PSYC 100B Study Flash cards

What is cognitive development?

The development of thinking across the lifespan

What is the theory of mind?

The human capacity to understand minds, a capacity that is made up of a collection of concepts and processes

What is an example of when we rely on the theory of mind?

• Teaching another person new actions or rules by taking into account what the learner knows or doesn’t know and how one might best help them to understand

• Learning the words of a language by monitoring what other people attend to and are trying to do when they use certain words

Are there stages of cognitive development?

According to Piaget, yes there are stages

How many cognitive development stages are there?

4

What is the 1st stage of development? (Piaget)

Sensorimotor - Birth to 2 years

• Intelligence in action: Child interacts with environment by manipulating objects (object permanence)

What is the 2nd stage of development? (Piaget)

Preoperational Reasoning - 2 years to 6-7 years

• Thinking dominated by perception, but child becomes more capable of symbolic functioning (conservation problems, language development occurs)

What is the 3rd stage of development? (Piaget)

Concrete Operational - 6-7 years to 11-12 years

• Logical reasoning only applied to objects that are real or can be seen

• Does not engage in systemic scientific reasoning

What is the 4th stage of development? (Piaget)

Formal Operational - 11-12 years to lifetime

• Individual can think logically about potential events or abstract ideas (advances reasoning)

• reasoning powers of educated adults

In terms of cognitive development, what was Piaget’s focus?

He tended to focus on physical interactions with the world for learning

In terms of cognitive development, what was Vygotsky’s focus?

• He tended to focus on social interaction.

• He developed a sociocultural theory that emphasized how other people and the attitudes, values, and beliefs of the surrounding culture influence children’s development.

• Caregivers provide structure to support children as they learn

What is the zone of proximal development?

The idea that children come into a time when they are ready to learn a new skill but they haven’t yet achieved it (a great time to facilitate learning).

What is a continuous development theory?

Focuses on development as a continuous gradual process

What is discontinuous development theory?

Focuses on development as a progression of stages where there is rapid discontinuous change

What is social and personality development?

Best understood as the continuous interaction between these aspects of psychological development:

1. The social context in which each child lives, especially the relationships that provide security, guidance and knowledge

2. Biological maturation that supports developing social and emotional competencies and underlies temperamental individuality

3. Children’s developing representations of themselves and the social world

What is personality?

The study of individual differences.

What is the 5 factor model? (OCEAN)

• Openness — Tendency to appreciate new art, ideas, values, feelings, and behaviour

• Conscientiousness — The tendency to be careful, on-time for appointments, to follow rules, and to be hardworking

• Extraversion — The tendency to be talkative, sociable and to enjoy others

• Agreeableness — The tendency to agree and go along with others rather than to assert one’s own opinions and choices

• Neuroticism — The tendency to frequently experience negative emotions such as anger, worry, and sadness, as well as being interpersonally sensitive

What was Bowlby’s observations on attachment?

Bowlby observed that infants would go to extraordinary lengths to prevent separation from their parents or to re-establish proximity to a missing parent.

• For example: He noted that children who had been separated from their parents would often cry, call for their parents, refuse to eat or play, ad stand at the door in desperate anticipation of their parents’ return

What is the Harlow Monkey Studies?

• Work suggests that the strong emotional bond that infants form with their primary caregivers is rooted in something more than whether the caregiver provides food per se.

• Harlow’s research is now regarded as one of the first experimental demonstrations of the importance of “contact comfort” in the establishment of infant-caregiver bonds.

What is the most common experiment to assess the nature of attachment?

The strange situation: involves brief separations from the caregiver to see what attachment style the child has.

What happens in the “Strange Situation” when the child is secure?

• Explore — Checks in with parent

• Stranger comes, parent leaves — Shows some distress when parent leaves

• Stranger — avoids stranger

• Parent returns as stranger leaves — Seeks comfort

What happens in the “Strange Situation” when the child is insecure anxious?

• Explore — Child clings to parent

• Stranger comes, parent leaves — Very upset

• Stranger — Quite fearful

• Parent returns as stranger leaves — Seeks comfort but then pushes parent away

What happens in the “Strange Situation” when the child is insecure avoidant?

• Explore — Oblivious to parent

• Stranger comes, parent leaves — Not upset

• Stranger — Unconcerned

• Parent returns as stranger leaves — Does not seek contact

What happens in the “Strange Situation” when the child is disorganized (instability)?

• Explore — Inconsistent and likely abusive experiences

• Stranger comes, parent leaves — Parents are a source or comfort and fear

• Stranger — Child wavers between wanting to be close vs. far away

• Parent returns as stranger leaves — Child wavers between wanting to be close vs. far away

What is a conservation problem?

Problems pioneered by Piaget in which physical transformation of an object or set of objects changes a perceptually salient dimension but not the quantity that ids being asked about

What is nurture vs nature?

• Nature — The genes that children bring with them to life and that influence all aspects of their development

• Nurture — The environments, starting with the womb, that influence all aspects of children’s development

What did Hazan and Shaver observe?

• Attachment styles aren’t limited to childhood

• Found that people who described themselves as secure, were more likely to report having had warm and trusting relationships with their parents.

What happens when parents exert low expectations/control and low warmth/ responsiveness?

Uninvolved parenting style

What happens when parents exert low expectations/control and high warmth/ responsiveness?

Permissive parenting style

What happens when parents exert high expectations/control and low warmth/ responsiveness?

Authoritarian parenting style

What happens when parents exert high expectations/control and high warmth/ responsiveness?

Authoritative parenting style

What is basic-level category?

The neutral, perferred category for a given object, at an intermediate level of specificity

What is category?

A set of entities that are equivalent in some way. Usually the items are similar to one another.

What is concept?

The mental representation of a category

What is exemplar?

An example in memory that is labeled as being in a particular category

What is psychological essentialism?

The belief that members of a category have an unseen property that causes them to be in the category and to have the properties associated with it

What is typicality?

The difference in “goodness” of category members, ranging from the most typical to borderline members

What is the object permanence task?

The Piagetian task in which infants below about 9 months of age fail to search for an object that is removed from their sight and, if noy allowed to search immediately for the objects, act as if they do not know that it continues to exist

What are endophenotypes?

A characteristic that reflects a genetic liability for disease and a more basic component of a complex clinical presentation. Less developmentally malleable than overt behaviour.

What are event-related potentials (ERPs)

• Measures the firing if groups of neurons in the cortex. As a person views or listens to specific types of information, neuronal activity creates small electrical currents that can be recorded from non-invasive sensors placed on the scalp.

• ERP provides excellent information about the timing of processing, clarifying brain activity at the millisecond pace at which it unfolds.

What is the social brain?

The set of neuroanatomical structures that allows us to understand the actions anf intentions of other people

What is conscience?

The cognitive, emotional, and social influences that cause young children to create and act consistently with internal standards of conduct

What is effortful control?

A temperament quality that enables children to become more successful in motivated self-regulation

What is the family stress model?

A description of the negative effects of family financial difficulty in child adjustment through the effects of economic stress in parents’ depressed mood, increases marital problems and poor parenting

What is the goodness of fit?

• The match betwwen a child’s temperament and charactristics of parental care that contributes to positive or negative personality development.

• A good “fit” means that parents have accomodated to the child’s temperamental attributes, and this contribures to positive personality growth and better adjustment.

What’s social referencing?

The process by which one individual consults another’s emotional expressions to determine how to evaluate to circumstances that are ambiguous or uncertain

What is the difference between INTERpersonal and INTRApersonal?

• Interpersonal — The relationship or interaction between 2 or more people in a group. The interpersonal function of emotion refer to the effect of one’s emotion on others, or to the relationship between oneself and others.

• Intrapersonal — What occurs within oneself. The effects of emotion to individuals that occur physical inside their bodies and psychologically in their minds

What is adolescence?

A developmental stage that has been defined as starting with puberty and ending with the transition to adulthood

• Physical changes: Height, hair, pimples, menstruations, etc…

• Cognitive changes: conctrete to abstract thinking, increased capacity for attention and memory, increase in sensation seeking

What are some social changes in adolescence?

• Parents play an important role as adolescence brings in negotiation (striving towards independence)

• Can be problematic for adolescence adjustment if parents seek psychological control (invading feelings and pressuring them)

What are some peer changes in adolescence?

• Friendships shift from primarily same-sex to mixed -sex

• Seek peers who are similar to self (homophily)

• Deviant peer contagion: reinforcing problem behaviour by laughing or showing signs of approval

• Short lived romantic relationships (help contribute to identity formation and emotional/behavioural adjustment)

What is differential susceptibility?

Genetic factors that make indivisuals more or less responsive to environmental experiences

What is identity achievement?

Individuals have explored different options and them made commitments

What is identity diffusion?

Adolescents neither explore nor commit to any roles or ideologies

What is moratorium?

State in which adolescents are actively exploring options but have not yet made identity commitments

What is foreclosure?

Individuals commit to an identity without exploration of options

What is collectivism?

Belief system that emphasized the duties and obligation that each person has towards others

What is emerging adulthood?

• A new life stage extending from approx. 18-25, during which the foundation of an adult life is gradually constructed in love and work.

• Primary features include identity exploration, instability, focus on self-development, feeling incompletely adult, and a broad sense of possibilities

What is individualism?

Belief system that exalts freedom, independence, and individual choice as high values

What is age identity?

How old or young people feel compared to their chronological age

What is a cohort?

Group of people typically born in the same year or historical period, who share common experiences over times; sometimes called a generations

What is the convoy model of social relations?

Theory that proposes that the frequency, types, and reciprocity of social exchanged change with age. These social exchanges impact the health and wellbeing of the givers and receivers in the convoy.

What is the difference between fluid and crystallized intelligence?

• Fluid — type of intelligence that relies on the ability to use information processing resources to reason logically and solve novel problems

• Crystallized — type of intellectual ability that relies om the application of knowledge, experience, and learned information

What is hedonic well-being?

Component of well-being that refers to emotional experinces, often including measures of positive and negative effects

What is heterogeneity?

Inter-individual and subgroup differences in level and rate of change overtime

What is inhibitory functioning?

Ability to focus on a subset of information while suppressing attention to less relevant information

What are three tasks that enable is to measure cognition in aging individuals?

• Processing speed — time it takes individuals to perform cognitive operations

• Recall — Memory task where individuals are asked to remember previously learned info with no assistance

• Recognition — Memory task where individuals are asked to remember previously learned info with the assistance of cues

What is successful aging?

Includes 3 components: avoiding disease, maintaining high levels of cognition and physical functioning, and having an actively engaged lifestyle

What is “G”?

Short for “general factor” and is often used to be synonymous with intelligence itself

What is intelligence?

An individual’s cognitive capability. This includes the ability to acquire, process, recall and apply information

What is IQ?

Short for intelligence quotient. This is a score, typically obtained from a widely used measure of intelligence that is meant to rank a person’s intellectual ability against that of others.

What is stereotype threat?

The phenomenon in which people are concerned that they will conform to a stereotype or that their performance does conform to that stereotype, especially in instances in which the stereotype is brought to their conscious awareness.

What is general mental ability?

A very general mental capacity that involves the ability to reason, plan, solve problems, think abstractly, comprehend complex ideas, learn quickly and learn from experience.

What is the difference between satisfaction and satisfactoriness?

• Satisfaction - Correspondence between an individuals needs or preferences and the rewards offered by the environment

• Satisfactoriness - Correspondence between an individual’s abilities and the ability requirements of the environment.

What is under-determined or misspecified causal models?

Psychological frameworks thar miss or neglect to include one or more of the critical determinants of the phenomenon under analysis.

What is anchoring?

The bias to be affected by an initial anchor, even if the anchor is arbitrary, and to insufficiently adjust our judgements away from that anchor

What are biases?

The systemic and predictable mistakes that influence the judgement of even very talented human beings

What are the 4 bounds of decision making (bounded rationality)?

• Bounded awareness — The systemic ways in which we fail to notice obvious and important information that is available to us

• Bounded ethically — The systemic ways in which our ethics are limited in ways we are not even aware of ourselves

• Bounded self-interest — The systematic and predictable ways in which we care about the outcomes of others

• Bounded willpower — The tendency to place greater weight in present concerns than future concerns

What is framing?

The bias to be systematically affected by the way in which information is presented, while holding the objective information constant

What are heuristics?

Cognitive strategies that simplify decision making by using mental short-cuts

What is system 1?

Our intuitive decision-making system, which typically fast, automatic, effortless, implicit and emotional

What is system 2?

Our more deliberative decision-making system, which is slower, conscious, effortful, explicit, and logical.

What is RIASEC?

• Realistic (R) = working with gadgets and things, the outdoors, need for structure

• Investigative (I) = scientific pursuits, especially math and the physical science, and interest in theory

• Artistic (A) = creative expression in art and writing, little need for structure

• Social (S) = people interests, the helping professions, teaching, nursing, counseling

• Enterprising (E) = likes leadership roles directed towards economic objectives

• Conventional (C) = liking of well-structures environment and clear chains of command, which as office practices

What is a drive state?

Affective experiences that motivate organisms to fulfill goals that are generally beneficial to their survival and reproduction

What is homeostasis?

The tendency of an organism to maintain stability in the all the systems in the body

What is the role of the hypothalamus in terms of reproduction?

Secretes various hormones and the regluation of hunger and sexual arousal

What is the preoptic area?

A region in the anterior hypothalamus involved in generating and regulating male sexual behaviour

What is lordosis?

A physical sexual posture in females that serves as an invitation to mate

What is reward value?

A neuropsychological measure of an outcome’s affective importance to an organism

What is satiation?

The state of being full to satisfaction and no longer desiring to take on more

What is emotion?

An experiential, physiological, and behavioural response to a personally meaningful stimulus

What emotion coherence?

The degree to which emotional responses (i.e. subjective experience, behaviour, physiology, etc..) converge with one another

What is emotion fluctuation?

The degree to which emotions vary or change in intensity over time

Define well-being.

The experience of mental and physical health and the absence of disorder

What’s affective neuroscience?

Examines how the the brain creates emotional responses

What is the amygdala?

Two almond-shaped structures located in the medial temporal lobes of the brain

What is the nucleus accumbens?

A region of the basal forebrain located in front of the preoptic region

What is the orbital frontal cortex?

A region of the frontal lobes of the brain above the eye sockets

What is the periaqueductal gray?

The grey matter in the midbrain near the cerebral aqueduct

What is the stria terminalis?

A band of fibres that run along the top surface of the thalamus