Chapter Summaries
Chapter 1-Introduction to Developmental Psychology and its research strategies
The Developmental Psychology seeks to find answers too many questions that may arise
about how the person sees theories, methods, discoveries and their practical accomplishments of
the modern developmental science. The developmental may refers to systematic continuities and
the changes within the individual that may occur between conception and even death.
Developmental is understood by two different process that may underlie the change such as:
maturation that refers to the biological unfolding of the individual according to the species-
typical biological inheritance and learning is the process in which their experiences may produce
permanent changes within the feelings, thoughts, and also the behaviors.
The goals that developmental sciences seek to pursue is describe, to explain, and to
optimize development. In order for them to seek the goals, the human developmentalists have to
carefully observe the many behaviors of their people, seek to observe how they change overtime.
They know that two people are alike, because he or she uses many pathways to the development
that virtually follow the people. It is understood that developmentalists seek to understand the
importance of ways that is developing the human resemble each other and how they are likely to
differ as they proceed through life. In order for them to explain the changes, they have to observe
the developmentalist, in hopes to determine why people develop as they should do and why some
people develop differently than other people.
Chapter 2-Hereditary influences on development
The genetic material is the first of the development that always occur after conception
that is protective. To explain the hereditary uniqueness is when a pair of chromosomes
segregates during meiosis, it is matter of chance that the two chromosomes will end up in a new
cell. Independent assortment occur independently from all other pairs because of the
segregations of the two chromosomes. The reason is because of the human germ cells contain 23
chromosomes pairs, each pairs is segregating independently of the others.
There are four patterns of genetics: simple dominant-recessive inheritance, codominance,
sex-linked inheritance and polygenic inheritance. The genes plays a part in the human
characteristic in different views. When understanding the single-gene inheritance, patterns can
help build the understanding of the actions of genes and their interaction with the environment.
Many of the human characteristic are influenced by one genes that is called the alleles. Meaning
a gene from the mother and one from the father. The dominant genes appeared more often in the
later generations than their opposite traits, which is called the recessive trait. An offspring’s
phenotype often is not simply a blend of characteristic of mother and father but one of the
parental genes that is often dominates the other and the child resembles the parent who
contributed the dominant gene. The simple dominant-recessive inheritance has the ability to see
distant objects clearly about 3/4, the remaining ¼ cannot. In other words, the person that inherits
one allele for normal vision and one for allele would display a phenotype of normal vision
because the normal vision gene will overpower the nearsighted genes. Some traits like the sex-
linked characteristic because they are determined by genes location on the sex chromosomes, the
vast majority of the sex-linked attributes are produced by recessive genes that are found only on
X chromosomes.
Chapter 3-Prenatal Development and Birth
Prenatal developmental is a passive experience for the developing organism. But it is
know that the fetus’ behavior before birth really does play a very important role in development.
The fetus needs to move and to practice using its mouth, lungs and its digestive system. While
the baby is still in the womb, the baby begins to learn how to do things such as sucking its
thumb. Verse a premature baby that arrives early, does not begin to suck its thumb. The reason
being the baby begin to suck the thumb during the 7th month of pregnancy. The active babies
effects even though they are not conscious choices to be active, and all in preparation for the
great environmental change that occurs at birth. There are three different stage for progression:
the developing organism proceeds, the first, the second, and the third trimesters of carrying their
baby. Child birth is three stage process that women goes through. They are labor: the mother will
experience uterine contractions about 10 to 15 minutes intervals and they will end when the
cervix has fully dilated so that the fetus head can pass through. The head has to be positioned at
the opening of the cervix because the second phase about to begin. The second stage of labor is
the delivery, at this point the fetus head passes through the cervix into the vagina and ends when
the baby emerges from the mother’s body. The final stage of labor is the after-birth. The after-
birth usually takes 5 to 10 minutes as the uterus once again contracts and expels the placenta
from the mother’s body. The experience of the mother after child birth can be an awesome
experience. The developmentalists used to go as far as suggesting that the first 6 to 12 hours after
births are a sensitive period for emotional bonding. When a mother’s is ready to respond to and
develop a sense of affection for her baby.
Chapter 4-Infancy
The infant states, newborns displays organized patterns of their daily activity that are
predictable and they foster healthy developmental outcomes. Over time the infants sleeps
becomes less and they are more alert. Their cry are unlearned responses to discomfort, distress
signals by which the infant makes their guardian aware of their need for something. Their cry is a
complex signal that may be vary from other wails. A mother begins to learn her baby’s cry from
any other baby.
The research method that is used to study the infant’s sensory is a simple procedure in
which two stimuli are presented to see whether infants will attend more to one of them than the
other. If the infant shows no preferences among the target stimuli, it is not clear whether they fail
to discriminate them or simply find them totally equal interesting. It is a tricky effects trying to
distinguishing between habituation and preference effects. When the infants doesn’t show no
preference, they really don’t look at a certain object, they look at other objects around them.
Determining whether the infant can sense is to present them with a stimulus and record their
brain activities or their brain waves. The electrodes are placed on the infants’ scalp just above the
brain centers that process the kind of sensory information that is needed for the investigation.
The multiple sensory modalities of an object can draw the infants’ attention: because
their system advances from an amodal state, in which the infant can separate sound from sight.
The object sound pairing elicit an intermodal perceptual response that draws attention to the
serial relationship, thus laying the foundation for the more advanced order-detection skills that is
demonstrated by an infant.
Chapter 5-Physical Development
People are often amazed about how fact children grow. All children doesn’t remain the
same size. They grow through different phases of growing. Children often time gain at least an
ounce a day if not more. As the babies are growing, their body shape changes very rapidly. When
they are growing upward, the babies are growing outward in a proximodistal direction.
Throughout infancy and childhood, the arms and legs continue to grow faster than the children
hands and feet. The center outward growth pattern reverses just before puberty and when the
hands and feet begin to grow fast and they become the first parts of the body to reach the adult
proportions. The reason being, teenagers are often appeared so awkward is that their hands and
feet may suddenly seem much too large for the rest of the body.
The motor development of the child’s first years of life is the most during progression,
which infants make in controlling their movements and perfecting their motor skills. Babies
doesn’t remain immobile for long, but some parents which they would last a little longer. By the
end of the first month, the brain and neck muscles have matured enough to permit most infants to
reach their first milestone in their development. The motor development proceeds in a head
down position, with the activities involving the neck, head, and the upper extremities. The
unfolding of a genetically programmed sequence of events in which the nerves and muscles
mature in an outward and downward position. Even though there is difference experiences,
infants from around the world progress through roughly the same sequence of motor milestones.
The interactions of nature and nurture in their effects on their physical development
expand the influences of the active child to include the environment in which the child is reared.
The infants used goal and objectives to actively reorganize existing motor skills.
Chapter 7-Cogntive Development
Capacity within an information-processing system can be understood in a variety of
ways. It can be refer to the total amount of space that is available to store information, sometimes
to how quickly information can be processed. During the developmental changes in processing
speed are similar across the many different problems, which is ranging from simple tasks in
which participants must determine whether the objects have the same number. Robert Kail once
that our past experiences can influence speed of processing within a particular domain, but he
believes that biological maturation is primarily responsible for broad age-related differences in
speed of information processing.
It was once believe that developmentalist preschool children were astrategtic-meaning
that the developmentalist didn’t use any strategies when trying to approach the problems. But
acquiring a new and more sophisticated strategy doesn’t always lead to improvements in task
performances. Children who grasp quickly usually generate and use strategies often times
display a utilization deficiency. Kail said that even when children are trained to use a strategy but
will show very little benefits from the strategy. Researchers have shown that children that is
aware of their own thoughts and the distinction between consciousness and the unconsciousness
develops during the childhood. It is understood that the mind will sometimes think about the
things even if the person has no interest in thinking about them and that one can’t avoid thinking
for an extended period of time. The knowledge of a person thought processes, is important for
many aspect of higher order thinking and problem solving. Many of the learning and memory
tasks are best accomplished when we are consciously aware of the mental processes that is
involved.
Chapter 8-Intelligence
Psychometric approach is an intellectual trait that differ among people and so
characterizes some people to a greater extent than others. To identify what the traits might be to
the measure so that the intellectual differences among the individuals can be described. The tests
were produced by Alfred Binet and Theodore Simon. They were commissioned by the
government to construct a test that would identify children as dull who might profit from
remedial instructions. They are given a big task of measuring skills that is presumed to be needed
for classroom learning. Some years later the test was revised, the test begin to be graded. The test
was later created to enable the children to identify slow learning and to estimate all children’s
levels of intellectual development. The original impetus for the making of the IQ test, and the
current basis understanding the use and for the interpretation of the IQ scores, is to predict school
performances.
There is a way to determine whether the intelligence is a single attribute or many
different attributes is to ask the people to perform a large number of mental tasks and then they
would analyze their performances using a statistical procedures called the factor analysis.
Charles Spearman was one of the first to use to the factor analysis to determine whether
intelligence was one or many abilities. Spearman found that a child’s score among the variety if
cognitive tests were moderately correlated and thus inferred that there must be a great general
mental factor, is what he called the G, which affects one’s performance on most cognitive task.
A person’s experience with a task helps determine whether that person’s performance qualifies
as intelligent behavior. He also believes that relatively novel task require active and conscious
information-processing and are the best measures of a person’s reasoning abilities, as long as the
tasks are not so foreign that the person is unable to apply what they may know.
Chapter 9-Development of Language and Communication skills
Each language uses only a subset of the sounds that humans are capable of generating
and also no two languages have the same phonologies. Children are to learn how to discriminate,
produce, and combined to form meaningful phonemes in their language and which sounds that
doesn’t exist in their language. Syntax is involve with language, it rules on how words are to be
connected together in order to form a meaningful phase and also make sentences. In order for
parents to understand what their toddler is saying, they used a form of situational cues of syntax.
It usually leads to the increase of communicative competence while the toddler begins to
understand and apply appropriate syntax. Children also master the pragmatics of language, the
knowledge of how the language might be used to communicate effectively. Pragmatics also is
involve with sociolinguistic knowledge, culturally it specifies rules that dictate how language
should be used in a certain way dealing with social contexts.
The brain is a lateralized organ with the major language centers in the left cerebral
hemisphere. Aphasia occurs when damages has been done to one of the languages. A loss of one
or more language functions and the symptoms that an aphasia patient displays will depend on the
site and the extent of the injury. If there is an injury to the Broca’s area it will somewhat affect
the person speech production and not comprehend. The left hemisphere is so sensitive to some
aspects of language from birth. Speech sounds already direct elicit more electrical activity from
the left side of the brain, whereas music and other nonspeech sounds produce greater activity
from the right cerebral hemisphere. Erik Lenneberg, said that language should be most easily
acquired between birth and puberty. That is the period when the lateralized human’s brain is
becoming increasingly specialized for linguistic functions. There are some differences between
early and late second-language learners in the organization of the brain.
Chapter 10-Emotional Development, Temperament, and Attachment
Emotions can appear at different times over the first few years of a child’s life. Babies
shows interest, distress, disgust and also contentment. After a few months the babies begin to
show their social smiles that are most often seen in interactions with their guardian or caregiver.
The guardian or caregiver are likely to be delighted at a baby’s positive reactions to them and
they will smile back. The basic emotions that have emerge between the ages of 2 to 7 months are
anger, joy surprise and also fear. The reason being, they emerge in all healthy infants at the same
age and are displayed and interpreted similarly in all the cultures. Some of the learning may be
necessary before babies are able to express emotions that were not present at birth. It was once
said that disconfirmation of these learned expectations is likely to anger many 2 to 4 months and
sadden 4 to 6 months old babies. Babies must devise strategies for emotional self-regulation,
meaning that words are controlling their emotions. The self-initiated actions are particularly
effective when the babies’ mothers notice them and they will offer their own comforting to draw
their babies’ attention.
The baby’s ability to regulate emotions is the only skill that the child must acquire to
comply with a culture’s emotional display of rules. The prescriptions often dictate that they are
not only suppress with whatever is unacceptable of emotions that they are experiencing, but will
replace them with the feelings of rules called for the right now situation. Throughout the years
the children will display some limited ability to disguise their true feelings and become
increasingly aware of socially sanctioned display rules, learning more about which emotions to
express and which emotions to suppress. We know that the children’s emotional side of
regulation will continue to develop throughout their adolescence.
Chapter 11-Development of the Self-Concept
It is believe that infants have the ability to distinguish the self from the surrounding
environment. The finding that newborns become distressed at hearing a recording of another
baby’s cry. But they not only hearing a recording of their own cries, it implies that differentiation
of self and others is possible at birth. Some developmentalist believe that infants are born
without a sense of self. Once the infants know whom they are, the infants will get into position to
find out who or what they are which is called self-concept. Over time the infants will display a
better way to discriminate visual representations of themselves and also other people as potential
social partners. A certain level of cognitive development may be necessary for self-recognition,
social experiences are probably of equal importance. One social experience that always
contribute to self-awareness in humans is a secure attachment to a primary caregiver or guardian.
The parents contribute to their child by expanding self-concept providing descriptive
information. The interchanges of helping young children to organize their experiences into a
storyline narrative and to recall them as the events they have shared together, for instance, a trip
to an amusement park. Heidi Keller believes that there is evidence that cultural differences in
parenting styles influences toddler to achieve the self-recognition. It is very clear that social
experiences that is related to cultural differences in child-rearing practices, do influence the age
at which children attain self-recognition.
The growth of self-recognition and an emerging awareness of oneself as a participant in
social interactions pave the way for many new social and emotional competencies. Once the
toddler has reach their milestone, it is believe that they become more outgoing and also more
socially skilled.
