genetic factors

Environmental factors

research used participants of different ages to compare how certain varaibles may change over the life span.

produces quick results results but can also be vague 


Ex) a developmental researcher might be interested in how our ability to recall nonsense words changes as we age

Exaimes one group of participants over time

Ex) a developmental researcher might study how a group mentally challenged children progress in their ability to learn skills

Has the advnatage of precisely measuring the effects of development on a specific group, but are often time consuming

Help determine what abilities we are born with, such as our reflexes and our process of developing motor skills

Researchers usually look for identical twins to determine which traits is determined by genetics

chemicals or agents can cause harm if ingested or contracted by the mother.

The placenta usually takes out harmful stuff, but if teratogens passes through it, it can affect the fetus

Most common ones are alchohol, cocaine, heroin

specific, inborn, automatic  responses to certain stimuli

We are borth with and lose later in life

Babies can hear before birt, hearing is most dominant sense due to poor vision at this time

Love the taste of sugar and respond to higher sugar levels

Like to look at faces and facelike objects

All humans develop the same basic motor skills in the same sequence, as we age, they differ from person to person

Ex) 5-1/2 month babies roll over

8-9 months they stand

15 months they walk

But this does not apply to everyone because parental and environmental factors have slight effect

raised baby money with two artifical wire fram figures to represent mother monkey

When the monkies were scared, they fled to the soft mother figure for "comfort " and "protection"

This shows the importance of physical comfort in the formation of attachment with parents.

researched the idea of attachment by placing human infants into novel situations

Observed infants reaction when placed into a Strange Situation

She divided the ractions into three : Secure attachments, avoidant attachments, anxious/ambivalent attachments (resitant attachments)

strict standards for their child's behavior and apply punishments. Child recieves no explanation

likely to distrust others and be withdrawn from peers

do not set clear guidelines for their child

they can get away with anything at home

likely to have emotional control problems and are more dependent

set, consistent standards for their children's behavior, but the standards are reasonable and explained

Produces the most desirable and beneficial home environment

more socially stable and perform better academically

Described how different aspects of thought and behavior develop

Continuity versus discontinuity

Stage develops during toilet training

if conflict around this stage, a person might fixate in teh stage and be overly controlling or out of control.

babies realize their gender and this causes conflict in the family.

boys go through Oedipus complex, when boys resent their father's relationship with their mother

girls go through Electra complex

Conflict in this stage could cause later problems in relationships

Freud throught childrne go through a short latency stage, or period of clam and low psychosexual anxiety

Where children remain for the rest of their lives

fixation in this stage is what Freud considers normal

Neo-Freudian

Developed his own stage theory of development

Thought that our personality was influenced by our experiences with others, called Psychological stage theory

The sense of trust or mistrust when ur a baby

will carry throughout the rest of our lives

toddlers begin to exert their will over their own bodies for the first time.

Autonomy is our control over when our body, and Erikson thought that potty training was an early effort at gaining this control

Toddlers usually have temper tantrums

If we learn how to control ourselves and our environment in reasonable wyas, we develop a healthy will

children go from "No" to "why?"

We feel curiosity and want to understand

We will feel comfortable about expressing our curiosity through the rest of the stages

We may feel anxious about our performance in an area throughout the rest of the stages

Ex) In school, you may have high grades in a certain subject, but someone else will have higher grades in other sbjects

our social task is to discover what social identity we are most comfortable with.

An adolescent should figure our a stable sense of self before moving on the next stage or have an identity crisis

Young adults who established stable identities then must figure out how to balance their ties and efforts between work.

How much time is spend on ourselves and our families?

patterns in this stage will establish the effort spent on selef and others in the future.

toward the end of life, we look back at our accomplisments and decide if we are satisfied with them or not.

If we can see that our lives were meaningful, we can leave the stress and pressures of society and offer wisdom and insight.

If we feel serious regret over how we lived our lives, we may fall into despair over lost opportunities

Theory of cognitive development

Thought that humans go through this process of schema creation, assimilation, and accomodation as we develop cognitively

Sensorimotor stage
Preoperational Stage

Concrete operations

Formal Operations

Babies start experiencing and exploring the world strictly through their senses

When babies start to look for or somehow acknowledge that objects do exist when they cannot see them, they have object permanence and are ready to move on to the next stage

Approx 2-7 yrs old

We start to use symbols to represent real world objects,

Ex) beginning og language, the most important cognitive development of this stage

Approx 8-12

children learn to think more logically about complex relationships between different characteristics of objects

Concepts of conservation- the realization that properties of objects remain the same even when their shapes change. Demonstrate how teh different aspects of objects are conserved even when their arrangment changes

Approx 12 - adulthood

Final stage

abstract reasoning

We can manipulate objects and contrast ideas in our mind without physically seeing them or having real-world correlates

Ex) Hypothesis testing

Metacognition- we can trace our thought processes and evaluate the effectiveness of how we solved a problem

Lawrence Kohlberg, wanted to describe how our ability to reason about ethical situations changed over our lives

Used the Heinz dilemma- a man making a moral choice about whether to steal a drug he cannot afford in order to save his wife's life

Preconventional

Conventional

Postconventional

Preconventional

Their moral reasoning is limited to how the choice affects themselves

Ex) the man should not steal the drug because he might be put in prison

make a moral choice based on how others will view them

children learn conventional standards of what is right and wrong

ex) children might say that the man should steal drug because then he could save his wife and people would think of him as a hero

last stage of Kolhberg moral development

moral reasoning

describes how universal ethical principles, such as personal conviction to uphold justice, might be involved in the reasoning in this stage

Ex) The man should steal the drug because his wife's right to life outweighs the store owners' right to personal property

Some psychologists challenge Kohlberg's conclusiosn

Kohlberg developed the model based on responses by boys and not girls

Ex) Boys have a more absolute view of what is moral while girls pay more attention to the situational factors

How we develop our ideas about what it means to be male and female and in developmental differences between genders

different culrtures encourage different geder roles, which are behaviors that a culture associates with a gender

nature element in the nature/nurtue combination that produces our gender role

Differences between male and female do exist

Women have larger corpus callosums than men

Freud viewed gender devleopment as a competition. Young boys compete w/ their fathers for their mothers' attention

Girls compete with mothers for their fathers love

look at how we react to boys and girls differently

concentrate on the effects society and our own thoughts about gender have on role development

Boys--> physical than girls

Cognitivits focus on the internal interpretations we make about the gender message we get from our environment

ex) if a girl sees that her brother is encouraged to wrestle with their father, we creates a rule governing how boys and girls should play