Develop

• Nature and nurture


  The degree to which genetic or hereditary influences (nature) and experiential or environmental influences (nurture) determine the kind of person you are
• Continuity


  Whether a particular developmental phenomenon represents a smooth progression throughout the life span
• Discontinuity


  A series of abrupt shifts in a particular developmental phenomenon
• Development is not always continuous
• Universal and context specific development


  Whether there is one path of development or several
• Basic forces in human development

  • Biological forces
  • Psychological forces
  • Sociocultural forces
  • Life-cycle forces
• Biological forces


  All genetic and health-related factors that affect development
• Psychological forces


  All internal perceptual, cognitive, emotional, and personality factors that affect development
• Sociocultural forces


  Interpersonal, societal, cultural, and ethnic factors that affect development
• Life-cycle forces


  Differences in how the same event affects people of different ages
• Biological forces are determined by our genetic code
• Biological forces can be viewed as providing the raw material necessary and as setting the boundary conditions
• Psychological forces


  Known by our behavior, including internal cognitive, emotional, personality, perceptual, and related factors that help define us as individuals and that influence behavior
• Sociocultural forces


  Include race, ethnicity, and culture
• Life-cycle forces


  Timing is everything
• Neuroscience


  The study of the brain and the nervous system, including memory, reasoning and emotion
• Theory in development


  An organized set of ideas that explains development
• Psychodynamic theory


  Holds that development is largely determined by how well people resolve conflicts they face at different ages, with roots in Sigmund Freud's theory
• Psychosocial theory


  Proposed by Erik Erikson, the first comprehensive life-span view, where personality development is determined by the interaction of an internal maturational plan and external societal demands
• Learning theory


  Concentrates on how learning influences a person's behavior
• Behaviorism


  A learning theory
• Social learning theory


  People learn much by simply watching those around them, which is known as imitation or observational learning
• Cognitive developmental theory


  Focuses on how people think and change over time, with three main approaches: thinking develops in a universal sequence of stages, people process information like computers, and the contributions of culture on thinking and cognitive growth
• Piaget's theory


  Focuses on how children construct knowledge and how their constructions change over time, with critical points of change around ages 2, 7, and before adolescence
• Information processing theory


  Human cognition consists of mental hardware (cognitive structure) and mental software (cognitive processes that enable people to complete specific tasks)
• Vygotsky theory


  Emphasizes that children's thinking is influenced by the sociocultural context in which they grow up
• Ecological and systems approach


  Only ecological theories have focused on the complexities of environments and their links to development, where human development is inseparable from the environmental contexts in which a person develops
• Levels of the environment in Bronfenbrenner's ecological theory

  • Microsystem (people and objects in an individual's immediate environment)
  • Mesosystem (connections across microsystems)
  • Exosystem (social settings that influence development but are not experienced firsthand)
  • Macrosystem (cultures and subcultures that embed the other systems)
• Competence-Environmental Press Theory


  People adapt most effectively when their competence, or abilities, match the environmental press, or the demands put on them by the environment
• Life span perspective


  Human development is multiply determined and cannot be understood within the scope of a single framework, with four key features: multidirectionality, plasticity, historical context, and multiple causation
• Selective optimization with compensation


  Elective selection (reducing involvement to fewer domains), loss-based selection (reducing involvement due to losses), and compensation (finding alternate ways to accomplish goals)
• Life-course perspective


  Various generations experience the biological, psychological and sociocultural forces of development in their respective historical context, with a key feature being the dynamic interplay between individual and society
• Three major dimensions of the life-course perspective

  • The individual timing of life events in relation to external historical events
  • The synchronization of individual transitions with collective familial ones
  • The impact of earlier life events, as shaped by historical events, on subsequent ones
• Measurement methods in human development research

  • Systematic observation
  • Naturalistic observation
  • Structured observation
  • Self-reports
• Reliability


  The extent to which a measure provides a consistent index of a characteristic
• Validity


  Whether a measure actually measures what researchers think it measures
• Correlational studies


  Investigations looking at relations between variables as they exist naturally in the world
• Correlation coefficient


  An expression of the strength and direction of a relation between two variables
• Experimental studies


  A systematic way of manipulating the key factor(s) that the investigator thinks causes a particular behavior, with an independent variable and a dependent variable
• Qualitative studies


  Methods that involve gaining in-depth understanding of human behavior and what governs it