Psychological Development Flashcards

Vocabulary flashcards based on lecture notes about psychological development.

Development

Refers to changes in an organism (human or animal) that occur over time.

Developmental norm

Show the typical characteristics or abilities and expected levels of achievement associated with a particular age or stage of development.

Emotional development

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

Cognitive development

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

Lifespan development

From birth through to and including old age.

Social development

Involves changes in an individual’s relationships with other people and their skills in interacting with others, such as the ability to form and maintain close relationships with others in a group situation.

Heredity

Involves the transmission of characteristics from biological parents to their offspring via genes at the time of conception.

Environment

Refers to all 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

Involve physiologically based or determined influences, often not under our control

Psychological factors

Involve all those internal, mental processes and influences

Social Factors

Involve influences from the external social environment in which we interact with others

Subjective Feelings

The inner, personal experience of an emotion.

Expressive behaviour

The many overt expressions of behaviour which communicate emotions.

Physiological response

Occur when we experience an emotion involving changes such as heart rate, blood pressure, breathing rate and perspiration.

Attachment

The emotional bond which forms between an infant and another person.

Strange situation

A standardised test for measuring the attachment relationship a child has with their parent.

Stranger anxiety

Refers the distress and uneasiness experienced by young children when they are around people who are unfamiliar to them.

Separation anxiety

Is indicated by the distress and uneasiness when away from the person or people to whom they are attached.

Secure attachment

An infant who has formed a secure attachment shows a balance between dependence and exploration. The infant uses the caregiver as a ‘home’, or safe base from which to venture out and explore an unfamiliar environment, but shows some distress and decreases exploration when the caregiver departs.

Insecure avoidant attachment

The infant does not seek closeness or contact with the caregiver and treats them much like a stranger. The infant rarely cries when the caregiver leaves the room and ignores the caregiver upon their return.

Insecure resistant attachment

The infant appears anxious even when their caregiver is near. They become very upset when separated from the caregiver. When the caregiver returns, the infant approaches them, cries to be picked up, then squirms or fights to get free, as though it is not sure about what it really wants.

Disorganised attachment

A form of insecure attachment in which infants show inconsistent or odd and contradictory behaviours during separation from and reunion with their caregivers

Surrogate

Anyone or anything which ‘substitutes for’ or ‘plays the part of’ something else.

Privation

Involves the absence of the opportunity to satisfy something that is needed or desired, in this case, the need for social contact.

Schema

A mental idea of what something is and how to act on it.

Object permanence

The understanding that objects still exist even if they cannot be seen, heard or touched.

Goal-directed behaviour

To perform and successfully complete a sequence of actions with a particular purpose in mind.

Egocentrism

The tendency to perceive the world solely from one’s own point of view.

Transformation

Understanding that something can change from one state to another.

Animism

The belief that everything which exists has some kind of consciousness.

Concentration

The child can focus on only one quality or feature of an object or event at a time.

Reversibility

The ability to mentally follow a sequence of events or line of reasoning back to its starting point.

Conservation

Refers to the understanding that certain properties of an object can remain the same even when its appearance changes.

Abstract thinking

A way of thinking that does not rely on being able to see, visualise, experience or manipulate in order to understand something

Classification

The infant learns that a desired object located out of reach on a coffee table may be obtained by using the table to pull themselves up to a standing position and therefore to where the object is reachable.

Social behaviour

Is defined as any action that is influenced, directly or indirectly, by the actual, imagined, expected, or implied presence of others.

Psychosocial crisis

Erikson viewed psychosocial development as a progression through eight sequential stages, with each stage corresponding with a different period in the life span.

Trust

Views and expectations that infants develop about their environment.

Autonomy

Refers to the ability to do things independently and the feelings of self-control, self-confidence, self- reliance and competence which accompanies this.

Initiative

Involves being able to plan, think for oneself and carry out various kinds of activities with purpose.

Identity

Refers to the overall image individuals have of themselves .

Role confusion

The negative outcome of stage 5, adolescents show a certain amount of role confusion — a sense of not knowing who they are, where they belong, to whom they belong or where they are headed in life.

Intimacy

Refers to the ability to share with and care about another person without fear of losing oneself in the process.

Isolation

Refers to the sense of being alone without anyone to share one’s life with or care for.

Generativity

Refers to a person’s concern with others beyond their immediate family, with future generations and the nature of the society and world in which those generations will live.

Stagnation

Refers to a sense of ‘sameness’, inactivity, boredom, too much concern with personal needs and comforts and a lack of personal growth.

Integrity

Refers to a sense of satisfaction with one’s achievements in life and a belief that all that happened in the course of one’s life has been useful, valuable and meaningful.

Sensitive period

A period during development when a person (or animal) is more responsive (‘sensitive’) to certain types of environmental experiences or learning.

Critical period

A specific period in development during which a person (or animal) is most vulnerable to the deprivation or absence of certain environmental experiences.

Imprinting

A simple type of learning process in which a very young animal fixes its attention on or attaches to the first object with which it has visual, auditory or tactile experience and thereafter follows that object and seems to form an attachment to that object.