PSYCH 30
Mr. Johnson
Semester One 2010-2011
Course Overview
• Psychology 30 is the study of human development across the time
spans of human life.
• Students will learn about human growth and changes in behaviour
associated with age, including the various stages of development
from conception to old age, and apply such knowledge to
investigate issues in their everyday lives.
Concept Map
Foundational Objectives
• Knowledge
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To acquire knowledge about the concepts of developmental psychology.
To understand the roles that biology and experiences play in human development.
To understand how the sociocultural context influences development.
To understand how the biological, cognitive and socioemotional domains interact and
influence development.
• Skills
• To organize and integrate new knowledge and understandings by making connections
with existing knowledge and understandings.
• To organize and integrate new knowledge and understandings within the discipline of
psychology.
• To organize and integrate new knowledge and understandings with other disciplines.
• To apply those concepts and understandings to a variety of practical, pertinent and
contemporary issues.
• Values
• To appreciate the complex, dynamic, reciprocal and personal aspects of human
development across the lifespans.
Units of Study
1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
6.
7.
What is developmental psychology?
What is the developmental process during the prenatal stage?
What is the developmental process during infancy?
What is the developmental process during early childhood?
What is the developmental process during middle childhood?
What is the developmental process during adolescence?
What is the developmental process during adulthood?
Glossary of Terms
• Accommodation: In Piaget's cognitive theory, accommodation
refers to changes in existing ways of thinking in response to
encounters with new stimuli or events.
• Altruism: An unselfish concern for another person.
• Assimilation: In Piaget's cognitive theory, assimilation is the
process through which people understand an experience in terms
of their current state of cognitive development and way of
thinking.
• Attachment: An intense emotional relationship that is specific to
two people, that endures over time, and in which prolonged
separation from the partner is accompanied by stress and sorrow
(Gross and McIlveen, 1998, p. 328).
• Biotechnology: Biological science when applied, especially to
genetic engineering and DNA technology.
Glossary of Terms
• Cephalocaudal trend: A newborn's head is about one-fourth of its body
length; a two-year-old's head is only one-fifth of its body length. This pattern
of growth is called the cephalocaudal trend (Lefton, Boyes and Ogen, 2000, p.
339).
• Cloning: To make a copy of.
• Cognition: Includes all the mental processes that are used to obtain
knowledge or to become aware of the environment. Cognition encompasses
perception, imagination, judgement, memory, and language. It includes the
processes people use to think, decide, and learn.
• Culture: Culture can be defined as a program of shared rules that govern the
behaviour of people in a community or society, and a set of values and beliefs
shared by most members of that community that are passed from one
generation to another.
• Ego: According to the psychoanalytic perspective on human
development, the ego is the part of the personality that is rational and
reasonable. Providing a reality check for the demands of the id, the ego acts
as a buffer between the outside world and the primitive id. The ego operates
on the “reality principle”, in which instincts are restrained in order to maintain
the safety of the individual and help integrate the individual into society.
Glossary of Terms
• Embryonic period: The embryonic period is the period of prenatal
development that occurs from two to eight weeks after
conception.
• Ethnicity: Ethnic character, background, or affiliation.
• Exosystem: Surrounding the microsystems is the exosystem, which
includes all the external networks, such as community structures
and local educational, medical, employment, and communications
systems that influence the microsystem.
• Fetal period: The fetal period is the period of development that
begins two months after conception and lasts for seven months, on
the average.
• Gender: Gender refers to culturally constructed distinctions
between masculinity and femininity. Individuals are born female or
male; however, they become feminine and masculine through
complex developmental processes that take years to unfold.
Glossary of Terms
• Genetics: The study of how heredity works and, in particular, of
genes. A gene is a section of a long deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA)
molecule. It carries information for the construction of a protein or
part of a protein.
• Genetic engineering: Genetic engineering is the alteration of an
organism's genetic instructions through the insertion of additional
genes. In humans, genetic engineering involves adding normal
genes, either directly via a blood transfusion or bone marrow
transplant or directly into a cluster of cells, thereby enabling the
body to replace ailing cells with healthy ones.
• Germinal period: The germinal period of development is the first
two weeks of development. It is characterized by rapid cell division,
the beginning of cell differentiation, and implantation of the
blastocyst into the uterine wall.
Glossary of Terms
• Heredity: The process of transmitting biological traits from parent
to offspring through genes, the basic units of heredity. Heredity
also refers to the inherited characteristics of an individual, including
traits such as height, eye colour, and blood type.
• Heuristics: Heuristics are rules of thumb people follow in order to
make judgements quickly and efficiently. People use judgemental
heuristics to deal with the large amount of social information with
which we are faced.
• Id: According to the psychoanalytic perspective on human
development, the id is the raw, unorganized, inborn part of
personality that is present at birth. It represents primitive drives
related to hunger, sex, aggression and irrational impulses. The id
operates according to the “pleasure principle”, in which the goal is
to maximize satisfaction and reduce tension.
Glossary of Terms
• Macrosystem: The macrosystem influences all other systems. It includes cultural
values, political philosophies, economic patterns, and social conditions.
• Maturation: The predetermined unfolding of genetic information.
• Microsystem: Microsystems are the systems that intimately and immediately shape
human development. Interactions among the microsystems, as when parents and
teachers coordinate their efforts to educate the child, take place through the
mesosystem.
• Nature/nurture: Nature refers to traits, abilities, and capacities that are inherited from
one's parents. Nature encompasses any factor that is produced by the predetermined
unfolding of genetic information, a process known as maturation. These genetic
inherited influences are at work as we move from the one celled organism that is
created at the moment of conception to the billions of cells that make up a fully formed human being. Nurture refers to the environmental influences that shape
behaviour. Some of these influences may be biological, such as the impact of a
pregnant mother's substance abuse on the fetus, or the amount and kind of food
available to children. Other environmental influences are more social, such as the
ways parents discipline their children and the effects of peer pressure on adolescents
(Feldman, 2000, p. 10).
• Perception: Perception is more than the sum of all the sensory input supplied by our
eyes, ears and other receptors. It is the active selection, organization, and
interpretation of such input.
Glossary of Terms
• Personality: Personality is a particular pattern of behaviour and thinking
prevailing across time and situations that differentiates one person from
another.
• Privation: The failure to develop an attachment to any individual. In
humans, it is usually (but not necessarily) associated with children reared
in institutions, either from or shortly after birth.
• Proximodistal trend: Another growth pattern, the proximodistal trend,
has growth moving from the centre (proximal part) of the body outward
to the more “distant” extremities, that is, the head and torso grow before
the arms, legs, hands, and feet.
• Psychology: Psychology is the science of human thought and behaviour.
• Reflex: An involuntary response to a stimulus.
• Reliability: The extent to which research yields the same results each
time it is applied to the same issue.
Glossary of Terms
• Social cognition: Focuses on the way in which our thoughts are affected
by the immediate social context, and in turn how our thoughts affect
social behaviour. The approach can be summarized as follows:
• people take cognitive shortcuts such as stereotyping in order to minimize the
cognitive load
• ·we develop schemata that represent our knowledge about ourselves, others
and our roles in the social world. Once formed, schemas bias our judgement
• schemata become more complex and organized over time and are harder to
change (Cardwell, 1996, p. 218).
• Social perception: The process by which someone infers other people's
motives and intentions from observing their behaviour and deciding
whether the causes of the behaviour are internal or situational. Social
perception helps people make sense of the world, organize their thoughts
quickly, and maintain a sense of control over the environment. It helps
people feel competent, masterful, and balanced because it helps them
predict similar events in the future (Lefton et al., 2000, p. 457).
Glossary of Terms
• Sudden Infant Death Syndrome (SIDS): The term ‘sudden infant death' is more a description after
the fact than a diagnosis of cause. Despite decades of research, the root cause of Sudden Infant
Death Syndrome is still unknown. In all probability, Sudden Infant Death Syndrome results from a
combination of factors (characteristics of the mother, characteristics of birth, situation at death,
and sleeping conditions), and each factor adds slightly to the overall risk for certain infants who,
for unknown genetic reasons, are vulnerable.
• Superego: According to the psychoanalytic perspective on human development, the superego
represents a person's conscience, incorporating distinctions between right and wrong. It
develops around age five or six and is learned from an individual's parents, teachers, and other
significant figures.
• Temperament: Every individual is born with a distinct genetically-based set of psychological
tendencies or dispositions. These tendencies, which together are called temperament, affect and
shape virtually every aspect of the individual's developing personality. Temperament, and
therefore personality, is not merely genetic. It begins in the multitude of genetic instructions that
guide the development of the brain and then is affected by the prenatal environment (Berger,
2000, p. 219).
• Teratogens: The broad range of substances (such as drugs and pollutants) and conditions (such
as severe malnutrition and extreme stress) that increase the risk of prenatal abnormalities.
• Validity: The extent to which a research methodology measures what it is supposed to measure
(Baron, Earhard and Ozier, 1998, p. 4)