Introduction to Lifespan, Theories and Research, Beginnings (Lessons 1-3) 1. Describe the study of human development. Distinguish between physical, cognitive, and psychosocial development.

• The Developing Person Through The Lifespan Study Guide Answers
• Chapter 2 Study Guide Answers

What are the stages of the lifespan? Describe these. What is meant by social class? What is a cohort?

How might social class impact a person’s life chances? Compare research methods noting the advantages and disadvantages of each. What is confirmation bias and sampling bias? Distinguish between independent and dependent variables.

Explain the conditions for establishing cause and effect relationships between variables. Define theory. Discuss in detail Freud’s theory of psychosexual development. Also explain the parts of the self, defense mechanisms, and fixation. Describe Erikson’s psychosocial stages of development.

Who is the father of developmental psychology? Explain classical and operant conditioning principles. Which names would you associate with each? Describe social learning theory including the concept of modeling. Explain Piaget’s theory of cognitive development including the concepts of schema, assimilation, accommodation, cognitive equilibrium and the stages of intelligence. Explain sociocultural theory of cognitive development.

The Developing Person Through The Lifespan Study Guide Answers

Explain the ecological-systems approach to development. What is the difference between genes and chromosomes? How do gametes differ from other normal human cells?

What determines the sex of the child? Define polygenic and multifactorial.

Distinguish between dizygotic and monozygotic twins. What is the difference between genetic and chromosomal abnormalities?

List and describe some more common chromosomal abnormalities. What happens during conception? Distinguish between the zygotic (germinal), embryonic, and fetal periods of development. Give details. What is the age of viability? Discuss some of the problems facing newborns.

What is the APGAR? Discuss some of the complications of pregnancy as well as a normal delivery.

Characterize approaches to childbirth and a normal birth process. What are teratogens? Give examples.

The online Word to HTML converter lets you convert Word documents to a clean HTML code with just a couple clicks.

QUESTIONS FROM TEXTBOOK READING MATERIAL WEEK 1-13/ CHAPTERS 1-18 READING 1, 2 What is development? Lifespan development concerns continuities and changes in a person’s long-term growth, feelings and patterns of thinking. It occurs in the physical, cognitive and psychosocial domains. The domains of development interact in many ways, and individuals always develop as whole persons rather than in separate parts Why study development? Studying development can help you develop appropriate expectations about human behaviour and its changes.

It can help you respond appropriately to individuals’ behaviour and recognise cases in which unusual behaviours are a cause for concern. Studying development can also give you knowledge and an understanding of your past How has society’s view of infancy, childhood and adolescence changed over time? Until just a few hundred years ago, childhood and adolescence were not regarded as distinct periods of life. Social changes, including the Industrial Revolution, led to an awareness of children’s unique needs and vulnerability, but also contributed to modern (and mistaken) views of children being incompetent, passive and unimportant. In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the first research studies of children consisted of baby biographies and structured observations of children at specific ages What general issues are important in developmental psychology? Developmental psychology is not dissimilar to other forms of developmental study.

However, it also has a distinctive emphasis on four themes: continuity within change; lifelong growth; changing meanings and vantage points; and diversity among individuals How do developmental psychologists study development? Research about developmental psychology tries to follow scientific methods: formulating research questions, stating them as hypotheses, testing the hypotheses, and interpreting and publicising the results.

Studies vary in the time frame (cross-sectional, or longitudinal), in the extent of control of the context (naturalistic or experimental), and in sampling strategies (surveys, interviews or case studies). Cross-sectional studies compare individuals of different ages at one point in time. Longitudinal studies observe human change directly following the same individuals over relatively long periods of time.

Naturalistic methods observe individuals in natural contexts as much as possible. Experimental methods try to control or hold constant extraneous conditions while varying only one or two specified variables. Surveys, interviews and case studies each sample different numbers of people and provide different levels of context in their information What ethical considerations should guide the study of development? Ethical considerations guide how development can be studies, sometimes ruling out certain studies altogether.

Generally, studies are guided by principles of confidentiality, full disclosure or purposes and respect for the individual’s freedom to participate. Research about children and vulnerable adults should strive for informed consent from participants and their parents / guardians. The specific ethical concerns in studying development depend on the age or developmental level of the individuals studied, as well as the content of the study itself What are the developmental theories and how are they useful? Theories are useful in organising and explaining the process of development and in stimulating and guiding developmental research, theory and practice. Theories differ in the degree to which they emphasise maturation versus experience, continuous versus stage-like development, the individual’s active versus passive participation, and the breadth of theoretical focus How have psychodynamic theories influenced thinking about development? Freud’s and Erikson’s theories see development as a dynamic process that occurs in a series of stages, each involving psychological conflicts that the developing person must resolve. According to Freud, personality development is energised by the conflicting functions of the id, ego and superego.

Erikson’s theory outlines eight developmental stages that encompass the entire lifespan; by resolving the basic crisis at each stage – such as trust vs mistrust in infancy or intimacy vs isolation in young adulthood – the developing person attains what Erikson terms virtue. So, for instance, the infant who resolves the trust/mistrust crisis attains the virtue of hope; the young adult who resolves the intimacy/isolation crisis attains love. Object relations approaches such as Mahler’s and Stern’s emphasise development as resulting from a child’s mental representations of early social and emotional relationships with parents and important others. Psychodynamic theories help us to understand the importance of attachment in intimate relationships throughout life and to conceptualise the process of identity formation in adolescence and adulthood, to name just two lifespan applications How have developmental theories based on learning theories contributed to our understanding of developmental change? Pavlov’s theory emphasises learning through classical conditioning as the main process through which developmental changes occur. Skinner’s operant conditioning theory emphasises the influence of reinforcement, punishment, extinction and shaping on developmental change. Bandura’s social cognitive theory emphasises reciprocal and interactional processes involving direct observational learning, modelling and vicarious reinforcement.

Learning theories have application across the lifespan, particularly in helping us to understand the influence of learning on development and helping individuals modify or eliminate problematic behaviours and learn new, desirable behaviours How do cognitive developmental theories help us to understand changes in thinking and problem solving throughout the lifespan? Piaget’s theory explains the underlying structures and processes involved in the development of children’s thinking and problem solving. Piaget suggested that thinking develops in a series of increasingly complex and sophisticated stages, each of which incorporates the achievements of those preceding it. The developing person achieves new ways of thinking and problem solving through the joint processes of assimilation (fitting a new scheme into an existing one) and accommodation (changing an existing scheme to meet the challenges of a new situation). Neo-Piagetian theorists Case and Fischer emphasis the role of mental space, skills acquisition, and information-processing capacity in cognitive development. Information-processing theory focuses on the steps involved in thinking, Information is stored in the sensory register, then in STM, and finally in LTM. As people grow older, they experience cognitive changes in control processes, metacognition and their knowledge bases.

Cognitive theories help us to understand and foster intellectual development, problem solving abilities and critical thinking skills throughout the lifespan. How have contextual approaches to development broadened our view of developmental change? Bronfenbrenner’s ecological systems theory proposes that the microsystem, mesosystem, exosystem, and macrosystem form interactive and overlapping contexts for development. Vygotsky emphasises the contribution of history and culture to development, which takes place within a child’s zone of proximal development. Lerner’s contextual approach emphasises the dynamic, interactive, reciprocal relationships between individual development and changes in the contexts in which development occurs, such as education, work and family. Elder suggests education, work and family create the social trajectories, or pathways, that guide individual development.

Ethological theory focuses on the development roles of behavioural dispositions and traits, such as temperament and attachment, that are thought to have evolutionary survival value for the human species. These theories are very useful in explaining how development throughout the life course interacts with and is influenced by the context in which the development occurs. How do adult developmental changes differ from child and adolescent changes? Normative-crisis theories focus on fairly predictable changes that occur over the lifespan, particularly during the adult years. Timing-of-events theory emphasises the role of both normative and nonnormative transitions in an individual’s life course and how social expectations may be internalised in a ‘social clock’ against which we judge our own development. Dynamic systems theory views the child’s mind, body, physical and social worlds as a dynamic integrated system. A change in the system leads the child to modify and re-organise their behaviour so the various components of the system work together in a more complex and effective manner.

How does comparing developmental theories help us to understand developmental change? Although developmental theories differ in both focus and explanatory concepts, collectively they provide a fairly comprehensive view of the processes of developmental change.

By systematically organising what we already know about development and proposing explanations that can be tested through formal and informal observations, developmental theories can be useful for non-experts, as well as experts. READING 3 How many chromosomes does a human cell nucleus contain?

46 chromosomes, arranged in 23 pairs What is a gametes? - The reproductive cells of a child’s parents - The process by which genetic information is combined and transmitted begins with gametes o In the father, the gametes are produced in the testicles, and each is called a sperm cell o In the mother, they develop in the ovaries, and each is called an ovum, or egg cell What is the name of the molecular structure that contains genetic information in the sperm and egg cells? - Genes o The sperm & egg cells contain genetic information in molecular structures called genes, which form threads called chromosomes.

 Thus, the chromosomes contain the genetic material the child will inherit from the parent. Each human sperm or egg cell contains 23 chromosomes. All other cells of the body contain 46 chromosomes and approximately 100,000 genes. A single chromosome may contain as many as 20,000 genes. True or False.

DNA is a double-stranded molecule, which has the appearance of a twisted ladderlike structure. True What is the name of the process through which DNA can duplicate itself? DNA can duplicate itself through the process of mitosis What is the process of mitosis? Mitotic cell division produces nearly all the cells of the body except the gametes.

During mitosis, each chromosome replicates to form two chromosomes with identical genetic blueprints. As the cell divides, one member of each identical pair becomes a member of each daughter cell. In this manner, complete genetic endowment is replicated in nearly every cell of the body. What is a genotype? Genotype refers to the specific genetic information a person inherits that has the potential to influence their observable physical or behavioural characteristics or traits, such as eye colour, height, intelligence or shyness. What is a phenotype?

- Phenotype refers to the physical and behavioural traits an individual actually exhibits; for example, blue eyes, a height of 165 centimetres, a certain intelligence test score or a certain level of shyness. O A person’s phenotype is always the product of the interactions of that person’s genotype with the environmental influences that occur from the formation of the first cell at conception onward. True or False.

Some genes are dominant and others are recessive. True True or False.

Chapter 2 Study Guide Answers

Genes are inherited in pairs; one from each parent. True What is a dominant gene? In any paired set of genes, the gene with greater influence in determining.