PSY 0310 Study Guide - Summer 2018, Comprehensive Midterm Notes - Psych, Interaction, Dev Alahan
PSY 0310
MIDTERM EXAM
STUDY GUIDE
Fall 2018
Developmental Psych Lecture 1:
Dev Psych: scientific study of how and why humans change over the course of their life. Not just
children. Usually focused on a certain life stage, often age specific, but not always (retirement= event
based). Dev psych perspective fits in other branches of psych.
Why learn about dev psych?
● Make informed decisions about social policy: curriculum reform, child courtroom testimonies,
prenatal med care and parental leave.
Ex: 1990s more women entering workforce: debate about effect of outside the home childcare on
the child. Research showed there was no difference in kids at home care vs outside child care.
Debate over whether govt should fund preschool programs
Headstart is a federally funded preschool where a lot of research is done.
● Make us better parents:
● Improve understanding of human nature: how dif experiences affect you.
○ Research on babies in Romanian orphanages with little contact with caregivers, socially
immature, malnourished. By 6 years old most of that development caught up, but varied
by when adopted. If adopted by 6 mo of age they were mostly fine, earlier is better,
timing matters.
● Help us become responsible consumers of research: vaccines/autism.
What are common questions dev psych tries to answer?
● Nature vs nurture: not either/or but how do they work together, joint influence to shape
development. Sometimes clear how they work together, other times not so much. Nativists vs
empiricists
○ Ex: intelligence: heritability of intelligence is much higher in more advantaged envts
because we see differences in people's genetic endowment.
○ Genetic factors matter less when the characteristic is determined by the envt (ex deprived
envt).
○ Clear nature: physical development, less clear: epigenetics, how your genes are
expressed. Stress/methylation affects things.
● The Active child: how do individuals shape their own development: Infancy: the infant
smales at mothers faces→ maternal input in response. Middle child: child temperament can
elicit types of parenting (support, irritability, discipline). Adolescence: teens select their own
peers, shape their own envt very deliberately.
● Continuity/Discontinuity: in what ways is dev continuous (Ex: tree growing slowly but
constantly over time). Discontinuous/stage growth (caterpillar→ cocoon→ butterfly)
○ Piaget’s Stages:
○ NOTE: after infancy most growth is continuous not stage.
● Mechanisms of development: how does change happen
○ Effortful attention: genetic differences and parenting
● Sociocultural context: kind of like nurture, all the physical, social, cultural, economic, historical
circumstances in which children grow up in. Who are kids interact with, dif neighborhood/school
opportunities, religious envt, sports team culture. Cumulative risks: accumulation of
disadvantages over years of dvlpt.
find more resources at oneclass.com
find more resources at oneclass.com
○ Ex: achievement gaps: generally 80% of kids graduate high school in US, but high and
low income areas/states make a big difference.
○ Generational effects: technology
● Individual Differences: how do children becomes so different from one another.
○ Genetic differences (nature)
○ Differences in treatment by parents and others (nurture)
○ Differences in relations to similar experiences (nature and nurture)
○ Differences choices in envt (nature→ nurture)
● Research and Child’s Welfare: how can research promote children's well-being:
○ Social programs like headstarts
○ Tech use
○ Intelligence and heritability
How do we design studies to answer these questions:
Scientific Method:
● Choose a question
● Formulate testable hypothesis
● Develop method
● Use data yielded by the method to draw conclusion about hypothesis
● Reliability: consistency: interrater reliability and test-retest reliability
● Validity: correctness:
○ internal validity: can the effects of the experiments be attributed to the factor that the
researcher is testing (solution effects are a problem)
○ External validity: degree to which results can be generalized across settings/populations.
Ex: tasks may not be same as in natural envt. Also WEIRD populations (western,
educated, industrialized, rich demographic).
Diff Types of measurements: interviews and questionnaires: have to ask the right questions, minimize
bias, minimize kids tendency to lie, also kids just can't self report very well. SCID helps to leave room for
straying from the question but getting at the point eventually.
● Structured interview: pre-set questions
● Questionnaires
● Clinical interview: more flexibility to dig into various responses.
● Naturalistic observation
● Structured observation
● Cross-sectional study
● Longitudinal studies
● Microgenetic study
Observations: naturalistic observations are most externally valid but might not see the behavior you’re
looking for. Structured observations help elicit the behavior but not true to what they do naturally.
find more resources at oneclass.com
find more resources at oneclass.com
Document Summary
Dev psych: scientific study of how and why humans change over the course of their life. Usually focused on a certain life stage, often age specific, but not always (retirement= event based). Dev psych perspective fits in other branches of psych. Make informed decisions about social policy: curriculum reform, child courtroom testimonies, prenatal med care and parental leave. Ex: 1990s more women entering workforce: debate about effect of outside the home childcare on the child. Research showed there was no difference in kids at home care vs outside child care. Debate over whether govt should fund preschool programs. Headstart is a federally funded preschool where a lot of research is done. Improve understanding of human nature: how dif experiences affect you. Research on babies in romanian orphanages with little contact with caregivers, socially immature, malnourished. By 6 years old most of that development caught up, but varied by when adopted.
