Deck 5: A--Nature, Nurture, and Human Development

Question 1

A researcher wishing to study the effects of attachment style in infancy on friendship formation in kindergarten MUST use a longitudinal research design.

Answer 1

True

Question 2

Piaget called the third stage of intellectual development the sensorimotor stage.

Answer 2

False

Question 3

Researchers have found that exercise programs designed to increase older people's physical activity levels also lead to improvements in their memory and cognition.

Answer 3

True

Question 4

Although new mothers may claim that their newborns (less than 3 days old) can recognize the sound of their voice, there is no research evidence to support this claim.

Question 5

Except for your red blood cells, all of your cells contain a nucleus, which includes strands of hereditary material called chromosomes.

Question 6

Assimilation means applying an old schema to new objects or problems.

Question 7

Temperament remains fairly consistent across the lifespan.

Question 8

The patterns of attachment originally found in the United States have been consistently observed in every culture that has been studied.

Question 9

A cohort is a group of people born at a particular time or a group of people who enter an organization at a particular time.

Question 10

Gender differences in play behavior, for example, are much more obvious in groups of boys and groups of girls than they are when individual boys and girls are tested in the laboratory.

Question 11

The Strange Situation was developed to measure the attachment style of infants.

Question 12

Being born with a low birthweight causes impaired brain development, leading to academic and behavior problems as the child ages.

Question 13

Selective attrition is a greater problem with longitudinal research than with cross-sectional research.

Question 14

Piaget believed that his four stages represented distinct levels of development, with major changes in thinking from stage to stage. After several decades of research, the vast majority of developmental psychologists would agree with this view.

Question 15

Both Piaget and Vygotsky implied that we start with infant cognition and eventually attain adult thinking, which we practice from then on.

Question 16

If monozygotic twins resemble each other on some dimension more than dizygotic twins do, researchers generally conclude there is a genetic basis for that dimension.

Question 17

A mother gives birth to a pair of twins: one boy and one girl. These twins must be dizygotic.

Question 18

Teenagers who believe in the "personal fable" are especially likely to be cautious individuals and to avoid taking risks.

Question 19

Research on twins separated at birth has led scientists to begin identifying the genes that cause specific behaviors, such as hobbies and other preferences.

Question 20

Tommy tells his mom about an event at preschool in a way that assumes his mom knows what he is talking about. Developmental psychologists would describe Tommy's thinking as egocentric.

Question 21

In Piaget's terminology, a ____________________ sometimes gets assimilated and sometimes gets accommodated.

Question 22

The research findings point to the conclusion that children placed in day care do worse on a variety of social and cognitive measures compared to children who were not in day care.

Question 23

Parenting styles tend to be consistent within a family (for example, parents who are authoritarian with their first child tend to be authoritarian with their other children).

Question 24

____________________ is the tendency to be active or inactive, outgoing or reserved, and to respond vigorously or quietly to new stimuli.

Question 25

According to Piaget young children's thought is ____________________.

Question 26

Genes located on the X chromosome are known as ____________________ genes.

Question 27

According to Piaget, children in the ____________________ stage of cognitive development lack the concept of object permanence.

Question 28

An indifferent parenting style causes children to be impulsive and out-of-control.

Question 29

Red-green color blindness depends on a recessive gene on the X chromosome. Red-green color blindness is therefore more common in ____________________ than in ____________________.

Question 30

Sections along each chromosome, known as ____________________, control the chemical reactions that direct development.

Question 31

An investigator who uses a ____________________ design examines different groups of people at the same time.

Question 32

Newborns who hear the same sound repeatedly show ____________________, which means ____________________.

Question 33

Imagine a married couple that has five children. If this family is typical, the research strongly suggests that the oldest (first-born) child will have a higher IQ than the other children in the family.

Question 34

____________________ twins develop from a single fertilized egg (zygote) and therefore have identical genes.

Question 35

The last of Piaget's stages of cognitive development is the ____________________.

Question 36

A research design that combines the advantages of both cross-sectional and longitudinal designs is known as ____________________.

Question 37

A ____________________ is a group of people born at a particular time or a group of people who enter an organization at a particular time.

Question 38

____________________ is the tendency for certain kinds of people to drop out of a study.

Question 39

A ____________________ study follows a single group of individuals as they develop.

Question 40

Psychologists say that a young child lacks, but gradually develops, ____________________, which is an understanding that other people have a mind too and that each person knows some things that other people don't know.

Question 41

According to ____________________ theory, we cope with our fear of death by avoiding thoughts about death and by affirming a worldview that provides self-esteem, hope, and value in life.

Question 42

To understand the effects of genes on physical characteristics and behavior, one has to understand the difference between dominant and recessive genes. Define the terms "dominant" and "recessive" in terms of genes. Based on your understanding of genetics, state what color eyes you would have if you had one gene for brown eyes and one gene for blue eyes and explain why?

Question 43

Researchers often use twins to study whether variation in a given behavior depends more on the variation in genes than on variation in the environment. Define the difference between monozygotic twins and dizygotic twins. If a researcher had two sets of twins (one pair of dizygotic twins and one pair of monozygotic twins) and both sets resembled each other in terms of their sense of humor, what is the researcher likely to conclude about the heritability of that trait?

Question 44

There are a number of research design methods that are employed to study human development. Briefly define the following types of research design methods: cross-sectional, longitudinal, and sequential designs. Give one example of a weakness of cross-sectional and longitudinal designs and explain how a sequential design attempts to address these limitations.

Question 45

An adolescent's concern with decisions about the future and the quest for self-understanding has been called an ____________________.

Question 46

Children during Piaget's preoperational stage of development have the concept of ____________________ but not the concept of ____________________.

Question 47

Define theory of mind and give an example of a situation involving a child that has not yet developed theory of mind.

Question 48

According to Vygotsky, every child has a ____________________, which is the distance between what a child can do alone and what the child can do with help.

Question 49

According to Piaget, a child constructs new mental processes as he or she interacts with the environment. The following terms represent core cognitive processes in Piaget's theory: schemata, assimilation, accommodation, and equilibrium. Define each term and identify which one of the processes best represents the following two scenarios: