Infant Development

Bronfenbrenner's Ecological Systems Theory

• The microsystem has the most influence on an individual's development.
• An example of the exosystem is a parent's workplace affecting their child's development at home.

Human Development

• The psychosocial domain involves personality, social relationships, and identity.

Research Methods

• Longitudinal research involves observing a culture or social group over a period of years.

Erikson's Psychosocial Theory

• The second stage, autonomy vs. shame and doubt, focuses on children developing a sense of personal control and autonomy.
• The third stage, initiative vs. guilt, occurs during the preschool years and involves children asserting their power and control over the world.
• The fifth stage, identity vs. role confusion, occurs during adolescence and involves exploring personal relationships and developing a sense of self.
• The seventh stage, generativity vs. stagnation, occurs during adulthood and focuses on building a career and family, and feeling productive and involved in the world.
• Ego identity is the ability to integrate childhood experiences into a coherent sense of self.
• There are eight stages of development in Erikson's theory.
• The first psychosocial stage is trust vs. mistrust.
• The second psychosocial stage focuses on autonomy vs. shame and doubt.
• Infants begin to look for hidden objects during the sensorimotor stage.

Piaget's Cognitive Stages

• A characteristic of the pre-operational stage is egocentrism, where children have difficulty taking other people's perspectives.
• A characteristic of the concrete operations stage is the ability to think logically about concrete objects and events.
• A characteristic of the formal operations stage is the ability to reason abstractly and consider multiple possibilities.

Lifespan Development

• Studying development helps us understand human changes and adaptations across the lifespan.
• A characteristic of lifespan development is that it is lifelong, multidirectional, and influenced by multiple factors.
• Change in lifespan development can be both quantitative (incremental) and qualitative ( Fundamental).
• One stage of lifespan development is adolescence.

Erikson's Psychosocial Theory (continued)

• The eighth stage of development is integrity vs. despair.
• Strengths of Erikson's psychosocial theory include its focus on social and emotional development, and its emphasis on the role of culture and society.

Behavioral Learning Theories

• The two behavioral learning theories are classical conditioning and operant conditioning.

Piaget's Cognitive Stages (continued)

• Formal operational thought allows adolescents to consider multiple possibilities and think abstractly, and to come up with a general theory of all possible factors that might affect the outcome.
• Another characteristic of formal operational thought is the ability to consider hypothetical situations.

Information Processing Theory

• The information processing theory considers the human mind as an information-processing system that takes in information, processes it, and produces an output.
• Metacognition refers to the ability to think about and reflect on one's own mental processes.
• The age-related development in cognition referred to in the information processing theory is the increasing ability to process information efficiently and effectively with age.