Human Growth and Development Practice Flashcards

A comprehensive set of vocabulary flashcards covering key theorists, developmental stages, and psychological concepts based on the Human Growth and Development lecture transcript.

Psychometric

Refers to mental testing or measurement.

Psychodiagnostic

The study of personality through the interpretation of behavior or nonverbal cues, often used in counseling to label a client in a diagnostic category using the DSM.

Psychopharmacology

The study of the effects that medications or drugs have on psychological functions.

Id

The seat of sex and aggression in Freudian theory; it is irrational, illogical, void of time orientation, and concerns itself only with the body and the pleasure principle.

Ego

The logical and rational portion of the personality that utilizes reasoning and control to keep impulses in check; also known as the reality principle.

Superego

The moralistic and idealistic portion of the personality.

Epigenesis

The biological notion that successfully completing a previous stage is necessary for the stages that transpire next; every stage emerges from the one before it in a systematic order.

Jean Piaget

The leading name in cognitive development in children, known for his four-stage theory: sensorimotor, preoperations, concrete operations, and formal operations.

Dualism

A concept identified by Robert Perry common to teens in which things are conceptualized as good or bad, or right and wrong, with virtually no ambiguity.

Relativism

The stage in adulthood where an individual perceives that an answer can exist relative to a specific situation and there is more than one way to view the world.

Idiographic Approach

Theories, such as those by Freud and Piaget, that examine individuals in depth rather than groups of people.

Nomothetic Approach

Approaches such as behaviorism or the DSM where large numbers of people are studied to create general principles that apply to the population.

Conservation

A Piagetian principle referring to the notion that a substance's weight, mass, and volume remain the same even if it changes shape, mastered during the concrete operations stage.

Schema

A cognitive structure or system that permits the child to test out things in the physical world and grows with life experience.

Reversibility

The Piagetian concept that one can undo an action, meaning an object can return to its initial shape.

Egocentrism

Used by Piaget to describe a child's inability to view the world from the vantage point of someone else.

Lawrence Kohlberg

The leading theorist in moral development who suggested three levels of morality: preconventional, conventional, and postconventional.

Heinz Dilemma

A fictional story used by Lawrence Kohlberg as a research tool to assess an individual's level and stage of moral development based on their reasoning.

Identity Crisis

A term from the work of Erik Erikson referring to the period during adolescence when individuals experiment with various roles to find out who they really are.

Harry Stack Sullivan

Founder of the psychiatry of interpersonal relations, which emphasizes social influences over biological determination across stages from infancy to late adolescence.

Fugue State

A state in which an individual experiences memory loss (amnesia) and leaves home, often intending to change their job and identity.

Counterconditioning

A behavioristic technique used to weaken or eliminate a learned response by pairing it with a stronger or more desirable response.

Maturation Hypothesis

The theory suggesting behavior is guided exclusively by hereditary factors and neural development, with certain behaviors manifesting only when the necessary stimuli are present.

John Bowlby

The British psychiatrist associated with bonding and attachment, who insisted children must bond with an adult before age $3$ to lead a normal social life.

Object Loss

A condition occurring when a primary bond is severed at an early age, which is considered a breeding ground for abnormal behavior.

Anaclitic Depression

A term used by René Spitz to describe infants who experienced maternal deprivation between the sixth and eighth months of life, leading to difficulties in forming close relationships.

Eros

The Freudian concept of the life instinct.

Thanatos

The Freudian concept of the self-destructive death instinct.

Latency

The only Freudian developmental stage that is not primarily psychosexual in nature, occurring between ages $6$ and $12$, where sexual interests are replaced by social interests.

Cephalocaudal

Refers to bodily proportions and development occurring from head to foot (head to tail).

Oedipus Complex

A phallic-stage phase where a boy has a secret wish to marry his mother and feels rage toward his father, typically occurring between ages $3$ and $5$.

Empiricism

A philosophy, often seen as the forerunner of behaviorism, adhering to the principle that experience is the only source for acquiring knowledge.

Visual Cliff

An apparatus used by Eleanor Gibson to research depth perception in children, demonstrating that it is an inherent trait by approximately $6$ months of age.

Object Permanence

The Piagetian concept that objects have an existence even when the child is not interacting with them or when they are out of sight; also called object constancy.

Ethology

The study of animals' behavior in their natural environment, often associated with Konrad Lorenz.

Imprinting

An instinctual behavior in which an infant instinctively follows the first moving object it encounters during a critical period, researched by Konrad Lorenz.

Centration

A Piagetian concept occurring in the preoperational stage characterized by focusing on one key feature of an object while ignoring others.

Equilibration

In Piagetian terms, the balance between taking in new information (assimilation) and modifying cognitive structures to deal with it (accommodation).

Nosology

The branch of medicine which concerns itself with the classification of disease; the DSM is used as the primary nosological guide in counseling.

Fixation

An analytic concept where emotional development stops because life becomes too traumatic, causing the individual to remain stuck in a safe developmental stage.

Risky Shift Phenomenon

The tendency for a group decision to be more liberal than the average decision of individual group members prior to group participation.

Animism

A concept in Piaget's preoperational period where a child attributes human characteristics and lifelike abilities to inanimate objects.