Human Development

• Developmental psychology is the scientific study of patterns of change and stability in human development
• Development is systematic and adaptive
• Developmental scientists are professionals who study the science of development and their work can have a dramatic impact on human lives
• Life-span development is the concept of human development as a lifelong process that can be studied scientifically
• The goals of human development include describing phenomena, establishing norms and averages, explaining how phenomena came to be, predicting future behavior, and intervening in developmental problems or using knowledge to enhance the quality of individual lives
• Domains of development include physical development, cognitive development, and psychosocial development
• Periods/stages of the life span include prenatal period, infancy and toddlerhood, early childhood, middle childhood, adolescence, emerging and young adulthood, middle adulthood, and late adulthood
• Influences on development include heredity, environment, and maturation
• Context of development includes family, nuclear family, extended family, socioeconomic status, and culture
• Normative and nonnormative influences are characteristics of events that occur in a similar way for most people in a group or are unusual events that happen to a particular person or at an unusual time of life
• Timing of influence includes critical or sensitive periods, imprinting, critical periods, and sensitive periods
• Paul B. Baltes's life span development approach includes principles like development being lifelong, multidimensional, multi-directional, and influenced by biology and culture
• Basic theoretical issues include quantitative and qualitative change, with John Locke's mechanistic model emphasizing gradual and incremental change, and Jean Jacques Rousseau's organismic model emphasizing active, growing organisms setting their own development in motion
• Five theoretical perspectives on human development include psychoanalytic perspective, learning behaviorism, social learning theory, cognitive perspective, and evolutionary perspective
• Research methods include quantitative research dealing with measurable data and qualitative research involving the interpretation of nonnumerical data
• Basic research design includes case study, ethnographic study, correlational study, and experiment
• Experimental research design controls the independent variable to determine its effect on the dependent variables
• Experimental research can be conducted in the laboratory or field
• Cross-sectional study:

  • People of different ages are assessed at one point in time
• Longitudinal study:

  • Researchers study the same person or group of people more than once, sometimes years apart
• Sequential study:

  • Study design that combines cross-sectional and longitudinal techniques
• Ethics of research include:

  • Informed Consent: consent freely given with full knowledge of what the research entails
  • Avoidance of deception
  • Protection of participants from harm and loss of dignity
  • Guarantees of privacy and confidentiality
  • The right to decline or withdraw from an experiment at any time
  • The responsibility of investigators to correct any undesirable effects
• Principles researchers are expected to be guided by:

  • Beneficence
  • Respect for participants' autonomy and protection of those who are unable to exercise their own judgment
  • Justice
• Fertilization (conception) is the process by which sperm and ovum combine to create a single cell called zygote, which duplicates itself by cell division to produce all the cells that make a baby
• Causes of multiple births:

  • Dizygotic twins: Twins conceived by the union of two different ova with two different sperm cells (fraternal twins)
  • Monozygotic twins: Twins resulting from division of a single zygote after fertilization
• Heredity is the inborn factors inherited from one's biological parents that affect development
• Genetic code is based on DNA with the genetic code being adenine (A), thymine (T), cytosine (C), and guanine (G)
• Autosomes are twenty-two pairs of chromosomes that are not related to sexual expression
• Sex chromosomes are the twenty-third pair that govern the baby's sex
• Genetic and chromosomal abnormalities include:

  • Alpha Thalassemia
  • Beta Thalassemia (Cooley's Anemia)
  • Cystic Fibrosis
  • Duchenne Muscular Dystrophy
  • Hemophilia
  • Anencephaly
  • Spina Bifida
  • Phenylketonuria (PKU)
  • Polycystic Kidney Disease
  • Sickle-cell anemia
  • Tay-Sachs Disease
• Alpha Thalassemia:

  • Severe anemia that reduces the ability of the blood to carry oxygen; nearly all affected infants are stillborn or die soon after birth
• Cystic Fibrosis:

  • Overproduction of mucus, which collects in the lung and digestive tract; children do not grow normally; short life span; the most common inherited lethal defect among White people
• Hemophilia:

  • Excessive bleeding, usually affecting males; in its most severe form, can lead to crippling arthritis in adulthood
• Phenylketonuria (PKU):

  • Metabolic disorder resulting in intellectual disability
• Tay-Sachs Disease:

  • Degenerative disease of the brain and nerve cells, resulting in death before age 5
• Incomplete dominance is a pattern of inheritance in which a child receives two different alleles, resulting in partial expression of a trait
• Sex-linked inheritance is a pattern of inheritance in which certain characteristics carried on the X chromosome inherited from the mother are transmitted differently to her male and female offspring
• Chromosomal abnormalities typically occur because of errors in cell division, resulting in an extra or missing chromosome
• Genetic counseling is a clinical service that advises prospective parents of their probable risk of having children with hereditary defects
• Heritability is a statistical estimate of heredity to individual differences in a specific trait within a given population