Unit 4: Human Development Across the Lifespan Flashcards
Mary Ainsworth
Research by Ainsworth and her colleagues suggests that attachment emerges out of a complex interplay between infant and mother.Ainsworth used a method called the strange situation procedure, in which infants are exposed to a series of eight separation and reunion episodes to assess the quality of their attachment. The three-minute episodes in this carefully orchestrated laboratory procedure involve events such as a stranger entering a room where an infant is playing with a parent nearby, followed by the parent leaving, returning, leaving, and returning again. The child’s reactions (distress, comfort) to the parent’s departures and returns are carefully monitored to gauge attachment quality.
Infant–mother attachments vary in quality. Ainsworth and her colleagues found that these attachments follow three patterns. Fortunately, most infants develop a secure attachment. They play and explore comfortably with their mother present, become visibly upset when she leaves, and are quickly calmed by her return. However, some children display a pattern called anxious-ambivalent attachment. They appear anxious even when their mother is near and protest excessively when she leaves, but they are not particularly comforted when she returns. Children in the third category seek little contact with their mother and often are not distressed when she leaves, a condition labelled avoidant attachment. Years later, other researchers added a fourth category called disorganized-disoriented attachment. These children appear confused about whether they should approach or avoid their mother and are especially insecure.
Jay Belsky
Jay Belsky’s process of parenting model, published in 1984, continues to be widely referenced within the scientific literature. The main premise of this model is that parenting is multiply determined and is influenced by characteristics of the parent, child, and social context.
John Bowlby
There is an alternative explanation of attachment proposed by John Bowlby. Bowlby was impressed by the importance of contact comfort to Harlow’s monkeys and by the apparently unlearned nature of this preference. Influenced by evolutionary theories, Bowlby argued that there must be a biological basis for attachment. According to his view, infants are biologically programmed to emit behavior (smiling, cooing, clinging, and so on) that triggers an affectionate, protective response from adults.
Bowlby also asserted that adults are programmed by evolutionary forces to be captivated by this behavior and to respond with warmth, love, and protection. Obviously, these characteristics would be adaptive in terms of promoting children’s survival. Attachment theory has had an evolutionary slant from its very beginning, long before evolutionary theory became influential in psychology. While John Bowlby analyzed attachment in terms of its survival value for infants, contemporary evolutionary theorists emphasize how attachment contributes to parents’ and children’s reproductive fitness
Erik Erikson
Like Freud, Erikson concluded that events in early childhood leave a permanent stamp on adult personality. However, unlike Freud, Erikson theorized that personality continues to evolve over the entire life span.
Building on Freud’s earlier work, Erikson devised a stage theory of personality development. As you’ll see in reading this chapter, many theories describe development in terms of stages. A stage is a developmental period during which characteristic patterns of behaviour are exhibited and certain capacities become established. Stage theories assume that (1) individuals must progress through specified stages in a particular order because each stage builds on the previous stage, (2) progress through these stages is strongly related to age, and (3) development is marked by major discontinuities that usher in dramatic transitions in behavior.
Erikson partitioned the life span into eight stages, each of which brings a psychosocial crisis involving transitions in important social relationships. According to Erikson, personality is shaped by how individuals deal with these psychosocial crises. Each crisis involves a struggle between two opposing tendencies, such as trust versus mistrust or initiative versus guilt, both of which are experienced by the person. Erikson described the stages in terms of these antagonistic tendencies, which represent personality traits that people display in varying degrees over the remainder of their lives. Although the names for Erikson’s stages suggest either–or outcomes, he viewed each stage as a tug of war that determined the subsequent balance between opposing polarities in personality. All eight stages in Erikson’s theory are charted in Figure 11.7. We describe the first four childhood stages here and discuss the remaining stages in the upcoming sections on adolescence and adulthood.
Trust versus Mistrust.- Erikson’s first stage encompasses the first year of life, when an infant has to depend completely on adults to take care of its basic needs for necessities such as food, a warm blanket, and changed diapers. If an infant’s basic biological needs are adequately met by his or her caregivers and sound attachments are formed, the child should develop an optimistic, trusting attitude toward the world. However, if the infant’s basic needs are taken care of poorly, a more distrusting, pessimistic personality may result.
Autonomy versus Shame and Doubt.- Erikson’s second stage unfolds during the second and third years of life, when parents begin toilet training and other efforts to regulate the child’s behavior. The child must begin to take some personal responsibility for feeding, dressing, and bathing. If all goes well, he or she acquires a sense of self-sufficiency. But, if parents are never satisfied with the child’s efforts and there are constant parent–child conflicts, the child may develop a sense of personal shame and self-doubt.
Initiative versus Guilt.- In Erikson’s third stage, lasting roughly from ages three to six, children experiment and take initiatives that may sometimes conflict with their parents’ rules. Overcontrolling parents may begin to instill feelings of guilt, and self-esteem may suffer. Parents need to support their children’s emerging independence while maintaining appropriate controls. In the ideal situation, children will retain their sense of initiative while learning to respect the rights and privileges of other family members.
Industry versus Inferiority.- In the fourth stage (age six through puberty), the challenge of learning to function socially is extended beyond the family to the broader social realm of the neighborhood and school. Children who are able to function effectively in this less nurturant social sphere where productivity is highly valued should learn to value achievement and to take pride in accomplishment, resulting in a sense of competence.
The strength of Erikson’s theory is that it accounts for both continuity and transition in personality development. It accounts for transition by showing how new challenges in social relationships stimulate personality development throughout life. It accounts for continuity by drawing connections between early childhood experiences and aspects of adult personality. One measure of a theory’s value is how much research it generates, and Erikson’s theory continues to guide a fair amount of research (Thomas, 2005).
On the negative side of the ledger, Erikson’s theory has depended heavily on illustrative case studies, which are open to varied interpretations. Another weakness is that the theory provides an “idealized” description of “typical” developmental patterns. Thus, it’s not well suited for explaining the enormous personality differences that exist among people. Inadequate explanation of individual differences is a common problem with stage theories of development. This shortcoming surfaces again in the next section, where we’ll examine Jean Piaget’s stage theory of cognitive development.
Harry Harlow
Harlow removed monkeys from their mothers at birth and raised them in the laboratory with two types of artificial “substitute mothers.” One type of artificial mother was made of terry cloth and could provide contact comfort. The other type of artificial mother was made of wire. Half of the monkeys were fed from a bottle attached to a wire mother and the other half were fed by a cloth mother. The young monkeys’ attachment to their substitute mothers was tested by introducing a frightening stimulus, such as a strange toy. If reinforcement through feeding were the key to attachment, the frightened monkeys should have scampered off to the mother that had fed them. This was not the case. The young monkeys scrambled for their cloth mothers, even if they were not fed by them. Harlow’s work made a simple reinforcement explanation of attachment unrealistic for animals, let alone for more complex human beings.
Lawrence Kohlberg
By presenting similar dilemmas to subjects and studying their responses, Lawrence Kohlberg devised a model of how moral reasoning develops. What is morality? That’s a complicated question that philosophers have debated for centuries. For our purposes, it will suffice to say that morality involves the ability to discern right from wrong and to behave accordingly.
Kohlberg’s model is the most influential of a number of competing theories that attempt to explain how youngsters develop a sense of right and wrong. His work was derived from much earlier work by Jean Piaget (1932), who theorized that moral development is determined by cognitive development. By this he meant that the way individuals think out moral issues depends on their level of cognitive development. This assumption provided the springboard for Kohlberg’s research.
Kohlberg’s theory focuses on moral reasoning rather than overt behaviour. This point is best illustrated by describing Kohlberg’s method of investigation. He presented his subjects with thorny moral questions such as Heinz’s dilemma. He then asked them what the actor in the dilemma should do and, more important, why. It was the why that interested Kohlberg. He examined the nature and progression of subjects’ moral reasoning.
The result of this work is the stage theory of moral reasoning outlined in Figure 11.12. Kohlberg found that individuals progress through a series of three levels of moral development, each of which can be broken into two sublevels, yielding a total of six stages. Each stage represents a different approach to thinking about right and wrong.
Younger children at the preconventional level think in terms of external authority. Acts are wrong because they are punished or right because they lead to positive consequences. Older children who have reached the conventional level of moral reasoning see rules as necessary for maintaining social order. They therefore accept these rules as their own. They “internalize” these rules not to avoid punishment but to be virtuous and win approval from others. Moral thinking at this stage is relatively inflexible. Rules are viewed as absolute guidelines that should be enforced rigidly.
During adolescence, some youngsters move on to the postconventional level, which involves working out a personal code of ethics. Acceptance of rules is less rigid, and moral thinking shows some flexibility. Subjects at the postconventional level allow for the possibility that someone might not comply with some of society’s rules if they conflict with personal ethics. For example, subjects at this level might applaud a newspaper reporter who goes to jail rather than reveal a source of information who was promised anonymity.
How has Kohlberg’s theory fared in research? The central ideas have received reasonable support. Studies have shown that youngsters generally do move through Kohlberg’s stages of moral reasoning in the order he proposed (Walker, 1989). Furthermore, relations between age and level of moral reasoning are in the predicted directions (Rest, 1986; see Figure 11.13). Although these findings support Kohlberg’s model, critics note that it is not unusual to find that a person shows signs of several adjacent levels of moral reasoning at a particular point in development (Krebs & Denton, 2005). As we noted in the critique of Piaget, this mixing of stages is a problem for virtually all stage theories. Evidence is also mounting that Kohlberg’s theory reflects an individualistic ideology characteristic of modern Western nations that is much more culture specific than Kohlberg appreciated (Miller, 2006). Finally, a consensus is building that Kohlberg’s theory has led to a constricted focus on reasoning about interpersonal conflicts, while ignoring many other important aspects of moral development (Walker, 2007). Contemporary theorists note that moral behavior depends on many factors besides reasoning, including emotional reactions, variations in temperament, and cultural background.
James Marcia
Building on Erikson’s insights, James Marcia proposed that the presence or absence of a sense of commitment (to life goals and values) and a sense of crisis (active questioning and exploration) can combine to produce four different identity statuses. In order of increasing maturity, Marcia’s four identity statuses begin with identity diffusion, a state of rudderless apathy, with no commitment to an ideology. Identity foreclosure is a premature commitment to visions, values, and roles—typically those prescribed by one’s parents. Foreclosure is associated with conformity and not being very open to new experiences (Kroger, 2003). An identity moratorium involves delaying commitment for a while to experiment with alternative ideologies and careers. Identity achievement involves arriving at a sense of self and direction after some consideration of alternative possibilities.
Identity achievement is associated with higher self-esteem, conscientiousness, security, achievement motivation, and capacity for intimacy. However, research suggests that people tend to reach identity achievement at later ages than originally envisioned by Marcia. In one large-scale study, by late adolescence only 22–26 percent of the sample had reached identity achievement. Thus, the struggle for a sense of identity routinely extends into young adulthood. Indeed, some people continue to struggle with identity issues well into middle and even late adulthood.
Jean Piaget
The investigation of cognitive development was dominated in most of the second half of the 20th century by the theory of Jean Piaget (Kessen, 1996) and there is no doubt that questions related to cognitive development continue to predominate in developmental psychology (e.g., Klahr & Chen, 2011). Much of our discussion of cognitive development is devoted to Piaget’s theory and the research it generated, although we’ll also delve into other approaches to cognitive development.
Jean Piaget was an interdisciplinary scholar whose own cognitive development was exceptionally rapid. In his early 20s, after he had earned a doctorate in natural science and published a novel, Piaget’s interest turned to psychology. He met Theodore Simon, who had collaborated with Alfred Binet in devising the first useful intelligence tests. Working in Simon’s Paris laboratory, Piaget administered intelligence tests to many children to develop better test norms. In doing this testing, Piaget became intrigued by the reasoning underlying the children’s wrong answers. He decided that measuring children’s intelligence was less interesting than studying how children use their intelligence. In 1921, he moved to Geneva, where he spent the rest of his life studying cognitive development. Many of his ideas were based on insights gleaned from careful observations of his own three children during their infancy.
Like Erikson’s theory, Piaget’s model is a stage theory of development. Piaget proposed that youngsters progress through four major stages of cognitive development, which are characterized by fundamentally different thought processes: (1) the sensorimotor period (birth to age two), (2) the preoperational period (ages two to seven), (3) the concrete operational period (ages 7 to 11), and (4) the formal operational period (age 11 onward). Figure 11.8 provides an overview of each of these periods. Piaget regarded his age norms as approximations and acknowledged that transitional ages may vary, but he was convinced that all children progress through the stages of cognitive development in the same order.
Noting that children actively explore the world around them, Piaget asserted that interaction with the environment and maturation gradually alter the way children think. According to Piaget, children progress in their thinking through the complementary processes of assimilation and accommodation. Assimilation involves interpreting new experiences in terms of existing mental structures without changing them. In contrast, accommodation involves changing existing mental structures to explain new experiences. Accommodation and assimilation often occur interactively. For instance, a child who has learned to call four-legged pets “puppies” may apply this scheme the first time she encounters a cat (assimilation), but she will eventually discover that puppies and cats are different types of animals and make adjustments to her mental schemes (accommodation). With the companion processes of assimilation and accommodation in mind, let’s turn now to the four stages in Piaget’s theory.
Sensorimotor Period - One of Piaget’s foremost contributions was to greatly enhance our understanding of mental development in the earliest months of life. The first stage in his theory is the sensorimotor period, which lasts from birth to about age two. Piaget called this stage sensorimotor because infants are developing the ability to coordinate their sensory input with their motor actions.
The major development during the sensorimotor stage is the gradual appearance of symbolic thought. At the beginning of this stage, a child’s behaviour is dominated by innate reflexes. But by the end of the stage, the child can use mental symbols to represent objects (e.g., a mental image of a favourite toy). The key to this transition is the acquisition of the concept of object permanence.
Object permanence develops when a child recognizes that objects continue to exist even when they are no longer visible. Although you surely take the permanence of objects for granted, infants aren’t aware of this permanence at first. If you show a four-month-old an eye-catching toy and then cover the toy with a pillow, the child will not attempt to search for the toy. Piaget inferred from this observation that the child does not understand that the toy continues to exist under the pillow. The notion of object permanence does not dawn on children overnight. The first signs of this insight usually appear between four and eight months of age, when children will often pursue an object that is partially covered in their presence. Progress is gradual, and Piaget believed that children typically don’t master the concept of object permanence until they’re about 18 months old.
Preoperational Period
During the preoperational period, which extends roughly from age two to age seven, children gradually improve in their use of mental images. Although progress in symbolic thought continues, Piaget emphasized the shortcomings in preoperational thought.
Consider a simple problem that Piaget presented to youngsters. He would take two identical beakers and fill each with the same amount of water. After a child had agreed that the two beakers contained the same amount of water, he would pour the water from one of the beakers into a much taller and thinner beaker (see Figure 11.9). He would then ask the child whether the two differently shaped beakers still contained the same amount of water. Confronted with a problem like this, children in the preoperational period generally said no. They typically focused on the higher water line in the taller beaker and insisted that there was more water in the slender beaker. They had not yet mastered the principle of conservation. Conservation is Piaget’s term for the awareness that physical quantities remain constant in spite of changes in their shape or appearance. Why are preoperational children unable to solve conservation problems? According to Piaget, their inability to understand conservation is due to some basic flaws in preoperational thinking. These flaws include centration, irreversibility, and egocentrism.
Centration
is the tendency to focus on just one feature of a problem, neglecting other important aspects. When working on the conservation problem with water, preoperational children tend to concentrate on the height of the water while ignoring the width. They have difficulty focusing on several aspects of a problem at once.
Irreversibility
is the inability to envision reversing an action. Preoperational children can’t mentally “undo” something. For instance, in grappling with the conservation of water, they don’t think about what would happen if the water was poured back from the tall beaker into the original beaker.
Egocentrism in thinking is characterized by a limited ability to share another person’s viewpoint. Indeed, Piaget felt that preoperational children fail to appreciate that there are points of view other than their own. For instance, if you ask a preoperational girl whether her sister has a sister, she’ll probably say no if they are the only two girls in the family. She’s unable to view sisterhood from her sister’s perspective (this also shows irreversibility).
A notable feature of egocentrism is animism—the belief that all things are living, just like oneself. Thus, youngsters attribute lifelike, human qualities to inanimate objects, asking questions such as “When does the ocean stop to rest?” or “Why does the wind get so mad?”
As you can see, Piaget emphasized the weaknesses apparent in preoperational thought. Indeed, that is why he called this stage preoperational. The ability to perform operations—internal transformations, manipulations, and reorganizations of mental structures—emerges in the next stage.
Concrete Operational Period
The development of mental operations marks the beginning of the concrete operational period, which usually lasts from about age 7 to age 11. Piaget called this stage concrete operations because children can perform operations only on images of tangible objects and actual events.
Among the operations that children master during this stage are reversibility and decentration. Reversibility permits a child to mentally undo an action. Decentration allows the child to focus on more than one feature of a problem simultaneously. The newfound ability to coordinate several aspects of a problem helps the child appreciate that there are several ways to look at things. This ability in turn leads to a decline in egocentrism and gradual mastery of conservation as it applies to liquid, mass, number, volume, area, and length (see Figure 11.10).
As children master concrete operations, they develop a variety of new problem-solving capacities. Let’s examine another problem studied by Piaget. Give a preoperational child seven carnations and three daisies. Tell the child the names for the two types of flowers and ask the child to sort them into carnations and daisies. That should be no problem. Now ask the child whether there are more carnations or more daisies. Most children will correctly respond that there are more carnations. Now ask the child whether there are more carnations or more flowers. At this point, most preoperational children will stumble and respond incorrectly that there are more carnations than flowers. Generally, preoperational children can’t handle hierarchical classification problems that require them to focus simultaneously on two levels of classification. However, the child who has advanced to the concrete operational stage is not as limited by centration and can work successfully with hierarchical classification problems.
Formal Operational Period
The final stage in Piaget’s theory is the formal operational period, which typically begins around 11 years of age. In this stage, children begin to apply their operations to abstract concepts in addition to concrete objects. Indeed, during this stage, youngsters come to enjoy the heady contemplation of abstract concepts. Many adolescents spend hours mulling over hypothetical possibilities related to abstractions such as justice, love, and free will.
According to Piaget, youngsters graduate to relatively adult modes of thinking in the formal operations stage. He did not mean to suggest that no further cognitive development occurs once children reach this stage. However, he believed that after children achieve formal operations, further developments in thinking are changes in degree rather than fundamental changes in the nature of thinking.
Adolescents in the formal operational period become more systematic in their problem-solving efforts. Children in earlier developmental stages tend to attack problems quickly, with a trial-and-error approach. In contrast, children who have achieved formal operations are more likely to think things through. They envision possible courses of action and try to use logic to reason out the likely consequences of each possible solution before they act. Thus, thought processes in the formal operational period can be characterized as abstract, systematic, logical, and reflective.
In many aspects, Piaget appears to have underestimated young children’s cognitive development (Birney et al., 2005). For example, researchers have found evidence that children understand object permanence and are capable of some symbolic thought much earlier than Piaget thought (Birney & Sternberg, 2011). Similarly, some evidence suggests that preoperational children are not as egocentric as Piaget believed (Moll & Meltzoff, 2011).
Another problem is that children often simultaneously display patterns of thinking that are characteristic of several stages. This “mixing” of stages and the fact that the transitions between stages are gradual rather than abrupt call into question the value of organizing cognitive development in terms of stages (Bjorklund, 2012). Progress in children’s thinking appears to occur in overlapping waves rather than distinct stages with clear boundaries.
Piaget believed that his theory described universal processes that should lead children everywhere to progress through uniform stages of thinking at roughly the same ages. Subsequent research has shown that the sequence of stages is largely invariant, but the timetable that children follow in passing through these stages varies considerably across cultures (Molitor & Hsu, 2011; Rogoff, 2003). Thus, Piaget underestimated the influence of cultural factors on cognitive development.
Albert Thomas and Stella Chess
Alexander Thomas and Stella Chess have conducted a major longitudinal study of the development of temperament. In a longitudinal design, investigators observe one group of participants repeatedly over a period of time. In a cross-sectional design, investigators compare groups of participants of differing age at a single point in time.
Thomas and Chess found that “temperamental individuality is well established by the time the infant is two to three months old” (Thomas & Chess, 1977, p. 153). They identified three basic styles of temperament that were apparent in most of the children. About 40 percent of the youngsters were easy children who tended to be happy, regular in sleeping and eating, adaptable, and not readily upset. Another 15 percent were slow-to-warm-up children who tended to be less cheery, less regular in their sleeping and eating, and slower in adapting to change. These children were wary of new experiences, and their emotional reactivity was moderate. Difficult children constituted 10 percent of the group. They tended to be glum, erratic in sleeping and eating, resistant to change, and relatively irritable. The remaining 35 percent of the children showed mixtures of these three temperaments.
According to Chess and Thomas (1996), a child’s temperament at three months was a fair predictor of the child’s temperament at age ten. Infants categorized as “difficult” developed more emotional problems requiring counseling than other children did. Although basic changes in temperament were seen in some children, temperament was generally stable over time.
Individual differences in temperament appear to be influenced to a considerable degree by heredity. Although temperament tends to be fairly stable over time, theorists emphasize that it is not unchangeable. Interestingly, there appear to be some modest cultural differences in the prevalence of specific temperamental styles. For example, an inhibited temperament is seen somewhat more frequently among Chinese children in comparison to North American children. It is not clear whether this disparity is rooted in genetic differences, cultural practices, or both.
Lev Vygotsky
Vygotsky was a prominent Russian psychologist whose research ended prematurely in 1934 when he died of tuberculosis at the age of 37. Western scientists had little exposure to his ideas until the 1960s, and it was only in 1986 that a complete version of his principal book, Thought and Language (Vygotsky, 1934), was published in English. His theory has become and continues to be very influential (Clarà, 2017).
Vygotsky’s and Piaget’s perspectives on cognitive development have much in common, but they also differ in several important respects (Lourenco, 2012). First, in Piaget’s theory, cognitive development is primarily fuelled by individual children’s active exploration of the world around them. The child is viewed as the agent of change. In contrast, Vygotsky places enormous emphasis on how children’s cognitive development is fuelled by social interactions with parents, teachers, and older children who can provide invaluable guidance. Second, Piaget viewed cognitive development as a universal process that should unfold in largely the same way across widely disparate cultures. Vygotsky, on the other hand, asserted that culture exerts great influence over how cognitive growth unfolds (Wertsch & Tulviste, 2005) so that cognitive development may not be universal as assumed in Piaget’s theory. For Vygotsky, culture is a critical factor in how cognitive development unfolds. For example, the cognitive skills acquired in literate cultures that rely on schools for training will differ from those skills acquired in tribal societies with no formal schooling. Third, Piaget viewed children’s gradual mastery of language as just another aspect of cognitive development, whereas Vygotsky argued that language acquisition plays a crucial, central role in fostering cognitive development (Kozulin, 2005). In fact, language and communication are seen to be crucial since cognitive development is affected by the information shared during cooperative activities with able partners.
According to Vygotsky, children acquire most of their culture’s cognitive skills and problem-solving strategies through collaborative dialogues with more experienced members of their society. Vygotsky’s emphasis on the primacy of language is reflected in his discussion of private speech. Preschool children talk aloud to themselves a lot as they go about their activities. Piaget viewed this speech as egocentric and insignificant. Vygotsky argued that children use this private speech to plan their strategies, regulate their actions, and accomplish their goals. As children grow older, this private speech is internalized and becomes the normal verbal dialogue that people have with themselves as they go about their business. Thus, language increasingly serves as the foundation for youngsters’ cognitive processes.
He saw cognitive development as more like an apprenticeship than a journey of individual discovery. His emphasis on the social origins of cognitive development is apparent in his theoretical concepts, such as the zone of proximal development and scaffolding.
The zone of proximal development (ZPD) is the gap between what a learner can accomplish alone and what he or she can achieve with guidance from more skilled partners. The ZPD for a task is the area in which new cognitive growth is likely and the area that should be the focus of instructional efforts. These efforts are more likely to be helpful when an instructor practices scaffolding: Scaffolding facilitates learning. Scaffolding occurs when the assistance provided to a child is adjusted as learning progresses. Typically, less and less help is provided as a child’s competence on a task increases.
Vygotsky’s sociocultural theory is guiding a great deal of contemporary research on cognitive development. This research has provided empirical support for many of Vygotsky’s ideas. Like Piaget’s theory, Vygotsky’s perspective promises to enrich our understanding of how children’s thinking develops and matures. Vygotsky’s theory continues to impact contemporary thinking about development and education.
Accommodation
Accommodation involves changing existing mental structures to explain new experiences. For instance, a child who has learned to call four-legged pets “puppies” may apply this scheme the first time she encounters a cat (assimilation), but she will eventually discover that puppies and cats are different types of animals and make adjustments to her mental schemes (accommodation).
Age of Viability
Sometime between 22 weeks and 26 weeks the fetus reaches the age of viability—the age at which a baby can survive in the event of a premature birth.
Assimilation
Assimilation involves interpreting new experiences in terms of existing mental structures without changing them. For instance, a child who has learned to call four-legged pets “puppies” may apply this scheme the first time she encounters a cat (assimilation), but she will eventually discover that puppies and cats are different types of animals and make adjustments to her mental schemes (accommodation).
Attachment
Attachment refers to the close, emotional bonds of affection that develop between infants and their caregivers.
Centration
Centration is the tendency to focus on just one feature of a problem, neglecting other important aspects.
Cognitive Development
Cognitive development refers to transitions in youngsters’ patterns of thinking, including reasoning, remembering, and problem solving.
Cohort Effects
Cohort effects occur when differences between age groups are due to the groups growing up in different time periods. For example, if you used the cross-sectional method to examine gender roles in groups aged 20, 40, and 60 years, you would be comparing people who grew up before, during, and after the women’s movement, which would probably lead to major differences as a result of historical context rather than development.
Conservation
Conservation is Piaget’s term for the awareness that physical quantities remain constant in spite of changes in their shape or appearance.
Cross-Sectional Design
In a cross-sectional design, investigators compare groups of participants of differing age at a single point in time. For example, in a cross-sectional study, an investigator tracing the growth of children’s vocabulary might compare 50 six-year-olds, 50 eight-year-olds, and 50 ten-year-olds. In contrast, an investigator using the longitudinal method would assemble one group of 50 six-year-olds and measure their vocabulary at age six, again at age eight, and once more at age ten.
Crystallized Intelligence
Crystallized intelligence involves the ability to deduce secondary relational abstractions by applying previously learned primary relational abstractions. Crystallized intelligence includes learned procedures and knowledge. It reflects the effects of experience and acculturation. Horn notes that crystallized ability is a “precipitate out of experience,” resulting from the prior application of fluid ability that has been combined with the intelligence of culture. Examples of tasks that measure crystallized intelligence are vocabulary, general information, abstract word analogies, and the mechanics of language.
Dementia
Dementia is an abnormal condition marked by multiple cognitive deficits that include memory impairment.
Development
Your life provides an interesting illustration of the two themes that permeate the study of human development: transition and continuity. In investigating human development, psychologists study how people evolve through transitions over time. In looking at these transitions, developmental psychologists inevitably find continuity with the past.
Developmental Norms
Developmental norms indicate the median age at which individuals display various behaviors and abilities. Developmental norms are useful benchmarks as long as parents don’t expect their children to progress exactly at the pace specified in the norms. Some parents become unnecessarily alarmed when their children fall behind developmental norms, but variations from the typical age of accomplishment are entirely normal.
Dishabituation
Dishabituation occurs if a new stimulus elicits an increase in the strength of a habituated response. Patterns of dishabituation can give researchers insights into what types of events infants can tell apart, which events surprise or interest them, and which events violate their expectations.
Egocentrism
Egocentrism in thinking is characterized by a limited ability to share another person’s viewpoint.
Embryonic Stage
The embryonic stage is the second stage of prenatal development, lasting from two weeks until the end of the second month. During this stage, most of the vital organs and bodily systems begin to form in the developing organism, which is now called an embryo.
Family Life Cycle
We can divide the lifespan into four broad periods: (1) the prenatal period, between conception and birth, (2) childhood, (3) adolescence, and (4) adulthood
Fetal Alcohol Syndrome (FAS)
Fetal alcohol syndrome disorder (FASD) is a collection of congenital (inborn) problems associated with excessive alcohol use during pregnancy.
Fetal Stage
The fetal stage is the third stage of prenatal development, lasting from two months through birth. Some highlights of fetal development are summarized in Figure 11.1. The first two months of the fetal stage bring rapid bodily growth, as muscles and bones begin to form (Moore, Persaud, & Torchia, 2013). The developing organism, now called a fetus, becomes capable of physical movements as skeletal structures harden. Organs formed in the embryonic stage continue to grow and gradually begin to function. Sex organs start to develop during the third month.
Fluid Intelligence
Fluid intelligence is the ability to solve novel reasoning problems and is correlated with a number of important skills such as comprehension, problem-solving, and learning.Fluid intelligence involved basic processes of reasoning and other mental activities that depend only minimally on prior learning (such as formal and informal education) and acculturation. Horn notes that it is formless and can “flow into” a wide variety of cognitive activities. Tasks measuring fluid reasoning require the ability to solve abstract reasoning problems. Examples of tasks that measure fluid intelligence include figure classifications, figural analyses, number and letter series, matrices, and paired associates.
Gender
Gender usually refers to culturally constructed distinctions between femininity and masculinity.
