Developmental Psychology - AP Psychology

"Alleles" are the different versions of a gene. Alleles can have varying patterns of inheritance like dominant alleles and recessive alleles. They can be found at the same location on a specific chromosome.

Secure, avoidant, ambivalent, and disorganized are the four categories of attachment determined by Mary Ainsworth. As revealed by "the strange situation," children with secure attachments are upset when the mother leaves and soothed when she returns. Children with avoidant attachments ignore the mother when she leaves and ignore her when she returns. Children with ambivalent attachments are upset when the mother leaves and aren't soothed when she returns. Children with disorganized attachments react to the strange situation in ways not covered by the other three categories.

If one is not developing in a healthy and positive manner throughout life, it is possible to become completely self-possessed during middle age. Instead of expressing concern about the people and society around them and their relationship with others, the middle-aged person is completely selfish and out to satisfy their own desires without much consideration for anyone else.

Eleanor Gibson developed the visual cliff apparatus to assess whether infants' depth perception was an innate or learned ability. Her results indicated that infants could perceive depth using visual clues even before they were able to crawl (around 6 months).

The Milgram experiment studied obedience to authority figures and conscience, and the Lab Coat experiment is a common alternate name for the Milgram experiment. The Prisoner experiment studied the psychological effects of being both a prisoner and prison guard. The Bobo doll experiment was the collective name for a series of experiments investigating childhood behavior modeling.

Mary Ainsworth conducted the "strange situation" experiment, in which young babies were briefly separated from their mothers in an unfamiliar laboratory environment. She used this scenario to assess the infants' responses to separation, and out of these responses she came up with 4 attachment styles. These styles of attachment continue to be used by psychologists today.

The longitudinal research design is popular in developmental psychology research because it allows the researcher to observe the same participants over a long period of time. For example, a longitudinal research study could look at how exposure to toxic chemicals in infancy impacts subjects many years later (in childhood, adolescence, and beyond!).

Authoritarian parenting is typically depicted as the parent being controlling and power-assertive over their child. The authoritarian parent expects a lot of their child, and may reject him/her if he/she does not meet their high expectations.

Jean Piaget set the intellectual foundations for Kohlberg's six stages of moral development. The major difference is that Piaget elucidates the process of moral reasoning in children, rather than breaking down moral development into evolutionary stages. Piaget said that children approach problems in two different ways: assimilation and accomodation. In assimilation, children easily internalize the rules of the outside world, including the ethical ones. In accomodation, children may have to change these internalized ideas or other pre-existing notions to fit what they see in the world. Kohlberg expanded on this and categorized ideas based on the stages of a person's life which, according to him, define the moral dilemnas a person faces.

Social comparisons are chracteristic of middle childhood when children begin to notice their relative strengths and weaknesses in comparison to their friends and classmates.

Erikson theorized that "basic trust" is a child's sense that the world is predictable and trustworthy. An infant is able to develop basic trust through positive relationships with his or her caregivers.

Erik Erikson was a famous psychologist who proposed eight psychosocial stages that every human being experiences during his or her lifetime. Erikson believed that adolescents experience confusion over which roles they wish to fulfill (e.g., rebel, good student, class clown). To successfully conquer this stage, adolescents must merge their various roles of choice into a complete identity. This conflict is known as identity vs. role confusion.

A general overview of Erikson's stages is given below:

Trust vs. mistrust, age 0-2 years

Autonomy vs. shame and doubt, age 2-4 years

Initiative vs. guilt, age 4-5 years

Industry vs. inferiority, age 5-12 years

Identity vs. role confusion, age 12-19 years

Intimacy vs. isolation, young adulthood

Generativity vs. stagnation, middle adulthood

Ego integrity vs. despair, late adulthood

Harry Harlow was an American psychologist who is best known for his maternal separation, dependency needs, and social isolation experiments with primates. His experiments would not have been allowed today because they would be considered animal cruelty by the IRB research approval panel.

Developmental psychology looks at the physical, cognitive, and social development that occurs throughout a lifespan. In doing so, developmental psychologists are faced with three engaging issues: nature and nurture, continuity and stages, and stability and change. Nature and nurture is a focus that examines how our biology interacts with our environment and experiences to influence our development. Continuity and stages examines which parts of development are gradual and which are clearly divided by stages via distinct changes. Stability and change looks at which traits persist throughout a lifespan versus those that change (e.g.. temperament and personality has been observed to become more stable as one gets older as opposed to social attitudes, which do not). The other options are incorrect because they are related to Darwin's theory of natural selection.

Naturalistic observation is research done in the natural environment of the subjects instead of the field. There is no manipulation of variables in this type of observation.

Individual case studies are not particularly common in developmental psychology research because the field of developmental psychology seeks to explain typical developmental trajectories among larger groups of people. Case studies are more common in clinical psychological research, in which psychologists will discuss unique cases and how they treated them.

Developmental psychologists study humans of all ages to observe how different stages of life (e.g., infants, adolescents) react to various stimuli. A significant proportion of research in developmental psychology focuses on children, seeing as childhood sees the greatest amount of change.

Following a Noam Chomsky "nativist" perspective regarding universal grammar, Dr. Lengua thinks people are born with the ability to communicate regardless of their environmental influences. Social interactionist perspective is the opposite view in that individuals learn language and communication through modeling, dialogue, and corrective feedback. Behaviorist and sociocultural are distractors.

An instinct is an innate, fixed pattern of behaviors in response to certain stimuli. Instincts do not need to be learned, and are embedded within an organism at birth. An example of an instinct can be observed in baby kangaroos, or joeys. A joey will immediately climb into its mother's pouch upon being born, without any need for learning such behavior.

Object permanence refers to the ability to know an object still exists even though it is out of sight. Although research on the exact age of onset of object permanence is controversial, the preponderance suggests the age of onset to be between 4 and 8 months old, hence the correct answer in this question is 6 months old. All of the other answer choices are much too late in life for object permanence to first develop.

Alcohol consumption of any amount may cause neurons in an unborn, developing child to overshoot their destinations (especially in the brain and spinal cord), while exposure to radiation may cause neurons to stop short of their final destinations. Consumption of alcohol may result in Fetal Alcohol Syndrome. Unborn children exposed to alcohol may, as a result, suffer from an abnormally small head, growth problems, learning and behavioral disabilities, lower intelligence, and birth defects.