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PSY 220 Chapter 1
Understanding Life-Span Human Development
| Question | Answer |
|---|---|
| development | systematic changes in the individual occuring between conception and death; such changes can be positive, negative, or neutral |
| growth | the physical changes that occur from conception to maturity |
| biological aging | the detrioration of organisms that leads inevitably to their death |
| aging | to most developmentalists, positive, negative, and neutral changes in mature organism; different from biological aging |
| emerging adulthood | newly identified period in life from ages 18-25, when young people are neither adolescents nor adults and exploring their identities, careers, and relationships |
| culture | a system of meanings shared by a population of people ad transmitted from one generation to the next |
| age grade | socially defined age groups or strata, each with different statuses, roles, priveleges, and responsibilities in society |
| rite of passage | marks a person's "passage" from one status to another, usually in reference to rituals marking the transition from childhood to adulthood |
| age norms | expectation about what people should be doing or how they should behave at different points in the life span |
| socila clock | a personal sense of when things should be done in life and when an individual is ahead or behind the schedule directed by age norms |
| ethnicity | a person's classification in or affiliation with a group based on common heritage or traditions |
| socioeconomic status | the position people hold in society based on such factors as income, education, occupational status, and the prestige of their neighborhoods |
| adolescence | transitional period between childhood and adulthood that begins when puberty ends when the individual has aquired the adult compentencies and responsibilities, around 10-18 |
| life expectancy | the average number of years a newborn baby can be expected to live |
| gerontology | the study of aging and old age |
| life span perspective | a perspective that views development as a lifelong, multidirectional process that involves gain and loss, is characterized by considerable plasticity, is shaped by historical-cultural context, has many causes, and is viewed from a multidiciplinary pov |
| plasticity | an openness of brain cells or of the organism as a whole to positive and negative environmental influence; a capacity to change in response to experience |
| neuroplasticity | the brain's remarkable ability to change in response to experience throughout the life span, as when it recovers from injury or benefits from stimulating learning experiences |
| baby biographies | carfully recorded observations of the growth and development of children by their parents over a period; the first scientific investigation of development |
| storm and stress | G. Stanley Hall's term for the emotional ups and downs and rapid changes that he believed characterize adolescence |
| theory | a set of concepts and propositions designed to organize, describe, and explain a set of oberservations |
| nature-nurture issue | the debate over the relative rles of biological predispositions (nature) and environmental influences (nurture) as determinants of human development |
| maturation | developmental changes that are biologically programmed by genes rather than causes primarily by learning, injury, illness, or some other life experience |
| environment | events or conditions outside the person that are presumed to influence and be influenced by the individual |
| learning | a relatively permanent change in behavior (or behavioral potential) that results from a person's experiences or practice |
| continuity-discontinuity issue | the debate among theorists about whether human development is best characterized as gradual and continuous or abrupt and stagelike |
| stage theory | a theory of development laid out in a sequence in distinct phases, each characterized by a particular set of abilities, motives, emotions, or behaviors that 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) |
| evolutonary psychology | the application of evolutionary theory and its concept of natural selection to understanding why humans think and behave as they do |
| psychoanalytic theory | the theoretical perspective associated with Freud and his followers that emphasizes unconscious motivations for behavior, conflucts within the personality, and stages of psychosexual development |
| social learning theory | Bandura's social learning theory; chldren and adults can learn novel responses merely by observing the behavior of a model, making mental notes on what they have seen, and then using these notes to reproduce the behavior |
| cognitive-developmental theory | Piaget's theory detailing how children advance through four stages of thinking; senorimotor, preoperational, concrete operational, and formal operational |
| systems theories | theories of development holding that changes of 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 (microsystems, mesosystem, exosystem, and macrosystem) over time (chronosystem) |
| microsystem | in Bronfenbrenner's bioecological approach, the immediate settings in which a person functions (ex. family) |
| mesosystem | in Bronfenbrenner's bioecological approach, interrelationships between microsystems or immediate environments (ex. ways in which events in the family affect a child's interactions at a day care center) |
| exosystem | in Bronfenbrenner's bioecological approach, seetings not experienced directly by individuals that still influence their development (ex. 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 |
| scientific method | an attitude or value about the pursuit of knowlege that dicttates that investigators must be objective and allow their data to decide the merits of their thoerizing |
| hypotheses | a theory-based precition about what will hold true if we observe a phenomenon |
| sample | a group of indivioduals chosen to be the subjects of a study |
| population | a well-defined group that a researcher studies a sample of individuals and is interested in drawing conclusions about |
| random sample | a sample formed by identifying all members of the larger population of interest and then selecting a portion of them in an unbiased way to participate in the study; a technique to ensure that a sample studied is represnetative |
| naturalistic obersevation | a research method in which the scientist observes people as they engage in common everyday activities in their natural habitats. contrast with structured observation |
| structured observation | a research method in which scientists create special conditions designed to elicit the behavior of interest to achieve greater control over the conditions under which they gather behavioral data. contract with naturalistic observation |
| case study | an in-depth examination of an individual (or small number of individuals) typically carries out by compiling and analyzing information from a varity of sources such as observing, testing, and interviewing the person or people who know the individual |
| experiment | a research strategy in which the investigator manipulates or alters some aspect of a person's environment to measure its effect on the individual's behavior of development |
| independent variable | the aspect of the enviornment that a researcher deliberately changes |
| dependent variable | the aspect of behavior measured in an experiment and assumed to be under control of the independent variable |
| random assignment | a technique in whcih research participants are placed in experimental conditiosn in an unbiased or random way so that the resulting groups are not systematically different |
| experimental control | the holding of all other factors besides the independent variable in an experiment constant so that any changes in the dependent variable can be said to be caused by the manipulaton of the independent variable |
| correlational method | a research technique involving determining whether two or more variables are related. it cannot indicate that one thing is caused by another, but it can suggest that a casual relationship exists |
| correlation coefficient | a measure, ranging from +1.00 to -1.00, of the extent to which two variables or attributes are systematically related to each other in either a positive or negative way |
| directionality problem | the problem in correlational studies of determining whether a presumed causal variable is the cause or the effect |
| third variable problem | in correlational studies, the problem posed by the fact that the association between the two variables of interest may be caused by some third variable |
| meta-analysis | a research method in which the results of multiple studies addressing the same question are synthesized to produce overall conclusions |
| corss-sectional design | a developmental research design in which different age groups are studies at the same point in time and compared |
| cohrot | a group of people born at the same time; a particular generation of people |
| age effects | in developmental research, the effects of getting older or of developing |
| cohort effects | in cross-sectional research, the effects on findings that the different cohorts being compared were born at different times and had different formative experiences |
| longitudinal design | a developmental research design in which on egroup pf subjects is studies repeatedly over months or years |
| time-of-measurement effects | in developmental research, the effects on findings of historical events occuring when the data for a study being collected (ex. psychological changes brought habout by an economic depression rather than as a function of aging) |
| sequential design | a developmental research design that combines the cross-sectional approach and the longitudinal approach in a single study to compensate fo rthe weakness of each |
| WEIRD people | an acornym referring to people luving in societies that are Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic. the field of psychology has been characterized as the study of WEIRD people |
| ethnocentrism | the belief that one's own cultural or ethnic group is superior to others |
| research ethics | standards of conduct that investigators are ethically bound to honor to protect their research participants from physical or psychological harm |
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