AoS 1 - What influences psychological development? PP1 Psych Flashcards

Flashcards covering key vocabulary and concepts from the lecture notes on psychological development.

Lifespan Development

Changes that occur over time throughout the lifespan, from birth to old age.

Emotional Development

Changes in how an individual experiences different feelings and how these feelings are expressed, interpreted, and dealt with.

Physical Development

Involves changes in the body and its various systems, such as development of the brain and its nervous systems.

Social Development

Involves changes in an individual’s relationships with other people and their skills in interacting with others.

Cognitive Development

Involves changes in an individual’s mental abilities, such as reasoning, problem-solving, decision-making, perception, learning, memory, and use of language.

Developmental Norms

Typical characteristics, abilities and expected levels of achievement associated with a particular age or stage of development.

Heredity (Nature)

The biological transmission of physical and psychological traits from generation to generation.

Environment (Nurture)

All the experiences, objects, and events to which we are exposed throughout our entire lifetime.

Biopsychosocial Model

An approach to describing and explaining psychological development and wellbeing through the interaction of biological, psychological, and social factors.

Biological Factors

Factors such as genes, age, brain chemistry, nervous system activity, and hormones that influence psychological development and wellbeing.

Psychological Factors

Factors such as effects of prior experience, learning & memory, ways of thinking, attitudes & beliefs, perceptions, emotions, resilience and coping skills that influence psychological development and wellbeing.

Social Factors

Factors such as interpersonal relationships, access to social support, social media, educational background, employment history, economic circumstances, access to health care, social stressors, ethnicity, cultural values and traditions that influence psychological development and wellbeing.

Attachment

A relationship between two people in which each person feels strongly about the other, especially the emotional bond between an infant and their caregiver.

The Strange Situation

A standardized test developed by Mary Ainsworth for measuring the attachment relationship a child has with their parent, usually conducted during infancy between 9-18 months.

Assimilation

Taking in new information and fitting it into a pre-existing mental idea about objects or experiences.

Accommodation

Changing a pre-existing mental idea in order to fit new information.

Object Permanence

The understanding that an object still exists even when it is not in sight.

Goal Directed Behavior

Behaving with a specific purpose in mind.

Animism

The belief that everything has a consciousness.

Reversibility

The ability to mentally reverse processes or reasoning.

Psychosocial Crisis

A personal conflict an individual faces in adjusting to society, involving a struggle between internal needs and societal demands.

Sensitive Period

A period where environmental factors are more likely to have a greater impact on psychological development gradually. The skill can still be learned after this period, but less efficiently.

Critical Period

A period where the organism has heightened sensitivity to external stimuli that are compulsory for development of a particular skill. The cortical areas allocated for the particular skill will adapt and perform a different function after this period.