Development
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93 terms
Terms | Definitions |
|---|---|
 Developmental psychologists | people who study physical, cognitive, and social changes throughout the human life cycle |
| Zygotes | the fertilized egg; it enters a 2 week period of rapid cell division and develops into an embryo |
| Embryo | the developing human organism from about 2 weeks after fertilization through the second month |
| Fetus | the developing human organism from 9 weeks after conception to birth |
| 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 |
| Rooting reflex | a baby's tendency, when touched on the cheek, to turn toward the touch, open the mouth, and search for the nipple |
| Habituation | decreasing responsiveness with repeated stimulation. As infants gain familiarity with repeated exposure to a visual stimulus, their interest wanes and they look away sooner |
| Maturation | biological growth processes that enable orderly changes in behavior, relatively uninfluenced by experience. |
| Jean Piaget | psychologist who revolutionized our understanding of a child's mind (children know differently- not less than adults know) |
| Schema | a concept or framework that organizes and interprets information |
| Assimilate | interpretation of one's new experience in therms of one's existing schemas |
| Accommodate | adaptation of one's current understandings (schemas) to incorporate new information |
| Cognition | all the mental activities associated with thinking, knowing, remembering, and communicating |
| Sensorimotor stage | experiencing the world through senses and actions (looking, touching, mouthing, grasping) (From birth to age 2) |
| Preoperational stage | representing things with words and images; use intuitive rather than logical reasoning (From age 2 to age 6-7) |
| Concrete operational stage | thinking logically about concrete events; grasping concrete analogies and performing arithmetical operations (From aprox. age 7 to age 11) |
| Formal operational stage | abstract reasoning (From aprox. age 12 through adulthood) |
| Object permanence | the awareness that things continue to exist even when not perceived |
| Conservation | the principal that properties such as mass, volume, and number remain the same despite changes in the forms of objects |
| Egocentrism | in Piaget's theory, the preoperational child's difficulty taking another's point of view |
| Theory of mind | people's ideas about their own and other's mental states- about their feelings, perceptions, and thoughts and the behavior these might predict |
| Stranger anxiety | the fear of strangers that infants commonly display, beginning by about 8 months of age |
| Attachment | an emotional tie with another person; shown in young children by their seeking closeness to the caregiver and showing distress on separation |
| Harry Harlow | did infant monkey experiment on attachment |
| Critical period | an optimal period shortly after birth when an organism's exposure to certain stimuli or experiences produce proper development |
| Imprinting | the process by which certain animals form attachments during a critical period vary early in life |
| Mary Ainsworth | observed how mothers react to their babies (calm, nervous, attention-giving, etc) and compared it to how secure the babies are in unknown situations |
| Basic trust | according to Erik Erikson, a sense that the world is predictable and trustworthy; said to be formed during infancy by appropriate experiences with response caregivers |
| Erik Erikson | developmental theorist who with his wife said that securely attached children approach life with a sense of basic trust |
| Self-concept | a sense of one's identity and personal worth |
| Language | our spoken, written, or signed words and the ways we combine them to communicate meaning. |
| Phoneme | in a language, the smallest distinctive sound unit |
| Morpheme | in a language, the smallest unit that carries meaning may be (word or prefix) |
| Grammar | in a language, a system of rules that enables us to communicate with and understand others |
| Semantics | rules we use to derive meaning from words and sentences; study of meaning |
| Syntax | the rules for combining words into grammatically sensible sentences in a given language |
| Babbling stage | beginning at about 4 months, the stage of speech development in which the infant spontaneously utters various sounds at first unrelated to the household language |
| One word stage | the stage in speech development, from about age 1 to 2, during which a child speaks mostly in single words |
| Two word stage | beginning about age 2, the stage in speech development during which a child speaks mostly two-word statements |
| Telegraphic speech | early speech stage in which a child speaks like a telegram -"go car"- using mostly nouns and verbs and omitting auxiliary words |
| BF Skinner | believed we can explain language development with familiar learning principles such as association, imitation, and reinforcement |
| Noam Chomsky | believed that children learn language and grammar from their environment and born with built in language acquisition device- turn "on" when exposed to language in the environment |
| Linguistic determinism | Whorf's hypothesis that language determines the way we think |
| Permissive parent | lacks boundaries, children later have conflict with authority figures |
| Authoratative parent | give support, discipline, are involved |
| Authoritarian parent | rules based, parent child conflict, "because I said so" |
| X chromosome | the sex chromosome found in both men and women. Females have two X chromosomes; males have one. An X chromosome from each parent produces a female child. |
| Y chromosome | the sex chromosome found only in males. When paired with an X chromosome from the mother, it produces a male child. |
| Testosterone | the most important of the male sex hormones. Both males and females have it, but the additional testosterone in males stimulates the growth of the male sex organs in the fetus and the development of the male sex characteristics during puberty |
| Gender roles | a set of expected behaviors for males and females |
| Gender identity | one's sense of being male or female |
| Gender-typed | the acquisition of a traditional masculine or feminine role |
| Social learning theory | the theory that we learn social behavior by observing and imitating and by being rewarded or punished |
| Gender schema theory | the theory that children learn from their cultures a concept of what it means to be male and female and that they adjust their behavior accordingly |
| Adolescence | the transition period from childhood to adulthood, extending from puberty to independence |
| Puberty | the period of sexual maturation, during which a person becomes capable of reproducing |
| Primary sex characteristics | the body structures (ovaries, testes, and external genitalia) that make sexual reproduction possible |
| Secondary sex characteristics | nonreproductive sexual characteristics, such as female breasts and hips, male voice quality, and body hair |
| Menarche | the first menstrual period |
| Lawrence Kohlberg | Contributions: created a theory of moral development that has 3 levels; focuses on moral reasoning rather than overt behavior |
| Preconventional morality | first level of Kohlberg's stages of moral development in which the child's behavior is governed by the consequences of the behavior (avoid punishment, gain rewards) |
| Conventional morality | second level of Kohlberg's stages of moral development in which the child's behavior is governed by conforming to the society's norms of behavior (follow rules or laws) |
| Postconventional morality | third level of Kohlberg's stages of moral development in which the person's behavior is governed by moral principles that have been decided on by the individual and that may be in disagreement with accepted social norms |
| Identity | one's sense of self; according to Erikson, the adolescent's task is to solidify a sense of self by testing and integrating various roles |
| Intimacy | in Erikson's theory, the ability to form close, loving relationships; a primary developmental task in late adolescence and early adulthood |
| Menopause | the time of natural cessation of menstruation; also refers to the biological changes a woman experiences as her ability to reproduce declines |
| Alzheimer's disease | an irreversible, progressive brain disorder, characterized by the deterioration of memory, language, and eventually, physical functioning |
| Cross-sectional studies | a study in which people of different ages are compared with one another |
| Longitudinal studies | research in which the same people are restudied and retested over a long period of time |
| Crystallized intelligence | one's accumulated knowledge and verbal skills; tends to increase with age |
| Fluid intelligence | one's ability to reason speedily and abstractly; tends to decrease during late adulthood |
| Social clock | the culturally preferred timing of social events such as marriage, parenthood, and retirement |
| Intimacy and generativity | forming close relationships & being productive and supporting future generations |
| Erikson's infancy stage | trust vs. mistrust |
| Erikson's toddlerhood stage | autonomy vs. shame & doubt |
| Erikson's preschooler stage | initiative vs. guilt |
| Erikson's elementary school stage | competence vs. inferiority |
| Erikson's adolescence stage | identity vs. role confusion |
| Erikson's young adulthood stage | intimacy vs. isolation |
| Erikson's middle adulthood stage | generativity vs. stagnition |
| Erikson's late adulthood stage | integrity vs. despair |
| Nature vs. nurture | name for a controversy in which it is debated whether genetics or environment is responsible for driving behavior |
| Newborn reflexes | babies are born with a number of different reflexes, some help to adjust to life out of the uterus, some help protect from danger, and some serve as the basis for later voluntary motor behavior |
| Mary Ainsworth's strange situation | study of attachment. Placed infant and mother in unfamiliar room, strange person enters, mother leaves, then returns. Determined secure and insecure attachment |
| Secure attachment | Infants use the mother as a home base from which to explore when all is well, but seek physical comfort and consolation from her if frightened or threatened |
| Avoidant attachment | infants who seem unresponsive to the parent when they are present, are usually not distressed when she leaves, and avoid the parent when they return |
| Anxious/ambivalent attachment | attachment style in which infants become extremely upset when their caregiver leaves but reject the caregiver when he or she returns |
| Anal stage | (psychoanalysis) the second sexual and social stage of a child's development during which bowel control is learned |
| Oral stage | (psychoanalysis) the first sexual and social stage of an infant's development |
| Phallic stage | (psychoanalysis) the third stage in a child's development when awareness of and manipulation of the genitals is supposed to be a primary source of pleasure |
| Genital stage | (psychoanalysis) the fifth sexual and social stage in a person's development occurring during adolescence |
| Jean Piaget's cognitive developmental theory | - Describes how children view the world through schemata, cognitive rules we use to interpret the world - Normally, we incorporate our experiences into these existing schemata in a process called assimilation - Sometimes, information does not fit into or violates our schemata, so we must accommodate and change our schemata |
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