Midterm 1 -- Developmental Psych

Reasons to learn about child development

1. to raise children properly and successfully

2. to influence social politics

3. to understand human nature

4. to build empathy for the diverse populations of children

Empathy

person’s capacity to understand & share feelings of another person and is key to emotional/moral development

Examples of social policies that consider children maturity

• whether video games influence child aggression

• whether to trust youth testimony, esp in SA trials

  • found that interview’s bias and push back/”are you sure” changed children responses

  • dolls blurred their lines between reality and fantasy

 National Institute of Child Health and Human Development

Used in 40 countries and acts as a standard for children interview procedures.

The Romanian Adoption Study

 Children in orphanage had v little physical/human contact. The children were adopted by gams in Great Britain. They arrived 

• Severely malnourished (over half being in the lowest 3% of height, weight, and head circumference)

• Showed signs of intellectual disability

• Socially immature

1. RBC adopted b4 6mnths = weight & IQ of BBC at 6yo

2. RBC adopted between 6-24mths weight & IQ < BBC. Smae for 24-42mnths

Same outcome occured w/ social behavior (showed abnormal behaviors)

• Not looking at parents in anxiety-provoking situations

• Willingly going off w/ strangers

• Difficulty controlling emotions & making friends

• Great use of mental health services

aRBC had low levels of neural activity in amygdala: brain area involved in emotion regulation/reaction) and a differently shaped prefrontal cortex

RESPONSE-DOSE DEPENDENT. the later the age of adoption > the long-term harmful effects of early deprivation

Plato vs Aristotle vs Locke vs Rousseau

(goals of education and how children acquire knowledge)

Plato: Education should teach self-control and discipline. He believed that children have innate knowledge.

Aristotle: Discipline is necessary in education, but education should be tailored to individual children's needs.

John Locke: Viewed children as tabula rasa (blank slates) whose development largely reflects nurture provided by parents & society. He agrees w/ Aristotle that child rearing should help them grow their characters: parents should set good examples & values & avoid indulging the child. After being disciplined, authority can relax, and the children can be treated as adults.

Rousseau: parents & society should give kids max freedom from the beginning/anti-discipline. Children learn from spontaneous interactions w/ objects & society as opposed to regulated parental instruction. Formal education should occur at 12yo, after they reach “the age of reason” where they can judge the worth of what they’re told

Kagan’s 5 abilities that primates lack. This is the humans innate moral sense

ability to

1. infer the thoughts & feelings of others

2. apply the concepts of good & bad to one’s behavior

3. reflect on past actions

4. understand that negative consequences could have been avoided

5. understand our own and others’ motivations and emotions

Seven Basic Questions about Child Development

1. How do nature and nurture shape development together (nature and nurture)

2. How do children shape their own development (the active child)

3. In what ways is development continuous and in other ways discontinuous (continuity/discontinuity)

4. How does change occur? (mechanisms of change)

5. How does sociocultural context influence development? (the sociocultural context)

6. How do people become different from each other (individual differences)

7. How can research promote children’s well-being? (Research and children’s welfare)

Genome

a person’s complete set of hereditary information influences behaviors & experiences. Includes genes that regulate gene expresssion by turning activity on and off

What influences gene expression?

proteins respond to experiences & produce changes in cognition/emotion/behavior without altering DNA

Epigenetics

the study of stable changes in gene expression mediated by environment

Evidence of epigenetic impact on early experience/behavior

Amt of stress mothers experiences during children infancy influences amt of methylation in children’s genomes 15yrs later

There was an increase in methylation in DNA of blood of umbilical cord of newborns w/ depressed mothers, or those abused during childhood. This increases the child’s risk for depression later on.

Methylation

biological process reducing expression of a variety of genes & is involved in stress regulation

How does selective attention influence infant development

• Objects that make sounds are observed more

• Children are drawn to faces, especially their mother’s (for facial recognition)

  • positive feedback loop when babies see their mother’s face they smile and coo

• Crib talk: toddler talk/babble when they’re alone helps them learn language

YOUTH PLAY

• Toddlers' play make-believe games/activities that contribute to knowledge of themselves & others. Teaches

  • how to cope w/ fears, resolve disputes, interact w/ others

OLDER PLAY

• more organized/rule-bound play promotes self-control, turn-taking, rule following, and controlling emotions during setbacks

Continuous growth

Continuous: process of small changes

A more modern belief of developmental growth as some behavior aligns w/ multiple levels of proposed stages

• facts can be interpreted differently depending on the OG perspective

Discontinuous growth

Discontinuous: process of a series of occasional, sudden stages/changes. belief that children of different ages seem qualitatively different in how they think/know of the world

• stage theories: development occurs in progression of distinct age-related stages of sudden changes affecting thinking and behavior

development occurs in progression of distinct age-related stages that involve relatively sudden, qualitative changes affecting thinking and behaviors and how they experience the world

there are 4 proposed cognitive stages of growth. believe that those between 2-5yo can only focus on one aspect of an event/one type of info but by 7yo this focus/ability to coordinate extends to 2+

Mechanisms of change

change involving brain activity, genes, and learning experiences in development of effortful attention (the voluntary control of one’s emotions & thoughts)

Effortful Attention

voluntary control of one’s emotions & thoughts

• inhibit impulses (obeying requests and following through w/ it

• controlling emotions (not crying)

• focusing attention (i.e. on hw rather than playing outside)

• difficulty in exerting effortful attention = behavioral problems, weak academics, mental illnesses)

brain activity is the connection between (what areas of the brain)

the limbic area (brain part w/ role in emotional reactions) and the anterior cingulate and prefrontal cortex (brain structures in setting & attending to goals)

• these connections develop during childhood and correlate w/ improving effortful attention (the strength is due to nature and nurture)

Neurotransmitters

chemicals involved in communicating among brain cells. genes influence certain neurotransmitter production which is based on the quality of task performance that demands effortful attention

How does parenting quality influence infant behavior (if they possess a particular gene presentation)

Infants’ effortful attention can be influenced by how they are parented.

• lower quality/more negligent parenting associated with lower ability to regulate attention

• Children without certain genes are unaffected by the quality of parenting

Importance of Sleep in Development

Infants sleep 14-15 hours a day, promoting learning. The type of learning changes as the hippocampus matures.

First 18 months: sleep promotes learning of general, common patterns BUT not of specific material that is rarely seen. This reflects the cortext functions (ensory perception, voluntary motor movement, language, planning, reasoning, memory, and conscious thought)

After 24+ moths: memory of general pattern is equal in those who took naps/didn’t BUT those who napped had better specific knowledge retention. This reflects the hippocamus’ functions

• this is because the hippocampus isn’t mature enough for rapid learning of details for specific experiences prior to 24 months

Hippocampus

the brain structure related to learning and remembering

Sociocultural contexts influencing development

the culture of the child’s upbringing/society influences them and their values.

In the US, children sleep alone & develop bedtime rituals (books, lullabies, comfort objects like stuffed animals). Reflects values of self-reliance and intimacy between parents.

In Mayan culture, there are no rituals because children sleep with their parents. Develops strong family bonds. Reflects the value of interdependence.

How do children become different from each other / develop individual differences

1. genetics

2. treatment by parents & others

3. reactions to similar experiences

4. choice of environments (who they surround themselves with)

Do children’s subjective interpretations of their treatment affect their development?

YES

Methods for Studying Scientific Child Development

Scientific Method: all beliefs, no matter how prevalent, may be wrong until repeated tested/experimentation occurs.

• if a tested hypothesis is not supported by evidence, it must be abandoned no matter how likely it seems

Reliability

degree that independent measurements of behavior are consistent

Interrater reliability

indicated how much agreement there is in the observation of different people witnessing the same behavior. this can be qualitative and quantitative

Test-retest reliability

attained when measured performance on the same test, in similar condition are comparable/similar. this is the scores of the same subject.

Validity

degree to which it measures what was intended to be measured

Internal validity

effects in the experiment can be confidently attributed to the factor being tested

External validity

the ability to generalize research findings beyond the particulars of that research experiment

Replicability

Combined reliability & external validity. The degree that independent measurements given behavior in subsequent experiments are consistent w/ the OG findings, if experiments are conducted similarly

Why are findings hard to replicate & how have they become more replicable recently

too small of a sample size

FIXES

• Large sample size

• there is a greater collaboration between original & subsequent researches

• more preregistration

The ManyBabies Consortium is an effort to increase finding replicability by globally conducting parallel experiments

How is Children’s Data mainly collected for studies?

Structured interviews: predetermined questions useful for self-reports on the same topic

Questionnaires: allows data to be obtain from many children simultaneously

Clinical interview: in-depth info about the individual. start w/ prepped qs but strays to be led by responses

• yields a lot of personal data

• answers are often bias and favor the respondent

Naturalistic Observation

Unobtrusively observe in the background of a chosen setting to minimize the researcher’s own influence and the “falseness” of how people act in the study

• i.e. a study involved a researcher observing a family’s dinner routine for a month. It found that trouble families (those w/ 1+ child labeled out of control/referred to for professional treatment) had more self-absorbed parents that were less responsive to children. The children had more aggressive reactions to parental punishment, causing a positive feedback loop.

• Parents of nontroubled children were more responsive

CONS OF NATURALISTIC: observers can’t control confounding factors, and many behaviors happen rarely, reducing ability to observe them.

Structured Observations

Focused on researching designed situations that elicit specific behaviors relevant to a hypothesis

• able to control/consider more factors (age, sex, personality)

• Ensures identical situations for all studied participants, allowing for direct comparison of behaviors

  • allows for generalization across different scenarios

• CONS: doesn’t provide true info about each child’s subjective experience or yield everyday responses

Direction-of-causation problem

a correlation doesn’t indicate which variable is causing and which is effecting

Third-variable problem

the correlation of two variables may be due to a third, unspecified variable

Correlational Designs

Determine whether children who differ in one variable can predictably differ a way in other variables

Experimental designs

Used to determine cause-effect relationships

• by nature, minimizes initial differences within the group

• experimental group and control group allows for conclusions to be drawn about. the cause and effects of a tested hypothesis.

  • this cannot be applied to study all issues of interest