Developmental Psychology Flashcards

Developmental Psychology

• The study of YOU from womb to tomb.
• Examines how we change physically, socially, cognitively, and morally over our lifetimes.

Unit 6: Developmental Psychology (7-9%) - AP Exam Topics

• Interaction of nature and nurture (including cultural variations) in the determination of behavior.
• Process of conception and gestation, including factors influencing successful fetal development (e.g., nutrition, illness, substance abuse).
• Maturation of motor skills.
• Influence of temperament and other social factors on attachment and appropriate socialization.
• Maturation of cognitive abilities (e.g., Piaget’s stages, information processing).
• Comparison of models of moral development (e.g., Kohlberg, Gilligan).
• Maturational challenges in adolescence, including related family conflicts.
• Influence of parenting styles on development.
• Development of decisions related to intimacy as people mature.
• Physical and cognitive changes that emerge as people age, including steps to maximize function.
• Influence of sex and gender on socialization and other aspects of development.
• Key contributors in developmental psychology: Mary Ainsworth, Albert Bandura, Diana Baumrind, Erik Erikson, Sigmund Freud, Carol Gilligan, Harry Harlow, Lawrence Kohlberg, Konrad Lorenz, Jean Piaget, Lev Vygotsky.

The Developing Person

• Developmental Psychology: A branch of psychology that studies physical, cognitive, and social change throughout the lifespan.
• Development: Sequence of age-related changes that occur as a person progresses from conception to death.

Core Issues in Developmental Psychology

• Focuses on changes in thinking, feeling, and behavior throughout a person’s life.
• Three major debates:
  • Nature vs. Nurture
  • Continuity vs. Discontinuity
  • Stability vs. Change

Nature vs. Nurture

• Examines the influence of heredity (nature) and environment (nurture) on development.
• Seeks to understand how much weight each factor has and how they interact.

Studying Nature-Nurture Interaction

• Twin studies: Compare identical twins (same genotype) and fraternal twins (50% shared genes).
• Adoption studies: Assess similarities with biological families (nature) and adoptive families (nurture).

Continuity vs. Discontinuity

• Debates whether human development is a gradual, continuous process or a series of discrete stages.

Continuity View

• Change is gradual and incremental.
• Skills and knowledge build upon previously acquired ones, similar to getting taller.
• Example: Trial and error method of learning to walk or eat with a spoon.

Discontinuity View

• Development occurs in more abrupt stages.
• Succession of changes produces different behaviors in different age-specific life periods (stages).
• Advancement requires reaching a behavioral goal to proceed.
• Example: Beginning readers suddenly connecting letters and sounds.

Developmental Theories Supporting Discontinuity

• Freud's psychosexual stages.
• Piaget's stages of cognitive development.
• Erikson's theories of psychosocial development.

Understanding Developmental Stages

• Developmental stages: Life periods initiated by distinct transitions in physical or psychological functioning.
• Individuals go through the same stages in the same order, but not necessarily at the same rate.
• Missing a stage can have lasting consequences.
• Analogy: Continuity is like an escalator (never stopping), while discontinuity is like an elevator (stops at every floor).

Stability vs. Change

• Examines whether personality traits present at birth remain constant or change throughout the lifespan.
• Considers if an extroverted baby remains extroverted throughout life.
• Related to the nature vs. nurture debate.
• Research typically uses cross-sectional and longitudinal studies.

Perspectives on Stability and Change

• Psychoanalysts: Personalities develop in the first five years and then remain stable.
• Change Theorists: Personalities are modified by interactions.
• Developmental psychologists: Some traits (e.g., temperament, outgoingness) stay stable, but social attitudes can change.

Developmental Periods

• Prenatal Period: Development before birth.
• Neonatal Period: Birth to 1 month.
• Infancy: 1 month to 18/24 months.

Prenatal Development

• Genetic plan: Determines how organs will be formed.
• Differentiation: Stem cells capable of forming into any organ.
• Mitosis: Zygote divides into two cells, then four, then eight, and so on until it becomes a baby.

Age of Viability

• Age at which a baby can survive premature birth – 5.75-6 months.

Maternal Drug Use

• Most drugs consumed by pregnant women can pass through the placenta.
• Placenta: Structure that allows oxygen and nutrients to pass into the fetus from the mother’s bloodstream and bodily waste to pass out to the mother.
• Teratogens: Agents, such as chemicals and viruses, that can reach the embryo or fetus during prenatal development and cause harm.
• Fetal Alcohol Syndrome (FAS): Physical and cognitive abnormalities in children caused by a pregnant woman’s heavy drinking; includes facial disproportions.
• Smoking: Miscarriage, stillbirth, prematurity, complications, and increased risk of Sudden Infant Death Syndrome.

Common Teratogens and Their Effects

• Measles, Mumps, and Rubella: Blindness, deafness, heart defects, brain damage.
• Marijuana: Irritability, nervousness, tremors; infant is easily disturbed, startled.
• Cocaine: Decreased height, low birth weight, respiratory problems, seizures, learning difficulties; infant is difficult to soothe.
• Alcohol: Fetal alcohol syndrome (intellectual disability, delayed growth, facial malformation), learning difficulties, smaller than normal heads.
• Nicotine: Miscarriage, low birth weight, stillbirth, short stature, intellectual disability, learning disabilities.
• Mercury: Intellectual disability, blindness.
• Vitamin A (high doses): Facial, ear, central nervous system, and heart defects.
• Caffeine: Miscarriage, low birth weight.
• Toxoplasmosis: Brain swelling, spinal abnormalities, deafness, blindness, intellectual disability.
• High Water Temperatures: Increased chance of neural tube defects.

Prenatal Development Stages

• Zygote: Fertilized egg by sperm; a one-celled organism containing chromosomes and genes with genetic information; enters a 2-week period of rapid cell division; develops into an embryo; less than half survive the first two weeks; the outer part becomes the placenta.
• Prenatal Period: From conception to birth; divided into three phases:
  • Germinal Stage (1st 2 weeks)
  • Embryonic Stage (2 weeks – 2 months)
  • Fetal Stage (2 months – birth)

Prenatal Development - Continued

• Germinal Stage: First phase, first 2 weeks after conception; 7 days, zygote attaches to uterine wall.
• Embryonic Stage: Developing human organism from 2 weeks through 2nd months; many vital organs form (beating heart); baby can hear (and recognize) sounds and respond to light.
• Fetal Period: 9 weeks after conception to birth; organs of the fetus develop and become functional; a period of tremendous growth; length increases by about 20 times; weight increases from 1 ounce at 2 months to a little over 7 pounds

Newborn Preferences and Abilities

• Preferences for human voices and faces, face-like images, and the smell and sound of the mother.
• Habituation: Decreasing responsiveness with repeated stimulation; newborns become bored with a repeated stimulus but renew their attention to a slightly different stimulus.

Innate Abilities of Newborns

• Newborns have innate abilities to find nourishment, interact with others, and avoid harmful situations.

Reflexes

• Used by pediatricians to determine whether or not an infant’s nervous system is working properly.
• Reflexes that help infants survive:
  • Grasping
  • Moro (startle)
  • Rooting (turns toward touch on cheek, opens mouth, and searches for nipple)
  • Stepping
  • Sucking

Neonatal and Infancy Periods

• Neonatal Period: Birth to one month old; babies respond to stimulation from all their senses.
• Infancy Period: 1 month to 24 months; rapid development but still heavily reliant on reflexive behavior; limited memory before age 3 ½ due to not fully developed brain circuits.

Childhood - Motor Development

• From birth to about 2 years, infants show tremendous amount of development in motor skills.
• Six motor milestones:
  • Raising head and chest
  • Rolling over
  • Sitting up with support
  • Sitting up without support
  • Crawling
  • Walking

Infancy and Childhood Learning

• Babies at 3 months old can learn that kicking moves a mobile and can retain that learning for a month (Rovee-Collier, 1989).

Motor Development Principles

• Cephalocaudal Trend: Head to foot direction of motor development; gaining control of upper part of body first.
• Proximodistal Trend: Center-outward direction of motor development; gain control of torso before extremities.
• Infants grow approximately quadruple their birth weight in the 1st year.

Gross vs. Fine Motor Skills

• Gross Motor Skills
  • Larger movements your baby makes with his arms, legs, feet, or his entire body.
• Fine Motor Skills
  • The coordination of small muscles, in movements-usually involving the synchronization of hands and fingers-with the eyes.

Physical Development

• Biological growth processes that enable orderly changes in behavior; relatively uninfluenced by experience; sets the course for development while experience adjusts it.

Brain Development

• At birth, an infant's brain has over 100 billion neurons.
• From birth to 3 years, neurons grow as the brain triples in weight due to growth of new dendrites, axon terminals, and increasing numbers of synaptic connections.
• Synaptic Pruning: Necessary loss of neurons as unused synaptic connections and nerve cells are cleared away to make way for functioning connections and cells.

Sensory Development at Birth

• Most sensory abilities such as the sense of touch, smell, and taste are fairly well developed.
• Hearing is functional at birth and takes a little while to reach its full potential; newborns seem most responsive to high pitches, as in a woman’s voice, and low pitches, as in a male’s voice.
• Vision is the least functional and takes 6 months to fully develop; newborns have poor color perception and a fixed distance of about 7-10 inches for clear vision.

Methods to Gauge Infant's Sensory Abilities

• Preferential looking: Assumes that the longer an infant spends looking at a stimulus, the more the infant prefers that stimulus over others.
• Habituation: The tendency for infants (and adults) to stop paying attention to a stimulus that does not change.

Infant's Physical Developmental Milestones.

• Newborn to 1 month
  • Turns head toward a speaking voice
  • Holds up head and shoulders
  • Keep their hands clenched in fists most of the time
  • Observe an object about 12-15 inches away.
  • Recongnizes primary familiar
  • Turns head to sounds
  • Responds to the mother/caregiver's voice
• Completion of 3 months
  • Holds head up high and well
  • Rolls belly to back
  • Begins to reach towards objects
  • Bright colours/shapes
  • Turn in the direction of a voice
  • Responds with the entire body to a familiar face.
• Completion of 6 months
  • Holds head up well when lifted
  • Rolls back to belly
  • Sits alone with rounded back and uses protection
  • Reaches and grasps with whole hand
  • Enjoys bright colours/shapes
  • Smiles at familiar faces and stares solemnly at strangers
  • Participates actively in interactions with other by vocalizing in response to adult speech
• Completion of 9 months
  • Moves and holds head easily
  • in all directions
  • Learn how to turn when sitting to
  • reach for a toy
  • Free hands for
  • exploring and
  • passes object from
  • one hand to
  • another
  • Recognizes self in photographs or
  • mirrors and also
  • other people
  • Understands simple words
• Completion of 1 year
  • Rolling
  • Crawling
    *Takes steps
    *Grasps with thumb and
    *forefinger
    *Enjoys observing and
    *interacting briefly with other children
    *Hears clearly and understands most simple language.
• Completion of 2 years
  *Sits well without
  *support with
  *straight back
  *Starts crawling
  *Walks
  *Looks at small things/pictures
• Completion of 3 years
  *Twists and moves easily while sitting
  *Can turn over on their own when on a flat surface
  *Begins to creep
  *Throws and catches the ball.

Learning in Development

• During infancy, youngsters begin to exploit their abilities for learning, for example: crying, cooing, smiling, etc.
• Child-directed speech: A child’s style of speaking is influenced by the way adults and older children talk to infants and very young children, with higher pitched, repetitious, sing-song speech patterns.

Language Development

• Month 4 (approximate): Babbles many speech sounds.
• Month 10 (approximate): Babbling reveals household language.
• Month 12 (approximate): One-word stage.
• Month 24 (approximate): Two-world, telegraphic speech.
• Month 24+: Language develops rapidly into complete sentences.

Classical Conditioning in Newborns

• Newborns who were stroked on the forehead were classically conditioned to turn their head toward the side where the sweetened water was provided, even if the bottle of water wasn’t present.

Social Abilities During Infancy

• Synchronicity: close coordination between the gazing, vocalizing, touching and smiling of mothers and infants.
• Babies are preprogrammed to their mother’s voice and to recognize faces; infants engage in the same behavior as their mother: laugh when she laughs/cry when she displays negative emotion.

Mimicking

• The idea that babies will mimic is not something that is unique to human babies.

Temperament and Attachment

• Psychological and social development of infants and children involves:
  • Development of personality
  • Development of relationships
  • A sense of being male or female
• Ways in which infants demonstrate personalities are:
  • Temperament
  • Attachment

Temperament

• Behavioral and emotional characteristics that are fairly well established at birth:
  • Easy: Regular in schedules of waking, sleeping, & eating, adaptable to change, happy babies, easily soothed when distressed.
  • Difficult: Opposite of easy ones; irregular in their schedules, unhappy about any kind of change, are loud, active, and tend to be crabby.
  • Slow to warm up: Less grumpy, quieter but slow to adapt to change; if change is introduced gradually, they warm up to new people and new situations.

Attachment

• Social-emotional relationship between a child and parent or caregiver.
• Attachment occurs instinctively in many species.
• One example in birds is called imprinting where a powerful attraction occurs between infants and the first moving object or individual they spend time with.

Origins of Attachment - Konrad Lorenz

• Imprinting: The process by which certain animals form attachments during a critical period very early in life.
• Example: A baby chick is hatched by a mother duck. The chick will follow the duck around and even try to get into the pond with the mother duck and her ducklings.

Critical Period

• Specific time during which an organism has to experience stimuli in order to progress through developmental stages properly.
• Example: Language has a critical period; during the critical period, it is much easier to learn a new language; if children don't start speaking around a certain time, it can become even more difficult for them to pick up their native language.

Mary Ainsworth - The Strange Situation

• Display attachment.
• Secure Attachment:
  • Ideal
  • Children show some distress when parent leaves
  • Seek contact at the reunion
  • Explore when parent is gone
  • Play and greet when parent is present
• Insecure Attachments:
  • Lack 1 or more of these traits

Types of Attachment

• Secure: Explore happily, upset when mother departs, but easily soothed upon her return.
• Avoidant: Willing to explore, don’t “touch base,” react very little to mother’s absence or return.
• Ambivalent: Clinging, unwilling to explore; upset when mother leaves, angry with her on her return.
• Disorganized-disoriented: Unable to decide reaction to mother’s return, approach mother with their eyes turned away from her, avoid eye contact.

Social Development

• Stranger Anxiety: Fear of strangers that infants commonly display; beginning by about 8 months of age.
• Separation Anxiety: Extreme emotional agitation, fear, and distress particularly in infants when object/loved one leaves; peaks between 14 and 18 months.
• Based on culture: Western countries tend to stress autonomy from a very early age, but in many other cultures, infants are rarely separated from their mother in the first year of life.

Imprinting with Human Babies

• While human babies are not as capable to move around at an early age, they will develop a strong connection to anyone who responds regularly to their signals-crying, cooing, smiling…etc.

Strength of Imprinting

• One study found that when mothers left the room, 2-4 month old babies’ skin temperature dropped, a sign of emotional distress.
• Skin temperature dropped even more when the mother was replaced by a stranger.
• In contrast, skin temperature remained constant steady if the mother stayed in the room-even if the stranger was present.
• Monkeys raised by artificial mothers were terror-stricken when placed in strange situations without their surrogate mothers.

Lasting Effects of Imprinting

• Despite the strength of attachment and imprinting, individuals who lack healthy attachments in infancy are not necessarily doomed for life.
• While attachment problems are good predictors of later problems with social relationships, many people do succeed in overcoming early attachment issues.

Contact Comfort

• Why do infants become attached to parents?
• Evolutionary -a way to safeguard an infants survival by providing support and protection.
• Through natural selection, individuals with genetic tendencies to “attach” will survive, thrive and pass along those tendencies.

Cupboard Theory

• Freud had convinced most doctors that young infants and children were so mentally underdeveloped that the only thing of real importance to infants was the breast or the bottle.
• Cupboard Theory: Infants become attached to those who provide the “cupboard” containing the food supply.

Disproving Freud - Harlow's Monkeys

• Harry and Margaret Harlow thought physical contact was important to child development.
• They conducted an experiment that used infant monkeys who had been separated from their mothers at birth.
• The monkeys had the choice between a wire monkey that provided milk (a cupboard), and a cloth covered monkey that provided only stimulation from the soft cloth it was made out of.

Harlow’s Findings

• Infants need more than food; they need contact comfort too.
• A lack of close, loving relationships in infancy even affects physical growth.
• A study of children in emotionally detached family environments showed slower growth and bone development.
• When removed from such a situation they may grow again. If, however they are placed back in the poor environment, their growth is stunted once again.
• This phenomenon is known as psychological dwarfism.

Maturation

• Maturation is the orderly sequence of biological growth by which an organism develops over time, both physically and mentally.
• Studies have shown that, when raised under adequate environment, maturation follows a predictable pattern.
• Maturation sets the basic course of development, experience adjusts it.
• Nature and nurture at work.

Cognitive Development Overview

• Brain triples its weight in the first 2 years
• By age 5, the brain is 90% of its adult weight, paving the way for major advances in cognitive development such as:
  • Development of thinking
  • Problem solving
  • Memory

Cognitive Development: Piaget’s Theory

• Jean Piaget developed a theory about development called the Cognitive Theory of Development.
• Piaget’s theory was a discontinuous stage model of development; children will undergo a revolutionary change in thought at each stage.

Key Ideas in Piaget's Theory

• Piaget’s theory was based on three key ideas:
  • Schemas
  • Assimilation and accommodation
  • Stages of cognitive development
• Schemas: Mental structures that guide thinking and are the building blocks of development; they form and change as we develop and organize our knowledge to deal with new experiences and predict future events.

Assimilation and Accommodation

• Assimilation: Process that modifies new information to fit with existing schemas or with what is already known; new information fits our existing view of the world; babies suck on anything put in front of them as if it was a bottle.
• Accommodation: Process of restructuring or modifying schemas to incorporate new information; changes our views to fit new information; when a child learns that a butterfly is not a “bird.”

Piaget’s Stages: Sensorimotor Stage (Birth to age 2)

• Uses senses & motor abilities to interact with environment.
• Uses reflexive responses with very little thinking involved.
• Stranger Anxiety, or fear of strangers, is very common during this period (8 months).
• A major step in thinking happens by year two, the ability to make mental images of objects, called mental representation, which is the foundation of being able to problem solve.

Key Developments in Sensorimotor Stage

• Object permanence: Knowledge that objects exist independently of one’s own actions or awareness.
• Develop symbolic thought: Ability to represent objects in one’s thoughts with symbols such as words; capable of thinking in simple symbols and planning out actions.

Piaget’s Stages: Preoperational Stage (2 to 6/7 years of age)

• Stage marked by well-developed mental representation and the use of language.
• Children still cannot solve problems requiring logical thought, but they can recognize when something is not right.

Key Features of Preoperational Stage

• Egocentrism: Self-centered focus that causes children to see the world only in their own terms.
• Animistic thinking: Believing inanimate objects have life and mental processes.
• Centration: Inability to understand an event because the child focuses their attention too narrowly.
• Irreversibility: Inability to think through a series of events or steps and then reverse course.
• Artificialism: Believing all objects are made by people.

Piaget’s Stages: Concrete Operational Stage (7 to 11 years)

• Child develops the abilities of irreversibility, conservation, and mental operations; they ask questions and arrive at their own rational conclusions.
• Not yet capable of abstract thinking.
• Mental operations: the ability to solve problems by manipulating images in one’s own mind.
• Conservation: The principle that quantity remains the same despite changes in shape.

Piaget’s Stages: Formal Operational (12 to adulthood)

• People begin to think about issues like being more accepted by peers, and abstract issues like love, fairness and our reason for existence.
• Consists of 4 unique structural properties:
  • Hypothetical reasoning
  • Analogical/Abstract reasoning
  • Deductive reasoning
  • Reflective abilities

Theory of Mind

• Theory of mind is the ability to infer (understand) other’s mental states, and know they may be different than our own.
• Piaget thought this did not happen until around age 8, but studies suggest this actually happens as young as age 4 or 5.

Piaget’s Stages of Cognitive Development Summary

• Sensorimotor (Birth to nearly 2 years): Experiencing the world through senses and actions (looking, touching, mouthing); Object permanence, Stranger anxiety.
• Preoperational (About 2 to 6 years): Representing things with words and images but lacking logical reasoning; Pretend play, Egocentrism, Language development.
• Concrete operational (About 7 to 11 years): Thinking logically about concrete events; grasping concrete analogies and performing arithmetical operations; Conservation, Mathematical transformations.
• Formal operational (About 12 through adulthood): Abstract reasoning; Abstract logic, Potential for moral reasoning.

Reflecting on Piaget

• Piaget remains one of the most significant psychologists in the history of the science.
• While he may have been a little off on the ages for his stages, his emphasis was more on the sequence (order) of specific milestones.
• Studies from around the world have confirmed that human cognition unfolds basically in the sequence that Piaget described.

Lev Vygotsky

• Piaget’s emphasis on how the child’s mind grows through interaction with the physical environment is complemented by Vygotsky’s emphasis on how the child’s mind grows through interaction with the social environment.
• Language is an important ingredient in social mentoring that provides the building blocks for thinking.

Zone of Proximal Development

• Vygotsky stated that a child follows an adult's example and gradually develops the ability to do certain tasks without help or assistance.
• Zone of proximal development: The difference between what a child can do alone and what that child can do with the help of a

Sigmund Freud

• We all have a libido (sexual drive).
• Our libido travels to different areas of our body throughout our development.
• If we become preoccupied with any one area, Freud said we have become fixated on it.
• Together Freud called these stages our Psychosexual Stages of Development.

Freud's Psychosexual Stages of Development

• Stages
  • Oral Stage
    • Ages
      • Birth to 2 years
    • Description
      • Pleasure from oral stimulation
      • Tasting & sucking
        *Problems/Fixation
        Dependency or aggression problems with drinking, smoking and nail biting
  • Anal
    • Ages
      • 15 months to 3 years
    • Description
      • Primary focus on controlling
      • Bladder and bowels
      • eliminating/retaining feces.
        *Problems/Fixation
        Anal-expulsive (messy, wasteful, destructive) vs. Anal-retentive( orderly, rigid, obsessive)
  • Phallic Stage
    • Ages
      • 3-6
    • Description
      • Genitals differences between male and female
        *Fixation can sexual deviancies or confused sexual gender
        *Problems/Fixation
        Child becomes rival for the affection of parent
  • Latency Stage
    • Ages 6 to puberty
    • Description
      • Sexual desires pushed to background
      • Focus on intellectual and social pursuits
        Important stage for development of communication skills and self
        *Problems/Fixation
• Freud believed that girls continue to possess feelings of envy or inferiority
  • Genital Stage
    • Ages Puperty through Adulthood
    • Description
      • Sexual desires renew seek relationships with others
        *Problems/Fixation
        Problems that emerge in this stage are carried over from earlier stages

Erikson’s Theory of Psychosocial Development

• Erik Erikson saw human development as a sequence of psychosocial stages, defined by common problems that emerge throughout life.
• Erikson identified 8 stages, with each bringing a new challenge; to move onto the next stage of life, the problem of the previous stage must successfully be coped with.

Erikson's Stages of Psychosocial Development.

• 0-1 ½ years
  *Principle challenge
  *Trust vs Mistrust.
  *Babies Learn either to Trust or mistrust that others will care for their basic needs.
  *1-3 years
  *Priniciple Challenge
  *Autonomy vs self-Doubt
  *Children learn to be Self-Sufficient in many activities, or to Doubt their own abilities
  *3-6 years
  *Priniciple Challenge
  *Initaive vs Guilt
  *Children want to undertake many adult like activities, sometimes overstepping the limits set be parents and feeling guilt
  *6-puberty
  *Priniciple Challenge
  *Competene vs Inferiority
  *Children bility learn to be competent and productive or inferior and unable to do anything well
  *Adolescence
  *Priniciple Challenge
  *Identity vs Role Confusion
  *Adolescents try to figure out