OC Psychology 100 Module 10

growth

"Handled" infants develop faster neurologically and gain weight more rapidly. By giving preemies massage therapy, neonatal intensive care units help them to go home sooner

Accommodation

(1) in developmental psychology, adapting our current understandings (schemas) to incorporate new information. (2) in sensation and perception, the process by which the eye's lens changes shape to focus near or far objects on the retina. Our schemas to incorporate information provided by new experiences. Thus, the child soon learns that the original dog schema is too broad and accommodates by refining the category.

Preoperational Stage

2 to 6 or 7 years - Representing things with words or pictures; uses intuition rather than logical reasoning. Developmental Phenomena include Pretend Play and Egocentrism. Too young to perform mental operations (such as imagining an action and mentally reversing it). Focusing only on the height dimension, this child cannot perform the operation of mentally pouring the milk back. Before about age 6, said Piaget, children lack the concept of conservation—the principle that quantity remains the same despite changes in shape

Baby Info

25 percent of all babies walk by 11 months of age, 50 percent within a week after their first birthday, and 90 percent by age 15 months. The recommended infant back-to-sleep position (putting babies to sleep on their backs to reduce the risk of a smothering crib death) has been associated with somewhat later crawling but not with later walking. Genes guide motor development. Identical twins typically begin walking on nearly the same day

Pretend Play

A child who can perform mental operations can think in symbols and therefore begins to enjoy pretend play. Contemporary researchers have found that symbolic thinking appears at an earlier age than Piaget supposed. Judy DeLoache showed children a model of a room and hid a miniature stuffed dog behind its miniature couch. The 2½-year-olds easily remembered where to find the miniature toy, but they could not use the model to locate an actual stuffed dog behind a couch in a real room. Three-year-olds—only 6 months older—usually went right to the actual stuffed animal in the real room, showing they could think of the model as a symbol for the room. Piaget did not view the stage transitions as abrupt shifts. Even so, he probably would have been surprised to see symbolic thinking at such an early age.

ASD

As men age, these mutations become more frequent, which may help explain why an over-40 man has a much higher risk of fathering a child with ASD than does a man under 30. Among those with ASD, who are less imitative and show much less activity in brain areas involved in mirroring others' actions. Biological factors, including genetic influences and abnormal brain development, contribute to ASD. Childhood MMR vaccinations do not. Based on a fraudulent 1998 study—"the most damaging medical hoax of the last 100 years"—some parents were misled into thinking that the childhood MMR vaccine increased risk of ASD. The unfortunate result was a drop in vaccination rates and an increase in cases of measles and mumps. Some unvaccinated children suffered long-term harm or even death.

Jean Piaget

His interest began in 1920, when he was in Paris developing questions for children's intelligence tests. While administering the tests, he became intrigued by children's wrong answers, which were often strikingly similar among same-age children. Where others saw childish mistakes, Piaget saw intelligence at work. Thanks partly to his work, we now understand that children reason differently than adults, in "wildly illogical ways about problems whose solutions are self-evident to adults." Piaget's studies led him to believe that a child's mind develops through a series of stages, in an upward march from the newborn's simple reflexes to the adult's abstract reasoning power. Piaget's core idea is that the driving force behind our intellectual progression is an unceasing struggle to make sense of our experiences. To this end, the maturing brain builds schemas, concepts or mental molds into which we pour our experiences. Piaget believed that children construct their understanding of the world while interacting with it. Their minds experience spurts of change, followed by greater stability as they move from one cognitive plateau to the next, each with distinctive characteristics that permit specific kinds of thinking. identified significant cognitive milestones and stimulated worldwide interest in how the mind develops. His emphasis was less on the ages at which children typically reach specific milestones than on their sequence. Studies around the globe, from aboriginal Australia to Algeria to North America, have confirmed that human cognition unfolds basically in the sequence Piaget described

Adaptation

In Piaget's theory, the growth of intelligence through direct interaction with the environment, using assimilation and accommodation to form schemas.

Secure Attachment

In their mother's presence they play comfortably, happily exploring their new environment. When she leaves, they become distressed; when she returns, they seek contact with her. Represents roughly 60% of infants. sensitive, responsive mothers—those who noticed what their babies were doing and responded appropriately—had infants who exhibited secure attachment

Insecure Attachment

Infants who avoid attachment, marked either by anxiety or avoidance of trusting relationships. They are less likely to explore their surroundings; they may even cling to their mother. When she leaves, they either cry loudly and remain upset or seem indifferent to her departure and return. Insensitive, unresponsive mothers—mothers who attended to their babies when they felt like doing so but ignored them at other times—often had infants who were insecurely attached. Feeling insecurely attached to others during childhood, for example, may take two main forms in adulthood. One is anxiety, in which people constantly crave acceptance but remain vigilant to signs of possible rejection. The other is avoidance, in which people experience discomfort getting close to others and use avoidant strategies to maintain distance from others.Avoidant people's discomfort with closeness makes parenting more stressful and unsatisfying (Rholes et al., 2006). But say this for those (nearly half of all humans) who exhibit insecure attachments: Anxious or avoidant tendencies have helped our groups detect or escape dangers. If secure attachment fosters social trust, babies locked away at home under conditions of abuse or extreme neglect are often withdrawn, frightened, even speechless. The same is true of those reared in institutions without the stimulation and attention of a regular caregiver. Most children growing up under adversity (as did the surviving children of the Holocaust) are resilient; they become normal adults. But others, especially those who experience no sharp break from their abusive past, don't bounce back so readily.

Attachment Bond

No social behavior is more striking than the intense and mutual infant-parent bond. This attachment bond is a powerful survival impulse that keeps infants close to their caregivers. the normal process by which we form emotional ties with important others. Imprinting occurs only in certain animals that have a critical period very early in their development during which they must form their attachments, and they do so in an inflexible manner. Children's anxiety over separation from parents peaks at around 13 months, then gradually declines. Although debate continues, many researchers now believe that our early attachments form the foundation for our adult relationships. Our adult styles of romantic love tend to exhibit secure, trusting attachment; insecure-anxious attachment; or insecure-avoidant attachment

Daycare

The researchers found that at ages 4½ to 6, children who had spent the most time in day care had slightly advanced thinking and language skills. They also had an increased rate of aggressiveness and defiance. But the child's temperament, the parents' sensitivity, and the family's economic and educational level influenced aggression more than did the time spent in day care.

infantile amnesia

Those experiencing the event as 3-year-olds could not remember the cause and usually misrecalled being already outside when the alarm sounded. Other studies have confirmed that the average age of earliest conscious memory is 3.5 years. As children mature, from 4 to 6 to 8 years, childhood amnesia is giving way, and they become increasingly capable of remembering experiences, even for a year or more. The brain areas underlying memory, such as the hippocampus and frontal lobes, continue to mature into adolescence

Curse of Knowledge

We assume that something will be clear to others if it is clear to us, or that e-mail recipients will "hear" our "just kidding" intent. Children are even more susceptible to such egocentrism.

Vygotsky v Piaget

Where Piaget emphasized how the child's mind grows through interaction with the physical environment, Vygotsky emphasized how the child's mind grows through interaction with the social environment. If Piaget's child was a young scientist, Vygotsky's was a young apprentice. By mentoring children and giving them new words, parents and others provide a temporary scaffold from which children can step to higher levels of thinking. Language, an important ingredient of social mentoring, provides the building blocks for thinking, noted Vygotsky

Death

Whether through death or separation, a break produces a predictable sequence. Agitated preoccupation with the lost partner is followed by deep sadness and, eventually, the beginnings of emotional detachment and a return to normal living. Newly separated couples who have long ago ceased feeling affection are sometimes surprised at their desire to be near the former partner. Deep and longstanding attachments seldom break quickly. Detaching is a process, not an event.

Schema

a concept or framework that organizes and interprets information. To explain how we use and adjust these, Piaget proposed assimilation and accommodation concepts.

Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD)

a disorder marked by social deficiencies, have been increasing. Once believed to affect 1 in 2500 children, ASD now affects 1 in 110 American children and about 1 in 100 in Britain. The increase in ASD diagnoses has been offset by a decrease in the number of children considered "cognitively disabled" or "learning disabled," which suggests a relabeling of children's disorders. The underlying source of ASD's symptoms seems to be poor communication among brain regions that normally work together to let us take another's viewpoint. This effect appears to result from ASD-related genes interacting with the environment. People with ASD are therefore said to have an impaired theory of mind. They have difficulty inferring others' thoughts and feelings. They do not appreciate that playmates and parents might view things differently. Mind reading that most of us find intuitive is difficult for those with ASD. (formerly referred to as "autism") has differing levels of severity. "High-functioning "individuals have normal intelligence, and they often have an exceptional skill or talent in a specific area. But they lack social and communication skills, and they tend to become distracted by minor and unimportant stimuli. Those at the spectrum's lower end are unable to use language at all. Afflicts four boys for every girl. Psychologist Simon Baron-Cohen argued that ASD represents an "extreme male brain. Although there is some overlap between the sexes, he believes that boys are better "systemizers." They tend to understand things according to rules or laws, for example, as in mathematical and mechanical systems. Children exposed to high levels of the male sex hormone testosterone in the womb may develop more masculine and autistic traits. In contrast, girls are naturally predisposed to be "empathizers," Baron-Cohen contends. They are better at reading facial expressions and gestures, though less so if given testosterone.

Temperament

a person's characteristic emotional reactivity and intensity. Temperament is genetically influenced. Shortly after birth, some babies are noticeably difficult—irritable, intense, and unpredictable. Others are easy—cheerful, relaxed, and feeding and sleeping on predictable schedules. The genetic effect appears in physiological differences. Anxious, inhibited infants have high and variable heart rates and a reactive nervous system. When facing new or strange situations, they become more physiologically aroused. One form of a gene that regulates the neurotransmitter serotonin predisposes a fearful temperament and, in combination with unsupportive caregiving, an inhibited child The most emotionally reactive newborns have tended also to be the most reactive 9-month-olds; Exceptionally inhibited and fearful 2-year-olds often were still relatively shy as 8-year-olds; about half became introverted adolescents; The most emotionally intense preschoolers have tended to be relatively intense young adults. In one long-term study of more than 900 New Zealanders, emotionally reactive and impulsive 3-year-olds developed into somewhat more impulsive, aggressive, and conflict-prone 21-year-olds. Such evidence supports the conclusion that our biologically rooted temperament helps form our enduring personality

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 responsive caregivers. He attributed basic trust not to environment or inborn temperament, but to early parenting. He theorized that infants blessed with sensitive, loving caregivers form a lifelong attitude of trust rather than fear.

Cognition

all the mental activities associated with thinking, knowing, remembering, and communicating.

Critical Period

an optimal period early in the life of an organism when exposure to certain stimuli or experiences produces normal development. Lacking any exposure to spoken, written, or signed language before adolescence, a person will never master any language. Likewise, lacking visual experience during the early years, a person whose vision is restored by cataract removal will never achieve normal perceptions. Without stimulation, the brain cells normally assigned to vision will die during the pruning process or be diverted to other uses. The maturing brain's rule: Use it or lose it. Goslings, ducklings, and chicks have a critical period for attachment, called imprinting, which falls in the hours shortly after hatching, when the first moving object they see is normally their mother. From then on, the young fowl follow her, and her alone.

Authoritative Parents

are both demanding and responsive. They exert control by setting rules, but, especially with older children, they encourage open discussion and allow exceptions. Research indicates that children with the highest self-esteem, self-reliance, and social competence usually have warm, concerned, authoritative parents, BUT The association between certain parenting styles (being firm but open) and certain childhood outcomes (social competence) is correlational. Correlation is not causation. We reach backward into our parents and forward into our children, and through their children into a future we will never see, but about which we must therefore care

maturation

biological growth processes that enable orderly changes in behavior, relatively uninfluenced by experience. Including the rapid development of the cerebellum at the back of the brain—creates our readiness to learn walking at about age 1. Maturation (nature) sets the basic course of development; experience (nurture) adjusts it. From ages 3 to 6, the most rapid brain growth was in your frontal lobes, which enable rational planning. During those years, your ability to control your attention and behavior developed rapidly. Frontal lobe development continues into adolescence and beyond. The last cortical areas to develop are the association areas—those linked with thinking, memory, and language. As they develop, mental abilities surge. The neural pathways supporting language and agility proliferate into puberty. Then, a use-it-or-lose-it pruning process shuts down unused links and strengthens others.

Sensorimotor Stage

birth to roughly 2 years - Experiencing the world through senses and actions (looking, hearing, touching, mouthing, and grasping). Developmental Phenomena include Object Permanence and Stranger Anxiety. Young infants lack object permanence—the awareness that objects continue to exist when not perceived. By 8 months, infants begin exhibiting memory for things no longer seen. If you hide a toy, the infant will momentarily look for it. Within another month or two, the infant will look for it even after being restrained for several seconds.

Authoritarian Parents

impose rules and expect obedience: "Don't interrupt." "Keep your room clean." "Don't stay out late or you'll be grounded." "Why? Because I said so." Those with authoritarian parents tend to have less social skill and self-esteem

Egocentric

in Piaget's theory, the pre-operational child's difficulty taking another's point of view.

Assimilation

interpreting our new experiences in terms of our existing schemas. we interpret them in terms of our current understandings (schemas). Having a simple schema for dog, for example, a toddler may call all four-legged animals dogs.

Permissive Parents

parents submit to their children's desires. They make few demands and use little punishment. Those with permissive parents tend to be more aggressive and immature.

Theory of Mind

people's ideas about their own and others' mental states—about their feelings, perceptions, and thoughts, and the behaviors these might predict. When Little Red Riding Hood realized her "grandmother" was really a wolf, she swiftly revised her ideas about the creature's intentions and raced away. Preschoolers, although still egocentric, develop this ability to infer others' mental states when they begin forming a theory of mind (a term first coined by psychologists David Premack and Guy Woodruff [1978], to describe chimpanzees' seeming ability to read intentions).

Formal Operational Stage

roughly 12 through adulthood - abstract reasoning; Developmental Phenomena - abstract logic and potential for mature moral reasoning. By about age 12, our reasoning expands from the purely concrete (involving actual experience) to encompass abstract thinking (involving imagined realities and symbols). As children approach adolescence, said Piaget, many become capable of thinking more like scientists. They can ponder hypothetical propositions and deduce consequences: If this, then that. Although full-blown logic and reasoning await adolescence, the rudiments of formal operational thinking begin earlier than Piaget realized.

Concrete Operational Stage

roughly 7 to 11 years - thinking logically about concrete events; grasping concrete analogies and performing arithmetical operations. Developmental Phenomena include Conservation and Mathematical Transformations. Given concrete (physical) materials, they begin to grasp conservation. Understanding that change in form does not mean change in quantity, they can mentally pour milk back and forth between glasses of different shapes.

Experiences

sights and smells, touches and tugs—activate and strengthen some neural pathways while others weaken from disuse. Like forest pathways, popular tracks are broadened and less-traveled ones gradually disappear. The result by puberty is a massive loss of unemployed connections.

Cognitive Development

the age-related changes in a child's memory, intelligence, and language

Object Permanence

the awareness that things continue to exist even when not perceived. Today's researchers believe object permanence unfolds gradually, and they see development as more continuous than Piaget did. Even young infants will at least momentarily look for a toy where they saw it hidden a second before. Researchers also believe Piaget and his followers underestimated young children's competence. Baby physics: infants look longer at an unexpected and unfamiliar scene of a car seeming to pass through a solid object, a ball stopping in midair, or an object violating object permanence by magically disappearing Baby math: Karen Wynn showed 5-month-olds one or two objects. Then she hid the objects behind a screen, and visibly removed or added one. When she lifted the screen, the infants sometimes did a double take, staring longer when shown a wrong number of objects. But were they just responding to a greater or smaller mass of objects, rather than a change in number? Later experiments showed that babies' number sense extends to larger numbers, to ratios, and to such things as drumbeats and motions. If accustomed to a Daffy Duck puppet jumping three times on stage, they showed surprise if it jumped only twice.

Stranger Anxiety

the fear of strangers that infants commonly display, beginning by about 8 months of age. A newly emerging ability to evaluate people as unfamiliar and possibly threatening helps protect babies 8 months and older. Children this age have schemas for familiar faces; when they cannot assimilate the new face into these remembered schemas, they become distressed. Once again, we see an important principle: The brain, mind, and social-emotional behavior develop together.

Conservation

the principle (which Piaget believed to be a part of concrete operational reasoning) that properties such as mass, volume, and number remain the same despite changes in the forms of objects.

Imprinting

the process by which certain animals form attachments during a critical period very early in life. Children—unlike ducklings—do not imprint. However, they do become attached to what they've known. Mere exposure to people and things fosters fondness. Children like to reread the same books, rewatch the same movies, reenact family traditions. They prefer to eat familiar foods, live in the same familiar neighborhood, attend school with the same old friends. Familiarity is a safety signal. Familiarity breeds content.

Paternal influences

those whose fathers were most involved in parenting (through outings, reading to them, and taking an interest in their education) tended to achieve more in school, even after controlling for other factors such as parental education and family wealth

Lev Vygotsky

was also studying how children think and learn. He noted that by age 7, they increasingly think in words and use words to solve problems. They do this, he said, by internalizing their culture's language and relying on inner speech. Parents who say "No, no!" when pulling a child's hand away from a cake are giving the child a self-control tool. When the child later needs to resist temptation, he may likewise say "No, no!" Second graders who muttered to themselves while doing math problems grasped third-grade math better the following year. Whether out loud or inaudibly, talking to themselves helps children control their behavior and emotions and master new skills.

Effects of Abuse

young children who have survived severe or prolonged physical abuse, childhood sexual abuse, or wartime atrocities are at increased risk for health problems, psychological disorders, substance abuse, and criminality. Abuse victims are at considerable risk for depression if they carry a gene variation that spurs stress-hormone production. Behavior and emotion arise from a particular environment interacting with particular genes.