding
What did Aristotle believe? (in relation to kids)
He believed children’s knowledge and understanding came from their surroundings.
How did Charles Darwin study developmental psychology?
He observed his son’s emotional development (case study)
Who was Piaget?
Developmental psychology’s “founding father”- coined this as he was the first to study developmental psychology empirically and systematically
What are the four methods of study we use to study development?
cross sectional studies, microgenetic studies, longitudinal studies and experimental studies
What are cross sectional studies?
Studies on samples of different age groups, therefore showing how a factor changes and develops across age.
What are longitudinal studies?
Studies that follow one group of individuals over an extended period of time.
What are microgenetic studies?
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.
What are some pros/cons of microgenetic studies?
They are intensive and very precise, must involve small samples and can be prone to practice effects
What are some pros/cons of longitudinal studies?
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.
What are some pros/cons of cross-sectional studies?
It is the least time consuming of all the study types.
It can’t look at how individual children develop, it is therefore nomothetic.
What is structured observation?
When behaviour is observed but in a lab where conditions can be manipulated to evoke a desired behaviour.
What are cognitive measures?
Tasks specifically desired to measure the process of interest (i.e. IQ tests or memory tasks)
What are psychophysical methods?
Methods to measure biological processes that can help us observe changes in perception and cognition i.e. eye tracking and pupil dilations
How can we tell if babies are surprised?
Their pupils dilate
What are four challenges of working with kids
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
What are sequential designs?
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.
What is the Flynn effect
Refers to the discovery that the average IQ test score increases over generations.
What are psychological tests (in terms of developmental psychology)?
They are instruments for the quantitative assessment of some psychological attributes or attributes of personality.
What is the clinical method? Who used this method?
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)
What personality shows the highest levels of continuity from childhood to adolescence/later life?
Aggression
What are the 2 types of correlational study?
Concurrent correlational studies and predictive correlational studies
What are concurrent correlational studies?
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)
What are predictive correlational studies?
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.
What is the catharsis hypothesis?
The argument that watching aggressive tendencies in others will reduce your own feelings of aggression (has pretty much been disproven)
What are developmental functions?
They are how we map typical trends in development, for example, we typically get more intelligent as we age.
What are continuous functions of increasing ability?
behaviour that improves with age, i.e. quality of friendships. This is often shown on a line graph.
What are continuous functions of decreasing ability?
When a behaviour is know for getting worse as we age, such as sound perception.
What are discontinuous (step ) functions?
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.
What are u shaped functions?
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.
