Developmental Psychology - Final Exam

Trends in growth/ average weight gain and growth in the first two years

- 5 months: birth weight has doubled to about 15 lbs - First year: infants height is about 32 in - more than 50% greater than at birth - tripled to 22 lbs - 2 years: it is 75% greater than when at birth - 36 inches - Quadrupled to 30 lbs

Bulling

- A particularly destructive form of interaction is peer victimization, in which certain children become targets of verbal and physical attacks or other forms of abuse. - About 20 percent of children are bullies, while 25 percent are repeatedly victimized. Most bullies who engage in face-to-face physical and verbal attacks are boys, but a considerable number of girls bombard vulnerable classmates with verbal and relational hostility - About 20 to 40 percent of youths have experienced "cyberbullying" through text messages, e-mail, social media sites, or other electronic tools - Many bullies are disliked, or become so, because of their cruelty. But a substantial number are socially powerful youngsters who are broadly admired by peers. These high-status bullies often target already-peer-rejected children, whom classmates are unlikely to defend - Indeed, bullies and the peers who assist them typically display overly high self-esteem, pride in their acts, and indifference to harm done to their victims - Chronic victims tend to be passive when active behavior is expected. Biologically based traits—an inhibited temperament and a frail physical appearance—contribute. But victims also have histories of resistant attachment, overly controlling child rearing, and maternal overprotection—parenting that prompts anxiety, low self-esteem, and dependency, resulting in a fearful demeanor that marks them as vulnerable

Freud's psychosexual stages of development

- According to the 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 - Freud's theory, which emphasizes that how parents manage children's sexual and aggressive drives in the first few years is crucial for healthy personality development - Birth - 1 year: Oral: If oral needs are not met through sucking from breast or bottle, the individual may develop such habits as thumb sucking, fingernail biting, overeating, or smoking. - 1-3 years: Anal: Toddlers and preschoolers enjoy holding and releasing urine and feces. If parents toilet train before children are ready or make too few demands, conflicts about anal control may appear in the form of extreme orderliness or disorder - 3-6 years: Phallic: As preschoolers take pleasure in genital stimulation, Freud's Oedipus conflict for boys and Electra conflict for girls arise: Children feel a sexual desire for the other-sex parent. To avoid punishment, they give up this desire and adopt the same-sex parent's characteristics and values. As a result, the superego is formed, and children feel guilty when they violate its standards - 6-11 years: Latency: Sexual instincts die down, and the superego strengthens as children acquire new social values from adults and same-sex peers. - Adolescence: Genital: With puberty, sexual impulses reappear. Successful development during earlier stages leads to marriage, mature sexuality, and child rearing.

Progression of language development during the first two years

- Around 2 months, babies begin to make vowel like noises, called cooing because of their pleasant "oo" quality - Gradually, consonants are added and around 6 months babbling appears, in which infants repeat consonant vowel combinations - Around 7 months, babbling starts to include many sounds from spoken language - 10 months, babbling reflects the sound and intonations patterns of the child's language community - Holophrase: By the time the child is twelve months old, he/she begins to say single words. These single words are called HOLOPHRASES. For example, the child may say "go" to mean "I want to leave now," or "mine" to say "This is my toy and I don't want you to play with it." - Middle of first year: When toddlers first learn words, they sometimes apply them too narrowly, an error called under extension. At 16 months, Caitlin used "bear" only to refer to the tattered bear she carried nearly constantly. As vocabulary expands, a more common error is overextension —applying a word to a wider collection of objects and events than is appropriate. For example, Grace used "car" for buses, trains, and trucks - 18-24 months: once toddlers produce 200-250 words, they start to combine two words. These two word utterance are called telegraphic speech because, like a telegram, they focus on high-content words, omitting smaller less important ones - CDS/Motherese: Adults in many cultures speak to babies in infant-directed speech (IDS), a form of communication made up of short sentences with high-pitched, exaggerated expression, clear pronunciation, distinct pauses between speech segments, clear gestures to support verbal meaning, and repetition of new words in a variety of contexts ("See the ball," "The ball bounced!") - Vocabulary: Learn 5 words a day. Research shows that they can connect new words with their underlying concepts after only a brief encounter, a process called fast-mapping

Self-regulation

- As their self-concepts develop, preschoolersacco become increasingly sensitive to praise and blame or to the possibility of such feedback. They more often experience self-conscious emotions—feelings that involve injury to or enhancement of their sense of self. By age 3, self-conscious emotions are clearly linked to self-evaluation. But because preschoolers are still developing standards of excellence and conduct, they depend on the messages of parents, teachers, and others who matter to them to know when to feel proud, ashamed, or guilty - Among Western children, intense shame is associated with feelings of personal inadequacy ("I'm stupid"; "I'm a terrible person") and with maladjustment—withdrawal and depression as well as intense anger and aggression toward those who shamed them

Progression of Written Language

- At first, preschoolers do not distinguish between writing and drawing. Around age 4, writing shows some distinctive features of print, such as separate forms arranged in a line on the page. But children often include picture-like devices—for example, a circular shape to write "sun." Only gradually, between ages 4 and 6, as they learn to name alphabet letters and link them with language sounds, do children realize that writing stands for language

How to reduce gender stereotyping/ schemes

- Because young children's cognitive limitations lead them to assume that cultural practices determine gender, adults are wise to try to delay preschoolers' exposure to gender-stereotyped messages. - Once children notice the vast array of gender stereotypes in their society, adults can point out exceptions.

Fostering emotional understanding - early childhood

- By age 4 to 5, children correctly judge the causes of many basic emotions ("He's happy because he's swinging very high"; "He's sad because he misses his mother"). Preschoolers' explanations tend to emphasize external factors over internal states, a balance that changes with age - In one study, mothers who explained emotions and negotiated and compromised during conflicts with their 2½-year-olds had children who, at age 3, were advanced in emotional understanding and used similar strategies to resolve disagreements

Components of self esteem

- By ages 6 to 7, children have formed at least four broad self-evaluations: academic competence, social competence, physical/athletic competence, and physical appearance. Within these are more refined categories that become increasingly distinct with age - From middle childhood on, individual differences in self-esteem become increasingly stable. And positive relationships among self-esteem, valuing of various activities, and success at those activities emerge and strengthen Influences on self-esteem: - Culture, Gender, and Ethnicity: Gender-stereotyped expectations also affect self-esteem. In one study, the more 5- to 8-year-old girls talked with friends, about the way people look, watched TV shows focusing on physical appearance, and perceived their friends as valuing thinness, the greater their dissatisfaction with their physical self and the lower their overall self-esteem a year later. Being overweight was more strongly linked to negative body image for third-grade girls than for boys - Child Rearing Practices: School-age children with a strong sense of attachment security and whose parents use an authoritative child-rearing style feel especially good about themselves. Warm, positive parenting lets children know that they are accepted as competent and worthwhile. And firm but appropriate expectations, backed up with explanations, help them evaluate their own behavior against reasonable standards. - Controlling parents—those who too often help or make decisions for their child—communicate a sense of inadequacy to children. Having parents who are repeatedly disapproving and insulting is also linked to low self-esteem - American cultural values have increasingly emphasized a focus on the self that may lead parents to indulge children and boost their self-esteem too much. Research confirms that children do not benefit from compliments ("You're terrific") that have no basis in real accomplishment. - Achievement-related attribution: The combination of improved reasoning skills and frequent evaluative feedback permits 10- to 12-year-olds to separate all these variables in explaining performance. Those who are high in academic self-esteem and motivation make mastery-oriented attributions, crediting their successes to ability—a characteristic they can improve through trying hard and can count on when faced with new challenges. And they attribute failure to factors that can be changed or controlled, such as insufficient effort or a difficult task

Recognition, recall, and other aspects of memory

- By attending to some information carefully than other information, you increase the chances that it will transfer to the next step of the information-processing system - In the second part of the mind, the short-term memory store, we retain attended-to information briefly so we can actively "work on" it to reach our goals - Working memory: the number of items that can be briefly held in mind while also engaging in some effort to monitor or manipulating those items - Automatic processes are so well-learned that they require no space in working memory and, therefore, permit us to focus on other information while performing them - The more effectively we process information in working memory, the more likely it will transfer to the third and the largest storage area - long term memory, our permanent knowledge base, which is unlimited - In fact, we store so much in long-term memory that retrieval—getting information back from the system— can be problematic. To aid retrieval, we apply strategies, just as we do in working memory. Information in long-term memory is categorized by its contents, much like a digital library reference system that enables us to retrieve items by following the same network associations used to store them in the first place - Recognition: noticing when a stimulus is identical or similar to one previously experienced - Recall is more challenging because it involves remembering something not present

Language Acquisition - middle childhood

- Children can become bilingual in two ways: (1) by acquiring both languages at the same time in early childhood or (2) by learning a second language after acquiring the first. Children of bilingual parents who teach them both languages in infancy and early childhood separate the language systems early on and attain early language milestones according to a typical timetable - Influential factors include child motivation, knowledge of the first language (which supports mastery of the second), and quality of communication and of literacy experiences in both languages at home and at school. - As with first-language development, a sensitive period for second-language development exists. Mastery must begin sometime in childhood for most second-language learners to attain full proficiency. But a precise age cutoff for a decline in second-language learning has not been established. Rather, a continuous age-related decrease from childhood to adulthood occurs - Children who become fluent in two languages develop denser synaptic connections in areas of the left hemisphere devoted to language. And compared to monolinguals, bilinguals show greater activity in these areas and in the prefrontal cortex during linguistic tasks, likely due to the high executive-processing demands of controlling two language

Changes in nutrition/ eating behavior - Middle Childhood

- Children need a well-balanced, plentiful diet to provide energy for learning and increased physical activity. - Yet eating an evening meal with parents leads to a diet higher in fruits, vegetables, grains, and milk products and lower in soft drinks and fast foods - School-age children report that they "feel better" and "focus better" after eating healthy foods and that they feel sluggish, "like a blob," after eating junk foods. - Even mild nutritional deficits can affect cognitive functioning. Insufficient dietary iron and folate during the school years are related to poorer concentration and mental test performance

Accomplishments and limitations of C-Operational thought

- Conservation: The ability to pass conservation tasks provides clear evidence of operations—mental actions that obey logical rules. Notice how Lizzie is capable of decentration, focusing on several aspects of a problem and relating them, rather than centering on just one. She also demonstrates reversibility, the capacity to think through a series of steps and then mentally reverse direction, returning to the starting point - Classification: Between ages 7 and 10, children pass Piaget's class inclusion problem. This indicates that they are better able to inhibit their habitual strategy of perceptually comparing the two specific categories (blue flowers and yellow flowers) in favor of relating each specific category to its less-obvious general category (Borst et al., 2013). School-age children's enhanced classification skills are evident in their enthusiasm for collecting treasured objects - Seriation: The ability to order items along a quantitative dimension, such as length or weight, is called seriation. To test for it, Piaget asked children to arrange sticks of different lengths from shortest to longest. Older preschoolers can put the sticks in a row, but they do so haphazardly, making many errors. In contrast, 6- to 7-year-olds create the series efficiently, moving in an orderly sequence from the smallest stick, to the next largest, and so on. The concrete operational child can also seriate mentally, an ability called transitive inference - Spatial Reasoning: Piaget found that school-age children's understanding of space is more accurate than that of preschoolers. To illustrate, let's consider children's cognitive maps—their mental representations of spaces such as a classroom, school, or neighborhood. Drawing or reading a map of a large-scale space (school or neighborhood) requires considerable perspective taking skill. Because the entire space cannot be seen at once, children must infer its overall layout by relating its separate parts. - Limitations: Their mental operations work poorly with abstract ideas—ones not apparent in the real world. Consider children's solutions to transitive inference problems. When shown pairs of sticks of unequal length, Lizzie easily engaged in transitive inference. But she had difficulty with a hypothetical version of this task: "Susan is taller than Sally, and Sally is taller than Mary. Who is the tallest?" Not until ages 11 or 12 can children typically solve this problem

Stages of labor

- Dilation and effacement of the cervix. This is the longest stage of labor, lasting an average of 12 to 14 hours with a first birth and 4 to 6 hours with later births. Contractions of the uterus gradually become more frequent and powerful, causing the cervix, or uterine opening, to widen and thin to nothing, forming a clear channel from the uterus into the birth canal, or vagina - Delivery of the baby. This stage is much shorter, lasting about 50 minutes for a first birth and 20 minutes in later births. Strong contractions of the uterus continue, but the mother also feels a natural urge to squeeze and push with her abdominal muscles. As she does so with each contraction, she forces the baby down and out - Delivery of the placenta. Labor comes to an end with a few final contractions and pushes. These cause the placenta to separate from the wall of the uterus and be delivered in about 5 to 10 minutes

Neurological development during the first two years (effect of myelination, synaptic pruning)

- First 2 years, neural fibers and synapses increase at an astounding pace. - Programmed cell death: makes space for these connective structures: as synapses form, many surrounding neurons die - 40-60%, depending on the brain region - Synaptic pruning: neurons that seldom stimulated soon lose their synapses is a process called synaptic pruning that returns neurons not needed at the moment to an uncommitted state so they can support future development - about half the brain's volume is made up of glial cells, which are responsible for myelination, the coating of neural fibers with an insulating fatty sheath (called myelin) that improves the efficiency of message transfer

Varying influences on gender roles (nature vs. nuture)

- Gender typing refers to any association of objects, activities, roles, or traits with one sex or the other in ways that conform to cultural stereotypes. Already, the children in Leslie's classroom had acquired many gender-linked beliefs and preferences and tended to play with peers of their own sex. Social learning theory, with its emphasis on modeling and reinforcement, and cognitive-developmental theory, with its focus on children as active thinkers about their social world, offer contemporary explanations of children's gender typing. As we will see, neither is adequate by itself. Gender schema theory, a third perspective that combines elements of both, has gained favor. - Nature: Experiments with non-human mammals reveal that prenatally administered androgens increase active play and aggression and suppress maternal caregiving in both males and females (Arnold, 2009). Research with humans shows similar patterns. Girls exposed prenatally to high levels of androgens, due to normal variation in hormone levels or to a genetic defect, show more "masculine" behavior—a preference for trucks and blocks over dolls, for active over quiet play, and for boys as playmates - Nurture: Beginning at birth, parents have different expectations of sons than of daughters. Many describe achievement, competition, and control of emotion as important for sons and warmth, polite behavior, and closely supervised activities as important for daughters - Nurture: Children's same-sex peer associations are a potent source of gender-role learning (Martin et al., 2013). By age 3, same-sex peers positively reinforce one another for gender-typed play by praising, imitating, or joining in. In contrast, when preschoolers engage in "cross-gender" activities—for example, when boys play with dolls or girls with cars and trucks—peers criticize them. Boys are especially intolerant of cross-gender play in other boys

Education level of American children

- In a traditional classroom, the teacher is the sole authority for knowledge, rules, and decision making. Students are relatively passive—listening, responding when called on, and completing teacher-assigned tasks. Their progress is evaluated by how well they keep pace with a uniform set of standards for their grade. - A constructivist classroom, in contrast, encourages students to construct their own knowledge. Although constructivist approaches vary, many are grounded in Piaget's theory, which views children as active agents who reflect on and coordinate their own thoughts rather than absorbing those of others. A glance inside a constructivist classroom reveals richly equipped learning centers, small groups and individuals solving self-chosen problems, and a teacher who guides and supports in response to children's needs. Students are evaluated by considering their progress in relation to their own prior development. - In these social-constructivist classrooms, children participate in a wide range of challenging activities with teachers and peers, with whom they jointly construct understandings. As children acquire knowledge and strategies through working together, they become competent, contributing members of their classroom community and advance in cognitive and social development - Our discussion of schooling has largely focused on how teachers can support the education of children. Yet many factors—both within and outside schools—affect children's learning. Societal values, school resources, quality of teaching, and parental encouragement all play important roles. These multiple influences are especially apparent when schooling is examined in cross-cultural perspective. In international studies of reading, mathematics, and science achievement, young people in China, Korea, and Japan are consistently top performers. Among Western nations, Canada, Finland, the Netherlands, and Switzerland are also in the top tier. But U.S. students typically perform at or below the international averages

Erikson's psychosocial stages of development

- In his 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 - A basic psychosocial conflict, which is resolved along a continuum from positive to negative, determines healthy or maladaptive outcomes at each stage - Birth - 1 year: Basic trust versus mistrust: From warm, responsive care, infants gain a sense of trust, or confidence, that the world is good. Mistrust occurs if infants are neglected or handled harshly - 1-3 year: Autonomy versus shame and doubt: Using new mental and motor skills, children want to decide for themselves. Parents can foster autonomy by permitting reasonable free choice and not forcing or shaming the child. - 3-6 year: Initiative versus guilt: Through make-believe play, children gain insight into the person they can become. Initiative—a sense of ambition and responsibility—develops when parents support their child's sense of purpose. If parents demand too much self-control, children experience excessive guilt. - 6-11 year: Industry versus inferiority: At school, children learn to work and cooperate with others. Inferiority develops when negative experiences at home, at school, or with peers lead to feelings of incompetence. - Adolescence: Identity versus role confusion: By exploring values and vocational goals, young people form a personal identity. The negative outcome is confusion about future adult roles. - Early Adulthood: Intimacy versus isolation: Young adults establish intimate relationships. Because of earlier disappointments, some individuals cannot form close bonds and remain isolated. - Middle Adulthood: Generativity versus stagnation: Generativity means giving to the next generation through child rearing, caring for others, or productive work. The person who fails in these ways feels an absence of meaningful accomplishment. - Old age: Integrity versus despair: Integrity results from feeling that life was worth living as it happened. Older people who are dissatisfied Erik Erikson with their lives fear death

Peer relation - Middle Childhood

- In middle childhood, the society of peers becomes an increasingly important context for development. The capacity for recursive perspective taking permits more sophisticated understanding of self and others, which, in turn, contributes to peer interaction. Compared with preschoolers, school-age children resolve conflicts more effectively, and prosocial acts such as sharing and helping increase. In line with these changes, aggression declines. But the drop is greatest for physical attacks - By the end of middle childhood, children display a strong desire for group belonging. They form peer groups, collectives that generate unique values and standards for behavior and a social structure of leaders and followers. Peer groups organize on the basis of proximity (being in the same classroom) and similarity in sex, ethnicity, academic achievement, popularity, and aggression

Make-believe play

- Make-believe play is another example of the development of representation in early childhood. Piaget believed that through pretending, young children practice and strengthen newly acquired representational schemes - Play detaches from the real-life conditions associated with it. In early pretending, toddlers use only realistic objects— a toy telephone to talk into or a cup to drink from. Their earliest pretend acts usually imitate adults' actions and are not yet flexible. One thing = one job/function - Play becomes less self-centered. Feeding a doll - Play includes more complex combinations of schemes - Later, children combine schemes with those of peers in sociodramatic play, the make-believe with others that is under way by the end of the second year and increases rapidly in complexity during early childhood - Today, many researchers regard Piaget's view of make-believe as mere practice of representational schemes as too limited. In their view, play not only reflects but also contributes to children's cognitive and social skills

Early childhood Physical changes

- On average, children add 2 to 3 inches in height and about 5 pounds in weight each year - "baby fat" drops off further and children become thinner - Between ages 2 and 6, approximately 45 new epiphyses, or growth centers in which cartilage hardens into bone, emerge in various parts of the skeleton - Between ages 2 and 6, the brain increases from 70 percent of its adult weight to 90 percent. By ages 4 to 5, many parts of the cerebral cortex have overproduced synapses - At the rear and base of the brain is the cerebellum, a structure that aids in balance and control of body movement - The reticular formation, a structure in the brain stem that maintains alertness and consciousness - amygdala plays a central role in processing of novelty and emotional information - Hippocampus aids in memory and in images of space that helps us find our way - The corpus callosum is a large bundle of fibers connecting the two cerebral hemispheres. Production of synapses and myelination of the corpus callosum peak between 3 and 6 years, continuing at a slower pace through adolescence. The corpus callosum supports smooth coordination of movements on both sides of the body and integration of many aspects of thinking, including perception, attention, memory, language, and problem solving - The pituitary gland, located at the base of the brain, which plays a crucial role by releasing two hormones that induce growth. The first, growth hormone (GH), is necessary for development of almost all body tissues - A second pituitary hormone, thyroid-stimulating hormone (TSH), prompts the thyroid gland in the neck to release thyroxine, which is necessary for brain development and for GH to have its full impact on body size

Physical changes - Middle Childhood

- Physical growth during the school years continues at the slow, regular pace of early childhood. At age 6, the average North American child weighs about 45 pounds and is 3½ feet tall. Over the next few years, children will add about 2 to 3 inches in height and 5 pounds in weight each year (see Figure 9.1 on page 236). Between ages 6 and 8, girls are slightly shorter and lighter than boys. By age 9, this trend reverses as girls approach the dramatic adolescent growth spurt, which occurs two years earlier in girls than in boys - Because the lower portion of the body is growing fastest, Joey and Lizzie appeared longer-legged than they had in early childhood. Girls continue to have slightly more body fat and boys more muscle. After age 8, girls begin accumulating fat at a faster rate, and they will add even more during adolescence - During middle childhood, the bones of the body lengthen and broaden. However, ligaments are not yet firmly attached to bones. This, combined with increasing muscle strength, gives children the unusual flexibility needed to perform cartwheels and handstands. Nighttime "growing pains"—stiffness and aches in the legs—are common as muscles adapt to an enlarging skeleton. - Between ages 6 and 12, all 20 primary teeth are lost and replaced by permanent ones, with girls losing their teeth slightly earlier than boys. For a while, the permanent teeth seem too large. Gradually, growth of facial bones causes the face to lengthen and mouth to widen, accommodating the newly erupting teeth.

Children's "age appropriate" artwork

- Scribbles. At first, children's gestures rather than the resulting scribbles contain the intended representation. For example, one 18-month-old made her crayon hop and, as it produced a series of dots, explained, "Rabbit goes hop-hop" (Winner, 1986). - First representational forms. Around age 3, children's scribbles start to become pictures. Few 3-year-olds spontaneously draw so others can tell what their picture represents. But when adults draw with children and point out the resemblances between drawings and objects, preschoolers' pictures become more comprehensible and detailed. A major milestone in drawing occurs when children use lines to represent the boundaries of objects, enabling 3- and 4-year-olds to draw their first picture of a person. Fine-motor and cognitive limitations lead the preschooler to reduce the figure to the simplest form that still looks human: the universal "tadpole" image, a circular shape with lines attached, shown on the left in Figure 7.3 on page 178. Four-year-olds add features, such as eyes, nose, mouth, hair, fingers, and feet. - More realistic drawings. Five- and 6-year-olds create more complex drawings containing more conventional human and animal figures, with the head and body differentiated. Older preschoolers' drawings contain perceptual distortions because they have just begun to represent depth. This free depiction of reality makes their artwork look fanciful and inventive

Stereotype threat

- Stereotype threat—the fear of being judged on the basis of a negative stereotype—can trigger anxiety that interferes with performance. Mounting evidence confirms that stereotype threat undermines test taking in children and adults - researchers gave African American, Hispanic American, and European-American 6- to 10-year-olds verbal tasks. Some children were told that the tasks were "not a test." Others were told they were "a test of how good children are at school problems." Among children who were aware of ethnic stereotypes (such as "black people aren't smart"), African Americans and Hispanics performed far worse in the "test" condition than in the "not a test" condition

Types of temperament

- The easy child (40 percent of the sample) quickly establishes regular routines in infancy, is generally cheerful, and adapts easily to new experiences. - The difficult child (10 percent of the sample) is irregular in daily routines, is slow to accept new experiences, and tends to react negatively and intensely. - The slow-to-warm-up child (15 percent of the sample) is inactive, shows mild, low-key reactions to environmental stimuli, is negative in mood, and adjusts slowly to new experiences

Rough and tumble play

- This friendly chasing and play-fighting is called rough-and-tumble play. It emerges in the preschool years and peaks in middle childhood - Children's rough-and-tumble play resembles the social behavior of many other young mammals. It is more common among boys, probably because prenatal exposure to androgens predisposes boys toward active play - Rough-and-tumble play offers lessons in how to handle combative interactions with restraint. As children reach puberty, individual differences in strength become apparent, and rough-and-tumble play declines. When it does occur, its meaning changes: Adolescent boys' rough-and tumble is linked to aggression - Unlike children, teenage rough-and-tumble players "cheat," hurting their opponent. In explanation, boys often say that they are retaliating, apparently to reestablish dominance. Thus, a play behavior that limits aggression in childhood becomes a context for hostility in adolescence

Changes in nutrition/ eating behavior - Early childhood

- Though they eat less, preschoolers require a high-quality diet, including the same nutrients adults need. Children tend to imitate the food choices of people they admire, both adults and peers. Repeated, unpressured exposure to new foods promotes acceptance. For example, serving broccoli or tofu increases children's liking for these healthy foods. In contrast, offering sweet fruit drinks or soft drinks promotes "milk avoidance." - Though they eat less, preschoolers require a high-quality diet, including the same nutrients adults need. Children tend to imitate the food choices of people they admire, both adults and peers. Repeated, unpressured exposure to new foods promotes acceptance - Although children's healthy eating depends on a wholesome food environment, offering bribes - "Finish your vegetables, and you can have an extra cookie"—leads children to like the healthy food less and the treat more

Fostering "resilience" with regards to self-esteem and confidence

- Throughout middle childhood—and other periods of development—children encounter challenging and sometimes threatening situations that require them to cope with psychological stress - Recall from Chapter 1 that four broad factors protect against maladjustment: (1) the child's personal characteristics, including an easygoing temperament and a mastery-oriented approach to new situations; (2) a warm parental relationship; (3) an adult outside the immediate family who offers a support system; and (4) community resources, such as good schools, social services, and youth organizations and recreation centers - Often just one or a few of these ingredient's account for why one child is resilient and another is not. Usually, however, personal and environmental factors are interconnected: Each resource favoring resilience strengthens others. For example, safe, stable neighborhoods with family-friendly community services reduce parents' daily hassles and stress, thereby promoting good parenting (Chen, Howard, & Brooks-Gunn, 2011). In contrast, unfavorable home, school, and neighborhood experiences increase the chances that children will act in ways that expose them to further hardship

Development of the 5 senses

- Touch: it is not surprising that sensitivity to touch is well-developed at birth. Newborns even use touch to investigate their world. When small objects are placed in their palms, they can distinguish shape (prism versus cylinder) and texture (smooth versus rough), as indicated by their tendency to hold on longer to an object with an unfamiliar shape or texture than to a familiar object. At birth, infants are highly sensitive to pain. If male newborns are circumcised without anesthetic, they often respond with a high-pitched, stressful cry and a dramatic rise in heart rate, blood pressure, palm sweating, pupil dilation, and muscle tension - Touch and smell: Newborns can distinguish several basic tastes. Like adults, they relax their facial muscles in response to sweetness, purse their lips when the taste is sour, and show an archlike mouth opening when it is bitter. Similarly, certain odor preferences are present at birth. For example, the smell of bananas or chocolate causes a pleasant facial expression, whereas the odor of rotten eggs makes the infant frown Hearing: Newborn infants can hear a wide variety of sounds— sensitivity that improves greatly over the first few months. At birth, infants prefer complex sounds, such as noises and voices, to pure tones. And babies only a few days old can tell the difference between a variety of sound patterns: a series of tones arranged in ascending versus descending order; utterances with two versus three syllables; the stress patterns of words ("ma-ma" versus "ma-ma"); happy-sounding speech as opposed to speech with negative or neutral emotional qualities; and even two languages spoken by the same bilingual speaker, as long as those languages differ in their rhythmic features—for example, French versus Russian Vision: . Vision is the least-developed of the newborn baby's senses. Visual structures in both the eye and the brain are not yet fully formed. For example, cells in the retina, the membrane lining the inside of the eye that captures light and transforms it into messages that are sent to the brain, are not as mature or densely packed as they will be in several months. The optic nerve that relays these messages, and visual centers in the brain that receive them, will not be adultlike for several years. And muscles of the lens, which permit us to adjust our visual focus to varying distances, are weak. As a result, newborns cannot focus their eyes well, and their visual acuity, or fineness of discrimination, is limited. At birth, infants perceive objects at a distance of 20 feet about as clearly as adults do at 600 feet

ADHD

- attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), which involves inattention, impulsivity, and excessive motor activity resulting in academic and social problem - Boys are diagnosed two to three times as often as girls. However, many girls with ADHD seem to be overlooked, either because their symptoms are less flagrant or because of a gender bias: A difficult, disruptive boy - Children with ADHD cannot stay focused on a task that requires mental effort for more than a few minutes. They often act impulsively, ignoring social rules and lashing out with hostility when frustrated. Many, though not all, are hyperactive, exhausting parents and teachers and irritating other children with their excessive motor activity. For a child to be diagnosed with ADHD, these symptoms must have appeared before age 12 as persistent problem - Consequently, they have difficulty with sustained attention, planning, memory, reasoning, and problem solving in academic and social situations and often fail to manage frustration and intense emotion. - ADHD runs in families and is highly heritable: Identical twins share it more often than fraternal twins

Piaget

- cognitive-developmental theory, children actively construct knowledge as they manipulate and explore their world. - central theory = adaptation - In infancy and early childhood, Piaget claimed, children's understanding is different from adults'. For example, he believed that young babies do not realize that an object hidden from view continues to exist. He also concluded that preschoolers' thinking is full of faulty logic - Sensorimotor: Age= birth to 2 years. Infants "think" by acting on the world with their eyes, ears, hands, and mouth. As a result, they invent ways of solving sensorimotor problems, such as pulling a lever to hear the sound of a music box, finding hidden toys, and putting objects into and taking them out of containers. - Preoperational: Age=2-7 years. Preschool children use symbols to represent their earlier sensorimotor discoveries. Development of language and make-believe play takes place. However, thinking lacks the logic of the two remaining stages - Concrete Operational: Age= 7-11 years. Children's reasoning becomes logical and better organized. School-age children understand that a certain amount of lemonade or play dough remains the same even after its appearance changes. They also organize objects into hierarchies of classes and subclasses. However, children think in a logical, organized fashion only when dealing with concrete information they can perceive directly - Formal Operational: Age= 11 years on. The capacity for abstract, systematic thinking enables adolescents, when faced with a problem, to start with a hypothesis, deduce testable inferences, and isolate and combine variables to see which inferences are confirmed. Adolescents can also evaluate the logic of verbal statements without referring to real-world circumstances.

The overweight and obesity epidemic (contributing factors) - middle childhood

- obesity, a greater-than-20-percent increase over healthy weight, based on body mass index (BMI)— a ratio of weight to height associated with body fat. A BMI above the 85th percentile for a child's age and sex is considered overweight, a BMI above the 95th percentile obese. - Factors responsible include lack of knowledge about healthy diet; a tendency to buy high-fat, low-cost foods; and family stress, which can prompt overeating. Recall, also, that children who were undernourished in their early years are at risk for later excessive weight gain - Overweight children are more likely to eat sugary and fatty foods, perhaps because these foods are plentiful in the diets offered by their parents, who also tend to be overweight - Frequent eating out—which increases parents' and children's consumption of high-calorie fast foods—is linked to overweight. - some parents anxiously overfeed, interpreting almost all their child's discomforts as a desire for food. Other parents are overly controlling, restricting when, what, and how much their child eats and worrying about weight gain - Reduced sleep may increase time available for eating while leaving children too fatigued for physical activity. It also disrupts the brain's regulation of hunger and metabolism. - TV and Internet ads encourage children to eat unhealthy snacks: The more ads they watch, the greater their consumption of high-calorie snack foods.

Howard Gardner's multiple intelligence

- theory of multiple intelligences defines intelligence in terms of distinct sets of processing operations that permit individuals to engage in a wide range of culturally valued activities. Dismissing the idea of general intelligence, Gardner proposes at least eight independent intelligences - Gardner believes that each intelligence has a unique neurological basis, a distinct course of development, and different expert, or "end-state," performances. At the same time, he emphasizes that a lengthy process of education is required to transform any raw potential into a mature social role (Gardner, 2011). Cultural values and learning opportunities affect the extent to which a child's intellectual strengths are realized and the ways they are expressed

Ways to help a child work through separation anxiety

2 months and 2 years Warm, supportive parenting reduces shy infants' and preschoolers' intense reactivity to novelty, whereas cold, intrusive parenting heightens anxiety. And if parents overprotect infants and young children who dislike novelty, they make it harder for the child to overcome an urge to retreat. Parents who make appropriate demands for their child to approach new experiences help shy youngsters develop strategies for regulating fear. When inhibition persists, it leads to excessive cautiousness, low self-esteem, and loneliness. In adolescence, it increases the risk of severe anxiety, depression, unrealistic worries about physical harm, and social phobia— intense fear of being humiliated in social situations For inhibited children to acquire effective social skills, parenting must be tailored to their temperaments—a theme we will encounter again in this and later chapters.

Newborn reflexes

A reflex is an inborn, automatic response to a particular form of stimulation. Reflexes are the newborn baby's most obvious organized patterns of behavior - In the Moro reflex, loss of support or a sudden loud sound causes the baby to arch his back, extend his legs, throw his arms outward, and then return them toward the body in an "embracing" motion - The grasp reflex is so strong during the first week after birth that many infants can use it to support their entire weight. - When held upright under the arms, newborn babies show reflexive stepping movements

How to assist language acquisition

As in toddlerhood, conversational give-and-take with adults is consistently related to preschoolers' language progress. In addition, sensitive, caring adults use specific techniques that promote early language skills. When children use words incorrectly or communicate unclearly, they give helpful, explicit feedback: "I can't tell which ball you want. Do you mean the large red one?" But they do not overcorrect, especially when children make grammatical mistakes. Criticism discourages children from freely using language in ways that lead to new skills

Over-extension

As vocabulary expands, a more common error is overextension—applying a word to a wider collection of objects and events than is appropriate. For example, Grace used "car" for buses, trains, and trucks. Toddlers' overextensions reflect their sensitivity to categories. They apply a new word to a group of similar experiences, often overextending deliberately because they have difficulty recalling or have not acquired a suitable word. Overextensions illustrate another important feature of language development: the distinction between language production (the words and word combinations children use) and language comprehension (the language they understand)

Attachment Styles

Attachment is the strong affectionate tie we have with special people in our lives that leads us to feel pleasure when we interact with them and to be comforted by their nearness in times of promotes survival, is the most widely accepted view - Secure attachment. These infants use the parent as a secure base. When separated, they may or may not cry, but if they do, it is because the parent is absent and they prefer her to the stranger. When the parent returns, they convey clear pleasure—some expressing joy from a distance, others asking to be held until settling down to return to play—and crying is reduced immediately - Insecure-avoidant attachment. These infants seem unresponsive to the parent when she is present. When she leaves, they usually are not distressed, and they react to the stranger in much the same way as to the parent. During reunion, they avoid or are slow to greet the parent, and when picked up, they often fail to cling - Insecure-resistant attachment. Before separation, these infants seek closeness to the parent and often fail to explore. When the parent leaves, they are usually distressed, and on her return they combine clinginess with angry, resistive behavior (struggling when held, hitting and pushing). Many continue to cry after being picked up and cannot be comforted easily - Disorganized/disoriented attachment. This pattern reflects the greatest insecurity. At reunion, these infants show confused, contradictory behaviors—for example, looking away while the parent is holding them or approaching the parent with flat, depressed emotion

Cardinal vs Ordinal sense of numbers

Between 14 and 16 months, toddlers display a beginning grasp of ordinality, or order relationships between quantities—for example, that 3 is more than 2, and 2 is more than 1. In the early preschool years, children attach verbal labels (lots, little, big, small) to amounts and sizes By age 3½ to 4, most children have mastered the meaning of numbers up to 10, count correctly, and grasp the vital principle of cardinality—that the last number in a counting sequence indicates the quantity of items in a set

Understanding of death

Between the ages of 5 and 7 years, children gradually begin to develop an understanding that death is permanent and irreversible and that the person who has died will not return

Classical and operant conditioning systems, imitation & habituation

Classical conditioning: A neutral stimuli is paired with a stimulus that leads to a reflexive response. Once the baby's nervous system makes the connection between 2 stimuli, the neutral stimulus produces the behavior by itself - Helps with recognizing which events usually occur together in the everyday world, so they can anticipate what is about to happen next Operant conditioning: infants act, or operate, on environment, and stimuli that follow their behavior change the possibility that the behavior will occur again. A stimulus that increases the occurrence of a response is called a reinforcer - Removing a desirable stimulus or presenting an unpleasant one to decrease the occurrence of a response is called punishment Habituation: a gradual reduction in the strength of a response due to repetitive stimulation. Time spent looking at the stimulus, heart rate, respiration rate, and brain activity may all decline, indicating a loss of interest. Once this has occurred, a new stimulus - a change in environment - causes responsiveness to return to a high level, an increase call recovery. Imitation: by coping the behavior of another person - Scientists have identified specialized cells in motor area of the cerebral cortex in primates - called mirror neurons - that may underlie early imitative capacities

Infectious Disease

Consistent with the sensitive period concept, more than 50 percent of infants whose mothers become ill during the embyronic period show deafness; eye cataracts; heart, genital, urinary, intestinal, bone, and dental defects; and intellectual disability. Infection during the fetal period is less harmful, but low birth weight, hearing loss, and bone defects may still occur. The organ damage inflicted by prenatal rubella often leads to severe mental illness, diabetes, cardiovascular disease, and thyroid and immune-system dysfunction in adulthood. The human immunodeficiency virus (HIV), which can lead to acquired immune deficiency syndrome (AIDS), a disease that destroys the immune system, has infected increasing numbers of women over the past three decades. Among these, cytomegalovirus (the most frequent prenatal infection, transmitted through respiratory or sexual contact) and herpes simplex 2 (which is sexually transmitted) are especially dangerous. In both, the virus invades the mother's genital tract, infecting babies either during pregnancy or at birth. Toxoplasmosis, caused by a parasite found in many animals, can affect pregnant women who have contact with the feces ofinfected cats, handle contaminated soil while gardening, or eat raw or undercooked meat. If the disease strikes during the first trimester, it is likely to cause eye and brain damage. Later infection is linked to mild visual and cognitive impairments

Correlation vs. Causation

Correlation - measure of how well one variable predicts another, NOT if it causes the other Causation can ONLY be determined by experimentation

Radiation

Defects due to ionizing radiation were tragically apparent in children born to pregnant women who survived the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki during World War II. After each disaster, the incidence of miscarriage and babies born with brain damage, physical deformities, and slow physical growth rose dramatically. Even when a radiation-exposed baby seems normal, problems may appear later. For example, low-level radiation, resulting from industrial leakage or medical X-rays, can increase the risk of childhood cancer. In middle childhood, prenatally exposed Chernobyl children had abnormal brain-wave activity, lower intelligence test scores, and rates of language and emotional disorders two to three times greater than those of nonexposed children in the surrounding area

Nature vs. nurture argument

Disagreement among theorists about whether genetic or environmental factors are more important influences on development - By nature, we mean the hereditary information we receive from our parents at the moment of conception. - By nurture, we mean the complex forces of the physical and social world that influence our biological makeup and psychological experiences before and after birth. - Although all theories grant roles to both nature and nurture, they vary in emphasis. A theory's position affects how it explains individual differences. Theorists who emphasize stability—that individuals who are high or low in a characteristic (such as verbal ability, anxiety, or sociability) will remain so at later ages— typically stress the importance of heredity. If they regard environment as important, they usually point to early experiences as establishing a lifelong pattern of behavior. Powerful negative events in the first few years, they argue, cannot be fully overcome by later, more positive ones

Progression of emotional development during the first two years years

During the early weeks, newborn babies smile when full, during REM sleep, and in response to gentle stroking of the skin, rocking, and a parent's soft, high-pitched voice. By the end of the first month, infants smile at dynamic, eye-catching sights, such as a bright object jumping suddenly across their field of vision. Between 6 and 10 weeks, the parent's communication evokes a broad grin called the social smile - Laughter: 3-4 months - During the second half-year, babies smile and laugh more when interacting with familiar people, a preference that strengthens the parent-child bond. And like adults, 10- to 12-month-olds have several smiles, which vary with context—a broad, "cheekraised" smile in response to a parent's greeting; a reserved, muted smile for a friendly stranger; and a "mouth-open" smile during stimulating play Anger and Sadness: - from 4-6months into the second year, angry expressions increase in frequency and intensity - Although expressions of sadness also occur in response to pain, removal of an object, and brief separations, they are less frequent than anger Fear: second half of the first year into the second year. - The rise in fear after age 6 months keeps newly mobile babies' enthusiasm for exploration in check. Once wariness develops, infants use the familiar caregiver as a secure base, or point from which to explore, venturing into the environment and then returning for emotional support Once these understandings are in place, beginning at 8 to 10 months, infants engage in social referencing—actively seeking emotional information from a trusted person in an uncertain situation. Humans are capable of a second, higher order set of feelings, including guilt, shame, embarrassment, envy, and pride. These are called self-conscious emotions because each involves injury to or enhancement of our sense of self - Besides self-awareness, self-conscious emotions require an additional ingredient: adult instruction in when to feel proud, ashamed, or guilty. The situations in which adults encourage these feelings vary from culture to culture - Emotional self-regulation refers to the strategies we use to adjust our emotional state to a comfortable level of intensity so we can accomplish our goals

Empathy and Sympathy

Empathy, another emotional capacity, serves as a motivator of prosocial, or altruistic, behavior—actions that benefit another person without any expected reward for the self. Compared with toddlers, preschoolers rely more on words to communicate empathic feelings. And as the ability to take another's perspective improves, empathic responding increases As a result, empathy does not lead to sympathy—feelings of concern or sorrow for another's plight. Temperament plays a role in whether empathy prompts sympathetic, prosocial behavior or self-focused distress. Children who are sociable, assertive, and good at regulating emotion are more likely to help, share, and comfort others in distress. But poor emotion regulators, who are often overwhemed by their feelings, less often display sympathetic concern and prosocial behavior

Encouraging optimal development of industry

Erikson's sense of industry combines several developments of middle childhood: a positive but realistic self-concept, pride in accomplishment, moral responsibility, and cooperative participation with agemates - During the school years, children refine their self-concept, organizing their observations of behaviors and internal states into general dispositions. A major change takes place between ages 8 -11 - These qualified, trait-based self-descriptions result from cognitive advances—specifically, the ability to combine typical experiences and behaviors into psychological dispositions. Children also become better at perspective taking—inferring others' attitudes toward themselves—and incorporate those attitudes into their self-definitions. - These capacities, combined with more experiences in which children are evaluated against agemates, prompt social comparisons—judgments of one's own appearance, abilities, and behavior in relation to those of others - Parental support for self-development continues to be vitally important. School-age children with a history of elaborative parent-child conversations about past experiences construct rich, positive narratives about the self and therefore have more complex, favorable, and coherent self-concepts

Independent, dependent and confounding variables

Experimental Design: permits inferences about cause and effect because researchers use an evenhanded procedure to assign people to two or more treatment conditions. Independent: the one the investigator expects to cause changes in another variable Dependent: the one the investigator expects to be influenced by the independent variable Confounding: those that affect other variables in a way that produces spurious or distorted associations between two variables

Experimenter, participant bias and double blind

Experimenter bias: a type of cognitive bias that occurs when experimenters allow their expectations to affect their interpretation of observations Participant bias: when the participants involved in research respond in a manner that suggests they are trying to match up with the desired result of the researcher Double blind: A type of clinical trial in which neither the participants nor the researcher knows which treatment or intervention participants are receiving until the clinical trial is over

Progression of fine/ gross motor skills

Exs for fine = pre-reaching, pincer grasp, ulnar grasps - Refers to smaller movements such as reaching and grasping - Newborns make poorly coordinated swipes, called pre-reaching, toward an object in front of them, but because of poor arm and hand control they rarely contact the object. Drops out around 7 weeks of age - The newborn's grasp reflex is replaced by the ulnar grasp, a clumsy motion in which the fingers close against the palm. Still, even 4- to 5-month-olds modify their grasp to suit an object's size, shape, and texture (rigid versus soft)—a capacity that improves over the second half-year By the end of first year, babies use the thumb and index finger opposable in well-coordinated pincer grasp. Then the ability to manipulate objects greatly expands. Exs for gross = walking, crawling, sits up unassisted (ages) - Refers to control over actions that help infants get around in environment, such as crawling, standing, and walking - Walking: 11 months, 3 weeks - Crawling: 7 months - Sits alone: 7 month

Alcohol

Fetal alcohol spectrum disorder (FASD), a term that encompasses a range of physical, mental, and behavioral outcomes caused by prenatal alcohol exposure. Children with FASD are given one of three diagnoses, which vary in severity: - Fetal alcohol syndrome (FAS), distinguished by (a) slow physical growth, (b) a pattern of three facial abnormalities (short eyelid openings; a thin upper lip; a smooth or flattened philtrum, or indentation running from the bottom of the nose to the center of the upper lip), and (c) brain injury, evident in a small head and impairment in at least three areas of functioning—for example, memory, language and communication, attention span and activity level (overactivity), planning and reasoning, motor coordination, or social skills. Other defects—of the eyes, ears, nose, throat, heart, genitals, urinary tract, or immune system—may also be present. Adam was diagnosed as having FAS. As is typical for this disorder, his mother drank heavily throughout pregnancy - Partial fetal alcohol syndrome (p-FAS), characterized by (a) two of the three facial abnormalities just mentioned and (b) brain injury, again evident in at least three areas of impaired functioning. Mothers of children with p-FAS generally drank alcohol in smaller quantities, and children's defects vary with the timing and length of alcohol exposure. - Alcohol-related neurodevelopmental disorder (ARND), in which at least three areas of mental functioning are impaired, despite typical physical growth and absence of facial abnormalities. Again, prenatal alcohol exposure is less pervasive than in FAS

Egocentrism

For Piaget, the most fundamental deficiency of preoperational thinking is egocentrism—failure to distinguish others' symbolic viewpoints from one's own. He believed that when children first mentally represent the world, they tend to focus on their own viewpoint and simply assume that others perceive, think, and feel the same way they do. Piaget's most convincing demonstration

Oedipal/Electra Complex

For boys, this is called the Oedipus complex, involving a boy's desire for his mother and his urge to replace his father, who is seen as a rival for the mother's attention. At the same time, the boy is afraid his father will punish him for his feelings, so he experiences castration anxiety. The Oedipus complex is successfully resolved when the boy begins to identify with his father as an indirect way to have the mother. Failure to resolve the Oedipus complex may result in fixation and development of a personality that might be described as vain and overly ambitious

Genetic-environmental correlations

Gene-environment interaction, which means that because of their genetic makeup, individuals differ in their responsiveness to qualities of the environment - Gene-environment interaction highlights two important points. First, it shows that because each of us has a unique genetic makeup, we respond differently to the same environment. Second, sometimes different gene-environment combinations can make two people look the same

Gross vs. fine motor skills & aids in their development

Gross motor skills: - As children's bodies become more streamlined and less top heavy, their center of gravity shifts downward, toward the trunk. As a result, balance improves greatly, paving the way for new gross-motor skills. By age 2, children's gaits become smooth and rhythmic—secure enough that soon they leave the ground, at first by running and later by jumping, hopping, galloping, and skipping - As children become steadier on their feet, their arms and torsos are freed to experiment with new skills—throwing and catching balls, steering tricycles, and swinging on horizontal bars and rings. Then upper- and lower-body skills combine into more refined actions. Five- and 6-year-olds simultaneously steer and pedal a tricycle and flexibly move their whole body when throwing, catching, hopping, jumping, and skipping. By the end of the preschool years, all skills are performed with greater speed and endurance Fine Motor skills: - As control of the hands and fingers improves, young children put puzzles together, build with small blocks, cut and paste, and improve in self-help skills—dressing and undressing, using a fork adeptly, and (at the end of early childhood) cutting food with a knife and tying shoes. Fine-motor progress is also apparent in drawings and first efforts to write

Gross vs. fine motor skills & aids in their development - Middle Childhood

Gross-Motor Development - Flexibility. Compared with preschoolers, school-age children are physically more pliable and elastic, a difference evident as they swing bats, kick balls, jump over hurdles, and execute tumbling routines. - Balance. Improved balance supports many athletic skills, including running, skipping, throwing, kicking, and the rapid changes of direction required in team sports. - Agility. Quicker and more accurate movements are evident in the fancy footwork of dance and cheerleading and in the forward, backward, and sideways motions used to dodge opponents in tag and soccer. - Force. Older youngsters can throw and kick a ball harder and propel themselves farther off the ground when running and jumping than they could at earlier ages - During middle childhood, the capacity to react only to relevant information increases. And steady gains in reaction time occur, including anticipatory responding to visual stimuli, such as a thrown ball or a turning jump rope. Ten-year-olds react twice as quickly as 5-year-olds. Physical fitness predicts improved executive function, memory, and academic achievement in middle childhood. children who are physically fit—and those assigned to a yearlong, one-hour-per-day school fitness program—activate these brain structures more effectively while performing executive function tasks Fine-Motor Skills: - By age 6, most children can print the alphabet, their first and last names, and the numbers from 1 to 10 with reasonable clarity. Their writing is large, however, because they make strokes using the entire arm rather than just the wrist and fingers. Children usually master uppercase letters first because their horizontal and vertical motions are easier to control than the small curves of the lowercase alphabet - By the end of the preschool years, children can accurately copy many two-dimensional shapes, and they integrate these into their drawings. Some depth cues have also begun to appear, such as making distant objects smaller than near ones - Around 9 to 10 years, the third dimension is clearly evident through overlapping objects, diagonal placement, and converging lines. school-age children not only depict objects in considerable detail but also better relate them to one another as part of an organized whole

Handedness Factoids

Handedness reflects the greater capacity of one side of the brain—the individual's dominant cerebral hemisphere—to carry out skilled motor action. Other important abilities are generally located on the dominant side as well. For right-handed people—in Western nations, 90 percent of the population— language is housed in the left hemisphere with hand control. For the left-handed 10 percent, language is occasionally located in the right hemisphere or, more often, shared between the hemispheres. This indicates that the brains of left-handers tend to be less strongly lateralized than those of right-handers

Epigenesis

How our environment influences brain development in terms of how neural pathways can be formed. This then distinguishes between neural behaviors, decision making in different situations in response to stress or a threat and also explain psychological disorders

illegal drugs

Illegal drugs: Nearly 6 percent of U.S. pregnant women take highly addictive, mood-altering drugs, such as cocaine or heroin (Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration, 2014). Babies born to users are at risk for a wide variety of problems, including prematurity, low birth weight, brain abnormalities, physical defects, breathing difficulties, and death around the time of birth

Assimilation

In Piaget's theory, the part of adaptation in which current schemes are used to interpret the external world. - we use our current schemes to interpret the external world. For example, when Timmy dropped objects, he was assimilating them to his sensorimotor "dropping scheme."

Accommodation

In Piaget's theory, the part of adaptation in which new schemes are created and old ones adjusted to produce a better fit with the environment - we create new schemes or adjust old ones after noticing that our current ways of thinking do not capture the environment completely. When Timmy dropped objects in different ways, he modified his dropping scheme to take account of the varied properties of objects

Learned helplessness

In contrast, children who develop learned helplessness attribute their failures, not their successes, to ability. When they succeed, they conclude that external factors, such as luck, are responsible. Unlike their mastery-oriented counterparts, they believe that ability is fixed and cannot be improved by trying hard. When a task is difficult, these children experience an anxious loss of control—in Erikson's terms, a pervasive sense of inferiority. They give up without really trying.

Range of reaction

In genetics, reaction range (also known as range of reaction) is when the phenotype (expressed characteristics) of an organism depends both on the organism's genetic characteristics (genotype) and the environment.

Environmental Pollution

In industrialized nations, an astounding number of potentially dangerous chemicals are released into the environment. When 10 newborns were randomly selected from U.S. hospitals for analysis of umbilical cord blood, researchers uncovered a startling array of industrial contaminants—287 in all. They concluded that many babies are "born polluted" by chemicals that not only impair prenatal development but increase the chances of life-threatening diseases and health problems later on. High levels of prenatal mercury exposure disrupt production and migration of neurons, causing widespread brain damage.

Theories used to explore language acquisition

Nativist perspective: language is etched into the structure of the brain. Focusing on grammar, Chomsky reasoned that the rules of sentence organization are too complex to be directly taught to or discovered by even a cognitively sophisticated young child - Language acquisition device (LAD): an innate system that contains a universal grammar or set of rules common to all languages. It enables children no matter which language they hear, to understand and speak in a rule-oriented fashion as soon as they pick up enough words Interactionist Perspective: one type of interactionist theory applies the information-processing perspective to language development. A second type emphasizes social interaction - Children make sense of their complex language environments by applying powerful cognitive capacities of a general kind - Infant's capacity to analyze speech and other information is not sufficient to account for mastery of higher-level aspects of language, such as intricate grammatical structures. They also point out that grammatical competence may depend more on specific brain structures than the other components of language

class inclusion

Preoperational children have difficulty with hierarchical classification—the organization of objects into classes and subclasses based on similarities and differences. Piaget's famous class inclusion problem, illustrated in Figure 7.6, demonstrates this limitation. Preoperational children center on the overriding feature, red. They do not think reversibly by moving from the whole class (flowers) to the parts (red and blue) and back again.

David's story

Preschoolers' first attempts to print often involve their name, generally using a single letter. "How do you make a D?" my older son, David, asked at age 3½. When I printed a large uppercase D for him to copy, he was quite satisfied with his backward, imperfect creation. By age 5, David printed his name clearly enough for others to read it, but, like many children, he continued to reverse some letters well into second grade. Until children start to read, they do not find it useful to distinguish between mirror-image forms, such as b and d or p and q

Common developmental problems

Siblings: - Sibling rivalry tends to increase in middle childhood. As children participate in a wider range of activities, parents often compare siblings' traits and accomplishments. The child who gets less parental affection, more disapproval, or fewer material resources is likely to be resentful and show poorer adjustment - For same-sex siblings who are close in age, parental comparisons are more frequent, resulting in more antagonism. This effect is particularly strong when parents are under stress - Although conflict rises, school-age siblings continue to rely on each other for companionship and support. But for siblings to reap these benefits, parental encouragement of warm, considerate sibling ties is vital. The more positive their relationship, the more siblings resolve disagreements constructively, provide each other with various forms of assistance, and contribute to resilience in the face of major stressors, such as parental divorce Only children: - However, only children tend to be less well-accepted in the peer group, perhaps because they have not had opportunities to learn effective conflict-resolution strategies through sibling interactions Divorce: - Family conflict often rises in newly divorced households as parents try to settle disputes over children and possessions. Once one parent moves out, additional events threaten supportive parent-child interaction. Mother-headed households typically experience a sharp drop in income. In the United States, nearly 30 percent of divorced mothers with young children live in poverty, and many more are low-income, getting less than the full amount of child support from the absent father or none at all - Preschool and young school-age children often blame themselves for a marital breakup and fear that both parents may abandon them. And although older children have the cognitive maturity to understand that they are not responsible for their parents' divorce, many react strongly, declining in school performance, becoming unruly, and escaping into undesirable peer activities, especially when family conflict is high - Exposure to stressful life events and inadequate parenting magnifies the problems of temperamentally difficult children. In contrast, easy children are less often targets of parental anger and also cope more effectively with adversity Fear and Anxiety: - Although fears of the dark, thunder and lightning, and supernatural beings persist into middle childhood, older children's anxieties are also directed toward new concerns. As children begin to understand the realities of the wider world, the possibility of personal harm (being robbed, stabbed, or shot) and media events (war and disasters) often trouble them. Other common worries include academic failure, physical injuries, separation from parents, parents' health, the possibility of dying, and peer rejection - But about 5 percent of school-age children develop an intense, unmanageable fear called a phobia. Children with inhibited temperaments are at high risk Sexual Abuse: - Sexual abuse is committed against children of both sexes, but more often against girls. Most cases are reported in middle childhood, but for some victims, abuse begins early in life and continues for many years - Many offenders blame the abuse on the willing participation of a seductive youngster. Yet children are not capable of making a deliberate, informed decision to enter into a sexual relationship! Even adolescents are not free to say yes or no. Rather, the responsibility lies with abusers, who tend to have characteristics that predispose them toward sexual exploitation of children - The adjustment problems of child sexual abuse victims—including anxiety, depression, low self-esteem, mistrust of adults, and anger and hostility—are often severe and can persist for years after the abusive episode

Kinship studies

Studies comparing the characteristics of family members to determine the importance of heredity in complex human characteristics

Transivity

The concrete operational child can also seriate mentally, an ability called transitive inference. In a well-known transitive inference problem, Piaget showed children pairings of sticks of different colors. From observing that Stick A is longer than Stick B and Stick B is longer than Stick C, children must infer that A is longer than C.

Cephalocaudal and proximodistal trends

The first is the cephalocaudal trend—from the Latin for "head to tail." During the prenatal period, the head develops more rapidly than the lower part of the body. At birth, the head takes up one-fourth of total body length, the legs only one-third. The lower portion of the body catches up. By age 2, the head accounts for only one-fifth and the legs for nearly one-half of total body length. In the second pattern, the proximodistal trend, growth proceeds, literally, from "near to far"—from the center of the body outward. In the prenatal period, the head, chest, and trunk grow first; then the arms and legs; and finally the hands and feet. During infancy and childhood, the arms and legs continue to grow somewhat ahead of the hands and feet.

id, superego, ego

The id, the largest portion of the mind, is the source of basic biological needs and desires. The ego, the conscious, rational part of personality, emerges in early infancy to redirect the id's impulses into acceptable behaviors. Between 3 and 6 years of age, the superego, or conscience, develops as parents insist that children conform to the values of society. Now the ego faces the increasingly complex task of reconciling the demands of the id, the external world, and conscience. According to Freud, the relations established among id, ego, and superego during the preschool years determine the individual's basic personality

Cross-sectional methods

The investigator studies groups of participants differing in age at the same point in time. Strength: More efficient than the longitudinal design. Not plagued by such problems as participant dropout and practice effects. Limitations: Does not permit study of individual developmental trends. Age differences may be distorted because of cohort effects.

Longitudinal methods

The investigator studies the same group of participants repeatedly at different ages. Strength: Permits study of common patterns and individual differences in development and relationships between early and later events and behaviors. Limitation: Age-related changes may be distorted because of participant dropout, practice effects, and cohort effects.

Teratogens

The term teratogen refers to any environmental agent that causes damage during the prenatal period. The harm done by teratogens is not always simple and straightforward. It depends on the following factors - Dose. Larger doses over longer time periods usually have more negative effects. - Heredity. The genetic makeup of the mother and the developing organism plays an important role. Some individuals are better able than others to withstand harmful environment - Other negative influences. The presence of several negative factors at once, such as additional teratogens, poor nutrition, and lack of medical care, can worsen the impact of a harmful agent. - Age. The effects of teratogens vary with the age of the organism at time of exposure. Think of the sensitive period concept—a limited time span in which a part of the body or a behavior is biologically prepared to develop rapidly. During that time, it is especially sensitive to its surroundings. If the environment is harmful, then damage occurs, and recovery is difficult and sometimes impossible

Centration

They focus on one aspect of a situation, neglecting other important features. In conservation of liquid, the child centers on the height of the water, failing to realize that changes in width compensate for changes in height. Second, children are easily distracted by the perceptual appearance of objects. Third, children treat the initial and final states of the water as unrelated events, ignoring the dynamic transformation (pouring of water) between them

Sleep patterns in the newborn

Throughout the day and night, newborn infants move in and out of five states of arousal, or degrees of sleep and wakefulness. During irregular, or rapid-eye-movement (REM), sleep, brain-wave activity is remarkably similar to that of the waking state. The eyes dart beneath the lids; heart rate, blood pressure, and breathing are uneven; and slight body movements occur. In contrast, during regular, or non-rapid-eye-movement (NREM), sleep, the body is almost motionless, and heart rate, breathing, and brain-wave activity are slow and even. - Regular, or NREM sleep: 8-9 hrs. The infant is at full rest and shows little or no body activity. The eyelids are closed, no eye movements occur, the face is relaxed, and breathing is slow and regular. - Irregular or REM: 8-9 hrs. Gentle limb movements, occasional stirring, and facial grimacing occur. Although the eyelids are closed, occasional rapid eye movements can be seen beneath them. Breathing is irregular - Drowsiness: Varies: The infant is either falling asleep or waking up. Body is less active than in irregular sleep but more active than in regular sleep. The eyes open and close; when open, they have a glazed look. Breathing is even but somewhat faster than in regular sleep - Quiet Alertness: 2-3 hrs: The infant's body is relatively inactive, with eyes open and attentive. Breathing is even - Waking activity and crying: 1-4 hrs: The infant shows frequent bursts of uncoordinated body activity. Breathing is very irregular. Face may be relaxed or tense and wrinkled. Crying may occur. Rapid brain growth means that the organization of sleep and wakefulness changes substantially between birth and 2 years, and fussiness and crying also decline. The newborn baby takes round the-clock naps that total about 16 to 18 hours. The average 2-year-old still needs 12 to 13 hours, but the sleep-wake pattern increasingly conforms to a night-day schedule. Most 6- to 9-month-olds take two daytime naps; by about 18 months, children generally need only one nap (Galland et al., 2012). Between ages 3 and 5, napping subsides.

Tobacco

Tobacco: The best known prenatal effect of smoking is low birth weight. But the likelihood of miscarriage, prematurity, cleft lip and palate, blood vessel abnormalities, impaired heart rate and breathing during sleep, infant death, and asthma and cancer later in childhood, also increases

Mono vs. dizygotic twins: formation and genetic similarity

Twins can also be created when a zygote that has started to duplicate separates into two clusters of cells that develop into two individuals. These are called identical, or monozygotic, twins because they have the same genetic makeup. Fraternal, or dizygotic, twins, the most common type of multiple offspring, resulting from the release and fertilization of two ova. Genetically, they are no more alike than ordinary siblings.

Over-regulation

When preschoolers acquire these markers, they sometimes overextend the rules to words that are exceptions—a type of error called overregularization. "My toy car breaked" and "We each got two foots" are expressions that appear between ages 2 and 3

Under-extension

When toddlers first learn words, they sometimes apply them too narrowly, an error called underextension. At 16 months, Caitlin used "bear" only to refer to the tattered bear she carried nearly constantly

Timeframes and major developmental differences between the zygote, embryonic and fetal periods of development

Zygote: When sperm and ovum unite at conception, the resulting cell, called a zygote, will again have 46 chromosomes. Between the seventh and ninth days, implantation occurs: The blastocyst burrows deep into the uterine lining. As many as 30 percent of zygotes do not survive this period. In some, the sperm and ovum did not join properly. In others, cell duplication never begins. By preventing implantation in these cases, nature eliminates most prenatal abnormalities. Embryo: 3-5 weeks: A primitive brain and spinal cord appear. Heart, muscles, ribs, backbone, and digestive tract begin to develop. 5-8 weeks: Many external body structures (face, arms, legs, toes, fingers) and internal organs form, and production and migration of neurons in the brain begin. The sense of touch starts to develop, and the embryo can move Fetus: 9-12 weeks: Rapid increase in size begins. Nervous system, organs, and muscles become organized and connected, touch sensitivity extends to most of the body, and new behavioral capacities (kicking, thumb sucking, mouth opening, and rehearsal of breathing) appear. External genitals are well-formed, and the fetus's sex is evident. - Second trimester: The fetus continues to enlarge rapidly. In the middle of this period, the mother can feel fetal movements. Vernix and lanugo keep the fetus's skin from chapping in the amniotic fluid. Most of the brain's neurons are in place by 24 weeks. Eyes are sensitive to light, and the fetus reacts to sound. - Third trimester: The fetus has a good chance of survival if born during this time. Size increases. Lungs mature. Rapid brain development, in neural connectivity and organization, enables sensory and behavioral capacities to expand. In the middle of this period, a layer of fat is added under the skin. Antibodies are transmitted from mother to fetus to protect against disease. Most fetuses rotate into an upside-down position in preparation for birth

Apgar scale

a standard measurement system that looks for a variety of indications of good health in newborns Color = Appearance; heart rate = Pulse; reflex irritability = Grimace; muscle tone = Activity; and respiratory effort = Respiration. Together, the first letters of the new labels spell Apgar

irreversibility

an inability to mentally go through a series of steps in a problem and then reverse direction, returning to the starting point. Reversibility is part of every logical operation

Control vs. experimental group

control: no intervention or receives an intervention that is unrelated to the independent variable being investigated experimental: one or more treatment groups of participants that receive the intervention of the independent variable being investigated

Concordance rate

indicates the percentage of twin pairs or other pairs of relatives who exhibit the same disorder

Age of viability

the age at which a baby can survive in the event of a premature birth

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