Chapter 2: There's of development

Question 1

Parsimony

Answer 1

a criterion for evaluating the scientific merit of theories
- a parsimonious theory is one that uses relatively few explanatory principles to explain a broad set of observations.

Question 2

Falsifiability

Answer 2

a criterion for evaluating the scientific merit of theories; a parsimonious theory is one that uses relatively few explanatory principles to explain a broad set of observations.

Question 3

Heuristic value

Answer 3

a criterion for evaluating the scientific merit of theories. A heuristic theory is one that continues to stimulate new research and discoveries

Question 4

Psychosexual Theory

Answer 4

Freud’s theory states maturation of the sex instinct underlies stages of personality development, and that the manner in which parents manage children’s instinctual impulses determines the traits that children display.

Question 5

repression

Answer 5

a type of motivated forgetting in which anxiety-provoking thoughts and conflicts are forced out of conscious awareness

Question 6

ID, EGO, SUPEREGO

Answer 6

ID: psychoanalytic term for the inborn component of the personality that is compelled by the drives
EGO: psychoanalytic term for the rational component of the personality.
Superego: psychoanalytic term for the component of personality that consists of one’s internalized moral standards.

Question 6

Fixation

Answer 6

arrested development at a particular psychosexual stage that can prevent movement to higher stages

Question 7

Psychosocial Theory

Answer 7

Erikson’s revision of Freud’s theory, which emphasizes sociocultural (rather than sexual) determinants of development and posits a series of eight psychosocial conflicts that people must resolve successfully to display healthy psychological adjustments.

Question 7

behaviourism

Answer 7

a school of thinking in psychology that holds that conclusions about human development should be based on controlled observations of overt behaviour

Question 8

cognitive development

Answer 8

age-related changes that occur in mental activities such as attending, perceiving, learning, thinking, and remembering

Question 9

Scheme

Answer 9

an organized pattern of thought or action that a child constructs to make sense of some aspect of his or her experience

Question 10

assimilation

Answer 10

Piaget’s term for the process by which children interpret new experiences by incorporating them into their existing schemes

Question 11

Accommodation

Answer 11

Piaget’s term for the process by which children modify their existing schemes in order to incorporate or adapt to new experiences

Question 12

disequilibrium

Answer 12

imbalances or contradictions between an individual’s thought processes and environmental events.

Question 13

Sociocultural Theory

Answer 13

Vygotsky’s perspective on development, in which children acquire their culture’s values, beliefs, and problem-solving strategies through collaborative dialogues with more knowledgeable members of society.

Question 14

Information-processing Theory

Answer 14

a perspective that views the human mind as a continuously developing symbol-manipulating system, similar to a computer, into which information flows, is operated on, and is converted into output

Question 15

ethology

Answer 15

the study of the bioevolutionary bases of behaviour and development.

Question 16

sensitive period

Answer 16

period of time that is optimal for the development of particular capacities or behaviours and in which the individual is particularly sensitive to environmental influences that would foster these attributes.

Question 17

evolutionary theory

Answer 17

the study of the bioevolutionary basis of behaviour and development, with a focus on survival of the genes.

Question 18

ecological systems theory

Answer 18

Bronfenbrenner’s model emphasizing that the developing person is embedded in a series of environmental systems that interact with one another and with the person to influence development.

Question 19

microsystem

Answer 19

the immediate settings (including role relationships and activities) that the person actually encounters; the innermost of Bronfenbrenner’s environmental layers or contexts.

Question 20

Mesosystem

Answer 20

the interconnections among an individual’s immediate settings or microsystems; the second of Bronfenbrenner’s environmental layers or contexts.

Question 21

Macrosystem

Answer 21

the larger cultural or subcultural context in which development occurs; Bronfenbrenner’s outermost environmental layer or context.

Question 22

exosystem

Answer 22

social systems that children and adolescents do not directly experience but that may nonetheless influence their development; the third of Bronfenbrenner’s environmental layers or contexts

Question 23

chronosystem

Answer 23

in ecological systems theory, changes in the individual or the environment that occur over time and influence the direction development takes.

Question 24

family social system

Answer 24

the complex network of relationships, interactions, and patterns of influence that characterize a family with three or more members.

Question 25

continuity/discontinuity issue

Answer 25

a debate among theorists about whether developmental changes are quantitative and continuous, or qualitative and discontinuous

Question 26

2 types of stability: positional and absolute

Answer 26

positional stability:
- stability of an individual’s relative position in a group of people with regard to a psychological characteristic.
absolute stability:
- no change in a person’s attribute over the course of development.

Question 27

Types of change: quantitive and qualitative

Answer 27

Quantitive Change:
- incremental change in degree without sudden transformations; for example, some view the small yearly increases in height and weight that 2- to 11-year-olds display as quantitative developmental changes.
Qualititative change:
- a change in kind that makes individuals fundamentally different than they were before; the transformation of a prelinguistic infant into a language user is viewed by many as a qualitative change in communication skills.

Question 28

holistic nature of development

Answer 28

awareness that development is a holistic process even when being studied as a segmented, separate process.

Question 29

Types of models

Answer 29

Mechanistic Model: view of children as passive entities whose developmental paths are primarily determined by external (environmental) influences.

organismic model: view of children as active entities whose developmental paths are primarily determined by forces from within themselves.

Contextual Model: view of children as active entities whose developmental paths represent a continuous, dynamic interplay between internal forces (nature) and external influences (nurture).

Question 30

Developmental systems view

Answer 30

view that the developmental process results from continuing interactions between biological, psychological, and social factors.