General Psychology Chapter Nine: Child Development

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• General PsychologyChapter NineChild Development

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Prenatal Development

• Stages of prenatal development
• Conceptionoccurs the moment a sperm cell
  fertilizes the ovum
• Zygotethe single cell that forms when a sperm
  and egg unite
• Sometimes the zygote divides into two cells, the
  result of which is identical, or monozygotic,
  twins
• There are also times when more than one egg and
  sperm unite, resulting in fraternal, or
  dizygotic, twins

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• Germinal stage
• The 2-week stage when the zygote travels to the
  uterus and attaches itself to the uterine wall
  this is also when rapid cell division occurs
• Embryonic stage
• When the embryo develops all of the systems,
  organs, and structures of the body
• Lasts from the beginning of week 3 through week 8
• Fetal stage
• Lasts from the end of week 8, when bone cells
  form, until birth

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• Teratogens
• Harmful agents in the prenatal environment, which
  can have a negative impact on prenatal
  development or even cause birth defects

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• Fetal alcohol syndrome
• A condition, caused by maternal alcohol intake
  during pregnancy, in which the baby is born often
  mentally retarded, with a small head and facial,
  organ, and behavioral abnormalities
• Low birth weight
• A baby weighing less than 5.5 pounds
• Preterm birth
• A baby born 3 or more weeks early

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• Sensory and perceptual development
• Vision
• Newborns focus best on objects about 9 inches
  away, and they can follow a slowly moving object
• By 2 to 3 months of age, most infants prefer
  human faces to other visual images

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• Visual cliff
• An apparatus used to test depth perception in
  infants and young animals
• Found that 6-week-old infants had distinct
  changes in heart rate when they faced the deep
  side of the cliff, but no change when they faced
  the shallow side
• The change in heart rate indicated interest and
  showed that the infants could perceive depth
• But they dont seem to know they could fall until
  after they learn to crawl.

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• Hearing and other senses
• At birth, the newborns hearing is much better
  developed than his or her vision
• Newborns also prefer their own mothers voice to
  that of an unfamiliar female

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• Temperament
• A persons behavioral style or characteristic way
  of responding to the environment
• Three general types of temperament
• Easy
• Difficult
• Slow-to-warm-up

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• Easy had generally pleasant moods, were
  adaptable, approached new situations and people
  positively, and established regular sleeping,
  eating, and elimination patterns
• Difficult had generally unpleasant moods,
  reacted negatively to new situations and people,
  were intense in their emotional reactions, and
  showed irregularity of bodily functions
• Slow-to-warm-up tended to withdraw, were slow
  to adapt, and had a medium mood

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Attachment

• Separation anxiety
• The fear and distress shown by toddlers when
  their parent leaves, occurring from 8 to 24
  months and reaching a peak between 12 and 18
  months
• Stranger anxiety
• A fear of strangers common in infants at about 6
  months and increasing in intensity until about 12
  months, and then declining in the second year

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• Attachment in infant monkeys
• Harry Harlow
• Conducted studies on attachment in rhesus monkeys
• Studies suggested that physical nourishment alone
  is not enough to bind infants to their primary
  caregivers
• Found that it was contact comfort the comfort
  supplied by bodily contact rather than
  nourishment that formed the basis of the infant
  monkeys attachment to its mother

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• Ainsworths attachment categories
• Identified four patterns of attachment secure,
  avoidant, ambivalent/resistant, and
  disorganized/disoriented (chart p. 314)
• Secure attachment is the most common pattern
  across culturesoften distressed when mom leaves
  but happy when she returns mom is safe base to
  explore

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• Insecure Attachment patterns
• AvoidantNot distressed when mom leaves and not
  care when she returns (neglecting or depressed
  parents)
• Resistant/AmbivalentMay be distressed when mom
  leaves may push mom away when she returns not
  comforted and may not explore (inconsistent or
  over-stimulating parents)
• Disorganized/DisorientedMay be distressed when
  mom leaves but inconsistent response when mom
  returns look away from mom engage in bizarre
  behaviors (abusive parents)

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• Piagets Theory of Cognitive Development
• Assimilation
• The process by which new objects, events,
  experiences, or information are incorporated into
  existing schemes
• Accommodation
• The process by which existing schemes are
  modified and new schemes are created to
  incorporate new objects, events, experiences, or
  information

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• Piagets stages of cognitive development
• Sensorimotor stage
• Piagets first stage of cognitive development
  (ages birth to 2 years), culminating in the
  development of object permanence and the
  beginning of representational thought
• Object permanence (p. 317)
• The realization that objects continue to exist
  even when they can no longer be perceived

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• Preoperational stage
• Piagets second stage of cognitive development
  (ages 2 to 7 years), characterized by rapid
  development of language and thinking governed by
  perception rather than logic

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• The ability to use symbols greatly advances the
  childs ability to think beyond what was possible
  in the sensorimotor stage
• Centration
• A preoperational childs tendency to focus on
  only one dimension of a stimulus and ignore other
  dimensions
• Because of egocentrism and centration, children
  in this stage have problems understanding any
  activity that is governed by rules

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• Concrete operations stage
• Piagets third stage of cognitive development
  (ages 7 to 11 years), during which a child
  acquires the concepts of reversibility and
  conservation and is able to apply logical
  thinking to concrete objects
• Reversibility
• The realization that any change in the shape,
  position, or order of matter can be reversed
  mentally

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• Conservation (examples p. 320)
• The concept that a given quantity of matter
  remains the same despite rearrangement or change
  in its appearance, as long as nothing is added or
  taken away

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• Formal operations stage
• Piagets fourth and final stage (ages 11 or 12
  years and beyond), characterized by the ability
  to apply logical thinking to abstract problems
  and hypothetical situations

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• Intellectual Development (finish and say what
  they mean)
• If at first you dont succeed,
• Too many cooks
• The early bird
• Better safe than
• Where there is a will
• Dont put off until tomorrow
• Early to bed, early to rise,
• An apple a day
• Dont count your chickens
• All work and no play
• A penny saved
• When the cat is away
• Don't cut off your nose
• He who hesitates
• Dont cry over
• A watched pot
• Strike while the iron
• Time flies when

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• Because of their ability to construct an
  imaginary reality that is linked to present
  reality, adolescents exhibit types of thinking
  that are virtually nonexistent in younger
  children
• Teenagers also have an exaggerated sense of their
  own uniqueness the personal fable
• They cannot fathom that anyone has ever felt as
  deeply as they feel or has ever loved as they love

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Other Approaches to Cognitive Development

• Vygotskys sociocultural view
• Lev Vygotsky
• Believed that talking to oneself private speech
  is a key component in cognitive development
• Saw a strong connection among social experience,
  speech, and cognitive development

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• Vygotsky maintained that a childs readiness to
  learn resides within a zone of proximal
  development
• This zone is a range of cognitive tasks that the
  child cannot yet perform alone but can learn to
  perform with the instruction, help, and guidance
  of a parent, teacher, or more advanced peer,
  called scaffolding

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• Theory of mind
• A fundamental developmental task for children is
  coming to understand how people may differ
  greatly in what they know and what they
  believedevelops around age 3 or 4

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Language Development

• Sequence of language development (chart p. 326)
• Cooing (2-3 months)
• Babblinguniversal vocalization of the basic
  speech sounds (phonemes), which begins between 4
  and 6 months
• By about 1 year of age, babies have restricted
  the sounds they utter to those that fit the
  language they are learning
• Sometime during the second year, infants begin to
  use words to communicate (average is 12 months)
• Sometimes these single words function as whole
  sentences called holophrases by linguists

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• Once children know about 50 words, they stop
  using holophrases and start combining words into
  two-word sentences (18-20 months)
• Overextension
• The act of using a word, on the basis of some
  shared feature, to apply to a broader range of
  objects than appropriate
• Underextension
• Restricting the use of a word to only a few,
  rather than to all, members of a class of objects

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• Childrens language advances considerably between
  2 and 3 years of age as they begin to use
  sentences of three or more words, which linguists
  call telegraphic speech

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• Overregularization
• The act of inappropriately applying the
  grammatical rules for forming plurals and past
  tenses to irregular nouns and verbs

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Parenting

• Diane Baumrind
• Studied the continuum of parental control and
  identified three parenting stylesthe
  authoritarian, the authoritative, and the
  permissive

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• Authoritarian parents
• Parents who make arbitrary rules, expect
  unquestioned obedience from their children,
  punish transgressions often physically, value
  obedience to authority, display low warmth and
  low listening to child
• Found preschool children disciplined in this
  manner tend to be withdrawn, anxious, and
  unhappy older children continue to be unhappy,
  show less intelligence, and often rebel
• Parents failure to provide a rationale for rules
  makes it hard for children to see any reason for
  following them

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• Permissive (Indulgent) parents
• Parents who make few rules or demands and allow
  children to make their own decisions and control
  their own behavior listen to child and provide
  warmth and love but no rules/limits
• Children raised in this manner are the most
  immature and seem to be the least self-controlled
  and self-reliant also grow up unhappy and with
  few friends and unable to keep a job

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• Authoritative parents
• Parents who set high but realistic standards,
  reason with the child, enforce limits, show high
  warmth, and encourage open communication and
  independence
• Knowing why the rules are necessary makes it
  easier for children to internalize and follow
  rules, whether in the presence of their parents
  or not
• These children grow up to be happy, are more
  intelligent, do better in school, and are the
  most socially adjusted and academically and
  occupationally successful

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• Neglecting/Indifferent parents (newer parenting
  style added)
• Parents who make few rules or demands because
  they are not involved in their childrens lives
• Infants of neglecting parents are more likely
  than others to be insecurely attached and
  continue to experience difficulties in social
  relationships throughout childhood and into their
  adult years

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• Culture and child development
• Urie Bronfenbrenner
• Proposes that we think of the environment in
  which a child grows up as a system of
  interactive, layered contexts of development
• Contexts of development
• Bronfenbrenners term for the interrelated
  settings in which a child grows up (chart p. 333)

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• At the core of the system are what he calls
  microsystems, which include settings in which the
  child has personal experiencefamily, daycare
  center, friends, computer at home
• Exosystems are the events that influence the
  microsystems (parents jobs, friends, nearby
  relatives, etc)
• The macrosystem includes the larger culture (SES
  in neighborhood, good schools, crime rate, ethnic
  majority, language spoken)