Fetal Development
A single sperm cell (male) penetrates the outer coating of the egg (female) and fuses to form one fertilized cell.
Germinal Stage
First 2 weeks
Zygote (initial splits, then differentiate into different body structures
Embryonic Stage
2-8th week
Embryo (zygote’s outer part attaches to the uterine wall, starting to form the placenta)
Fetal Stage
8th week to birth
Fetus
Placenta Functions
Transfers nutrients, oxygen, antibodies, and hormones from the mother’s to the fetus.
Also, it forms a barrier (placental barrier) that filters out some harmful substances - teratogen;
The barrier also prohibits the blood transfusion between the mother and the fetus.
Teratogen
Potential harmful influences
German measles (rubella) (Eyes, ears, heart problem) Deafness
X-rays and other toxic chemicals (cognitive abnormality) attention problem, lower IQ
STD Intellectual disability , blindness, other physical disorder
Cigarette smoking Miscarriage, premature birth, underweight baby
Regular consumption of alcohol Birth defects and intellectual disability (FAS – fetal alcohol syndrome)
Drugs Impaired Cognitive and language ability
Infancy
Newborn to toddler (0~3)
Childhood
Toddler (3) to teenager
Rooting reflex
turns head towards gentle touch
Sucking reflex
instinctively sucks on anything that touches the roof of their mouth
Moro reflex
also known as the startle reaction or embrace reflex
Physical development
First, infants begin to roll over. Next, they sit unsupported, crawl, and finally walk. Experience has little effect on this sequence.
Brain development
Brain cells: present before birth
Neural network development
3 to 6: frontal lobe (rational planning)
6 to puberty: association areas
Sensorimotor stage
0-2 years
Infants learn about the world through their senses and actions.
Tasting and touching everything
Object permanence
8 months
The knowledge that an object does not disappear into thin air when it’s hidden – that’s why peek-a-boo is so fun for little babies.
Stranger anxiety
7-8 months
Infants start to distinguish between family members and strangers. They start to show anxiety around strangers.
Preoperational stage
2 to 6~7 years
Memory and language develop in leaps and bounces at this stage. They rely primarily on intuition rather than logical reasoning.
Egocentrism
Cannot take the perspective of another person yet
Conservation
The knowledge that properties such as mass, volume, and number remain the same despite changes in the form or shape.
Concrete operational
7 to 11
Kids start to understand logic and reason
Identity
Acquire the ability of conservation, comparison and categorization.
Mathematical transformation
Formational Operational
12~
Reasoning ability expands from concrete thinking to abstract thinking. We can now use symbols and imagined realities to systematically reason.
Imprinting
Discovered by Konrad Lorenz, who was awarded a Nobel Prize in physiology and medicine in 1973 for his breakthrough. Lorenz showed that young geese will form a lasting social bond with the first moving being they encounter after birth—even if it is Konrad Lorenz.
Secure Attachment
They explore their environment happily in the presence of their mothers. When their mother leaves, they show distress. When the mother returns, they are happy for the reunion
Insecure Attachment
Clingy and anxious (anxious-ambivalent), or are cold and distant (anxious-avoidant).
Adolescence
Is defined as a life between childhood and adulthood.
The transition from parental influence to peer influence
Mental Disorder
Persistently harmful thoughts, feelings, and actions. It describes deviant, distressful, and dysfunctional behaviors.
DSM
Defines a diagnostic process and 16 clinical syndromes. Without presuming to explain their causes, it describes various disorders and lists their prevalence.
Anxiety Disorder
Feelings of excessive apprehension and anxiety.
Generalized Anxiety
Chronic and exaggerated worry and tension
Symptoms:
Persistent and uncontrollable tenseness and apprehension.
Autonomic arousal.
Inability to identify or avoid the cause of certain feelings.
Panic Disorder
Sudden surge of intense fear and anxiety
Symptoms:
Minutes-long episodes of intense dread which may include feelings of terror, chest pains, choking, or other frightening sensations.
Occasionally a panic attack can be mistaken as a heart attack.
Phobia
Persistent and irrational fear of an object or situation that disrupts behavior.
OCD
Persistence of unwanted thoughts (obsessions) and/or urge to engage in senseless rituals (compulsions) that cause distress
PTSD
Mental disorder characterized by flashbacks to previously encountered highly stressful experiences, such as military combat, abuse, assault
Symptoms:
At least 1 re-experiencing symptom (flashback, bad dreams, frightening thoughts) At least 1 avoidance symptom (avoiding places, people, thoughts)
At least 2 arousal and reactivity symptom (easily startled, tense, insomnia, angry outbursts)
At least 2 cognition and mood symptom (amnesia, depression, guilt/shame, loss of interest)
Symptoms typically develop early – within 3 months of the traumatic incident, but could begin years afterward.
Some people recover within 6 months, many have symptoms that last much longer, or even become chronic
Mood disorder
Psychological disorders characterized by emotional extremes
Depression
A mood disorder in which a person experiences, in the absence of drugs or a medical condition, two or more weeks of significantly depressed moods, feelings of worthlessness, and diminished interest or pleasure in most activities
Major Depression Symptoms:
Dysphoric mood: sad, hopeless, loss of pleasure in almost all usual activities;
Appetite: Significant weight loss/gain
Sleep: Insomnia or hypersomnia
Motor activity: Markedly slowed down or agitated
Guilt: Feelings of worthlessness; self-reproach
Concentration: Diminished ability to think or concentrate; forgetfulness
Suicide: Recurrent thoughts of death; suicidal ideas or attempts
Mania
Extreme elation, euphoria, grandiose thoughts or feelings
Bipolar
The person alternates between depression and manic episodes (formerly known as manic depression).
Schizophrenia
A group of severe disorders characterized by disorganized and delusional thinking, disturbed perceptions
Schizophrenia Positive Symptoms
Positive symptoms: the presence of inappropriate cognitions or behaviors
Hallucinations: Experiences (sights, sounds, smells, tastes, or touches) of people or things that are not really there
Disorganized Thinking: A positive symptom of schizophrenia in which thoughts and speech are not properly structured, and speech is thus unintelligible
Delusional Belief: Personal convictions that contradict known facts about the world but that a person clings to even when faced with conflicting evidence
Wrong reactions/Flat Affect: An absence of normal emotional expression; a negative symptom of schizophrenia
A schizophrenic person may laugh at the news of someone dying or show no emotion at all (flat affect).
Schizophrenia Negative Symptoms
Negative symptoms: the absence of appropriate behaviors
expressionless faces
rigid bodies
Cognitive impairments: reduced ability to perform everyday thinking tasks.
Patients with schizophrenia may continually rub an arm, rock a chair, or remain motionless for hours (catatonia).
DID
A disorder in which a person exhibits two or more distinct and alternating personalities (formerly called multiple personality disorder)
Personality Disorder
Chronic styles of thinking, behavior, and emotion that severely lower the quality of people’s personal relationships. These personal styles create conflicts with others and in the long run, harm the person with the disorder.
Cluster A
Odd and eccentric
Personality disorders are often associated with schizophrenia. The difference is mainly in the degree of severity and duration. This cluster people tend to have greater grasp on reality than schizophrenia patients.
Paranoid personality
Schizoid personality
Schizotypal personality
Cluster B
Dramatic and erratic
Antisocial personality
A pervasive pattern of disregard for a violation of the rights of others, lack of empathy, bloated self image, manipulative and impulsive behavior. They tend to be cynical of the feelings and sufferings of other people. They may display a superficial charm and can be verbally facile
Borderline Personality
A pervasive pattern of abrupt mood swings, instability in relationships, self-image, identity, behavior and affect, often leading to self-harm and impulsivity.
Histrionic Personality
Pervasive pattern of attention seeking behavior and excessive emotions.
Uncomfortable or feel unappreciated when they are not the center of attention;
Appearance and behavior of them are often inappropriately sexually provocative or seductive;
Style of speech is excessively impressionistic and lacking in detail;
Narcissistic Personality
Pervasive pattern of grandiosity, need for admiration, and lack of empathy.
Grandiose sense of self-importance;
They believe they are superior, special, or unique and expect others to recognize them as such;
Require excessive admiration;
Lack of empathy and have difficulty recognizing the desires and feelings of others;
Often envision others to be envious of them.
Cluster C
Anxious and fearful
Avoidant personality
feelings of social inhibition and inadequacy, extreme sensitivity to negative evaluation
Dependent personality
pervasive psychological need to be cared for by others
Obsessive-Compulsive
rigid conformity to rules, perfectionism, and control to the point of satisfaction and exclusion of leisurely activities and friendship (different from obsessive-compulsive disorder).
Psychoanalysis
The first formal psychotherapy to emerge was psychoanalysis developed by Sigmund Freud
Psychoanalysis Goal
Freud believed psychological problems originate from repressed impulses and conflicts in childhood, the aim of psychoanalysis is to bring repressed feelings into conscious awareness where the patient can deal with them.
Psychoanalytic Method
Freud developed the method of free association to unravel the unconscious mind and its conflicts.
The patient lies on a couch and speaks whatever comes to his mind. During free association, the patient edits his thoughts to resist his feelings and to express his emotions. Such resistance becomes important in the analysis of conflict-driven anxiety. Eventually the patient opens up and reveals his innermost private thoughts to the therapist, developing positive or negative feelings (transference) towards him.
Humanistic Therapy
Aims to boost self-fulfillment by helping people grow in self-awareness and self-acceptance.
Behavioral Therapy
Therapy that applies learning principles to the elimination of unwanted behaviors. To treat phobias or addictive behaviors therapists do not delve deeply below the surface looking for inner causes.
Exposure Therapy
Exposes patients to things they fear and avoid. Through repeated exposures anxiety lessens because they habituate to the things feared.
Aversive Therapy
A type of counterconditioning that associates an unpleasant state with an unwanted behavior. With this technique, temporary conditioned aversion to alcohol has been reported.
Cognitive Therapy
Aaron Beck (1979) suggests that depressed patients believe that they can never be happy (thinking) and thus associate minor failings (e.g. failing a test [event]) in life as major causes for their depression.
Group Therapy
Normally consists of 6-9 people and a 90-minute session which can help more people and cost less. Clients benefit from knowing others have similar problems.
Drug Therapy
Drugs directly alter chemical activity in the brain.
Placebo effect may occur through drug therapy.
Encoding
Getting information to the brain
Automatic processing
Some information (route to your school)
Effortful processing
New or unusual information
Memory Effects
Mechanisms that influence how (and how well) memory works
Rehearsal
Effortful learning usually requires rehearsal or conscious repetition.
Serial Postion Effect
Primacy effect
Encoding the first items better Recency effect
Encoding the last items better
Saliency Effect
Encoding the items that stand out (visually or semantically)
Chunking Effect
Organizing information into meaningful units
Spacing
We retain information better when our rehearsal is distributed over time.
Sensory Memory
Snapshot memory, very large capacity, very short duration. ​​The duration of sensory memory varies for the different senses.
Working Memory
Limited capacity, highly efficient. Working memory, a new name for short-term memory, has limited capacity (7±2) and short duration (20 seconds).
Long-Term Memory
Unlimited capacity, with memory decay. Unlimited capacity store. Estimates on capacity range from 1000 billion to 1,000,000 billion bits of information (Landauer, 1986).
Episodic Memory
Memory about events (in time)
Semantic Memory
Memory about fact, concepts, etc..
Autobiographical Memory
Similar to episodic memory, but only pertains to self
Procedural Memory
Memory for skills – how to use something, how to do something.
Emotional Memory
Memory related to a particular emotion
Retrieval
Refers to getting information out of the memory storage
Recognition
the person has to identify an item amongst others e.g., a multiple-choice test requires recognition
Recollection
the person must retrieve information using effort, e.g., a fill-in-the blank test requires recall
Relearning
the individual shows how much time (or effort) is saved when learning material a second time.
Retrieval cues
Memories are held in storage by a web of associations. These associations are like anchors that help retrieve memory.
Priming
To retrieve a specific memory from the web of associations, you must first activate one of the strands that leads to it.
Forgetting
An inability to retrieve information due to poor encoding, storage, or retrieval
Interference
learning something new (especially similar) will cause competition to the old material/Learning some new information may disrupt retrieval of other information.
Retroactive Interference
Sleep prevents retroactive interference (nothing occurs afterwards). Therefore, it leads to better recall.
Proactive Interference
Studying first thing in the morning is also an effective strategy. It minimizes proactive interference – because nothing occurs before.
Memory Reconstruction
​​While tapping our memories, we filter or fill in missing pieces of information to make our recall more coherent.