<aside> 💡 skeleton notes

</aside>

• developmental psychology: the study of continuity and change across the life span

• zygote: fertilized egg that contains chromosomes from both an egg and a sperm

• germinal stage: 2-week period that begins at conception

• embryonic stage: period that starts aroudn 2nd week after conception and lasts until about the 8th week

• fetal stage: period that lasts from 9th week after conception until birth

• myelination: formation of fatty sheath around axons of a neuron

• teratogen: substance that passes from mother to unborn child and impairs development

• fetal alcohol syndrome (FAS): developmental disorder that stems from heavy alcohol use by mother during pregnacy

• infancy: stage of development that begins at birth and lasts between 18 and 24 months

• motor development: emergence of the ability to execute physical actions

  • ex: reaching, grapsing, crawling, walking

• motor reflexes: specific motor responses that are triggered by specific patterns of sensory stimulation

  • ex: rooting reflex, sucking reflex

• development of sophisticated behaviors obeys two general rules

  • cephalocaudal rule: (top-to-bottom rule) describes the tendency for motor skills to emerge in sequence from the head to the feet
  • proximodistal rule: (inside-to-outside rule) describes the tendency for motor skils to emerge in sequence from the center to the periphery

• cognitive development: process by which infants and children gain the ability to think and understand

  • happens in 4 discrete stages:
    • sensorimotor stage: stage of cognitive development that begins at birth and lasts through infancy
      • using ability to sense + move to acquire info
    • preopertional stage
    • concrete operational stage
    • formal operational stage
  • schemas: theories about the way the world works
  • assimiation: when infants apply their schemas in novel situations
  • accommodations: when infants revise their schemas in light of new information
  • object performance: the fact that objects exist even when they are not visible
    • infants do not have this (so researchers previously thought)
  • childhood: period that begins at about 18 to 24 months and lasts about 11 or 14 years
  • preoperational stage: stage of cognitive development that begins at about 2 years and ends at about 6 years
    • when children enter childhood
  • concrete operational stage: stage of cognitive development that begins at about 6 years and ends at about 11 years..can transform the concrete objects of the physical world
    • when children exit childhood
  • conservation: notion that the quantitative properties of an object are invariant despite changes in the object's appearance
  • formal operational stage: the final stage of cognitive development that begins around the age of 11, when children learn to reason about abstract concepts
    • concepts like liberty and love
    • ability to generate, consider, reason about, mentally "operate on"
  • egocentrism: failure to understand that the world appears different to different people
  • theory of mind: the understanding that the mind produces representations of the world and that these representations guide behavior
    • autistic people are slow to acquire a theory of mind
  • 3 skills that allow children to learn from others
    • joint attention: ability to focus on what another person is focused on
    • imitation: tendency to do what an adult does
    • social referencing: ability to use another person's reactions as information about how we should think
  • attachement: an emotional bond
    • human infants predisposed to form one with a primary caregiver
  • temperament: characterstic pattern of emotional reactivity
  • internal working model of relationships: set of beliefs about the self, the primary caregiver, and the relationship between them
  • how children's moral thinking shifts:
    • from realism to relativism
    • from prescriptons to principles
    • from outcomes to intentions
  • moral reasoning develops in three stages:
    • preconventional stage: when morality of an action is primarily determined by its consequences for the actor
    • conventional stage: when morality of an action is primarily determined by the extent to which it conforms to social rules
    • postconventional stage: morality of an action is determined by a set of general principles that reflect core values
  • moral judgments are the consequences, not the causes, of emotional reactions
  • adolescence: the period of development that begins with the onset of sexual maturity (11-14yrs) and lasts until the beginning of adulthood (18-21yrs)
  • puberty: onset of bodily changes associated with sexual maturity
  • primary sex characteristics: bodiy structures that are directly involved in reproduction
  • secondary sex charactertistics: bodily structures that change dramatically with sexual maturity that are not directly involved in reproduction
    • boobs
  • brain also changes during this time
  • puberty now happening earlier than it did a few decades ago
    • diet
    • more body fat → more secretion of estrogen
  • adulthood: stage of development that begins around 18 or 21 years and ends at death
  • socioemotional selectivity theory: younger adults are largely oriented toward the acquisition of information that will be useful to them in the future, older adults generally oriented toward informational that brigns emotional satisfaction in the present
    • older people are better at sustaining positive emotions and curtailing negative ones
    • people find late adulthood to be one of the happiest and most satisfying periods of their life
  • marry people report being happier than unmarried people
  • alternatively, researchers believe that happy people are more likely to get married and that marriage is the consequence of happiness
  • interesting stuff here tbh
  • many studies are just correlationational because they cannot be randomly studied

  b

  a

  a

  b

  c

  b

  b

  d

  c

  d

  d

  a

  c

  c

  d