Chapter 1 Flashcards
(33 cards)
What is the ways in which people grow, change, and stay the same throughout their lives, from conception to death?
Lifespan human development
What’s development? What are the five ways it’s described?
Development is the transformation from infant to adult, but it doesn’t end with adulthood.
It’s described as multidimensional, multidirectional, plastic, influenced by multiple contexts, and multidisciplinary.
What’s physical development? Cognitive development?
Physical: refers to body maturation and growth, including body size, proportion, appearance, health, and perceptual abilities
Cognitive: refers to the maturation of thought processes and the tools that we use to obtain knowledge, become aware of the world around us, and solve problems
What’s socioemotional development?
Socioemotional: includes changes in personality, emotions, views of oneself, social skills, and interpersonal relationships with family and friends
How is development multidirectional?
It’s not just a series of improvements in functioning and performance; it has both gains and losses, growth and decline throughout the lifespan.
What term refers to to development’s ability to be malleable or changeable? (Ex. The brain and body compensating for illness and injury)
Plasticity
What is context? Culture? Cohort?
Context: When and where a person develops (ex, family, neighborhood, country, culture, historical time period)
Culture: set of customs, knowledge, attitudes, and values that are shared by members of a group and are learned through group interactions
Cohort: generation of people born at the same time, explains why they’re similar
What’s continuity and discontinuity?
Continuous: slow/gradual change
Discontinuous: abrupt change
What’s the nature-nurture issue?
Is development caused by nature (genetics, etc.) or nurture (environment)?
What’s a theory? Hypothesis?
Theory: a way of organizing a set of observations or facts into a comprehensive explanation of how something works
Hypothesis: proposed explanation for a given phenomenon, that can be tested by research
What’s a good theory? Why are hypotheses tested?
A good theory is falsifiable it capable of generating a hypothesis that can be tested and potentially refuted. Hypotheses are tested in search of flaws, not to prove it
What theories describe development and behavior as a result of the interplay of inner drives, memories, and conflicts of which we are unaware and cannot control?
Psychoanalytic theories
What’s Freud’s psychosexual theory?
There are five stages: oral, anal, phallic, latency, and genital. Phallic refers to attraction to one parent, fear of other, and eventual pushing of these emotions to the unconscious.
What’s Erikson’s psychosocial theory?
There are 8 stages: trust vs. mistrust, autonomy vs. shame and doubt, initiative vs. guilt, industry vs. inferiority, identity vs. role confusion, intimacy vs. isolation, generativity vs. stagnation, and integrity vs. despair.
How is Erikson’s theory different from Freud’s?
Erikson placed less emphasis on instinctual drives as motivators of development and instead focused o the role of the social world, society, and culture in shaping development. Each stage has a crisis to resolve. If not resolved it will be revisited throughout life, but it’s never too late to resolve a crisis!!
What’s behaviorism?
The belief that all behavior is influenced by the physical and social environment
What’s a form of behaviorist learning in which a person or animal comes to associate environmental stimuli with physiological responses? (This is which a neutral stimulus can elicit a response originally from another stimulus.)
Classical conditioning (ex. Pavlov’s dogs salivating at the sound of a bell before food)
What behaviorist theory accounts for voluntary, non physiological responses? (This is when behavior becomes more or less probable to be repeated depending on the consequences.)
Operant conditioning.
Reinforcement: rewarding/pleasant outcome
Punishment: aversive/unpleasant outcome
What’s the social learning theory?
The idea that people actively process information; they think and feel emotions, and their thoughts and feelings influence their behavior. This was proposed by Bandura, who viewed individuals as active in their development, not passively molded.
What’s observational learning? And reciprocal determinism?
The idea that people learn through observing and imitating models; the idea that individuals and the environment interact and influence each other
What is a meta-theory?
A schematic model to represent phenomena, a way of looking at things, a philosophical system; more general than a grand theory & different world views aren’t compatible
What are mechanistic theories?
They’re passive. Ex. John Locke & his “tabula rasa” or blank slate theory; individuals are reactive/ machine-like and all behavior is a result of external causes.
Development is continuous and additive like a ramp & focus is on quantitative change
What are organismic theories?
Active development, like Rousseau’s “noble-savage” theory; children set their own development in motion, initiate events and don’t just react; focus on qualitative change & development is like a flight of stairs, different @ various ages
What’s the cognitive-developmental theory? The 4 stages?
Piaget claimed that children & adults are active explorers and learn of the world around them by organizing what they learn into cognitive schémas (sensorimotor, preoperations, concrete operations, and formal operations.
