PSY Ch.1

Ethnography

a descriptive, qualitative technique, Instead of aiming to understand a single individual, it is directed toward understanding a culture or a distinct social group through participant observation.

Lifespan Perspective

a dynamic systems approach to development that assumes development is lifelong, multidimensional, and multidirectional, highly plastic, and affecting by multiple interacting forces.

Sensitive Period

a time that is optimal for certain capacities to emerge and in which the individual is especially responsive to environmental influences. However, its boundaries are less well-defined than those of a critical period. Development can occur later, but it is harder to induce.

Cohort effects

Individuals born at the same time period are influenced by a particular set of historical and cultural conditions. Results based on one cohort may not apply to people developing at other times.

Cognitive-Development Theory

children actively construct knowledge as they manipulate and explore their world.

Microsystem

consists of activities and interaction patterns in the person's immediate surroundings. (innermost level of the environment)

Macrosystem

consists of cultural values, laws, customs, and resources.

Nonnormative Influences

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

Age-Graded Influences

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

Sociocultural Theory

focuses on how culture is transmitted to the next generation. According to Vygotsky, social interaction is necessary for children to acquire the ways of thinking and behaving that make up a community's culture.

Correlation Design

researchers gather information on individuals, generally in natural life circumstances, without altering their experiences. Then they look at relationships between participant's characteristics and their behavior or development.

Clinical Interview

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

Evolutionary developmental psychology

seeks to understand the adaptive value of specieswide cognitive, emotional, and social competencies as those competencies change with age.

Ethology

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

Contexts

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

Ecological Systems Theory

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

History-Graded Influences

why people are born around the same time, called a cohort, tend to be alike in ways that set them apart from people born at other times.

Psychosocial Theory

Erikson's theory, which emphasizes that at each Freudian stage, individuals not only develop a unique personality but also aquire attitudes and skills that help them become active, contributing members of their society. Recognizes the lifespan nature of development and the impact of culture.

Chronosystems

Life changes can be imposed externally or can arise from within the person, since individuals shape many of their own settings and experiences.

Developmental Science

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

Correlation Coefficient

a number that describes how two measures, or variables, are associated with each other.

Discontinuous

a process in which new ways of understanding and responding to the world emerge at specific times.

Continuous

a process of gradually augmenting the same types of skills that were there to begin with.

Social Learning Theory

an approach that emphasizes the role of modeling, otherwise known as imitation or observational learning, in the development of behavior.

Theory

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

Clinical Method (Case Study)

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

Developmental Cognitive Neuroscience

brings together researchers from psychology, biology, neuroscience, and medicine to study the relationship between changes in the brain and the developmenting person's cognitive processing and behavior patterns.

Exosystem

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

Behaviorism

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

Nature-Nurture Controversy

disagreement among theorists about whether genetic or environmental factors are more important influences on development.

Structured Interviews

each participant is asked the same set of questions in the same way.

Mesosystem

encompasses connections between microsystems. (2nd level of Bronfenbrenner's model)

Cross-Sectional Design

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

Psychosexual Theory

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

Sequential Design

inwhich they conduct several similar cross-sectional or longitudinal studies (called sequences) at varying times.

Normative Approach

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

Longitudinal Design

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

Psychoanalytic Perspective

people move through a series of stages in which they confront conflicts between biological drives and social expectations. How these conflicts are resolved determines the person's ability to learn, to get along with others and to cope with anxiety.

Experimental Design

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

Behavior Modification

procedures that combine conditioning and modeling to eliminate undesirable behaviors and increase desirable responses.

Stages

qualitative changes in thinking, feeling, and behaving that characterize specific periods of development.

Information processing

the human mind may also be viewed as a symbol-manipulating system through which information flows.

Structured Observations

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

Naturalistic Observation

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