Human Development
The multidisciplinary study of how people change and how they remain the same over time.
Continuity
A particular developmental phenomenon represents a smooth progression throughout the life span.
Discontinuity
A series of abrupt shifts.
Biopsychosocial framework
A useful way to organize the biological, psychological, and sociocultural forces or several paths.
Neuroscience
Is the study of the brain and nervous system, specially in terms of brain-behavior relationships.
Theory
An organized set of ideas that is design to explain development.
Psychodynamic theories
Theories proposing that development is largely determined by how well people resolve conflicts they face at different ages.
Psychosocial theory
Erikson's proposal that personality development is determined by the interaction of an internal maturational plan and external societal demands.
Epigenetic principle
In Erikson's theory, the idea that each psychosocial strength has its own period of particular importance.
Reinforcement
A consequence that increases the future likelihood of the behavior that it follows.
Punishment
A consequence that decreases the future likelihood of the behavior it follows.
Imitation or observation learning
Learning that occurs simply watching how others behave.
Ecological theory
A theory based on the idea that human development is inseparable from the environmental contexts in which a person develops.
information processing theory
A theory proposing that human cognition consist of mental hardware and mental software.
Microsystem
The people and objects in an individual's immediate environment.
Mesosystem
Provides connections across microsystems.
Exosystem
The social setting that a person may not experience firsthand but that still influence development.
Macrosystem
The cultures and subcultures in which microsystem, mesosystem, and exosystem are embedded.
Competence
A person's abilities
Environmental press
The demands put on an individual by the environments.
Life-span perspective
The view that human development is multiply determined and cannot be understood within the scope of a single framework.
Selective optimization with compensation model
The model in which the processes(selection, optimization, and compensation) form a system of behavioral action that generates and regulates development and aging.
Life-course perspective
The ways in which various generations experience the biological, psychological, and sociocultural forces of development in their respective historical contexts.
Systematic observation
Watching people and carefully recording what they do or say.
Naturalistic observation
A technique in which people are observed as they behave spontaneously in some real-life situation.
Structural observations
The researcher creates a setting that is likely to elicit the behavior of interest.
Self-reports
People's answers to questions about the topic of interest.
Reliability
The extent to which a measure provides consistent index of a characteristic.
Validity
The extent to which a measure actually assesses what researches think it assesses.
Populations
Broad groups of people that are of interest of researches.
Sample
A subset of the population
Experiment
A systematic way of manipulating the key factor or factors that the investigator thinks causes a particular behavior.
Independent variable
The factor being manipulated.
Dependent variable
the behavior being observed.
Qualitative research
A method that involves gaining in-depth understanding of human behavior and what governs it.
longitudinal study
A research design in which the same individuals are observed or tested repeatedly at different points in their lives.
Cross-sectional study
A study in which developmental differences are identified by testing people of different ages.
Cohort effects
Problems with cross-sectional designs in which differences between age groups/cohorts may result as easily from environmental events as from developmental processes.
Sequential design
A developmental research design based on cross-sectional and longitudinal designs.
Stem cells
Unspecialized human or animal cells that can produce specialized body cells and can replicate themselves.
Correlational study
An investigation that looks at relations between variables as they exist naturally in the world.
Correlation coefficient
An expression of the strength and direction of a relation between two variables.
Nature
The degree to which genetic or hereditary influences determine the kind of person you are.
Nurture
The degree to which experiential or environmental influences determine the kind of person you are.