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Summary Human Development
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Summary of 13 pages for the course Social Psychology at U of W (.)
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CHAPTER TEN: HUMAN DEVELOPMENT● Developmental Psychology: the study of how behavioural and mental processes change
over the lifespan.
○ Post Hoc Fallacy: false assumption that because one event occurred before
another event, it must have caused that event.
■ Ex. 100% of serial killers drank milk as children, so drinking milk creates
serial killers.
○ Bidirectional Influences: children’s experiences influence their development, but
their development also influences their experiences. Children can change their
environments by acting in ways that create changes in the behaviour of parents,
siblings, friends, and teachers.
○ Pop psychology is full of unidirectional influences: those that attempt to explain
development in terms of a one-headed arrow; parents fight with each other →
children react negatively; children witness violence → children become more
aggressive.
○ Cross-Sectional Design: a design in which researchers examine people of
different ages at a single point in time.
■ The major problem with cross-sectional designs is that they don’t control
for cohort effects: effects due to the fact that sets of people who lived
during one period of time (cohorts) can differ in some systematic way
from sets of people who lived during a different time period.
○ Longitudinal Design: psychologists track the development of the same group of
subjects over time; allows us to examine developmental effects– changes over
time within individuals as a consequence of growing older.
■ Externalizing Behaviours: behaviours such as breaking rules, defying
authority figures, and committing crimes.
■ Attrition: participants dropping out of a study before it is completed.
● Selective Attrition: the dropout of participants is not random, but
drawn disproportionately from a particular definable group (ex.
women, older adults, indigenous peoples, etc).
○ Myths Concerning Development:
■ Infant Determinism: the widespread assumption that extreme early
experiences–especially in the first three years of life– are almost always
more influential than later experiences in shaping us as adults.
■ Childhood Fragility: holds that children are delicate little creatures who
are easily damaged.
, ● Nature and Nurture
○ Genes and environment intersect in complex ways, so we can’t always conclude
that one or the other is driving behaviour. Genes and environment are
confounded.
■ Ex. as children develop, how their genes are expressed often depends on
their experiences.
■ Gene-Environment Interactions: the impact of genes on behaviour
depends on the environment in which the behaviour develops.
■ Nature Via Nurture: genetic predispositions can drive us to select and
create particular environments, leading to the mistaken appearance of a
pure effect of nature.
■ Gene Expression: some genes “turn on” only in response to specific
environmental events.
● Physical and Motor Development
○ Prenatal (Prior to Birth) Development
■ Once a sperm cell fertilizes an egg to produce a zygote, prenatal physical
development unfolds in three stages:
● Germinal Stage: the zygote begins to divide and double, forming a
blastocyst– a ball of identical cells that haven’t yet begun to take
on any specific function in a body part. The blastocyst keeps
growing as cells continue to divide for the first week and a half or
so after fertilization. Around the middle of the second week, the
cells begin to differentiate, taking on different roles as the organs
of the body begin to develop. Once different cells start to assume
different functions, the blastocyst becomes an embryo.
● Embryonic Stage: continues from the second to the eighth week
of development, during which limbs, facial features, and major
organs (including the heart, lungs, and brain) begin to take shape.
Many things can go awry in this stage; such as spontaneous
miscarriages when the embryo doesn’t form properly.
● Fetal Stage: the major organs are established by the ninth week,
and the heart begins to beat. The embryo becomes a fetus, whose
job for the rest of the pregnancy is physical maturation; fleshing
out what’s already there. The last third of pregnancy is devoted
almost entirely to “bulking up.”
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