Psych 319 Test 1

• Applied developmental psychology: Applications of theories and research in developmental psychology to contemporary social issues; topics may include daycare, child abuse, divorce and remarriage, substance abuse, sexuality.
• Applied: Direct implications for what parents/teachers/policy-makers do; practical problems; Developmental: changes across the human lifespan; developmental populations; Psychology: grounded in research methods; using scientific method
• Focuses of Applied Developmental Psychology research: Assessment (evaluating, observing, identifying people who may be at risk); Intervention (programs or methods that could prevent problems or help reduce problems); Research on socially important issues (tend to focus on things that matter to people, like childcare, schooling, and judicial system; Contribution to public policy (bringing research into laws and policy); Dissemination (spreading) of psychological knowledge
• Difficulties in applying research to practice: Different communities, different goals, Research often doesn't give clear-cut answers that can be used for practice (lack of clarity); different "deadlines" for results (research is incredibly slow, especially longitudinal studies); Difficult to generalize research across populations, contexts, situations; Research findings may be difficult to understand for those not in the field, can be misinterpreted; Researcher not rewarded for applying research
• Example of an education program for parents:babies cry alot at 3 weeks, this can be hard as a parent, this is incredibly common; research has found that this crying creates huge stress responses in parents and that parents can do things that can cause harm to the baby like shaking it; so the government created a lesson to teach parents that babies are going to cry at this age, if you tell parents about this then they get less distressed because they have more knowledge; less head trauma to babies during this time because of this lesson plan
• Example of misinterpretation in media: Mozart effect: initial findings did not specify Mozart music, media made assumptions, government finances Mozart CDs for children within the areas; findings are manipulated and changed when being processed through the media; based on one singular research finding rather than validated by many
• research methods:How data is gathered: observation, interview, survey, brain measurement, ect; Research designs: how the study is structured: correlational vs experimental design and how the study examines development/age: longitudinal vs cross-sectional design
• Correlational Designs: determine whether there is a relationship between 2 variables; do children who differ on variable 1 also differ on variable 2; variables are not manipulated; correlation does not equal causation because there could be third variables at play
• Experimental designs: able to examine cause-effect relations; research manipulates the independent variable; participants are randomly assigned to different groups; Do differences in the independent variable cause differences in the dependent variable
• Correlational Designs: Pros: easier in ethical perspective due to lack of manipulation; seen as more generalizable to real life; Cons: no causal claims can be made
• Experimental: pros: can make causal claims; Cons: difficulty in making ethical designs when manipulating variables; Confounds required to be accounted for
• Longitudinal Design: Same participants tested repeatedly at different ages; Cohort concerns: are findings generalizable beyond the cohort studied and are changes due to developments with age or developments with time; Cross-Sectional Design: different groups of participants tested at different ages around the same time; Cohort concerns: Are differences due to age or other differences between cohorts (generation)
• Ethics: risk vs benefits: physical risk; psychological risk (inducing undesirable behaviour? Stressful situations?; Do the benefits to be gained from a study outweigh any potential risks?
• Ethics: developmental populations: Non-harmful procedures: use the least stressful procedure possible; Consent issues: children cannot consent themselves but they have to be in agreement (incentives should not be persuasive); Anonymity & privacy; Jeopardy: when to discuss child's well-being with parents?
• Ethics: application of research: responsibility: does the weight of research findings justify applying them to privately/publicly funded programs; Is it reasonable to spend money on this finding and apply it to the real world? How confident is the research finding; how generalizable is the research finding?
• What are some of the risk factors associated with and predictive of negative outcomes in development: Fired from many jobs; hospitalized with heart problems; angry divorce; depression and anxiety
• Risk: attributes of the child: Preterm birth (babies born a little bit earlier) or early sexual activity; Attributes of the parents/family: Divorce or mental illness; Sociodemographic factors: poverty (associated with being exposed to more stressor) or race & experience of racism; Life experiences: maltreatment: physical abuse, sexual abuse, psychological maltreatment, neglect, war, natural disaster
• lower status race tend to experience heightened race, come withs less social access; experience of racism is a stressor has biological impacts and this is a risk factor
• Growing up in poverty is associated with being exposed to more stressors, exposed to more violence, or crime, get access to less high quality experiences like school or childcare; kids who qualified for free meals (low-income) or without much housing stability: compared to the general school and national average they have less reading achievement 
• Positive stress: brief increases in heart rate, these mild stressors can be good for our development; Toxic stress: prolonged activation of stress response systems is associated with long-term effects: neurological impairments, emotional dysregulation, social difficulties, poorer cognitive/academic skills
• Adverse early childhood experiences (ACES): ; there are 10 major adversities, they are common: 60-70% of adults have experienced at least 1; ACEs predict psychological and physical problems (index of cumulative risk); these experiences of risk tended to co-occur; for example: low income parents are more likely to have pre-term babies, low-income children are more likely to experience maltreatment
• ACEs: an index of cumulative risk: it does not get at the details of the particular experiences and it isn't that one factor matters more than the other, it is the cumulative nature of it: that a child who is experiencing many of these risk factors at once are the ones really at the greatest risk
• Criticism of ACEs: What qualifies as an ACE? Interactions between ACEs? Ignores the severity and timing of experiences; Fails to acknowledge the role of societal factors; ignores positive experiences that may buffer effects of negative experiences in some children
• Resilience: the capacity to withstand or recover from significant disturbances and continue to function or develop in a healthy or normative way ("Beating the odd" or "bouncing back")
• In study about homeless and highly mobile families when they zoomed in and looked at each individual child, they found that there is huge individual differences; A bunch of these children are doing better than the national average, showing that not all of these homeless or highly mobile children are seeing negative outcomes
• Resilience: Individual attributes: cognitive skills (like IQ or problem solving skills); Easygoing temperament; hope, belief that life has meaning; agency and mastery motivation (to get good at something or figure it out); self-regulation (control your own behaviours and think ahead)
• Resilience: Relationship qualities: (Attachment) Effective, warm parenting; Close relationships
• Resilience: Community or cultural factors: Effective schools and community organizations; Comforting rituals and cultural practices; Spirituality, support of a religious community
• Risk and Resilience: Individual differences: genetic predispositions (might shift where you fulcrum is placed, like whether it is a place that makes it easier to tend to negative outcomes or easier to tend to positive outcomes); biological sensitivities to experiences (for some of us experiences might be more impactful)
• Biological sensitivities to experiences: Study looked at how much people's body reacts to experiences (bodily response), and found that some are more reactive. Then they looked at these kids on whether they experienced a high or low conflict environment and how that correlated with the development of problem behaviour. They found that those with low reactivity that their experiences didn't matter much (having high low conflict environment didn't matter); They also found that for those with high reactivity having a low conflict environment is good and high conflict one has negative outcomes
• Risk and Resilience: Concerns and Challenges: Risk and resilience factors come from data on groups (so predictive, not deterministic); Who decides what good and bad outcomes are?
• Parents & Caregivers matter: Genes (for genetically related children); Cognitions (Goals, beliefs, attitudes, expectations); Behaviours (responsiveness, control, monitoring, communication, expressions of physical/emotional support and love, material caregiving, teaching); Indirect influences: Interactions between parents and interactions with child's environment
• Parenting styles: Permissive/Indulgent (high warmth & support, low control); Authoritative (High warmth & support, high control); Authoritarian (low warmth & support, high control); Uninvolved/Neglectful (Low warmth & support, low control)
• There are general benefits for authoritative parenting in terms of social and academic outcomes; There are consistent negative outcomes for uninvolved parents in terms of social and academic outcomes; authoritarian and permissive parents tend to fall somewhere in between; with permissive parenting not leading to terrible social outcomes and authoritarian not leading to terrible academic outcomes
• Divorced/Single-Parent Households: most children in "non-traditional" households are well-adjusted; But are more likely to have adjustment problems (more behavioural problems, more academic problems, more social problems, more psychological problems)
• Many Individual differences in relating to outcomes of Divorced/Single-parent households: parent conflict; Parenting quality; economic difficulties/changes; disruptions; Absence/difficult relationships with a parent; genetics
• Same-sex/gender parents: just as likely to be well-adjusted as children raised by straight parents; But there are still legal/social barriers and social stigma & harassment
• Culture & Attachment: percent of secure attachment similar across cultures ( Infants in all cultures form attachments; Secure attachment is the norm across all cultures); Across cultures, parent responsiveness seems linked with secure attachment
• Certain cultures appear to have different percents of insecure attachment types (insecure avoidant more common in West & insecure resistant more common in Africa, Japan, Israel). Could be explained by differences in parenting and differences in how the Strange Situation is received and how attachment is shown (for ex: in Kenya infants typically greet caregiver with a handshake; the secure infants they would give a enthusiastic handshake when the parent came back. If this was being evaluated from a Western lens the handshake might not be understood as reflective as a secure attachment)
• non-white/non-Western parents typically classified as more authoritarian; There are cultural differences in impacts of parenting style: for Asian, Black, and Latin parents there are less consistent advantages for authoritative parenting and less pronounced disadvantages for authoritarian parenting