Vocabulary

Age identity: How old or young people feel compared to their chronological age; after early adulthood, most people feel younger than their chronological age.
Assent: When minor participants are asked to indicate their willingness to participate in a study. This is usually obtained from participants who are at least 7 years old, in addition to parent or guardian consent.
Attachment behavioral system: A motivational system selected over the course of evolution to maintain proximity between a young child and his or her primary attachment figure.
Attachment behaviors: Behaviors and signals that attract the attention of a primary attachment figure and function to prevent separation from that individual or to reestablish proximity to that individual (e.g., crying, clinging).
Attachment figure: Someone who functions as the primary safe haven and secure base for an individual. In childhood, an individual’s attachment figure is often a parent. In adulthood, an individual’s attachment figure is often a romantic partner.
Attachment patterns: (also called “attachment styles” or “attachment orientations”) Individual differences in how securely (vs. insecurely) people think, feel, and behave in attachment relationships.
Attrition: When a participant drops out, or fails to complete, all parts of a study.
Authoritative: A parenting style characterized by high (but reasonable) expectations for children’s behavior, good communication, warmth and nurturance, and the use of reasoning (rather than coercion) as preferred responses to children’s misbehavior.
Authority stage: Stage from approximately 2 years to age 4 or 5 when parents create rules and figure out how to effectively guide their children’s behavior.
Autobiographical narratives: A qualitative research method used to understand characteristics and life themes that an individual considers to uniquely distinguish him- or herself from others.
Average life expectancy: Mean number of years that 50% of people in a specific birth cohort are expected to survive. This is typically calculated from birth but is also sometimes re-calculated for people who have already reached a particular age (e.g., 65).
Bidirectional: The idea that parents influence their children, but their children also influence the parents; the direction of influence goes both ways, from parent to child, and from child to parent.
Bidirectional relations: When one variable is likely both cause and consequence of another variable.
Chutes and Ladders: A numerical board game that seems to be useful for building numerical knowledge.
Cohort: Group of people typically born in the same year or historical period, who share common experiences over time; sometimes called a generation (e.g., Baby Boom Generation).
Cohort effects: When research findings differ for participants of the same age tested at different points in historical time.
Collectivism: Belief system that emphasizes the duties and obligations that each person has toward others.
Concrete operations stage: Piagetian stage between ages 7 and 12 when children can think logically about concrete situations but not engage in systematic scientific reasoning.
Conscience: The cognitive, emotional, and social influences that cause young children to create and act consistently with internal standards of conduct.
Conservation problems: Problems pioneered by Piaget in which physical transformation of an object or set of objects changes a perceptually salient dimension but not the quantity that is being asked about.
Continuous development: Ways in which development occurs in a gradual incremental manner, rather than through sudden jumps.
Convoy Model of Social Relations: Theory that proposes that the frequency, types, and reciprocity of social exchanges change with age. These social exchanges impact the health and well-being of the givers and receivers in the convoy.
Cross-sectional research: A research design used to examine behavior in participants of different ages who are tested at the same point in time.
Cross-sectional studies: Research method that provides information about age group differences; age differences are confounded with cohort differences and effects related to history and time of study.
Crowds: Adolescent peer groups characterized by shared reputations or images.
Crystallized intelligence: Type of intellectual ability that relies on the application of knowledge, experience, and learned information.
Departure stage: Stage at which parents prepare for a child to depart and evaluate their successes and failures as parents.
Depth perception: The ability to actively perceive the distance from oneself of objects in the environment.
Deviant peer contagion: The spread of problem behaviors within groups of adolescents.
Differential susceptibility: Genetic factors that make individuals more or less responsive to environmental experiences.
Discontinuous development: Discontinuous development
Dishabituation: When participants demonstrated increased attention (through looking or listening behavior) to a new stimulus after having been habituated to a different stimulus.
Effortful control: A temperament quality that enables children to be more successful in motivated self-regulation.
Elicited imitation: A behavioral method used to examine recall memory in infants and young children.
Emerging adulthood: A new life stage extending from approximately ages 18 to 25, during which the foundation of an adult life is gradually constructed in love and work. Primary features include identity explorations, instability, focus on self-development, feeling incompletely adult, and a broad sense of possibilities.
Event-related potentials (ERP): The recording of participant brain activity using a stretchy cap with small electrodes or sensors as participants engage in a particular task (commonly viewing photographs or listening to auditory stimuli).
Family Stress Model: A description of the negative effects of family financial difficulty on child adjustment through the effects of economic stress on parents’ depressed mood, increased marital problems, and poor parenting.
Fluid intelligence: Type of intelligence that relies on the ability to use information processing resources to reason logically and solve novel problems.
Foreclosure: Individuals commit to an identity without exploration of options.
Formal operations stage: Piagetian stage starting at age 12 years and continuing for the rest of life, in which adolescents may gain the reasoning powers of educated adults.
Gender schemas: Organized beliefs and expectations about maleness and femaleness that guide children’s thinking about gender.
Global subjective well-being: Individuals’ perceptions of and satisfaction with their lives as a whole.
Goodness of fit: The match or synchrony between a child’s temperament and characteristics of parental care that contributes to positive or negative personality development. A good “fit” means that parents have accommodated to the child’s temperamental attributes, and this contributes to positive personality growth and better adjustment.
Habituation: When participants demonstrated decreased attention (through looking or listening behavior) to repeatedly-presented stimuli.
Hedonic well-being: Component of well-being that refers to emotional experiences, often including measures of positive (e.g., happiness, contentment) and negative affect (e.g., stress, sadness).
Heterogeneity: Inter-individual and subgroup differences in level and rate of change over time.
Homophily: Adolescents tend to associate with peers who are similar to themselves.
Identity achievement: Individuals have explored different options and then made commitments.
Identity diffusion: Adolescents neither explore nor commit to any roles or ideologies.
Image-making stage: Stage during pregnancy when parents consider what it means to be a parent and plan for changes to accommodate a child.
Individualism: Belief system that exalts freedom, independence, and individual choice as high values.
Industrialized countries: The economically advanced countries of the world, in which most of the world’s wealth is concentrated.
Information processing theories: Theories that focus on describing the cognitive processes that underlie thinking at any one age and cognitive growth over time.
Informed consent: The process of getting permission from adults for themselves and their children to take part in research.
Inhibitory functioning: Ability to focus on a subset of information while suppressing attention to less relevant information.
Institutional Review Boards (IRBs): A committee that reviews and approves research procedures involving human participants and animal subjects to ensure that the research is conducted in accordance with federal, institutional, and ethical guidelines.
Interdependent stage: Stage during teenage years when parents renegotiate their relationship with their adolescent children to allow for shared power in decision-making.
Interpretive stage: Stage from age 4or 5 to the start of adolescence when parents help their children interpret their experiences with the social world beyond the family.
Interview techniques: A research method in which participants are asked to report on their experiences using language, commonly by engaging in conversation with a researcher (participants may also be asked to record their responses in writing).
Intra- and inter-individual differences: Different patterns of development observed within an individual (intra-) or between individuals (inter-).
Involuntary or obligatory responses: Behaviors in which individuals engage that do not require much conscious thought or effort.
Life course theories: Theory of development that highlights the effects of social expectations of age-related life events and social roles; additionally considers the lifelong cumulative effects of membership in specific cohorts and sociocultural subgroups and exposure to historical events.
Life span theories: Theory of development that emphasizes the patterning of lifelong within- and between-person differences in the shape, level, and rate of change trajectories.
Longitudinal research: A research design used to examine behavior in the same participants over short (months) or long (decades) periods of time.
Longitudinal studies: Research method that collects information from individuals at multiple time points over time, allowing researchers to track cohort differences in age-related change to determine cumulative effects of different life experiences.
Moratorium: State in which adolescents are actively exploring options but have not yet made identity commitments.
Motor control: The use of thinking to direct muscles and limbs to perform a desired action.
Nature: The genes that children bring with them to life and that influence all aspects of their development.
Non-industrialized countries: The less economically advanced countries that comprise the majority of the world’s population. Most are currently developing at a rapid rate.
Numerical magnitudes: The sizes of numbers.
Nurture: The environments, starting with the womb, that influence all aspects of children’s development.
Nurturing stage: Stage from birth to around 18-24 months in which parents develop an attachment relationship with child and adapt to the new baby.
Object permanence: The understanding that objects continue to exist even when they cannot be directly observed (e.g., that a pen continues to exist even when it is hidden under a piece of paper).
Object permanence task: The Piagetian task in which infants below about 9 months of age fail to search for an object that is removed from their sight and, if not allowed to search immediately for the object, act as if they do not know that it continues to exist.
OECD countries: Members of the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development, comprised of the world’s wealthiest countries.
Phonemic awareness: Awareness of the component sounds within words.
Piaget’s theory: Theory that development occurs through a sequence of discontinuous stages: the sensorimotor, preoperational, concrete operational, and formal operational stages.
Practice effect: When participants get better at a task over time by “practicing” it through repeated assessments instead of due to actual developmental change (practice effects can be particularly problematic in longitudinal and sequential research designs).
Preoperational reasoning stage: Period within Piagetian theory from age 2 to 7 years, in which children can represent objects through drawing and language but cannot solve logical reasoning problems, such as the conservation problems.
Processing speed: The time it takes individuals to perform cognitive operations (e.g., process information, react to a signal, switch attention from one task to another, find a specific target object in a complex picture).
Psychological control: Parents’ manipulation of and intrusion into adolescents’ emotional and cognitive world through invalidating adolescents’ feelings and pressuring them to think in particular ways.
Psychometric approach: Approach to studying intelligence that examines performance on tests of intellectual functioning.
Psychophysiological responses: Recording of biological measures (such as heart rate and hormone levels) and neurological responses (such as brain activity) that may be associated with observable behaviors.
Qualitative changes: Large, fundamental change, as when a caterpillar changes into a butterfly; stage theories such as Piaget’s posit that each stage reflects qualitative change relative to previous stages.
Quantitative changes: Gradual, incremental change, as in the growth of a pine tree’s girth.
Recall: Type of memory task where individuals are asked to remember previously learned information without the help of external cues.
Recall memory: The process of remembering discrete episodes or events from the past, including encoding, consolidation and storage, and retrieval.
Recognition: Type of memory task where individuals are asked to remember previously learned information with the assistance of cues.
Research design: The strategy (or “blueprint”) for deciding how to collect and analyze research information.
Research methods: The specific tools and techniques used by researchers to collect information.
Security of attachment: An infant’s confidence in the sensitivity and responsiveness of a caregiver, especially when he or she is needed. Infants can be securely attached or insecurely attached.
Self-perceptions of aging: An individual’s perceptions of their own aging process; positive perceptions of aging have been shown to be associated with greater longevity and health.
Sensorimotor stage: Period within Piagetian theory from birth to age 2 years, during which children come to represent the enduring reality of objects.
Sequential research designs: A research design that includes elements of cross-sectional and longitudinal research designs. Similar to cross-sectional designs, sequential research designs include participants of different ages within one study; similar to longitudinal designs, participants of different ages are followed over time.
Social network: Network of people with whom an individual is closely connected; social networks provide emotional, informational, and material support and offer opportunities for social engagement.
Social referencing: The process by which one individual consults another’s emotional expressions to determine how to evaluate and respond to circumstances that are ambiguous or uncertain.
Sociocultural theories: Theory founded in large part by Lev Vygotsky that emphasizes how other people and the attitudes, values, and beliefs of the surrounding culture influence children’s development.
Socioemotional Selectivity Theory: Theory proposed to explain the reduction of social partners in older adulthood; posits that older adults focus on meeting emotional over information-gathering goals, and adaptively select social partners who meet this need.
Solidity principle: The idea that two solid masses should not be able to move through one another.
Strange situation: A laboratory task that involves briefly separating and reuniting infants and their primary caregivers as a way of studying individual differences in attachment behavior.
Subjective age: A multidimensional construct that indicates how old (or young) a person feels and into which age group a person categorizes him- or herself
Successful aging: Includes three components: avoiding disease, maintaining high levels of cognitive and physical functioning, and having an actively engaged lifestyle.
Temperament: A child’s innate personality; biologically based personality, including qualities such as activity level, emotional reactivity, sociability, mood, and soothability.
Temperament: Early emerging differences in reactivity and self-regulation, which constitutes a foundation for personality development.
Tertiary education: Education or training beyond secondary school, usually taking place in a college, university, or vocational training program.
Theory of mind: Children’s growing understanding of the mental states that affect people’s behavior.
Verbal report paradigms: Research methods that require participants to report on their experiences, thoughts, feelings, etc., using language.
Vignette: A short story that presents a situation that participants are asked to respond to.
Violation of expectation paradigm: A research method in which infants are expected to respond in a particular way because one of two conditions violates or goes against what they should expect based on their everyday experiences (e.g., it violates our expectations that Wile E. Coyote runs off a cliff but does not immediately fall to the ground below).
Voluntary responses: Behaviors that a person has control over and completes by choice.
Working memory: Memory system that allows for information to be simultaneously stored and utilized or manipulated.