Developmental psychology
Chapter 19
Risk and resilience in development
Resilience: occurs when children experience positive outcomes despite experiencing significant risk.
The historical roots of resilience can be traced to research on individuals with psychopathology.
Many of the children with mental illness were doing well.
Risk factors includes:
Protective factor: anything that prevents or reduces vulnerability for the development of a disorder.
Vulnerability factors: those attributes of the individual that contribute to maladjustment under conditions of adversity.
Children’s exposure to risk varies according to age.
Children in the first few years of live are highly dependent on their families.
Adolescents have larger and more varied social communities and therefore may have access to supportive environments other than family. But they are more influenced by the loss and devastation involved with war and natural disasters.
Parental bereavement
One of the most immediately traumatizing events for children and adolescents is the death of a parent.
Parental bereavement represents a permanent loss and separation from a primary caregiver.
Can be aggraveted by additional stressors.
There is evidence that parental death typically has a smaller effect on children than the effect of parental divorce.
Parental separation/divorce and inter-parental conflict
Family dissolution from parental divorce increases children’s risk for psychological, behavioral, social and academic problems.
Children who grow up in single-parent homes are less successful on average.
These differences have been found to relate to a broad range of outcomes.
Risk is the greatest for children of divorced parents who experience:
Although the intensity diminishes over time, offspring of divorced and remarried families experience difficulties that extend into adolescence and young adulthood.
Children of divorced parents are more likely to have problems with family members, in intimate relations, in marriage, and in the workplace.
The divorce rate is higher and reports of general well-being and life satisfaction are lower.
Resilience is the normative outcome for children who are faced with their parents’ marital transitions.
Abuse and maltreatment
Abuse and maltreatment have developmental consequences which can be wide ranging and long lasting, including perpetration of child maltreatment.
Some children fare better than others in the aftermath of abuse and neglect.
This is likely due the heterogeneity of maltreatment experiences. Children who are older at the age of onset of maltreatment and who are exposed to shorter, less severe and pervasive experiences of abuse are more likely to experience resilience.
Parental psychological disturbances
Parental mental health problems and drug/alcohol use have been linked to a variety of behavioral, socio-emotional and cognitive problems in children.
Many of these disorders co-exist, so it is difficult to disentangle their effects on children.
Parental psychological disturbances also interfere with interpersonal relationships within the family as well as compromise family functioning.
Apart from genetic mechanisms of risk, the quality and quantity of parenting behaviors are likely the key determinants relating to the poor functioning of children and adolescents of depressed mothers.
The effects of maternal depression on positive parenting were strongest for socioeconomically disadvantaged mothers and mothers of children under 1 year of age.
Socioeconomic risks
Childhood income poverty: living in a family whose income falls below a specified level necessary for minimum coverage of basic expenses has been shown to increase the risk of negative child outcomes.
Poverty has more detrimental effects if it is extreme and chronic.
Include:
Poverty in early childhood is more deleterious to long-term achievement outcomes than poverty in middle childhood or adolescence.
Parental education influences the educational advantages of the family and their access to key educational resources and opportunities.
A larger family size, also increases the risk to negative outcomes for children.
The effects of homelessness on school achievement are chronic.
Stressful life events
Stressful life events range from the trivial to severe and from desirable to undesirable.
Although stressful life evens may have more of an impact on parents, both major and minor events contribute to variation in children’s well-being.
Chronic life stress impacts on children’s ability to respond efficiently to new stressors. Chronic stress elevates allostatic load, and this may be implicated in how early childhood exposure to cumulative stressors translates into poorer adjustment and elevated morbidity across the lifespan.
Children’s social context
Children living in impoverished urban areas are particularly at risk for experiencing a variety of difficult circumstances.
Neighborhood disadvantage is associated with more internalizing behavior problems and a higher number of children in the clinical range.
Externalizing behavior problems: delinquent activities, aggression and hyperactivity. Are directly linked to violent episodes, often learned from observing others.
Socioeconomic disadvantage can, via the resources or services available in deprived neighborhoods to the kinds of role models affluent neighborhoods can provide, strongly influence children’s psychiatric outcomes.
The peer group is one of the primary agents through which neighborhood socialization adversely affects children’s outcomes.
Societal mechanisms
The lager social context.
Like discrimination.
Catastrophic events
Catastrophic events such as war, extreme privation and natural disasters, clearly disrupt children’s development.
In such severe trauma, children experience devastation on an extreme and massive scale.
Children are often less capable of coping with the consequences of such catastrophes. They are especially vulnerable to emotional distress.
The effects of war are enduring. War-traumatized children are more likely to experience emotional and physical health problems in adulthood. But, most child survivors do not experience long-term effects.
The examination of a single risk factor does not address the reality of most children’s lives.
The effects of an isolated risk factor tend to be rather modest.
Risk accumulation
The way in which multiple factors have a cumulative effect on child outcomes.
Cumulative risk theory: the sum of risk factors rather than any single risk is what leads to dysfunction because it overwhelms the adaptive capacities of the individual.
No one risk factor is seen as more important than another.
The total effect of individual risk factors is greater than the sum of their individual effects.
The higher number of risk children experience, the worse their developmental outcomes.
Risk specificity
The specific characteristics of an individual risk factor, both in terms of its specific effect and in terms of how it interacts with specific child outcomes.
Individual risk factors vary in their respective impacts.
Adverse life events scale: a measure of life stress, composed of 25 possible events occurring in the last year over which children had little or no control of some adverse life effect.
It is mostly the quantity!
Equifinality and multifinality
Risk specificity oversimplifies the complex interactions between risk factors and outcomes.
Risk factor can influence multiple child outcomes (multifinality) and, a child outcome can be influenced by multiple risk factors (equifinality).
Levels of risk
there is lot of debate around deciding the appropriate level of contextual risk.
Protective factors: those attributes of persons, environments, situations and events that relate to positive adaptation under conditions of adversity.
Vulnerability factors: those attributes that relate to maladjustment under conditions of adversity.
These factors are opposite ends of the same construct.
Three broad sets of variables that have been found to operate as protective factors:
There are few universal protective factors for children.
Factors that promote competence may vary according to the age of the child, the developmental outcome being targeted, or even the general context.
Personal characteristics
Personal attributes suggested to operate as protective factors include both genetic and constitutional factors.
Personal characteristics are always active in a child’s life, but they can also influence the way children react when negative situations occur.
Factors that moderate the effect of risk may be themselves moderated by other factors.
Family characteristics
A secure attachment has been shown to be particularly important for children exposed to adversity. The security of attachment between child an mother has been shown to differentiate between positive and negative outcomes in children experiencing risk. May also enable children to develop their capacity for resilience in the future.
The quality of parenting can also play an essential role in children’s responses to stressful situations.
Parenting may either protect children from difficult life circumstances or make them more vulnerable to adversities.
Authoritative parenting provides the most beneficial environment for children’s development.
A positive, warm and nurturing parent-child relationship may also mitigate the adverse effect.
Family-level resources such as cohesion, positive interactions and support operate as protective factors.
More distal characteristics of families also operate as protective factors.
External support systems
As children mature, external support systems play an increasingly significant role in their capacity for resilience.
Moderator (interactive) effects models
The earliest models of resilience used the term protective factors to refer to factors promoting resilience.
To be meaningful, protective/vulnerability factors must be evident only in combination with a risk factor.
Protective/vulnerability factors are required to have an interactive relationship with the risk factor thereby either having no effect in low-risk populations or their effect being magnified in the presence of risk.
Whether a variable is considered a protective or vulnerability factor depends on its connection with the risk variable.
Main effects models
Models of resilience in which single factors are identified as determining whether a given child exposed to a risk has a good or a poor outcome.
Can be differentiated in terms of whether homogeneous or hetrogeneous risk samples are examined.
Mediator effects models
Models that explore the role of intervening or intermediate variables on the effects of risk.
Pathways through which risk factors are related to outcomes.
Two forms of mediation with respect to how risk operates to influence outcomes:
Moderator versus main/mediator effects models
Interaction effect are the distinguishing feature of resilience research.
Interaction effects identify which factors are associated with positive adaption.
This does not imply that main effects models lack insight into protective processes.
In many cases, interactions are disguised as main effects.
The definition of resilience depends on the outcome being assessed.
In the past, resilience has been defined according to the absence of social deviance or psychopathology.
Research on resilience has traditionally focused on defining competence in a single domain. But children who are doing well in one area may suffer in another.
The definition of resilience is dynamic and developmental in nature.
A resilience framework emphasizes the promotion of competent functioning and fosters the development of policies and interventions that reflect the belief in resilient adaption.
Three types of intervention designs:
Developmental psychology - summary of chapter 1 of an Introduction to Developmental psychology by A. Slater and G. Bremner (third edition)
Developmental psychology
Chapter 1
The scope and Methods of Developmental psychology
Introduction
Developmental psychology: the discipline that attempts to describe and explain the changes that occur over time in the thought, behavior, reasoning and functioning of a person due biological, individual and environmental influences.
Maturation: aspects of development that are largely under genetic control, and hence largely uninfluenced by environmental factors.
Developmental psychologist study age-related changes in behavior and development.
Age itself causes nothing. So we need to look for the many factors that cause development to take place.
The assumptions and ideas we have about human nature will affect how we rear our own children and how we interpret the findings from studies of children.
‘Folk’ theories of development: ideas held about development that are not based upon scientific investigation.
Often reflect the issues that psychologists investigate, with aim of putting our understanding on a firmer, more scientific footing.
Defining development according to world views
The manner in which development is defined, and the areas of development that are of interest to individual researchers, will lead them to use different methods of studying development.
Two paradigms:
Organismic world view
The idea that people are inherently active and continually interacting with the environment, and therefore helping to shape their own development.
Emphasizes the interaction between maturation and experience that leads to the development of new internal, psychological structures for processing environmental input.
Each new stage in development represents an advance on the preceding stage and the individual does not regress to former stages.
Each new stage presents new characteristics not present in the previous stage.
Mechanistic world view
The idea that a person can be represented as being like a machine, which is inherently passive until stimulated by the environment.
Ultimately, human behavior is reducible to the operation of fundamental behavioral units that are acquired in a gradual, cumulative manner.
The frequency of behaviors can increase with age due to various learning processes and they can decrease with age when they no longer have any functional consequence, or lead to negative consequences.
Development is reflected by a more continuous growth function, rather than occurring in qualitatively different stages, and the child is passive rather than active in shaping its own development.
Behaviorists represent this world view.
Designs for studying age-related changes
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Developmental psychology
Chapter 2
Theories and issues in child development
Introduction
Theory of development: a scheme or system of ideas that is based on evidence and attempts to explain, describe and predict behavior and development.
Two types of theory:
Motor milestones: the basic motor skills acquired in infancy and early childhood, such as sitting unaided, standing, crawling and walking.
The development of motor skills has very important implications for other aspects of development.
The ability to act on the world affects all other aspects of development, and each accomplishment brings with it an increasing degree of independence.
Maturational theories
Motor development proceeded from the global to the specific in two directions.
Development is controlled by a maturational timetable linked particularly to the central nervous system and also to muscular development.
Dynamic systems theory
A theoretical approach applied to many areas of development which views the individual as interacting dynamically in a complex system in which all parts interact.
Not all infants go through the same motor developmental stages.
Infants’ acquisition of a new motor skill is much the same as that of adults learning a new motor skill. The beginnings are usually fumbling and poor. There is trial and error learning and great concentration, all gradually leading to the accomplished skillful activity, which then is usually used in the development of yet new motor skills.
All new motor development is the result of a dynamic and continual interaction of three factors:
Piaget’s theory of development
Developmental psychology before Piaget
Behaviorism and psychoanalysis.
The child is seen as the passive recipient of their upbringing. Development results from such things as the rewards and punishments.
Fundamental aspects of human development according to Piaget
Children are active agents in shaping their own development, they are not simply blank slates who passively and unthinkingly respond to whatever the environment offers them.
Children’s development and behavior is motivated largely intrinsically.
Children learn to adapt to their environments and as
Developmental psychology - summary of chapter 3 of an Introduction to Developmental psychology by A. Slater and G. Bremner (third edition)
Developmental psychology
Chapter 3
The nature-nurture debate
Precocial and altricial species
Precocial species: they young are physically mobile and able from the moment of birth or hatching.
Altricial species: are helpless and do not have this capacity at birth.
Nativism and empiricism
Nativism: the view that many skills or abilities are ‘native’ or hard wired into the brain at birth, the result of genetic inheritance.
Empiricism: the view that humans are not born with built-in ‘core-knowledge’ or mental content and that all knowledge results form learning and experience.
Cognition: mental activity.
Mental age and intelligence quotient (IQ)
Chronological age (CA): a person’s actual age
Mental age (MA): an individual’s level of mental ability relative to others.
Intelligence quotient (IQ): a measure of a person’s level of intelligence compared to a population of individuals of approximately the same age.
Originally (MA/CA)*100
Intelligence tests
Four important notes about IQ:
What is intelligence, on ability or several?
To a large extent how intelligence is defined determiners how it is measured.
There are those who argue that a general intelligence ability underlies performance on all intelligence tests.
Others suggest that intelligence is made up of a number of specific abilities or subskills.
Still others have argued that performance on intelligence tests is unrelated to our ability to ‘live our lives intelligently’.
Intelligence test items
Many test divide intelligence into two broad abilities.
Verbal subscales
Similarities: the child is asked in what way things might be similar.
Comprehension: measures the child’s common sense and understanding.
Recall of digits
Performance subscales
Block design: This child is given a set of blocks with colored patterns on them, and asked to use them to make patterns that the tester knows.
Copying: the child is shown a drawing and asked to copy it on a sheet of paper. The drawings are initially simple and become progressively more complex geometric shapes.
Controversies and issues in intelligence
Heriability: a statistical measure that describes how much of the variation of a trait in a population is due to genetic differences in that population.
.....read more Developmental psychology - summary of chapter 4 of an Introduction to Developmental psychology by A. Slater and G. Bremner (third edition)
Developmental psychology
Chapter 4
Prenatal development
Prenatal development: the development of human individuals before they are born.
Foetus: (by humans) the organism 12 weeks after conception until birth.
Embryo: the developing organism during the period when organs are forming. In human from first cell divisions until about 10 weeks.
Neonate: an infant less than a month old.
Postnatal development: the development of a human individual after he or she is born, particularly during early infancy.
Organogenesis: the process of organ formation in very early development. In humans this is from fist cell division until about 10 weeks.
Throughout life, normal development demands constant and complex interactions between genes, environment and the emerging organism.
The impact of prenatal experience occurs on multiple levels. From biochemical factors influencing gene expression, in the foetus’s neuronal circuitry to characteristics of the mother’s lifestyle affecting the foetal environment.
Exquisitely timed, complex interactions between the genes and environmental input affect acquisition of neuronal identity, guidance of axons to target, induction of connections between cells or synaptogenesis, and also programmed cell death or apoptosis.
Processes and sequencing of brain development
Ectoderm: the outermost of the three primary germ layers of an embryo. The central nervous system and skin, among other structures, develop from ectodrem.
The other two are endoderm and mesoderm.
During he embryonic period, the central nervous system brings as cells of ectoderm, one of three germ layers. The germ layers are the foundation for organ formation.
The endoderm thickens and becomes the neural plate by day 18 of gestation. By then it is already differentiated into cells that will become forebrain, midbrain and hindbrain.
The neural plate folds to become the neural tube, and by the end of the first month the embryonic body has the basic cranial-caudal (head to feed) organization.
Cells are born, and begin extensive migration to their eventual location where the will become their final forms.
Neurogenesis and migration continue right up to about the sixth month of pregnancy, and are followed by extensive changes in individual cells that program them for the myriad tasks awaiting the emerging brain.
Despite their ultimate high level of specialization, the 1010 nerve cells that will comprise the brain originate from one single
Developmental psychology - summary of chapter 5 of an Introduction to Developmental psychology by A. Slater and G. Bremner (third edition)
Developmental psychology
Chapter 5
Perception, knowledge and action in infancy
Cognitive development: the development of behaviors that relate to perception, attention, thinking, remembering and problem-solving.
Mental representation: an internal description of aspects of reality that persists in the absence of these aspects of reality.
Traditionally a key aspect of the distinction between perception and cognition.
But, its applicatoin to infancy has not been so productive as once seemed likely.
Right from birth, infants perceive the world in a sophisticated way, and in the early months they develop perceptual abilities that ‘fill in the gasp’ in perception so that invisible parts of objects are perceived, and that are temporarily hidden are treated as continuing in existence.
Early limitations in vision; are they really a problem?
Visual acuity: the ability to make fine discrimination between the elements in the visual array.
Newborns’ vision is significantly poorer than that of older individuals.
Visual acuity is probably around 1/30th the level of perfect adult acuity.
Young infants have poor control over focusing the eyes (visual accommodation).
These limitations are short lived, both acuity and accommodation improve rapidly during the first 6 months.
Although much of the detail of the visual world may be not available to young infants, these limitations should not affect perception of the larger scale structure of objects.
How can we investigate infant perception?
The visual preference method
Visual preference method to determine whether infants have preferences for certain stimuli. They are shown two objects side by side, and the amount of time they spend looking at each one is then compared.
Such looking time difference is defined as a visual preference. Such a preference implies discrimination, otherwise there would be no basis for preference.
The two stimuli are presented over a series of trials in which left-right associations are systematically varied.
Habituation techniques
If the infant looks for shorter periods over trials, this implies that progressively more of the stimulus has been committed to memory. This if infants habituate they must have form of visual memory.
To investigate visual discrimination.
Shape perception in newborns
Even newborns are capable of
.....read more Developmental psychology - summary of chapter 6 of an Introduction to Developmental psychology by A. Slater and G. Bremner (third edition)
Developmental psychology
Chapter 6
Emotional development and attachment relationships
Introduction
Emotional development underlies many other aspects of development, and has serious implications for how we conduct research with children.
Children’s emotional development can broadly be divided into three areas.
Expressing and recognizing emotional expressions
Are expressions of emotions innate?
Cross-cultural evidence
There is good evidence for the universality of human facial expressions of emotion.
Understanding of how emotions are conveyed through facial expressions is universal, but does not necessarily mean that understanding emotional expressions is innate.
Expressions of emotion in infancy
Infants from birth spontaneously display a wide repertoire of emotions though their facial expressions.
Basic emotions: happiness, interest, surprise, disgust, sadness, distress, anger, fear.
Complex emotions: pride, shyness, jealousy, guilt, shame, embarrassment.
Adults are skillful in accurately reading infants’ expressions.
However, adults are less accurate in discriminating infant’s negative facial expressions indicative of fear, anger, sadness or disgust. This appears not to be due to a lack of subtlety in young infants’ expression, but to the fact that the facial expressions arising from these different emotions are quite similar.
There is a biological basis for infant’s emotional facial expressions.
Multiple facial cues are used to signal emotion and the ability to convey and accurately interpret emotional expressions is impressively robust.
Infants indisputably display basic emotions very early in life. But there is considerable debate about when complex emotions emerge.
Infant discrimination of facial expressions
3-month-olds can distinguish between photographs of people smiling and frowning.
4- to 7-month-olds can distinguish between expressions of happiness and surprise.
Can young infants empathize with others’ emotions?
Very young infants may be emphasizing with the emotion they see portrayed.
But we cannot be sure.
Social referencing
Social referencing: infants and young children look at their caregiver for ‘advice’ when faced with an difficult or uncertain situation and seek social cures to guide their actions.
This provides and excellent way to assess infants’ understanding of other people’s emotional expressions.
Emotion understanding
Children begin to talk about emotions at a surprisingly young age, and parents readily give anecdotal accounts of their children using emotion words in the second year of life.
There are differences between emotional responses of infants and young children and those of older children and adults.
Emotional ambiguity: the realization that a person’s feelings may not be clear-cut or match your own emotional response.
.....read more
Developmental psychology - summary of chapter 9 of an Introduction to Developmental psychology by A. Slater and G. Bremner (third edition)
Developmental psychology
Chapter 9
Cognitive development
Epistemology: the study of the origins of knowledge and how we know what we know.
Two important findings of Piaget:
According to Piaget, everything that we know and understand is filtered through our current frame of reference. We construct new understandings of the world based on what we already know.
Constructivist.
Underlying structures and processes
Schemes
The basic unit of understanding is a scheme.
This is a cognitive structure that forms the basis of organizing actions and mental representations so that we can understand and act upon the environment.
This makes up our frames of reference through which we filter new information. Everything we know starts with the schemes we are born with.
Three of the basic schemes we are born with are reflexive actions that can be performed on objects: sucking, looking and grasping.
As children grow older they begin to use schemes based on internal mental representations rather than using schemes based on physical activity.
These schemes are operations.
Processes: organization and adaptation
Two innate processes to explain how children modify their schemes:
Through the processes of accommodation and assimilation we adjust to reality.
Piaget’s stages of cognitive development
Equilibration: in Piagetian theory, a state in which children’s schemes are in balance and undisturbed by conflict.
The processes of assimilation and accommodation comprise the equilibration process.
We are, by nature, constantly motivated to be able to fully assimilate and accommodate to objects and situations in our environment, to reach the state of cognitive equilibration.
At times, so many new levels of understanding converge that we reach a major reorganization in the structure of thinking.
These new levels of thinking are states. Qualitative shifts in a child’s way of thinking.
The ages at which they are achieved vary from one child to another. But, the order of progressing through stages is invariant.
Piaget believed his stages were universal:
Developmental psychology - summary of chapter 10 of an Introduction to Developmental psychology by A. Slater and G. Bremner (third edition)
Developmental psychology
Chapter 10
The development of language
A communication system
Human language is primarily a communication system, a means for speakers of a language to communicate with one another.
This ability is not unique to the human species.
But non of the communication systems of other species have been found to possess all of he characteristics found in human communication.
Human language is a symbolic, rule-governed system that is both abstract and productive, characteristics that enable its speakers to produce and comprehend a wide range of utterances.
It evolved from multiple abilities.
A symbolic system
Words and parts of words represent meanings.
These symbols refer to things other than themselves. They are conventional because speakers of a language use the same word to express the same meanings. This makes communication possible.
Language symbols are arbitrary, there is no necessary relation between sound and meaning.
A rule-governed system
Each human language is constrained by a set of rules that reflects the regularities of the language.
The rule system is abstract, it goes beyond the simple association of individual words and instead involves the manipulation of abstract classes of words.
Articles precede nouns.
The abstract classes and rules enable a languages productivity.
Language is productive
A finite number of linguistic units and a finite number of rules are capable of yielding an infinite number of grammatical utterances.
Speakers may produce and comprehend novel utterances.
Language also makes it possible to discuss fantasies and hypothetical situations and events.
Turn-taking
Conversations take place when participants take turns responding to each other’s queries or statements.
Mother-infant interactions
Turn-taking behavior makes its first appearance in the earliest interaction between mothers and infants.
Nursing sometimes involves an early non-verbal type of turn-taking.
Touching and vocalizations are two modalities in which exchanges between mothers and their infants takes turns.
Proto-conversations: interactions between adults and infants in which the adults tend to vocalize when the infants are not vocalizing, or after the infant has finished vocalizing.
Between 8 and 12 months, infants begin to take a more active role in turn-taking.
The dyadic proto-conversations evolve into triadic interactions
Developmental psychology - summary of chapter 11 of an Introduction to Developmental psychology by A. Slater and G. Bremner (third edition)
Developmental psychology
Chapter 11
Acquiring a theory of mind
Unlike other creatures, humans are able to marshal vast intellectual resources in an effort to connect with other people.
In non-humans, social behavior might have a great deal to do with instinct.
Early attunement to others’ minds
The ability to connect with other minds is present early in development.
Before long, the relationship is cemented when the baby shows a range of social responses.
Intuitive psychology: the awareness some people have regarding other’s desires, motives and beliefs, they appear able to anticipate others’ reactions and behavior.
Focusing on false beliefs: the unexpected transfer test
If we ask a participant to make judgments about another person’s true beliefs, they would respond correctly even in the absence of knowing anything about other minds.
Unexpected transfer test: a measure of theory of mind in which a child sees an object put in one place and it is later moved to another location without the child being aware of it. The theory-of-mind question is ‘where will the child look for the object when they want to find it?’
A reason for focusing on false beliefs is because it is important for children to be attuned to false as opposed to true beliefs.
Piaget characterized children below 7 years as egocentric.
But,
Wimmer found that from about 4 or 5 years, children set aside their own knowledge in making correct attributions of other people’s false beliefs.
Children negotiate a radical conceptual shift around the time of their fourth birthday, which equips them with a representational theory of mind that allows them to acknowledge false belief.
Children rapidly develop in their understanding of the mind at about 4 years of age.
The deceptive box test
According to Gopnik, understanding other minds by a process of simulation is implausible.
Being able to find out what someone else thinks by working out what you yourself would think in that situation depends
Developmental psychology - summary of chapter 12 of an Introduction to Developmental psychology by A. Slater and G. Bremner (third edition)
Developmental psychology
Chapter 12
Reading and mathematics in developmental psychology
Introduction
Cultural tools: any tools that help us to calculate, produce models, make predictions and understand the word more fully.
One characteristic of cultural tools is that they can vary from culture to culture.
Orthography: a writing system. Orthography is used to describe any aspect of print, or, the spelling
Alphabetic script: a writing system in which written symbols (letters) correspond to spoken sounds. Individual phonemes represent the individual letters of an alphabetic script.
There are several different alphabetic scrips, and there are radical differences among orthographies that use exactly the same script.
Morpheme: a unit of meaning.
In some scripts, each character signals a morpheme.
Syllabary: the name given to a language that relies heavily on syllables for meaning.
Mora: a rhythmic unit in languages like Japanese that can be either a syllable or part of a syllable.
Syllable: the smallest unit of a word whose pronunciation forms a rhythmic break when spoken.
The difficulty of alphabetic scripts
Represents speech at the level of phonemes.
No language has many phonemes in it and thus one does not need many letters to represent them.
The problem
Phonemic awareness and learning to read
Children get better with phonemes as they grow older.
This has to do with instruction.
Experience of learning to read an alphabetic script does make people aware of phonemes. Children need this form of awareness to become successful readers.
Rhymes and rimes
Some research suggests that children’s awareness of other phonological units, beside phoneme, plays a part in learning to read.
Between the levels of the syllable and the phoneme lies a set of phonological units which is called intrasyllabic. These are usually smaller in size than the syllable and larger than the phoneme. (like onset and rime).
Onset: of a syllable is the consonant, cluster of consonants, or vowel at the beginning of a syllable.
Rime: the vowel sound of a syllable plus any consonants that follow.
Monosyllabic words rhyme because they have a rime in common. (cat and hat).
Most children are aware of rimes from an early age and often actively and spontaneously create, and play with,
Developmental psychology - summary of chapter 15 of an Introduction to Developmental psychology by A. Slater and G. Bremner (third edition)
Developmental psychology
Chapter 15
Moral reasoning
Every discussion of the development of prosocial and antisocial behavior must cover the work of Piagent and Kohlberg.
Piaget
The first to study in a systematic way the moral judgments of children.
Piaget presented them with hypothetical moral dilemmas and then asked the children to make judgments.
From responses to dilemmas and to queries concerning the rules of games, Piaget concluded that younger children’s moral judgment was governed by unilateral respect for adult and adults’ rules, with little understanding of reciprocity or the intentions of others.
Young children children judge that the greater damage constitutes a larger moral violation, because the intentions will not be salient.
With age children develop a morality of cooperation and social exchange.
Children come to understand that intentions matter, that roles can be reversed, and that moral conflicts must be resolved through discussion and compromise with peers.
Age 10.
Kohlberg
Moral dilemmas to elicit moral reasoning.
Five stages of judgment
1. Heteronomous morality
2. Instrumental morality
3. Interpersonal normative morality
4. Social system morality
5. Human rights and social welfare morality
Age and stage
Kohlberg claimed that development across childhood and adolescence is characterized by sequential passage through the stages.
Stages 1 and 2 are most characteristic of children
Stage 3 emerging among adolescents.
Stage 4 increases in salience across adolescence
Stage 5 appears in adulthood
Developmental psychology - summary of chapter 16 of an Introduction to Developmental psychology by A. Slater and G. Bremner (third edition)
Developmental psychology
Chapter 16
Cognitive development in adolescence
Perception
Perception is one of the cognitive abilities that develop earliest in life.
Children’s perception becomes increasingly flexible.
Ambiguous figures.
Increased flexibility of thought in adolescence allows alternations between the different perspecitves to be easily accomplished in ambiguous figures.
Adolescents can identify both components and wholes.
Selective attention
Development is evident in the adolescent’s superior ability to allocate attentional resources.
Selective attention.
the time it takes for the brain to either receive or output information.
It develops rapidly during childhood and continues to develop during the adolescent years so that older adolescents show faster speed of processing compared to younger adolescents.
This development is at least partially driven by the maturation of white matter in the brain.
By early adulthood memory can be quite remarkable.
There is a rapid development in face processing abilities during childhood and adolescence, with adult-level recognition reached by about 16 years of age.
Is there a qualitative change in face processing between childhood and adolescence?
Proposal
Encoding switch hypothesis: different information abut faces is represented in memory by children at different ages. Young children rely on information about individual features, whereas older children and adults use information bout the configuration of the features.
Face processing emphasizing features is referred to as featural processing.
Face processing emphasizing configuration is configural processing.
Children younger than 10 years of age make identifications largely on the basis of parahernalia items such as hat or glasses.
Younger children’s failure in recognizing the right person may be because they encoded non-essential information for determining identity.
Even face-processing abilities during adolescence are still developing considering their less than adult like levels in face recognition memory.
There is a drop in performance on face recognition tasks occuring at about 11 years of age.
This appears to be influenced by factors such as children’s level of familiarity with the type of face stimuli used and the difficulty of the recognition task.
Hormonal influence?
Short-term memory
Short-term memory increases steadily throughout childhood and into adolescence.
Possible explanations:
Developmental psychology - summary of chapter 18 of an Introduction to Developmental psychology by A. Slater and G. Bremner (third edition)
Developmental psychology
Chapter 18
Educational implications
Pedagogy: an aspect of theory or practice related to learning.
Curriculum: the set of courses, and their content, offered at a school or university.
The effects of peer interaction
Piaget’s interest in interaction was predominantly in the importance of interaction with the physical rather than interpersonal environment.
In his earlier work, Piaget outlined a case for the importance of social interaction not only as a means to encourage learning, but also as a direct cause of development itself.
The primary intellectual deficit of the preoperational child, is the child’s inability to decentre or take account of alternative perspectives on the world to their own. However, this egocentrism could be overcome by peer interaction.
Through interaction with peers the child questions their own understanding, leading to a resolution of the conflict and a cognitive advantage.
Working in pairs can promote performance on Piagetian tasks
Peer facilitation effects: pairing of two children can have a positive impact on children’s later individual performance.
Bad performing children benefit from interaction.
Peer effects are persistent
The effects of paired interaction improve children’s performance are relatively long-lasting.
The changes in thinking promoted by sociocognitive conflict help children to benefit from subsequent learning experiences.
The positive and persistent effects of peer interaction extend beyond advances in cognitive development to advances in social development.
There is also concomitant development in social skills, communication, self-esteem, perspective-taking and social-emotional competence.
These positive effects on social skills are themselves a separate product of peer collaboration.
Peer effects in older children: Computer-based tasks
Much of the experimental work on the effects of peer interaction on children’s learning in middle school has centered on computer-based tasks.
7- 9 year olds benefit from interacting with other child when working on the Tower of Hanoi problem-solving task.
Peer interaction not only improved how quickly children arrived at the correct solution, but also positively affects the kind of strategies these children use.
Positive peer interaction effects are not restricted to very young children.
Constructing effective peer pairings
Positive effects of the efficacy of peer collaboration are not certain to arise.
Whilst a more developmentally advanced peer can likely benefit form collaboration in the form crystallizing and
Developmental psychology - summary of chapter 19 of an Introduction to Developmental psychology by A. Slater and G. Bremner (third edition)
Developmental psychology
Chapter 19
Risk and resilience in development
Resilience: occurs when children experience positive outcomes despite experiencing significant risk.
The historical roots of resilience can be traced to research on individuals with psychopathology.
Many of the children with mental illness were doing well.
Risk factors includes:
Protective factor: anything that prevents or reduces vulnerability for the development of a disorder.
Vulnerability factors: those attributes of the individual that contribute to maladjustment under conditions of adversity.
Children’s exposure to risk varies according to age.
Children in the first few years of live are highly dependent on their families.
Adolescents have larger and more varied social communities and therefore may have access to supportive environments other than family. But they are more influenced by the loss and devastation involved with war and natural disasters.
Parental bereavement
One of the most immediately traumatizing events for children and adolescents is the death of a parent.
Parental bereavement represents a permanent loss and separation from a primary caregiver.
Can be aggraveted by additional stressors.
There is evidence that parental death typically has a smaller effect on children than the effect of parental divorce.
Parental separation/divorce and inter-parental conflict
Family dissolution from parental divorce increases children’s risk for psychological, behavioral, social and academic problems.
Children who grow up in single-parent homes are less successful on average.
These differences have been found to relate to a broad range of outcomes.
Risk is the greatest for children of divorced parents who experience:
Although the intensity diminishes over time, offspring of divorced and remarried families experience difficulties that extend into adolescence and young adulthood.
Children of divorced parents are more likely to have problems with family members, in intimate relations, in marriage, and in the workplace.
The divorce rate is higher and reports of general well-being and life satisfaction are
Developmental psychology - summary of chapter 20 of an Introduction to Developmental psychology by A. Slater and G. Bremner (third edition)
Developmental psychology
Chapter 20
Social problems in schools
Social pressures in the classroom
One key factor is he process of social comparison whereby the child compares his or her performance with classmates.
Comparison is usually upward, with students who perform better than themselves but who seem similar to them on a rage of related and unrelated attributes.
Such comparison can raise the child’s level of academic performance but can also result in negative self-perceptions.
Self-worth protection: the tendency of some students to reduce their levels of effort so that any subsequent poor academic performance will be attributed to low motivation rather than a lack of ability.
Peer pressure to work, or not!
An important social factor in school concerns pressure to work, or not to work, hard in class and on homework.
There is a very different nature of peer pressure in Eastern and Western cultures.
In eastern cultures, striving is typically seen as praiseworthy.
Children in US and UK often discourage any overt display of academic engagement by their classmates. Academic success in itself is not necessarily problematic for acceptance. Effortless success is generally admired.
As high stakes testing in many countries increasingly lead teachers, parents and students focus upon success on a variety of externally regulated tests and examinations, it is not surprising that student stress levels on relation to academic performance can often be high.
Bullying is usually taken to be a subset of aggressive behavior, characterized by repetition and an imbalance of power.
The behavior is repetitive and the victim cannot defend him/herself easily, for one or more reasons.
Bullying is likely to have particular characteristics and particular outcomes.
The relative defenselessness of the victim implies an obligation on others to intervene.
How do we find out about bullying?
The main methods are:
Incidence figures for bullying
Incidence figures for bullying vary greatly depending on measurement criteria.
Broadly speaking, in Western industrialized countries, some 5 per cent of children might
Developmental psychology - summary of chapter 21 of an Introduction to Developmental psychology by A. Slater and G. Bremner (third edition)
Developmental psychology
Chapter 21
Atypical development
Two ways in which development can be atypical
Williams syndrome: a rare neurodevelopmental disorder caused by deletion of about 26 genes from the long arm of chromosome 7.
Considering whether a child development is
Quantifying delay
Types of delay
Assessment of delay is not confined exclusively to norms for atypical development. Standardized assessment scales have been designed for use with specific exceptional populations.
The study of atypically developing children provides a profile of the main behaviors associated with a condition withing the context of development across the human lifespan.
This profile has the potential to generate a new knowledge base from which to design and deliver interventions.
Unfortunately, in the context of a relatively young field, there remains insufficient description of the atypical trajectories associated with particular disorders to warrant a sufficiently robust evidence base to inform the design and delivery of interventions fit-for-purpose.
Studying development that is considered atypical can inform us about development that is typical and vice versa.
Developmental Psychology: UvA Practice Questions
Which of the following statements about development in puberty is true?
A developmental psychologist carries out research into the development of aggression in children. She registers the same group of children at several moments and has chosen a research design in which she can both identify possible cohort effects and correct them in her analyzes. What is the design of this researcher?
Berk typifies developmental psychological theories as theories that view development as discontinuous or continuous. In which following combination of two developmental psychological theories is first called a discontinuous development theory and then a continuous development theory?
Jorrin is 3 years old and is asked to arrange a group of 7 blocks from small to large. Completing this task requires __________ and Jorrin will probably _________ be able to complete the task.
In developmental psychology, a "sensitive period" refers to:
The neo-Piagetan approach combines:
Camille says to her father on the other side of the room: "Look, Daddy, an elephant!" Camille keeps the book up without turning it over so that her father can also see the picture. The behavior of Camille is characteristic of _________ thinking.
Introduction to developmental psychologyIn this magazine you can find everything you need in the course developmental psychology at the first year of psychology at the Uva.
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