Exam 3 Study GuideIncludes Human Development and Social Psychology (Parts 1 and 2).This information is taken from class lectures, notes, and the textbook. I’ve come to class every day and read the textbook. Good luck!Human Development 1) What does developmental psychology study?a. Developmental psychology: study of how behavior and mental processes change over the lifespan2) Be able to define and differentiate between cross-sectional design and longitudinal design. What are the problems with each?a. Cross-sectional design : design that examines people of different ages at asingle point in timei. A problem with this is cohort effects: effects due to individuals growing up in the same time period. Examples of this are how old people can be influenced by life experiences, like war, and young people are usually better with technology. This limits the ability to measure the difference between the groups.b. Longitudinal design: design that examines development in same group at multiple time points. For example, checking up on the same people every year.i. Costly, takes a lot of time and resources to keep checking up on these people.ii. Selective attrition - this is the main idea that people will probably drop out of the study, and those people are probably different than the people that stay. An example of this is a study on marriage, where people that get divorced or are less satisfied with their marriage are more likely to drop out of the study.c. The main difference between these two is that cross-sectional uses different people at once, where the longitudinal uses the same people over time.3) What is post-hoc fallacy? What are bi-directional effects? How do these things relate to the study of human development?a. Post-hoc fallacy : false assumption that because A precedes B, A must have caused Bi. This type of reasoning becomes tempting when the earlier behaviorseems logically related to the later one. Many factors could have influenced both behaviors, so we don’t have the grounds for inferring causation from this correlation.b. Bi-directional effects : individuals are affected by parents, peers, environment but individuals also affect those around them and shape theirown environment.. An example is people say that violent video gamesmake people more violent, but maybe the aggressive people are more likely to play more violent video games. Children’s experiences influence their development, but their development also influences their experiences.i. Children change their environment by acting in ways that create changes in the behaviors of their parents, siblings, friends, and teachers. Furthermore, as children grow older, they play an increasingly active role in altering and selecting their environments. 4) Is our development due to nature or nature? Know three ways (discussed in class) that nature and nurture work together to shape our development.a. They both play powerful roles in shaping development, but it’s hard to isolate their effects since nature and nurture intersect in many interesting ways.b. Gene-environment interaction : effects of genes depend on environment (and vice versa)c. Nature via nurture : tendency of genetic predispositions to encourage people to seek out/create certain environments. An example is an anxious person avoiding things that make them anxious, which would maintain the anxiety, and make it seem worse when they are approached with that stimulus.d. Gene expression : activation/deactivation of genes by environmental experiences throughout development5) Who was Piaget and what were his three important contributions to understanding cognitive development in children (discussed in class)?a. Piaget was the first to present a comprehensive account of cognitive development. He attempted to identify the stages that children pass through on their way to adult-like thinking.b. First to present comprehensive account of cognitive developmentc. Major contribution: children are not mini-adults, understanding of world is different from an adult’sd. Posited stages of development marked by radical reorganization of thinking6) What are schemas? What is equilibration? Be able to define and differentiate between assimilation and accommodation? Be able to give an example of each.a. Schema: knowledge structures/mental models of our worldb. Equilibration : maintain a balance between our experiences of the world and our thoughts about it. You know the podium is a podium, and not a dinosaur.c. Assimilation : fitting new experiences into existing mental models. An example of this is a little kid going to the zoo for the first time. They know what a horse is so the recognize that, but they don’t recognize a zebra, so they fit it into the horse category.d. Accommodation : changing mental models to account for new experiences.In this case, the child will understand that the zebra is not a horse, and even make a new schema for zebras.7) Know Piaget’s four stages of development, when they (generally) occur, and what cognitive abilities (and limitations) occur in each.a. Sensorimotor stage i. Birth- 2 yearsii. Learning through own actions/consequences: like touching something sharp, that hurting, and not doing that again.iii. No thought beyond immediate experience. Can’t think far in the future, what we believe animals do too.iv. Milestone: object permanence: understanding that objects exist even when out of sight. Peek-a-boo. They truly believe that you are disappearing. Object permanence is when they understand that’s not the case.b. Preoperational stage i. 2-7 yearsii. Able to think beyond immediate situation, understand symbolic representation. An example of symbolic representation is a child pretending a banana is a phone on not really seeing it as talking into a bananaiii. egocentric : inability to see the world from another’s perspectiveiv. unable to perform mental transformations1. Fail conservation tasks. Putting the same amount of water into a different shaped glass. Children can’t understand that the taller, thinner glass holds the same amount as the fatter, shorter glass. This is part of the reason that little kids have ahard time with math, because they have such a hard time understanding this.c. Concrete operations stage i. 7-11 yearsii. Mental transformations, but only physical objectsiii. Difficult to imagine hypothetical situationsd. Formal Operations i. 11-adulthoodii. Can think
View Full Document
Unlocking...