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PSYCH 3GG3 > Week 1 > Flashcards

Week 1 Flashcards

1
Q

Define Developmental Psych

A

Scientific study of changes in psychology and behavior often from the prenatal period to early adulthood and sometimes including the progression through older adulthood.

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2
Q

Normative Changes

A

similar - entire species goes through

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3
Q

idiosyncratic changes

A

how do people differ from one another) respond to the environment and adapt to circumstance

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4
Q

scientific method can be used for: (2 things)

A

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

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5
Q

What is a hypothesis and what is important about it in relation to developmental psych?

A

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

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6
Q

Explain the relationship between development and accidental death

A

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

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7
Q

Development begins when…

A

the genome of a new individual is complete

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8
Q

Why Study the Psychological Development of Children? (3)

A
  1. Gives insight into universal human nature
    - Learn which traits are human universals robust across species-typical environments and learn how environment effects
  2. 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
  3. 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
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9
Q

Plato

A
  • 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
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10
Q

Aristotle

A
  • empiricist (all knowledge depends on direct experience or empirical observation)
  • a blank slate
  • Acquire knowledge by being exposed to the knowledge
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11
Q

Locke

A
  • 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
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12
Q

Rosseau

A
  • 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
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13
Q

Charles Darwin

A
  • 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
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14
Q

G Stanley Hall

A
  1. First psych laboratory in US at John Hopkins -
  2. 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

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15
Q

James Mark Baldwin

A

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

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16
Q

Arnold Gesell

A

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

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17
Q
A

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

18
Q

Jean Piaget - most influential in cognitive development

A

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

19
Q

Lev Vygotsky

A

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.

20
Q

Erik Erikson

A

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

21
Q

Urie Bronfenbrenner

A

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

22
Q

Jerome Kagan

A

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

23
Q

Walter Mischel

A

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

24
Q

Evolutionary Psychology

A

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

25
Q

An Evolutionary perspective in developmental:

A

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
26
Q

Why is evolutionary psych important to developmental psych?-four

A
  1. Promotes research that is consistent with evolution by natural selection
  2. 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
  3. FRAMES OUR INQUIRY - evolutionary perspective allows us to make sense of the interaction between a developing organism and its environment
  4. 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
27
Q

Continuous development

A

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

28
Q

Discontinuity

A

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

29
Q

False-belief task (discontinuity)

A

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

30
Q

Scale Error (discontinuity)

A

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

31
Q

Plasticity

A

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

32
Q

Stability

A

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

33
Q

Normative approach

A
  • 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
34
Q

Individual differences approach

A
  • 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

35
Q

Plasticity and Stability

A
  1. Are traits stable or do they change
  2. 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
36
Q

Normative Development and Individual Differences

A

Looking at children with diagnosis to no diagnosis, across culture etc

Characterize differences, explain differences, may differ by trait, may reflect researcher’s interests

  1. Some traits are designed to follow species-typical developmental timelines while some are designed to take info as input that influences development
  2. Different approaches reflect the different interests of different researchers
37
Q

Interactionism

A

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

38
Q

Functionality

A

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

39
Q

Instinct Blindness

A

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

40
Q

Empirical Research

A

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

41
Q

The environment of evolutionary adaptedness

A

the conditions under which our ancestors lived and to which our morphological and psychological features are adapted

42
Q

Variance in EEA

A

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

PSYCH 3GG3 (12 decks)

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