Understanding Human Development Flashcards
Systematic changes and continuities in the individual that occur between conception and
death, or from “womb to tomb.”
Development
3 broad domains/most important aspects of human development?
Physical Development
Cognitive Development
Psychosocial Development
Growth of the body and its organs; the functioning of physiological systems including the brain,
physical signs of aging, changes in motor abilities, and so on.
Physical Development
Changes and continuities in perception, language, learning, memory, problem solving, and other mental processes.
Cognitive Development
Changes and carryover in personal
and interpersonal aspects of development, such as motives, emotions, personality traits, interpersonal skills and relationships, and roles played in the family and in the larger society.
Psychosocial Development
3 ways/processes in development.
Orderly
Pattern
Unpredictable
3 kinds of changes.
Gains
Losses
Different from what we like before
Physical changes that occur from conception to maturity.
Growth
The deterioration of organisms (including humans) that leads inevitably to their death.
Biological aging
Refers to a range of physical, cognitive, and psychosocial changes, positive and negative, in the mature organism.
Aging
A transitional period between adolescence and full-fledged adulthood that extends from about age 18 to age 25 and maybe as late as 29.
Emerging adulthood
Periods of the Life Span.
Prenatal period (Conception to birth)
Infancy (0-18/24 months)
Preschool period (2–5)
Middle childhood (6-10)
Adolescence Approximately (10–18)
Emerging adulthood (18–25/29)
Early adulthood (25–40)
Middle adulthood (40–65)
Late adulthood (65 years and older)
Often defined as the shared understandings and way of life of a people; includes beliefs, values, and practices concerning the nature of humans in different phases of the life span, what children need to be taught to function in their society, and how people should lead their lives as adults.
Culture
Assigned different statuses, roles, privileges, and responsibilities.
Age-grade
A ritual that marks a person’s “passage” from
one status to another; can involve such varied
practices as body painting, circumcision, beatings, instruction by elders in adult sexual practices, tests of physical prowess, and gala celebrations.
Rite of passage
Society’s way of telling people how to act their age; basis for social clock; affect how easily people adjust to life transitions.
Age norms
A person’s sense of when things should be done and when they are ahead of or behind the
schedule dictated by age norms.
Social clock
People’s affiliation with a group based on common heritage or traditions.
Ethnicity
Standing in society based on such indicators as occupational prestige, education, and income.
Socioeconomic Status (SES)
The question of how biological forces and environmental forces act and interact to make us what we are.
Nature-Nurture issue
Emphasize the influence of heredity, universal maturational processes guided by the genes, biologically based or innate predispositions produced by evolution, and biological influences on us every day of hormones, neurotransmitters, and other biochemicals.
Nature
The biological unfolding of the individual as sketched out in the genes.
Maturation
The hereditary material passed from parents to child at conception.
Genes
Emphasize change in response to environment.
Nurture
All the external physical and social conditions, stimuli, and events that can affect us.
Environment
The process through which experience brings about relatively permanent changes in thoughts, feelings, or behavior.
Learning
Goals driving the study of life-span development.
Description
Prediction
Explanation
Optimization
Characterize the functioning of humans of different ages and trace how it changes with age.
Description
Identify factors that predict development and establish that these factors actually cause humans to develop as they typically do or cause some individuals to develop differently than others.
Prediction
Finding a relationship between a possible influence on development and an aspect of development
Explanation
How can humans be helped to develop in
positive directions; how can their capacities be enhanced; how can developmental difficulties be prevented, and how can any developmental problems that emerge be overcome.
Optimization
Grounding what educators, human service, and
health professionals do in research and ensuring that the curricula and treatments they provide have been demonstrated to be effective.
Evidence-based practice
Most influential baby biographer; made daily records of his son’s development (1877).
Charles Darwin
Several scholars began to carefully observe the growth and development of their own children and to publish their findings in the form of?
Baby biography
First president of the American Psychological Association; founder of developmental
psychology; developed the questionnaire to explore “the contents of children’s minds” at
different ages (1981).
G. Stanley Hall
An influential book written by Hall in 1904.
Adolescence
A time of emotional ups and downs and rapid changes—a time of what Hall characterized as?
Storm and stress
An analysis of how society treats (or, really, mistreats) its older members made by Hall.
Senescence (1992)
Study of aging and old age.
Gerontology
Developed 7 key assumptions of the life-span perspective.
Paul Baltes (1987)
7 key assumptions of the life-span perspective.
Development is a life-long process
Development is multidirectional
Development is multi-dimensional
Development is plastic
Development contextual
Dev. Science is multidisciplinary
Dev. Science involves growth, maintenance, and loss
Co-construction of biology, culture, and individual
Refers to the capacity to change in response to
experience, whether positive or negative.
Plasticity
The brain’s remarkable ability to change in response to experience throughout the life span.
Neuroplasticity
A belief that investigators should allow their systematic observations (or data) to determine the
merits of their thinking.
Scientific method
A set of concepts and propositions intended to describe and explain certain phenomena.
Theory
Specific predictions generated by theories.
Hypotheses
A good theory should be:
Internally consistent
Falsifiable
Supported by data
Its different parts and propositions should hang together and should not generate contradictory hypotheses.
Internally consistent
It can be proved wrong; that is, it can generate
specific hypotheses that can be tested and either supported or not supported by the data collected.
Falsifiable
A good theory should help us better describe, predict, and explain human development; its hypotheses should be confirmed by research results.
Supported data
The group of individuals studied.
Sample
A well-defined group from which the sample is drawn and about which we want to draw conclusions.
Population
A sample formed by identifying all members of the larger population and then, by a random means selecting a portion of that population to study.
Random sample
3 major methods of data collection used by developmental researchers.
Verbal reports
Behavioral observations
Physiological measurements.
Interviews, written questionnaires or surveys, ability and achievement tests, and personality scales all involve asking people questions, either about themselves (self-report measures) or about someone else.
Verbal reports
Involves observing people in their everyday surroundings; observed in homes, schools, playgrounds, workplaces, nursing homes, or wherever people are going about their lives.
Naturalistic observation
Creating special stimuli, tasks, or situations designed to elicit the behavior of interest.
Structured observation
Used to assess variables of interest to them.
Physiological measurements
A brain-scanning technique that uses magnetic forces to measure the increase in blood flow to an area of the brain that occurs when that brain area is active.
Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI)
An in-depth examination of an individual (or a
small number of individuals), typically carried out by compiling and analyzing information from a variety of sources, such as observation, testing, and interviewing the person or people who
know them.
Case study
An investigator manipulates or alters some aspect of the environment to see how this affects the behavior of the sample of individuals studied.
Experimental method
The variable manipulated so that its causal effects can be assessed
Independent variable
The behavior expected to be affected.
Dependent variable
3 critical features of the DeLoache study.
Random assignment
Manipulation of the independent variable
Experimental control
Helps ensure that the treatment groups are similar in all respects at the outset.
Random assignment
Investigators must arrange the experiences that different groups in the experiment have so that the effects of those experiences can be assessed.
Manipulation of the independent variable
All factors other than the independent variable are controlled or held constant so that they cannot
contribute to differences among the treatment groups.
Experimental control
Involves determining whether two or more variables are related in a systematic way.
Correlational method
An index of the extent to which individuals’ scores on one variable are systematically associated with their scores on another variable.
Correlation coefficient
The direction of the cause-effect relationship could be the reverse of what the researcher thinks it is.
Directionality problem
The association between the two variables of interest may be caused by some third variable.
Third variable problem
Synthesizing of multiple studies addressing the same question to produce overall conclusions.
Meta-analysis
A difficulty learning as much from video presentations as they do from face-to-face presentations.
Video deficit
3 development research designs.
Cross-sectional designs
Longitudinal designs
Sequential designs
The performances of people of different age groups, or cohorts, are compared.
Cross-sectional design
A group of individuals born at the same time, either in the same year or within a specified span of years.
Cohort
Relationships between age and an aspect of development.
Age effects
The effects of being born as a member of a
particular cohort or generation in a particular historical context.
Cohort effects
One cohort of individuals is assessed repeatedly over time.
Longitudinal design
The effects of historical events and trends occurring when the data are being collected and that can affect anyone alive at the time.
Time-of-measurement effects
Combines the cross-sectional approach and
the longitudinal approach in a single study.
Sequential design
What are WEIRD people?
People living in societies that are Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic.
The belief that one’s own group and its culture are superior.
Ethnocentrism
Is age-graded and history-graded.
Normative-influence
Only a personal experience.
Non-normative
