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| An area of study devoted to understanding constancy and change from conception through adolescence. |
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| Large, interdisciplinary field which includes all changes we experience throughout the lifespan. |
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| An orderly, integrated set of statements that describes, explains, and predicts behavior. |
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| A process of gradually adding more of the same types of skills that were there to begin with. |
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| Discontinuous (Development) |
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| A process in which new ways of understanding and responding to the world emerge at specific times. |
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| Qualitative changes in thinking, feeling, and behaving that characterize specific periods of development. |
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| Unique combinations of personal and environmental circumstances that can result in different paths of change. |
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| Nature-Nurture Controversy |
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| Are genetic or environmental factors more important in influencing development? Nature = inborn biological givens/hereditary information. Nurture = complex forces of the physical and social world that influence our biological makeup and psychological experiences. |
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| Open to change in response to influential experiences. Some theorists see development as having substantial plasticity throughout life. |
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| The ability to adapt effectively in the face of threats to development. |
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| A genetically determined, naturally unfolding course of growth. |
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| Measures of behavior are taken on large numbers of individuals and age-related averages are computed to represent typical development. |
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| Psychoanalytic Perspective |
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| Children 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. |
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| Psychosexual Theory (Freud) |
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| Emphasizes that how parents manage their child's sexual and aggressive drives in the first few years is crucial for healthy personality development. |
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| Psychosocial Theory (Erikson) |
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| 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. |
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| Believes directly observable events (stimuli and responses) are the appropriate focus of study. |
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Social Learning Theory
(Most Influential: Bandura-1977) |
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| Emphasizes modeling, also known as imitation or observational learning, as a powerful source of development. |
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| Consists of procedures that combine conditioning and modeling to eliminate undesirable behaviors and increase desirable responses. |
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| Cognitive-Developmental Theory (Piaget) |
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| Children actively construct knowledge as they manipulate and explore their world. |
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| Perspective that the human mind might also be viewed as a symbol-manipulating system through which information flows. |
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| Developmental Cognitive Neuroscience |
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| Brings together researchers from psychology, biology, neuroscience, and medicine to study the relationship between changes in the brain and the developing child's cognitive processing and behavior patterns. |
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| Concerned with the adaptive, or survival, value of behavior and its evolutionary history. |
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| A time that is biologically optimal for certain capacities to emerge because the individual is especially responsive to environmental influences. However, its boundaries are less well-defined than are those of a critical period. Development can occur later, but its harder to induce. |
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| Evolutional Developmental Psychology |
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| Seeks to understand the adaptive value of species-wide cognitive, emotional, and social competencies as those competencies change with age. |
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| Sociocultural Theory (Vygotsky) |
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| Focuses on how culture (the values, beliefs, customs, and skills of a social group) is transmitted to the next generation. |
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| Ecological Systems Theory (Bronfenbrenner) |
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| Views the child as developing within a complex system of relationships affected by multiple levels of the surrounding environment. |
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| The innermost level of the environment that consists of activities and interaction patterns in the child's immediate surroundings. |
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| The second level of Bronfenbrenner's model that encompasses connections between microsystems, such as home, school, neighborhood, and child-care center. |
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| Consists of social settings that do not contain children but that nevertheless affect children's experiences in immediate settings. |
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| Outermost level of Bronfenbrenner's model that consists of cultural values, laws, customs, and resources. |
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| What Bronfenbrenner termed the temporal dimension of his model. Life changes can be imposed on the child; alternatively, they can arise from within the child, since as children get older they select, modify, and create many of their own settings and experiences. |
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| Dynamic Systems Perspective |
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| The child's mind, body, and physical and social worlds form an integrated system that guides mastery of new skills. The system is constantly in motion (dynamic). A change in any part of it (from brain growth to physical or social surroundings) disrupts the current organism-environment relationship. When this happens, the child actively reorganizes his or her behavior so the various components of the system work together again but in a more complex, effective way. |
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| Go into the field, or natural environment, and observe the behavior of interest. |
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| The experimenter sets up a laboratory situation that evokes the behavior of interest so that every participant has an equal opportunity to display the response. |
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| A flexible, conversational style is used to probe for the participant's point of view. |
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| Each participant is asked the same questions in the same way; include tests and questionnaires. |
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| Clinical (Case Study) Method |
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| Brings together a wide range of information on one child, including interviews, observations, and sometimes test scores. |
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| Descriptive, qualitative technique directed toward understanding a culture or a distinct social group through participant observation. |
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| Researchers gather information on individuals, generally in natural life circumstances, and make no effort to alter their experiences. |
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| A number that describes how two measures, or variables, are associated with one another. |
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| Permits inferences about cause and effect because researchers use an evenhanded procedure to assign people to two or more treatment conditions. |
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| One the experimenter expects to cause changes in another variable. |
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| One the experimenter expects to be influenced by the independent variable. |
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| (Of participants to treatment conditions). By using an unbiased procedure, such as drawing numbers out of a hat or flipping a coin, investigators increase the chances that participants' characteristics will be equally distributed across treatment groups. |
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| Participants are studied repeatedly, and changes are noted as they get older. |
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| Longitudinal studies examine the development of cohorts- children born at the same time, who are influenced by particular cultural and historical conditions. Results based on one cohort may not apply to children developing at other times. |
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| Groups of people differing in age are studied at the same point in time. |
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| Conduct several similar cross-sectional or longitudinal studies (called sequences) at varying times. |
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| An adaptation of the longitudinal approach, presents children with a novel task and follows their mastery over a series of closely spaced sessions. Within this "microcosm" of development, researchers observe how change occurs. |
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