Human Development Stages

Lecture 1 - Human development

• Germinal stage occurs from 0-2 weeks, involving fertilization and implantation
• Embryonic stage occurs from 3-8 weeks, involving development of organs
• The fetus stage occurs at 9 weeks
• Variation in fetal heart rate when specific external voices are heard and can cause miscarriage
• Teratogens affect the fetus during critical and sensitive periods
• Critical period is when most change happens in a structure and damage occurs
• Sensitive period is when changes and structures are developing, but less severely
• Affect of teratogenic substances will be less severe than in critical periods, the most severe damage will occur at 5 weeks
• Neonates (Newborn) sleep
• Perceptual development begins in utero and is richer after birth
• Sensation involves detection of physical signals
• Perception involves organization and interpretation of sensory information
• Measuring of infants perception involves preferential looking, which is when infants choose to spend more time looking at objects that are interesting, stimulating, or familiar
• Principle of visual acuity is when infants will look at stripes over a plain gray pad
• Discrimination is discriminating between two stimuli
• In the first month of life, visual acuity increases from 20/400 to 20/120 (approx)
• Color and depth perception develop in the first 6 months
• Moving the head from side to side is a movement by choice
• Newborns motor skills are predominantly reflexes

Lecture 2 - Human development

• Cephalocaudal rule ("Top-to-bottom") explains how motor skills in infants emerge from head to toe
• Proximodistal rule ("inside-to-outside") explains how motor skills emerge from the center to the periphery
• Infants have more control of their core/stomach before controlling of arms/fingers
• Piaget only studied his child with a small sample size
• Piaget believed that children move from one stage to the next as they gain knowledge about the world
• Children acquire knowledge
• Children organize this knowledge into a schema
• Children acquire new knowledge
• Children add new knowledge to their existing schema, referred to as assimilation and results in a subtle change
• Children acquire new knowledge that doesnt fit within their existing schema, referred to as accommodation and contradicts what they already learn
• Children modify their schema to fit new knowledge by drastically changing their framework to understand the new knowledge they've learned

Lecture 3 - Human development

• Sensorimotor stage relies mainly on movement and senses to learn about the world and infants are not very good at remembering about things that are out of sight
• Preoperational stage explains that most babies are egocentric, think and believe that their world is the only one in front of them, and will later understand that there are other people and that doesn't mean that they cant see it it doesnt exist
• Theory of mind explains that babies are not born with the ability to learn the way they think about other people's mental states
• False belief task involves sally anne (failed by 1-3 yo.) and unexpected contents task (3-4 yo.)
• Measuring individual differences in attachment involves parents as a secure base, and how infants react to reunions (Mary Ainsworth (strange situation))
• Infant attachment style predicts outcomes in adulthood in areas such as academic achievement, emotional health, relationship quality, and self-esteem
• Identity in early childhood involves positive words to describe themselves until school, social comparison begins, and cognitive skills increase
• Rank-order stability involves an individuals self-esteem that is relatively consistent across the lifespan

Lecture 4 - Human development

• Young children have high self-esteem but gradually lose it as they grow, especially women
• Identical twin studies help compare how much something is due to genetics
• Much variability in self-esteem is due to heredity, rank order stability is consistent throughout lifespan
• Brain maturation is the end of adolescence
• Adolescence involves an increase and refinement of connection in the prefrontal cortex
• Erik Erikson developed a theory of conflicts and resolution, believed that identity formation is the biggest challenge for adolescence ("identity vs confusion")
• Identity confusion involves an incoherent and incomplete sense of self
• Identity foreclosure involves a premature identity choice
• Negative identity involves formed identities in opposition to others/social norms, and something negative when doing something positive but against what others want

Lecture 5 - Intelligence

• The main difference between non-human and human language is that humans utilizes symbols, which involves arbitrary paintings
• Generativity is making up brand new words and expecting another person to understand
• Phonemes are the sound that is produced
• The smallest unit of sound recognizable as speech is rather than random noise is a building block of words (consonants and vowels)
• Morphemes are the combination of sounds that create meaning, and the smallest meaningful units of language
• Semantics refers to what words mean
• Syntax (grammar) involves the rules governing how words are combined to form meaningful phrases and sentences
• Pragmatics changes the meaning of words (with context, tone, etc)
• Metalinguistics is when language is used
• Simultaneous bilingualism refers to the early stages of speaking two languages
• Sequential bilingualism is learning a language after the first one
• Heritage bilingualism is when one understands the family language but is not comfortable speaking
• Adult second-language bilingualism explains how critical period of language development has ended but one is still able to learn a language but not as comfortable
• Intelligence increases the likelihood of passing genes
• General intelligence (g) encompasses all forms of human intelligence
• Basic intelligence involves different types of intelligence
• Fluid intelligence interacts with our environment/skills and abilities that rely on information-processing skills such as reaction time, attention, and working memory
• Crystallizes intelligence involves facts/hardware, the ability to solve problems using already acquired knowledge, and general memory and learning (our ability to learn something)
• Alfred Binet measures people's psychology and invented the first IQ test using trial and error, puzzles, object naming, and counting (Binet-Simon test)
• IQ tests are specific to an age group and location
• The mean score on IQ tests is designed to be 100 (the population on average scores 100) and has changing stimuli

Lecture 6 - Emotion & Motivation

• Gardner's theory of multiple intelligences includes Linguistic, logical math, musical, nature, body-kinesthetic, spatial, interpersonal, and intrapersonal (How well regulate emotions)
• Evidence of Gardner's approach explains how areas of intelligence have different developmental patterns (emerge at different ages) and damage to a specific brain can impact only one type of intelligence and not others
• Emotional intelligence refers to the ability to reason about emotions and use emotions to enhance reasoning, identification of one's own emotions, description of one's own emotions, management of own emotions, and detection of other's emotions

Lecture 7 - Emotion & Motivation

• Emotions are a positive or negative experience in response to stimulus which consists of valence and positive or negative and also involves psychological arousal (severity)
• Two major neural structures related to emotion include the amygdala and prefrontal cortex
• Amygdala is a relatively primitive part of the limbic system and processes the biologically relevant information from our environment
• Prefrontal cortex has capacity for slow rational thinking about information
• The Thalamus processes motion from the environment and the amygdala reacts, sends information from sensory cortices, makes sense of the environment (visual and hearing cortex), transmits forward to the prefrontal cortex (Makes sense of the information), and sends back to the amygdala down-regulates the emotion (amygdala detects stimuli)
• Emotions exist to allow one to be more functional in environment, and help one to survive
• Darwin argues that facial expression has been evolved and universal
• The universality hypothesis explains that humans should have the same expression when experiencing an emotion
• The facial feedback hypothesis states that emotion facial expression can cause/change an individual's emotional experience

Lecture 8 - Emotion & Motivation

• Motivation refers to the psychological reason for producing an action and is primarily driven by emotion
• Damaged amygdala impacts decision making
• The hedonic principle states that humans simply want to attract pleasure and avoid pain

Lecture 9 - Personality

• The study of personality involves the study of individuals (idiographic approach) and more common trends in the population (nomothetic approach)
• Two main components of personality study include measuring personality and explaining personality
• Projective techniques involves the psychodynamic approach
• Personality inventories rely on self-report and has low validity and reliability
• The minnesota multiphasic personality inventory (MMPI) measures 5 big personality factors
• Theories of personality is a part of explaining personality
• The trait approach attempts to describe personality as a series of traits, a relative disposition to behave in a particular and consistent way, and factor analysis
• The big personality traits are not correlated with each other (orthogonal) and include openness, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness, and neuroticism (OCEAN)
• Personality traits are relatively stable, and rank order stability increases across the lifespan
• Some changes may occur (mean-level changes in our cohort), and it results in changes in the same direction
• Intraindividual change is when a person's personality significantly changes from one time to the next and could concur after life-changing experiences
• Biological explanation explains how genetics is the largest single factor and the heritability factor of between 0.35 and 0.49
• Theories of personality includes social-cognitive approach, psychodynamic approach, and humanist approach

Lecture 10 - Personality

• The psychodynamic approach involves psychoanalysis, “hysteria” , highly emotional thinking, psychosomatic symptoms, and believed that free association, fantasies, and dreams cause hysteria and personality differences
• Social-cognitive approach emerges from behaviourism

Lecture 11 - Social psychology

• Consists of studying the causes and consequences of being social in areas such as cooperation and competition, group behaviour, altruism, and reproduction
• Cooperation involves working together toward a common goal, one way of solving scarcity of resources, social loafing, and receiving all the benefits but no contribution
• Competition involves struggling with one another to obtain limited resources
• Aggression refers to behavior with the purpose of harming another

Lecture 12 - Social psychology

• Implicit biases involve in-group or out-group beliefs that people are not aware of
• The Implicit association test (IAT) measures biases that people are unable to report on others
• IAT differs from biases that we are unwilling to report and does not categorize bad or good but measure how accurately you are able to match different dimensions, which are not explicit beliefs
• How strongly and quickly one associates two concepts (e.g., Black/White faces with good/bad words)
• Reaction times when pairing certain categories together
• Implicit in-group/out-group preferences, stereotypes, or bias
• It does not measure explicit beliefs, and reflects automatic associations
• Faster reaction times suggest stronger mental associations
• Group cognition explains the common knowledge effect, group polarization, groupthink, and diffusion of responsibility

Lecture 13 - Social psychology

• Testosterone reduces threat assessment
• Social psychology refers to the attempt to influence other individuals (social influence)
• Hedonic motivation refers to appealing to the hedonic principle which is hoping an individual will avoid certain behaviors by making them afraid of the consequences, and appealing to it with rewards can backfire especially when behavior is already intrinsically motivated
• Approval motivation is motivation to have others like us and approve of us, and adherence to norms causes one to conform to the behavior of others

Lecture 13 - Clinical psychology

• Mental disorder refers to the persistent disturbance or dysfunction in behavior, thoughts, or emotions that causes significant distress or impairment
• The medical model refers to atypical, distressing psychological experiences that are classified as illnesses that have biological causes
• The Biopsychosocial model refers to atypical, distressing psychological experiences that are classified as illnesses that have biological, psychological and social causes
• Psychopathology refers to the study of mental disorders
• Psychopathy is one aspect of a specific mental illness
• Overpathologizing refers to attributing diverse or atypical behaviors or thoughts to psychological illness, particularly when diagnostic criteria are not met
• Diagnostic criteria involves features of a disorder and a set of symptoms, behaviors, or characteristics that must be present in order to diagnose an individual with a disorder, relies on a set of criteria, questionnaires and interviews, behavioral observation, and patient history
• The DSM-5 used predominantly in North America elsewhere uses ICD-11 and divides mental disorders into 22 categories
• Can lead to over-pathologizing (Binary (black and white system) and many disorders are likely more spectral

Lecture 14 - Clinical psychology

• Anxiety disorder is the fear of something threatening that may happen in the future
• Adaptive reaction to threats that, when it interferes with normal functioning, it becomes maladaptive (reduces fitness of survival)
• Pathological anxiety
• Generalized anxiety disorder involves worries are not focused on any specific threat and rarely occurs before adolescence
• Diagnostic criteria include excessive anxiety and worry, occurring more days than not for at least 6 months, individuals must find it difficult to control their worry, restlessness, fatigue, concentration deficiency, irritability, muscle tension, and sleep disturbance
• Phobic disorders are a more specific type of anxiety and are characterized by market, persistent, and excessive fear of specific objects, activities, and situations
• Social anxiety disorder is a maladaptive feat of being publicly humiliated or embarrassed

Lecture 15 - Clinical psychology

• Mood disorders are long-lasting and nonspecific
• Depressive disorders affects a large proportion of the population, gender differences (More women than men diagnosed), Hormonal and biological differences, Higher diagnoses, Different coping strategies, and Differences in childhood adversity
• The Onset may appear at any age but is more likely in the 18-29-year-old age group
• Major depressive disorder is unipolar depression and consists of one or more episodes of depression lasting two weeks or longer
• The prognosis consists of some individuals rarely ever experiencing remission without treatment, others experiencing many years of remission between episodes, and 80% recovering within one year
• Chronicity is associated with underlying personality dimensions and the presence of other disorders
• Comorbidity consists of substance-related disorders, panic disorders, OCD, eating disorders, and The way the individual thinks about to event/stimuli
• Attribution theory describes the way a person thinks about failure which makes it more or less likely to be depressed where there is Attribution of failures to internal characteristics, that failures are permanent (Stable), and that failures are global (apply to many areas of life)
• Serious mental Illnesses (SMI) is significant disturbances in thinking, emotional regulation, or behavior leading to significant distress or impairment in social education or occupational functioning
• The Symptoms of schizophrenia consist of requiring at least 2 with at least 1 being delusions, hallucinations, or disorganized speech, Social/Occupational Impairment, and Continuous signs of disturbance for at least 6 months (1 month active phase

Lecture 16 - Treatment of psychological disorders

• Psychiatrist treats more severe patients and can diagnose, prescribe, and practice psychotherapy
• Psychologist → Can diagnose and practice psychotherapy but not prescribe, can treat common illnesses but most of the time more complex cases
• Clinical counselors can practice psychotherapy
• Diagnosis can consist of Psychological or biological treatment
• There are personal and social and financial costs to consider
• Access to treatment consists of 20% of Canadians suffering from moderate to serious mental health disorder and only 40% seeking treatment
• There are are many barriers to seeking mental healthcare

Lecture 17 - Treatment of psychological disorders

• Techniques in Psychotheraphy involve orientations

Lecture 18 - Treatment of psychological disorders

• Biological treatment consists of medications, other physiological interventions, electronconvulsive therapy, transcranial magnetic stimulation, deepbrain stimulation, and psychosurgery
• Pharmacological treatment consists of drug classes, Antipsychotic medication, anti-anxiety medications , anti-depressant medication , reuptake inhibitors , Reuptake inhibitors , and others

Lecture 19 - Stress and Health

• Stress is the physical and psychological response to internal or external stressors, or the evolved response to threat, which activates adrenal glands, an increase in cortisol, more glucose in the blood stream, increase heart and respiration rate and allows to flee from threats
• Stressors describes specific events or chronic pressures that place demands on a person or threaten their subjective well-being
• Health psychology examines the relationship between physical health and psychological health
• General adaptation syndrome - Hans Selye involves: -1. Alarm phase,Initial, healthy reaction to stressor -2. Resistance phase, which is diverting resources -3. Exhaustion phase:Resources are depleted, and the body cannot cope with Death, illness, , and injury
• High correlation between psychological stress and physical illness
• Holmes-Rahe stress scale measures points to various stressful life events, developed by psychiatrists, one time stressful events (acute stressors)
• Chronic stress results in greater illness than acute stressors, by repeating chronic stress can increase exhaustion
• Control of stress refers to how much an individual control over a stressor
• Glass & Singer: determined that the noisy group suffered
• Primary appraisal involves whether an event is dangerous/threatening, Secondary appraisal determining whether can control
• Repressive coping involves avoiding situations or thoughts that remind individual of stressor, Rational coping facing the stressor

Lecture 20 - Stress and Health

• Understanding involved working to find the meaning of the stressor in life
• Reframing is thinking repetitive or positive ways to think about the stressor
• Meditation can involve silence to reduce stressors, increases myelination/connectivity
• Relaxation helps for tension and alerts when tense/brainwave patterns are active in activity parts of the brain
• Exercise reduces perceived stress and depressive symptoms and increase serotonin and endorphins
• Bioecological models explains how psychological and physical health are affected by myriad internal and external factors
• Brofenbrenners model involves classic example to interactions between nature vs nurture, and that personalities affect environment

Chart - Theories of Emotion

• James-Lange theory explains that emotions equals your body's reaction and a stimulus to physiological arousal to emotion
• Cannon-Bard: explains that both emotion and arousal happen @ the same time
• Shachter-Singer explains how people labels label situations
• SAME explain how arousal can be related to interpetation and specificty
• Appraisal explains cognitive interperations