Chapter 1 (intro) Flashcards
(20 cards)
What is Developmental Psychology?
The scientific study of how people change/do not change across their whole lives.
Plasticity
our ability to change and the flexibility of many of our characteristics. ex, neuroplasticity. The brain learns from experience and through development we recover from injury and challenges.
Cohort
generation/people born in the same time period in a society (history-grade influence)
age-grade
a specific age group, e.g. toddler, adolescent, or senior
The “dimensions” of human development
physical, cognitive, and psychosocial
Who came up with the lifespan perspective?
Paul Baltes
Describe Socioeconomic status
A family’s level of income, education, and occupation. These aspects are pretty interconnected - a person with a better education is able to get a high-end occupation and is therefore paid more. On the flip side: low wages, more lay-offs, require less education. This class system is moveable based on social and individual limits/opportunities.
What is the poverty level?
A threshold of income based on family size. Those who fall below the line are in poverty, and they tend to have poorer health and diet, a lower life expectancy, more stress, difficulty in school, and less access to healthcare.
cultural relativity
an appreciation for cultural differences and the understanding that cultural practices are best understood from the viewpoint of that particular culture.
Lifespan/Longevity
The amount of time a species can live in the most optimal conditions (the lifespan of humans is 122)
Life expectancy
The number of years someone under certain conditions (e.g. a specific time period) can expect to live
teratogens
environmental factors that can lead to birth defects
Describe continuous development and who believes in it
The theory that development is continuous, slow, and gradual. Adults don’t have new skills, just advanced skills they had as children. Vygotsky.
Behaviorism
Also known as the Learning theory, they wrongly believed you cannot objectively study the mind, so you study behavior. ex. Skinner, who used reinforcements to shape behavior in animals (skinner box/operant conditioning)
We influence and are influenced by our environment
Reciprocal determinism
Is it possible to measure thoughts and feelings?
Yes. The behaviorists do not agree, but they are old and wrong.
Cognitive theory (of development)
how our mental processes/cognitions change over time (literally just studying how our cognition develops). Three important theories are Piaget’s, Vygotsky’s, and Information-processing.
culture
the *learned values, language, behavior, knowledge, and objects of a group of people.
list the different conceptions of age
social, chronological, biological, and psychological
attrition
when participants fail to complete all portions of a study. It should always be predicted/accounted for, but can never be pinned to a cause.
