Week 3 Flashcards
Development in the Biological Context 3 parts
Genetics
Neuropsychology
Temperament
General Developmental Framework
Five contexts:
- Biological
- Individual
- Family
- Social
- Cultural
These interact
Genetics
- Genotype
- Phenotype
- Genes vs environment (nature vs nuture)
- Epigenetics
- Heritability estimates
- Evocative gene-environment interactions
- Niche-picking
Neuropsychology
- Brain development: functions of specific areas and
connections between them - Development into adolescence and early adulthood
- > Pruning (Neural connections that are not used and needed gradually disappear from the brain as it matures.)-> Myelination (coating the axon of each neuron with a fatty coating called myelin, which protects the neuron and helps it conduct signals more efficiently. Begins in the brain stem and cerebellum before birth, but is not completed in the frontal cortex until late in adolescence.)
Temperament language researchers use
Thomas & Chess (1977)
“Difficult”, “slow to warm-up”, “easy”
Rothbart (2011)
- Surgency (activity engagement, openness)
- negative affectivity
- effortful control (dimension of temperament related to the self-regulation of emotional reactivity and behaviour. Impulse control.)
Temperament consistently associated with
development of psychopathology. Temperament a precursor to personality types.
Temperament: Goodness of Fit
Match between the demand of the environment
and the temperamental style of the child.
Developmental Psychopathology:
Biological Context
Several processes:
- Genetically inherited traits
- Abnormalities in brain structure
- Dysfunctions in brain function or miscommunication among parts of the brain
- Inadequate myelination
- Imbalances in brain chemistry
- Dysfunctions of the pruning process
- Difficult temperament
Development in the Individual Context
- Cognitive development
- Emotional development
- Attachment
- Self-development
- Moral development
- Sex and gender
Normative development: Cognitive development
- Schemas (worldviews)
- Assimilation (incorporating new info into existing schema)
- Accommodation (altering schema to take into account new info)
Adaptive development has good balance of the two
Development of Psychopathology:
Cognitive processes 5
1- Imbalance. Assimilation (too much, make eroneous errors, applying an old rule to things that aren’t working in the situation)
- Accommodation (too much leads to wishy washy changing your mind too often)
2- Magical thinking - belief that you can control/cause things that you can’t. Can occur under conditions of stress such as parental separation. They think they can do something. Can also mis-attribute blame on themselves.
3- Egocentrism - i.e. very young child thinks an object doesn’t exist unless they are interacting with it. Also normal in adolescence. Ties in with CD and ODD.
4- Cognitive delays and school failure - affects self-esteem, disruptive behaviour, peer rejection etc.
5- Cognitive distortion - anx and dep, hostile attribution bias.
Normative development:
Emotional development 4
1 - Emotion expression - (if parent responds in only anxious ways, child might display anxious expression to neutral things)
2- Emotion recognition (need to be able to recognise emotions in others)
3- Emotion understanding (need to understand our own and others’ emotions for self concept and moral dev)
4- Emotion regulation (under regulate = externalizing disorders or over regulate, = internalizing disorders)
Emotional processes
- Inaccurate emotion expression, recognition, or understanding
- Emotion dysregulation
Normative development: Attachment
Attachment theory - adaptive for kids to stay close to family.
Transactional processes - Child behaviour influences parent behaviour, vice versa. Attachment is an interaction.
Continuity of attachment across the lifespan
Cross-cultural diversity in attachment
Patterns of attachment
Secure
- Insecure-avoidant
- Insecure-resistant (ambivalent)
- Insecure-disorganised
Risks associated with insecure attachment
Insecurity (internalise that the world is trustworthy or not)
Inhibited mastery motivation (if we feel secure, we can go off and develop mastery)
Internal working models (working models that we develop on relationships are based on early attachment)
