Textbook (1.1 and 1.2) Flashcards
The multidisciplinary study of how people change and how they remain the same over time:
Human Development
A person’s development is a blend of these characteristics (3):
- Nature and nurture
- Continuity and discontinuity
- Universal and context-specific development
Whether a particular developmental phenomenon represents a smooth progression throughout the lifespan or a series of abrupt shifts:
Continuity-Discontinuity Issue
Whether there is just one path of development or several paths:
Universal Versus Context-Specific Development Issue
A useful way to organize the biological, psychological, and sociocultural forces on human development:
Biopsychosocial Framework
The study of the brain and nervous system, especially in terms of brain-behavior relationships:
Neuroscience
An organized set of ideas that is designed to explain development:
Theory
Who came up with the theory that personality emerges from conflicts that children experience between what they want to do and what society wants them to do?
Freud
Concentrates on how learning influences a person’s behavior (Behaviorism and Social Learning Theory):
Learning Theory
Theories proposing that development is largely determined by how well people resolve conflicts they face at different ages:
Psychodynamic Theories
Erikson’s proposal that personality development is determined by the interaction of an internal maturational plan and external societal demands:
Psychosocial Theory
Erikson’s 8 stages:
- Trust vs. Mistrust
- Autonomy vs. Shame and Doubt
- Initiative vs. Guilt
- Industry vs. Inferiority
- Identity vs. Role Confusion
- Intimacy vs. Isolation
- Generativity vs. Stagnation
- Integrity vs. Despair
In Erikson’s theory; the idea that each psychological strength has its own period of particular importance:
Epigenetic Principle
The consequences of a behavior determine whether a behavior is repeated in the future:
Behaviorism
A consequence that increases the future likelihood of the behavior that it follows:
Reinforcement
A consequence that decreases the future likelihood of the behavior that it follows:
Punishment
Learning that occurs by simply watching how others behave:
Social Learning Theory/Observational Theory
People’s beliefs about their own abilities and talents:
Self-Efficacy
The key is how people think and how thinking changes over time (Piaget’s theory, information-processing theory, and Vygotsky’s theory):
Cognitive-Developmental Theory
Who believed that throughout infancy, childhood, and adolescence, youngsters want to understand the workings of both the physical and the social world?
Piaget
Piaget’s Four Stages of Cognitive Development:
- Sensorimotor
- Preoperational Thought
- Concrete Operational Thought
- Formal Operational Thought
Infant’s knowledge of the world is based on senses and motor skills; by the end of the period, child has mental representation:
Sensorimotor Stage (Birth to 2 years)
Child learns how to use symbols such as words and numbers to represent aspects of the world but relates to the world only through his or her perspective:
Pre-operational Thought (2 to 6 years)
Child understands and applies logical operations to experiences provided they are focused on the here and now:
Concrete Operational Thought (7 years to early adolescence)
Adolescent or adult thinks abstractly, deals with hypothetical situations, and speculates about what may be possible:
Formal Operational Thought (Adolescence and beyond)
A theory proposing that human cognition consists of mental hardware and mental software:
Information-Processing Theory
Refers to cognitive structures, including different memories where information is stored:
Mental Hardware
Includes organized sets of cognitive processes that enable people to complete tasks:
Mental Software
Who emphasized the influence of children’s sociocultural context on their thinking?
Lev Vygotsky
Who proposed that the developing person is embedded in a series of complex and interactive systems?
Urie Bronfenbrenner
The people and objects in an individual’s immediate environment:
Microsystem
Provides connections across microsystems:
Mesosystem
The social settings that a person may not experience firsthand but that still influence development:
Exosystem
The cultures and subcultures in which the microsystem, mesosystem, and exosystem are embedded:
Macrosystem
A person’s abilities:
Competence
The demands put on an individual by the environment:
Environmental Press
A theory based on the idea that human development is inseparable from the environmental contexts in which a person develops:
Ecological Theory
The view that human development is multiply determined and cannot be understood within the scope of a single framework:
Life-span Perspective
Development involves both growth and decline; as people grow in one area, they may decline in another and at different rates:
Multidirectionality
Capacity is not predetermined. Many skills can be learned or improved with practice, even in late life:
Plasticity
People develop within a particular set of circumstances determined by the historical time in which they are born and the culture in which they grow up:
Historical Context
Development results from the biological, psychological, sociocultural, and life-cycle forces that we mentioned previously:
Multiple Causation
The model in which three processes form a system of behavioral action that generates and regulates development and aging:
Selective Optimization with Compensation Model
Involves continuing previous goals on a lesser scale or substituting new goals, and it may be either proactive or reactive:
Selection
Occurs when people’s skills have decreased so that they no longer function well in a particular domain. When they compensate, they search for an alternative way to accomplish the goal:
Compensation
Involves finding the best match possible between resources (biological, psychological, and sociocultural) and desired goals:
Optimization
The ways in which various generations experience the biological, psychological, and sociocultural forces of development in their respective historical contexts:
Life-Course Perspective
