CHAPTER 10: Human Development
What is the 2nd stage of prenatal development?
Embryonic stage: the cells of the blastocyst BEGIN to differentiate to assume different functions around the middle of the 2nd week until the 8th week of pregnancy, developing into limbs, facial features and major organs - brain begins to development 18 days after fertilization (and continues to develop into early adulthood, unlike all other organs) - proliferation - neurons develop at an astronomical rate - a lot more than the infant actually needs
_________ developed the most comprehensive model on how _________ develops
Erikson; identity
T or F: most teens experience marked turmoil
F; only 20% experience this supposedly inevitable roller-coaster ride while the rest ride out teenage years smoothly
Infants prefer looking at ________ over all other visual information, especially _________, even only 4 days after birth!
Faces; mom's face
Post hoc fallacy
False assumption that just because one event precedes another event, that it must have caused that event - just because all serial killers drank milk as children, this doesn't mean milk causes one to become a serial killer
T or F: gender differences are purely sociologically constructed.
False: some gender differences are evident in early infancy such as choice of toys (boy monkeys tend to choose trucks and balls while girl monkeys tend to choose dolls and pots) which may reflect differences in biological predispositions like aggressiveness and nurturance - may be impacted by hormone levels
True or false: extremely early experiences (under age of 3) are always more influential than later experiences in shaping us as adults
False; infant determinism is a myth - later experiences can be just as impactful as earlier experiences - eg. Study shows that separating infants from their mother during the first few hours after birth DOESN'T produce lasting negative consequences for emotional adjustment (despite popular belief)
What is the 3rd stage of prenatal development?
Fetal stage - 9th week to birth - major organs are established during this period of time and the heart begins to beat - main job of the fetus is physical maturation rather than establishing new structures
Distinguish between gender identity vs gender role
Gender identity refer's to an individual's sense of being male or female (sex) where gender roles refer to the sets of BEHAVIOURS that tend to be associated with being male or female
One of the central challenges of adolescence is to understand our ________ and form_______ with other
Identity; intimacy - the ability to form close, loving relationships
Define temperament
Basic emotional style that appears EARLY in development and is largely GENETIC in origin - however, babies in different cultures are found to react to the same studies differently - three major temperamental styles: easy (40%), difficult (10%), slow to warm up (15%) - the rest don't neatly fit into these categories
Attachment is based on ___________ comfort, not nourishment as demonstrated by the fact that Harlow's monkeys preferred the ______ mother when frightened by a novel object.
Contact; cloth
What reflexes must infants learn (they are not born with them)?
MAJOR MILESTONES IN MOTOR (self-initiated movement of the muscles and bones) development: - sitting by your self - crawling - cruising (walking while holding on to something) - standing unsupported - walking (These may be acquired at different times in different infants and some even skip certain stages, but are almost always acquired in the same order)
Define identity
Our sense of who we are, and our life goals and priorities
Emerging adulthood
Period of life between 18-25 during which many aspects of emotional development, identity, and personality become solidified - transitional period into assuming full responsibilities
Piaget vs Vygotsky
Physical interactions vs social interactions
Primary aging vs secondary aging
Primary aging - typical INEVITABLE age-related changes (slower reflexes, hearing loss, wrinkles) Secondary aging - atypical changes that affect some seniors, but not all (diabetes, cancer, heart disease
Longitudinal design
Research design that examines development in the SAME group of people on multiple occasions over time
What is sex segregation and what is its significance?
Sex segregation is the tendency for boys to hang out with other boys and girls to hang out with other girls as early as the age of 3, suggesting that children already have developed a sense of the difference between genders and are aware they fit better with one gender - this sex segregation occurs in rhesus monkeys too raising the possibility that this has biological roots
Moral dilemmas are _______________ and they arise more frequently in the ___________
Situations in which there is no clear right or wrong; teen and young adult years
Define cognitive development
Study of how children acquire the ability to learn, think, reason, communicate, and remember
_______ is the most common form of dementia (60% of cases)
Alzheimer's disease - characterized by deterioration of the brain, depression, all the dementia symptoms, delusions, hallucinations, aggressions, wandering
When do infants develop stranger anxiety? Why do they do this even though they are comfortable with strangers before then?
Around 8 months and it doesn't dissipate until around 12-15 months. This is relatively consistent across cultures and is hypothesized to be evolutionarily beneficial since this is the age when they begin to crawl; it's useful as it keeps infants away from dangers such as strangers
The is the myth of childhood fragility?
Assumption that children are very easily damages and traumatized - this is a myth because research that most children are very resilient and can withstand lots of stress, even after traumatic incidents
The strong emotional connection we share with those we feel closest to
Attachment
How does a behaviourally inhibited infant or person act? (This is another type of temperamental style)
They are frightened at the sight of novel or unexpected stimuli; their heart beats faster, they tense up etc - heightened risk for shyness and anxiety disorders
How are children hypothesized to development an idea of morality?
Through fear - fear of punishment by parents and later on, fear of our own guilt over our own mortal sensibilities ("moral anxiety") - Piaget predicted that a sense of morality is constrained by level of cognitive development - if children are in the concrete operations stage, they tend tp emulate people in terms of OBJECTIVE RESPONSIBILITY - by the amount of harm they've done whereas those in the formal operations tend to emulate based on SUBJECTIVE RESPONSIBILITY - by the intentions to produce harm
Continuity principle
Who we are today is determined by a complex interaction of our past experiences, behaviour, and genetics
Sensorimotor stage (birth - 2)
- 1st Piagetian stage - focus on the HERE AND NOW - all knowledge is obtained through INTERACTIONS WITH AND OBSERVATIONS OF THE ENVIRONMENT - lack the ability to represent experiences mentally - lack sense of OBJECT PERMANENCE - the understanding that objects exist even when not in sight (that's why peekaboo is fun) - to pass this stage, children must accommodate when they are forced to engage in MENTAL REPRESENTATION - to think about objects that are absent from immediate surroundings - they are not able to engage in deferred imitation (ability to perform an action observed earlier)
Preoperational stage (2-7)
- 2nd Piagetian stage in his theory of cognitive development - marked by an ability to construct mental representations of experience (by means of drawing, language, and objects) - eg. Using a banana as a phone demonstrates an ability to have a mental representation that differs from physical experience - although they can think a little better about hypothetical scenarios, their ability to do so is hampered by EGOCENTRISM - inability to see the world from others' perspectives (eg. Piaget's 3 mountain task) - kids don't understand that what they see isn't what everyone sees - called "preoperational" because it is marked by their limitation in terms of their INABILITY to perform MENTAL OPERATIONS (as demonstrated by PIAGET'S CONSERVATION TASKS) - they have mental representations, but it's difficult for them to interact with these representations by performing mental transformations ("operations") on them - how does he know they can't perform mental operations? In his conservation tasks in which children are required to understand that despite a transformation in the physical presentation of an amount, the amount remains the same (eg. Amount of water in different containers, number of pennies depending on amount of space between them)
Concrete operations stage (7-11)
- 3rd Piagetian stage - characterized by ability to perform mental operations (pass most conservation tasks) - they can engage in logical and flexible thinking - less egocentric - limited by the fact that they can only perform these mental operations for ACTUAL PHYSICAL EVENTS as opposed to abstract situations (thus, "concrete operations")
Formal operations stage (11+)
- 4th Piagetian stage - characterized by the ability to perform hypothetical reasoning beyond the here and now - they can deduce and test their hypotheses about the world (pendulum task) - they can explain the causes of outcomes - understand cause and effect (if-then statements and either-or concepts)
Assimilation vs accomodation
- Assimilation is the Piagetian process of ABSORBING new experience into current knowledge structure without changing the current knowledge structure; the child's schema and world view remains UNCHANGED and relatively LOW cognitive effort is required - (eg. Thinking the earth is flat, but learning that it is round so the child thinks the earth is a flat circle) - When the child can no longer reconcile what she believes and what she experiences (eg. She sees a globe), she can no longer assimilate this info into her schema; she must ACCOMMODATE - accommodation is the ALTERING OF A SCHEMA to make it more compatible with experience.
What is the significance of the results from Ainsworth's Strange Situation?
- Attachment predicts CHILDREN'S BEHAVIOUR later on; infants w a secure attachement style tend to grow up more well-adjusted, trusting, and empathetic with a solid sense of worth while insecure attachement infants are more likely to be mistreated by their peers, untrusting, have low sense of worth, and clingy
Developmental influences are __directional, also known as ____________. What does this mean?
- Bi; reciprocal determinism - this means that not only do experiences influence development, but development influences experience - therefore, children are NOT passive recipients of their parents' influence; they could be doing something to influence their parents which in turn impacts them - eg. Parents influence the development of their children AND their children's development also influences their parents' behaviours (As opposed to parents only affecting their children)
What are cohort effects and why do we have to be wary of them when studying development?
- Cohort effects are effects observed in a sample of participants that RESULT FROM INDIVIDUALS IN THE SAMPLE GROWING UP AT THE SAME TIME (as opposed to the effects resulting from other causes such as their age or their genetics) - since longitudinal studies are costly, cross-sectional designs are performed in which people of different ages are studied at a single point in time - when performing cross-sectional studies, you cannot simply say, "people at age 10 act this way and then develop into people at age 40 who act differently" because perhaps the development/aging was not what caused the difference in behaviour but it was the cohort effects (eg. Older people don't know less about computers because they're age prevents them from being able to comprehend how to use them, they know less because they grew up in an age without computers)
What was concluded from Harry Harlow's research on rhesus monkeys?
- It was previously thought that babies formed attachment to whomever supplied nourishment to them since this is evolutionarily advantageous. - however, Harlow found monkeys that were separated only a few hours from their mother after birth spent more time with the cloth mother than the wire mother - He termed this phenomenon "contact comfort" - positive emotions afforded by touch - gentle massages help premies gain weight, sleep better, and bond more closely with their parents than attention alone `
What is dementia characterized by?
- Progressive deterioration of cognitive abilities and functional impairments - memory loss - problems w judgment and reasoning - communication issues (can't find a word, can't understand, can't follow instructions) - inability to function in day-to-day life - personality/behavioural changes (paranoia, anger, suspicious, hear/see things)
Define developmental psychology
- Study of physical, behavioural, cognitive, and social change throughout the lifetime and the causes of these changes (nurture or nature)
What does the fact that infants acquire different motor skills at different times tell us about motor development?
- The stages of motor development don't necessarily build on each other in a causal fashion, despite what the post hoc fallacy might make us assume; some infants skip crawling entirely
How did Piaget view cognitive development? (First psychologist to present an account of cognitive development)
- focused on PHYSICAL INTERACTION WITH THE WORLD - He attempted to identify STAGES (RADICAL reorganizations of thinking at specific transition points) that children pass through on their way to adult like thinking, separated by periods of during which their understanding of the world stabilizes; STAGELIKE THINKING - endpoint of cognitive development is achieving the ability to reason abstractly and logically - children ARE NOT mini adults (their understanding of the world differs greatly) - children are not passive observers of their worlds; they are ACTIVE leaners who SEEK INFORMATION and observe the consequences of their actions - stages are DOMAIN-GENERAL; a child's capability to think in one area matches their capability in another area - cognitive change is marked by EQUILIBRATION (maintaining a balance between our experience of the world and our thoughts about it) - children are motivated to match their experiences with their beliefs about the world (schemas) and if their experience doesn't match, children use the processes of ASSIMILATION AND ACCOMMODATION TO keep their thinking about the world in tune w their experiences
How did Vygotsky approach cognitive development?
- focused on SOCIAL cultural influences on cognitive development and learning - observed that parents structure the learning environment for children in ways that guide them to behave as if they've learned something before they have. The parents then gradually remove the scaffolding as children become more competent - most influential notion was his identification of the "ZONE OF PROXIMAL DEVELOPMENT" - phase of learning during which children require and can benefit from instruction (eg. Parent instructs child how to put a puzzle together) - they move from a phase when they can't learn a given skill to this stage during which they're ready to make use of scaffolding - no domain general STAGES - children acquire skills at different rates
How does cognitive function look in adulthood?
- free recall declines (no options for answers, you just have to know the answer), but cued recall and recognition remain largely intact - speed of processing declines sharply (eg. Playing video games) - older adults perform better on most vocab and knowledge tests than younger adults suggesting their crystallized intelligence remains intact or increase as you gain more experience - they show little decline when it comes to remembering info pertinent to their everyday lives, but don't perform well when it comes to remembering a random list of words - variation amongst older adults is greater than variation between older and younger adults
How did Kohlberg approach studying moral development?
- he extended Piaget's thinking that morality develops over the lifespan - he came up with moral dilemmas that don't have a clear right or wrong and so, he didn't score people based on what was right or wrong, he scored their REASONING PROCESS because how people reason and the underlying principles they invoke to solve a moral problem is what indicated their moral development - after testing people using these dilemmas, he came up with 3 developmental stages of morality
Problems with Piaget's theory
- much of development is found to be more continuous - some children are more advanced in one cognitive domain than others (these cases are referred as horizontal décalage). Therefore, his theory that children advance in domain-general stages is refuted - underestimated abilities because of types of measures used (motor responses and reports may not reflect what the child is actually thinking) - researchers have not seen the developmental progression that Piaget observed when using tasks that are less dependent on language - his methods might've been culturally biased in that they excited more sophisticated responses from children in western societies
Problem with The Strange Situation
- people tend to fall into "mono-operation bias" - they draw conclusions on the basis of only a single measure; they tend to equate the strange Situation with attachment rather than view it as only 1 way to measure attachment - it's not reliable (not consistent with its results) as infants switched their attachment styles over short periods of time - attachment styles are assumed attributable to parents' responsiveness to their infants; if they comfort their distressed infant, the infant is supposedly more likely to develop secure attachment. THIS IS ONLY A ONE WAY CAUSE AND EFFECT ASSUMPTION- not bidirectional. - it could be that infants' temperament influence their attachment style; infants with certain temperaments may elicit certain attachment behaviours from their parents
Characteristics of Erikson's psychosocial Development theory
- personality growth continues throughout the lifespan (it doesn't stop after childhood) - 8 stages - at each we confront a different psychosocial crisis - dilemma concerning an individual's relations to other people: 1. Infant - trust vs mistrust 2. toddler - autonomy vs shame and doubt 3. Preschool - initiative vs guilt 4. Childhood - industry vs inferiority 5. Adolescence - identity vs role confusion 6. Young adult - isolation vs intimacy 7. Middle adult - generativity vs stagnation 8. Seniors - ego integrity vs despair - those who don't successfully solve the challenges posed by early stages, we experience more difficulty with later stages than individuals who do
Why do infants develop different stages of motor skills in the same order, despite each stage being very different from the others?
- some motor skills may be innately programmed to activate at specific time points - Some stages like crawling and walking require the infant to be physically mature (a certain size with certain muscles developed) since they require coordination and strength - heavier babies usually take longer because they have to build up more muscles to support their weight - culture and parenting practices affect motor development (if the parents are too overprotective or if the infant is swaddled too tightly, the infant may not develop their motor skills too quickly)
What kinds of reflexes are infants born with?
- sucking reflex - automatic response to oral stimulation (even putting a finger near their mouth causes them to suck - rooting reflex - when you touch an infant' s cheek, they'll turn toward the hand and begin CASTING AROUND WITH THEIR MOUTH, looking for a nipple These allow infants to automatically know how to eat; if they didn't know how to already, learning by trial and error might take too long; they might starve
Problems with Erickson's psychosocial theory:
- there is not too much research basis for his postulations - the fact that there could be exactly 8 stages that we go through in that order is questionable
Chronological age doesn't necessarily forecast the behavioural or biological changes that accompany aging; how else can we measure age?
1. Biological age - efficiency of organ systems (60 year old has the body - and therefore, the biological age of a 40 year old) 2. Psychological age - IQ, memory, mental attitudes, capacity to deal w stress, ability to learn 3. Functional age - based on ability to function in given roles in society; functional age may be a better basis for judging readiness to retire 4. Social age - based on whether people behave in accordance with their social behaviour appropriate for their age (eg. When people judge a person for dressing "too young" for her age, they are invoking expectations about her social age)
What are some life transitions you go through in adulthood:
1. Careers - adults are changing jobs more often now rather than staying in one career for their whole lives - job satisfaction impacts emotional well-being - those who just start their first professional positions as well as those who are about to retire report high levels of satisfaction, but this declines after the novelty wears off (U-shaped curve) - more education is required to get a job now 2. Love and commitment - benefits of a partner: physical and emotional intimacy is associated with better health and lower stress and those who are in a long term relationship report higher levels of happiness (although it could just be that happier people have a higher tendency to engage in such relationships) - trends: # of marriages have decreased - people are getting married older
3 ways fetal development can be disrupted:
1. Exposure to environmental factors that exert a negative impact on prenatal development - called teratogens (eg. Drugs, alcohol - causes FASD, virus's, radiation, stress of mother) - fetal alcohol spectrum disorder can cause learning disabilities, physical growth retardation, facial malformations, and behavioural disorders - brain is particularly vulnerable to teratogens because its maturation period is v long - infants exposed to cigarette chemicals tend to be low-birth-weight infants 2. Biological influences such as genetic disorders or errors in cell division 3. Premature birth - born before 36 weeks (viability point is around 25 weeks) - underdeveloped organs and cannot support life on their own - they often experience serious delays in cognitive and physical development
What are the 3 different ways nature and nurture intersect? (making it difficult to distinguish the extent to which each influences development)
1. Gene-environment interactions - the effect of one depends on the contribution of the other (PFK only affects neurological development if the child consumes a specific protein and people are at high risk for developing into violent criminals if they have the low MAO gene AND a history of maltreatment) 2. Nature via nurture - tendency of individuals with certain genetic predispositions to seek out and create environments that permit the expression of those predispositions (Eg. Highly fearful children - a genetic trait - tend to seek out safe environments. Some people may misinterpret the situation as safe environments produce fearful children when the environment is actually a consequence of genetic predispositions) 3. Gene expression/epigenetics - activation or deactivation of genes by environmental experiences throughout development (eg. What you eat may cause certain genes to be turned off or on in your children and in yourself. Another example is that children who are genetically predisposed to have anxiety may not develop it until a highly stressful situation "turns on" the gene)
What is the 1st stage of prenatal development?
1. Germinal stage: zygote (fertilized egg) begins to divide and double to form a BLASTOCYST (ball of identical cells that haven't differentiated yet)
4 challenges of research on aging:
1. Life spans are long; longitudinal studies are time-consuming and expensive 2. Attrition (reduction in numbers - drop out) rates are high when a study is long and sometimes, the type of people who drop out is not random which ruins the accuracy of the data 3. Cross-sectional data is weak due to cohort effects 4. Aging is a continuous process
What are some cognitive landmarks of early development?
1. Physical reasoning (naive physics such as which way is up and when objects will fall over) 2. categorization 3. Object permanence (which may be earlier than what Piaget suggested) 4. Concept of the "self" as different from others (seems to be developed very early on - babies prefer to look at videos of another babies legs as opposed to their own even though they look the same suggesting they think their own movements boring) - associated w specific regions of the brain 5. Concept of people - infants smile more at ppl than objects and imitate people's behaviours more 6. Theory of mind - ability to reason about what other people know or believe and understand that their perspective differs from yours (eg. Asking parents where "daddy is" indicates that children know that their parents know more than them) - tested by "false-belief task" - task in which parent moves something from the cupboard and the researcher asks the child when the person returns where they will look 7. Numbers and mathematics (counting) - these skills don't inevitably develop; conventional counting does not exist in rare tribes - involves understanding what numbers signify and the fact that there can be the same # of one object as another type of object
What were Kohlberg's 3 moral stages?
1. Preconventional (0-9) - right and wrong defined by what you get PUNISHED for or REWARDED for and by doing what others want - concern for others is motivated by selfishness - "he might get caught" vs "he might get away w it" 2. Conventional (most teens and adults) - being good is whatever pleases others (conformist attitude) - right and wrong are determined by the MAJORITY - being good means doing your DUTY TO SOCIETY by obeying laws without question and respect authority - "it's against the law" vs "others will look down on him if he doesn't do it" 3. Postconventional (0-15% of the ppl over 20s) - right and wrong are determined by PERSONAL VALUES (regardless of what democratically agreed laws say) - we can choose to ignore laws that infringe our OWN SENSE OF JUSTICE - moral, personal principles are more important than laws of the land - "stealing violates a basic human social contract that creates trust between people" vs "protecting human life is a higher moral principle that can overrule laws against stealing"
4 categories of infant attachement:
1. Secure attachment (60%) - infant is sad when mom leaves, but is happy to see her when she comes back - mom is a secure base; infant returns to her periodically and sees her as a source of support to turn to when anguished 2. Insecure-avoidant attachment (15-20%) -infant is indifferent to mom's departure and return 3. Insecure-anxious attachement (15-20%) - infant is panicked when mom leaves, but shows MIXED emotional response upon her return, reaching for her, but squirming to get away when she holds him 4. Insecure disorganized attachment (5-10%) - react to mom's departure and return with an inconsistent and confused set of responses NOTE THIS IS CULTURE-DEPENDENT; THESE STATISTICS ARE FOR NORTH AMERICAN BABIES
Cognitive developmental theories differ in three core ways:
1. Stagelike (sudden spurts in knowledge) changes vs continuous changes in understanding 2. Domain-general (all or most areas of cognitive function develop at once) vs domain-specific (cognitive skills develop independently and at different rates across different domains such as reasoning, language, and memory) account of development 3. Principle SOURCES of learning vary across different cognitive developmental models - some emphasize physical experience, others social interaction, and others biological maturation
What are the 3 age divisions for seniors:
1. Young-old (65-74) 2. Old-old (75-84) 3. Oldest-old (85+)
What are some criticisms of Kohlberg's work?
1. cultural bias - individualistic cultures score higher 2. Sex bias - his student argued that it was biased against women since his scheme favoured males who are more likely than women to adopt a JUSTICE orientation based on abstract principles of fairness whereas women would adopt a more CARING orientation: who's to say that one is more morally developed than the other 3. Weak correlation with moral behaviour (0.3) - what stage you are at doesn't indicate or predict all that well what your moral behaviour is because the scheme measures people's THINKING ABOUT MORAL PROBLEMS not their actual behaviour themselves 4. Confound w verbal intelligence - people are scored on Kohlberg's system based on how people understand and talk about the moral dilemmas posed; those who score higher ya just be more intelligent, not more morally developed 5. Causal direction - Kohlberg's model assumes that our moral reasoning precedes our emotional reactions to moral issues, but often when we are presented with something morally wrong, we immediately feel emotionally disgusted even before deciding that it's wrong or even before knowing why we think it's wrong
Developmental effects
Changes over time within individuals as a consequence of aging
What kind of design do researchers rely on to find out infants' attachement styles?
The strange situation in which researchers take advantage of infants' stranger anxiety and use it to see how infants react when their mother leaves and only a stranger is there
True or false: growth spurts are real
True; growth is not always occurring at the same rate (however, periods of an absolute absence of growth have not really been documented)
As age increases, so does __________
Variability within that age group