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Questions and Answers
What is the main theme in understanding human development?
During which stage of prenatal development does the risk of environmental factors affecting the fetus increase?
What direction does motor development follow in childhood?
What percentage of children are classified as 'Easy' in terms of temperament?
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What is the primary focus of Bowlby's attachment theory?
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What is the age range when separation anxiety typically peaks?
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What is the term for the sudden burst of growth accompanied by restlessness and irritability in childhood?
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What is Harlow's substitute mothers experiment known for?
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What is the percentage of children classified as 'Difficult' in terms of temperament?
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What is the primary assumption of Bowlby's attachment theory?
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Study Notes
Cognitive Development
- Piaget's stages: sensorimotor (birth to 2), preoperational (2-7), concrete operational (7-11), and formal operational (11+)
- Preoperational: improve use of mental images, no mastery of conservation, centration, irreversibility, egocentrism, and animism
- Concrete operational: ability to perform operations, masters reversibility and decentration, decline of egocentrism, and gradual mastery of conservation
- Formal operational: abstract concepts and systematic problem-solving
Neo-Piagetian Theories
- M-capacity and staircase model
Vygotsky’s Sociocultural Theory
- Importance of social interaction
- Role of language acquisition
- Zone of proximal development (ZPD)
- Scaffolding
Critical Periods of Development
- Sensitive or optimal period (critical period)
- Six-month threshold (in Romanian study)
What do Children Understand about the Mind?
- Before age 4, don't understand concept of false beliefs or motivations for behaviors
- Copy → interpretive theory of mind
- Autistic children: patterns of attachment
Patterns of Attachments
- Secure
- Anxious-ambivalent
- Avoidant
- Disorganized-disoriented
Effects of Secure Attachment
- Resilient, competent toddlers with high self-esteem
- Display more persistence, curiosity, self-reliance, and leadership and better peer relationships
- More advanced cognitive development
Bonding
- At birth: skin-to-skin contact ("magic moment")
- Day care: heated debate
Culture and Attachment
- Emergence of separation anxiety seems universal
- But rates of secure vs. anxious-ambivalent vs. avoidant attachments vary by culture (e.g., Germany and Japan)
- Attributed to variations in child-rearing practices (e.g., Germans encourage independence unlike Japanese)
Personality Development
- Erikson’s Stage Theory: eight stages, each based upon a psychosocial crisis
- Key is how are these crises dealt with
Cognitive Development
- Embryological parallelism: "Does ontogeny recapitulate phylogeny?"
- Suggests common ancestry and so common development
Intellectual Development
- Piaget’s Stage Theory: four major stages
Human Development
- Development is the sequence of age-related changes that occur as a person progresses from conception to death
- An orderly, cumulative process
- Two Themes: transition and continuity
- Look at how people evolve through transitions over time
- Try to understand continuity with the past
Prenatal Development
- Germinal stage
- Embryonic stage
- Fetal stage
- Environmental Factors: Maternal drug use; Maternal illness; and Maternal nutrition
Childhood
- Motor development: head-to-foot direction (cephalocaudal trend) and centre-outward direction (proximodal trend)
- Sudden burst of growth accompanies by restlessness and irritability
- Attributed mostly to maturation
- Developmental norms and benchmarks
- Individuals vary and so do cultures
- But great similarity in sequence and timing of motor development
Temperament
- Refers to characteristic mood, activity level, and emotional reactivity
- Considerable variation
- Longitudinal studies (Fels Institute followed individuals from birth to death)
- Cross-sectional studies look at differing age at a single point in time
- Three styles of temperament: 40% Easy children, 15% Slow-to-warm-up, 10% Difficult children, and 35% Mixture of these three
- Temperament at 3 Mo. fair predictor at age 10 years
Attachment
- Harlow’s substitute mothers: Wire vs. Cloth substitutes, Contact comfort
- Bowlby: Biological basis for attachment (they depend upon adults and adults are captivated by them—THEY ARE SO CUTE!)
- Evolutionary Perspectives: Bowlby assumed attachment is a product of natural selection, biologically programmed, and has survival value
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Description
This quiz covers the preoperational and concrete operational periods of Piaget's cognitive development theory, including characteristics such as centration, egocentrism, and conservation.