Transcript for:
Overview of Developmental Psychology Principles

hello and welcome to developmental psychology we're going to start right away with chapter one and work our way through now chapter one is going to be a little different than rest of the chapters what we're going to be looking at in this chapter is sort of an overview of human development and the study of human development when we get into the later chapters um starting with sort of chapter three we're really going to start hitting different ages so we want to start with a basic definition of human development and what we're talking about here in this class is we're going to be looking at how people change over a period of time as we think about it who we were when we were five versus who we were when we 10 15 20 25 and multiple ages after that really changes and so this looks at those changes we're going to look at some physiological changes some psychological changes but basically it's going to be looking at the change now this is not based on just one particular area of science human development this is going to be looking at multiple areas so it's not just psychology but it'll be physiology and social Concepts so there's going to be a lot to do within this class now there are going to be three themes that we keep talking about and the first one is going to be nature versus nurture so the question is is how much who am I based on my genes that I got from my parents and who who am I based on the environment and this is is something that's always a controversy between the two how much does each one give so is your IQ because of your parents or is your IQ because you were able to go to special schools and got all kinds of special treatment and um you know got high IQ things which one really influenced your IQ the most and we know that there's going to be some that's based on your environment and there's going to be some that's going to be based on your genetics and we'll be looking at that now continuity versus discontinuity basically is this a smooth smoth pass or do we have stages now this one's pretty easy to spot when you talk about things because if we talk about stages so we'll talk about a gentleman named Eric Ericson later on and we talk about his stages of development which means he sees this as discon continuality which means is not smooth and keep going whereas our physical development we can think of that as sort of continuality that there's not really a stop and start sort of to that process when we're talking about babies growing now Universal versus context specific development the question is is is there only one way to develop or does our society and our environments and where we grow does that affect the way that we develop and so your book gives a really good example about how the children in the United States don't learn to count money until they're you know somewhere in the second or third grade is when we really begin to work on money and yet there are kids in other parts of the world which are counting money very early in life um many of them are doing money and stuff like this by time they're five or or six they're down in the marketplac is selling basic things so that kind of shows us that learning to count money is not a universal thing it doesn't happen all the same time around the world it's rather a context specific thing the forces that we'll be talking about that tends to make up this subject is first our biological forces so that's our genetics and health related things we'll talk about the psychological forces within development and cognitive is one of the things we talk about the most now cognitive is a word that sometimes people hear sometimes don't hear but let's make sure we're all on the same page for this definition cognitive is thinking some of you might think of it as the mind when we say what's the study of psychology and people say the study of the Mind really they're talking about how we think how we problem solve how we do things and that's sort of where cognitive sits our social cultural forces are something we also focus on so the question is is how does our society our ethic eity and our interpersonal Rea reactions to things really help develop who we are as a person and who we are across um cultures and even us for ourselves so I live here on the beach and does living on the beach give me a different sort of social cultural background the people who live on the mainland we always call us beach bums and those are the mainlanders and there is s slight differences and it does affect who we become as people and then we have to think about life forces and those what we're talking about here is that our our life cycle this life cycle forces tend to also dictate who we are there are only certain times in our life that certain things are going to happen and so those life cycle forces then affect who we become as people and who we are at the moment now the first thing is we're going to talk about what is a theory theory is one of those words that tends to be thrown around a lot and we use a very specific uh definition within psychology basically it's an organized set of ideas as designed to explain some sort of development basically a theory has to be something that has gone through some sort of scientific analysis and it's done through experimentation or scientific study of some sort and we'll talk a lot about scientific studies later on but a theory is not something that comes from the gut now we do hear people use words that way however that truly is a hypothesis because we are in a science class now so we're not going to use Theory as a guess a theory has to be something that has been proven we're going to be covering a bunch of different areas within psychology and these are sort of some of the biggies you might want to say um psychoanalysis here we're going to be talking about Freud and Ericson now Ericson's really going to be your big person for this class in fact you're going to need Ericson for the rest of your time if you were going into the nursing foundations um nursing very much focuses on Ericson and so I warn the nurses you need to be able to memorize and regurgitate Ericson Skinner is going to come under our Learners and some of you may have heard about Skinner back in your intro class and Operate conditioning when we talk about cognitive it's all about p p as our big guy and we will talk about Mr V over here um he's a little bit more in the cognitive area we don't focus on him as much and then finally we have our ecological and I simply call him Yuri because I say his name wrong all the time and those are going to be our big ones we're going to focus on now when we get into the chapters we're going to get into these gentlemen a little bit more specifically and their theories of human development specifically this one we're just going to kind of skim over a little bit about many of them so when we talk about Freud one of the things we like about Freud is that he really brings um psychology into the academic world until Freud comes along we mostly had psychology in the background it was something we just did with crazy people in institutions or it was mostly only done within Academia but he says hey you know what there are other people who really need to use psychology and we need to use psychology in multiple ways so he brings this out sort of to the real world which is why Freud is so well known he also brought a lot of the words that we tend to use today anal personality librito denial these are all words that come basically from Freud in fact the word ego is developed by Freud now Freud also develops this concept that there are three parts of the mind and if you took our intro class you kind of cover this a little bit but we've got the conscious the preconscious and the unconscious now the conscious is what you're aware of so right now you are listening to me which means that your conscious is working um preconscious may be things that you're aware of but you're not really focused on right now but if you focus on it you would understand it now the unconscious is sort of our biological instincts these are the things that sort of sit underneath the surface and we're not always aware of it he truly felt that if we could become more aware of our unconscious area that we would be able to have better control of it and that was the goal that he was working on was the goal of control if we look at his three parts of personality and again this is just a quick review from our intro class what we have is the conscious the preconscious and the unconscious but within those three parts of Personality we have the ID the ego and the super ego now remember the ID is all about pleasure it's sort of the the Pleasure Principle it rules you as far as wanting to have fun but what's interesting is is that it's in the unconscious so generally he felt like this drive to have pleasure was something we weren't always aware we controlling us so my great example always is this morning when you woke up there was this little voice that said just stay in bed bed is good don't get up well you can think of that as your ID you probably weren't really aware that it was saying that to you and he thought was is that if you were somebody who were too focused on Pleasure too much trying to always have fun all the time then we needed to help you focus on how to listen to that voice and control that voice well that voice is controlled by the ego which you notice is in the conscious and the pre- unconscious and a little bit in the unconscious area basically he really thought the ego was is very complex thing but it was ruled by the reality principle it's that little voice that this morning that said no get your ass out of bed and move so your ego is the one that sort of manages your day-to-day activities he thought if your ID was too big that basically your ego got squished so you were basically running around looking for fun all the time without really thinking about the reality of what that might do to you so you think about the friends you know who are always sort of in trouble because all they do is run around and have fun and they don't think about the financial cost or the physical cost this might have and he would say they're being ruled by their ID where in the other thing is is that we would have the ego and if the ego was too big it covered up sort of the ID and people stopped having fun all they did was work all they did was try to manage things um they became very controlling and because that's what they needed to do was control their world all the time so he always was looking for this sort of balance between the ID and the ego then the last thing is he had this super ego and the super ego is kind of interesting he said the super ego go really where our values and our morals SAT but it's the place that really we judge things so we judge the actions that we took not the actions of others but the actions that we took ourselves and he really felt that if you were taking an action that was not within what you thought was correct then that tended to build anxiety or if you didn't know what action to take that would build anxiety I need a couple of different anxieties we're not so interested in that in this class but you notice that the super ego runs sort of the length of the ID and the ego and that's because he really felt that it had a very strong component to what we do also notice that if you look at this little line where the unconscious is that most of it actually sits in our unconscious and he really felt that a lot of what drove us we just weren't aware of and that's why he really focused on trying to make people more aware of their actions now Ericson he actually studies under Freud he's what we call a Neo and he really believed that culture was sort of at the center of what we do it's not that he didn't like um what Freud said but he kind of just took it another step now we're going to be covering Ericson a great deal when we get into each um phase of life and so the thing is is that he has these eight stages um that all develop who we are now we thought most of them happened before we were 18 um but the the development itself really varied on what he called these crisises so here are the basic stages don't worry about memorizing regurgitating them now as I said we're going to go into these in more depth when we get into each chapter but what we have are these basic conflicts so when we're young from birth to 18 months of old he really felt like this trust or mistrust was what we were working on and then we had the anatomy autonomy versus shame and doubt you know did we get to find that we walked and talked ourselves or were we always worried about what somebody else was saying then somewhere in preschool the question is is did we begin to take initiative or we always feeling guilty about you know trying to move forward you might want to say um he thought in school industrious versus inferiority becomes in there basically we need to begin to able to cope with things we need to be able to develop a sense of ourselves away from our parents and we also need to be able to figure out if we're going to do things for ourselves or we just always going to wait for somebody else to do it adolesence is one of our fun stages we have a couple of chapters dedicated to just adolescence and the big thing in adolescence is beginning to identify who we are and developing that identity and that causes a lot of strife you might want to say in one's life because we have to begin to decide how much of what we decide Is Us and how much of what we decide is based on our parents even down to things like the shampoo we use is it my am I using the shampoo because I picked it or because my parents picked it for me basically who am I as a person and there's a lot of conflict at this time as far as internally trying to figure out who I am in young adulthood it knows he says 19 to 40 but this happens a little bit more like in the 20s and the 30s we're talking about intimacy versus isolation basically are we going to be able to develop longlasting loving relationships now these relationships don't always have to be of a sexual nature we're talking about friendships we're talking about you know good friends that we might be able to do or are we going to wind up in isolation where we don't have a whole lot of friends now he believes that a lot of this has to also deal with identity that if we haven't developed our identity it's really going to be hard for us to develop intimacy now um this phase when we're talking about our older middle youth kind of adulthood basically up till retirement age is talking about are we going to be keep moving forward are we going to stagnate are we just going to be you know we hit 40 and we just don't really change much until we retire and he really felt that the people who kept moving and progressing and doing things and finding new things were people who tended to be happier versus the people who went into stagnation where they just really didn't do much new things um then at the end when we talk about 65 to death and yeah we might actually bump that up a little bit higher um the question is is are we happy with the life we've chosen or do we tend to go into Despair and again we're going to cover each one of these much more in depth when we go to each chapter this is the only time though in your chapter you're going to see all of them together so if you're a person who every once in a while wants to go back and say wait a minute I I forgotten how this one relates to that one mark this page in your book and you'll want to go back and look at it the chart of the book looks a little bit different than this one I kind of like this one um I forgot where I stole this one from but um this one is a a nice one because I like that it has our outcomes in it too um with the learning theorists what we're talking about here is kind of a fun thing Skinner he's best known for what's called Operate conditioning and you may have heard about the little Skinner box where the mouse run around and they press these levels well what he's trying to do is decide what consequence um will determine if that behavior happens again so if I push the lever and I get food I'll be likely as a mouse to go push that lever again to get some more food so the consequences is something that is um reinforcing I'm going to keep doing it however if the consequence is something that's considered to be a punishment then I'm going to decrease that behavior now what we talk about when we talk about reinforcement we're talking about both positive and negative reinforcement now here's where we have to come back to some words the word positive and negative this does not mean good and bad if you went through our develop our iny we push this and push this and push this positive and negative refers to a number line which side of zero are we on and depending on what we're studying would depend on which side you would like to be on the word we want to focus here is on the word reinforcement anytime you see the word reinforcement and I don't care which one of these come in front of it remember there's an increase in Behavior positive reinforcement is talking about the development of something good starting negative reinforcement is talking about something bad ending we don't like bad things so we're going to make sure we don't have those happen again and we're going to find out whatever it is I need to do to make sure it doesn't happen again um the other thing he talks about is punishment now we know something as punishment if it actually decreases the the chance that behavior is going to happen again so if I touch a hot stove I don't like it I'm not likely to touch that hot stove again now if you have not um taken our our introduction to psychology class yet or it's been a very long time there is a lecture called conditioning and learning that um I put together for psychology uh 1012 I'm going to put that in our class you don't need to watch it unless you really want to go back and sort of catch up a little bit on conditioning and learning it is something that they assume that you know as you read through this book because this course is supposed to be taken after introduction to psychology occasionally I get people who get this before that so you might really want to go and listen to that or if it's been a very long time you may want to choose to go back and listen to that lecture it is not required though now with the social learning theorists what we're talking about is observational learning or imitation and we know especially with childhood this is something that people are going to do a great deal and you actually do this even as adults because you think about it you're going to be watching other students you're going to be watching other people in class do certain things and then you're going to follow that example so what we talk about observational learning let's say that you're in the nursing program and you have to learn how to give a shot well you know you're going to watch somebody else give a shot first before you give a shot I would hope so and so you're going to be learning by watching other people now what we do find is that imitation tends to happen a lot more if we feel like the subject is popular smar or talented and that we think that there's some sort of reward to that behavior now with cogn development theory we're talking about the development of the thought process how do we develop thought and there's going to be a couple people we look at with this now there are three basic approaches that our book will talk about P who looks at um stages so he kind of thinks of this as being step by step by step and then we got V here who really says that it's um not only the age but he thinks of this as sort of an apprenticeship that basically our social our culture is going to influence a lot of how we think about things and then last there's the information processing Theory these are more about computers and you know how we bring information in and how we think about it and the brain is really the best computer out there now we as a class don't really focus much on this one if you are going into education you may want to read up on this one a little bit more but for most of our students since they're going more into the uh medical Fields it's just not one that we bring forward a great deal so let's look at P first well P started to notice um this difference when he was beginning to help people develop a cognitive ability test um and for France he was working with the banet intelligence test and what he began to realize is that you know kids and and adults they they learned very differently and so as he began to notice that kids were learning differently he wanted to know how that occurred well what he began to realize is that kids experimented they did little things if we think about you know little babies and we think about one-year-olds and 2-year-olds they're trying little things doesn't matter how many times we tell them something they're going to try it anyway why is that because they have no brains yet they're little squishy things they're not mature brains like ours they don't even have all the parts of the brain yet um as far as thought cognitive processes are concerned so P was very interested in how does that develop over time so what he did is he focused on development now the reason this is important is he's not focusing on how we learn he's not focusing on what we learn he's focusing on the development how does the brain develop over time and then that development of the brain how does that reflect on our cognitive thought so don't confuse this with education now cognitive stages he believed um was because as children became more aware of their surroundings they became increasingly more cognitive and one of the things that's interesting about p is that he came up with a lot of his Concepts before we really even understood the development of the brain so he's a pretty smart man now he also believed that there are these three basic parts now we're going to go into these again um when we start covering I think it's chapter four or so but this is just sort of a quick um overview for you but he thought of these three basic parts to devel the cognitive development of the brain the first of these schemas and what schema is is basically a scene in your head and this is how we think things are organized This Is How We Believe something is going to work and as we get older we are going to course develop more of these because we have more scenarios in our head and so if we think about it when I'm a kid all I think about is that there's a car and it rolls down the Road as I get older I begin to understand that cars have parts and then as I get older to that I begin that Parts Begin to Fall Apart then I begin to understand that there may have to be oil changes and his question was is well how do we begin to understand all that and so what he said is that we have to adapt so an adjustment has to be done and there are kind of three parts to this adjustment there's a simulation accommodation and equilibrium now with a simulation what we're doing is we're using our current knowledge to understand the new object situation so I'm a little kid I understand that cars roll down the road somebody gives me a little play car and I roll it back and forth because I understand that that's what cars do now all of a sudden um I begin to understand that cars have Motors and Motors run now somebody gives me a toy car and I begin to see if I can open the hood of that toy car and I'm wondering why why can't I open the hood to this toy car I don't get this well what happens is our new information doesn't fit our current schema which is that cars have engines and you should be able to open up the car and see the engine well this is going to get me frustrated from a kid because this car hood doesn't open this toy car and so I have to begin to understand something and what I begin to understand is that there's a difference between the toy car and a real car once I've got that some learning has happened and my frustration goes away because I understand toy cars don't have engines and real cars do now he believed that there were four basic stages and again this is a very very simple overview because we're going to go into detail as we get through the chapters the first one the sensory motor is from birth to two years of age and basically you know a little baby to two years there's not a whole lot of brain power going on yet he's basically or she's basically just getting a concept about the world although we're still going through those stages we just talked about we have a belief of what happens and then things change and that's where we get the learning pre-operational stage we begin to get the ability to use symbols and if we think about it letters are symbols and so why is this important because once we begin to understand that letters are symbols and once we understand what symbols mean we can really begin to develop language the other big thing about the the 2 to seven year-old age is that we only look at things based on our own perspect our own perspective so this egocentric istic kind of atmosphere becomes and we've all heard the joke about the 2-year-old the world is all about me everything's about me and we'll explore that further as we get into other chapters from there he thinks of us having this concrete operational thought that's seven to early adolescence somewhere in there we're going to do that what's going to begin to happen is that we're going to use what we call Here and Now logic you know this is what I see so this is what it must be um things are very concrete very black and white during this phase and that's how I kind of remember it it's the black and white phrase you know pizzas only have eight slices and so when you tell them you're getting a pizza with 10 slices they'll argue with you that you can't have a pizza that has 10 slices or they argue with you that you can't have a pizza that's Square because pizzas are always round things are very concrete to them it's not until we get a little bit older um sort of Beyond adolescence very late high school early college that we begin to develop this formal operation and the big thing here is that we begin to develop abstract thought and we can begin to develop hypothetical situations so hypothetically if this happens what would happen hypothetically if this would happen What would happen and this is really a big developmental stage according to P now P sort of ends there but we're going to find out that we keep developing thought after that now Mr V here he's kind of interesting because as I said he emphasizes this social cultural influence of Child Development where p is only talking about development and then learning this one's looking at how our social learning influences our development so one of the big things he talks about is mkos or more knowledge of others and what he believed is is that we would learn best when we're in situations that somebody knows something just a little bit higher than me now the person who knows that higher knowledge doesn't have to always be much older than me simply they know a little bit more so what's going to happen is is you're going to have a teacher and in this case my teacher knows more letters than I do so my teacher's going to help me understand letters but I could also be learning from a six-year-old who knows more about letters than I do at 4 he really didn't focus on the age as much as the fact that somebody would know a little bit more than you that led him to something called the zone of proximal development and this is one that again a lot of our medical people uh people in our occupational therapy assistant programs things in our nursing programs people in our Health Service Administration program we'll talk a lot about zone of proximal development or the zbd what we're talking about is what is the difference between what I cannot do without help versus what I can do by myself now what we mean by this is that you know if I I can't do it even with help means that I do have the potential to be able to do it so I can't sit there and say well we're going to talk about somebody who um oh let me give an example somebody who's just had their legs unfortunately amputated they don't have their artificial legs yet so we can't even talk about them walking yet because I don't have their artificial legs yet but now they get their artificial legs so they still can't walk but they could if somebody lifts them and helps them and shows them sort of that stepbystep stuff now the differen is is what I can do by myself well I can put my legs on by myself and I can learn to stand by myself so the zone of development is sort of learning to walk we could walk with help we can put on our legs by ourselves so what we're going to be working with that patient is this zone of development now we also talked about doing this in school we talked about this as adults but basically this is what these kind of Concepts were and again we're going to go into these in depths as we get through chapters that focus on those areas remember this chapter is just giving you a little overview a little touch a little taste of each one of these so you some basic knowledge going forward now the epical sort of approach Ro looks at Psychology very different what they do is they say that all human development is interactive and that we can't just take one area of of development and stick it off all by itself that we're connected but that there's no single thing to really de to talk about development that um all aspects of Our Lives sort of focus within development this is one of our newer areas of thought as far as human development is concerned because it really needed to have all these other things that we've talked about to sort of come together and what the big person that we really talk about in this one is Yuri Yuri looks at this chart right here and and you'll find this in your textbook and I'm going to just tell you right now you get to memorize and regurgitate this uh there are test questions on this but basically what he says is that we have these different systems and these systems are constantly interacting with each other if you think about it parent and child are always interacting they're learning and teaching to each other but I'm going to use the example of music and we I'm going to use Music um in Bard County to show how these different systems come together so if you look at the next system out here the meso system you'll notice that school is listed there well the question is is how does music in school reflect on the child well let's say that you go to school here in Bard County for you know 1 through sixth grade well one of the interesting things about that is that almost all of our schools here in Bard County have some sort of a music program with instruments that is part of our schools now why do they have that well let's go to the exo system and over here we're talk about government and policies well why we have that is because we had a gentleman who was the head of Bard County schools at one point who truly believed that music education was extremely important in the development of a child's brain he truly believed that having spent the money on music education that that would help develop better thinking people well how does he get that concept well he gets that concept through historical events and in this case it's through research studies that show how music helps develop the young brain so because of this historical stuff out here the macro system it it helped a government official decide to dedicate money to music systems and so musical education became part of our school system and so now if a child is in school first through uh sixth grade they will have an opportunity to learn a musical instrument so that is where the child will come home and say to the parent I would like to learn violin and the parent goes okay you know you're learning violin at school that sounds good that's a wonderful thing so it is the these different systems that are interrelated that winds up with this child learning a musical instrument when you perhaps have parents who never played a musical instrument at all now the other reason I bring music as a great example is we think about Bard County because in Bard County we happen to have some extraordinary music programs you would think all schools have this music program but they don't so it's because we had this government official who decided that music was important in our system that we have early music education so how does that begin to affect again the child in the long run well there is this thing called All State Orchestra competition and to compete an all state Orchestra competition this starts in seventh grade all the musicians around the state play the same piece of music and they select the top players from the state to go to the all state music orchestra now if we talk about something like violin uh or even the orchestra as a whole the orchestra might have uh 50 kids in it let's say only so many kids are going to come from each County and you know to go to all state to be the best among the 50 kids in the whole state to play a musical instrument is enormous well with violin out of the 50 players there might be 20 25 oh it's actually even number 26 violin players let's say well what happened one year is it's kind of a big deal is that Bard County sent three people to the junior high all state music orchestra we sent three violinists you might say well three out of 25 well yeah except for the fact that Miami Dade only sent one so if you think about how large Miami Dade County is that's you know the city of Miami and they only had one person who could make it and then you look at little Bard County Which is far smaller but we had three musicians who made it to the top orchestra that shows you the Influence of Music within the schools and that all started from here from a government official who decided that music was important because he read it about some historical events which then got into the schools the schools liked it pushed it down to the child and the parents supported it and that's how this works and that's what Yuri was talking about that we can't just look at this as a single event but that it's interchangeable and that these different layers work upon each other now we are talking about the lifespan approach and there are four features that we're going to be talking about as we go through our different chapters one is called multi-directional and that's basically that um the development growth and decline sort of happen at the same time you know we're talking about maybe bones going up and mental processing going down or this moving this way and that one moving that way we can't say everything is moving at the same direction at one time so we talk about multidirectional as far as development is concerned plasticity basically says that we can improve and develop throughout our lifetime certain skills and abilities we talk about the plasticity of the brain a lot if you think about that they can compensate the brain learns how to compensate for this or learns how to compensate for that but plasticity basically is just saying that we can improve throughout our lifetime and most things we do we talk about historical context we're talking about how we must consider and examine development over a period of time you know what was the child like at 6 months what were they like at a year what were they like at 18 months and so historical context caught often can tell us a lot about development in the future so as an example um my child did not get his first tooth until he was 13 months old now I know this because we kept joking for his first birthday all the child wanted was a tooth one tooth that's it well he develops his first tooth at 13 months old so by knowing this now that he is a much older child we realize that all of his teeth are going to come in a little bit later where other kids might have these mullers and these other things when they're young my child's not going to be getting them until much later because he's just simply developing his teeth a little bit later so a historical context in this case gives us an idea of what's going to happen in the future and what should be happening here in the present so let's say that most kids develop their wisdom teeth around 15 we're guessing my kid won't develop his wisdom teeth until maybe 16 or 17 and so we're not going to be too worried about that because we know that simply as far as teeth are concerned he's a little bit late on teeth development not a big deal probably something genetic within the family context multiple causation basically says that there is not one thing to consider again that's sort of like multi-directional that different things are growing different times so multiple ation says that that something is caused not just simply by a life cycle force or simply by a biological but that we need to look at all three and four things at one time that it could be a physiological a social cultural a life cycle all happening and that all these things together sort of help us understand the development and so as we talk about this lifespan approach we're going to be looking at all four of those now what's really interesting is is that once we get into talking about sort of kids and adults and all that our chapters are actually going to be divided up the first chapter is always going to be biological and psychological and the second chapters tend to be social cultural and life cycle so adolesence will go over two chapters um you know school goes over two chapters late adulthood goes over two chapters and we have sort of this pattern that begins to emerge now when we start talking about research the other thing that we need to understand is that there's more than one research project again we went through this in introduction to psychology if you did not get introduction to psychology yet I'm going to encourage you to listen to the chapter one um video that I have posted from introduction of psychology because it goes into more detail about research and developmental aspects of research again they assume that you know this information because you've had that class or if it's been a really long time since you've had that class you might want to just go back and relisten to that lecture just so you sort of catch up and have this knowledge but the first thing that they talk about in your book is the systematic approach and when we talk about that we talk about two basic types of systematics approach first would be like the naturalistic observation real life so that's Jane good all in the day and there's her little chimpanzee I guess not really her chimpanzee it's the chimpanzee out in the wild and basically all I can do is watch them I can't interact I can't do anything with them I simply watch how things happen in the real world and we know how people say things happen versus how things really happen can quite often be very different so we don't want to interfere in any way into What's Happening Now jeane Goodall is probably our most famous example of this but I use this a lot in um consumer psychology and we'll talk a little bit more about that in class structured observation basically says that I'm going to give some sort of scenario I'm going to do something and what I'd like to see is what happens after that so I give you something and I want to see how people interact and how people work together and we'd like to see how that changes Behavior so I'm going to observe but I'm going to give a little structure to that observation we also have what we call sampling behaviors and so what we may do is we give you a task and we look to see what you do with that task so in this case we're asking about a kid to measure emotional reactions which is a happy phase which is a sad face we have self-reporting and you've probably done this at some point where somebody has sent you a survey and they say would you please you know tell us how you felt today eating food and you filled out the survey it's not a bad thing the problem with self-reporting is how accurate are you and again we may not be as accurate as we think we do a lot of psychological uh physiological measuring in Psychology for psychological Concepts and a lot of what we may do is be measuring brain wave activities we may be measuring pupil dilation because here we can see physiological reactions to development and to other processes now we're going to be talking about reliability and validity now these are two words I want you to get into your head pretty well reliability says are we basically going to be getting the same scores each time I mean a test isn't very reliable if I take it one time and I get one score and I take another time get another score so think about something like the SATs you know if you take it and one time you get a 500 and the next time you get a 000 and then you go back to 600 you how reliable is that score and so we talk about you know this is not reliable right here we're all over the place now this one is reliable because look at that we've got four little spots right here together but we're going to say it's not valid why because we want the middle of this so validity says am I actually measuring what I say I'm measuring am I studying what I want to say so over here we have something that that's valid you know we we are hitting all the target that's no question about that but we're not real reliable because again we're all over the place so what we look for in evaluating research methods is something that's both reliable and valid basically we're going to be hitting the middle we're going to be close together in those scores there's not going to be much difference and it's going to be on target meaning is that it's going to be talking about the things we want it to talk about so if we want to study how smart somebody is giving them um a race to run to see how fast they can do it that wouldn't be very valid to determine how smart they were that determines how fast they can run and yes maybe every day they can run this race and they get basically the same score so the score is reliable but it isn't valid and then we could do something as I said with the SATs where we're getting all these different scores and we're like hey this isn't very reliable because we keep getting different scores but it could be valid because it is measuring at that moment in time what your ability to do something is we want tests that do both we also need to make sure we understand what a population is versus a sample you know population is a large group of people a sample may be a subset of people so in this case pregnant women um that represent the population now we can't go and find every pregnant woman and tester so we're going to use a small percentage of those pregnant women and then we're going to generalize out to the entire population based on that sampling that we got now we also going to talk about that there are different types of research developments and this is a big one a correlation now the big saying is that a correlation does not prove causation it shows relationships so it measures how people score in two different variables and basically what we're going to be doing is looking at how two things affect each other again if you haven't heard this before you may want to go back and listen to to that lecture I have from chapter one from introduction psychology we really kind of cover correlations in depth there what we bring into this one now that you understand a little bit about correlations is the fact that we're not going to make those scattergrams every single time because scattergrams after a while they get a little hard to really understand what's going on so we're going to be doing something called a correlation coefficient now this is not a statistics class so you don't have to calculate a correlation coefficient but you need to understand what the little R means now little r is basically the symbol for correlation coefficient and it can range between a negative 1 and a positive one it can never be smaller than negative 1 it can never be larger than positive one why here's a positive one notice that these dots are in a perfect line and basically we make a line straight through it it can't get any more perfect than that and a perfect negative one is just basically going the opposite direction so we can't get any more perfect than that this one in the middle an R would equal to zero because there is no gathering at all there's no commonality to these at all there's no relationship we would say now what we do have down here is an example of a um an R that's a positive six and an R that's a negative six again let's not assume that positive negative means good and bad it simply means the left or right is zero so in this case notice that the dots are a little bit further apart and that means that there's maybe not as a closer relationship here as as there is here this relationship is dead on if one thing moves a quar of an inch the next one's going to move a quarter of an inch so a great one to use for something like this is to show something like um Fahrenheit and Celsius if something measures in Fahrenheit and it goes up you know two degrees it's going to go up 2 degrees and Celsius those things are closely related down here we have the same thing here we have two things that are related but not exactly related um but pretty close so in this case it might be uh how much we watch TV versus um our grades we would expect the more TV we watch the further down our grades would get but we might also want to relink this to medication maybe if we take a certain amount of medication we actually see the number of symptoms going down so in that case we'd like to see a negative correlation between symptoms and medication meaning is is we want to see symptoms go down as we take um more medication so remember negative doesn't always mean a bad thing psychology now with experimental design we are talking about a cause and effect relationship this is the only study that gives us cause and effect between two variables if I do this one thing what will be the effect of that so we talked about the fact that there were independent dependent and extraneous variables now your book basically just talks about independent variables and independent variables because again they assume you understand what extraneous variables are so remember that independent VAR variable is the thing that we manipulate it's the thing that we expose to the condition whereas the dependent variable is the outcome there's always a number with a dependent variable and that's how you always can find it the question that we're always trying to ask is does the independent variable affect the dependent variable and if so how much does it affect it so as an example let's say that um I would like to study the effect of calories on weight loss so what I'm going to do is have one subject eat 2,000 calories another subject eat, 1500 calories and maybe another one eat um 1,000 calories and that is my independent variable is that the number of calories we consume will be different from person to person and they do this for two weeks and at the end of two weeks I then measure their weight the score they get on the weight is the dependent variable so let's say one actually gains a pound the first one who ate 2,000 calories the person who ate 1500 calories they don't lose anything they're the exact same weight they were the person who ate 1,000 calories they actually lose 2 pounds so the independent variable did affect the outcome it did affect the dependent variable and that's basically what experimental design is always trying to do another type of design we have is called longitudinal studies and basically what a longitudinal study is is that we're going to study you over a period of time maybe not over your whole lifetime like this but what we'd like to do is find out if something um changes throughout your lifetime our biggest problem with longitudinal studies is that they are very expensive and very timeconsuming think about this if I want to study from birth to 10 years of age it's going to take me 10 years to do this study and meanwhile lots of things could have changed U we also have a problem because people tend to drop out of longitudinal studies so over the long period of Time how many people will drop away from that study now with medicine we do a lot of longitudinal studies because we can begin to study how what is the effect of medicine over a given period of time so you could do something like a diabetic who's going to be taking insulin pretty much for the rest of their lives depending on which type of diabetic they are and there we can look at development over a period of time the problem with again longitudinal studies though is that they're expensive they're very timec consuming and we may lose people so to fix that we have something called cross-sectional studies now a cross-sectional study what we're going to do is take a whole bunch of subjects at the same time and we're going to be dividing them up and looking at some specific aspect so in this case what we have is subjects from a population so let's just say that these are all um oh we're going to look at people who are 18 years of age and we're going to look at people who are 30 years of age and what we're going to be be looking at is lung cancer and so we're going to look at people are 18 who smoke and versus people who don't smoke so we're going to take this one group of 18s and we're going to look at the risk factor in the disease and then we're going to take 30-year-olds and we're look at the risk factor in the disease and we do this all on the same day so what we're assuming is that the difference between the person at 18 and their lungs if they're smokers and 30 if they continue to smoke that whatever ever um whatever happened is going to have happened because of the time that was there so cross-sectional studies are much cheaper we can do them at one point but we do have the problem that they are different people so why one person seems to smoke all their lives and not develop lung cancer and another person smokes for a little time and develops lung cancer that's not going to be answered we're making some generalizations but again we can't always wait 10 years to get an answer to a study but at the same point our problem with this one is that we have different people we're looking at we're making the assumption that this 18-year-old is going to be equal to this different 30-year-old to solve that we have sequential studies and basically what we're going to have is a series of studies that are going to be done over a period of time where we're doing both cross-sectional and longitudinal studies at the same time and so this sort of gives you a chart of how complex a study like this is now the word cohort we tend to use that a lot here in Psychology and people don't always know what that is aort is a group of people of something that is related so you hear the word baby boomer all the time you hear the word Generation Y Millennium babies the xers those are cords there's something that connects them all together in this case it would be age so what we have here is in um we're going to be looking at the year birth so people were born in 1994 versus people born in 19 uh 96 and what we're going to do in the year 2000 is that we're going to look at six-year-olds and we're going to look at 8-year-olds and we're going to be comparing them so this is the cross-sectional right here because we're talking about six and eight that's a two-year difference but then we're going to come back two years later and we're going to look at 8-year-old and 10year olds and again here we're doing basically cross-sectional because we're doing two ages but we can also now look at how did the 8-year-old um here versus the 8-year-old here is there any difference and that would have happened because the six-year-old grew up by two years and that's the longitudinal sort of study and then we're going to do the same thing here when they're 10 and 12 now that means is that we've been able to do this study now in far less time we're able to do it in four years but we got a lot of information so we hope that usually in sequential designs that we're going to be able to get the same information that might have taken us 10 years to do by doing it in this type of format and yet we're still going to be able the same people to be able to measure the differ when they're 8 and 10 and 10 and 12 um to get that longitudinal it is a lot more expensive but most people really feel that this is sort of the best design when we're talking about development over time now another one that's become much more popular is a meta analysis and I bring meta analysis in because I see this a lot happening again in medicine and we have a lot of our students who are going to the medical programs and as you read things they say this meta analysis decid this and The Meta analysis decided that so what's a metaanalysis well here's an example of an actual meta analysis right here and we're looking at um a bunch of different studies and that's what a metaanalysis is we're going to take multiple studies and we're going to Crunch all their data together now we couldn't really do metaanalysis until recently because we just didn't really have the computers who could do that now we have these computers that can really crunch these datas together so here you can be looking at here's you know one study the green is a different study each one of these colors are sort of different studies and we can begin to see if these variables are repeated over time and we can begin to see sort of a a look that happens across time with this but this meta analysis has really been very good because it helps us to really understand um sort of a bigger picture of what's going on now the problem with the meta analysis is that we're only using secondhand data we don't collect anything new it's all based on Old research so while meta analysis are really nice we also have to remember that this data is not fresh lastly what we like to talk about is the process of communicating our results and basically since we are again talking about mostly in the medical Fields we're going to use what's called a peerreview process and what happens is is that here a paper is going be written by somebody so I've done some study I've now got some information I'm going to write my paper and I'm going to submit it to a journal now remember we're not talking about any old Journal here we're talking about a peer-reviewed journal again if you need to understand more about this go back and listen to that lecture on chapter one introduction to psychology now what happens here is that that's been submitted over here to the editor they're then going to take that and they're going to hand it out to a whole bunch of people who are going to look at that paper determine whether or not it's good bad or different they're going to review it for accuracy validity for reliability procedures they're going to make comments they're going to give that back to the editor who's going to perhaps give it back to the author and the author may have to make some changes and this process will keep going around now the thing is is that we keep going around in this until we feel that the science is right when we feel the science is right then and only then will it get published in a peer-reviewed journal now this becomes important because when things are published in peer-reviewed journals we tend to think of them as being the best science at least the most accurate science of the time now it doesn't mean that it has it won't change over time because we learn things and we say oh here's the information we had and this was the best we knew at the time you know I I like to joke about the dinosaurs we apparently had the wrong dinosaur heads on many of dinosaurs for a very long time and we had to go switch the dinosaur head um somewhere in the ' 880s or 90s they figured that out and yet we used to think that the tales dragged on the ground the dinosaurs and now we know the taals probably were up and above the ground um I always wondered about that dragon on the ground wouldn't it scrape it up but you know we now know it's actually up and they were walking so things do change over time but peer-review journals are important because when something comes out in a peer rreview Journal we tend to feel like it was the best science at that time and that it wasn't just somebody guessing so this isn't going to come out in Time magazine or USA Today this is going to come out in something like the Journal of American Medicine or Jama and that's one of the ones that we hear a lot so on the news quite often they'll be reporting tomorrow in Jama they're going to publish this blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah and so what they're reporting on is some information that has been received tested and we now believe is accurate well this sort of ends up our first chapter here in developmental psychology I will see see you in class and have a good day