Nature vs Nurture: Perspectives on Development

Perspectives on Nature and Nurture

• Human development is a scientific study of systematic changes and stability throughout a person's life.
• Life-Span Development encompasses human development as an ongoing process that can be studied scientifically.
• The Life-Span Perspective views development as lifelong, multidimensional, multidirectional, plastic, multidisciplinary, contextual, and involving growth, maintenance, and regulation of loss.

Domains of Development

• Physical Development involves the growth of the body and brain, sensory capabilities, motor skills, and health.
• Cognitive Development includes learning, attention, memory, language, thinking, reasoning, and creativity.
• Psychosocial Development focuses on emotions, personality, and social relationships.

Factors Influencing Development

• Social Construction is an invention of a particular culture or society.
• The Stability-Change Issue addresses the degree to which early traits and characteristics persist or change throughout life.
• Continuity-Discontinuity focuses on whether development involves gradual, cumulative change (continuous) or distinct stages (discontinuous).
• Maturation refers to the unfolding of a natural sequence of physical changes and behavior patterns.
• Behavioral Genetics studies the extent to which genetic and environmental differences among people and animals are responsible for their trait variations.

Heritability and Studies

• Heritability measures the proportion of trait variability within a sample that can be linked to genetic differences.
• Gregor Mendel studied heredity in plants.
• Selective Breeding attempts to breed animals for a particular trait to determine its heritability.
• Genes contribute to attributes like activity level, emotionality, aggressiveness, and sex drive in rats, mice, and chickens.
• Twin, adoption, and family studies are used to assess genetic and environmental influences.
• Concordance Rate refers to the percentage of pairs where if one member displays a trait, the other does too.

Gene-Environment Interaction

• Genes turn on and off in patterned ways (Epigenetics).
• Gene-Environment Interaction means that gene effects depends on the environment and how we react to it.
• Intelligence is influenced by heredity and environmental influences such as parental stimulation, education, and peer influence.
• Three factors impacting individual emotionality differences are genes, shared environmental influences (e.g., parenting style), and nonshared environmental influences (e.g., parental favoritism).

Gene-Environment Correlations

• Passive Gene-Environment: children are influenced by their parents' genotypes.
• Evocative Gene-Environment: a child's genotype evokes specific reactions from others.
• Active Gene-Environment: a child's genotype influences the types of environments they seek.

Heredity, Environment, and Individual Differences

• Heredity consists of inborn traits and characteristics provided by parents,
• Environment consists of influences outside the body, starting from conception.
• Individual Differences include variations in gender, height, weight, body build, health, and energy level.
• Heredity consists of inborn traits from parents.

Context of Development

• Family: Includes nuclear and extended family structures.
• Socioeconomic Status: combination of economic and social factors such as income, education, and occupation.
• Culture: A society's or group's total way of life.
• Ethnic Gloss: Overgeneralization that obscures or blurs variations
• Race is defined as an identifiable biological category and social construct.
• Gender and history also contribute to context.

Normative and Nonnormative Influences

• Normative Influences: Biological or environmental events affect many or most people similarly.
• Historical Generation involves a group of people who experience an event during a formative time in their lives.
• Age Cohort is a group of people born at about the same time.
• Nonnormative Influences: Unusual events that significantly impact individual lives by disrupting the expected life cycle.

Imprinting, Periods, and Theory

• Imprinting involves the instinct to follow the first moving object seen.
• Critical Period occurs when a specific event has a specific impact on development.
• Sensitive Periods refer to times when a developing person is especially responsive to experiences.
• Plasticity refers to the modifiability of performance.
• Theory is a collection of related concepts that describe, explain, and predict behavior.
• Hypothesis are explanations or predictions that are tested by research.
• John Locke coined the term Tabula Rasa.
• Jean-Jacques Rousseau believed children are "noble savages."

Models & Changes

• The Mechanistic Model views people as machines reacting to environmental input.
• The Organismic Model views people as active, growing organisms initiating events, not just reacting.
• Continuous Change is gradual and incremental.
• Discontinuous Change is abrupt or uneven.
• Quantitative Change involves changes in number or amount.
• Qualitative Change involves the emergence of phenomena not easily predicted by the past.
• Evolutionary Psychology emphasizes adaptation, reproduction, and survival of the fittest to shape behavior.

Research Ethics

APA General Principles

• Beneficence and Nonmaleficence: Take care to do no harm and minimize it.
• Fidelity and Responsibility: Establish relationships of trust and uphold professional standards.
• Integrity: Promote accuracy, honesty, and truthfulness.
• Justice: Ensure fairness and equitable access to benefits.
• Respect for People's Rights and Dignity: Respect rights to privacy, confidentiality, and self-determination.

PAP General Principles

• Respect for Dignity of Persons and Peoples: Respect for all humans.
• Competent Caring: Promote the well-being of persons and peoples.
• Integrity: Honesty, truthfulness, open and accurate communication.
• Professional and Scientific Responsibility: contributing knowledge about human behavior.

Responsibility to Society

• Conduct affairs with the highest ethical standards.
• Provide accurate study information, and obtain approval.
• Informed consent requires knowing the research's purpose, duration, procedures, right to decline or withdraw, consequences, risks, benefits, confidentiality limits, incentives, and researcher contact information.
• Vulnerable populations need consent from both individual and guardian.
• Obtain individual's ascent, and permission from guardians.
• Document consent appropriately, and obtain needed permissions.
• Consent is needed for recording images/voices.
• Debriefing is needed to obtain consent.

Omitting-Dispensing

• Informed consent can be omitted if: research would not create distress or harm, in normal educational practices, with anonymous questionnaires, confidentiality is protected, or law permits.
• Avoid excessive incentives that could coerce participation.
• Do not conduct deceptive studies without justification.
• Discuss the deception as early as possible.
• Provide opportunity to review research and results and minimize misconceptions.
• Ensure animal safety, minimize discomfort/pain, and justify procedures.
• During termination, minimize pain and do it rapidly.
• Do not pass off other's work as your own.
• Take authorship only for performed work or contributes to it.
• Faculty advisors must discuss publication credits with faculty advisors and students early.
• Do not withhold data for reanalysis after publishing it.

Data and Values

• Use shared data only for the declared purpose.
• Researchers studying cultural influences must counteract culture values biasing perceptions.
• Ethnocentrism means that one group is superior than other groups.
• Deception must be explained asap, and participants have the right to withdraw.

Research Design

Basic Research Desigs

• Descriptive research aims to observe and record behavior.
• A Case Study involves the study of an individual in rare cases.
• Ethnographic Studies determine culture as a way of life.
• Correlational Study analyzes correlation between variables.
• *It studies data without manipulation, and no random assignment.

Experiment & Differentiating

• Experiment: Cause & Effect relation, is controlled, has manipulations, can be replicable, but could be artificial.
• Quasi Experiment: Correlational data, compares people assigned to separate groups by life experiences.
• Cross Sectional: Children of different ages are assessed at ONE point of time.
• Longitudinal: SAME group is assessed more than once through the years.
• Sequential: Collects data on successive cross-sectional or longitudinal samples.

Cohort & Theories

• Cohort effect effects dependent measures of the subject.
• Psychosexual Theory (Freud): early experiences shape later functioning with biologically born drives of hunger, aggression, & sex.
• People are driven by motives, emotional conflicts, & are not largely aware that they are shaped by experiences with family. The unconscious motivations are instincts & influence our unconscious nature.
• Instincts: inborn motivations for behavior.

Freud Psychology

• The Id - pleasure principle, impulsive, irrational, selfish.
• The Ego- reality principle, rational.
• The Superego-morality principle, internalized moral standards.
• Balance is Health Personality
• Psychological problems arise when supply is psychic energy is distributed unevenly.

Fixation & Oral

• Fixation arrests in development stages and shows in developed adult personality.
• Oral is during mouth stage: anxiety & need of defence against being denied food during toddler.

Erikson's Theory

• Emphasized influences society has on personalities.
• Crisis: main challenge that is important & remains the issue in a life cycle.
• Resolution of this conflict would put the person in a good position to resolve the next one.
• Social Clock: the timing of important historical events that are culturally preferenced.

Cognitive Development (Piaget) & Stages

• It is an intelligence process that helps an organism adapt to it's development.
• Constructivism is built on the understandings of the world with experiences.
• Organization: create tendencies.
• Schemes: organizing around the world & influence a child's behavior & thought.
• Adaptation: ways children use their info.
• Sensorimotor occurs when 2 year old learns to reproduce the first stages by chance.
• Schemes: actions & representations for objects.
• Accommodation/Assimilation: occurs when children adjust their info by using the existing & processing experiences.
• Equilibration: balancing the shifting.

Additional Info

• Representational Ability is when the ability represents actions & objects in memory.
• Visible imitation is used primarily and made up of visible parts.
• Believed children under 18 months could not engage in Deferred Imitation (reproduction of behavior over time.)

Object Permanence

• Realizing something continues after they can no longer see it.
• Dual Representation: the difficulty in grasping relationship that kids 3 years & younger have.
• *Pre operational": in 2nd stage *symbolic thought develops.
• operations is where they reversible and start to think more.
• *Pre operational Thought": when things are begining to reconstruct.

Symbolic & Thought

• *Being able to think about something in the absence of motor Cues.
• Deferred Imitation: imitating an action that someone has already done.
• *Occurs between ages 2 & 4.
• Intuitive thought-wanting to know the answers so they use premitive reasoning.
• Conservation: two things are equal but altered in their appearance (same).
• Theory of Mind: is awareness for range of human mental states that allows all to predict behavior.

Theories

• Concrete Operational: Age about 7, children enter and their thought now is logical cause they incorporate the ideas properly.
• Deductive & Inductive: children go in the order of making observations that involve people & animals when people are concerned.
• Piaget believed kids in those stage only knew what they read about and that same object still had a different appearance.

Formal

• Adolescents move further from dependence of the environment and capacity for abstraction develops(usually 11 years)
• Hypothetical-Deductive Reasoning is methodical, scientific approach, and characterizes thinking with formal operations.
• *Self-Consciousness: ability to think about their own thinking (observer).
• Personal Fable: belief that their special, one-of-kind and not subject to normal rules.

Moral

• Moral theory has to do with behavior/actions over thoughts.
• *Fuffy trace theory-dual processs Model: decision making is influenced by intellectual and cognitive systems that deal with it parallel.

Kohlberg

• Level 1 (3-7yrs)- is based on a good or okay to avoid punishment.
• Level 2 (8-13yrs):Child is seen as okay from other in interpersonal relationships-approval is an important aspect.
• Level 3 (14-older): In contracts & rights in individuals: the laws are bent to the specific self interest.
• His system is bias.

Bionfenbrenner Model and Attachment

• Bronfenbrenner Model is focused on the development of self and surrounded environments. It has systems of macro, eco, meso, micro.
• Not outcome of child & development but child is active shaper in it.
• According to Ainsworth-Attachment is for enduring emotional ties, & between caregivers and infants. And the Theory is:
• Attachment: a secure attachment is flexible
• Attachments is resulted of interactions.

Strange Situation

• Designed to attach and determine infant patterns of behavior.
• Attachment is the main sensitive for response.
• Disoriented: show repetitive or misdirected behavior and confusion.
• Anixiety- is the distress of caregivers.

Mahler

• Separation will happen because there is a internal method.
• At 6 months infants exist in a phase of symbotic until 6 months so they are unaware of others and surroundings.

Formation

• From birth, first 6 months in normal phase can cause a issue.

Marcia

• 4 categories-the commitment and presence of an event that will result in another ones plans.

Identity Achievement: Crisis leading to commitment

• Foreclosure: a commitment with no crisis.

Theorist

Negl

Evolutionary Theory: adaptive value, used for humans and Wilson. Learning Behavior: the predictable response and behavior that is observed.

Watson

• Had to find out experiment

Social Cog

• Observational behavior is learning: people do what others do and learn from it.
• And you can then learn chunks using models.
• Self confidence happens with the ability.

Lifelong

• Devoted to things that happen before and what to come and affected
• Interconnected between life cycle.

Influences

• Biology
• Culture (contextual)
• Shifting over a life cycle.

Development

• Context
• Historical (occurs with multiple texts)
• Development Issues & tasks
• Issues and Crtitical issues.

Development

• Down syndrome- a problem is in chromosome 21 for Trisomy.
• Hormone therapy treats kinefelter & turner symptoms.

Others

• Gene linked to an individual with a sickness is tested for in the process of blood.
• Hemophilia is when you can't clot.
• CNS goes down and deterirates Huntingtons.

More Illnesses

• Limits Phenyl & Sickle.
• Spina and Surgery are related..
• Kidney the Poly Kidneys in surgery.
• Anencephaly is no treatment for absent brain.

Issues

• Anoxia is not enough oxygen.
• Low birth weight, pre term/gestation.

Small

• Infants need to those whose the weight is low and reduced by increasing the hormone progestin.
• Babies are not warm or are premature if they don't use the right hormone.
• Infant syndrome can happen out of the blue.

Problems To Physical

• Preterm birth or Miscarriages.
  • A short live pregnancy.
• Spontaneous is miscarry
  • Is a embryo with a worm.
• Happens in around the 3rd trimester.
• Overweight is bad.
• Neural for development nervous.
• Weight can mess up.

Toxol & Diet

• Caffeine slightly increases the chance of issues for new born.
• Diet can mess you up.
• X Rays are scary for full term (triple the weight.)
• There are issues

What's not Good

• Older dads don't make babies easy.
  • sperm don't connect. Prenatal cell tests can fix defects Issues is messing w trying to get it. Drugs is going to make it easy.

Issues that are develoomentally focused are with children

• Issues with behavior
• Caregivers do not engage so is hard for cognitive behavior and lack stimulation.
• Eriksson's theory is key to this
• Tendecy the over trustworthiness.
• Person of importance to the infants development should be a person of importance.

Self

• the way we know ourselves
  • if 3 months pay attention a lot in the mirror. Socializarion occurs w the habits and the skills and motives.

In Freud theory if we are trying to develop well you have to:

• Follow the rules in family.
• Understand that they way it goes is very important.