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CH 2 Sigelman &Rider
Life-Span Human Development, 9th edition: Theories
Term | Definition |
---|---|
activity–passivity issue | The issue in developmental theory centering on whether humans are active contributors to their own development or are passively shaped by forces beyond their control. |
continuity–discontinuity issue | The debate among theorists about whether human development is best characterized as gradual and continuous or abrupt and stagelike. |
developmental stage | A distinct phase within a larger sequence of development; a period characterized by a particular set of abilities, motives, behaviors, or emotions that occur together and form a coherent pattern. |
universality–context specificity issue | The debate over the extent to which developmental changes are common to everyone (universal, as in most stage theories) or different from person to person (particularistic). |
psychoanalytic theory | The theoretical perspective associated with Freud and his followers that emphasizes unconscious motivations for behavior, conflicts within the personality, and stages of psychosexual development. |
instinct | An inborn biological force assumed to motivate a particular response or class of responses. |
unconscious motivation | Freud’s term for feelings, experiences, and conflicts that influence a person’s thinking and behavior even though they cannot be recalled. |
id | A psychoanalytic term for the inborn component of the personality that is driven by the instincts or selfish urges. |
ego | Psychoanalytic term for the rational component of the personality. |
superego | The psychoanalytic term for the component of the personality that consists of the individual’s internalized moral standards. |
libido | Freud’s term for the biological energy of the sex instinct. |
psychosexual stages | Freud’s five stages of development, associated with biological maturation and shifts in the libido: oral, anal, phallic, latency, and genital. |
fixation | In psychoanalytic theory, a defense mechanism in which development is arrested and part of the libido remains tied to an early stage of development. |
identification | Freud’s term for the individual’s tendency to emulate, or adopt the attitudes and behaviors of, another person, particularly the same-sex parent. |
defense mechanisms | Mechanisms used by the ego to defend itself against anxiety caused by conflict between the id’s impulses and social demands. |
repression | Removing unacceptable thoughts or traumatic memories from consciousness, as when a young woman who was raped has no memory at all of having been raped or if you have dental surgery, but you fail to wake up on time for the procedure. |
regression | A defense mechanism that involves retreating to an earlier, less traumatic stage of development. |
psychosocial stages | Erikson’s eight stages of development (trust, autonomy, initiative, industry, identity, intimacy, generativity, and integrity), emphasizing social influences more and biological urges less than Freud’s psychosexual stages. |
behaviorism | A school of thinking in psychology that holds that conclusions about human development should be based on controlled observations of overt behavior rather than on speculation about unconscious motives or other unobservable phenomena. |
classical conditioning | A type of learning in which a stimulus that initially had no effect on the individual comes to elicit a response because of its association with a stimulus that already elicits the response. |
operant conditioning | Also called instrumental conditioning, a form of learning in which freely emitted acts (or operants) become more or less probable depending on the consequences they produce. |
positive reinforcement | The process in operant conditioning whereby a response is strengthened when its consequence is a pleasant event. |
negative reinforcement | The process in operant conditioning in which a response is strengthened or made more probable when its consequence is the removal of an unpleasant stimulus from the situation. |
positive punishment | The process in operant conditioning whereby a response is weakened when its consequence is an unpleasant event. |
negative punishment | The process in operant conditioning in which a response is weakened or made less probable when its consequence is the removal of a pleasant stimulus from the situation. |
extinction | The gradual weakening and disappearance of a learned response when it is no longer reinforced. |
social cognitive theory | Bandura’s social learning theory, a theory emphasizing the importance of cognitive processing of social experiences. |
observational learning | Learning that results from observing the behavior of other people; emphasized in Bandura’s social cognitive theory. |
latent learning | Learning occurs but is not evident in behavior; children can learn from observation even though they do not imitate (perform) the learned responses. |
vicarious reinforcement | In observational learning, the consequences experienced by models, because of their behavior, that affect the learner’s likelihood of imitating the behavior. |
overimitation | An adaptive and apparently universal tendency of children to imitate every detail of what they see a model do, even actions that are not directly useful in achieving a goal. |
self-efficacy | The belief that one can effectively produce desired outcomes in a particular area of life. |
reciprocal determinism | The notion in social cognitive theory that the flow of influence between people and their environments is a two-way street; the environment may affect the person, but the person’s characteristics and behavior will also influence the environment. |
constructivism | The position taken by Piaget and others that humans actively create their own understandings of the world from their experiences, as opposed to being born with innate ideas or being programmed by the environment. |
sensorimotor stage | Piaget’s first stage of cognitive development, spanning the first 2 years of life, in which infants rely on their senses and motor behaviors in adapting to the world around them. |
preoperational stage | Piaget’s second stage of cognitive development, lasting from about age 2 to age 7, when children think at a symbolic level but have not yet mastered logical operations. |
concrete operations stage | Piaget’s third stage of cognitive development, lasting from about age 7 to age 11, when children are acquiring logical operations and can reason effectively about real objects and experiences. |
formal operations stage | Piaget’s fourth and final stage of cognitive development (from age 11 or 12), when the individual begins to think more rationally and systematically about abstract concepts and hypothetical ideas. |
sociocultural perspective | Vygotsky’s theory of development, which maintains that cognitive development is shaped by the sociocultural context in which it occurs and grows out of children’s social interactions with members of their culture. |
information-processing approach | An approach to cognition that emphasizes the fundamental mental processes involved in attention, perception, memory, and decision making. |
systems theories | Theories of development holding that changes over the life span arise from the ongoing interrelationships between a changing organism and a changing environment, both of which are part of a larger, dynamic system. |
bioecological model | Bronfenbrenner’s model of development that emphasizes the roles of both nature and nurture as the developing person interacts with a series of environmental systems (microsystem, mesosystem, exosystem, and macrosystem) over time (chronosystem). |
microsystem | In Bronfenbrenner’s bioecological approach, the immediate settings in which the person functions (for example, the family). |
mesosystem | In Bronfenbrenner’s bioecological approach, interrelationships between microsystems or immediate environments (for example, ways in which events in the family affect a child’s interactions at a day care center). |
exosystem | In Bronfenbrenner’s bioecological approach, settings not experienced directly by individuals that still influence their development (for example, effects of events at a parent’s workplace on children’s development). |
macrosystem | In Bronfenbrenner’s bioecological approach, the larger cultural or subcultural context of development. |
chronosystem | In Bronfenbrenner’s bioecological approach, the system that captures the way changes in environmental systems, such as social trends and life events, are patterned over a person’s lifetime. |
proximal processes | In Bronfenbrenner’s bioecological theory, the important recurring, reciprocal interactions between the individual and other people, objects, or symbols that move development forward (for example, parent and child reading bedtime stories together nightly). |
PPCT model | In Bronfenbrenner’s bioecological theory, a call for doing more than comparing children who live at different social addresses by examining development as a function of four factors: process, person, context, and time. |
eclectic | In the context of science, an individual who recognizes that no single theory can explain everything but that each has something to contribute to our understanding. |