Berk Chapter 1

"The normative period" - Maturational Process

-A genetically determined series of events that unfold automatically

"The lifespan perspective: a balanced point of view"

-A growing number of psychologists regard heredity and environment as inseparably interwoven -During the first half of the 20th century it was widely assumed that development stopped at adolescence, adulthood was viewed as a plateau and aging as a period of decline

Correlation Coefficient

-A number that describes how two measures, or variables, are associated with each other

Discontinuous Development

-A process in which new ways of understanding and responding to the world emerge at specific times ---infants/children have a unique way of thinking, feeling, and behaving

Continusous Development

-A process of gradually augmenting the same type of skills that were there to begin with ---infants respond to the world in a similar way as adults, difference is the amount of complexity

"Development is Lifelong"

-According to the lifespan perspective, no single age period is supreme in its impact on the life course -Within each period, change occurs in three broad domains: physical, cognitive, and emotional/social

"Non normative influences"

-Are events that are irregular: they happen to just one person or just a few people and do not follow a predictable timetable

"Relative influence of nature and nurture" - Nature-Nurture Controversy

-Are genetic or environmental factors more important? -Although all theories grant roles to both nature and nurture, they vary in emphasis

"Self Reports"

-Ask research participants to provide information on their perceptions, thoughts, abilities, feelings, attitudes, beliefs, and past experiences

The clinical or case study method

-Brings together a wide ranged of information on one person, including interviews, observations, and test scores

Cognitive-Developmental Theory

-Children actively construct knowledge as they manipulate and explore their world

"Information processing"

-Computers suggest to psychologists that the human mind might also be viewed as a symbol-manipulating system through which information flows -Information is actively coded, transformed, and organized -Like Piaget's theory, the information-processing approach regards people as active, sense-making beings. But unlike his theory it does not divide development into stages, it sees it as continuous

Macorsystem

-Consists of cultural values, laws, customs, and resources

Behavior Modification

-Consists of procedures that combine conditioning and modeling to eliminate undesirable behaviors and increase desirable responses

Exosystem

-Consists of social settings that do not contain the developing person but nevertheless affect experiences in immediate settings

"Behaviorism and social learning theory" - Behaviorism

-Directly observable events - stimuli and responses - are the appropriate focus of study

Erikson's Psychosocial Theory

-Emphasized that in addition to mediating between id impulses and superego demands, the ego makes a positive contribution to development, acquiring attitudes and skills that make the individual an active, contributing member of society

Psychosexual Theory

-Emphasizes that now parents manage their child's sexual and aggressive drives in the first few years is crucial for healthy personality development -According to Freud, relations established among the id, ego, and superego during the preschool years determine the individual's basic personality

Structured Interviews

-(Including tests and questionnaires), in which each participant is asked the same set of questions in the same way

"Age-graded influences"

-Events that are strongly related to age and therefore fairly predictable in when they occur and how long they last

"History-graded influences"

-Explain why people born around the same time - called a cohort tend to be alike in ways that set them apart from people born at other times

Sociocultural Theory

-Focuses on how culture - the values, beliefs, customs, and skills of a social group - is transmitted to the next generation. According to Vygotsky, social interaction - in particular, cooperative dialogue with more knowledgable members of society - is necessary for children to acquire the ways of thinking and behaving that make up a community's culture

Lifespan Perspective

-Four assumptions make up this broader view: that development is (1) lifelong, (2) multidimensional and multidirectional, (3) highly plastic, and (4) affected by multiple, interacting forces

Cross-Sectional Design

-Groups of people differing in age are studied at the same point in time -Doesn't permit the study of individual development trends. Age differences may be distorted because of the cohort effect

Normative Approach

-In which measures of behavior are taken on large numbers of individuals, and age-related averages are computed to represent typical development

Sensitive Period

-Is a time that is optimal for certain capacities to emerge and in which the individual is especially responsive to environmental influences. However, its boundaries are less well-defined than those of a critical period. Development can occur later, but it is harder to induce

Ethology

-Is concerned with the adaptive, or survival, value of behavior and its evolutionary history ---discovered the critical period

Independent Variable

-Is the one investigator expects to cause changes in another variable

Dependent Variable

-Is the one the investigator expects to be influenced by the independent variable

Evolutionary Developmental Psychology

-It seeks to understand the adaptive value of species-wide cognitive, emotional, and social competencies as those competencies change with age

"Development is plastic"

-Lifespan researchers emphasize that development is plastic at all ages

"Methods for studying culture" - Ethnography

-Like the clinical method, ethnographic research is a descriptive, qualitative technique. But instead of aiming to understand a single individual, it is directed toward understanding a culture or a distinct social group through participant observation

"Developmental Cognitive Neuroscience"

-New area of investigation. It brings together the researchers from psychology, biology, neuroscience, and medicine to study the relationship between changes in the brain and the developing person's cognitive processing and behavior patter

Random Assignment

-Of participants to treatment conditions. By using an unbiased procedure, such as drawing numbers out of the hat or flipping a coin, investigators increase they chances that participants characteristics will be equally distributed across treatment groups

"Systematic Observation" - Naturalistic Observations

-One approach is to go into the field, or natural environment, and record the behavior of interest

"Designs for studying development" - Longitudinal Design

-Participants are studied repeatedly, and changes are noted as they get older Problems: -participants drop out or move away, people become more aware of themselves Cohort Effects -Individuals born in the same time period are influenced by a particular set of historical and cultural conditions. Results based on one cohort may not apply to people developing at other times

"The psychoanalytic perspective"

-People have through a series of stages in which they confront conflicts between biological drives and social expectations. How these conflicts are resolved determines the person's ability to learn, to get along with others, and to cope with anxiety

"Experimental design"

-Permits influences about cause and effect because researchers use an evenhanded procedure to assign people to two or more treatment conditions

Rights of Research Participants

-Protection from harm -Informed consent -Privacy -Knowledge of results -Beneficial treatments

Stages

-Qualitative changes in thinking, feeling, and behaving that characterize specific periods of development

"General Research Designs" - Correlational Design

-Researchers gather information on individuals, generally in natural life circumstances, without altering their experiences. Then they look at relationships between participants' characteristics and their behavior or development -We can't infer cause and effect

Clinical Interview

-Researchers use a flexible, conversational style to probe for the participant's point of view

"Social learning theory"

-Several kinds of social learning emerged. The most influential emphasizes modeling, also known as imitation or observational learning, as a powerful source of development

"Development is multidimensional and multidirectional"

-The challenges and adjustments of development are multidimensional - affected by the intricate blend of biological, psychological, and social forces -Lifespan development is also multidirectional. At every period, development is a joint expression of growth and decline

Microsystem

-The innermost level of the environment consists of activities and interaction patterns in the person's immediate surroundings -To understand this level, we need to know that all relationships are bidirectional

Structured Observations

-The investigator sets up a laboratory situation that evokes the behavior of interest so that every participant has equal opportunity to display the response

Mesosystem

-The second level of bronfenbrenner's model, encompasses connections between microsystems

Plasticity

-Throughout life - as open to change in response to influential experiences

"One course of Development or many" - Contexts

-Unique combinations of personal and environmental circumstances that can result in different paths of change

Sequential Designs

-Used to overcome some of the limitations of traditional developmental designs. -They conduct several similar cross-sectional or longitudinal studies (called sequences) ---can have the same problems as the other designs, but the problems can be identified more easily ---using comparisons to see if the cohort effect is happening

Ecological Systems Theory

-Views the person as developing within a complex system of relationships affected by multiple levels of the surrounding environment

Chronosystem

-What Bronfenbrenner called the temporal dimension of his model

Developmental Science

A field of study devoted to understanding constancy and change throughout the lifespan

Basic Issues

Theory -Is an orderly integrated set of statements that describes, explains, and predicts behavior -They provide organizing frameworks for our observations of people, guiding and giving meaning to what we see -Theories that are verified by research provide a sound basis for practical action -A theory's continued existence depends on scientific verification

The environment is not a static force...

that affects people in a uniform way. It is ever-changing -These shifts in contexts - or ecological transitions - are often important turning points in development