developmental psychology

• Human Development focuses on the scientific study of the systematic processes of change and stability in people.
• Life-Span Development conceptualizes human development as a lifelong process, which can be studied scientifically.
• Life-Span Perspective views development as lifelong, multidimensional, multidirectional, plastic, multidisciplinary, and contextual, and as a process that involves growth, maintenance, and regulation of loss.
• Physical Development in human development involves the growth of the body and brain, sensory capacities, motor skills, and health.
• Cognitive Development in human development involves learning, attention, memory, language, thinking, reasoning, and creativity.
• Psychosocial Development in human development involves emotions, personality, and social relationships.
• Social Construction is a concept or practice that is an invention of a particular culture or society.
• Stability-Change Issue in human development involves the degree to which early traits and characteristics persist through life or change.
• Continuity-Discontinuity in human development focuses on the degree to which development involves either gradual, cumulative change (continuity) or distinct stages (discontinuity).
• Growth in human development refers to physical changes.
• Maturation in human development is a transitional state that tells a person is fully functional.
• Development in human development encompasses physical, mental, and social aspects and is progressive.
• Learning in human development is how a person adapts to the environment.
• Behavioral Genetics is the scientific study of the extent to which genetic and environmental differences among people and animals are responsible for differences in their traits.
• Heritability is the proportion of all the variability in the trait within a large sample of people that can be linked to genetic differences among those individuals.
• Gregor Mendel studied the heredity in plants.
• Selective Breeding involves attempting to breed animals for a particular trait to determine whether the trait is heritable.
• Genes contribute to such attributes as activity level, emotionality, aggressiveness, and sex drive in rats, mice, and chickens.
• Concordance Rate in human development is the percentage of pairs of people studied in which if one member of a pair displays the trait, the other does too.
• Reaction Range in human development is a wide range of possibility that it might exhibit differently.
• Canalized Range in human development is a limited possible changes of changing (fixed).
• Epigenetics is the study of changes in gene expression caused by factors other than changes in DNA sequence.
• Gene-Environment Interaction in human development is the effects of genes depend on what kind of environment we experiences, and how we respond to the environment depends on what genes we have.
• Intelligence is strongly influenced by heredity, but it is also affected by parental stimulation, education, peer influence, and others.
• Empiricist Perspective suggests that environment plays a role in development.
• Context of Development includes family (nuclear and extended), socioeconomic status, culture, and history.
• Sensitive Periods are when a developing person is especially responsive to certain kinds of experience.
• Normative Influences are biological or environmental events that affect many or most people in a society in similar ways and events that touch only certain individuals.
• Hereditary consists of inborn traits provided by the parents.
• Heredity consists of inborn traits provided by the parents.
• Jean Jacques Rousseau's concept of children as "noble savages" who develop according to their own positive natural tendencies if not corrupted by society is also mentioned.
• 3 factors that contribute to individual differences in emotionality are Genes, Shared Environmental Influences, and Nonshared Environmental Influences.
• Continuous change is gradual and incremental.
• Nativist Perspective suggests that genes play a role in development.
• Theory is a set of logically related concepts or statements that seek to describe and explain development and to predict the kinds of behavior that might occur under certain conditions.
• Environment influences stem from the outside body, starting from conception throughout life.
• Normative Age-Graded Influences refer to historical generation and age cohort.
• Nonnormative refers to unusual events that have major impact on individual lives because they disturb the expected sequence of the life cycle.
• Qualitative Change is the emergence of new phenomena that could not be easily predicted on the basis of the past basic functioning.
• Critical Period is a specific time when a given event, or its absence, has a specific impact on development.