Unit 2 - lifespan development and personality chapters 13 and 14 Flashcards
Development begins at the moment of conception, when the sperm from the father merges with the egg from the mother.
Within a span of nine months, development progresses from a single cell into a zygote and then into an embryo and fetus.
The fetus is connected to the mother through the umbilical cord and the placenta, which allow the fetus and mother to exchange nourishment and waste. The fetus is protected by the amniotic sac.
The embryo and fetus are vulnerable and may be harmed by the presence of teratogens.
Smoking, alcohol use, and drug use are all likely to be harmful to the developing embryo or fetus, and the mother should entirely refrain from these behaviours during pregnancy or if she expects to become pregnant.
Environmental factors, especially homelessness and poverty, have a substantial negative effect on healthy child development.
Babies are born with a variety of skills and abilities that contribute to their survival, and they also actively learn by engaging with their environments.
Attachment to a caregiver is an important first relationship in life. Attachment styles refer to the security of this relationship and more generally to the type of relationship that people, and especially children, develop with those who are important to them.
Temperament refers to characteristic mood, activity level, attention span, and level of distractability that is evident in infancy and early childhood. It is the foundation for personality.
Parents use different types of discipline, such as power assertion and induction, and have parenting styles characterized by levels of warmth and parental control.
Children’s knowledge of the self is evident as young as 18 months of age.
By the end of the preschool years, young children’s “moral self” reflects how they think of themselves as people who want to do the right thing, who feel badly after misbehaving, and who feel uncomfortable when others misbehave.
The habituation technique is used to demonstrate the newborn’s ability to remember and learn from experience.
Children use both assimilation and accommodation to develop functioning schemas of the world.
Piaget’s theory of cognitive development proposes that children develop in a specific series of sequential stages: sensorimotor, preoperational, concrete operational, and formal operational.
Piaget’s theories have had a major impact, but they have also been critiqued and expanded.
Vygotsky’s sociocultural theory proposes that cognitive development is partly influenced by social interactions with more knowledgeable others.
Gender and sex are different concepts.
Gender development begins in early childhood. Parents and others reinforce gender stereotypes.
Sexual orientation is distinct from gender identity.
Adolescence is the period of time between the onset of puberty and emerging adulthood.
Emerging adulthood is the period from age 18 years until the mid-20s in which young people begin to form bonds outside the family, attend university, and find work. Even so, they tend not to be fully independent and have not taken on all the responsibilities of adulthood. This stage is most prevalent in Western cultures.
Puberty is a developmental period in which hormonal changes cause rapid physical alterations in the body.
The cerebral cortex continues to develop during adolescence and early adulthood, enabling improved reasoning, judgment, impulse control, and long-term planning.
Adolescent development is characterized by social change as adolescents become more independent, spend more time with peers, explore romantic relationships and sexuality, and engage in more risk-taking behaviour.
The developmental context for adolescence has wide variability including country, culture, sexual orientation, and so on.
A defining aspect of adolescence is the development of a consistent and committed self-identity. The process of developing an identity can take time, but most adolescents succeed in developing a stable identity.
Kohlberg’s theory proposes that moral reasoning is divided into the following stages: preconventional morality, conventional morality, and postconventional morality.
Kohlberg’s theory of morality has been expanded and challenged, particularly by Gilligan, who has focused on differences in morality between boys and girls.
It is in early and middle adulthood that muscle strength, reaction time, cardiac output, and sensory abilities begin to decline.
One of the key signs of aging in women is the decline in fertility, culminating in menopause, which is marked by the cessation of the menstrual period.
The different social stages in adulthood — such as marriage, parenthood, and work — are loosely determined by a social clock, a culturally recognized time for each phase.
Longitudinal and cross-sectional studies are each used to test hypotheses about development, and each approach has advantages and disadvantages.
Most older adults maintain an active lifestyle, remain as happy as they were when younger — or are happier — and increasingly value their social connections with family and friends.
Although older adults have slower cognitive processing overall (i.e., fluid intelligence), their experience in the form of existing knowledge about the world and the ability to use it (i.e., crystallized intelligence) is maintained and even strengthened during old age.
Expectancies about change in aging vary across cultures and may influence how people respond to getting older.
A portion of the elderly suffer from age-related brain diseases, such as dementia, a progressive neurological disease that includes significant loss of cognitive abilities, and Alzheimer’s disease, a fatal form of dementia that is related to changes in the cerebral cortex.
Two significant social stages in late adulthood are retirement and dealing with grief and bereavement. Studies show that a well-planned retirement can be a pleasant experience.
A significant number of people going through the grieving process are at increased risk of mortality and physical and mental illness, but grief counselling can be effective in helping these people cope with their loss.
Personality is an individual’s consistent patterns of feeling, thinking, and behaving.
Early theories assumed that personality was expressed in people’s physical appearance. One of these approaches, known as physiognomy, has been validated by current research.
Self-report personality tests like the MMPI are used to assess personality, screen applicants for job training, in criminal cases, and in custody battles.
Projective tests are based on the assumption that the test-taker will project unconscious aspects of their personality onto their test responses. Many projective tests lack reliability and validity.
Personality is driven in large part by underlying individual motivations, where motivation refers to a need or desire that directs behaviour.
Personalities are characterized in terms of traits — relatively enduring characteristics that influence our behaviour across many situations.
The most important and well-validated theory about the traits of normal personality is the five-factor model of personality.
There is often a low correlation between the specific traits that a person expresses in one situation and those that they expresses in other situations.
One of the most important psychological approaches to understanding personality is based on the psychodynamic approach to personality developed by Sigmund Freud.
For Freud, the mind was like an iceberg, with the many motivations of the unconscious being much larger, but also out of sight, in comparison to the consciousness of which we are aware.
Freud proposed that the mind is divided into three components: id, ego, and superego. The interactions and conflicts among the components create personality.
Freud proposed that we use defence mechanisms to cope with anxiety and maintain a positive self-image.
Freud argued that personality is developed through a series of psychosexual stages, each focusing on pleasure from a different part of the body.
The neo-Freudian theorists, including Adler, Jung, Horney, and Fromm, emphasized the role of the unconscious and early experience in shaping personality, but they placed less evidence on sexuality as the primary motivating force in personality.
Although there is little empirical support for Freud’s theory, it continues to play a role in popular culture.
Behaviourists view personality as significantly shaped by reinforcements and consequences from the environment.
In social-cognitive theory, the concepts of reciprocal determinism, observational learning, and self-efficacy all play a part in personality development.
Rotter proposed that locus of control is an important aspect of personality.
Mischel’s person-situation theory argued that cognitive interpretations of situations must be accounted for in personality.
Genes are the basic biological units that transmit characteristics from one generation to the next.
Personality is not determined by any single gene, but rather by the actions of many genes working together.
Behavioural genetics refers to a variety of research techniques that scientists use to learn about the genetic and environmental influences on human behaviour.
Behavioural genetics is based on the results of family studies, twin studies, and adoptive studies.
The largely unknown environmental influences, known as nonshared environmental effects, have the largest impact on personality.
Personality is shaped by environmental factors, genetic factors, and the interactions between them.
There are broad differences in the Big Five factors between collectivistic and individualistic cultures, and these differences can also be found within countries such as Canada and the United States.
Personality assessment instruments have been translated into other languages, but understanding the role of culture requires a deep understanding of the culture itself.
Indigenous identity in Canada is poorly understood by psychologists because the variability in culture, language, and traditions of Indigenous communities in Canada are not well understood outside of these communities.
