Developmental Psychology Chapter 1 Summary

CHAPTER 1: INTRODUCTION TO DEVELOPMENTAL PSYCHOLOGY
WHAT IS DEVELOPMENT? 1. Development * Systematic continuities and changes in the individual that occur between conception and death 2. Changes are systematic because they are orderly, patterned, and enduring * Temporary mood swings and other transitory changes in our appearances, thoughts, and behaviors are excluded 3. Continuities in development * Ways in which we remain the same or continue to reflect the past
WHAT CAUSES US TO DEVELOP? 4. Two important processes that underlie developmental change: maturation and learning 5. Maturation * Biological unfolding of the individual according to species-typical biological inheritance and an individual person’s
biological inheritance * Maturation is partly responsible for psychological changes such as increasing ability to concentrate, solve problems, and understand another person’s thoughts or feelings * Results from the aging process rather than from learning, injury, or illness 6. Learning * The process through which our experiences produce permanent changes in our feelings, thoughts, and behaviors * Relatively permanent change in behavior (or behavioral potential)
WHAT GOALS DO DEVELOPMENTALISTS PURSUE? 7.
Three major goals of the development sciences * Describe * Explain * To optimize development

8. Description * Human developmentalists observe the behavior of people of different ages, seeking to specify how people change over time * They focus on typical patterns of change (normative development) and on individual variations in patterns of change (ideography development) * Normative development are developmental changes that characterize most or all members of a species * Ideographic development are individual variations in the rate, extent, or direction of development * They seek to understand the important ways that developing humans resemble each other and how they are likely to differ as they proceed through life 9. Explain * Determine why people develop as they do and why some people develop differently than others * Centers both on normative changes within individuals and on variations in development between individuals 10. Optimize development * Optimize development by applying what they have learned in attempts to help people develop in positive directions * Breakthroughs: * Promote strong affectional ties between fussy, unresponsive infants and their frustrated
parents * Assist children with learning difficulties to succeed at school * Help socially unskilled kids and adolescents prevent the emotional difficulties that could result from having no close friends and being rejected by peers
SOME BASIC OBSERVATIONS ABOUT THE CHARACTER OF DEVELOPMENT 11.
A continual and cumulative process * First 12 years are important for setting the stage for adolescence and adulthood * Human development is a continual and cumulative process * The one constant is change, and the changes that occur as each major phase of life have major implications for the future 12. A holistic process * Unified view of the developmental process that emphasizes the important interrelationships among the physical, mental, social, and emotional aspects of human development * Boys who have early puberty are more popular than boys who reach puberty later * Kids who do well in school tend to be more popular than kids who perform poorly * Popularity depends not only on the growth of social skills but also on aspects of both cognitive and physical development * Holistic perspective is one of the dominant themes of human development today * 13. Plasticity * Capacity for change * Developmental state that has the potential to be shaped by experience * EX: Somber babies living in barren, understaffed orphanages become cheerful and affectionate when placed in socially stimulating adoptive
homes * EX: Highly aggressive kids are intensely disliked by their peers often improve their social status after learning and practicing the social skills that popular kids display
EARLY PHILOSOPHICAL PERSPECTIVES ON CHILDHOOD 14. Thomas Hobbes’s doctrine of original sin * Idea that children are inherently negative creatures who must be taught to rechannel their selfish interests into socially acceptable outlets * Hobbes maintained that kids must learn to rechannel their natural selfish interests into socially acceptable outlets and they are passive subjects to be moulded by parents 15. Jacques Rousseau’s doctrine of innate purity * Idea that infants are born with an intuitive sense of right and wrong that is often misdirected by the demands and restrictions of society * Parents must control their egoistic kids * Parents should give kids freedom to follow their inherently positive inclinations * Kids are involved in the shaping of their own intellects and personalities 16. John Locke’s tabula rasa * The idea that the mind of an infant is a “blank slate” and that all knowledge, abilities, behaviors, and motives are acquired through experience * Child’s role is passive because the mind of an infant is a blank slate on which experience writes its lessons
CHILDREN AS SUBJECTS OF STUDY: THE BABY BIOGRAPHIES 17. Baby biographies * A detailed record of an infant’s growth and development over a period of time 18. Charles Darwin made daily records of the development of his son * Young, untrained infants share characteristics with their nonhuman ancestors, and he advanced the idea that the development of the individual kid retraces the entire evolutionary history of the species, thereby illustrating the “descent of man.”
ORIGINS OF A SCIENCE OF DEVELOPMENT 19. G. Stanley Hall conducted the 1st large-scale scientific investigation of children, and he is the founder of developmental psychology * Developed the questionnaire to explore the contents of children’s minds * Kids’ understanding of the world grows during childhood and that the “logic” of kids is not very logical 20. Freud’s psychoanalytic theory * Theory is a set of concepts and propositions designed to organize, describe, and explain existing set of observations * Good theories have the ability to predict the future events (hypotheses)
RESEARCH STRATEGIES: BASIC METHODS AND DESIGNS 21. Scientific methods * The use of objective and replicable methods to gather data for the purpose of testing a theory or hypothesis * It dictates that investigators must be objective and must allow their data to decide the merits of their thinking 22. Objective * Everyone who examines the data will come to the same conclusion, that is, it is not a subjective opinion 23. Replicable * Every time the method is used, it results in the same data and conclusions
GATHERING DATA: BASIC FACT-FINDING STRATEGIES 24. Use methods must display reliability and validity 25. Reliability * The extent to which a measuring instrument yields consistent results, both over time and across observers * Must produce comparable estimates with independent observers (interrater reliability) and yield similar scores from one testing to another (temporal stability) 26. Validity * The extent to which a measuring instrument accurately reflects what the researcher intended to measure * An instrument must be reliable before it can possibly be valid, but reliability itself does not guarantee validity * EX: A reliable observational scheme intended as a measure of children’s aggression may provide overinflated estimates of aggressive behavior if the investigator classifies all acts of physical force as examples of aggression * The research has failed to recognize the much high-intensity behavior may just represent enjoyable forms of rough play without harmful intent * Researchers must demonstrate they are measuring the attribute they say they are measuring before we can have much faith in the data they collect or the conclusions they reach

* SELF-REPORT METHODOLOGIES

27. 3 common self-report methodologies are interviews, questionnaires, and the clinical method 28. Interviews and questionnaires * Ask the child or parents a series of questions pertaining to aspects of development such as the child’s behavior, feelings, beliefs, or characteristic method of thinking 29. Structured interview or structured questionnaire * A technique in which all participants are asked the same questions in the same order so that the responses of different participants can be compared * Purpose of this is to treat each person alike * Williams found that kindergarten kids were knowledgeable about gender stereotypes, although children’s thinking become more stereotyped between kindergarten and Grade 2 30. Diary study * A questionnaire method in which participants write answers to specified questions in a diary or notebook, either at specified timed or when prompted by an electronic pager 31. Interviews and questionnaires have their shortcomings * Neither approach can be used with very young children, who cannot read or comprehend speech well * Must hope that the answers are honest and accurate, and this leads to erroneous conclusions * Participants of all ages interpret questions in the same way; otherwise, the age trends in the study may reflect differences in children’s ability to comprehend and communicate rather than real underlying changes in their feelings, thoughts, or behaviors * Interviews with developing children and parents may be tough to determine which set of reports is more accurate if the children’s description of their own behaviors differ from those of the parents 32. The clinical method * A type of interview in which a participant’s response to each successive question (or problem) determines what the investigator will ask next 33. Jean Piaget relied on the clinical method to study children’s moral reasoning and intellectual development 34. Advantages * Like structured interviews, clinical methods are useful for gathering large amounts of information in brief period * By asking follow-up questions that are tailored to the participant’s original answers, it is possible to obtain an understanding of the meaning of those answers 35. Shortcomings * It may be difficult to directly compare the answers of participants who are asked different questions * Tailoring questions to the participant’s responses raises the possibility that the examiner’s preexisting theoretical biases may affect the follow-up questions

* OBSERVATIONAL METHODOLOGIES

36. Method that developmentalists favor is naturalistic observation * A method in which scientist tests hypotheses by observing people as they engage in everyday activities in their natural habitats 37. Limitations * Some behaviors occur so infrequently or are socially undesirable that they are unlikely to be witnessed * Many events are happening at the same time in a natural setting, and any of them may affect people’s behavior * The presence of an observer can make people behave differently than they otherwise would * Children tend to “show off” 38. For these reasons researchers attempt to minimize observer influence * Videotaping their participants from a concealed location * Spending time in the setting before collecting “real” data so that the individuals they are observing grow accustomed to their presence and will behave naturally 39. Time-sampling * A procedure in which the investigator records the frequencies with which individuals display particular behaviors during the brief time intervals that each is observed 40. How might observational researchers study unusual behaviors that they are unlikely to observe in the natural setting? * Conduct structured observations * An observational method in which the investigator cues the behavior of interest and observes participants’ responses in a lab * Ensures that every participant is exposed to the same eliciting stimuli and has an equal opportunity to perform target behavior * Disadvantage: Participants may not always respond in a contrived lab setting as they would in everyday life 41. Structured interviews questionnaires, clinical method, and behavioral observations can be used to complete a detailed portrait of an individual’s development through the case study method 42. Case study * A research method in which the investigator gathers extensive information about the life of an individual and then tests developmental hypotheses by analyzing the events of the person’s life history 43. Bamburg suggests that one of the ways that people make sense of themselves and others is through socially interactive conversation 44. Shortcomings * Difficult to directly compare subjects who have been asked different questions, taken different tests, and been observed under different circumstances * Lack generalizability; that is, conclusions drawn from the experiences of the small number of individuals studies may not apply to most people 45. Ethnography * Method in which the researcher seeks to understand the unique values, traditions, and social processes of a culture or subculture by living with its members and making extensive observations and notes * Mostly consists of naturalistic observations 46. Disadvantages * Highly subjective method because researchers’ own cultural values and theoretical biases can cause them to misinterpret what they have experienced * Pertain only to the culture or subculture studied and cannot be assumed to generalize to other contexts or social groups 47. Psychophysiological methods * Methods that measure the relationships between physiological processes and aspects of children’s physical, cognitive, social, or emotional behavior/development * Useful for interpreting the mental and emotional experiences of infants and toddlers, who are unable to report such events 48. Heart rate is an involuntary physiological response that is sensitive to psychological experiences * Compared to their normal resting (baseline) levels, infants who are attending to an interesting stimulus may show a decrease in heart rate, those who are uninterested show no heart rate change, and other who are afraid or angered by the stimulus show a heart rate increase 49. Measures of brain functions are useful for assessing psychological state * EEG recordings can track how sleep cycles and other states of arousal change with age * Novel stimuli or events also produce short-term changes in EEG * To test the limits of infant sensory capabilities, they can present novel sights and sounds and look for changes in brain waves (event-related potentials or ERPs) to determine whether these stimuli have been detected, or discriminated, because 2 stimuli sensed as “different” will produce different patterns of brain activity * Researchers have used ERPs to explore infants’ reactions to others’ displays of emotions * 7 month olds attend more to facial displays of negative rather than positive (or neutral) emotions and that 12 month olds are more inclined to use negative rather than positive facial expressions as a guide for how they should be feeling or behaving in new and uncertain situations 50. Psychophysiological states of parents can be examined in investigations of children’s development * Hormone oxytocin is thought to play a role in human attachment and social relationships 51. Psychophysiological measures can be used with older children and adolescents to assess aspects of development * Blood pressure and cortisol levels have been found in adolescence to be accurate measures of chronic stress that is empirically related to chronic childhood poverty

52. Disadvantages * Even though an infant’s heart rate or brain wave activity may indicate that they are attending to a stimulus, it is difficult to determine which aspect of that stimulus (shape, color, etc.) has captured attention * Changes in physiological responses reflect mood swings, fatigue, hunger, or even negative reactions to the physiological recording equipment, rather than a change in the infant’s attention to a stimulus or emotional reactions to it
DETECTING RELATIONSHIPS: CORRELATIONAL EXPERIMENTAL, AND CROSS-CULTURAL DESIGNS 53. Correlational design * A type of research design that indicates the strength of associations among variables; though correlated variables are systematically related, these relationships are not necessarily causal * Correlational researchers take people as they find them – already “manipulated” by natural life experiences – and try to determine whether variations in people’s life experiences are associated with differences in their behaviors or patterns of development 54. Correlational coefficient * Numerical index, ranging from -1.00 to +1.00, of the strength and direction of the relationship between 2 variables * Absolute value of r tells us the strength of the relationship * A correlation coefficients of -.70 and +.70 are of equal strength, and both are stronger than a moderate correlation of .30 * And r of .00 indicates that the 2 variables are not systematically related * The sign of the correlational coefficient indicates the direction of the relationship * If the sign is positive, this means that as one variable increases, the other variable also increases * Negative correlations indicate inverse relationships: As one variable increases, the other decreases 55. Correlational design is a versatile approach that can detect systematic relationships between any two or more variables that we might be interested in and capable of measuring 56. Shortcoming * It cannot indicate that one thing causes another 57. Experimental design * A research design in which the investigator introduces some change in the participant’s environment and then measures the effect of that change on the participant’s behavior 58. Independent variable * The aspect of the environment that an experimenter modifies or manipulates in order to measure its impacts on behavior

59. Dependent variable * The aspect of behavior that is measured in an experiment and assumed to be under the control of the independent variable 60. Confounding variable * Some factor other than the independent variable that, if not controlled by the experimenter, could explain any differences across treatment conditions in participants’ performance on the dependent variable * EX: Pre-existing conditions 61. Experimental control * Steps taken by an experimenter to ensure that all extraneous factors that could influence the dependent variable are equivalent in each experimental condition * These precautions must be taken before an experimenter can be certain that observed changes in the dependent variable were caused by manipulation of the independent variable * One way to equalize these extraneous factors is by random assignment 62. Random assignment * Control technique in which participants are assigned to experimental conditions through an unbiased procedure so that the members of the groups are not systematically different from one another 63. Strength of the experimental method * Ability to establish unambiguously that one thing causes another 64. Shortcomings * Tightly controlled lab experiments are contrived and artificial and that kids are likely to behave differently in these surroundings than they would in a natural setting * Conclusions drawn from lab experiments do not always apply to the real world 65. Ecological validity * State of affairs in which the findings of one’s research are an accurate representation of processes that occur in the natural environment 66. Field experiment * An experiment that takes place in a naturalistic setting * Combines all advantages of naturalistic observation with the more rigorous control that experimentation allows * Participants are not apprehensive about participating in a “strange” experiment because all the activities thy undertake are everyday activities * They may not even be aware that they are participating in an experiment 67. Natural (or Quasi) experiment * A study in which the investigator measures the impact of some naturally occurring event that is assumed to affect people’s lives

68. Shortcomings * Researchers do not control the independent variable, nor do they randomly assign participants to experimental treatments * In the absence of tight experimental control, it is hard to determine what factor is responsible for any group differences that are found 69. Advantage * A natural event could have influence those who experienced it and thus can provide some meaningful clues about cause and effect
CROSS-CULTURAL DESIGNS 70. Cross-cultural comparison * A study that compares the behavior and/or development of people from different cultural or subcultural backgrounds * Guards against the overgeneralization of research findings and is the only way to determine whether there are truly “universals” in human development 71. Cross cultural studies are those in which participants from different cultural backgrounds are observed, tested, and compared on one or more aspects of development * Purpose: They allow the investigator to determine whether conclusions drawn about the development of children from one social context also characterize children growing up in other societies or those from different ethnic or socioeconomic backgrounds within the same society 72. Other investigators who favor the cross-cultural approach are looking for differences rather than similarities * They recognize that humans develop in societies that have different ideas about various issues * People from other cultures differ in the ways they perceive the world, express emotions, think, and solve problems 73. Apart from its focus on universals in development, cross-cultural approach also illustrates that human development is influenced by the cultural context in which it occurs 74. One of the greatest values of cross-cultural comparisons is that they can tells us whether a developmental phenomenon is or is not universal
RESEARCH STRATEGIES AND STUDYING DEVELOPMENT * RESEARCH DESIGNS FOR STUDYING DEVELOPMENT

75. Cross-sectional design * A research design in which subjects from different age groups are studied at the same point in time * Participants at each age level are different people; they come from different cohorts

76. Cohorts * A group of people of the same age who are exposed to similar cultural environments and historical events as they are growing up 77. By comparing participants in the different age groups, age-related changes can be identified in whatever aspect of development 78. Advantage * Can collect data from children of different ages over a short time 79. Shortcoming * Cohort effect * Age-related differences among cohorts that is attributable to cultural/historical differences in cohorts’ growing up experiences rather than to true developmental change * It tells us nothing about the development of individuals because each person is observed at only one point in time 80. Cross-sectional comparison is the design that developmentalists use most often * It’s quick and easy * Likely to yield valid conclusions when there is little reason to believe that the cohorts being studied have had different experiences while growing up 81. Longitudinal design * A research design in which one group of subjects is studied repeatedly over a period of months or years 82. Advantages * By repeatedly testing the same participants, investigators can assess the stability (continuity) of many attributes for each person in the sample * Can identify normative developmental trends and processes by looking for the experiences that children share prior to reaching these milestones * Tracking several participants over time will help investigators to understand individual differences in development, particularly if they are able to establish that different kinds of earlier experiences lead to different outcomes 83. Shortcomings * Longitudinal projects can be costly and time consuming * Practice effects * Changes in participants’ natural responses as a result of repeated testing * Selective attrition * Nonrandom loss of participants during a study that results in a nonrepresentative sample * Cross-generalizational problem * The fact that long-term changes in the environment may limit the conclusions of a longitudinal project to that generation of children who were growing up while the study was in progress

84. Sequential design * A research in which subjects from different age groups are studied repeatedly over a period of months or years * Cross-sectional + longitudinal studies = sequential design 85. Advantages * Allows us to determine whether cohort effects are influencing our results by comparing logical reasoning of same-aged children who were born in different years * Allows us to make both longitudinal and cross-sectional comparisons in the same study * More efficient than standard longitudinal designs 86. Microgenetic design * A research design in which participants are studied intensively over a short period of time as developmental changes occur; attempts to specify how or why those changes occur * Favored by researchers who study children’s cognitive development 87. Cognitive theorists have used this approach to specify how children come to rely on new and efficient strategies for solving problems 88. Shortcomings * Difficult, time consuming, and costly to track large numbers of children in such a detailed manner * Frequency of observations required by the microgenetic method may affect the developmental outcomes of the children involved * The intensive experiences children receive to stimulate development may not reflect what they would normally encounter in the real world and may produce changes in their behavior that may not persist over the long run 89. Investigators use the microgenetic design to investigate age-related changes in thinking or behavior that are already known to occur * Purpose: Specify how or why these changes might occur by studying children as the changes take place
ETHICAL CONSIDERATIONS IN DEVELOPMENTAL RESEARCH 90. Informed consent * The right of research participants to receive an explanation, in language they can understand, of all aspects if research that may affect their willingness to participate 91. Benefits-to-risks ratio * A comparison of the possible benefits of a study for advancing knowledge and optimizing life conditions versus its costs to participants in terms of inconvenience and possible harm 92. Confidentiality * The right of participants to concealment of their identity with respect to the data they provide 93. Protection from harm * The right of participants to be protected from physical or psychological harm