Vocabulary

Adoption: To take in and raise a child of other parents legally as one’s own.
Adoption study: A behavior genetic research method that involves comparison of adopted children to their adoptive and biological parents.
Age identity: How old or young people feel compared to their chronological age; after early adulthood, most people feel younger than their chronological age.
Age in place: The trend toward making accommodations to ensure that aging people can stay in their homes and live independently.
Anxious-avoidant: Attachment style that involves suppressing one’s own feelings and desires, and a difficulty depending on others.
Anxious-resistant: Attachment style that is self-critical, insecure, and fearful of rejection.
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.
Attachment theory: Theory that describes the enduring patterns of relationships from birth to death.
Attrition: When a participant drops out, or fails to complete, all parts of a study.
Authoritarian parenting: Parenting style that is high is demandingness and low in support.
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.
Authoritative parenting: A parenting style that is high in demandingness and high in support.
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.
Automatic empathy: A social perceiver unwittingly taking on the internal state of another person, usually because of mimicking the person’s expressive behavior and thereby feeling the expressed emotion.
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).
Behavioral genetics: The empirical science of how genes and environments combine to generate behavior.
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.
Blended family: A family consisting of an adult couple and their children from previous relationships.
Boomerang generation: Term used to describe young adults, primarily between the ages of 25 and 34, who return home after previously living on their own.
Child abuse: Injury, death, or emotional harm to a child caused by a parent or caregiver, either intentionally or unintentionally.
Childfree: Term used to describe people who purposefully choose not to have children.
Childless: Term used to describe people who would like to have children but are unable to conceive.
Chutes and Ladders: A numerical board game that seems to be useful for building numerical knowledge.
Cohabitation: Arrangement where two unmarried adults live together.
Coherence: Within attachment theory, the gaining of insight into and reconciling one’s childhood experiences.
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.
DNA methylation: Covalent modifications of mammalian DNA occurring via the methylation of cytosine, typically in the context of the CpG dinucleotide.
DNA methyltransferases (DNMTs): Enzymes that establish and maintain DNA methylation using methyl-group donor compounds or cofactors. The main mammalian DNMTs are DNMT1, which maintains methylation state across DNA replication, and DNMT3a and DNMT3b, which perform de novo methylation.
Effortful control: A temperament quality that enables children to be more successful in motivated self-regulation.
Elder abuse: Any form of mistreatment that results in harm to an elder person, often caused by his/her adult child.
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.
Empty Nest: Feelings of sadness and loneliness that parents may feel when their adult children leave the home for the first time.
Engagement: Formal agreement to get married.
Epigenetics: Heritable changes in gene activity that are not caused by changes in the DNA sequence. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epigenetics
Epigenetics: The study of heritable changes in gene expression or cellular phenotype caused by mechanisms other than changes in the underlying DNA sequence. Epigenetic marks include covalent DNA modifications and posttranslational histone modifications.
Epigenome: The genome-wide distribution of epigenetic marks.
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).
False-belief test: An experimental procedure that assesses whether a perceiver recognizes that another person has a false belief—a belief that contradicts reality.
Family of orientation: The family one is born into.
Family of procreation: The family one creates, usually through marriage.
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.
Family systems theory: Theory that says a person cannot be understood on their own, but as a member of a unit.
Fluid intelligence: Type of intelligence that relies on the ability to use information processing resources to reason logically and solve novel problems.
Folk explanations of behavior: People’s natural explanations for why somebody did something, felt something, etc. (differing substantially for unintentional and intentional behaviors).
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.
Foster care: Care provided by alternative families to children whose families of orientation cannot adequately care for them; often arranged through the government or a social service agency.
Functional distance: The frequency with which we cross paths with others.
Gender schemas: Organized beliefs and expectations about maleness and femaleness that guide children’s thinking about gender.
Gene: A specific deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA) sequence that codes for a specific polypeptide or protein or an observable inherited trait.
Genome-wide association study (GWAS): A study that maps DNA polymorphisms in affected individuals and controls matched for age, sex, and ethnic background with the aim of identifying causal genetic variants.
Genotype: The DNA content of a cell’s nucleus, whether a trait is externally observable or not.
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).
Heritability coefficient: An easily misinterpreted statistical construct that purports to measure the role of genetics in the explanation of differences among individuals.
Heterogamy: Partnering with someone who is unlike you in a meaningful way.
Heterogeneity: Inter-individual and subgroup differences in level and rate of change over time.
Histone acetyltransferases (HATs) and histone deacetylases (HDACs): HATs are enzymes that transfer acetyl groups to specific positions on histone tails, promoting an “open” chromatin state and transcriptional activation. HDACs remove these acetyl groups, resulting in a “closed” chromatin state and transcriptional repression.
Histone modifications: Posttranslational modifications of the N-terminal “tails” of histone proteins that serve as a major mode of epigenetic regulation. These modifications include acetylation, phosphorylation, methylation, sumoylation, ubiquitination, and ADP-ribosylation.
Homogamy: Partnering with someone who is like you in a meaningful way.
Homophily: Adolescents tend to associate with peers who are similar to themselves.
Identical twins: Two individual organisms that originated from the same zygote and therefore are genetically identical or very similar. The epigenetic profiling of identical twins discordant for disease is a unique experimental design as it eliminates the DNA sequence-, age-, and sex-differences from consideration.
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.
Intention: An agent’s mental state of committing to perform an action that the agent believes will bring about a desired outcome.
Intentionality: The quality of an agent’s performing a behavior intentionally—that is, with skill and awareness and executing an intention (which is in turn based on a desire and relevant beliefs).
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).
Intimate partner violence: Physical, sexual, or psychological abuse inflicted by a partner.
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.
Joint attention: Two people attending to the same object and being aware that they both are attending to it.
Joint family: A family comprised of at least three generations living together. Joint families often include many members of the extended family.
Learned helplessness: The belief, as someone who is abused, that one has no control over his or her situation.
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.
Marriage market: The process through which prospective spouses compare assets and liabilities of available partners and choose the best available mate.
Mere-exposure effect: The notion that people like people/places/things merely because they are familiar with them.
Mimicry: Copying others’ behavior, usually without awareness.
Mirror neurons: Neurons identified in monkey brains that fire both when the monkey performs a certain action and when it perceives another agent performing that action.
Modern family: A family based on commitment, caring, and close emotional ties.
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.
Multigenerational homes: Homes with more than one adult generation.
Nature: The genes that children bring with them to life and that influence all aspects of their development.
Neglect: Failure to care for someone properly.
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.
Nuclear families: A core family unit comprised of only the parents and children.
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.
Oxytocin: A nine amino acid mammalian neuropeptide. Oxytocin is synthesized primarily in the brain, but also in other tissues such as uterus, heart and thymus, with local effects. Oxytocin is best known as a hormone of female reproduction due to its capacity to cause uterine contractions and eject milk. Oxytocin has effects on brain tissue, but also acts throughout the body in some cases as an antioxidant or anti-inflammatory.
Perceived social support: A person’s perception that others are there to help them in times of need.
Permissive parenting: Parenting that is low in demandingness and high in support.
Phenotype: The pattern of expression of the genotype or the magnitude or extent to which it is observably expressed—an observable characteristic or trait of an organism, such as its morphology, development, biochemical or physiological properties, or behavior.
Phonemic awareness: Awareness of the component sounds within words.
Physical abuse: The use of intentional physical force to cause harm.
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).
Projection: A social perceiver’s assumption that the other person wants, knows, or feels the same as the perceiver wants, know, or feels.
Proximity: Physical nearness.
Psychological abuse: Aggressive behavior intended to control a partner.
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.
Quantitative genetics: Scientific and mathematical methods for inferring genetic and environmental processes based on the degree of genetic and environmental similarity among organisms.
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.
Received social support: The actual act of receiving support (e.g., informational, functional).
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.
Sandwich generation: Generation of people responsible for taking care of their own children as well as their aging parents.
Second shift: Term used to describe the unpaid work a parent, usually a mother, does in the home in terms of housekeeping and childrearing.
Secure attachments: Attachment style that involves being comfortable with depending on your partner and having your partner depend on you.
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.
Sexual abuse: The act of forcing a partner to take part in a sex act against his or her will.
Simulation: The process of representing the other person’s mental state.
Single parent family: An individual parent raising a child or children.
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.
Stepfamily: A family formed, after divorce or widowhood, through remarriage.
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.
Support support network: The people who care about and support a person.
Synchrony: Two people displaying the same behaviors or having the same internal states (typically because of mutual mimicry).
Temperament: Early emerging differences in reactivity and self-regulation, which constitutes a foundation for personality development.
Temperament: A child’s innate personality; biologically based personality, including qualities such as activity level, emotional reactivity, sociability, mood, and soothability.
Tertiary education: Education or training beyond secondary school, usually taking place in a college, university, or vocational training program.
Theory of mind: The human capacity to understand minds, a capacity that is made up of a collection of concepts (e.g., agent, intentionality) and processes (e.g., goal detection, imitation, empathy, perspective taking).
Theory of mind: Children’s growing understanding of the mental states that affect people’s behavior.
Traditional family: Two or more people related by blood, marriage, and—occasionally-- by adoption.
Twin studies: A behavior genetic research method that involves comparison of the similarity of identical (monozygotic; MZ) and fraternal (dizygotic; DZ) twins.
Two-parent family: A family consisting of two parents—typical both of the biological parents-- and their children.
Uninvolved parenting: Parenting that is low in demandingness and low in support.
Vagus nerve: The 10th cranial nerve. The mammalian vagus has an older unmyelinated branch which originates in the dorsal motor complex and a more recently evolved, myelinated branch, with origins in the ventral vagal complex including the nucleus ambiguous. The vagus is the primary source of autonomic-parasympathetic regulation for various internal organs, including the heart, lungs and other parts of the viscera. The vagus nerve is primarily sensory (afferent), transmitting abundant visceral input to the central nervous system.
Vasopressin: A nine amino acid mammalian neuropeptide. Vasopressin is synthesized primarily in the brain, but also may be made in other tissues. Vasopressin is best known for its effects on the cardiovascular system (increasing blood pressure) and also the kidneys (causing water retention). Vasopressin has effects on brain tissue, but also acts throughout the body.
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).
Visual perspective taking: Can refer to visual perspective taking (perceiving something from another person’s spatial vantage point) or more generally to effortful mental state inference (trying to infer the other person’s thoughts, desires, emotions).
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.
Working models: An understanding of how relationships operate; viewing oneself as worthy of love and others as trustworthy.