Theories are vital tools for developmental researchers because they
provide organizing frameworks for our observations of people.
he field of developmental science is considered to be __________ because investigators often are interested in the practical implications of their research.
At birth, the brain is
nearer to its adults size than any other physical structure.
When baby Brad gazes at his mother, she smiles at him, and then Brad gazes and smiles, too. This contingent responsiveness is an example of
Infants and toddlers grow
in little spurts.
The specialization of the two hemispheres of the brain is called
he _______ reflex permits feeding.
Of all motor skills, ________ may play the greatest role in infant cognitive development.
Which of the following is true about infantile amnesia?
Most older children and adults cannot retrieve events that happened before age 3.
are those born several weeks or more before their due date.
Baby Luigi retrieves his pacifier, which his mother has hidden behind a pillow. Baby Luigi has begun to master
Which of the following is true about make-believe play?
Make-believe is a major means through which children extend their cognitive skills and learn about important activities in their culture.
Human adults have especially elaborate ___________, which enable them to observe another's behavior while simulating the behavior in their own brains.
Some researchers claim that infants respond in kind to others' emotions through a fairly automatic process of
Piaget believed that infants and toddlers
"think" with their eyes, ears, and hands
Although Justin spent his first 18 months in an orphanage, his adoptive mother believes that sensitive caregiving will help Justin overcome his early experiences. Justin's mother emphasizes the role of ____________ in development.
With the transition to toddlerhood, attraction to __________ declines and __________ improves.
novelty; sustained attention
Information-processing researchers focus on
many aspects of thinking, from attention, memory, and categorization skills to complex problem solving.
Core knowledge theorists assume that
infants start out life with a set of prewired understandings.
Younger students who divide information, values, and authority into right and wrong or good and bad engage in
Fifth and sixth graders describe _________ as the most influential people in their lives.
According to Erikson, the psychological conflict of middle childhood is
industry versus inferiority.
To test for ________, Piaget asked children to arrange sticks of different lengths from shortest to longest.
School-age children use frequent _________ in their self-descriptions.
When classmates are asked to rate each other's likeability, __________ children get many positive votes, whereas __________ children are seldom mentioned.
The most common psychological problem of adolescence is
Which of the following is a secondary sexual characteristic?
Threats to __________ health accelerate puberty, whereas threats to ___________ health delay it.
According to anthropologist Margaret Mead, _____________ is/are entirely responsible for the range of teenage experiences.
the social environment
Many homosexual adolescents and adults move through a three-phase sequence in coming out to themselves and others. Those three phases are
feeling different, confusion, and self-acceptance.
Although Kohlberg proposes six stages of moral development,
most people never move beyond Stage 4.
Regular physical activity is linked to
reduced incidence of cancer.
Adolescents who reach the formal operational stage of cognitive development
no longer require concrete things and events as objects of thought.
Which substance do American adolescents experiment with most during high school?
Adolescents feel most comfortable with peers who
match their own level of biological maturity.
On average, girls reach puberty
2 years earlier than boys.
n making decisions, adolescents, more often than adults,
fall back on well-learned intuitive judgments.
is under way in early adulthood
According to Labouvie-Vief, adulthood involves moving from _______________ thought.
hypothetical to pragmatic
Lev Vygotsky's theory focuses on
how culture is transmitted to the next generation.
Emotional self-regulation refers to
the strategies children use to adjust their emotional state to a comfortable level of intensity
In Bowlby's "clear-cut" attachment phase, babies display
Some basic emotions are happiness, fear, sadness, and
____________ is early-appearing, stable individual differences in reactivity and self-regulation.
The belief that inanimate objects have lifelike qualities, such as thoughts, wishes, feelings, and intentions, is called
The practical, social side of language is called
thinking about thought.
Piaget called children's self-directed utterances _________ speech, reflecting his belief that young children have difficulty taking the perspectives of others.
______________ refers to the idea that certain physical characteristics of object remain the same, even when their outward appearance changes.
With __________________, a woman is given hormones that stimulate the ripening of several ova. These are removed surgically and placed in a dish of nutrients, to which sperm are added.
in vitro fertilization
The Human Genome Project is an ambitious international research program aimed at
deciphering the chemical makeup of human genetic material.
Down syndrome most commonly results from
a failure of the twenty-first pair of chromosomes to separate during meiosis.
During the decade of the twenties, there is a sharp rise in the extent to which people feel they
are personally in control of the events in their lives.
In the transformation of romantic involvements from passionate to companionate, __________ may be the aspect of love that determines whether a relationship survives.
The leading cause of unintentional injury to children in the United States is
motor vehicle accidents.
During middle childhood, child-invented games usually involve
simple physical skills and a sizable element of luck.
_________ aggression in verbal and ________ forms tends to rise over early and middle childhood.
he ____________ child-rearing style is the most successful approach.
Which of the following is true about the consequences of smoking during pregnancy?
Smoking during pregnancy can increase the likelihood of miscarriage, prematurity, asthma, infant death, and childhood cancer.