Lifespan1

Field of study devoted to understanding constancy and change throughout the lifespan

Orderly, integrated set of statements that describes, explains, and predicts behavior.

A process of gradually augmenting the same types of skills that were there to begin with

A process in which new ways of understanding and responding to the world emerge at specific times

Qualitative changes in thinking, feeling, and behaving that characterize specific periods of development.

Unique combinations of personal and environmental circumstances that can result in different paths of change.

Are genetic or evironmental factors more important?

• 1) Lifelong
• 2) Multidimensional & multidirectional
• 3) Highly plastic
• 4) Affected by multiple, interacting forces

Events that are strongly related to age and therefore fairly predictable in when they occur and how long they last

The ability to adapt effectively in the face of threats to development

Explain why people born around the same time tend to be alike in ways that set them apart from people born at other times

Events that are irregular: they happen to just one person or a few people and do not follow a predictable timetable

Measures of behavior are taken on large numbers of individuals, and age related averages are computed to represent typical development.

States that people 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.

Emphasizes that how parents manage their child's sexual and aggressive drives in the first few years is crucial for healthy personality development

Emphasizes that in addition to mediating between id impulses and super-ego demands, the ego makes a positive contribution to development, acquiring attitudes and skills at each stage that make the individual an active, contributing member of society.

Directly observable events-stimuli and responses-are the appropriate focus of study.

Empasizes modeling, also known as imitation or observational learning, as powerful source of development.

Consists of procedures that combine conditioning and modeling to eliminate undesirable behaviors and increase desirable responses.

States that children actively construct knowledge as they manipulate and explore their world.

Persepctive that the human mind might also be viewed as a symbol-manipulating system through which information flows

Brings togther researchers from psychology, biology, neuroscience, and medicine to study the relationship between changes in the brain and the developing person's cognitive processing and behavior patterns.

Is concerned with the adaptive, or survival, value of behavior and it's evolutionary history

A time that is optimal for certain capacities to emerge and in which the individual is especially responsive to environmental influences. However, its boundaries are less well-defines than those of a critical period. Development can occur later, but it is harder to induce.

Seeks to understand the adaptive value of specieswife cognitive, emotional, and social competencies as those competencies change with age.

Focuses on how culture is transmitted to the next generation. According to Vygotsky social interation -In particular, cooperative dialogues with more knowledgable members of society- is necessary for children to acquire the ways of thinking and behaving that make up a community's culture.

The values, beliefs, customs, and skills of a social group

Views the person as devliping within a complex system of relationships affected by multiple levels of the surrounding environment

Consists of activites and interaction patterns in the person's immediate surroundings. (First level of Bronfenbrenner's model)

Encompasses connections between microsystems. (Second level of Bronfrenbrenner's model)

Consists of social settings that do not contain the developing person but nevertheless affect experiences in immediate settings. (Third level of Bronfenbrenner's model)

Consists of cultural values, laws, customs, and resources. (Fourth level of Bronfenbrenner's model)

Life changes can be imposed extrenally, or, alternatively, can arise from within the person, since idviduals select, modify, and create many of their own settings and experiences. (Fifth, or temporal demension, of Brondenbrenner's model)

Approach of going into the field, or natural environment, and recording the behavior of interest.

The investigator sets up a laboratory situation that evokes the bahavior of interest so that every participant has an equal opportunity to display the response.

Researchers use a flexible, conversational style to probe for the participant's point of view.

(Including tests and questionnaires) Each participant is asked the same set of questions in the same way.

Brings together a wide range of information on one person, including interviews, observations, and sometimes test scores.

Like the clinical method, a descriptive, qualitative technique. But instead of aiming to understand a single individual, it is directed toward understanding a culture or a distinct social group through participant observation.

Researchers gather information on individuals, generally in natural life circumstances, without altering their experience. Then they look at relationships between participants' characteristics and their behavior or development.

A number that decribes how two measures, or variables, are associated with each other.

Permits inferences about cause and effect because researchers use an evenhanded procedure to assign people to two or more treatment conditions.

The one the investigator expects to cause changes in another variable.

The one the investigator expects to be influenced by the independent variable.

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.

Participants are studied repeatedly, and changes are noted as they get older.

Individuals born in the same time period are influenced by a particular set of historical and cultural conditions. Results based on one cohort may not apply to people developing at other times.

Groups of people differing in age are studied at the same point in time.

Conducting seceral similar cross-sectional or longitudinal studies at varing times.

Inborn biological givens - the hereditary information we receive from out parents at the moment of conception.

Complex forces of the physical and social world that influence our biological makeup and psychological experiences before and after birth.

Individuals who are high or low in a characteristic will remain so at later ages

Change is possible and even likely if new experiences support it.

A genetically determined series of events that unfold automatically

Largest protion of the mind, is the source of basic biological needs and desires.

The conscious, rational part of personality, emerges in early infancy to redirect the id's impulses so they are dischared in acceptable ways.

Or conscience, develops through interactions with parents, who insist that children conform to the values of society.

Associating a neutral stimulus with another stumulus that produces a reflexive response.

Frequency of a behavior can be increased by following it with a wide variety of reinforcers. It can also be decreased through punishment.