Week 1 Flashcards
Developmental Psychology
The scientific study of how a person’s psychology changes as they grow and develop through their lifespan
-Offers insights into development and contentious issues which can shape services such as education and healthcare
What develops?
-Physical body and motor skills
-Cognitive abilities
-Social understanding
-Emotional skills (understanding and regulation)
Developmental periods:
Prenatal
Conception to birth
Developmental periods:
Infancy
0-2 years
-Major changes
Developmental periods:
Early childhood
2-6 years
-Major changes
Developmental periods:
Middle childhood
7-10 years
-Major changes
Developmental periods:
Adolescence
11-18 years
-Major changes
Developmental periods:
Early adulthood
18-24 years
Developmental periods:
Middle Adulthood
25-69 years
Developmental periods:
Old age
70+ years
Considerations when studying children
-Suitability of tasks or language
-Environment
-Test situation
-Ethics such as long-term impact on child
Suitable research methods for children
-Observation (faces, crying, looking, sucking)
-Play or disguise the task
-Physiological data collection
Child Observation:
Faces
-Conflicting information over whether newborns can copy facial expressions
-Expressions can show how the child feels about
Child Observations:
Crying
-Babies have different cries for different situations
-Babies cry in their mothertongue
Child Observations:
Looking
-Eye tracking technology can calculate gaze direction, duration, and response time
-Looking time can
->indicate preference (preferential looking paradigm)
->discrimination as babies look longer at new stimuli (habituation to familiar stimuli)
->expectation as babies look longer at unexpected events (violation of expectation paradigm)
->prediction as babies focus on areas they expect something to happen (anticipatory looking paradigm)
-
Child Observations:
Sucking
Non-nutritive (high amplitude) sucking can indicate:
-Discrimination, infants suck faster around new stimuli
-Preference, infants suck faster to get a preferred response (preferential operant sucking paradigm)
Child Physiological observations:
Heart rate
Changes in heart rate can indicate a child’s response eg. heartrate increase in response to mother’s voice and decreases in response to stranger
Child Physiological observations:
EEG
EEGs can show electrical signal in the brain, for instances babies brains respond to their own name
Child Physiological observations:
Neuroimaging techniques
Can show brain activity and abnormalities. For example, fcMRI may predict autism spectrum disorder in infants
Adult Research methods
-Tasks and tests
-Questionairres
Experimental designs:
Longitudinal
Studying the same group as they age
Experimental designs:
Cross-sectional
Studying different groups for different ages
What is culture?
Culture is the knowledge, beliefs, laws, traditions, and customs of a group; this is dynamic and passed on through generations
Cause of different cultures
Migration and settlement cause separate groups of humans which developed to have different cultures
Cross-cultural studies
The use of data from many societies and cultures to creat a bigger picture of human behaviour and psychology
WEIRD people
Westernised
Educated
Industrialised
Rich
Democratic
WEIRD Samples in Behavioural sciences
Between 2003 and 2007, 68% of participants in studies across 6 psychology disciplines where from the USA, and 96% were from the Industrialised West
Similarly, 99% of the authors were from Western countries.
96%of samples are from 12% of the population
Student Samples
Undergraduate students are 4000 times more likely to participate in studies, making them the overwhelming majority of samples
The problem with WEIRD and Student samples
This restricted demographic means we are only getting insight into specific cultures, which may not be universal experiences, so the data is biased
Universality of expression
There are 6 universal of emotions, which are depicted with similar expressions throughout cultures:
-Anger
-Disgust
-Fear
-Sad
-Surprise
-Happy
Cultural differences in development:
First words
Uk children say “mama”, “dada” ect while hunter-gatherer cultures first communicate about resources eg “take this”
Cultural differences in development:
Motor skills
Different milestone in Western vs Africa
-eg. Uganda children sit, crawl, and walk faster than in the west
Cultural differences in development:
Sleeping
Separate bedrooms is generally unique to the west, in 2/3 of societies beds are shared, an co-sleeping is common, and shared bedrooms even more so
Cultural differences in development:
Causes
-Rearing methods
-Beliefs
-Priorities
-Family type (Nuclear vs multigenerational)
