Week 1 Flashcards
Define Developmental Psych
Scientific study of changes in psychology and behavior often from the prenatal period to early adulthood and sometimes including the progression through older adulthood.
Normative Changes
similar - entire species goes through
idiosyncratic changes
how do people differ from one another) respond to the environment and adapt to circumstance
scientific method can be used for: (2 things)
Description - reporting the age children typical show skills and understandings
Explanation - testing hypotheses that predict how changes in a given variable will effect the outcome variable
What is a hypothesis and what is important about it in relation to developmental psych?
educated guesses that can and should be tested - may need to be modified or abandoned
Hypotheses in developmental psychology need to be consistent with information from other branches of science
Explain the relationship between development and accidental death
Development happens because accidental death happens - opens opportunities for new individuals
creates an available niche (shelter, food, water) and mechanisms for bringing new individuals into the world - reproduction and development
Fewer older individuals than younger individuals - more adapted to the environment which is part of why more older people are sick
Development begins when…
the genome of a new individual is complete
Why Study the Psychological Development of Children? (3)
- Gives insight into universal human nature
- Learn which traits are human universals robust across species-typical environments and learn how environment effects - May shed light on adult psychological processes which can be complex and difficult to study
- Ex. Language development in adults children over apply rules but adults don’t - you couldn’t know this without studying development -
- Observing the development of processes may yield clues as to components and developmental precursors - Parents, educators, policy, etc. want to know how their interactions with children affect their development - real-world applications
Ex. speech to children, rewards, and punishments
Plato
- nativist (development driven by internal forces)
- children born with innate knowledge
- no learning needed just had to recollect info
- information is preserved in the genes
Aristotle
- empiricist (all knowledge depends on direct experience or empirical observation)
- a blank slate
- Acquire knowledge by being exposed to the knowledge
Locke
- empiricist - blank slate - tabula rasa - all children equal
- All knowledge was a result of experience and the mind simply had to accept the knowledge that was imparted by virtue of sensory inputs
- the upbringing was always credited for the child outcome in empiricism
- A child could do little to influence their development
Rosseau
- nativist - opposed the idea of blank slates
- Thought that children had conceptual understandings and knowledge
- justice and fairness that unfolded through maturation - acknowledged role of environment as well
- Children largely responsible for their own development and tutoring could interfere
- Noble savages (children) - be given as much freedom as possible for education
- Age 12 - age of reason - could choose and discriminate info - should be left to explore until then
Charles Darwin
- Baby Biography - description of his infant son’s development
- Observed the similarity of early prenatal development across the species that he was able to explore
G Stanley Hall
- First psych laboratory in US at John Hopkins -
- Founded first english language journal of experimental psych and was the first president of the APA - among the first to use scientific approach
Child development and education - should be educated according to their emerging needs and abilities - illuminated by considering evolutionary history
Maturational Process that characterized child development - children developed following an inherent plan that unfolds automatically in the proper circumstances
First large systematic study of development and most well known for starting the normative approach - define the norms of development
James Mark Baldwin
Founding member of APA - Theory of evolution joined with child development - First to use experimental methods
Contributions:
Step-wise theory of psychological development - thought that improvements in thinking occurred in broad and sudden steps rather than continuously and gradually
Baldwin effect - possible effect of learning on natural selection
- Developing organism was designed to respond to the environment during a lifetime - grow muscle in response to exercise - plasticity is costly
- Needs development of learning mechanism, metabolic cost of learning, cost of ignorance before learning
- Competition to reach learning faster - evolutionary pressure may simply develop the end outcome rather than the learning mechanism
Arnold Gesell
Student of Hall - Normative development of typical children
Like Hall - view- Development followed a maturational process - the unfolding of normal biological processes
Focused on norms of development - watched many many children and documented the age at which their skills develop - normative approach
Father of Behaviorism - described, named and popularized
Extreme Empiricist
- Think you can turn a child into any profession
- Behavior can be entirely controlled reward and punishment - classical and operant conditioning
Little Albert experiments
Demonstrated classical conditioning of fear - trained an 11 month old boy to fear white rats - concluded that parents should be able to control behavior by controlling the stimulus and response pairings
Insisted on objective methods - data collection and analysis
Jean Piaget - most influential in cognitive development
Piaget’s theory of cognitive development was a stage theory - children attained a certain stage of cognitive development they were limited to the skills characterized by that stage until they reached the next stage - new set of skills available
Genetic epistemology - process of cognitive development from birth through late adolescence - accord to Piaget
Presented children with tasks rather than observing - innovative at the time - clinical method: pre-planned, semi-structured interview, probe areas of interest based on responses
- More interested in how children think than right or wrong answers
Lev Vygotsky
Theory of social development - influence of culture and other people on development
Studied relationship btw language development and thought
- Focused on dialogues btw children and elders as cultural transmission
- Thought culture influence was strong enough to disrupt stages
Development resulted from the dialectical process - shared problem-solving - work through issue with adult
Zone of proximal development - child’s growing edge or next step in development - difference btw support from adult and no support
The difference between tasks a child can
complete with and without adult support.
Erik Erikson
8 stages of psychosocial development - challenges at each stage describes both ideal and failed completion of these challenges - trust vs. mistrust - if the virtue is achieved it is carried throughout life
If not completed it is expected to arise again - even if the individual has moved on
Urie Bronfenbrenner
Ecological systems theory of child development - child develops in a social system - development cannot be understood without looking at the context in which development takes place
Jerome Kagan
Child temperament
Personality traits - consistent across lifespan
Reactivity in children predicted the same level of reactivity in adulthood - looked at areas of brain
Effects of daycare - whether it effected development - high-quality daycare - no negative effects
Walter Mischel
Personality psychology - a field founded on the premise that personality was a characteristic of an individual and could be observed as that individual moves from situation to situation
Mishel pointed out that this wasn’t true - the situation is a stronger factor in determining how a person would behave
Evolutionary Psychology
approach to the study of psychology that holds being well-informed about the process of evolution as well as the circumstances in which our ancestors lived during our evolutionary history will aid us in understanding the function and design of the human mind
An Evolutionary perspective in developmental:
Children develop as a result of interactions btw the environment and the developing child
As a result of adaptations that evolved in our ancestral environment
- Interact with environment in ways that they are designed to interact
- Children a better fit for ancestral environment than modern - some mismatches
Why is evolutionary psych important to developmental psych?-four
- Promotes research that is consistent with evolution by natural selection
- Guidance in terms of hypothesis testing - hypotheses that can be tested are infinite - narrows the hypothesis space - don’t test those that are inconsistent with evolutionary theory
- FRAMES OUR INQUIRY - evolutionary perspective allows us to make sense of the interaction between a developing organism and its environment
- Functional understanding - To understand a psychological process we need to know what it was designed to do - adaptive problem, how is mind designed, learning mechanisms, environment influence - ev psych lends a coherent framework for answering these questions
Continuous development
Best described in quantitative terms
Ex. Older children are bigger, stronger, faster and smarter than a younger child - growth in the form of height
Describe the development using numbers
Discontinuity
Changes are also qualitative
Ex. Older child is smarter not just because they have more experience but also because they can use logical inference to apply knowledge to new situations or can reason about abstract or hypothetical situations
- Different kinds of intelligence - more fundamental differences
Cannot be described by numbers
Piaget - stage theory - move to a fundamentally different way of understanding and thinking about the world - object permanence
False-belief task (discontinuity)
3yr cannot understand that another person could have a false belief - thinking your keys are on the table when they’re in your bag
Cannot use false belief to predict and explain behavior
Learned by 4
Scale Error (discontinuity)
2yr old children will try to interact with miniature toys as if they were not miniature - slide down a 5 inch slide or get into a toy car - by 2.5 wouldn’t do this
Plasticity
functional change that happens by design as a result of factors in the environment or the child’s behavior or reparative changes following injury
Supposed to happen - will happen as a result of maturation by design - playing violin - improvement in motor abilities or by trauma/injury to the brain
Stability
traits and characteristics that don’t change across the lifespan or at least don’t change after some point in development
Ex. Learn native language and acquire all grammar - stability doesnt change, Good at processing faces
Normative approach
- norms or averages are computed over a large population - describing the changes one typically sees in children
Ex. Age of crawling, lifting head etc - averages
Individual differences approach
- measuring and characterizing the ways in which development and developmental outcomes differ among children identifying factors that might predict these individual differences - attachment theory
Looking at children with diagnosis to no diagnosis, across culture etc
Plasticity and Stability
- Are traits stable or do they change
- Do the ones that change in a response to environmental cues or because of the maturational process
- Depends on the trait
- Some traits are designed to be stable, and resilient to information in the environment. Some traits are designed to be plastic, responding to information in the environment. The extent to which a trait is plastic or stable can change during development
Normative Development and Individual Differences
Looking at children with diagnosis to no diagnosis, across culture etc
Characterize differences, explain differences, may differ by trait, may reflect researcher’s interests
- Some traits are designed to follow species-typical developmental timelines while some are designed to take info as input that influences development
- Different approaches reflect the different interests of different researchers
Interactionism
nature and nurture working together in the development of every individual and every trait
Developing child interacting with information in the environment, working together to make an adult person
Without genes, nothing develops, and without the necessary environmental input, nothing develops.
Every person and every trait of every person is a result of genetic and environmental interaction
Functionality
Function - function is the adaptive problem that is solved in the EEA - the adaptive problem created the selection pressure that led to the selection of genes that support the development of that organ or process during development
EX. Baby talk/infant directed speech aids in language development
Understanding would be aided greatly by knowing the purpose for which it was designed - George Williams
Function of categorization is to allow for inference - allows you to behave reasonably in response to your environment
Instinct Blindness
Inability to appreciate the complexity of our mental processes because they seem automatic and inevitable to us
Difficult to appreciate how difficult perception is and hence the complexity of the adaptations underlying vision
Ex. fish may never know they are in water ie. take it for granted
Empirical Research
Early philosophers did not ground their disagreements in empirical evidence - based it on observation or opinion
Became a field grounded in evidence in the late 19th or early 20th century
The environment of evolutionary adaptedness
the conditions under which our ancestors lived and to which our morphological and psychological features are adapted
Variance in EEA
adapted to respond to warm and cold climates - designed to respond to our current environment
Evidence that children are equipped to detect which kind of environment they are born into and adjust their life strategies accordingly
