Understanding Life-Span Human Development
Systematic changes in the individual occurring between conception and death; such changes can be positive, negative, or neutral.
What is development?
A system of meanings shared by a population of people and transmitted from one generation to the next.
What is culture?
A relatively powerful gene that is expressed phenotypically and masks the effect of a less-powerful recessive gene.
What is the dominant gene?
A genetically based pattern of tendencies to respond in predictable ways; the building blocks of personality.
What is temperament?
A test routinely used to assess a newborn’s heart rate, respiration, color, muscle tone, and reflexes immediately after birth and 5 minutes later; used to identify high-risk babies.
What is an Apgar test?
The physical changes that occur from conception to maturity.
What is growth?
Carefully recorded observations of the growth and development of children by their parents over a period; the first scientific investigations of development.
What are baby biographies?
A chromosomal abnormality in which the child has inherited an extra 21st chromosome and is, as a result, intellectually disabled; also called trisomy 21.
What is Down syndrome?
A serious form of mental illness characterized by disturbances in logical thinking, emotional expression, and interpersonal behavior.
What is schizophrenia?
Fetal death that occurs late in pregnancy when survival outside the womb would normally have been possible
What is stillbirth?
The deterioration of organisms that leads inevitably to their death.
What is the scientific method?
A relatively permanent change in behavior (or behavioral potential) that results from a person’s experiences or practice.
What is learning?
Method of examining physical organs by scanning them with sound waves—for example, scanning the womb and thereby producing a visual outline of the fetus to detect gross abnormalities.
What is ultrasound?
Method of studying genetic and environmental influence that examines similarities in traits between pairs of siblings who have different degrees of genetic similarity—for example, identical twins, full biological siblings, half siblings, and unrelated stepsiblings who live together in stepfamilies.
What is family study?
A state of active, irregular sleep associated with dreaming; named for the rapid eye movements associated with it.
What is REM sleep?
To most developmentalists, positive, negative, and neutral changes in the mature organism; different from biological aging.
What is aging?
Bandura’s social learning theory, which holds that children and adults can learn novel responses merely by observing the behavior of a model, making mental notes on what they have seen, and then using these mental representations to reproduce the model’s behavior; more broadly, a theory emphasizing the importance of cognitive processing of social experiences.
What is social learning theory?
Method of studying genetic and environmental influence in which the similarity of identical twins is compared to that of (less genetically similar) fraternal twins, often in studies involving both twins reared together and twins reared apart
What is a twin study?
In genetics, individuals who possess a recessive gene associated with a disease and who, although they do not have the disease, can transmit the gene for it to offspring.
What is a carrier?
A type of gland that secretes chemicals called hormones directly into the bloodstream. Endocrine glands play critical roles in stimulating growth and regulating bodily functions.
What is endocrine gland?
Newly identified period of the life span extending from about age 18 to age 25 or even later, when young people are neither adolescents nor adults and are exploring their identities, careers, and relationships.
What is emerging adulthood?
A technique in which research participants are placed in experimental conditions in an unbiased or random way so that the resulting groups are not systematically different.
What is the random assignment?
Interventions that involve substituting normal genes for the genes associated with a disease or disorder; otherwise altering a person’s genetic makeup.
What is gene therapy?
A change in the structure or arrangement of one or more genes that produces a new phenotype.
What is mutation?
The processes of biological change that result in an individual’s attaining sexual maturity and becoming capable of producing a child.
What is puberty?