Week 7 - Chapter 9: How Do People Grow, Change, and Develop?

What is development? Development includes changes in physical, emotional, social, and cognitive behavior and abilities over time through an interaction of nature and nurture.

Prenatal Development: The germinal stage: the zygote undergoes rapid cell division and duplication. The embryonic stage: major organs and organ systems form. Fetal Stage: body organs and systems more fully develop.

Differences in Physical Development: Infant's brains are highly changeable. Reflexes such as sucking, rooting, and grasping help the infant survive. Gross motor skills develop and allow the child to run, walk, jump and hop. Fine motor skills develop and aid activities such as writing, using utensils, and playing a musical instrument.

Differences in Cognitive Development: According to Jean Piaget, infants and children apply schemas to understand their environment and adapt to change through accommodation when existing schemas are changed or modified. Lawrence Kohlberg's research on moral reasoning suggests that children's understanding of right and wrong develops progressively from a focus on the self to the external world.

Psychosocial Development: An infant's temperament can influence the attachment between the infant and the primary caregiver. Diana Baumrind identified three styles of parenting: authoritarian, authoritative, and permissive. Children also process and develop schemas about gender roles.

Development in Adolescence and Adulthood: Puberty is the maturation of sex characteristics that enables us to reproduce. At around age 50, women experience menopause and hormonal changes that bring an end to reproductive capacity. During adolescence, the brain remains highly changeable. Teenagers tend to be egocentric.

Coping with Death and Dying: Death is a process rather than a point in time, and is inevitable part of our development. There have been five reactions identified that may characterize people who know they are dying: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance. 

That's it for this week folks! :)

Prenatal Development - I LOVE learning about this kind of stuff. Really interests me. :)
Picture Courtesy of: http://blog.lib.umn.edu/vanm0049/myblog/2011/11/fetal-development-and-obstacles.html 

Week 7 - Chapter 8: Motivation and Emotion: What Guides Our Behavior?

What is a motive? A motive is the tendency to desire and seek out positive incentives and rewards and to avoid negative outcomes.

How Do Psychologists View Motivation? William James that most motives were inborn instincts. According to the drive reduction theory, primary drives maintain homeostasis. Arousal theories suggest that we all have different optimal levels of arousal. Abraham Maslow proposed a hierarchy of needs in which some needs take priority over others.

Hunger: What Makes Us Eat? Receptors in the stomach monitor the intake of food and contractions of the stomach, and signal the brain when to make us hungry or to shut off hunger. Obesity can be caused by biological factors, such as a slow metabolism, as well as a number of behavioral factors, such as poor diet, excessive food intake, and emotional eating. Eating disorders:anorexia nervosa involves extreme concern about gaining weight and reduction in caloric intake that leads to drastic weight loss. Bulimia nervosa involves bingeing on food followed by purging or drastic reduction in caloric intake to rid the body of the extra calories. Binge eating disorder involves bingeing on food without compensatory measures to rid the body of extra calories.

Sexual Desire: is influenced by neurotransmitters, hormones, sensory ques, and cultural attitudes. The sexual response cycle includes excitement, plateau, orgasm, and resolution phases. Sexual orientation can be heterosexual (other sex), bisexual (both sexes), or homosexual (same sex). Homophobia is prejudice against homosexuals and bisexuals. \

Theories & Expression of Emotion Components of emotion include physiological reactions, behavioral reactions, facial expressions, cognition, and affective response. Theories of Emotion include the James-Lange theory (emotion is a physiological response to a stimulus) Cannon-Bard theory (emotion occurs in the brain, response to a situation), facial feedback hypothesis (emotion occurs by the feedback the brain receives from muscles in the face), two-factor theory (emotions are a product of both physiological arousal and cognitive interpretations of this arousal), and the cognitive-meditational theory (cognitive appraisal of a situation determines what emotion we feel). Basic emotions include happiness, sadness, anger, and fear are present across cultures. Display rules determine the appropriate expression of emotion in a culture. This week is continued on Week 7 - Chapter 9: How Do People Grow, Change, and Develop?

A Fun Little Diagram of Theories of Emotion :)
Courtesy of http://employees.csbsju.edu/ltennison/PSYC111/M&E.htm. 

Week 6 - Cognition, Language, and Intelligence: How Do We Think?

Thinking: Cognition is the way we store and use information. Knowledgeises the mental representations of the world we have stored in long-term memory. Thinking is the use of knowledge to accomplish a goal. Concepts are mental categories. Three levels of catergorization: superordinate (broad), basic level category, and the superordinate (most specific).

Reasoning, Decision Making, and Judgement: Deductive reasoning means reasoning from the general to the specific, whereas inductive reasoning means reasoning from the specific to the general. Decision making means choosing among several alternatives.

Problem Solving: Algorithm is a way of solving a well-structured problem that always leads to the correct solution. A heuristic is a shortcut that may or may not lead to the solution. Ill-structured problems must be solved by heuristics. Insight, creativity, and incubation help us overcome common obstacles to problem solving such as functional fixedness and mental sets.

Lanugage: Research indicates that infants generally proceded from cooing to babbling to morphemes. The Whorfian hypothesis sugguests that language determines one's thoughts sand perceptions of the world.

Intelligence: Alfred Binet established the measurement of mental age that reflected a child's mental abililtes compared to the average. Lewis Terman revised these testing procedures and introduced the intelligence quotient (Or IQ), which is obtained by dividing one's mental age by one's chronological age.

I accomplished a lot this week, but if I don't hurry and close this, I'm going to miss my bus for the volleyball game! Next week will be two chapters based on motivation and development1 :)

Week 5 - How Do We Learn? & How Does Memory Function?

Chapter 5

Habituation: Orienting reflexes allow us to respond to unexpected stimuli. Habituation allows us to stop responding to stimuli that are repeated over and over. Dishabituation allows us to re-respond to a stimulus to which we were previously habituated.

Classical Conditioning: Occurs when a neutral stimulus is paired with an unconditioned stimulus that reliably causes an unconditioned response, and because of this association, the neutral stimulus loses its neutrality and becomes a conditioned response that elicts the conditoned response. Is most effective when the neutral stimulus/conditioned stimulus and the unconditioned stimulus are separated only by a brief period of time and the pairing must reliably predict the response. Stimulus generalization occurs when we respond to similar stimuli with the same conditioned response. Stimulus discrimination occurs when the conditioned response is only elicited by a particular conditioned response. Extinction is the elimination of a conditioned response.

Operant Conditioning: We learn from the consequences of our actions. E.L. Thorndike developed the law of effect, which emphasized the negative and positive consequences of behavior. B.F. Skinner coined the term "operant conditioning".

Observational learning is learning that occurs by observing others and modeling their behavior.

Chapter 6 Functions of Memory: The brain encodes, stores, and processes information. This can be explicit (consciously) or implicit (unconsciously).

Long term memory is organized into schemas, which allow us to effectively use our memory.

Forgetting: may be due to decay, interference, cue-dependent forgetting, or even repression.

Flashbulb memories are unusually detailed memories for emotionally charged events. We are prone to many memory errors, including the misinformation effect.

This Week I Accomplished: Read Chapter 5 & 6, 4 discussion posts, 2 C&R's, 2 quizzes, 3 tweets, and a blog posting. Also accomplished: Homecoming Week! Plus 2 volleyball games and a tournament. Went line dancing, and got all of my regular homework done too!

Next Week: Chapter 7 - Cognition, Language, and Intelligence: How Do We Think? :)

Reference: What is Psychology? Essentials, Second Edition by Ellen Pastorino and Susann Doyle-Portillo. 2013: Cengage Learning.

Three Stages Model of Memory (and how alcohol affects it!)