CHAPTER 4 REVIEW QUESTIONS

1. Prenatal Development is a hard course for many parts of the

reproductive cycle. At first once the sperm is injected into the vagina only
one of millions of sperm makes it to the egg and gets in while the others die.
And then Fewer than half of fertilized eggs, called zygotes, survive.
About 10 days after conception, the zygote's outer part attaches to the
uterine wall and becomes the placenta where nourishment for the child
enters. The next 6 weeks the embryo's body organs begin to form and
function like the heart and liver. Now at the end of the sixth month
internal organs have grown and matured enough to allow a premature
baby of that age a chance to live and thrive but it’s still hard. Teratogens
are harmful substances that can penetrate the placenta and can damage
the baby through whichever process it’s at. Also alcohol can
dramatically harm the child if too much is taken but also even a little.
FAS is an example of this which can cause mental retardation, About 4
in 10 alcoholic mothers who drink during pregnancy have babies with
FAS.
2. The newborn is very competent and more than we have imagined. They are born
with sensory materials in their brain and reflexes ideally suited for survival
such as interaction and nourishment. There are behaviors that ilstrate this
like the rooting reflex (touch the cheek , baby searches for a nipple), looks
longer at humans than other patterns, prefer to look at objects a certain
amount of inches away (which is usually how far a mother’s face is from the
baby when holding him/her up), and lastly they can recognize their mother
from her smell and voice. A form of simple learning is called habituation (a
decrease in responding with repeated stimulation). It helps scientists see the
somewhat boredom of the child with the visual stimuli and lets us
understand a way to ask infants what they see and remember. With this way
of studying a child they figured out that a child can recognize something
familiar if it were rotated 90 degrees and also it can ddiscriminate colors,
shapes, sounds, and can understand some basics of numbers and physics (2
objects cannot occupy the same space.)
3. As maturation is defined in the book as biological growth processes that
enable orderly changes in behavior, relatively uninfluenced by experience.
This will always affect us. We seldom remember memories before the age of
3 or 31/2 for lack of neural connections at the time. Maturation changes the
way our mind organizes ideas, memories, etc. It also influences the
development in the frontal lobes, the last of this maturation of the brain is
the association areas of the cortex. Motor skills with a few exceptions the
sequence in which babies perform motor skills is universal. This does not
reflect imitation but a maturing nervous system; blind children can crawl and
walk also.
4. Jean Piaget began his interst 1920 when he was working in paris to make
children intelligence tests. This is where he realized many children think the
same in all the errors in the intelligence tests. He believed that the mind of
the child is not a miniature model of the adult's. This revolutionized our
understanding of children’s minds. He theorized that the mind develops by
forming schemas that organize and interpret information, which we
sometimes accommodate to understand new information. Eventually the
child’s mind stops thinking from its wild and illogical ways to the powerful
abstract reasoning power of the adult. Before they would believe if
something was out of sight it simply didn’t exist anymore but an example of
the brain maturing is when they realize object permanence, an awareness
that things still exist even when they are out of sight. Piaget also
proposed the idea that children are egocentric since they only think of
things from their point of view and that others may hold false beliefs.
Piaget also suggested that around the age of 12 reasoning expands from
concrete to abstract thinking which piaget called formal operational
thinking. Nowadays we’ve advanced to believe that young children are
more capable and their development is more continuous than what piaget
had suggested. Now we believe that cognition abilities that happen in
different parts of the development of a child start developing very
immaturely in a stage before that one.
5. The impact of body contact as harlow describes it is that we don’t
become attached to our mothers because they can supply to our need of
nourishment, its actually the need of a safe haven a place where they can
explore freely and be protected. Like when a mother leaves a child at the
park by itself it becomes distressed if the mom leaves its side but runs after
the mother once she comes back for that secure feeling. Like the experiment
harlow conducted with the monkeys it didn’t attach itself to the nourishing
parent but more to the one that it knew more and offered comfort. For
humans our safe havens change from parents to peers and peers to our
partners. It all depends on how secure you feel to that person.
Familiarity is another important concept for offspring, familiarity is
very important during the critical period of a childs life. The reason why a
chick, duck, gosling follow their mother is because she is usually the first
moving object they see and usually only follow her and her alone. Konrad
said this process Is called imprinting where the animals form attachments
during the critical period early in life. Children do not imprint though, but we
do become attached to what we’ve known. Just a little bit of exposure to
people and things start the process of familiarity. Familiarity is a safety
signal, it makes a child happy and satisfied. Responsive parenting as the book
suggests is when responsive parents who are sensitive to the baby it usually
becomes securely attached while insensitive, unresponsive parents have
babies who usually as the book suggests insecurely attached.
6. Secure attachment Usually help babies become more socially competent
children. Whichever way the child was treated is usually a reflection on how
they were treated. The book states that whenever an infant whether it be a
monkey or human are deprived of attachment to their parent they might
become withdrawn, anxious, and maybe in the coming future even abusive.
Those that are temporarily deprived of this attachment may become sad and
angry and even lose hope. This study has been backed up by abusive parents
testimony saying that they have also been neglected or battered as children.
7. Children developed their self-concept (a sense of their own identity and
personal worth) around the end of their childhood around age 12. According
to studies done by placing a red dot on the child’s nose and seeing if they can
recognize its not part of their schema in the mirror, they achieve self concept
around 15-18 months. They wonder “what is that dot doing on my face”. By
an evaluation of themselves compared to their peers children start forming a
stable concept of themselves. If they form a positoive self concept than they
are usually more confident, independent, optimistic, assertive, and sociable.
Parenting styles also have effects on children during this stage.. In the
book there are 3 child rearing practices such as
authoritarian - impose rules and expecting obedience
 Tend not to internalize their actions.
permissive - submit to children's desires and make few demands use
little punishment
 Become more motivated and self-confident but feel like they’re
in control.
authoritative - both demanding and responsive. set rules but also
reason with children, also encouraging open discussion and allowing
exceptions when making the rules.
 Internalize their behavior
 Feel more self-control

8. Adolescence is life between childhood and adulthood. During this period of

time there are some major changes that are well known such as Puberty
which is where your body starts maturing sexually yor body starts activating
the reproductive organs such as the ovaries and testicles but also your body
starts transforming on the outside such as developing breasts, lower voice,
etc. The way girls realize their puberty is starting is from the menarche, first
menstrual period around the age of 11 while it’s the spermarche, first
ejaculation for boys which is usually around the age of 14. Our brains also
start selective pruning of our neural connections; what we don’t use we lose.
The brain in which we enter our teens is not the same in which we leave our
teens.
9. Adolescents’ growing reasoning power is a huge change from the beginning
to the end. At the beginning we are more self-focused but eventually toward
the end of adolescence we gain formal operations, the ability to reason
hypothetically and deduce consequences also enables them to detect
 inconsistencies in other’s reasoning and to spot hypocrisy. This can lead into
conflicts with parents and believe in their own ideals more strongly. Moral
behavior as Kohlberg proposed can be put into 3 levels
 Preconventional Morality- preconventional morality of self-interest,
they obey to avoid punishment or to gain concrete rewards.
 Conventional Morality- Caring more for others and upholding laws
and rules just because they’re laws and rules. Adolescents might
approve actions that will gain social approval or that help maintain
social order.
 Postconventiolnal Morality- Affirms people agreed upon rights, or
follows what one personally perceives as basic ethical principles..
As our thinking matures, as thinking matures, our behaviors becomes less
selfish and more caring. A person would feel disgusted at degrading and sub
human behavior, and feel uplifted when seeing other people do good things.
To stand up and be counted, to explain and defend our convictions, to
commit money and energy is to believe our convictions even more strongly.
10. An adolescents search for identity is a long journey for him/her. In the book
Identity is defined as one’s sense of self. It is mentioned that a teen will try on
many social roles before choosing his/her identity and integrating different
aspects of their experience. Some might take on roles similar to their parents
while others might take on a negative role that is supposed to be In
opposition to their parents and society but in conformity to another peer
group. The development of intimacy grows also during the adolescent years.
In order to reach the stage in where you can form intimate bonds with other
people you have to have a clear and comfortable sense of who you are. Men
and women differ in intimate social relationships during these years as men
are more likely to be more skeptical, and intradependent unlike their female
counterparts which are more open to spirituality and interdependent.
11. Are bodies when beginning adulthood (mid 20’s) are just reaching our peak
of physical health from there our bodies start slowly declining from Muscular
strength, reaction time, sensory keenness and cardiac output. For women, a
significant physical change of adult life is menopause, which generally seems
to be a smooth rather than a rough transition. In early adulthood we may not
see the signs of our bodies declining until later in life. Even our neurological
processes slow though we don’t notice it, But our brains still remains healthy
except for many unfortunate people who have brain diseases .
12. As we age we remember things well, but recall speed begins to decline, even
for things such as names and basic words but there was no difference in how
much each one remember just in how fast it was remembered. Nonesense is
most likely not going to be remembered later in life. Tests have also revealed
that recognition memory is better for older adults early in the day rather
than later.
13. The path of adult development shouldn’t be linked to one’s chronological age
because there are many factors surrounding it but age only plays a really
small role. Some psychologists have suggested that adults progress through a
 sequence of life stages. They argue that as people enter their forties, they
undergo a "midlife transition" (midlife crisis) to middle adulthood, which for
many is a crisis but is not always associated with this age. There have been
large samples where many sad and awful things don’t just happen around the
forties like divorce rates is more common in thos in their twenties while
suicide happens more during the 70’s-80’s. It all depends on what the person
went through and such as life events and chance encounters. Adults can
change a lot more differently than what Myer’s suggests.
14. The importance of family and work commitments in adult development is
intimacy and generativity (being productive and supporting future
generations) as Erik Erikkson called them. Researchers called them
Affiliation, achievement, attachment, and productivity, commitment and
competence. Love is a big aspect in a person’s life and it centers more on love
centers on family, commitments toward spouse, parents and children. There
have been studies in which married couples were happier and 9/10
heterosexual adults marry. However, as children begin to absorb more and
more time, money, and emotional energy, satisfaction with the marriage may
decline. But most parents are still happy at whatching their kids grow up,
Mature, and leave the “nest”.
Work is what many men and women reflect upon with their friends.
A person dentifies themselves by what they work as.Choosing a career
path is difficult, especially now in this time. It frequently takes time
for people to settle into an occupation. Most people shift from their
initially intended majors while in college, many find their postcollege
employment in fields not directly related to their majors, and most
will change careers. Happiness is having work that fits your interests
and provides a sense of competence and accomplishments.
15. People of all ages report similar feelings of happiness and satisfaction with
life. Yet most of us will suffer and cope with the deaths of relatives and
friends.
Grief is bad when the death of a loved one comes before its expected time on
the social clock. The normal range of reactions to a loved one's death is wider
than most people think. Some cultures encourage public weeping and wailing
others hide grief like here in America but there are many with crying and
wailing. Within any culture, some individuals grieve more intensely and
openly. Research disproves the popular idea that terminally ill and upset
people go through predictable stages. But even at a death all can be fixed
with how you think and be joyful even when looking a death which makes life
that much more sweeter after one has though of it as meaningless and
worthless. Really makes you asses your life in a different way. (sense of
integrity)
16. Piaget, Kolberg and Erikson have made some brilliant discoveries that
scientists have modified to now and new ideas. Continuity and discontinuity
were two side of a debate that could’ve been anyone’s win but continuous
won over because yes the way we mature is more of a fluid motion than just
many neat steps for this function to finish. Stability vs change was also
another great point and the way harlow fought that infants liked stability he
was mostly right but some ideas were updated There is evidence of both of
stability and change. Stability stays a lot more imprinted in us than change
because we want a defining personality not one that switches everyday.
Attitudes too also become stable with age. There is always that chance of
change though even if you were a big delinquent you could change into a
mature and intelligent adult that obeys.