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• Study guide for Human Development includes:
  • 10 True/False
  • 15 Definitions
  • 15 Multiple Choice
  • 8 Short Answers

Chapter 1

• Culture includes shared language, knowledge, material objects, and behavior.
• Cultural relativity involves appreciating cultural differences and understanding practices from their own cultural standpoint.

Ecological Systems Theory

• Urie Bronfenbrenner developed Ecological Systems Theory.
• The theory provides a framework for understanding the influences on human development.
• Human interaction is influenced by larger social forces.
• Understanding these forces is essential for understanding an individual.
• Individuals are impacted by several systems:
  • Microsystem: Direct contact with the person like parents and siblings.
  • Mesosystem: Larger organizational structures like school, family, and religion.
  • Exosystem: Larger contexts of community.
  • Macrosystem: Cultural elements.
  • Chronosystem: Historical context.

Erikson's Stages

• Trust vs. Mistrust (HOPE):
  • Infancy: 0-1 year
  • Trust or mistrust results from basic needs being met like nourishment and affection.
• Autonomy vs. Shame/Doubt (WILL):
  • Early Childhood: 1-3 years
  • Sense of independence develops through various tasks.
• Initiative vs. Guilt (PURPOSE):
  • Play age: 3-6 years
  • Taking initiative on some activities can lead to guilt when one is unsuccessful or boundaries are overstepped.
• Industry vs. Inferiority (COMPETENCE):
  • School age: 7-11 years
  • Self-confidence develops in abilities when one is competent or inferiority when one is not.
• Identity vs. Confusion (FIDELITY):
  • Adolescence: 12-18 years.
  • Experimentation occurs while identities and roles develop.
• Intimacy vs. Isolation (LOVE):
  • Early adulthood: 19-29 years
  • Intimacy and relationships are established with others.
• Generativity vs. Stagnation (CARE):
  • Middle age: 20-64 years
  • Contribution to society and family.
• Integrity vs. Despair (WISDOM):
  • Old age: 65 onward
  • Life is assessed to make sense of meaning and contributions.
• Ethnocentrism is the belief that one's own culture is superior.

Lifespan Perspective

• Development is lifelong, with changes across the lifespan.
• No age period is more crucial; all are uniquely characterized.
• Development is multidirectional, with gains in some areas and losses in others.
• Finishing high school, getting married, and becoming a parent are all growth and loss.
• Development is multidimensional, changing across physical, cognitive, and psychosocial domains.
• Development is characterized by plasticity: ability to change with malleable characteristics.
• Development is multi-contextual, with both normative and non-normative influences:
  • Normative age-graded influences
  • Normative history graded influences
  • Non-normative life influences

Physical domain

• Includes changes in height and weight, sensory capabilities, the nervous system, and the propensity for disease and illness.

Piaget's Stages

• Sensorimotor:
  • Birth to 2 years
  • Object permanence is identified as the understanding that objects still exist out of sight.
  • Recognition of the ability to control objects and act intentionally.
• Preoperational:
  • 2-7 years
  • Language use begins.
  • Egocentric thinking struggles to see beyond the world from other viewpoints.
  • Objects are classified by a single feature, like color.
• Concrete Operational:
  • 7 to 11 years
  • Logical thinking occurs.
  • Conservation of numbers, mass, and weight is understood.
  • Objects are classified by several features and placed in order.
• Formal Operational:
  • 11 years and onward
  • Logical thinking about abstract propositions occur.
  • Concerned with the hypothetical and the future.
  • Hypotheses are created and tested.

Piaget's theory

• Intellectual skills in children change over time influenced through maturation rather than training.
• Children of different ages interpret the world differently.
• Recognize and map out the ways in which children's intelligence from that of adults.
• Psychosocial domain focuses on changes in emotion, self-perception, and interpersonal relationships with families, peers, and friends.
• Reciprocal determinism involves interplay between environment and individual, personality, and interpretation of events.

Sensorimotor stage

• Stage 1 is the sensorimotor stage:
  • Birth to 2 years
  • Identifies object permanence as understanding that objects still exist out of sight.
  • Recognition of ability to control objects and act intentionally.
• Social learning theory involves learning by watching others.

Chapter 2

• Alcohol consumption in pregnancy results in Fetal Alcohol Spectrum Disorders.
  • These disorders include a range of effects from alcohol consumption during pregnancy.
  • Fetal Alcohol Syndrome (FAS) is the most severe form of FASD.
• Behavioral genetics: studies the interplay between genetic and environmental contributions to behavior.
  • The environment can affect the expression of genes, just as genetic predispositions can impact potential.

Birth Preparation

• Good physical condition helps provide a healthy environment for the baby to develop.
• It helps people to prepare to accept their new role as parents.
• The more prepared future parents are, the better they will be with childbirth and newborns.
• The Lamaze Method emphasizes teaching the birthing person to be in control during delivery.
• The Bradley Birth Method includes a medication-free vaginal childbirth experience.
  • Dark or dim lighting
  • Solitude
  • Comfort
  • Sense of safety
  • Confidence
  • Physical Relaxation
  • Controlled breathing.
  • Sleep like relaxation
  • Breastfeeding directly after childbirth
• Epigenetics studies modifications in DNA that affect gene expression.
  • Environmental factors change gene expression by switching genes on and off.

Fetal Alcohol Syndrome

• Facial features
  • Head size: below-average head circumference.
  • Eyes: smaller than average eye opening, with skin folds at the corner.
  • Nose: low nasal bridge, short nose.
  • Midface: smaller-than-average midface size.
  • Lip and Philtrum: thin upper lip, indistinct philtrum.
• Genotype Environment Correlations refer to processes where genetic factors contribute to environmental variations.
  • Passive correlations occur when children passively inherit genes and family-provided environments.
  • Evocative correlations refer to how the social environment reacts to individuals based on inherited characteristics.
  • Active correlations occur when individuals seek out environments supporting their genetic tendencies.
• Mental illness in pregnancy
  • Can be caused by stress or high stress levels
  • Can cause complications in the baby like premature birth or low birth weights
• Stress related hormones may cause complications by affecting a birthing persons immune systems resulting in an infection and premature birth.
• Depression
  • Consequences – premature birth, low birthweight, irritability, inactivity, and low attention skills or less facial expression
• Paternal impact
  • Age of male is an important factor towards child health risks.
  • Nippoldt (2015) found offspring of males over 40 faces an increased risk of miscarriages, autism, birth defects, achondroplasia (bone growth disorder) and schizophrenia.
  • These increased health risks are thought to be due to accumulated chromosomal aberrations and mutations during sperm maturation in older men.
• Neonatal Abstinence Syndrome: Sudden discontinuation of fetal exposure to substances, which can result in:
  • Jittery
  • Shakey
  • Tight Muscle Tone
  • High-pitched cry
  • Difficulty Eating
  • Weight Loss
• Postpartum depression: Peripartum onset of depression.
  • It occurs during pregnancy or within 4 weeks following pregnancy.
• It's important that pregnant individuals taking antidepressants discuss medication with a healthcare provider because some medications can harm/cause harm to the developing organism.
• Teratogens: things that can contribute to birth defects and include some maternal diseases, pollutants, drugs and alcohol.
• Risk factors include:
• Risk factors include timing and amount of exposure
• Number of teratogens
• Genetics
• Being male or female
• The biggest common teratogen is alchohol.
• Other teratogens:
• Tobacco
• Prescription / otc drugs
• Illicit drugs
• Pollutants, lead, pesticides, bisphenol A (BPA), radiation, mercury, toxoplasmosis, STDS
• HIV
• Measles

Chapter 3

• The Bayley Scales of Development:
  • Comprehensively assess children within the age range of 1 to 42 months
  • Children are evaluated in 5 key developmental domains
  • Cognition
  • Language
  • Social-emotional behavior
  • Motor behavior
  • Adaptive behavior
  • This highlights early intervention techniques that might be most beneficial by identifying developmental delays in the young.
• Brain growth in infancy (slide 6):
  • Cortex: where most of neural activity occurs
  • Thin outer covering of the brain: involved in voluntary activity and thinking
  • Frontal lobe: behind the forehead
  • Responsible primarily for thinking, planning, memory, and judgement
  • Parietal lobe: extends from the middle to the back of the skull
  • Responsible primarily for processing information about touch
  • Occipital lobe: very back of the skull
  • Processes visual information
  • Temporal lobe: in front of the occipital lobe between the ears
  • Responsible for hearing and language
• Brain grows rapidly during infancy, specific brain regions do not mature at the same rate
  • Primary motor areas develop earlier than primary sensory areas
  • The prefrontal cortex is the least developed
• Lateralization is where the process in which different functions become localized primarily on one side of the brain.
  • In most adults:
    • Left hemisphere – language production
    • Right hemisphere – visuospatial abilities
  • Process develops over time; however, structural asymmetries between the hemispheres have been reported even in fetuses
• Neuroplasticity: the brains ability to change, both physically and chemically, to enhance its adaptability to environmental change and compensate for injury
  • The brain constantly creates new neural communication routes and rewires existing ones:
    • Environmental experiences, such as stimulation and events within a persons body, such as hormones and genes, affect the brains plasticity
• Object permanence: the understanding that even if something is out of sight, it still exists
• Personality:
  • Made up of many other features, besides temperament
  • Childrens developing self-concept
  • Their motivations to achieve or to socialize
  • Their values and goals
  • Their coping styles
  • Their sense of responsibility and conscientiousness
  • Qualities are influenced by biological dispositions, but more by the childs experiences with others, particularly in close relationships, that guide the growth of individual characteristics
  • Development begins with the biological foundations of temperament but becomes increasingly elaborated, extended, and refined over
• Reactive Attachment Disorder:
  • Children experiencing neglectful situations and also displaying markedly disturbed and developmentally inappropriate attachment behavior, such as being inhibited and withdrawn, minimal social and emotional responsiveness to others, and limited positive affect: may be diagnosed with reactive attachment disorder.
• Schema: A framework to organize information:
  • Children develop schemata through the processes of assimilation and accommodation
• Secondary Circular Reactions:
  • Infant begins to interact with objects in the environment.
  • At first: the infant interacts with objects (e.g., a crib mobile) accidentally, but then these contacts with the objects are deliberate/become a repeated activity.
  • The infant becomes more and more actively engaged in the outside world/takes delight in being able to make things happen.
  • Repeated motion brings particular interest as, for example, the infant is able to bang two lids together from the cupboard when seated on the kitchen floor
• Secure base: Bowlby:
  • Believed children need a parental presence that gives the child a sense of safety as the child explores the surroundings
• Sensorimotor substages:
  • Reflexes
    • Newborns learn about their world through the use of their reflexes, sucking, reaching, grasping
    • Use of reflexes becomes more deliberate and purposeful
  • Primary circular reactions
    • Infants begin to actively involve their own body in some form of repeated activity
    • Accidentally engage in a behavior/find it interesting, such as making a vocalization
    • Interest motivates trying to do it again and helps infant learn new behaviors that originally occurred by chance
    • Identified as circular/primary because: centers on the infants own body
  • Secondary circular reactions
    • Infants begin to interact with the objects in the environment.
    • Infants first interacts with objects accidentally... but then contact becomes deliberate (repeated activity)
    • The infant becomes more/more actively engaged in the outside world and takes delight in being able to make things happen.
    • Repeated motion brings particular interest as, for example, the infant is able to bang two lids together from the cupboard when seated on the kitchen floor.
  • Coordination of secondary circular reactions
    • The infant combines these basic reflexes/simple behaviors and uses planning/coordination to achieve a specific goal.
    • The infant can engage in behaviors that others perform/anticipate upcoming events.
    • Perhaps because of continued maturation of the prefrontal cortex, the infant become capable of having a thought and carrying out a planned goal.
    • For example: infant sees a toy car under the kitchen table, crawls reaches/grabs toy Infant is coordinating both internal and external activities to achieve a planned goal
  • Tertiary Circular Reactions
    • The toddler is considered a “little scientist” and begins exploring the world in a trial-and-error manner, using both motor skills/planning abilities.
      • For example: The child might throw her ball down the stairs.
    • The toddler's active engagement in experimentation helps them learn about their world.
  • Beginning of Representational Thought
    • Sensorimotor period ends with the appearance of symbolic/representational thought.
    • The toddler now has a basic understanding that objects can be used as symbols.
    • Child is able to solve problems using mental strategies/can remember something/repeat it and engage in pretend play.
    • This initial movement from “hands-on” approach to the more mental marks the transition to preoperational
• Social referencing: the process children seek out information from others to clarify a situation/then using that information to act
  • Visual Cliff scenario
    • Parent acts like nothing is wrong: child will crawl over
    • Parent acts worried /scared: child wont crawl over
• Stranger Anxiety: a fear of unfamiliar people
  • Develops at same time as object permanence
    • Results when a child can't assimilate the stranger into an existing schema; therefore, they cant predict their experience and results in a fear response
• Temperament: the innate characteristics of the infant, including mood, activity level, and emotional reactivity, noticeable soon after birth
  • New York longitudinal study
    • Infants’ behavioral profiles are categorized in 3 temperaments:
      • Easy child: Doesn't need much extra attention
      • Slow to warm up child: May need advance warning if new people/situations are introduced
      • Difficult child: May need to be given extra time to burn off their energy