And I also used information from the book
If you want me to write a better work cited , just let me know!
Monday, April 26, 2010
Early Adulthood
The summer right before I came to BSCA Gradual Transition: Emerging Adulthood
In emerging adulthood, young adults from about age 18 to 25 are released from parental oversight but have not yet taken on adult roles. During these years of extended exploration, young people prolong identity development as they make frequent changes in educational paths, hobs and love partners.
Increased education required for entry-level positions in many fields, gains in economic prosperity, reduced need for young people’s labor, and globalization have prompted the appearance and spread of emerging adulthood.
Physical Development
Once body structures reach maximum capacity and efficiency in the teens and twenties, biological aging, or senescence, begins. The programmed effects of specific genes may control certain age-related biological changes in DNA and body cells. DNA may also be damaged as random mutations accumulate, leading to less efficient cell repair and replacement and to abnormal cancerous cells.
Release of highly reactive free radicals is a likely cause of age-related DNA and cellular damage. Biological aging may result from a complex combination of programmed effects of specific genes and random events that cause cells to deteriorate.
Genetic and cellular deterioration affects organs and tissues. The cross-linkage theory of aging suggests that over time, protein fibers form links and become less elastic, producing negative changes in many organs. Declines in the endocrine and immune systems may also contribute to aging.
Physical Changes
Gradual physical changes take place in early adulthood and later accelerate. Declines in heart and lung performance are evident during exercise. Heart disease is a leading cause of death in adults, although it has decreased considerably in the past half-century due to lifestyle changes and medical advances. Atherosclerosis is a serious, multiply-determined cardiovascular disease involving fatty deposits on artery walls.
Athletic skills requiring speed, strength, and gross body coordination peak in the early twenties; those requiring endurance, arm-hand steadiness, and aiming peak in the late twenties and early thirties. Less active lifestyles rather than biological aging account for most of the age-related decline in athletic skill and motor performance.
The immune response strengthens through adolescence and declines after age 20. This trend is partly due to shrinking of the thymus gland. Increased difficulty coping with physical and psychological stress also contributes.
After age 35, women’s reproductive capacity declines dramatically due to reduced quality and quantity of ova. Men show a gradual decrease in amount of semen and concentration of sperm in each ejaculation after age 40.
Cognitive Development
Changes in the Structure of Thought
Cognitive development beyond Piaget's formal operations is known as post formal thought. Adult cognition typically reflects an awareness of multiple truths, integrates logic with reality, and tolerates the gap between the ideal and the real.
According to Perry's theory of epistemic cognition, college students move form dualistic thinking, dividing information into right and wrong, to relativistic thinking, awareness of multiple truths. Eventually, the most mature individual’s progress to commitments within relativistic thinking, a perspective that synthesizes contradictions.
Epistemic cognition depends on experiences that encourage young people to consider the rationality of their though processes, resulting in gains in metacognition. Peer collaboration on challenging, ill-structured problems is especially beneficial.
According to Labouvie-Vief's theory, the need to specialize motivated adults to progress from the ideal world of possibilities to pragmatic thought, which uses logic as to pragmatic thought, which uses logic as a tool to solve real-world problems and accepts inconsistency, imperfection, and the need to compromise. As a result of enhanced reflective capacities, adults also gain in cognitive-affective complexity--coordination of positive and negative feelings into a complex, organized structure.
Erickson's Theory: Intimacy
In Erickson's theory, young adults must resolve the conflict of intimacy versus isolation, balancing independence and intimacy as they form a close relationship with a partner. Research confirms that s a secure identity fosters attainment to intimacy. The negative outcome is loneliness and self-absorption.
Young people also focus on aspects of generatively, including contributions to society through work and child rearing.
My Early Adulthood
It has been a long journey, I am kind of old for being freshman, but that is what it is now. I am still worried about when I should go back to Korean and serve for the army for two years which really sucks. I grew up a little bit more, I am now almost 6"1. I've worked out really hard to gain more weights, I used to weight 158 when I was in hight school, but now I weight 165 pounds. I care more about family now, I care more about my school works than I used to in high school. I think it is because I've grown up more and now it is the time for me to think about my future more seriously. Living in another country is really hard. I am trying to enjoy this, I am trying to think positive. I am still trying to meet more people, and it is really interesting that I can meet many people from all over the world. I am really glad that I can experience this another culture, even though I have to fight through my lanague problem every day. By doing this blog work, I had a chance to look back my life. It was really good.
Adolescence
Me and my friends in middle schoolDefinition of Adolescence
Adolescence, initiated by puberty, is the period of transition between childhood and adulthood. Early biologically oriented theories viewed adolescence as an inevitable period of storm and stress. An alternative perspective regarded the social environment as entirely responsible for the wide variability in adolescent adjustment. Contemporary research shows that adolescence is a product of biological, psychological, and social forces.
Puberty: The Physical Transition to Adulthood
Hormonal changes beginning in middle childhood initiate puberty, on average, two years earlier for girls than for boys. The first outward sign is the growth spurt. As the body enlarges, girls’ hips and boys’ shoulder broaden. Girls add more fat, boys more muscle.
Puberty changes lead to improvements in gross motor performance, which are much larger for boys than for girls. Some boys become so preoccupied with physical prowess that they use dangerous, often illegal performance-enhancing drugs.
Although girls’ involvement in high school sports has increased, they continue to receive less athletic encouragement than boys. The number of adolescents participating in regular physical activity declines from ninth to twelfth grade.
Sex hormones regulate changes in primary and secondary sexual characteristics. Menarche occurs late in the girl’s sequence of pubertal events, following the rapid increase in body size. Among boys, as the sex organs and body enlarge and pubic and underarm hair appears, spermarche takes place.
Heredity, nutrition, exercise, and overall physical health contribute to the timing of puberty. In industrialized nations, a secular trend toward earlier menarche has occurred.
Pruning of unused synapses in the cerebral cortex continues in adolescence and growth and myelination of stimulated neural fibers accelerate. These changes support adolescents’ cognitive advances and may play a role in their drive for novel experiences.
Changes occur in the way the brain regulates sleep timing, so that adolescents generally go to bed much later than they did as children. Sleep deprivation contributes to poor achievement, depressed mood, and behavior problems.
The Psychological Impact of Pubertal Events
Girls generally react to menarche with surprise and mixed emotions, but whether their feelings lean in a positive or a negative direction depends on prior knowledge and support from family members. Although boys usually know ahead of time about spermarche, they also react with missed feelings. Boys receive less social support for the physical changes of puberty than girls.
Besides higher hormone levels, negative life events and adult-structured situations are associated with adolescents’ negative moods. In contrast, teenagers feel upbeat when with peers and in self-chosen leisure activities.
Puberty is accompanied by psychological distancing between parent and child. The reaction may be a modern substitute for physical departure form the family, which typically occurs at sexual maturity in primate species and in nonindustrialized cultures.
Early maturing boys and late maturing girls, whose appearance closely matches cultural standards of physical attractive ness, have a more positive body image and usually adjust well in adolescence. In contrast, early-0maturing girls and late maturing boys, who fit in least well physically with peers, experience emotional and social difficulties. Early maturing girls, in particular, may experience lasting difficulties.
Cognitive Development
Piaget’s Theory: The Formal Operational Stage
During Piaget’s formal operational stage, adolescents engage in hypotheticodeductive reasoning. When faced with a problem, they start with a hypothesis about variables that might affect an outcome, deduce logical, testable inferences, systematically isolate and combine variables to see which inferences are confirmed.
Propositional thought also develops. Adolescents can evaluate the logic of verbal statements apart from real-world circumstances.
Erickson's Theory: Identity versus Role Confusion
Erikson’s theory regards identity as the major personality achievement of adolescence. Young people who successfully resolve the psychological conflict of identity versus role confusion construct a solid self-definition consisting of self-chosen values and goals. Cognitive changes lead adolescences’ self-descriptions to become more organized and consistent, and personal and moral values appear as key themes. New dimensions of self-esteem are also added.
For most young people, self-esteem rises over the teenage years. Adolescents vary widely in their self-esteem drops, most are girls. Authoritative parenting and schools and neighborhoods that respect the young person’s ethnicity support positive self-esteem.
In complex societies, a period of exploration is necessary to form a personally meaningful identity. Identity achievement and identity moratorium are psychologically healthy identity statuses. Long-term identity foreclosure and identity diffusion are related to adjustment difficulties.
Adolescents who use a flexible, open-minded, rational approach to grappling with competing beliefs and values and who feel attached to parents but free to voice their own opinions are likely to be advanced in identity development. Close friends assist young people in exploring options.
Schools and communities that provide rich and varied opportunities also foster identity achievement. Ethnic minority youths who construct a strong, secure ethnic identity or a bicultural identity are advantages in many aspects of emotional and social development.
My adolescence experience
During adolescence, I started growing up really fast. I was only 5 foot when I was 12, but when I was 14, I grew 5 inches and when i was 17, I was almost 6 foot. And I also went through the puberty. I remember that I was not really shocked or anything. I didn't really gain any weight, I dont know why. I started to play more and more sports and one of the reasons that I started playing sprots a lot was to get rid of my stress from all pressure that I had to really do well in classes(That is what most students in South Korea go through about grades and school things in their adolescence period). Some of my friends couldn't hand the pressure and they started doing bad things like smoking or drinking. I am really glad that I didn't really care about those things and I really thank my parents that they didn't push me hard but supported me with kindness.
Middle Childhood
The elementary school that I went to for 6 yearsBody Growth
Gains in body size during middle childhood extend the pattern of slow, regular growth established during the preschool years. Bones continue to lengthen and broaden, and all twenty primary teeth are replaced by permanent ones. By age nine, girls overtake boys in physical size.
During middle childhood, children from economically advantaged homes are at their healthiest, as a result of good nutrition and rapid development of the immune system. But a variety of health problems do occur, many of which are more prevalent among low-SES children.
The most common vision problem in middle childhood is myopia, or nearsightedness. It is influenced by heredity, early biological trauma, and time spent reading and doing other close work. Myopia is one of the few health conditions that increase with SES.
Overweight and obesity are growing problems in Western nations. Although heredity contributes to obesity, parental feeding practices, maladaptive eating habits, and lack of exercise also play important roles. Obese children are disliked by peers and adults and have serious adjustment problems. They are also at risk for serious health difficulties, including early-onset diabetes. Family-based interventions to change parents’ and children’s eating patterns and lifestyles, including time spent watching TV, are the most effective treatment approaches.
Motor Development and Play
Games with rules become common during the school years. Children, especially boys, also engage in rough-and-tumble play, friendly play-fighting that helps establish a dominance hierarchy among group members. Children’s spontaneous games support cognitive and social development.
Many school-age children are not physically fir. More frequent physical education classes emphasizing individual exercise rather than competition could help ensure that all children have access to the benefits of regular exercise and play.
Piaget’s Theory: The Concrete Operational Stage
Children in the concrete operational stage can reason logically about concrete, tangible information. Mastery of conservation demonstrates reversibility in thinking. School-age youngsters are also better at hierarchical classification and seriation, including transitive inference. Their spatial reasoning improves, as seen in their ability to give directions and to create cognitive maps representing familiar large-scale spaces.
School-age children master logical ideas gradually.
Concrete operational thought is limited in that children do not come up with general logical principles.
Specific cultural practices, especially those associated with schooling, affect children’s mastery of piagetian tasks.
Some researchers believe that the gradual development of operational thought can best be understood within an information-processing framework. According to Case’s neo-piagetian theory, with practice, cognitive schemes demand less attention, freeing up space in working memory for combining old schemes and generating new ones. Eventually, children consolidate schemes into highly efficient, central conceptual structures. On a wide variety of tasks, children move from a focus on only one dimension to coordinating two dimensions to integrating multiple dimensions.
Language Development
During middle childhood, vocabulary continues to grow rapidly, and children have a more precise and flexible understanding of word meanings. They also use complex grammatical constructions and conversational strategies, and their narratives increase in organization, detail, and expressiveness. Language awareness contributes to school-age children’s language progress.
Mastery of a second language must begin in childhood for full development to occur. Bilingualism has positive consequences for cognitive development and certain aspects of language awareness. In Canada, language immersion programs are highly successful n making children proficient in both English and French. In the Unites States, bilingual education that combines instruction in the native tongue and in English supports ethnic minority children’s academic learning.
Individual Differences in Mental Development
Most intelligence tests yield an overall score as well as scores for separate intellectual factors. During the school years, IQ becomes more stable, and it correlates well with academic achievement. The Stanford-Binet Intelligence Scale and the Wechsler Intelligence Scale for Children (WISC-IV) are widely used individually administered intelligence tests.
Aspects of information processing that are related to IQ include speed of thinking and effective strategy use. Sternberg’s triarchic theory of successful intelligence views intelligence as an interaction of information-processing skills, specific experiences, and contextual (or cultural) influences.
Gardner’s theory of multiple intelligences--which identifies at least eight mental abilities, each with a unique biological basis and distinct course of development--has been especially helpful in understanding and nurturing children’s talents. It has also stimulated efforts to define, measure, and foster emotional intelligence.
Heritability estimates and adoption research indicate that intelligence is a product of both heredity and environment. Studies of black children adopted into well-to-do homes indicate that the black-white IQ gap is substantially influenced by environment.
Erickson’s Theory: Industry versus Inferiority
According to Erickson, children who successfully resolve the psychological conflict of industry versus inferiority develop a sense of competence at skills and tasks, a positive but realistic self-concept pride in accomplishment, moral responsibility, and the ability to work cooperatively with age mates.
My experience of middle childhood
I started to go to the elementary school when i was eight(In South Korea, parents usually send their kids to elementary school when they are eight.)
It was a new different experience that I ever had at that time. I met a lot of people, I got to make some friends. And started learning how to live with others and not just for me but for everyone. I started playing sports with friends. And I really thank you to my dad for playing many sports with me which made me a cool guy among my friends. But the only bad thing was the school was also a little bit far from where i lived, so when I came back home, I either played video games, or had to play sports by myself.
Early Childhood
Physical Development
Body Growth
Children grow more slowly in early childhood than they did in the first two years. As body fat declines, they become longer and leaner. New growth centers appear in the skeleton, and by the end of early childhood, children start to lose their primary teeth.
Different parts of the body grow at different rates. Changes in body size follow the general growth curve--rapid in infancy, slower in early and middle childhood, rapid again in adolescence--except for the genitals, the lymph tissue, and the brain.
Brain Development
In early childhood, frontal-lobe areas of the cerebral cortex devoted to planning and organizing behavior develop rapidly. In addition, the left cerebral hemisphere shows more neural activity than the right, supporting young children’s expanding language skills.
In early childhood, connections are established among different brain structures. Fibers linking the cerebellum to the cerebral cortex myelin ate, enhancing balance and motor control. The reticular formation, responsible for alertness and consciousness, and the corpus callosum, which connects the two cerebral hemispheres, also myelin ate rapidly.
Hand preference strengthens during early and middle childhood, indicating that lateralization is increasing. Handedness reflects an individual's dominant cerebral hemisphere. One theory proposes that most children are genetically biased for right handedness but that experience can sway them toward a left-hand preference.
Cognitive Development
Piaget's Theory: The Preoperational Stage
Rapid advances in mental representation, notably language and make-believe play, mark the beginning of Piaget's preoperational stage. With age, make-believe becomes increasingly complex, evolving into sociodramatic play with others. Preschoolers' make-believe supports many aspects of development. Gradually, children become capable of dual representation--viewing a symbolic object, such as a model or map, as both an object in its own right and a symbol.
Aside from representation, Piaget described the young child in terms of deficits. According to his theory, preoperational children are egocentric, often failing to imagine others' perspectives. By preventing children from reflecting on their own thinking and accommodating, egocentrism contributes to animistic thinking, centration, a focus on perceptual appearances, and irreversibility. These difficulties cause preschoolers to fail conservation and hierarchical classification tasks.
Vygotsky's Socio-cultural Theory
Unlike Piaget, Vygotsky regarded language as the foundation for all higher cognitive processes. According to Vygotsky, private speech, or language used for self-guidance, emerges out of social communication as adults and more skilled peers help children master challenging tasks. Eventually private speech is internalized as inner, verbal thought. Scaffolding is a form of social interaction that promotes the transfer of cognitive processes to children.
A Vygotskian classroom emphasizes assisted discovery. Verbal guidance from teachers and peer collaboration are vitally important. Make-believe play serves as a vital zone of proximal development that enhances many new competencies.
Guided participation, a broader term than scaffolding, recognizes cultural and situational variations in adult support of children’s efforts.
Language Development
Between ages two and three, children adopt the basic word order of their language. As they master grammatical rules, they may overextend them in a type of error called over-regularization. By the end of early childhood, children have acquired complex grammatical forms.
To communicate effectively, children must master the practical, social side of language, known as pragmatics. Two-year-olds are already skilled conversationalists in face-to-face interaction. By age 4, children adapt their speech to their listeners in culturally accepted ways. In highly demanding contexts, preschoolers’ communication skills may appear.
Erikson's Theory: Initiative versus Guilt
Erickson’s image of initiative versus guilt captures the emotional and social changes of early childhood. A healthy sense of initiative depends on exploring the social world through play, forming a conscience through identification with the same-sex parent, and receiving supportive child rearing.
Gender Typing
Gender typing is well under way in the preschool years. Preschoolers acquire many gender stereotypes and behaviors. Heredity, through prenatal hormones, contributes to boys’ higher activity level and overt aggression and to children’s preference for same-sex playmates. But parents, teachers, peers, and the broader social environment also encourage many gender-typed responses.
Although most people have a traditional gender identity, some exhibit androgyny, combining both masculine and feminine characteristics. Masculine and androgynous identities are linked to better psychological.
My experience of early childhood
I remember that i used to go to a kindergarten when i was maybe four to seven......But I don't think I really liked it. I did not really get along with other guys there. I think I would rather like to stay home and play with my toys. There was a housekeeper who was really nice to us and my family really trusted her, I used to go out and play outside with her too. I didn't really have many friends back then.. because the kindergarten was a little bit far from where I used to live(I still live where I used to live!)
Tuesday, April 20, 2010
Infancy and toddlerhood
Body growth
- Changes in height and weight are rapid during the first two years. In the first nine months, body far is laid down quickly, while muscle development is slow and gradual. Skeletal age is the best way to estimate a child’s physical maturity, which tends to vary by ethnic group and sex. Body proportions change as growth follows cephalocaudal and proximodistal trends.
- By the end of the first year, a typical infant’s height is about 32 inches, more than 50 percent greater then at birth; by 2 years, it is nearly 75 percent greater (36 inches). Similarly, by 5 months of age, birth weights has doubled (to about 15 pounds), at 1 year it has tripled (to 22 pounds), and at 2 years it has quadrupled (to about 30 pounds).
Brain Development
- Early in development the brain grows faster than any other organ of the body. Once neurons, or nerve cells, are in place, they rapidly form synapses. To communicate, neurons release neurotransmitters, which cross synapses. As synapses form, to make room for new synaptic connections, many surrounding neurons die. Neurons that are seldom stimulated lose their synapses in a process called synaptic pruning. Glial cells, responsible for myelination, multiply rapidly into the second year, contributing to large gains in brain weight.
- The cerebral cortex is the largest, most complex brain structure and the last to stop growing. Its regions develop in the general order in which various capacities emerge in the growing child. The hemispheres of the cerebral cortex specialize, a process called lateralization. In the first few years of life, there is high brain plasticity, with many areas not yet committed to specific functions.
- Stimulation of the brain is essential during periods in which it is growing most rapidly. Prolonged early deprivation, as in some babies reared in orphanages, can permanently impair brain growth and all aspects of psychological development.
Influences on Early Physical Growth
- Twin and adoption studies reveal the contribution of heredity to body size and rate of physical growth.
- Breast milk is ideally suited to infants' growth needs, offers protection against disease, and prevents malnutrition and infant death in poverty-stricken areas of the world. Breast- and bottle-fed babies do not differ in emotional adjustment, and cognitive benefits of breastfeeding are inconclusive.
Nororganic failure to thrive, which occurs in infants who lack affection and stimulation, illustrates the importance of these factors in normal physcial growth.
Piaget's Cognitive -Developmental
In Piaget’s theory, by acting directly on the environment, children move through four stages in which psychological structures, or schemes, achieve a better fir with external reality.Schemes change in two ways: through adaptation, which is made up of two complementary activities—assimilation and accommodation—and through organization, the internal rearrangement of schemes into a strongly interconnected cognitive system.
Language Development
According to the behaviorist perspective, parents train children in language skills through operant conditioning and imitation. Behaviorism, however, has difficulty accounting for children‘s novel utterances.
Erikson's Theory of Infant and Toddler Personality
According to Erikson, warm, responsive care giving leads infants to resolve the psychological conflict of basic trust versus mistrust on the positive side. During toddlerhood, the conflict of autonomy versus shame and doubt is resolved favorably when parents provide appropriate guidance and reasonable choices. If children emerge from the first few years without sufficient trust and autonomy, the seeds are sown for adjustment problems.
Personal experience of infancy and toddlerhood
I couldnt really remember anything, so i had to call my mom and ask her. She said i started walking when i was about 10 months old... and other than that, my mom said she doesn't really remember anything... She said i used to pee on my body(of course i was laying down) and my mom was always with me which I really thank her for doing.
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