Psychology Exam I :Chapter 1 & 2

The scientific method is essentially a four-step process...

(1) conceptualize a process or problem to be studied, (2) collect research information (data), (3) analyze data, and (4) draw conclusions.

Laboratory research does have some drawbacks, however, including the following concerns...

(1) it is almost impossible to conduct research without the participants' knowing they are being studied; (2) the laboratory setting is unnatural and therefore can cause the participants to behave unnaturally; (3) people who are willing to come to a university laboratory may not fairly represent groups from diverse cultural backgrounds; (4) people who are unfamiliar with university settings, and with the idea of "helping science," may be intimidated by the laboratory setting.

As a result of these changes, contexts exert three types of influences...

(1) normative age-graded influences, (2) normative history-graded influences, and (3) nonnormative or highly individualized life events. Each of these types can have a biological or environmental impact on development.

The formal operational stage, which appears between the ages of...

11 and 15 and continues through adulthood, is Piaget's fourth and final stage. In this stage, individuals move beyond concrete experiences and think in abstract and more logical terms. As part of thinking more abstractly, adolescents develop images of ideal circumstances. They might think about what an ideal parent is like and compare their parents to this ideal standard. They begin to entertain possibilities for the future and are fascinated with what they can become. In solving problems, they become more systematic, developing hypotheses about why something is happening the way it is and then testing these hypotheses.

The upper boundary of the human life span (based on the oldest age documented) is ...

122 years.

In the twentieth century alone, life expectancy increased by ... because of...

30 years, thanks to improvements in sanitation, nutrition, and medicine.

In Erikson's theory, ... stages of development unfold as we go through life.

8

How does are relate to development?

According to some life-span experts, chronological age is not very relevant to understanding a person's psychological development. Chronological age is the number of years that have elapsed since birth. But time is a crude index of experience, and it does not cause development. Chronological age, moreover, is not the only way of measuring age. Just as there are different domains of development, there are different ways of thinking about age.

How do US adults today compare with earlier decades?

Compared with earlier decades, U.S. adults today are less likely to be married, more likely to be childless, and more likely to live alone. As the older population continues to expand during the twenty-first century, an increasing number of older adults will be without either a spouse or children—traditionally the main sources of support for older adults. These individuals will need social relationships, networks, and other supports.

How are Biological, cognitive, and socioemotional processes intertwined?

Consider a baby smiling in response to a parent's touch. This response depends on biological processes (the physical nature of touch and responsiveness to it), cognitive processes (the ability to understand intentional acts), and socioemotional processes (the act of smiling often reflects a positive emotional feeling, and smiling helps to connect us in positive ways with other human beings).

Why is development considered plasitic?

Developmentalists debate how much plasticity people have in various dimensions at different points in their development. Plasticity means the capacity for change. For example, can you still improve your intellectual skills when you are in your seventies or eighties? Or might these intellectual skills be fixed by the time you are in your thirties so that further improvement is impossible? Researchers have found that the cognitive skills of older adults can be improved through training and developing better strategies. However, possibly we possess less capacity for change when we become old. The exploration of plasticity and its constraints is a key element on the contemporary agenda for developmental research.

True or false. Development happens only to children and adolescents.

False

Concerns about the well-being of older adults are heightened by two facts. What are they?

First, the number of older adults in the United States is growing rapidly. Second, many of these older Americans are likely to need society's help.

What is cognitive about observational learning in Bandura's view?

He proposes that people cognitively represent the behavior of others and then sometimes adopt this behavior themselves.

How has recent progress been made in improving the lives of older adults?

In our discussion of late adulthood, you will read about researchers who are exploring ways to modify the activity of genes related to aging, methods for improving brain functioning in older people, medical discoveries for slowing or even reversing the effects of various chronic diseases, and ways to prepare for a better quality of life when we get old, including strategies for staying cognitively sharp, maintaining our physical fitness, and becoming more satisfied with our lives as older adults. But much more remains to be accomplished, as described earlier by Laura Carstensen (2015, 2016) and others (Antonucci & others, 2016; Hudson, 2016).

At the other end of the life span, older adults have health issues that social policy can address. Give examples.

Key concerns are escalating health-care costs and the access of older adults to adequate health care. One study found that the health-care system fails older adults in many ways. For example, older adults received the recommended care for general medical conditions such as heart disease only 52 percent of the time; they received appropriate care for undernutrition and Alzheimer disease only 31 percent of the time.

How might you benefit from studying life-span development?

Perhaps you will be, a parent or teacher. If so, children will be, a part of your everyday life. The more you learn about them, the better you can raise them or teach them. Perhaps you hope to gain some insight about your own history—as an infant, a child, an adolescent, or a young adult. Perhaps you want to know more about what your life will be like as you grow. The study of life-span development addresses some provocative questions about who we are, how we came to be this way, and where our future will take us.

Explain how developmental science is multidisciplinary?

Psychologists, sociologists, anthropologists, neuroscientists, and medical researchers all share an interest in unlocking the mysteries of development through the life span. How do your heredity and health limit your intelligence? Do intelligence and social relationships change with age in the same way around the world? How do families and schools influence intellectual development? These are examples of research questions that cut across disciplines.

What example is given to the way gender effects development?

The conditions in which many of the world's women live are a serious concern (UNICEF, 2016). Inadequate educational opportunities, violence, and lack of political access are just some of the problems faced by many women.

A dependent variable is...

a factor that can change in an experiment, in response to changes in the independent variable. As researchers manipulate the independent variable, they measure the dependent variable for any resulting effect (Gravetter & Forzano, 2016).

These theories have been criticized for...

a lack of scientific support, too much emphasis on sexual underpinnings, and an image of people that is too negative.

a correlation coefficient is...

a number based on a statistical analysis that is used to describe the degree of association between two variables. Correlation coefficients range from -1.00 to +1.00. A negative number means an inverse relation. The higher the correlation coefficient (whether positive or negative), the stronger the association between the two variables. A correlation of 0 means that there is no association between the variables. A correlation of -.40 is stronger than a correlation of +.20 because we disregard whether the correlation is positive or negative in determining the strength of the correlation.

Are there certain characteristics that make children resilient? Are there other characteristics that influence children like Ted Kaczynski, who despite his intelligence and education, became a killer? After analyzing research on this topic, Ann Masten and her colleagues concluded that ...

a number of individual factors, such as good intellectual functioning, influence resiliency. In addition, family and extrafamilial contexts of resilient individuals tend to share certain features. For example, resilient children are likely to have a close relationship to a caring parent figure and bonds to caring adults outside the family.

Socioeconomic status (SES) refers to...

a person's position within society based on occupational, educational, and economic characteristics. Socioeconomic status implies certain inequalities. Differences in the ability to control resources and to participate in society's rewards produce unequal opportunities.

Middle and late childhood is the developmental period from...

about 6 to 11 years of age, approximately corresponding to the elementary school years. During this period, children master the fundamental skills of reading, writing, and arithmetic. They are formally exposed to the world outside the family and to the prevailing culture. Achievement becomes a more central theme of the child's world, and self-control increases.

Random assignment is...

an important principle for deciding whether each participant will be placed in the experimental group or in the control group. Random assignment means that researchers assign participants to experimental and control groups by chance. It reduces the likelihood that the experiment's results will be due to any preexisting differences between groups (Gravetter & Forzano, 2016).

A case study is...

an in-depth look at a single individual. Case studies are performed mainly by mental health professionals when, for either practical or ethical reasons, the unique aspects of an individual's life cannot be duplicated and tested in other individuals. A case study provides information about one person's experiences; it may focus on Page 28nearly any aspect of the subject's life that helps the researcher understand the person's mind, behavior, or other attributes. A researcher may gather information for a case study from interviews and medical records.

Psychological age is...

an individual's adaptive capacities compared with those of other individuals of the same chronological age. Thus, older adults who continue to learn, remain flexible, are motivated, think clearly, and have positive personality traits are engaging in more adaptive behaviors than their chronological age-mates who do not do these things. And a recent study found that a higher level of conscientiousness was protective of cognitive functioning in older adults.

Biological processes produce changes in...Give examples

an individual's physical nature. Genes inherited from parents, the development of the brain, height and weight gains, changes in motor skills, nutrition, exercise, the hormonal changes of puberty, and cardiovascular decline are all examples of biological processes that affect development.

Cognitive processes refer to changes in...

an individual's thinking, intelligence, and language. Watching a colorful mobile swinging above the crib, putting together a two-word sentence, memorizing a poem, imagining what it would be like to be a movie star, and solving a crossword puzzle all involve cognitive processes.

Late adulthood potentially lasts longer than...because...

any other period of development. Because the number of people in this age group has been increasing dramatically, life-span developmentalists have been paying more attention to differences within late adulthood. According to Paul Baltes and Jacqui Smith (2003), a major change takes place in older adults' lives as they become the "oldest-old," at about 85 years of age.

The preoperational stage, which lasts from...

approximately 2 to 7 years of age, is Piaget's second stage. In this stage, children begin to go beyond simply connecting sensory information with physical action and are now able to represent the world with words, images, and drawings. However, according to Piaget, preschool children still lack the ability to perform what he calls operations, which are internalized mental actions that allow children to do mentally what they previously could only do physically. For example, if you imagine putting two sticks together to see whether they would be as long as another stick, without actually moving the sticks, you are performing a concrete operation.

Middle adulthood is the developmental period from...

approximately 40 years of age to about 60. It is a time of expanding personal and social involvement and responsibility; of assisting the next generation in becoming competent, mature individuals; and of achieving and maintaining satisfaction in a career.

The concrete operational stage, which lasts from...

approximately 7 to 11 years of age, is the third Piagetian stage. In this stage, children can perform operations that involve objects, and they can reason logically about specific or concrete examples. Concrete operational thinkers, however, cannot imagine the steps necessary to complete an algebraic equation because doing so would require a level of thinking that is too abstract for this stage of development.

The cognitive dimension, for example, includes ...

attention, memory, abstract thinking, speed of processing information, and social intelligence.

Social cognitive theory holds that... factors are the key factors in development.

behavior, environment, and person/cognitive

In Skinner's (1938) view, such rewards and punishments shape development. For Skinner the key aspect of development is...

behavior, not thoughts and feelings. He emphasized that development consists of the pattern of behavioral changes that are brought about by rewards and punishments. For example, Skinner would say that shy people learned to be shy as a result of experiences they had while growing up. It follows that modifications to an environment can help a shy person become more socially oriented.

Bandura's most recent model of learning and development includes three elements...

behavior, the person/cognition, and the environment.

Behavioral and social cognitive theories hold that development can be described in terms of ...

behaviors learned through interactions with our surroundings.

Age has been conceptualized not just as chronological age but also as...

biological age, psychological age, and social age.

Development consists of ...

biological, cognitive, and socioemotional dimensions. Even within each of those dimensions, there are many components.

Development comes from...For example...

biological, cultural, and individual factors influencing each other (Baltes, Reuter-Lorenz, & Rösler, 2006). For example, the brain shapes culture, but it is also shaped by culture and the experiences that individuals have or pursue. In terms of individual factors, we can go beyond what our genetic inheritance and environment give us. We can create a unique developmental path by actively choosing from the environment the things that optimize our lives (Rathunde & Csikszentmihalyi, 2006).

Infancy is the developmental period from...

birth to 18 or 24 months when humans are extremely dependent on adults. During this period, Page 12many psychological activities—language, symbolic thought, sensorimotor coordination, and social learning, for example—are just beginning.

The sensorimotor stage, which lasts from...

birth to about 2 years of age, is the first Piagetian stage. In this stage, infants construct an understanding of the world by coordinating sensory experiences (such as seeing and hearing) with physical, motor actions—hence the term sensorimotor.

A cohort is a group of people who are...

born at a similar point in history and share similar experiences as a result, such as living through the Vietnam war or growing up in the same city around the same time. These shared experiences may produce a range of differences among cohorts (Kadlecova & others, 2015; MacDonald & Stawski, 2016). For example, people who were teenagers during the Great Depression are likely to differ from people who were teenagers during the booming 1990s in their educational opportunities and economic status, in how they were raised, and in their attitudes toward sex and religion. In life-span development research, cohort effects are due to a person's time of birth, era, or generation but not to actual age.

To study causality, researchers turn to experimental research. An experiment is a...

carefully regulated procedure in which one or more factors believed to influence the behavior being studied are manipulated while all other factors are held constant.

Adolescence encompasses the transition from...

childhood to early adulthood, entered at approximately 10 to 12 years of age and ending at 18 to 22 years of age. Adolescence begins with rapid physical changes—dramatic gains in height and weight, changes in body contour, and the development of sexual characteristics such as enlargement of the breasts, growth of pubic and facial hair, and deepening of the voice. At this point in development, the pursuit of independence and an identity are prominent themes. Thought is more logical, abstract, and idealistic. More time is spent outside the family.

Like Piaget, the Russian developmentalist Lev Vygotsky (1896-1934) reasoned that...

children actively construct their knowledge.

The prenatal period is the time from...

conception to birth. It involves tremendous growth—from a single cell to a complete organism with a brain and behavioral capabilities—and takes place in approximately a nine-month period.

We will examine the life span from the point of...

conception until the time when life (at least, life as we know it) ends.

Social age refers to...

connectedness with others and the social roles individuals adopt. Individuals who have better social relationships with others are happier and tend to live longer than individuals who are lonely.

Ethnicity is rooted in...

cultural heritage, nationality, race, religion, and language. In recent years, there has been a growing realization that research on children's development needs to include more children from diverse ethnic groups (Schaefer, 2015). A special concern is the discrimination and prejudice experienced by ethnic minority children (Spencer & Swanson, 2016).

In contrast with descriptive research, correlational research goes beyond describing phenomena by providing information that helps to predict how people will behave. In correlational research, the goal is to...

describe the strength of the relationship between two or more events or characteristics. The more strongly the two events are correlated Page 29(or related or associated), the more effectively we can predict one event from the other (Aron, Aron, & Coups, 2017).

At every age, changes occur in every dimension. Changes in one dimension also affect... in the other dimensions.

development

Intimacy versus isolation is Erikson's sixth developmental stage, which individuals experience during...

early adulthood. At this time, individuals face the developmental task of forming intimate relationships. If young adults form healthy friendships and an intimate relationship with a partner, intimacy will be achieved; if not, isolation will result.

The most widely used classification of developmental periods involves an...

eight-period sequence. For the purposes of organization and understanding, this book is structured according to these developmental periods.

Industry versus inferiority is Erikson's fourth developmental stage, occurring approximately in the...

elementary school years. Children now need to direct their energy toward mastering knowledge and intellectual skills. The negative outcome is that the child may develop a sense of inferiority—feeling incompetent and unproductive.

In terms of the continuity-discontinuity issue discussed earlier in this chapter, the behavioral and social cognitive theories...

emphasize continuity in development and argue that development does not occur in stage-like fashion.

Throughout life, some dimensions or components of a dimension ... and others ...

expand, shrink Ex.For example, when one language (such as English) is acquired early in development, the capacity for acquiring second and third languages (such as Spanish and Chinese) decreases later in development, especially after early childhood.

As he listened to, probed, and analyzed his patients, he became convinced that their problems were the result of...

experiences early in life.

All development occurs within a context, or setting. Contexts include...

families, schools, peer groups, churches, cities, neighborhoods, university laboratories, countries, and so on. Each of these settings is influenced by historical, economic, social, and cultural factors. Contexts, like individuals, change. Thus, individuals are changing beings in a changing world.

Thus, Freud viewed early experiences as...Whereas Erikson...

far more important than later experiences. Whereas Erikson emphasized the importance of both early and later experiences.

Growth and development are dramatic during the...

first two decades of life.

Piaget's theory states that children go through...

four stages of cognitive development as they actively construct their understanding of the world.

The mastery of life often involves conflicts and competition among three goals of human development: ...

growth, maintenance, and regulation of loss.

Normative history-graded influences are common to people of a particular generation because of... For example...

historical circumstances. For example, in their youth American baby boomers shared the experience of the Cuban missile crisis, the assassination of John F. Kennedy, and the Beatles invasion. Other examples of normative history-graded influences include economic, political, and social upheavals such as the Great Depression in the 1930s, World War II in the 1940s, the civil rights and women's rights movements of the 1960s and 1970s, the terrorist attacks of 9/11/2001, as well as the integration of computers and cell phones into everyday life during the 1990s (Schaie, 2013).

During the adolescent years individuals face finding out who they are, what they are all about, and where they are going in life. This is Erikson's fifth developmental stage...

identity versus identity confusion. If adolescents explore roles in a healthy manner and arrive at a positive path to follow in life, then they achieve a positive identity; if not, then identity confusion reigns.

Information-processing theory emphasizes that...

individuals manipulate information, monitor it, and strategize about it. Unlike Piaget's theory but like Vygotsky's theory, information-processing theory does not describe development as stage-like. Instead, according to this theory individuals develop a gradually increasing capacity for processing information, which allows them to acquire increasingly complex knowledge and skills (Muller & Kerns, 2015).

In step 1 researchers often draw on theories and develop hypotheses. A theory is an...

interrelated, coherent set of ideas that helps to explain phenomena and make predictions. It may suggest hypotheses, which are specific assertions and predictions that can be tested.

Developmentalists generally acknowledge that development...

is not all nature or all nurture, not all stability or all change, and not all continuity or all discontinuity.

Integrity versus despair is Erikson's eighth and final stage of development, which individuals experience in...

late adulthood. During this stage, a person reflects on the past. If the person's life review reveals a life well spent, integrity will be achieved; if not, the retrospective glances likely will yield doubt or gloom—the despair Erikson described.

Autonomy versus shame and doubt is Erikson's second stage. This stage occurs in...

late infancy and toddlerhood (1 to 3 years). After gaining trust in their caregivers, infants begin to discover that their behavior is their own. They start to assert their sense of independence or autonomy. They realize their will. If infants and toddlers are restrained too much or punished too harshly, they are likely to develop a sense of shame and doubt.

He stressed that cognitive development involves...

learning to use the inventions of society, such as language, mathematical systems, and memory strategies. Thus, in one culture children might learn to count with the help of a computer; in another they might learn by using beads. According to Vygotsky, children's social interaction with more-skilled adults and peers is indispensable to their cognitive development (Rogoff & others, 2015). Through this interaction, they learn to use the tools that will help them adapt and be successful in their culture. Later we will examine ideas about learning and teaching that are based on Vygotsky's theory.

The maximum life span of humans has not changed since the beginning of recorded history. What has changed is ...

life expectancy, the average number of years that a person born in a particular year can expect to live.

An independent variable is a...

manipulated, influential experimental factor. It is a potential cause. The label "independent" is used because this variable can be manipulated independently of other factors to determine its effect. An experiment may include one independent variable or several of them.

Generativity versus stagnation, Erikson's seventh developmental stage, occurs during...

middle adulthood. By generativity, Erikson means primarily a concern for helping the younger generation to develop and lead useful lives. The feeling of having done nothing to help the next generation is stagnation.

In the life-span perspective, early adulthood is not the endpoint of development; rather,...

no age period dominates development.

At each stage, a unique developmental task confronts individuals with a crisis that must be resolved. According to Erikson, this crisis is...

not a catastrophe but a turning point marked by both increased vulnerability and enhanced potential. The more successfully an individual resolves these crises, the healthier his or her development will be.

From a life-span perspective, an overall age profile of an individual involves...

not just chronological age but also biological age, psychological age, and social age. For example, a 70-year-old man (chronological age) might be in good physical health (biological age), but might be experiencing memory problems and having trouble coping with the demands placed on him by his wife's recent hospitalization (psychological age) and dealing with a lack of social support (social age).

Albert Bandura emphasizes that cognitive processes have important links with the environment and behavior. His early research program focused heavily on...

observational learning (also calledimitation or modeling), which is learning that occurs through observing what others do. For example, a young boy might observe his father yelling in anger and treating other people with hostility; and then later with his peers, the young boy acts very aggressively, showing the same behavioral characteristics as his father.

All of the data-collection methods that we have discussed can be used in descriptive research, which aims to...

observe and record behavior. For example, a researcher might observe the extent to which people are altruistic or aggressive toward each other. By itself, descriptive research cannot prove what causes some phenomenon, but it can reveal important information about people's behavior and provide a basis for more scientific studies (Leedy & Ormrod, 2016).

Siegler (2006) also argues that the best way to understand how children learn is to...

observe them while they are learning. He emphasizes the importance of using the microgenetic method to obtain detailed information about processing mechanisms as they are occurring moment to moment. Siegler concludes that most research methods indirectly assess cognitive change, being more like snapshots than movies. The microgenetic method seeks to discover not just what children know but the cognitive processes involved in how they acquired the knowledge (Miller, 2015). A number of microgenetic studies have focused on a specific aspect of academic learning, such as how children learn whole number arithmetic, fractions, and other areas of math (Siegler, 2016a, b).

Naturalistic observation means...

observing behavior in real-world settings and making no effort to manipulate or control the situation. Life-span researchers conduct naturalistic observations at sporting events, child-care centers, work settings, malls, and other places people live in and frequent.

Social cognitive theorists stress that people acquire a wide range of behaviors, thoughts, and feelings through...

observing others' behavior and that these observations form an important part of life-span development.

Biological age is a person's age in terms...

of biological health. Determining biological age involves knowing the functional capacities of a person's vital organs. One person's vital capacities may be better or worse than those of others of comparable chronological age. The younger the person's biological age, the longer the person is expected to live, regardless of chronological age.

He determined we pass through five stages of psychosexual development...

oral, anal, phallic, latency, and genital.

Two processes underlie this cognitive construction of the world...

organization and adaptation. To make sense of our world, we organize our experiences. We also must adjust to changing environmental demands.

According to B. F. Skinner (1904-1990), through operant conditioning the consequences of a behavior...

produce changes in the probability of the behavior's recurrence. A behavior followed by a rewarding stimulus is more likely to recur, whereas a behavior followed by a punishing stimulus is less likely to recur. For example, when an adult smiles at a child after the child has done something, the child is more likely to engage in that behavior again than if the adult gives the child a disapproving look.

Social policy is a government's course of action designed to...

promote the welfare of its citizens. Values, economics, and politics all shape a nation's social policy. Out of concern that policy makers are doing too little to protect the well-being of children and older adults, life-span researchers are increasingly undertaking studies that they hope will lead to effective social policy.

Freud was a pioneer in the treatment of psychological problems. Freud developed a technique called...

psychoanalysis.

Erikson said we develop in...rather than the ...

psychosocial stages, rather than the psychosexual stages that Freud described.

Normative age-graded influences include biological processes such as...

puberty and menopause. They also include sociocultural, environmental processes such as beginning formal education (usually at about age 6 in most cultures) and retirement (which takes place during the fifties and sixties in most cultures).

Piaget described four stages in understanding the world. Thus, according to Piaget, the child's cognition is...

qualitatively different in one stage compared with another.

Contributions of the behavioral and social cognitive theories include an emphasis on...

scientific research and environmental determinants of behavior. These theories have been criticized for placing too little emphasis on cognition (Skinner) and giving inadequate attention to developmental changes.

What are Piaget's four stages of cognitive development?

sensorimotor stage, preoperational stage, concrete operational stage, and formal operational stage.

According to Freud, the primary motivation for human behavior is...

sexual in nature

The cross-sectional approach is a research strategy that...

simultaneously compares individuals of different ages. A typical cross-sectional study might include three groups of children: 5-year-olds, 8-year-olds, and Page 3111-year-olds. Another study might include groups of 15-year-olds, 25-year-olds, and 45-year-olds. The groups can be compared with respect to a variety of dependent variables, such as IQ, memory, peer relations, attachment to parents, hormonal changes, and so on. All of this can be accomplished in a short time. In some studies data are collected in a single day. Even in large-scale cross-sectional studies with hundreds of subjects, data collection does not usually take longer than several months to complete.

Late adulthood is the developmental period that begins in the...

sixties or seventies and lasts until death. It is a time of life review, retirement from the workforce, and adjustment to new social roles involving decreasing strength and health.

According to Erikson, motivation is...

social and reflects a desire to affiliate with other people. According to Freud, our basic personality is shaped in...] the first five years of life

However, Vygotsky (1962) gave... far more important roles in cognitive development than Piaget did.

social interaction and culture

Vygotsky's theory is a...

sociocultural cognitive theory that emphasizes how culture and social interaction guide cognitive development. Vygotsky portrayed the child's development as inseparable from social and cultural activities (Gauvain & Perez, 2015).

The only problem with the world changing so quickly would be...

that the world we live in not was not built/prepared for the older generations that are forming. (the people who are living longer)

Gender is...

the characteristics of people as females and males. It is another important aspect of sociocultural contexts. Few aspects of our development are more central to our identity and social relationships than gender. We discuss sociocultural contexts and diversity in each chapter.

The continuity-discontinuity issue focuses on...

the degree to which development involves either gradual, cumulative change (continuity) or distinct stages (discontinuity). In terms of continuity, as the oak grows from a seedling to a giant tree, its development is continuous. Similarly, a child's first word, though seemingly an abrupt, discontinuous event, is actually the result of weeks and months of growth and practice. Puberty might seem abrupt, but it is a gradual process that occurs over several years.

Early childhood is the developmental period from...

the end of infancy to age 5 or 6. This period is sometimes called the "preschool years." During this time, young children learn to become more self-sufficient and to care for themselves. They also develop school readiness skills, such as the ability to follow instructions and identify letters, and they spend many hours playing with peers. First grade typically marks the end of early childhood.

Trust versus mistrust is Erikson's first psychosocial stage, which is experienced in...

the first year of life. Trust during infancy sets the stage for a lifelong expectation that the world will be a good and pleasant place to live.

Socioemotional processes involve changes in...

the individual's relationships with other people, changes in emotions, and changes in personality. An infant's smile in response to a parent's touch, a toddler's aggressive attack on a playmate, a school-age child's development of assertiveness, an adolescent's joy at the senior prom, and the affection of an elderly couple all reflect the role of socioemotional processes in development.

Early adulthood is the developmental period that begins in...

the late teens or early twenties and lasts through the thirties. For young adults, this is a time for establishing personal and economic independence, becoming proficient in a career, and for many, selecting a mate, learning to live with that person in an intimate way, starting a family, and rearing children.

Initiative versus guilt, Erikson's third stage of development, occurs during...

the preschool years. As preschool children encounter a widening social world, they face new challenges that require active, purposeful, responsible behavior. Feelings of guilt may arise, though, if the child is irresponsible and is made to feel too anxious.

The main advantage of the cross-sectional study is that...

the researcher does not have to wait for the individuals to grow up or become older. Despite its efficiency, though, the cross-sectional approach has its drawbacks. It gives no information about how individuals change or about the stability of their characteristics. It can obscure the hills and valleys of growth and development. For example, a cross-sectional study of life satisfaction might reveal average increases and decreases, but it would not show how the life satisfaction of individual adults waxed and waned over the years. It also would not tell us whether the same adults who had positive or negative perceptions of life satisfaction in early adulthood maintained their relative degree of life satisfaction as they became middle-aged or older adults.

The longitudinal approach is a research strategy in which...

the same individuals are studied over a period of time, usually several years or more. For example, in a longitudinal study of life satisfaction, the same adults might be assessed periodically over a 70-year time span—at the ages of 20, 35, 45, 65, and 90, for example.

One problem with surveys and interviews is...

the tendency of participants to answer questions in a way that they think is socially acceptable or desirable rather than to say what they truly think or feel. For example, on a survey or in an interview some individuals might say that they do not take drugs even though they do.

Our adult personality, Freud (1917) claimed, is determined by...

the way we resolve conflicts between sources of pleasure at each stage and the demands of reality.

One criticism of standardized tests is that...

they assume a person's behavior is consistent and stable, yet personality and intelligence—two primary targets of standardized testing—can vary with the situation. For example, a person may perform poorly on a standardized intelligence test in an office setting but score much higher at home, where he or she is less anxious.

Robert Siegler (2006, 2013), a leading expert on children's information processing, states that...

thinking is information processing. In other words, when individuals perceive, encode, represent, store, and retrieve information, they are thinking. Siegler emphasizes that an important aspect of development is learning good strategies for processing information (Siegler, 2016a, b). For example, becoming a better reader might involve learning to monitor the key themes of the material being read.

According to Erikson, developmental change occurs...

throughout the life span.

The 8 stages are...

trust vs. mistrust, Autonomy versus shame and doubt, Initiative versus guilt, Industry versus inferiority, identity versus identity confusion, Intimacy versus isolation, Generativity versus stagnation, Integrity versus despair.

Psychoanalytic theories describe development primarily in terms of...

unconscious (beyond awareness) processes that are heavily colored by emotion. Psychoanalytic theorists also stress that early experiences with parents extensively shape development.

A standardized test has...

uniform procedures for administration and scoring. Many standardized tests allow performance comparisons; they provide information about individual differences among people (Gregory, 2014). One example is the Stanford-Binet intelligence test, which is discussed in detail later. Your score on the Stanford-Binet test tells you how your performance compares with that of thousands of other people who have taken the test.

Nonnormative life events are...Some examples are...

unusual occurrences that have a major impact on the individual's life. Examples include the death of a parent when a child is young, pregnancy in early adolescence, a fire that destroys a home, winning the lottery, or getting an unexpected career opportunity.

Longitudinal studies provide a wealth of information about...

vital issues such as stability and change in development and the importance of early experience for later development, but they do have drawbacks (Cicchetti & Toth, 2015, 2016). They are expensive and time-consuming. The longer the study lasts, the more participants drop out—they move, get sick, lose interest, and so forth. The participants who remain may be dissimilar to those who drop out, biasing the outcome of the study. Those individuals who remain in a longitudinal study over a number of years may be more responsible and conformity-oriented than the ones who dropped out, for example, or they might have more stable lives.

Behaviorism essentially holds that...

we can study scientifically only what can be directly observed and measured. Out of the behavioral tradition grew the belief that development is observable behavior that can be learned through experience with the environment (Spiegler, 2016).