Ch 5 Human Development

EARLY SENSORY DEVELOPMENT

Five major senses develop at different rates. Hearing is almost fully developed at birth, but a newborn's vision is only about 20-600. Visual acuity continues to improve during infancy, and by 6 mo vision is 20-100. Newborns do not see color well, and are best able to see black and white edges and patterns. Color vision approximates that of adults by 4 mo of age. Experience is crucial in the development of vision. The occipital cortex of the brain has to be stimulated by visual input to develop proper synaptic connections needed to process visual information.

Tiffany Field

Found that regularly touched preterm babies gained weight faster and were able to leave the hospital sooner.

NICOTINE

Exposure from maternal smoking interferes with the oxygen supply to the fetus. Such exposure can lead to premature and low birth weight babies as well as increased risk for stillbirth.

IMPRINTING

The rapid and innate learning of the characteristics of a caregiver very soon after birth. Newborn humans cannot follow around the first large creature they see, so they do not imprint. Rather, they ATTACH. In everyday usage, attachment means "connectedness." In human development, attachment refers to the strong emotional connection that develops early in lie to keep infants close to their caregivers. This relationship shapes the child's social and emotional development and forms the foundation for social relationships later in life.

Children show preference for same-sex playmates because:

they have similar preference for certain types of play and toys.

There is no known safe level of alcohol consumption during pregnancy. The most serious effect of prenatal alcohol exposure is FETAL ALCOHOL SPECTRUM DISORDER

which causes damage to the brain and central nervous system; intellectual disability; low birth weight; physical abnormalities in the face, head, heart, and joints; and behavioral problems.

SEPARATION ANXIETY (JOHN BOWLBY 1969)

Bowlby described the process of emotional attachment between infants and their caregivers and the emotional distress that develops when they are separated. He proposed that the major function of this affection-based bonding system is to protect infants from predation and other threats to survival. In his observations, he noted that there is a clear sequence of reactions-- from protest, to despair, to detachment. Bowlby defined separation anxiety as the distress reaction shown by babies (typically at around 9mo) when they are separated from their primary caregiver. On the basis of such observations, Bowlby developed his ATTACHMENT THEORY, which rests on the two fundamental assumptions that 1), a responsive and accessible caregiver creates a secure base for the child, who needs to know the caregiver is accessible and dependable. With a dependable caregiver, the child can develop confidence and security in exploring the world. The bonding relationship serves the critical function of attaching the caregiver to the infant, thereby making the survival of the infant, and ultimately the species, more likely.

Maternal Nutrition and Teratogens

Doctors know that what a pregnant woman eats and drinks affects the health of the fetus and even of the infant and child for years after birth. Both schizophrenia and antisocial personality disorder are more likely to occur if a woman is malnourished during pregnancy. If pregnant women smoke, the risk of the child developing bipolar disorder later in life doubles. The body may have a built-in toxin detector called pregnancy sickness (morning sickness) which causes pregnant women to develop an aversion to foods that may negatively influence the baby. Pregnancy sickness is worse during the first 3 mo while the fetus is most susceptible to teratogens, and occurs most commonly with foods susceptible to molds, and to bitter substances. Possibly because these foods can cause birth defects.

Early Brain Development

Experiences such as eating, exercising, and learning mold our brains throughout life, but especially in infancy and childhood. With learning and experience, certain synaptic connections strengthen, whereas those that don't receive stimulation from the environment die off- a process known as PRUNING, nature's way of making the brain more efficient. It is required for normal brain development. research shows that problems with neural pruning may result in neurological disorders, such as autism or schizophrenia.

Genetically, sex is determines at conception.

Girls have two X chromosomes (XX) and boys have an X and a Y (XY). Until about 7 weeks after conception, there are no physical traits distinguishing male from female.

EMBRYONIC STAGE (2)

If implantation is successful, the second stage of prenatal development begins, about 2 weeks after conception. This is when all the major organs start to form. At this point, the bundle of cells is officially an embryo. The embryonic stage is marked by the formation of major organs: the nervous system, the heart, eyes, ears, arms, legs, teeth, palate, and external genitalia. Embryonic development continues until about 8 weeks after conception.

SOCIAL REFERENCING

If the mother showed fear or anger on her face, the baby did not move over the cliff, but most babies went willingly over the cliff when the mom smiled. What this means is that, by the age of 1, children can make sense of their mothers' emotional facial expressions and use them to know what to do. This ability to make use of social and emotional information from another person, especially a caregiver, is known as social referencing

SNARY The post-conventional level appears to be limited to Western cultures, which place a strong emphasis on individual values, and post-conventional moral reasoning is heavily based in moral code.

In contrast, many non-Western cultures emphasize the importance of the group or community, so the highest level of moral reasoning would be likely to involve compassion and caring for others, altruism, and family honor- all of which are values that Kohlberg did not measure.

THEORY OF MIND

Knowing and understanding what other people are thinking, wanting, or feeling. The ideas and knowledge about how another person's mind works. Important questions from a development perspective are when and how does such a skill emerge and how does it change with age?

PRENATAL DEVELOPMENT

Life before birth is commonly divided into three distinct stages: germinal, embryonic, and fetal.

LEVELS OF MORAL REASONING, (KOHLBERG)

PRECONVENTIONAL LEVEL: focus on avoiding punishment judgements based on personal needs CONVENTIONAL LEVEL: rules are rules and they are not to be broken judgements are based on needs of society; individual needs serve group needs at this level, the person values trust, caring, relationships, as well as social order and lawfulness POSTCONVENTIONAL LEVEL: willing to break law-- and suffer the consequences-- if it is perceived as unjust or immoral judgements balance needs of society with personal convictions

By mid to late childhood, PEERS are probably a bigger influence than the parents on a child's development. Why?

Peers share equal standing or status in terms of age, gender, skill, or power, so they are important role models. Peer influence research shows that even 5 y/o's are sensitive to peer criticism. Kids who are more attuned to social and emotional information are more likely to display this sensitivity.

Most adults know that people believe things that sometimes are not true, as well as themselves. Children under the age of 4 are not cognitively capable of understanding this concept.

Psychologists created a FALSE BELIEF task to explore children's theory of mind and the stage at which they come to understand that others may hold false beliefs. Around age 4, children can disentangle their own beliefs from those of others.

EARLY MOTOR DEVELOPMENT

Referring to the changes in physical movement and body control Fine motor skills involve the coordination of many smaller muscles, along with information from the eyes, in service of some task. Fine motor development shows up, for example, in children's drawing skills. These take longer to develop.

BRAIN AND SENSORY PRENATAL DEVELOPMENT

The brain is the first major organ to develop, and is till growing rapidly at birth. By the time an infant is born, it's head has grown to 25% of its adult weight, whereas the body is only 5% of its adult weight. During the fetal stage, the rate of new neural growth can be approx. 3 million neurons per minute at its peak. From months 3-5 of pregnancy, neurons move from one part of the brain to their more permanent home in a process known as NEURAL MIGRATION. Factors that interfere with normal neural migration, such as prenatal exposure to certain toxins or viruses, can increase the risk of psychological disorders.

EMOTIONAL COMPETENCE

The ability to control emotions and know when it is appropriate to express certain emotions. This begins to develop as early as preschool and continues through childhood. The better children do in school and the fewer stressful and dysfunctional situations they have at home, the more emotionally skilled and competent they become.

CONSERVATION

The ability to recognize that when some properties (such as a shape) of an object change, other properties (such as volume) remain constant. During preoperational thinking, the child cannot yet recognize that amounts stay the same when shapes change.

Temperament

The biologically based tendency to behave in particular ways from very early in life. To be clear, temperament involves mostly unique behaviors, whereas personality also involves unique traits, feelings, beliefs, attitudes, goals, and motivations. So personality develops out of temperament differences.

PRENATAL PROGRAMMING

The process by which events in the womb alter the development of physical and psychological health. Of particular concern in this context are TERATOGENS, substances that can disrupt normal prenatal development and cause lifelong deficits to the embryo or fetus.

MARY AINSWORTH

developed a technique for testing Bowlby's assumptions about attachment of infant and caregiver. This procedure, known as the strange situation, consists of a 20-minute laboratory session that creates a mildly stressful situation for the baby. The strange situation is designed to see how much the caregiver is a safe haven when the infant is distressed and a "secure base" from which to explore. From the behavior in this context, Ainsworth describes one secure attachment style and three types of insecure attachment. Based on temperamental and contextual factors, babies who are securely attached to parents may or may not be distressed on separation. The key issue is that they initiate contact with the parent on return and then can return to play. Securely attached infants are confident in the accessibility and responsiveness of their caregiver, and this security and dependability provide the child with the foundation for play and exploration when the caregiver is absent. About 65% of infants are securely attached. In all three kinds of insecure attachment, infants lack the ability to engage in effective play and exploration. These three types are insecure-avoidant, insecure-resistant, and insecure-disorganized/disoriented.

Mischel found that:

distraction is an important self control mechanism and the ability to control impulses beginning in early childhood predicts adolescent and adult academic achievement and intellectual ability.

ANIMISTIC THINKING

refers to the idea that inanimate objects are alive

EGOCENTRISM

the tendency to view the world from only one's own perspective. Piaget and Inhelder designed the three mountains task to measure young children's egocentrism.

PEER INTERACTION

Children begin to act socially at around age 3

Jean Piaget proposed four stages of cognitive development.

(1) THE SENSORIMOTOR STAGE, with object permanence being the major accomplishment --- characterizes the way infants learn about the world through their senses and own movements. ---they sense more than they "think." ---also observes that during the first 8-9 mo, children have not concept of object permanence (2)THE PREOPERATIONAL STAGE, when young children (until age of 5-6) begin to think systematically ---emergence of symbolic thought ---limitations include animistic thinking, egocentrism, and lack of conversation (3) THE CONCRETE OPERATIONAL STAGE, when school-age children master conservation, the knowledge that the total amount of something stays the same even when its shape or arrangement changes ---can perform mental operations on real/concrete objects and events-- but still have trouble with abstract ideas and reasoning. (4) THE FORMAL OPERATION STAGE, during which adolescents begin to think logically and abstractly ---formal logic becomes possible

Harry Harlow Attachment Research

-Developmental psychologist who studied infant attachment using monkeys. - Using wire frame and cloth-covered "mothers" to study the impact of nurturing touch, warmth, and food on infant monkey attachment.- Found that deprivation of attachment with real mother has long-term effects on monkeys' behavior. In follow-up research, Harlow found that monkeys raised without mothers (including some raised with cloth surrogates) were negligent and abusive mothers when they had their own babies. They failed to give their babies proper contact or even to feed them correctly

PERSONALITY DEVELOPMENT DURING INFANCY

ALEXANDER THOMAS + STELLA CHESS developed an influential model of temperament, with three general categories: THE EASY CHILD: predictable in daily functions, is happy most of the time, and is adaptable. About 40% of children fell into this category. THE DIFFICULT CHILD: unpredictable in daily functions, is unhappy most of the time, and is slow to adapt to new situations. About 10% fell into this category. THE SLOW-TO-WARM-UP CHILD: Mildly intense in his or her reactions to new situations and mildly irregular in the daily patterns of eating, sleeping, and eliminating. Although his or her first response to new situations might be negative, after repeated exposure they are likely to develop an approaching style. About 15% fell into this category. 35% of children were not classified by these three dimensions.

Insecure Avoidant Attachment (1)

An insecure-avoidant infant often shows little to no distress in separation episodes, although physiological measures suggest that the infant is indeed under stress. When the caregiver returns, the infant tends to ignore and avoid her, focusing instead on something else in the room. The infant's avoidance on reunion may reflect the expectation that a bid for more contact would be followed by the parent's rejection.

Insecure-Resistant Attachment (2)

An insecure-resistant infant cannot be comforted by the caregiver on reunion and shows difficulty in returning to play. Some babies actively resist contact with the parents at this stage, and others act more passive. The infant's resistance and distress during the reunion may reflect the infant's lack of confidence in being comforted.

Mirroring/ Communicating Needs

At just 7 hours old, newborns can imitate, or mimic, simple adult facial expressions. By imitating others, infants learn to make facial expressions that help them communicate their needs Such infant imitation may be a result of mirror neuron systems in the brain, although the brain mechanisms involved in imitation may extend beyond mirroring

Before 1 y/o babies possess a basic ability to interpret other people's emotions.

Babies, by 7 mo, can discriminate between fearful and happy faces. Can understand the emotional meaning of the voice (intonation changes) that tends to go with certain emotional values.

PRENATAL PERSONALITY DEVELOPMENT

Before the 1990s, most thought that personality was something that starts to develop only after birth. A finding that challenged these assumptions revealed that temperament begins before birth.

GERMINAL STAGE (1)

Begins at conception and lasts for 2 weeks. At conception, the fertilized egg is a single celled ZYGOTE, which starts dividing rapidly around 36 hours after conception. By day 7, the multi-celled organism- now called a blastocyst- travels down the mother's fallopian tube and attaches to the uterine wall. Between 30% and 50% of blastocysts do not implant properly, and the pregnancy ends without the woman having known she was pregnant.

VYGOTSKY : One limitation to Piaget's theory is it omitted the social component to cognitive development.

Russian psychologist Lev Vygotsky developed a more social view of the cognitive development than Piaget. Vygotsky argued that cognitive development does not happen in a vacuum but rather it must be understood in its social context. Other people can and do affect what we learn. Vygotsky coined the phrase ZONE OF PROXIMAL DEVELOPMENT and defined it as the distance between what a child can learn alone and what a child can learn assisted by someone else, usually an adult. The idea of zone of proximal development is that when a child is near his or her potential (in the zone), a more experienced person can aid the child in learning more and learning faster than the child would alone. Learning, therefore, is best understood as a social process.

After conception, the neurons connecting the ear to the brain are complete around 18 weeks, and the fetus begins to respond to sound around 26 weeks (6 mo). A few weeks later, fetuses find their mother's voice soothing, and prefer it to the voice of others.

Slow heart rate indicates attention, interest, or orienting response, whereas an increased heart rate indicates fear or distress. Particular sounds and music to which fetuses are exposed change their neural networks and are retained in memory for at least 4 mo postnatal.

Personality

Stems from temperament and is the consitently unique way in which an individual thinks, behaves, feels, and is motivated over time and in many different situations. Mothers who are depressed or anxious, or who experience a lot of stress during pregnancy are more likely to have infants who are temperamentally "difficult" and "fussy" Thus, temperament and sensitivity to stress are set not only by our genes (nature) but also by our mother's experiences (nurture)

Teratogens

Substances from the external environment impact fetal and infant development

Neglect exists when caregivers fail to provide basic sensory experience and stimulation during key periods of a child's development.

The deficit results of neglectful envir. can be overcome if the children are removed from the envir. But the later that happens, the less likely they are to recover. Findings in neuroscience suggest that children's brains or more plastic and more sensitive to stimulation from the outside world than are the brains of older people. Part of the reason is that young brains are more flexible because they have less myelin, which makes neural transmission more efficient but at the cost of neuroplasticity.

PRUNING

The degradation of synapses and dying off of neurons that are not strengthened by experience. When unused neurons die. Because pruning is based on input from the environment, the quality of the environments in which we are raised influence how our brains develop. Normal and enriched never. create more complex neural connections, whilst abusive, neglectful, and impoverished envir. create less developed neural connections. Ex. physically fit children are more cognitively fit.

FETAL STAGE (3)

The key event that distinguishes the embryoni stage from the fetal stage is the formation of bone cells at 8 weeks after conception. By this time, all the major organs have begun to form. Between 8 and 12 weeks into development, the heartbeat can be detected with a stethoscope. Organs continue to grow and mature while the fetus rapidly increases in size.

DEVELOPMENTAL MORAL REASONING

The most well known account of the development of moral reasoning comes from LAWRENCE KOHLBERG (1981) who studied the development of moral reasoning in children and adults by giving them a moral dilemma and recording the reasons they provided for their responses. Their responses were less important to him than was the reasoning behind them.

Insecure-Disorganized/Disoriented Attachment (3)

These infants show odd, conflicted behaviors in the strange situation. They might approach the caregiver on reunion, but they do so with their heads averted. Or they might freeze in place for 50 seconds in the caregiver's presence (Main & Solomon, 1990). Theory and research suggest that these infants are frightened (Main & Hesse, 1990). Kids who have been maltreated are more likely to be insecure-disorganized, and home observations suggest they are afraid of their parents. Not all parents of infants classified as insecure-disorganized/disoriented maltreat their infants (Hesse & Main, 2006). This classification is considered the most insecure, because infants' fear of their attachment figures inhibits the development of a strategy for effective regulation of stress.

BRAIN GROWTH CONTINUES THROUGHOUT THE LIFE SPAN

Though the rate of change slows down considerably after the age of 6, increases in early adolescence, and then settles again afterwards.

GIBSON AND WALK (1960)

Visual cliff experiment. Got babies from age 6-12 months and encouraged them to crawl across a perspex (see-through) floor where their mother was waiting on the other side. In this study, babies stopped crawling when they reached the visual cliff, indicating that, at least by the time they learn to crawl, babies can perceive depth.

THREE BASIC FORMS OF TEMPERAMENT

WELL ADJUSTED: UNDER CONTROLLED: impulsive and prone to temper tantrums more likely to abuse alcohol likely to have a relational conflict likely to be aggressive and hostile INHIBITED: -less likely to have social support -likely to avoid risk and harm -likely to be nonassertive and over-controlled, and suffer from prolonged depression. -as adults, reported the least amount of social, emotional, and financial support from others.