Development pt.1 (infancy and childhood)

developmental psychology

• how do individuals change as they get older; idea is that people grow, change, mature as a function of age across life span

areas of development

• physical - as we get older our bodies change, and because of this we have different abilities (how do our behaviors change as a function of physical development)

• cognitive - our minds change as we age, as it changes we develop different ways of thinking about the world, understanding ourselves, others, and solving problems

• social - our ways of interacting with others change as we get older

issues in developmental psychology

• stability v. change - idea is do our early personality traits persist throughout life or do we develop different personalities as we grow (have the same traits or grow out of phases)

• continuity v. stages - is development a gradual continuous progress or happens in discrete stages

• nature v. nurture - how does genetic inheritance and our experience influence our development

research methods

• cross sectional - people of all ages are assessed at the same time and then answers are compared (how do people at two different ages value materialistic or internal goals)

  • advantage is that its quick and easy / disadvantage that it uses correlational method (correlation doesn’t imply causation)

  • cohort effect - differences between generations or groups that cause differences in results

• longitudinal - same people are re-tested at different times in their lives to measure age related change (days, months, years)

  • advantage is that they allow researchers to evaluate change as a function of age (question being how does age affect the development of peoples values) / disadvantages is that it’s labor intensive and long

  • directionality amongst two or more variables (can assess) (pointing in one way or another

  • attrition - over time people tend to drop out of studies

newborns

• psychologist assess newborns on what they can do (eye contact, grasp, cry, chewing, tuning head

• habituation - tendency for attention to a novel stimulus to wane over time (most basic way that we learn, shown something new newborns maintain eye contact and heart rate increases)

  • allows researchers to assess what infants see and remember

• can fetuses discriminate sounds - by the third trimester, the fetus can hear and distinguish sounds in the outside world (mom voice, heartbeat, dad voice

DeCasper and Spence

• last 6 weeks of pregnancy mom read the baby a book, one fast paced and one slow paced

• after birth the child (3 days old) brought back and the rate at which they sucked on a pacifier played a recording of the book

• showed that kids sucked the pacifier to the cadence of the story to mom read

• also showed that infants prefer moms voice and her heartbeat over other sounds

newborn capacities

• reflexes - automatic unlearned reaction to stimulus; newborns have a strong grasp, so much so that they can support its own body weight; rooting is when you touch the baby it will turn in the way of that stimulus

• visual preferences - at birth they are severely near sighted, they prefer to see things that look like faces, can distinguish light and dark, and contract slow movements with their eyes / facial imitation saw that infants can mimic facial gestures

• auditory preferences - at birth infants are hard of hearing, but they can locate the direction of sounds in the environment / they can also tell the difference between their moms voice and dads voice and speech sounds (ba and pa)

newborn capacities pt.2

• taste and smell - strong ability, tastes sweet baby will smile, sour they will grimace, bitter they will be mad / same predictable reactions to smells (preference for mom’s smell and other lactating women)

• sensitivity to number - basic awareness of numbers

• Wynn - showed 1 or 2 dolls and then covered by a blanket and then a doll was added or taken away, the baby was able to tell when the math wasn’t adding up by staring longer at the math that didn’t make sense

cognitive development

• how do children develop knowledge, how do they come to know what they know

• Jean Piaget - children aim to make sense of their experiences

• schema - mental molds that we put our experiences into, cognitive recognitions of environment

• assimilation - try to fit new information into preexisting schema bc they don’t have a schema / mental capacity for that yet

• accommodation - modify preexisting schema to fit new information

stages of cognitive development

• all children progress through these stages in the same order

1. sensorimotor - birth to 2 yrs, come to know the world, object permanence (knowing a object is still there even if you can’t see it)

2. pre operational - 2-6yrs, to young to perform mental operations, lack understanding of conservation of mass/volume, they are egocentric bc they can’t see things from others point of view

3. concrete - 6-12yrs, begin to understand the principle of conservation, and can now think logically

4. formal - 12yrs-older, can reason in a logical, hypothetical, and abstract way

social development

• at 6months children form strong attachment to mom/care taker, heavy with emotion

• strange-situation test: separation and reunion procedure

  • secure - happy and exploring when mom is here, anxious and scared when mom is gone, then happy again when mom is returns

  • insecure - anxious (cling to mom when near, cry when she leaves, and is mad when she comes back) avoiding (no reaction when mom is near, gone, or returns)

Parenting styles

• how and to what extent parents want to control their children

• authoritarian - impose rules and expect obedience (my house my rules), children tend to have less social skills and less self esteem

• permissive- parents want to be their child’s friend, children are more aggressive and immature

• authoritative- parents are demanding but are also warm and responsive, children have high self esteem, self reliance, and are good socially