Chapter 1

Sequential Designs

conduct several similar cross-sectional or longitudinal studies at varying times

Sensitive Period

a time that is biologically optimal for certain capacities to emerge because the individual is especially responsive to environmental influences

Ethology

concerned with the adaptive, or survival, value of behavior and its evolutionary history

Microsystem

consists of activities and interaction patterns in the child's immediate surroundings

Macrosystem

consists of cultural values, laws, customs, and resources

Exosystem

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

Nature-Nurture Controversy

deals with the extent to which heredity and the environment each influence behavior

Developmental Social Neuroscience

devoted to studying the relationship between changes in the brain and emotional and social development

Sociocultural Theory

focuses on how culture - the values, beliefs, customs, and skills of a social group - is transmitted to the next generation

Cross-sectional Design

groups of people differing in age are studied at the same point in time

Chronosystem

historical changes that influence the other systems

Normative Approach

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

Plasticity

open to change in response to influential experiences

Longitudinal Design

participants are studied repeatedly, and changes are noted as they get older

Psychoanalytic Perspective

people move 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 inferences about cause and effect because researchers use an evenhanded procedure to assign people to two or more treatment conditions

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

Clinical Interview

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

Evolutionary Developmental Psychology

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

Resilience

the ability to adapt effectively in the face of threats

Information Processing

the design of digital computers that use mathematically specified steps to solve problems suggested to psychologists that the human mind might also be viewed as a symbol-manipulating system through which information flows

Continuous Development

the idea that changes with age occur gradually, in small increments, like that of a pine tree growing taller and taller

Structured Observation

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

Dependent Variable

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

Independent Variable

the one the investigator expects to cause changes in another variable

Ethnography

the scientific description of the customs of individual peoples and cultures.

Social Learning Theory

the theory that we learn social behavior by observing and imitating and by being rewarded or punished

Naturalistic Observation

to go into the field, or natural environment, and record the behavior of interest

Contexts

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

Ecological Systems Theory

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

Applied Behavior Analysis

Consists of careful observations of individual behavior and related environmental events, followed by systematic changes in those events based on procedures of conditioning and modeling. The goal is to eliminate undesirable behaviors and increase desirable responses.

Cohort Effects

Effects due to a person's time of birth, era, or generation but not to actual age.

Psychosocial Theory

Erikson 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

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.

Lifespan Perspective

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

Developmental Science

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

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

Stage

a qualitative change in thinking, feeling, and behaving that characterizes a specific period of development

Theory

an orderly, integrated set of statements that describes, explains, and predicts behavior

Random Assignment

assigning participants to experimental and control conditions by chance, thus minimizing preexisting differences between those assigned to the different groups

Clinical, or case study, method

brings together a wide range of information on one person, including interviews, observations, and test scores

Developmental Cognitive Neuroscience

brings together 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 patterns

Cognitive-developmental Theory

children actively construct knowledge as they manipulate and explore their world

Behaviorism

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

Structured Interview

each participant is asked the same questions in the same way

Psychosexual Theory

emphasizes that how parents manage their child's sexual and aggressive drives in the first few years is crucial for healthy personality development

Mesosystem

encompasses connections between microsystems

Nonnormative Influences

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

Age-graded Influences

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