Developmental Psychology

Self-concept

A conceptual system made up of one's thoughts and attitudes about one's self, including physical being, social characteristics, and internal characteristics.

Identity

A comprehensive and coherent sense of self that is robust across different scenarios and circumstances.

"I" self

The self as the knower or doer, acting as the inner observer that plans and asks about the world; it is not accessible to others.

"me" self

The self as an object of evaluation; it is the self that is thought about, judged, and expressed to others.

Material self

A type of "me" self that includes everything in a person's physical possession, such as their body, room, clothes, toys, and books.

Social self

A type of "me" self regarding social connections where a person slightly changes how they present themselves with every individual they meet.

Spiritual self

The internal, personal self encompassing morality, intellect, and religiousness; it is the slowest part of the self to form and the most difficult to change.

Self-regulation

The process of monitoring and changing behavior to suit specific goals, desires, or wants in a particular situation.

Social Comparison

The process starting in middle childhood ($6-9$ years old) where children evaluate their own abilities by comparing themselves to others.

Social learning theory

A theory suggesting children learn by observing others' behaviors, seeing the reactions to those behaviors, and then practicing the behaviors themselves.

Bobo Doll Experiment

A $1961$ study by Bandura investigating whether children learn aggression by observing an actor's behavior toward a doll and the subsequent consequences.

Role taking

The experience of practicing awareness of the perspective of another person to better understand their behaviors, thoughts, and feelings.

Stage 0: Egocentric Role Taking

A stage for children aged $3-6$ years who focus on the self and have difficulty recognizing others' perspectives.

Stage 1: Subjective Role Taking

A stage for children aged $6-8$ years who recognize that they and others may have different views, but only if they have different information.

Stage 2: Self-reflective Role Taking

A stage for children aged $8-10$ years where children acknowledge that different perspectives are informed by different motivations or worldviews.

Stage 3: Mutual Role Taking

A stage for children aged $10-12$ years where children recognize motivations of others as a third-party spectator would.

Stage 4: Societal Role Taking

A stage for children aged $12$ years and older who understand what most people in a certain group or situation would think compared to a 'generalized other.'

Mutual Relationship

A characteristic of friendship where both individuals benefit from the relationship.

Reciprocal Relationship

A characteristic of friendship referring to the actions people take for one another in a relationship.

Rubin's Model of Peer Relations

A nested system of peer relations including the individual child, interactions, relationships, and groups.

Interactions

Social exchanges between two people that may be brief; they are the building blocks of relationships but are not yet friendships.

Dynamic systems

A system where all elements are interrelated such that a substantial or sustained change to any one element ultimately changes the entire system.

Attachment

A strong, enduring, emotional bond between an infant and a caregiver that informs the child's internal working model for all future relationships.

Indiscriminate sociability

The first phase of attachment ($0-2$ months) where infants use signals like crying and smiling to communicate needs to everyone without a specific preference.

Clear-cut attachment

The third phase of attachment ($7-24$ months) where the child actively seeks caregiver contact and uses the caregiver as a secure base for exploration.

Internal Working Model

A set of assumptions and expectations about meaningful relationships formed from the first bond between caregiver and child.

Secure Attachment

A pattern ($60-70\%$ of infants) where a child is upset when a caregiver leaves but is easily comforted and happy when they return.

Anxious-resistant Attachment

An insecure attachment pattern where an infant is upset by a caregiver's departure and remain difficult to soothe or resistant to comfort upon their return.

Anxious-avoidant Attachment

An insecure attachment pattern where the infant is indifferent to the caregiver and may be easily comforted by anyone.

Disorganized/Disoriented Attachment

An insecure attachment pattern where the infant appears 'frozen,' confused, or inconsistent, often due to inconsistent messaging from the caregiver.

Prototype Model

The hypothesis that an person's attachment pattern is relatively fixed from infancy and does not change during major life transitions.

Revisionist Model

The hypothesis that attachment behaviors can change or be revised through new meaningful relationships.

Sibling Rivalry

Competition between siblings for resources such as a parent's attention, grades, or accolades.

Sibling Coalition

A dynamic where siblings help, defend, and support each other, often serving as a training ground for prosocial behavior.

Primary Appraisal

The initial part of an emotional event where a person assesses what is happening using cognitions and physiological experiences.

Secondary Appraisal

The stage of an emotional event where a person determines how to respond and what resources they have to handle the stimulus.

Discrete Models of Emotion

Theories suggesting that emotions are distinct from each other, have particular profiles, and that everyone experiences the same emotions identically.

Temperament

A person's characteristic way of feeling and responding to emotion, comprised of reactivity and self-regulation.

Easy Temperament

A temperament profile ($40\%$ of infants) characterized by positive mood, good adaptability, and regular rhythmicity.

Difficult Temperament

A temperament profile ($10\%$ of infants) characterized by negative mood, slow adaptability, and intense, stressed emotional reactivity.

Slow to Warm Up Temperament

A temperament profile ($15\%$ of infants) characterized by withdrawal from new situations and low-intensity negative reactions that improve over time.

Microsystem

The immediate environment in the bioecological model that a child directly interacts with, such as family and school.

Mesosystem

The relationships and interactions between different elements of the microsystem in the bioecological model.

Exosystem

Factors that directly affect the microsystem without the child coming into direct contact with them, such as a parent's work life or local social services.

Macrosystem

The outermost level of the bioecological model, including laws, cultural beliefs, values, and social norms.

Chronosystem

The dimension of the bioecological model that recognizes that systems and their influences change over time.

Absenteeism

Persistent absence from school that can lead to lower academic achievement, school dropout, and poorer mental health.

Popular (Peer Status)

A status profile where a child has high acceptance by peers, low rejection, and high social impact.

Controversial (Peer Status)

A status profile where a child has both many likes and many dislikes from peers, often associated with aggressive but sociable behavior.

Rejected (Peer Status)

A status profile with low acceptance and high peer rejection, often leading to aggression and withdrawn behavior.

Prejudice

Preconceived, usually negative and non-rational ideas about a person or group developed through emotional and social experiences.

Cognitive development

Mental capacities that help a person think and reason, including memory, retention, and knowledge about facts.

Sensorimotor stage

Piaget's first stage of development, occurring from age $0-2$ years, where children use physical senses and motor skills to explore the world.

Preoperational stage

Piaget's second stage ($2-6$ years) where children use symbols and language to represent objects but still do not reason logically.

Concrete operational stage

Piaget's third stage ($7-12$ years) where children begin to think logically about concrete objects following rules like conservation.

Formal operational stage

Piaget's final stage starting at $12+$ years where thought becomes increasingly flexible and abstract.

Discontinuous development

Piaget's theory that children stay in one stage for a period before making a sudden, qualitatively different leap to the next stage.

Primary circular reactions

The first sensorimotor substage ($1-4$ months) where children repeat pleasurable actions centered on their own body.

Secondary circular reactions

The second sensorimotor substage ($4-8$ months) where children repeat actions using their bodies and other objects to trigger a response.

Tertiary circular reactions

The sensorimotor substage ($12-18$ months) where children engage in trial and error experimentation with the environment.

Object permanence

The cognitive milestone where a child understands that an object continues to exist even when it is out of sight.

Preconceptual stage

The first substage of preoperational thought ($2-4$ years) characterized by egocentric speech and symbolic play.

Intuitive stage

The second substage of preoperational thought ($4-7$ years) where speech becomes more social and children show curiosity about others' perspectives.

3 mountains task

A task used by Piaget to investigate perspective-taking, showing that young preoperational children are often egocentric.

Conservation task

A test of concrete operational thought proving the understanding that quantity remains constant despite changes in container shape.

Information Processing Theories

Theories focusing on the underlying quantitative processes of thinking, such as encoding, memory, and attention, similar to a computer.

Vygotsky's Sociocultural Theory

A theory emphasizing that cognitive development is shaped by social interactions and cultural context rather than independent exploration.

Zone of Proximal Development (ZPD)

The gap between what a child can do unassisted and what they can achieve with the guidance of a more competent person.

Scaffolding

A process where a more experienced person provides a temporary framework to support a child's learning at a level just beyond their current ability.

Functional play

Play typical of the first $2$ years involving simple, repetitive movements and learning about cause and effect.

Constructive play

Play occurring from age $3-15$ involving the physical manipulation of objects to build or create something.

Games with rules

Formal play governed by fixed conventions, typical of children aged $6-15$ in the concrete operational stage.

Theory of Mind (ToM)

The ability to understand and comprehend that someone else's perspective, thoughts, or knowledge may differ from one's own.

Core Knowledge Theories

Theories proposing that infants are born with innate, domain-specific knowledge in areas of evolutionary importance like objects, number, and agents.

Violation of expectation

An experimental paradigm where infants' surprise at 'impossible' events is used to infer their innate knowledge or expectations.

Cephalocaudal trend

The general principle that motor development proceeds from the head downward to the arms, torso, and legs.

Rooting reflex

An innate reflex where an infant turns their head with an open mouth when touched on the cheek, assisting in feeding.

Visual acuity

The clarity of vision, which is poor at birth ($14\text{ cm}$ distance) but develops to adult-like levels by $8-12$ months.

Joint attention

The social act of focusing on the same object or event with another person, often involving eye gaze alternation.

Shared intentionality

The ability to participate with others in collaborative activities with shared goals, intentions, and enjoyment.

Private speech

Self-directed speech used by children for self-guidance and problem-solving, which eventually is internalized as thought.

Behaviorist view of language

The theory by Skinner that language is learned through imitation and positive reinforcement without innate mechanisms.

Linguistic/Nativist view

Chomsky's theory that children possess an innate Universal Grammar and a language acquisition device to solve the poverty of stimulus.

Statistical learning

The domain-general ability to track patterns and distributional regularities in the environment to learn phonemes or word boundaries.

Broca's area

A region in the left inferior frontal gyrus essential for speech production.

Wernicke's area

A brain region in the left superior temporal gyrus involved in processing word meanings and linguistic input.

Critical period

A specific time window (e.g., up to age $5$ or $17$) during which an individual must be exposed to language to achieve native-like proficiency.

Phonemes

The shortest segments of speech that distinguish one word from another in a specific language.

Categorical perception

The phenomenon where the brain imposes discrete categories on a continuous physical stimulus, such as voice onset time ($\text{VOT}$).

Transitional probabilities (TPs)

The likelihood of one syllable following another, used by infants to identify word boundaries in continuous speech.

Fast mapping

The ability of children to learn the meaning of a word after only one or two exposures to the label.

Indeterminacy of reference

Quine's problem (Gavagai) that a word's meaning is logically under-constrained and could refer to many different things.

Shape bias

The tendency of children, emerging in the second year, to categorize novel objects based on their form rather than color or texture.

Mutual exclusivity

A word-learning heuristic where children assume that each object has only one label.

Morphemes

The smallest units of language that convey meaning, such as prefixes, suffixes, and root words.

U-shaped curve

The developmental pattern in verb morphology where children start with correct usage, then overgeneralize rules (e.g., 'goed'), and finally return to correctness.

Genotype

The specific genetic information a person inherits that has the potential to influence observable properties of an organism.

Phenotype

The observable properties of an organism produced by the genotype and environmental influences.

Down's Syndrome (Trisomy 21)

A condition caused by non-disjunction results in 3 chromosomes on the 21st chromosome pair, totaling 47 chromosomes.

Mutations

Changes in the structure or amount of DNA caused by mutagenic agents like chemicals or radiation.