DevPsych: Lecture 1

Flashcards covering key vocabulary and concepts related to life span development.

Development

The pattern of change that begins at conception and continues through the life span. It involves growth, although it also includes decline brought on by aging and dying.

Life Span Development

Systematic change in terms of physical, cognitive and psychosocial domains.

Physical Development

The growth of the body and its organs, the functioning of physiological systems including the brain, physical signs of aging, changes in motor abilities.

Cognitive Development

Changes and continuities in perception, language, learning, memory, problem solving, and other mental processes.

Psychosocial Development

Changes and carryover in personal and interpersonal aspects of development, such as motives, emotions, personality traits, interpersonal skills and relationships, and roles played in the family and in the larger society.

Life-Span Perspective

The perspective that development is lifelong, multidimensional, multidirectional, plastic, multidisciplinary, and contextual; involves growth, maintenance, and regulation; and is constructed through biological, sociocultural, and individual factors working together.

Development Is Lifelong

People continue to develop throughout their lives, and that no age period dominates development. Rather, development occurs throughout all periods of life.

Development Is Multidimensional

Change happens across many different aspects of a human life. Biological (or physical), cognitive (or mental) and socioemotional changes all take place at the same time and interact with each other in different ways.

Development Is Multidirectional

Dimensions and specific components of dimensions grow and shrink during different points in a person's development.

Development Is Plastic

Characteristics are malleable or changeable. Plasticity denotes intrapersonal variability and focuses heavily on the potentials and limits of the nature of human development.

Development Science is Multidisciplinary

A combination of disciplines is necessary to understand development across the lifespan.

Development is Contextual

Development occurs in context and varies from person to person, depending on factors such as a person’s biology, family, school, and ethnicity.

Normative Age-Graded Influences

Biological and environmental factors that have a strong correlation with chronological age, such as puberty or menopause, or age-based social practices such as beginning school or entering retirement.

Normative History-Graded Influences

Associated with a specific time period that defines the broader environmental and cultural context in which an individual develops.

Non-Normative Influences

Unpredictable and not tied to a certain developmental time in a person’s development or to a historical period. They are the unique experiences of an individual, whether biological or environmental, that shape the development process.

Biological Processes

Produce changes in an individual’s physical nature. Examples include genes inherited from parents, the development of the brain, height and weight gains, changes in motor skills, nutrition, exercise, the hormonal changes of puberty, and cardiovascular decline.

Cognitive Processes

Refer to changes in the individual’s thought, intelligence, and language.

Socioemotional Processes

Involve changes in the individual’s relationships with other people, changes in emotions, and changes in personality.

Prenatal Period

The time from conception to birth.

Infancy

The developmental period from birth to 18 or 24 months.

Early Childhood

The developmental period from the end of infancy to age 5 or 6.

Middle and Late Childhood

The developmental period from about 6 to 11 years of age, approximately corresponding to the elementary school years.

Puberty

The period during which growing boys or girls undergo the process of sexual maturation.

Adolescence

The developmental period of transition from childhood to early adulthood, entered at approximately 10 to 12 years of age and ending at 18 to 21 years of age.

Early Adulthood

The developmental period that begins in the early 20s and lasts through the 30s.

Middle Adulthood

The developmental period from approximately 40 years of age to about 60.

Late Adulthood

The developmental period that begins in the 60s or 70s and lasts until death.

Old Age (Senescence)

The final stage of the normal life span, generally from the 60s onward.

Nature and Nurture

Involves the extent to which development is influenced by nature (an organism’s biological inheritance) and by nurture (its environmental experiences).

Continuity and Discontinuity

Focuses on the degree to which development involves either gradual, cumulative change (continuity) or distinct stages (discontinuity).

Stability and Change

Involves the degree to which we become older renditions of our early experience (stability) or whether we develop into someone different from who we were at an earlier point in development (change).