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Mother-Child Synchrony
The reciprocal aspect of the attachment relationship, with a caregiver and infant responding emotionally to each other in a sensitive, exquisitely attuned way
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Consequences of maternal depression
Leads to insecure attachment, along with child temperamental vulnerabilities and parental arguments
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Secure Attachment
Child uses the parent as a safe base to explore, when separated the child may not cry during absence, seek contact when the parent returns, decrease crying if present
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Avoidant Attachment
Seem excessively detached. Rarely show separation anxiety or much emotion - positive or negative - when their primary attachment figure returns. They seem wooden, disengaged, without much feeling at all
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Anxious-Ambivalent Attachment
Clingy, nervous, too frightened to explore. Terribly distressed by mother's departure, show contradictory emotions when she returns - clinging, then striking out in anger. Often inconsolable, unable to be comforted when attachment figure returns
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Disorganized Attachment
Freeze, run around erratically, or even look frightened when the caregiver returns
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Extreme Social Deprivation
Romanian Orphanages
- As a result of Ceausescu's ban of contraception, a flood of unwanted babies were given to the state to care for. There were three to four babies to a bed, no bathing facilities, and some children hadn't seen natural light in years. After the fall of the iron curtain, the globe sought to adopt these children, but noticed symptoms:
- Sons and daughters who displayed a strange, indiscriminate friendliness and never showed interest in any specific adult - lack of any attachment whatsoever
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Head-Start Program
A federal program offering high-quality day care at a center and other services to help preschoolers aged 3 to 5 from low-income families prepare for school
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Non-parental childcare/daycare effects
- Putting a child in daycare does not weaken the attachment bond
- Good daycare can lead to a benefit in academics through teen years
- However, children who spent long hours in "non-relative" care were more difficult to control by teachers - leads to an elevated risk of acting out in teens as well
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Social Referencing
A baby's checking back and monitoring a caregiver for cues as to how to behave while exploring; linked to clear-cut attachment
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Shared Eye-Gaze
Ability of a child to look at what others are looking at
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Temperament
- inborn differences between one person and another in emotions, activity and self-regulation
- Inhibited, shy: react negatively, withdraw from new stimuli
- Uninhibited, sociable: react positively, approach new stimuli
- Affected by parenting style (nervous mother --> nervous baby)
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Frontal Lobe Development
- Humans have slow frontal lobe development - takes over 20 years to be fully developed
- Pruning doesn't begin until around age 9
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Frontal Lobe Functions
Responsible for reasoning and planning out actions
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Brain Development: Motor Skills
Motor cortices are in the process of being pruned in toddlers, so they don't have finite motor skills yet
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Gross Motor Skills:
- Physical abilities that involve large muscle movements, such as running and jumping
- Boys develop this faster than girls
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Fine Motor Skills
- Physical abilities that involve small, coordinated movements such as drawing and writing one's name
- Girls develop this faster than boys
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Conservation
- The understanding that the morphing of a substance does not change the overall amount (two glasses into one glass, smashing a ball of clay into a pancake)
- Develops in concrete operations period (ages 8-12)
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Egocentricism
Young children think they are the center of the universe, have an inability to understand that others may have a different point of view
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Executive Function
- inhibition, planning and directing thinking
- the ability to manage cognitive resources, including attention and memory – to complete any given task
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Symptoms and Treatment of ADHD
- The most common childhood learning disorder in the US, disproportionately affects boys, characterized by excessive restlessness and distractibility at home and at school
- Treatment involves psycho-stimulant medications along with parent training
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Overextension
- An error in early language development in which children apply verbal labels too broadly
- Ex] calls every old man grandpa
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Underextension
- An error in early language development in which children apply verbal labels too narrowly
- Ex] tells another child he can't have a grandpa because grandpa is the name for his grandfather alone
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Overregularization
- An error in early language development in which children apply the rules for plurals and past tenses even to exceptions, so irregular forms sound like irregular forms
- Ex] foots, runned
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Theory of Mind
Children's first cognitive understanding which appears at about age 4, that other people have different beliefs and perspectives from their own
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Preoperational Stage
- Ages 2-7
- Believe inanimate objects are really alive, don't have conservation or reversibility
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Concrete Operational Stage
- Ages 8-12
- Have a realistic understanding of the world. Develop conservation and reversibility. Cannot think abstractly in a scientific way like an adult could
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Early Childhood
- Erikson's stage for children 3 to 6 years
- Primary task is initiative vs. guilt (actively taking on life's tasks instead of being told to do so - cleaning up after yourself before someone tells you to)
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Middle Childhood
- Erikson's stage for children 6 years to puberty
- Primary task is industry vs. inferiority (managing emotions and realizing that real-world success involves hard work - realizing that you won't get a good job and live nicely unless you focus and work hard in school)
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Self-Esteem
The tendency to feel good or bad about ourselves
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Self-Awareness
The way children reflect on who they are as people
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Self-Esteem Distortions
- Internalizing Problems:
- Learned Helplessness: the feeling that a child is powerless to affect his or her fate. He or she may give up at the starting gate, assuming "I'm going to fail, so why should I try?"
- Externalizing Problems:
- Blame others for personal failings
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Prosocial Behavior
Sharing, helping, and caring actions
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Altruism
Prosocial behaviors that are carried out for selfless, non-egocentric reasons
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Gender Play
- Boys run around; girls talk calmly
- Boys compete in groups; girls play collaboratively, one-to-one
- Boys live in a more exclusionary, separate world when it comes to play - Girls can stray into boy play far easier than boys can stray into girl play without being labled
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Parenting Styles
How parents align on two dimensions of child-rearing: nurturance (or child-centeredness) and discipline (or structure and rules)
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Authoritative Parents
- The best possible child-rearing style in which parents rank high on both nurturance and discipline, providing both love and clear family rules
- Ideal in middle-class, individualistic Western cultures
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Authoritarian Parents
- A type of child-rearing in which parents provide plenty of rules but rank low on child-centeredness, stressing unquestioning obedience
- More beneficial in societies where rule-following is strictly adhered to (Palestine, places where individuality and rebelliousness can lead to jail or death)
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Permissive Parents
A type of child-rearing in which parents provide few rules but rank high on child-centeredness, being extremely loving but providing little discipline
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Rejecting-Neglecting Parents
The worst child-rearing approach, in which parents provide little discipline and little nurturing or love
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Resilience
Confront terrible conditions such as parental abuse, poverty, and the horrors of war and go on to construct successful, loving lives
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Discipline/Spanking
- Spanking = corporal punishment = the use of physical force to discipline a child
- Many psychologists see spanking as never acceptable - it shows children that hitting someone smaller than you is OK, however some don't see serious detrimental effects in mild spanking
- Frequent spanking tends to promote the behavior that it is trying to cure
- Escalation can lead to child abuse - it's too dangerous of a slope to partake in
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Intelligence
- IQ - measured on a score of 100 (being the average)
- Iodine Deficiency Disorder mean IQ is 90 - lower, same for other developmental disorders
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WISC (Wechsler Intelligence Scale for Children)
The standard intelligence test used in childhood, consisting of a Verbal Scale (questions for the child to answer), a Performance Scale (materials for the child to manipulate), and a variety of subtests
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Gifted
The label for superior intellectual functioning characterized by an IQ score of 130 or above, showing that a child ranks in the top 2% of his or her age group
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Dyslexia
A learning disability that is characterized by reading difficulties, lack of fluency, and poor word recognition that is often genetic in origin
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Discrepancy Criteria
When there is a mismatch between IQ and learning it usually means there is a learning disability involved
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Analytic Intelligence
The facet of intelligence involving performing well on academic-type problems - the type of intelligence that IQ tests screen for
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Creative Intelligence
The ability to think "outside the box" or to formulate problems in new ways
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Practical Intelligence
Common sense, or street smarts
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