CH-4-5 Sensing and Perceiving Our World – Psychology: Perspectives and Connections : Chapter Notes

This Document Contains Chapters 4 to 5 Chapter 4: Sensing and Perceiving Our World BRIEF CHAPTER OUTLINE The Long, Strange Trip from Sensation to Perception Basic Sensory Processes Principles of Perception Absolute Thresholds Difference Threshold Perceptual Set Vision Sensing Visual Stimuli Vision and the Eye Vision and the Brain Vision and Specific Neurons Challenging Assumptions in How Neurons “Recognize” Human Faces Perceiving Visual Stimuli Perceiving Motion Depth Perception Binocular Depth Cues Monocular Depth Cues Perceptual Constancy Size Constancy Shape Constancy Organizing Visual Information: Gestalt Laws of Grouping Visual Perception: Bottom-Up or Top-Down? Perceiving Color Two Theories of Color Perception Deficiencies in Color Vision Hearing The Physics of Sound and the Psychology of Hearing The Ear Hearing in the Brain Psychology in the Real World: Hearing Loss Can Happen in Young People Too The Bodily Senses Touch Pain Pain Perception Explaining Pain Controlling Pain The Chemical Senses: Smell and Taste Smell (Olfaction) Taste Synesthesia Bringing It All together: Making Connections in Sensation and Perception: Differences Across Cultures Cultural Variation in Visual Perception Cultural Variation in Olfactory Experience Cultural Variation in Pain Chapter Review EXTENDED CHAPTER OUTLINE THE LONG, STRANGE TRIP FROM SENSATION TO PERCEPTION • The sense organs transform information from its physical form into a nerve impulse and transmit it to the brain, which organizes that information, interprets it, and then initiates a response. • Sensation is the stimulation of our sense organs by the outer world. o Our sense organs detect different features of our surroundings: eyes are sensitive to light waves, ears to sounds, skin to touch and pressure, tongues to tastes, and noses to odors. • Perception is the act of organizing and interpreting sensory experience. o It is how our psychological world represents our physical world. • Before our brains can create meaning from sensory information, our sense organs transform physical stimuli from the outer world to a form that the brain can use: action potentials. Basic Sensory Processes • Sensory adaptation refers to our diminished sensitivity to a constant stimulation. It ensures that we notice changes in stimulation more than stimulation itself. • Once we know that a physical stimulus is something to attend to, the sense organs convert it into action potentials. This conversion of physical into neural information is called transduction. o This occurs when cells in the retina change light waves to neural energy, when hair cells in the inner ear change sound waves to neural energy, when chemicals in the air bind to receptors in the nose, when food chemicals stimulate taste buds on the tongue, and when pressure and temperature stimulate nerve cells in the skin. Principles of Perception • Psychophysics is the study of how people psychologically perceive physical stimuli such as light and sound waves and touch. Absolute Thresholds o An absolute threshold is the lowest intensity level of a stimulus we can detect half of the time. o Under ideal laboratory conditions, an average person on a very clear night could detect a single candle from 30 miles away or could detect 1 teaspoon of sugar in two gallons of water as compared to two gallons of pure water. o One problem with using absolute thresholds is that detecting sensations is not only a matter of intensity of the stimulus, but also the decision-making process of the person in a particular context. o Signal detection theory takes into account both stimulus intensity and the decision-making processes people use when saying whether they detect a stimulus. o In signal detection research a low-intensity stimulus is presented on some occasions and not presented on other occasions. Instead of having a 50% detection line, signal detection presents only a single low-intensity stimulus.  There are four possible outcomes: • A hit is correctly detecting a stimulus that is there. • A miss is failing to detect a stimulus that is there. • A false alarm is saying that a stimulus exists when it does not. • A correct rejection is not reporting a stimulus that is not there.  The participant’s responses create a profile of hits, misses, false alarms, and correct rejections. Difference Threshold o Difference threshold (also known as the just noticeable difference [JND]) is the smallest amount of change between two stimuli that a person can detect half of the time. o Weber’s law says that the size of the JND is a constant fraction of the intensity of the stimulus (e.g., 3% for weight perception). Perceptual Set o Perceptual set is the effect of frame of mind on perception  Examples of perceptual sets include: mood, health, knowledge of how the world works, and cultural upbringing. VISION • Humans rely more on our sense of sight than other sense information. Sensing Visual Stimuli • The eye bends light, converts light energy to neural energy, and sends that information to the brain for further processing. • The eye is the gateway to vision, but very little of what we experience as vision actually happens in the eye; it happens in the brain. Vision and the Eye o Light enters the eye at the cornea, a hard covering that protects the lens. o It then passes through liquid until it reaches a hole called the pupil. o The colored part of the eye, the iris, adjusts the pupil to control the amount of light entering the eye (e.g., when light is very bright, the iris shrinks the pupil until you can adjust). o The light then passes through the lens, which bends the light rays. o Muscles around the lens alter its shape, depending on the distance of an object, to allow it to focus light on the retina. The retina is a thin layer of nerve tissue that lines the back of the eye. The process by which the muscles control the shape of the lens to adjust to viewing objects at different distances is known as accommodation. o The retina consists of several layers of cells. The light that hits the retina travels through several cell layers before processing begins.  The deepest layer of cells, where processing of light energy begins, is the layer of photoreceptors, which convert light energy into nerve energy. In other words, they are transducers. • Rods are most responsive to dark and light contrast. These very sensitive cells work well at low illumination and the dark. o The process of adjustment to seeing in the dark is known as dark adaptation. • Cones are responsible for color vision and are most functional in conditions of bright light. They act much more quickly than rods. o The fovea, located on the back of the retina, contains the highest concentration of cones in the retina. As such, when images are projected onto the fovea we have the greatest visual acuity (i.e., clearest vision). In other words, our ability to see clearly depends on our cones. Vision and the Brain o After transduction at the photoreceptor layer, the visual information is processed by different layers of cells in the retina. o Axons of the ganglion cells make up the optic nerve, which transmits the signals from the eye to the brain. o The point at which the optic nerve exits the eye is the blind spot of the retina because at this point there are no receptor cells (so nothing is seen). o When light enters the eye, the lens bends the light in such a way that the image is upside down compared to the orientation of the object in the outside world. The brain reorients the inverted image so that our world is right-side up. o In people with normal vision the lens projects the image to hit just on the retina. o In people who are nearsighted (people who can see things close to them but have problems with distance) the image focuses slightly in front of the retina. o In people who are farsighted (they can see things far away but not up close) the image actually focuses behind the retina.  Age-related farsightedness occurs because, as we age, the lens becomes less flexible, making it more likely for images to be focused behind the retina. o The optic nerve carries impulses to the thalamus (the brain’s sensory relay station), which then sends the message to the visual cortex of the occipital lobes. o The information from the left visual field is processed in the brain’s right hemisphere, and the information from the right visual field is processed in the brain’s left hemisphere.  In each eye, each half of the retina sends out its own axons. Each optic nerve has two strands. One strand from each eye contains axons that travel from the retina to the thalamus and on to the visual cortex of the same side of the brain as the eye from which the axons come. The other strands cross to the opposite side of the brain in an area called the optic chiasm. o A cluster of the neuron cell bodies in the thalamus form the lateral geniculate nucleus (LGN). Visual information creates a point-by-point representation on the tissue of the LGN, meaning that patterns of neural firing that correspond to the shape projected on a specific region of retina affect a similar layout of cells in here. In other words, the retina and the LGN represent visual information in similar ways. o Fibers from the LGN in the thalamus then travel to the visual cortex in the occipital lobes. Neurons in the visual cortex analyze the retinal image in terms of its various patterns, contrasts, lines, and edges.  Different cortical cells handle different aspects of this analysis. Vision and Specific Neurons o For centuries, it was believed that nerves and the brain worked as a general structure, with little to no specific brain region performing specific tasks. o Toward the end of the 1800s it was demonstrated that injury to different parts of the brain resulted in different speech and behavior disabilities. o Until the mid-20th century, however, scholars studying vision focused mostly on the eye. While they knew about photoreceptors, researchers did not fully understand or appreciate the importance of the brain in vision. o Researchers knew that after leaving the retina, optic fibers went to the LGN and then on to the visual cortex. o Hubel and Weisel’s (1962, 1979) Nobel Prize–winning work showed that individual neurons fire only because of very specific visual information.  They were able to record specialized activity of individual cells in the brain’s vision area by implanting electrodes into the visual cortex of cats.  As a result, they discovered neurons called feature detectors in the visual cortex, which analyze the retinal image and respond to aspects of shapes, such as angles and movements. o Hubel and Weisel described three types of neurons in the visual cortex that acted as feature detectors.  Simple cells respond to very specific information (e.g., a bar of light oriented at a particular angle). Some simple cells respond to only one angle or orientation, others respond to other angles of orientation, and still others to edges. All simple cells, though, will only respond to stimuli that stay still or are in the middle of their receptive fields.  Complex cells receive input from many different simple cells and are receptive to particular stimuli but in different parts of the receptive field. They are also sensitive to an image as it moves and if it appears anywhere in the visual field.  Hypercomplex cells receive inputs from many complex cells and fire in response to patterns of lines. o Reassembling the pieces occurs partly in hypercomplex cells in the visual cortex when the visual cortex sends the images to other parts of the brain, such as the frontal or parietal lobes. o Hubel and Weisel made an even more monumental discovery when they closed one eye of a newborn cat.  In the first weeks in a cat’s life, when its brain is growing the most, visual experience is critical for brain structures to develop all the necessary neural connections needed to see well.  If a cat is blinded or has its eyes closed for a week or more during this important stage of development, its visual cortex does not develop properly and the animal’s vision is forever stunted.  If one eye is closed early in life for an extended period of time, the part of the brain receiving messages from the closed eye soon begins to receive and process visual messages from the one good eye. Challenging Assumptions in How Neurons “Recognize” Human Faces  After Hubel and Wiesel’s work, other researchers continued to find other cortical cells that fire in response to certain visual stimuli. Some, for example, respond to faces.  Researchers took advantage of surgical procedures already being conducted on people for epileptic seizures testing the activity of individual neurons. These patients would already have their brains being probed with electrodes measuring activity of single neurons and so Quiroga and colleagues piggy-backed onto that procedure to examine whether single neurons fired to specific images of famous and non-famous people, animals, and buildings. Famous people included Bill Clinton, Jennifer Aniston, and Halle Berry.  Results of the study were stunning and surprising. As Quiroga put it: “The first time we saw a neuron firing to seven different pictures of Jennifer Aniston–and nothing else–we literally jumped out of our chairs.” The same thing happened with photos of Clinton and Berry and famous buildings such as the Sydney Opera House and the Tower of Pisa.  This finding has been dubbed the “Halle Berry neuron” finding even though it is more general than just Halle Berry. Recent research has extended this finding and has demonstrated that just thinking about Halle Berry (not actually seeing a picture of her) is enough to stimulate the “Halle Berry neuron.” Perceiving Visual Stimuli • Many processes involving motion, depth, size, grouping, and color perception work together to help recognize objects. Perceiving Motion o Feature detectors play a role in how we perceive movement and form. We perceive movement when an image moves across the retina. Simple and complex cells respond to either the orientation or direction of moving images. o Several factors contribute to how we perceive movement.  One factor is the background against which an object moves and another factor is the size of the object. When an object moves across a complex background, it appears to move faster than when it moves across a simple background.  The size of the object affects perception of movement. All things being equal, smaller objects appear to move faster than larger objects.  We can also be fooled into thinking something is moving when it is not. We refer to this illusion as apparent motion because our brains interpret images that move across our retinas as movement. • Movement neurons respond only when the image itself moves and not when the eye itself moves. This is one way the brain can determine the difference between real and false movement. Depth Perception o Depth perception allows for the discrimination between what is near and far from us.  Binocular depth cues rely on input from both eyes. • Binocular disparity comes from the fact that the eyes are separated by a few inches, so the image from each eye will provide slightly different viewpoints. • Convergence occurs when the eyes move inward as an object moves closer to you. The muscles that move the eyeball contract and the brain make use of the feedback from these muscles to perceive distance. This is the most effective as a depth cue for stimuli that are within 10 feet of us.  Monocular depth cues rely on input from one eye. • Linear perspective involves parallel lines that converge or come together the farther away they are from the viewer. The more they converge, the greater distance we perceive. A good example of this is the Müller-Lyer illusion. • Texture gradient happens when the texture of a surface becomes more tightly packed together and denser as the surface moves to the background. These changes in textural information help us judge depth. • Atmospheric perspective comes from looking across a vast space into the distance in the outdoors. Objects farther away appear more blurred and bluish as a result. • Interposition happens when objects closer to the viewer often overlap with those farther away. Perceptual Constancy o The image on our retinas changes shape and size as objects move through space. The ability of the brain to preserve perception of such objects in spite of the changes in retinal image is known as perceptual constancy.  Size constancy is when we see things as the same size regardless of the changing size of the image on the retina, because we know what the size of the object is. A good example here is Ames room.  Shape constancy is when the brain uses its knowledge of shapes to override changing retinal images that might make the world very confusing. Organizing Visual Information: Gestalt Laws of Grouping o Gestalt psychologists recognized that often we perceive wholes as more than merely the sum of their parts. o Max Wertheimer, Kurt Koffka, and Wolfgang Köhler studied visual perception in the early 20th century and described a set of principles or laws by which people organize elements of figures or scenes into whole objects. o The law of similarity is the tendency to group like objects together. o The law of continuity is the tendency to see points or lines in such a way that they follow a continuous path. o The law of proximity says that we tend to group together objects that are near one another. o The law of closure occurs when we perceive a whole object in the absence of complete information. o There is also the principle of figure and ground: The figure is the thing that stands in front of a somewhat unformed background (i.e., the ground). Perhaps the most famous example of figure-ground effects is Rubin’s (1915) face-vase figure. o The Müller-Lyer illusion results from our tendency to see the right line as the inside corner of a room and the left one as the outside corner of a room or building, making use of the monocular depth cue of linear perspective. Visual Perception: Bottom-Up or Top-Down? o Bottom-up processing is the process of building a visual experience from smaller pieces. We put the pieces together, and then we “see” the whole (e.g., reading). o Top-down processing occurs when the perception of the whole guides perception of smaller elemental features (e.g., facial recognition). o Which process we use depends on the nature of the information being processed. Perceiving Color o The perception of color varies depending on our photoreceptors, our brains, and the physical characteristics of the stimulus at which we look.  Color perception is partly determined by wavelength, measured in billionths of a meter or nanometers (abbreviated nm). The spectrum of color visible to humans ranges from 400 nm, which most of us perceive to be the color blue, to 700 nm, which most of us perceive as red. Light that we perceive as green is at 550 nm. • Two Theories of Color Vision o Young and Helmholtz’s trichromatic color theory says that there are three kinds of cones: red, green, and blue, and all color we experience must result from a mixing of these three colors of light. This mixing occurs inside the eye in terms of how different kinds of cones respond to different wavelengths of light.  The human retina does contain three kinds of receptor cones, each sensitive to different wavelengths of light. The red cones fire in response to longer wavelength light. Green cones respond to medium wavelength light, and blue cones respond to shorter wavelength light. Different patterns of firing of these various kinds of photoreceptors combine to help create our experience of a wide array of colors. How much each cone is stimulated determines the color we will see. o Hering (1878) proposed opponent process theory, which says that cones are linked together in three opposing color pairs: blue/yellow, red/green, and black/white. The members of the color pairs oppose one another, whereby activation of one member of the pair inhibits activity in the other.  This theory does can account for afterimages, visual images that remain after removal of the stimulus.  This theory helps to explain some types of color blindness, and why we never experience some colors, such as reddish-green or yellowish-blue. o Current research indicates that both theories account for how human color vision works.  The trichromatic theory explains processing at the retina or cone, of which there are three types.  Opponent process theory explains more about how cells in the LGN of the thalamus and visual cortex process color information. • Deficiencies in Color Vision o There are many types of color blindness. It generally refers to a weakness or deficiency in perception of certain colors. o Usually results from an inherited pigment deficiency in the photoreceptors and generally occurs in men and boys. o The most common form of color blindness results from a deficiency in red (long wavelength light) and green (medium wavelength light) sensitive cones.  People with this disorder have trouble distinguishing some shades of green from red, may see green and brown as similar, or might have difficulty distinguishing blue and purple. HEARING • Hearing begins when we sense sound waves. Sound waves must travel through some medium (fluid or, more commonly, the air) for us to hear them. • Sound waves travel much slower than light waves, which is why you hear thunder after you have seen lightning. The Physics of Sound and the Psychology of Hearing • Hearing is affected by three physical properties of the sound wave: its amplitude, frequency, and purity. o The height, or amplitude, of the sound wave determines what we perceive as loudness.  The taller the wave is, the louder the sound.  The scale for a sound’s loudness is decibels (dB). o The frequency of the sound wave, or how many waves occur in a given period of time, we perceive as the sound’s pitch.  Frequency is measured in units called hertz (Hz), which is how many times the wave cycles per second. The higher the frequency, the higher the pitch. • Most sounds we hear are in the 400 to 4,000 Hz range. • Sounds below 20 Hz are called subsonic. • Sounds above 20,000 Hz are called ultrasonic. o Purity refers to the complexity of the wave. Most sound waves are pretty simple, made of only one frequency. They are almost always a mixture of frequencies and how much of a mixture defines its purity.  We perceive purity as timbre. The Ear • The Outer Ear o The structures on the sides of our head (pinnae) collect and funnel sounds into the passage called the auditory canal. o Once inside this canal, sound vibrations travel to the eardrum, or tympanic membrane. • The Middle Ear o The sound waves on the tympanic membrane set into motion the bones of the middle ear: the hammer, anvil, and stirrup. These bones do more than just vibrate: they amplify the waves more than 20 times the energy they had entering the ear.  The hammer hits the anvil and the anvil moves the stirrup. The vibration of the stirrup, in turn, sets into motion a series of important changes in the inner ear. • The Inner Ear o The semi-circular canals play a key role in maintaining a sense of balance.  As the stirrup vibrates, it moves a membrane that covers the inner ear, called the oval window. The vibrations on the oval window send movement through the fluid-filled cavity of the cochlea. o The cochlea is a bony tube, curled like a snail’s shell, and filled with fluid. o The basilar membrane runs through the cochlea. Within the basilar membrane of the cochlea are hair cells, which are the sensory receptors for sound. o As the vibrations move through the cochlear fluid, the basilar membrane vibrates, and this makes the hair cells bend. As they bend, the hair cells transduce the sound vibrations into electrical impulses, which may generate an action potential in the auditory nerve. o Hair cells vary in size depending on where in the cochlea they are. The smallest hair cells are nearest the oval window and the largest hair cells are in the coiled-up center part of the cochlea.  There is a one-to-one connection between size of hair cell and its sensitivity to different frequency of sounds. The smallest cells are sensitive to the highest frequencies and the largest hair cells are sensitive to the lowest frequencies.  The louder the sound, the bigger the vibration in the cochlear fluid, the more stimulation of the hair cells, the faster the rate of action potentials in the auditory nerve, and the louder the sound we perceive. o If the hair cells in the inner ear become damaged, as can happen when a person is exposed to very loud noises once or moderately loud noises (such as machines) over long periods of time, the person can suffer irreparable hearing loss. Hearing in the Brain • After the sound energy is changed to neural energy in the cochlea, the hair cells synapse with auditory neurons that transmit the sound impulses to the thalamus in the brain. • From there, the neural impulses get relayed to various parts of the brain, including the brain stem, the thalamus, and the temporal lobes, home of the auditory cortex. • The auditory pathways go from the cochlea to the inferior colliculus in the brain stem and from there to the medial (middle) geniculate nucleus (MGN). This is where we organize and interpret sounds from the outside world (i.e., hear). • The auditory cortex receives inputs from several other cortical regions, including the visual cortex and regions involved in perceiving speech. • There are also hemispheric differences in auditory perception: o the right auditory cortex is more active in processing non-verbal stimuli the left auditory cortex is more active in processing speech and language PSYCHOLOGY IN THE REAL WORLD: HEARING LOSS CAN HAPPEN IN YOUNG PEOPLE TOO • Studies often divide the causes of hearing loss into age-related and noise-exposure, but in fact, these two are related. o Being exposed to loud noise levels over long periods of time leads to a loss of hearing after 10 to 15 years. • Noise often leads to age-related hearing loss, especially in the high-frequency range of 5,000–15,000 Hz. o Factory or machine workers exposed to 90 dB level noise for 8 hours a day, 5 days a week, suffer permanent hearing loss after 10 years on the job. o Rock musicians tested before and after concerts, who were exposed to noise levels from 95 dB to 107 dB, showed both temporary and permanent hearing loss. • MP3 players, including the iPod, have maximum decibel levels of around 115–120 dB, about the loudness of a rock concert. Hearing loss has increased in teens since the release of the iPod in 2001. Earbud styles headphones are the biggest problem. • Most young people claim to understand the risk of hearing loss. It is unclear, however, whether they act in accordance with that information. THE BODILY SENSES • The senses based in the skin, body, or any membrane surfaces are known as the bodily senses. There are at least six distinct bodily or somatic senses: touch, temperature, pain, position/motion, balance, and interoception (perception of bodily sensations). Of these six senses, we will discuss touch and pain. • The largest contact surface area any sensory input has with our bodies is the skin, and it is carefully mapped in the somatosensory cortex in the parietal lobe of the brain. • Bodily senses also include knowing where our body parts are. • We also sense things inside our bodies (e.g., organ pain, levels of heart rate, depth of breathing, etc.). Touch • The top layers of skin have receptor cells (mechanoreceptors) that are sensitive to different tactile qualities: some to shape, some to grooves, some to vibrations and movements. o There are different kinds of mechanoreceptors each of which has a unique profile of sensitivity.  Some of the mechanoreceptors are slow to change. Some are fast to change with variations in tactile stimulation.  Some are sensitive to fine details, whereas others are not sensitive to fine details.  Some sense movement and vibration. o Different areas of skin have different numbers of mechanoreceptors (e.g., there are fewer mechanoreceptors on the soles of your feet than on your fingertips). • The sensory qualities of shape, size, hardness, and temperature stimulate different kinds of mechanoreceptors in the skin but those sensory impulses must travel to the brain to be processed and interpreted. o When our fingertips, forearm, or shoulder gets touched, a dedicated region of cortex becomes active and we perceive the sensation of being touched. o Tactile sensations from our skin travel via sensory neurons to the spinal cord and up to the brain. o The first major structure involved in processing bodily sensations is the thalamus, which relays the impulses to the somatosensory cortex in the parietal lobes. o Repeated sensory and motor tactile experience changes the amount of cortex involved in processing that particular sensation or movement. The general location in the somatosensory cortex stays the same, but areas of the cortex devoted to that experience or function grow. o The more one body region is touched or stimulated, the more sensory or motor cortex gets called into duty in processing that information.  Researchers have found that experienced violinists have larger representations, or brain maps, of the hand and finger regions of the somatosensory cortex than non-musicians.  CONNECTION: The part of the brain involved in the sense of touch is the somatosensory cortex shown in Figure 3.16 (Chapter 3). Pain • We need pain to survive. People born with no pain receptors can get severely injured or killed, because they don’t know they have been harmed. • Pain is a complex emotional and sensory experience associated with actual or potential tissue damage. • People vary in their experience of pain but it is needed to survive. If you can’t detect pain then you may not know if you have been injured). • The experience of pain in limb or tissue that is missing is called phantom limb pain. • Pain also is enhanced by one’s reaction to the injury. The emotional reaction to pain can create as much suffering as the actual tissue damage. Pain Perception o Damage to the skin is only one kind of pain. Other forms include organ tissue and nerve damage as well as joint inflammation. o Pain from skin damage is called nociceptive pain. The skin has pain receptors that are sensitive to heat, cold, chemical irritation, and pressure, all of which are kinds of nociceptors.  The nociceptors send signals to the spinal cord and then to the brain, signaling that damage has happened.  The brain can then initiate an appropriate response. o The spinal cord may actually play an active rather than passive role in pain perception.  The spinal cord relays and, in some cases, enhances the pain messages from the sensory neurons to the brain.  This seems to be a function of the glial cells wrapped around the axons. o Once the pain messages get sent and even enhanced by the spinal cord, they move on to the brain.  Some of the same brain regions activated when we experience physical pain also are activated during emotional pain (especially rejection and seeing others receive shocks).  The brain regions active in both physical and emotional pain are the anterior cingulate cortex (ACC) and the insula. Explaining Pain o The gate control theory of pain proposes that the spinal cord regulates the experience of pain by either opening or closing neural channels, called gates, involved in pain sensations that get sent to the brain. o Smaller neural channels are dedicated to pain sensations and when they are activated, pain messages get sent to the brain. o Larger neural channels are involved in non-pain sensations and when they are activated, they can inhibit or close the pain impulses sent to the brain. That is, they override pain messages. o This theory explains why certain kinds of stimulation (e.g., acupuncture or rubbing a hurt area) can relieve sensations of pain. o Inhibitory channels can actually come from the brain as well as the body. Messages sent by the brain itself (i.e., thoughts, feelings, and beliefs) can close channels in the spinal cord involved in pain sensations.  This is one reason why people vary so much in their perception of pain. Controlling Pain o Our bodies have natural painkillers called endorphins. When we are injured they are released and interfere with pain messages in the spinal cord and brain.  Endorphin release may explain such odd phenomena as why people initially experience no pain after a horrible injury from an accident. o Drugs such as aspirin, acetaminophen, and ibuprofen, can help with everyday aches and pains by controlling inflammation. o For more severe pain, doctors may prescribe opioids. Opioids are a class of drug known as analgesics. Morphine, heroin, oxycodone, and hydrocodone are all opioids, and all but heroin are commonly prescribed for pain relief.  They work to deaden or lessen pain by blocking neural activity involved in pain perception.  There is a high risk of dependency on opioids, so their use must be carefully monitored. THE CHEMICAL SENSES: SMELL AND TASTE • Smell and taste are chemical senses because they respond to contact with molecules from objects we encounter in the world. • Smell and taste are very important survival-related senses, as they govern our choices about what we take into our bodies. o This is why these senses are very sensitive, are heightened during pregnancy, and can trigger emotional reactions. • Unlike other senses, receptors for chemical molecules are regularly replaced every few weeks because of their constant exposure to dirt and bacteria that can impair function. Smell (Olfaction) • Our receptors for smell reside high up in the nose. • A small area high in the lining of the nasal cavity contains the olfactory sensory neurons, the receptors for smell. o These neurons contain hairlike projections called cilia, which are similar to the hair cells in the inner ear. The cilia convert chemical information in odor molecules to neural impulses. • When chemicals come in contact with the cilia, transduction occurs, and the olfactory message travels to the olfactory bulb in the forebrain. • The olfactory bulb sends information either directly to the smell processing areas in the cortex or indirectly to the cortex by way of the thalamus. o The primary olfactory cortex resides in the temporal lobe. o The secondary olfactory cortex is in the frontal lobe near the eyes. • Some fibers from the olfactory bulb go directly to the amygdala, which sends smell information to the hypothalamus, thalamus, and frontal cortex. o These connections may explain why smells can instantly evoke an emotional memory. • There may be as many as 1,000 different olfactory sensory receptors. Greater concentrations of odors will stimulate a greater number of sensory neurons. This can lead us to perceive the same odor presented at different concentrations as being an entirely different smell. • People differ considerably in their ability to sense odors. Some people lose the ability to sense smell with infection or injury, but usually this is short term. Taste • Textured structures on the tongue are called papillae. They contain about 10,000 taste buds. The cells on the buds that process taste information are called taste cells. • There are dozens of taste cells in each taste bud. • Human experience of taste results from stimulation of taste buds on the front, sides, and rear of tongue. When chemicals from food or liquid come into contact with the tips of these taste buds, a chain of events unfolds that leads to the experience of taste. o Different tastes use different mechanisms to stimulate an impulse in a taste cell. In general, chemicals alter the membranes of taste cells in ways that make them more likely to generate action potentials. o Such signals from taste cells in various regions of the tongue then travel down fibers to the brainstem. o From the brain stem, taste information travels to the thalamus and frontal lobe. Neurons from the thalamus project taste information to the taste cortex in the insula and other regions of the frontal-parietal cortex. • Humans distinguish five basic taste qualities: bitter, sweet, salty, sour, and savory. Specific receptors exist for each type of taste. • The experience of flavor results from the combination of taste plus smell. • The region of the brain most involved in flavor perception is the orbitofrontal cortex (OFC). It receives inputs from brain areas involved in olfaction and taste, as well as touch and vision perception areas. SYNESTHESIA • Synesthesia occurs when a person experiences sensations in one sense when a different sense is stimulated. In short, synesthesia occurs when the senses get mixed up rather than stay separate. • The most common form of synesthesia is one in which people experience numbers or sometimes letters as colors. • There are a few potential explanations of synesthesia listed below. o Synesthesia may result from a cross-wiring or cross-activation of sensory neurons in various parts of the brain.  Cross-activation occurs when two areas of the brain, normally kept separate, get activated at the same time by the same stimulus. o The neurons connecting sensory systems may not be pruned in people with synesthesia. o Certain hallucinogenic drugs can temporarily create synesthetic experiences. BRINGING IT ALL TOGETHER: MAKING CONNECTIONS IN SENSATION AND PERCEPTION: DIFFERENCES ACROSS CULTURES • Culture and place can serve as perceptual sets. • Most research on cultural influence on perception has focused on three sense systems: vision, olfaction, and pain. Cultural Variation in Visual Perception • Differences exist across cultures in response to certain visual images that use monocular cues to depth. • People who grow up in cultures without angular buildings do not experience visual illusions in the same way as those who grew up with angular buildings. o Recall the Müller-Lyer line illusion in Figure 4.21.  The explanation we offered for why people see the line on the right as longer than the one on the left, when the lines are in fact equal, is due to linear perspective. The left drawing looks like the inner corner of a room, while the one on the right looks like the outer corner of a building.  Those living in a carpentered world—an environment with constructed buildings with many right angles—are much less likely to see the lines of Figure 4.21 as differing in length, as they are not accustomed to rooms with edges. • Hudson (1960) studied the perception of depth cues in the Bantu people of the Niger-Congo region of Africa. He showed people the picture depicted in Figure 4.34 and others similar to it. He then asked the people to explain what was going on in the scene. o When people from the United States, Europe, and India viewed such a picture, they said the hunter was going after the gazelle, as the elephant is clearly in the distance. o Bantu people, however, said the hunter was attacking the elephant. This response may result from not having much experience with two-dimensional drawings like the figure.  Bantu who had been educated in European schools said the hunter was going for the gazelle. • People from Eastern cultures tend to perceive the world more as a whole, with people and objects and the context being connected and belonging together. Westerners, however, tend to focus most on foreground objects and less on background and the periphery. Cultural Variation in Olfactory Experience • Cultures differ widely on the acceptability of odors based on experience, climate, and cuisine. Different places vary in their standards for cleanliness and for what is acceptable body odor. • Cross-culturally, women tend to be more sensitive to smells than men. o Since olfaction and taste keep harmful things out of the body and these senses are heightened during pregnancy, women may have more highly developed olfactory perception due to the fact that women can carry young. Cultural Variation in Pain • In one of the most painful of human experiences, childbirth, we see widely differing perceptions of how painful it is. o The Yap in the South Pacific consider childbirth to be simply a part of everyday life where the women routinely work in the fields right up until childbirth and are back at work often by the next day. Moreover, the husband experiences the pain of childbirth and it is he who stays in bed to recover after the birth of the child. KEY TERMS absolute threshold: the lowest intensity level of a stimulus a person can detect half of the time. accommodation: the process by which the muscles control the shape of the lens to adjust to viewing objects at different distances. afterimages: visual images that remain after removal of or looking away from the stimulus. auditory nerve: the nerve that receives action potentials from the hair cells and transmits auditory information to the brain. basilar membrane: a membrane that runs through the cochlea; contains the hair cells. binocular depth cues: aids to depth perception that rely on input from both eyes. bodily senses: the senses based in the skin, body, or any membrane surfaces. bottom-up processing: idea that perception is a process of building a perceptual experience from smaller pieces; putting the pieces together to see the whole. cochlea: a bony tube of the inner ear, which is curled like a snail’s shell and filled with fluid. cones: photoreceptors that are responsible for color vision and are most functional in conditions of bright light. continuity: According to the Gestalt law of continuity. We see points or lines in such a way that they follow a continuous path. cornea: the clear hard covering that protects the lens of the eye. dark adaptation: process of adjustment to seeing in the dark. depth perception: the ability to see things in three dimensions and to discriminate what is near from what is far. difference threshold: the smallest amount of change between two stimuli that a person can detect half of the time. feature detectors: neurons in the visual cortex that analyze the retinal image and respond to specific aspects of shapes, such as angles and movements. fovea: spot on the back of the retina that contains the highest concentration of cones in the retina; place of clearest vision. gate control theory of pain: theory that proposes that the spinal cord regulates the experience of pain by either opening or closing neural channels, called gates, involved in pain sensations that get sent to the brain. hair cells: inner ear sensory receptors for sound; they transduce sound vibrations into neural impulses. iris: the muscle that comprises the colored part of the eye; it adjusts the pupil to regulate the amount of light that enters the eye. law of closure: the tendency to perceive a whole object in the absence of complete information. lens: the structure that sits behind the pupil; it bends the light rays that enter the eye to focus images on the retina. mechanoreceptors: receptor cells in the skin that are sensitive to different tactile qualities: some to shapes, some to grooves, some to vibrations and movements. monocular depth cues: aids to depth perception that do not require two eyes, such as linear perspective. olfactory bulb: a forebrain structure that sends information either directly to the smell-processing areas in the cortex or indirectly to the cortex by way of the thalamus. olfactory sensory neurons: the sensory receptors for smell that reside high up inside the nose. opponent process theory: the theory that color vision results from the fact that cones are linked together in three color pairs: blue/yellow, red/green, and black/white. The members of the color pairs oppose one another, so that activation of one member of the pair inhibits activity in the other. optic chiasm: the point at which strands of the optic nerve from half of each eye cross over to the opposite side of the brain. optic nerve: structure composed of the axons of ganglion cells from the retina that carry visual information from the eye to the brain. pain: a complex emotional and sensory experience associated with actual or potential tissue damage. papillae: textured structures on the surface of the tongue; contain thousands of taste buds. perception: a psychological process: the act of organizing and interpreting sensory experience. perceptual constancy: the ability of the brain to preserve perception of objects in spite of changes in retinal image when an object changes in position or distance from the viewer. perceptual set: the effect of frame of mind on perception; a tendency to perceive stimuli in a certain manner. photoreceptors: cells in the retina (called rods and cones) that convert light energy into nerve energy; they are transducers. proximity: a Gestalt law that says we tend to group objects together that are near one another. psychophysics: the study of how people psychologically perceive physical stimuli such as light and sound waves and touch. pupil: the opening in the iris through which light enters the eye. retina: the thin layer of nerve tissue that lines the back of the eye. rods: photoreceptors that function in low illumination and play a key role in night vision; response to dark and light contrast. semi-circular canals: structure of the inner ear involved in maintaining balance. sensation: a physical process: the stimulation of our sense organs by the outer world. sensory adaptation: the process by which our sensitivity diminishes when an object constantly stimulates our senses. signal detection theory: the viewpoint that takes into account both stimulus intensity and the decision-making processes people use when saying whether they detect a stimulus. similarity: a Gestalt law that says we tend to group like objects together in visual perception. synesthesia: an unusual sensory experience in which a person experiences sensations in one sense when a different sense is stimulated, such as experiencing sound as colors. taste buds: structures inside the papillae of the tongue that contain the taste cells. taste receptor cells: sensory receptors for taste that reside in the taste buds; site of transduction of chemical information to neural impulse in the processing of taste sensations. top-down processing: idea that perception of the whole guides perception of smaller elemental features. transduction: the conversion of physical into neural information. trichromatic color theory: the theory that all color that we experience must result from a mixing of three colors of light (red, green, and blue). tympanic membrane: the ear drum. visual acuity: our ability to see clearly. Weber’s law: the theory stating that size of a just noticeable difference is a constant fraction of the intensity of the stimulus. MAKING THE CONNECTIONS (Some of the connections are found in the text. Other connections may be useful for lecture or discussion.) Signal Detection CONNECTION: Attention helps prevent sensory overload by filtering out sensory stimuli that aren’t important (Chapter 6). • Suggested Activity: Ask students to write down their trip from home to their first class that day. Ask them to share their notes with the class. The discussion will be of general, main events (got up, took a shower, ate, got in car, etc.). Then ask them to dig deeper: What did they see, hear, smell, touch, taste? Did they see any Chevys on the drive in? Did they see any ants on the sidewalk? The brain filters out much of this information because it is extraneous to our purpose (to get to class on time). Perceptual Set CONNECTION: Memories of events, especially emotional events like crimes, are very selective and our frame of mind (perceptual set) influences what part of an event we are likely to recall (Chapter 7). • Suggested Activity: For a discussion on the fragility of episodic memories see: http://faculty.washington.edu/eloftus/Articles/sciam.htm Elizabeth Loftus’s page. She has a great discussion of research looking at this topic. You can either discuss in class or have students read the article and write a brief paragraph summarizing the research and then an episodic memory from childhood they have that is either confirmed or disconfirmed by a close family member. CONNECTING Challenging Assumptions in How Neurons “Recognize” Human Faces CONNECTION: In many areas of development, such as language and learning, there are sensitivity periods when the brain is optimally receptive to environmental stimulation. One researcher found this out when newly hatched goslings (geese) mistook him for their mother (Chapter 8). • Suggested Clip: In this 30-second clip you see a gosling following a little boy, which demonstrates imprinting: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CrXPb2G-3P0. Organizing Visual Information: Gestalt Laws of Grouping CONNECTION: The Gestalt law of proximity makes use of the short-term memory technique called “chunking” (see Chapter 7). • Suggested Site: Go to the following site for visual examples of the law of proximity. Have students discuss how this is like chunking (grouping information together to make it easier to recall): http://homepages.ius.edu/rallman/gestprx.html. Touch CONNECTION: What are the benefits of touch for premature and low-birth-weight newborns? (Chapter 5) • Discussion: Ask students to pretend that they are counselors or doctors dealing with the new parents of a premature or low-birth-weight child. Based on what they have learned about the issues surrounding these children and the research on sensation from this chapter, what advice would they give the parents so that the parents could provide an optimal environment for the newborn to thrive? Controlling Pain CONNECTION: Why do opioids have a high potential for abuse? (Chapter 6) • Discussion: Explain to students that endorphins are your body’s natural opioids, so if the body is getting something similar from an external source, it will stop producing its own. When the person stops taking the opioid, then, they do not have a backup supply for endorphins so their withdrawal pain is very intense. Instead of taking the time to wait for their bodies to begin endorphin production again, they may decide to continue ingesting the opioid. This pattern leads to abuse and addiction. INNOVATIVE INSTRUCTION 1. Ask students, if they had to choose, which sense they would be most willing to go without for the rest of their lives (you can use the CPS clickers to pole the class). Then ask them why. 2. Ask students if they are wearing a watch, ring, or necklace (you may use CPS to pole the class on this). Now ask them how many of them can feel that piece of jewelry. Most people don’t. They might when they first put it on that day, but after a little (very little) time has passed they may no longer feel it. The same thing happens at pool parties. Some people are in the pool saying the water’s “not that bad.” Then you jump in and think its freezing! Were they lying? No, they had just already undergone sensory adaptation to the temperature. In a few minutes you do the same thing to the next person thinking of coming in the pool. 3. A good way to explain absolute thresholds is to remind students of the hearing tests they took when they were kids. They had earphones put over their ears and were told to raise the hand of the side they hear the noise coming from. The sounds would go from loud to a whisper in order to determine their absolute thresholds. 4. Ask students to imagine that they are fumbling around one morning to get ready for an 8:00 a.m. class. In their confusion they misstep and kick their desk chair, causing their toe to go off at a 90-degree angle. What is their reaction? What do they try to do to alleviate the pain? Use this to introduce ways to cope with pain and gate-control theory. 5. Ask students what smells trigger strong childhood memories. Explain why smells make for such strong memory cues. 6. To demonstrate difference thresholds and the JND, bring a pile of books, a blindfold, and some CDs to class and ask for a strong volunteer. Place the blindfold on them and the stack of books in their arms. Tell them to report when they think you have added another book. Then slowly add CDs to the pile until they say something. Even though weight is constantly being added, they won’t notice it until there is a 3% change. You can tell them that when they ask friends to help them move, they maximize this. Their buddy picks up a box and you add a few more things on top saying “you won’t even notice the extra weight” and, in some cases, they’re right! 7. Ask students to go cross-eyed. Tell them to put their right finger out in front of you at arm’s length and, with their eyes glued to that finger, move it closer to their nose. Then have them slowly pull their finger outward again. This demonstrates convergence. 8. Have students re-create the Müller-Lyer illusion shown in Figure 4.21. Have them show that image to five people and ask them which line looks longer. Using the information in their book on visual perception, have them explain their findings. 9. Go to http://faculty.washington.edu/chudler/after.html for an interactive afterimage activity. 10. Go to http://www.eyetricks.com/colorblindtest.htm for a color blindness test you can give in class. You can use the CPS clickers to have students send in their answers if you’d like. 11. Ask for a class volunteer who has no food allergies. Blindfold the student and plug their noise with a swimming nose plug or something similar. Offer them an apple and ask them what they taste. You can also offer them something less exciting like an onion. Use their perceptions to discuss the interaction that smell and taste play in our sense of flavor. 12. This is a good link that lets students actively participate in facial recognition with a focus on faces that appear upside down: http://faculty.washington.edu/chudler/java/faces.html. 13. Neurons are shaped by experience and “learn” to respond only to very specific faces, buildings, or animals. • Suggested Activity: Have students go to Scientific American’s article on the “Halle Berry Neuron,” “One Face, One Neuron” and have them read the article (this is at a very readable level) and write a two-paragraph summary of what the research suggests. http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=one-face-one-neuron 14. Different cultural backgrounds can impact how people perceive and understand their world. • Suggested Link: A great site on the olfactory system as well as things like body odor and small in space can be found at: http://www.cf.ac.uk/biosi/staffinfo/jacob/teaching/sensory/olfact1.html. It includes new research as well as past research. 15. Ask students to think about their senses. If they had to give up one sense, which would it be? Ask for a show of hands as you go through the senses. Ask them why they chose this sense. 16. Write the word FOLK on the board and ask students “what does it spell?” Write SOAK and ask “what does it spell?” Write CROAK and ask students “what does it spell?” Then yell out “What do you call the white of an egg?” Students will yell out “yolk” and then be surprised that they did that. You can them ask them “really? The white of the egg is the yolk? I always thought it was the egg white?” Source: Bolt, M. (1992). Instructor's resources for use with D. G. Myer's, Psychology (3rd ed.). New York: Worth. Suggested Media 1. There is a Wayne’s World (1992) scene where Wayne (Mike Myers) is with his girlfriend and is alternating covering his right and left eyes. As he does so the camera angle adjusts to show his perspective. This is a good example of binocular disparity. 2. Ames Room (Errol and Ricky): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5ic7QGjGEX8 3. Synesthesia: http://web.mit.edu/synesthesia/www/ 4. Primetime Medical Mysteries—Part 4 (Synesthesia) 5. Dr. Katz discussing the ear: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SQXK4BN-ORE 6. NIH video clip on the ear: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=md99QDTOqGM 7. NASA clip on the ear: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_ovMh2A3P5k&NR=1 8. Some nice optical illusions: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E_in33BsKOE&feature=related 9. Discovering Psychology--Sensation and Perception (Annenberg) 10. Secret World of Pain (BBC) 11. Sensation: The Mind-Body Connection (McGraw-Hill Connect for Feist and Rosenberg, 3rd ed.) 12. Inattentional Blindness (McGraw-Hill Connect for Feist and Rosenberg, 3rd ed.) 13. Inability to Feel Pain (McGraw-Hill Connect for Feist and Rosenberg, 3rd ed.) Concept Clips (McGraw-Hill Connect for Feist and Rosenberg, 3rd ed.) 1. Thresholds 2. Sensory Adaptation Suggested Websites 1. Illusion Games: http://www.brainconnection.com/library/?main=playhome/illusions 2. Some information and images for depth perception cues: http://webvision.med.utah.edu/KallDepth.html 3. Explanation of Ames room (with video): http://www.moillusions.com/2007/03/ames-room-video-illusion.html 4. Ames room: http://www.psychologie.tu-dresden.de/i1/kaw/diverses%20Material/www.illusionworks.com/html/ames_room.html 5. Optical illusions: http://www.michaelbach.de/ot/, http://www.optillusions.com/ 6. Gestalt laws of perceptual psychology: http://psychology.about.com/od/sensationandperception/ss/gestaltlaws.htm 7. Rubin’s face-vase: http://www.psychologie.tu-dresden.de/i1/kaw/diverses%20Material/www.illusionworks.com/html/figure_ground.html 8. The Müller-Lyer illusion: http://www.michaelbach.de/ot/sze_muelue/index.html 9. Depth Cues http://psych.hanover.edu/Krantz/art/cues.html 10. Afterimages http://faculty.washington.edu/chudler/after.html 11. Synesthesia and the synesthetic experience: http://web.mit.edu/synesthesia/www/ 12. Sensation and Perception Tutorials and Demonstrations http://psych.hanover.edu/Krantz/sen_tut.html Suggested Readings Bartram, D. J. (1974). The role of visual and semantic codes in object naming. Cognitive Psychology, 6, 325–356. Biederman, I. (1972). Perceiving real-world scenes. Science, 177, 77–80. Brannan, J. R. (Ed.). (1992). Applications of parallel processing in vision. Amsterdam: Elsevier. Duffy, P. L. (2001). Blue cats and chartreuse kittens: How synesthetes color their worlds. W.H. Freeman Book. Ekman, P., Friesen, W. V., & O’Sullivan, M. (1997). Smiles when lying. Ekman, P. & Rosenberg, E. L. (Eds.) What the face reveals: Basic and applied studies of spontaneous expression using the Facial Action Coding System (FACS). New York: Oxford University Press. Fiser, J., & Biederman, I. (1995). Size invariance in visual object priming of gray-scale images. Perception, 24, 741–748. Gallagher, S. P., & Hoefling, C. L. (2013). A laboratory exercise demonstrating the relationship of projected size to distance. Teaching of Psychology, 40, 212–216. Gilbert, C. D., & Li, W. (2013). Top-down influences on visual processing. Nature Reviews Neuroscience, 14, 350–363. Jolicoeur, P. (1987). A size-congruency effect in memory for visual shape. Memory and Cognition, 15, 531–543. Kosslyn, S. M. (1988). Aspects of a cognitive neuroscience of mental imagery. Science, 240, 1621–1626. Riley, D. A., & Roitblat, H. L. (1978). Selective attention and related cognitive processes in pigeons. In S. H. Hulse, H. Fowler, & W. K. Honig (Eds.), Cognitive Processes in Animal Behavior (pp. 249–276). Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum. Shepard, R. N., & Metzler, J. (1972). Mental rotation of three-dimensional objects. Science, 171, 701–703. Ungerleider, L. G., & Mishkin, M. (1982). Two cortical visual systems: Separation of appearance and location of objects. In D. L. Ingle, M. A. Goodale, & R. J. W. Mansfield (Eds.), Analysis of visual behavior (pp. 549–586). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Chapter 5: Human Development BRIEF CHAPTER OUTLINE The Developing Fetus Stages of Prenatal Development Brain and Sensory Development Before Birth Nature and Nurture Influences on Fetal Development Maternal Nutrition and Teratogens Teratogens Prenatal Personality Development The Developing Infant and Child Physical Development in Infancy and Childhood Early Motor Development Early Sensory Development Early Brain Development Psychology in the Real World: Musical Training Changes the Brain Early Cognitive Development Theory of Mind Development of Moral Reasoning Personality Development During Infancy Early Socioemotional Development Attachment Challenging Assumptions in the Importance of Physical Contact for Well-Being Developing Relationships and Emotions Development of Emotions Peer Interaction Childhood Temperament and Personality Development The Developing Adolescent Physical Development in Adolescence Cognitive and Brain Development Social Development in Adolescence Personality Development in Adolescence The Developing Adult Early Adulthood Emerging Adulthood Young Adulthood Marriage Parenthood Early Adult Personality Development Middle Adulthood Sensory and Brain Development Personality development During Middle Adulthood Late Adulthood Personality Development in Late Adulthood Death and Dying Bringing It All Together: Making Connections in Development: Technology Across the Life Span Chapter Review EXTENDED CHAPTER OUTLINE • Human development is the study of both change and continuity in the individual across the life span. This process begins before birth, in the prenatal environment of the mother’s womb. THE DEVELOPING FETUS • We pass more biological milestones before birth than we will in the rest of our lives. Stages of Prenatal Development There are three stages involved in prenatal development. 1. The germinal stage begins at conception and lasts for two weeks. • At conception, the fertilized egg forms a single-celled zygote. • By day 7 the multicelled organism is now called a blastocyst, which travels down the fallopian tube and attaches to the uterine wall. • Between 30% and 50% of the blastocysts do not attach properly and the pregnancy ends without the woman having known she was pregnant. • If implantation was successful, the second stage of prenatal development begins two weeks later. 2. The embryonic stage is marked by the formation of the major organs: the nervous system, heart, eyes, ears, arms, legs, teeth, palate, and external genitalia. Embryonic development continues until about 8 weeks after conception. • An embryo is the bundle of rapidly multiplying cells (the blastocyst) that has implanted in the uterus. 3. The fetal stage is the formation of bone cells at 8 weeks after conception. By this time, all of the major organs have already begun to form. Between 8 and 12 weeks into development, the heartbeat can be detected with a stethoscope. During the fetal stage the organs continue to grow and mature while the fetus rapidly increases in size. Brain and Sensory Development Before Birth • The first major organ to develop, the brain is still growing rapidly at birth. • By the time an infant is born, its head has grown to 25% of its adult weight, whereas its body is only 5% of its adult weight. • During the fetal stage, the rate of new neural growth can be approximately 3 million neurons per minute at its peak! From months 3 through 5 of pregnancy, neurons move from one part of the brain to their more permanent home in a process known as neural migration. • Factors that interfere with migration include teratogens, such as prenatal exposure to certain toxins or viruses, which can increase the risk of psychological disorders. • Generally, male fetuses are more active than females, suggesting their greater activity levels after birth may be inborn. Nature and Nurture Influences on Fetal Development • What a pregnant mother eats, drinks, smokes, feels, and experiences plays an important role in fetal development. • Prenatal programming: the process by which events in the womb alter the development of physical and psychological health. • For example, doctors prescribe folic acid and other vitamins to women who are pregnant or trying to become pregnant because they reduce the rates of abnormalities in the developing nervous system. Maternal Nutrition and Teratogens • What a pregnant woman eats and drinks is important for the health of the fetus and even for the infant and child for years after birth. For example, both schizophrenia and antisocial personality disorder are more likely to occur if the mother is malnourished during pregnancy. • Maternal nutrition is a key part of the developing baby's environment. • Maternal nutrition is an important example of epigenetics. Teratogens • Teratogens are substances that can disrupt normal development and cause long-term effects. Examples of teratogens include smoking, drinking alcohol, viruses, illness, and chemicals. • Because all major body parts are forming and growing during the embryonic and fetal stages, the fetus is quite susceptible to birth defects during these stages. Known teratogens include: (1) viruses, such as those that cause rubella (measles) and the flu; (2) alcohol; (3) nicotine; (4) prescription drugs, such as the antidepressants Prozac and Zoloft; (5) and radiation. • Timing determines how detrimental the effects of any given teratogen will be. In general, the earlier in pregnancy the woman is exposed, the more serious the effects. • Maternal substance use can also cause serious prenatal and postnatal problems. Pregnant women who drink alcohol take chances with their developing baby, as there is no known safe level of alcohol consumption during pregnancy. Don’t drink! • Fetal alcohol spectrum disorder (FASD) causes damage to the central nervous system, low birth weight, physical abnormalities in the face, head, heart, and joint, intellectual disabilities, and behavioral problems. • The effect of fetal alcohol exposure is described as a spectrum of disorders because the types and degrees of deficits can vary tremendously among individuals. FASD affects about 1% of live births in the United States and is a leading cause of mental retardation in this country. • FASD has been reported in babies of women who drink excessively as well as in infants whose mothers have only occasionally had drinks during pregnancy, although binge drinking and heavy drinking appear to increase the severity of FASD. • Nicotine exposure from maternal smoking interferes with the oxygen supply to the fetus. It can lead to premature and low-birth-weight babies as well as increased risk for stillbirth. • Some studies on animals and humans indicate that the antidepressants Zoloft and Prozac can cause respiratory problems, increased risk of premature birth, and short-lasting effects on motor development. Others, however, suggest there are few risks to the developing fetus. • CONNECTION: How does having the flu virus while pregnant influence the way neurons grow in the developing fetus and increase the vulnerability to schizophrenia later in life (Chapter 15). Prenatal Personality Development • Janet DiPietro and her colleagues (1996) showed that fetal activity and fetal heart rate predict temperament differences over the first year of life. In particular, a high heart rate in a 36-week-old fetus foreshadowed less predictable eating and sleeping habits at 3 and 6 months after birth. The infant with a high heart rate also would be less emotional at 6 months after birth. • What happens to the mother during pregnancy may also affect personality. THE DEVELOPING INFANT AND CHILD • Because the brain is still developing immediately after a child is born, the environment the child is brought up in can shape it. • The newborn human brain is more responsive than that of other animals to the specific world it is in, allowing nurture to shape human nature more than is the case for most animals. Physical Development in Infancy and Childhood Early Motor Development • When we speak of motor development, we are referring to changes in physical movement and body control. • Early in infancy, babies start to show intentional movements. • There is a fairly regular sequence of development. At 4 months they can hold objects. At 6 months many babies can sit by themselves. At 7 months they move themselves around. At 8 to 9 months, babies start walking with assistance. Late in the first year many babies will take their first step. By 17 months most babies walk with ease. Early Sensory Development • Hearing is almost fully developed at birth, but a newborn’s vision is only about 20-600. Visual sharpness, or acuity, continues to improve during infancy, and by 6 months of age, vision is 20-100. By age 3 or 4, a child’s vision is similar to an adult’s. • Newborns are best able to see black-and-white edges and patterns. Color vision develops by around 6 months of age. • Experience is crucial in the development of vision, in regard to vision; the occipital cortex of the brain has to be stimulated by visual input in order to develop the proper synaptic connections needed to process visual information. • The critical period is a specific period in biological development when individuals are most receptive to a particular kind of input from the environment (e.g., visual stimulation and language learning). • All babies who have normal vision in both eyes see the world in three dimensions. Soon after birth, they demonstrate the ability to detect depth in the real world. • The visual cliff is a test of depth perception in babies who have learned to crawl. Researchers placed clear Plexiglas over one end of a crawl area to make it look as though there was a steep drop in the middle of the crawl area. They put a baby on the other end of the crawl area and asked the mother to stand at the end with the drop. The mother’s role was to encourage the baby to crawl across the Plexiglas to her. The baby would stop crawling when he or she reached the visual cliff, indicating that at least by the time babies learn to crawl, they can perceive depth. Early Brain Development • After birth, the brain continues to grow new neurons. By the second year of life, the human brain has more neurons than it will ever again have. Brain growth continues throughout the life span, but the rate of change slows down considerably after the age of 6 and then settles again after adolescence. • After age 2, some neurons and synapses die off. The reason for this is simple: during the first year of life, neural growth occurs, but it is somewhat random and disorganized. New neurons and synapses develop because that is what the newborn brain does. • With learning and experience certain synaptic connections become stronger, whereas those that do not receive stimulation from the environment die off. This process, known as pruning, is nature’s way of making the brain more efficient. • By adolescence, up to half of the synapses that existed in early childhood have been pruned. • CONNECTION: Experience is crucial in the formation of synaptic connections and the growth of neurons (neurogenesis) in the brain throughout the life span. Pruning is nature’s way of making the brain more efficient (Chapter 3). PSYCHOLOGY IN THE REAL WORLD: MUSICAL TRAINING CHANGES THE BRAIN • The brain is most responsive to stimulation during infancy and childhood. • Early in life there is more opportunity for experience to leave its mark on the brain; for example, learning to play an instrument. • Researchers have found that for musicians, the somatosensory cortex shows lateralization that is not found in nonmusicians. • Musicians who started playing before the age of 12 show the most pronounced effects; so musical training may change brain organization, especially for people who start training as children. • Brain imaging studies also suggest that musical training molds the structure of the brain. People who have had intensive musical training have a thicker corpus callosum and increased brain growth in regions associated with music-related skills than do nonmusicians, even more so if they started their training before age 7. • This would mean that there is greater communication between the two sides of the brain in musicians than in people who have not had such training. • Musicians also have larger cerebellums (an area involved in motor coordination) than do nonmusicians. • Musical training enhances neural activity in the hippocampus. • Neuroplasticitic effects of musical training last into adulthood. • The findings discussed so far are correlational. They suggest that musical training can shape the brain, but do not lead to the conclusion that musical training causes brain growth. • To test the causal nature of this relationship, researchers taught a musical skill to one group and found that as skill improved, cortical representation for the finger muscles involved in the task increased. • They also found in subsequent research that practice has an effect. The brains of those who ceased practicing returned to the way they were previously. For those who continued practicing, brain map changes continued. If you don’t use it, you lose it! • Learning to play an instrument fosters the development of other skills, too. Music training is positively correlated with intelligence test scores in children and college students, and this relationship is strongest for people who have trained longer. • It also improves performance on verbal memory tasks. Moreover, the ability to detect pitch changes in music aids processing of pitch changes in language processing. Early Cognitive Development • With growth, especially brain growth, comes cognitive development. Cognitive development is advances in the ability to think, reason, remember, learn, and solve problems. • An important factor that developmental psychologists have learned about infants in the last 20 years comes from Gopnik’s findings. These findings indicate that infant perception is more sophisticated than previously thought. Piaget’s Four Stages 1. The sensorimotor stage is Piaget’s first stage of cognitive development (ages 0–2). It is called this because infants learn about the world by using their senses and by moving their bodies in it. • One of the hallmarks of thinking at this age is object permanence. • Object permanence is the ability to realize that objects still exist when they are not being sensed. Piaget argued this appears around 9 months of age. However, Baillargeon has found it in infants as young as 4 months. 2. The preoperational stage is the second major stage of cognitive development (ages 2–5). This stage begins with the emergence of symbolic thought, or the use of symbols such as words or letters to represent ideas or objects. • Symbolic thinking involves using symbols such as words or letters to represent ideas or objects. Other qualities of preoperational thinking include animistic thinking, egocentrism, and lack of conservation. • Animistic thinking is the idea that inanimate objects are alive. • Egocentrism is the tendency to view the world from one’s own perspective and not see things from another person’s perspective. • Conservation is the ability to recognize that when objects change shape or size, the overall amount stays the same. 3. In the concrete operational stage (ages 6–11) children can perform mental operations, on real, or concrete, objects and events, but they still have trouble with abstract ideas and reasoning. • Reversing events is one type of operation a child masters in this stage. 4. In the formal operational stage (ages 12 and up) formal logic becomes possible. In addition, adolescents develop scientific reasoning and hypothesis-testing skills. Vygotsky’s View • Development is a more social cognitive view than Piaget. • Cognitive development must be understood in social context. • Children learn with the help of others (zone of proximal development). Theory of Mind • Theory of mind refers to our knowledge and ideas of how other people’s minds work. It involves knowing and understanding what other people are thinking, wanting, or feeling. • Children under the age of 4 do not realize that people may believe things that are not true. Adults know that people believe things, such as superstitions, that are untrue. Psychologists created the false-belief task to determine when children develop theory of mind and come to know that others can believe something that is false. Development of Moral Reasoning • Kohlberg (1981) studied the development of moral reasoning in children and adults by giving them a moral dilemma and recording the reasons they provided for their responses. Their responses were less important to him than the reasoning behind them. • An example is the dilemma of Heinz: “A woman was near death from a special kind of cancer. There was one drug that the doctors thought might save her. It was a form of radium that a druggist in the same town had recently discovered. The drug was expensive to make, but the druggist was charging ten times what the drug cost him to produce. He paid $200 for the radium and charged $2,000 for a small dose of the drug. The sick woman’s husband, Heinz, went to everyone he knew to borrow the money, but he could only get together about $1,000, which is half of what it cost. He told the druggist that his wife was dying and asked him to sell it cheaper or let him pay later. But the druggist said: ‘No, I discovered the drug and I’m going to make money from it.’ Heinz got desperate and broke into the man’s store to steal the drug for his wife. Should Heinz have broken into the laboratory to steal the drug for his wife? Why or why not?” • Based on how people answered, he proposed a three-stage theory of moral reasoning. He found that moral reasoning moves from being focused on the self to being increasingly focused on others, with a basis in clear personal principles of morality and ethics. • Kohlberg describes three levels of moral reasoning. 1. The preconventional level is the first level in Kohlberg’s theory of moral reasoning, in which moral reasoning involves avoiding punishment or maximizing rewards. 2. The conventional level is the second level in Kohlberg’s theory of moral reasoning, during which the person values caring, trust, and relationships, as well as the social order and lawfulness. 3. The postconventional level is the third level in Kohlberg’s theory of moral reasoning, in which the person acknowledges both the norm and the law, but argues that there are universal moral rules that may trump unjust or immoral local rules. • Research supports Kohlberg’s argument that children tend to reason preconventionally and adults conventionally. This is found cross-culturally, particularly for the first two stages. • The postconventional level appears to be limited to Western cultures. When one realizes that Western cultures place a strong emphasis on individualism and individual values, this finding makes sense. Postconventional moral reasoning is heavily based in a personal moral code. In contrast, many non-Western cultures emphasize the group and community, and so the highest level of moral reasoning would be likely to involve compassion and caring for others, altruism, and family honor. Personality Development During Infancy • One thing that stays with us our entire lives is our personality. It may change a bit, but for the most part personality tends to be a fairly stable part of who we are. • Temperament is the biologically based tendency to behave in specific ways. It makes up the building blocks of personality. • Personality is the consistently unique way in which an individual behaves over time and situations. • After birth, some infants soon settle into a predictable routine. Others do not. Some are generally happy, and others aren’t. Some infants have lower thresholds for stimulation than others. • Thomas and Chess developed a classification of three types of personality based on differences in temperament. 1. An easy child is predictable in daily functions, is happy most of the time, and is adaptable. About 40% of children fall into this category. 2. A difficult child is unpredictable in daily functions, is unhappy most of the time, and is slow to adapt to new situations. About 10% fall into this category. 3. A slow-to-warm-up child is mildly intense in his or her reactions to new situations and mildly irregular in the daily patterns of eating, sleeping, and eliminating. Although his or her first response to new situations might be negative, after repeated exposures, he or she develops an approaching style. About 15% of the children fall into this category. • These three dimensions do not classify about 35% of children. Early Socioemotional Development Attachment • Some animals, especially birds, follow and imitate the first large creature they see immediately after birth. This behavior is called imprinting. The newborn sees this creature as a protector. Usually this creature also happens to be the protector (mom or dad), so it is a good strategy. Newborn humans cannot follow around the first large creature they see, so they do not imprint. Humans attach. • Imprinting is the rapid and innate learning of the characteristics of a caregiver very soon after birth. • In everyday usage, attachment means “connectedness.” In human development, attachment refers to the strong emotional connection that develops early in life to keep infants close to their caregivers. • John Bowlby (1969) described how infants become emotionally attached to their caregivers and emotionally distressed when separated from them. He proposed that the major function of this affection-based bonding system is to protect infants from predation and other threats to survival. • In his observations of human infants and primates, Bowlby noted that they went through a clear sequence of reactions, from protest, to despair, to detachment, when separated from their caregiver. • Bowlby defined separation anxiety as the distress reaction shown by babies when they are separated from their primary caregiver (typically shown around 9 months of age). • On the basis of such observations, Bowlby developed his attachment theory, which rests on two fundamental assumptions. 1. A responsive and accessible caregiver (usually the mother) must create a secure base for the child. The infant needs to know that the caregiver is accessible and dependable. With a dependable caregiver, the child can develop confidence and security in exploring the world. 2. Infants internalize the bonding relationship, which provides a mental model on which they build future friendships and love relationships. Therefore, attachment to a caregiver is the most critical of all relationships. • Influenced by Bowlby’s work, Mary Ainsworth developed a technique for measuring the attachment of infant and caregiver. The strange situation task is a 20-minute laboratory session in which a mother and her 12-month-old infant are initially alone in a playroom. Then a stranger comes into the room, and after a few minutes the stranger begins a brief interaction with the infant. The mother then leaves for two separate 2-minute periods. During the first period, the infant is left alone with the stranger. During the second period, the infant is left completely alone. • The critical behavior that Ainsworth and colleagues rated was how the infant reacted when the caregiver returned. They presumed that the infant’s reaction reflects the way the baby has learned to respond to his or her caregiver and that these reactions are based on the history of comfort and reassurance the caregiver has provided. • Based on this reunion behavior, Ainsworth developed a classification system of three types. 1. In secure attachment the infants are happy and initiate contact when the mother returns. They will go over to her and want to be held. After they’ve been reunited with their mothers, they may return to their play. • The other three types of attachment represent insecure attachment. 2. In insecure-resistant attachment infants can't be comforted by mom on reunion and have difficulty returning to play. 3. In insecure-avoidant attachment infants stay calm when their mother leaves, they accept the stranger, and when their mother returns, they ignore and avoid her. 4. In insecure-disorganized/disoriented attachment infants show odd, conflicted behavior in the Strange Situation. The children appear to be frightened. This is considered to be the most insecure. Challenging Assumptions in the Physical Contact for Well-Being • In the early part of the 20th century, psychologists assumed that all babies needed to survive was to have their internal biological needs met—hunger, thirst, and temperature regulation. • Harry Harlow thought there might be more to infants’ desire for contact than a need for nourishment. In his early work, Harlow (1958) noticed that baby monkeys whom he had separated from their mothers became very attached to cloth diapers that lined their cages. This strong attachment to cloth made Harlow think that a baby primate needs something soft to cling to. It reminded him of the attachment babies have for their blankets. • To test his hunch, Harlow and his colleagues carried out a series of studies with newborn monkeys whom they separated from their mothers. They housed them with surrogate mothers constructed of wire and wood. One was just a wire frame with a crude head. The other was a wire frame covered with soft terry cloth. Both mothers were heated and either could be hooked up to a bottle of milk. • In the first study, Harlow removed eight monkeys from their mothers shortly after birth. Cloth and wire mothers were housed in cubicles attached to the infants’ cages. Half the monkeys were randomly assigned to get milk from the wire monkey; the other half got their milk from the cloth monkey. • Harlow used the amount of time spent with a surrogate mother as a measure of the affection bond. He found that contact comfort was much more important than the source of food in determining which surrogate mother the monkeys preferred. Regardless of whether a baby monkey nursed from the cloth mother or the wire mother, it spent most of its time with the cloth mom. • Harlow’s findings suggested that those babies preferred being with their moms because the mothers provided food was at least partially incorrect. Harlow went so far as to say that a primary function of nursing in humans was contact as much as nutrition. • Field and her colleagues (1986) decided to test whether regular touch might help tiny premature infants. She randomly assigned 40 preterm infants from a hospital’s newborn intensive care unit to either receive touch therapy (experimental group) or not (control group). All of the premature infants lived in isolettes, plastic-covered bassinets designed to prevent infection. This touch therapy involved gently stroking the baby with warmed hands (no gloves) through portholes in the isolette for 15 minutes, three times a day for 10 days. • Over the treatment period, babies who received touch therapy gained significantly more weight than those who did not, even though they did not eat more. • Later research showed the same effect in weight gain when mothers touched their preterm infants. Touch also leads to reduced stress levels in premature babies and to fewer diarrheas. Touch, in this case, makes for better health! Developing Relationships and Emotions • Developmental psychologist James Sorce studied 1-year-old babies and their mothers’ reactions to the visual cliff. In his study, the mom would place her baby on the visual cliff. She would stand at the other end, put a toy down, and pose one of five facial expressions of emotion: fear, anger, sadness, interest, or happiness. She said nothing and did nothing else. When mom’s facial expression showed fear or anger, the baby did not move to the deep side. Most babies went willingly over the cliff when the mom smiled. • What this means is that by the age of one, children can make sense of their mothers’ emotional facial expressions and use them to know what to do. This ability to make use of social information from another person is known as social referencing. • CONNECTION: One way we learn is by imitating someone else’s behavior. This type of learning, seen also in infant mimicry, may be based on mirror neurons systems in the brain (Chapters 3 and 8). Development of Emotions • Emotional competence is the ability to control emotions and to know when it is appropriate to express certain emotions. • Babies show emotions early in life. • The development of emotional competence starts as early as preschool and continues throughout childhood. The better children do in school and the fewer stressful and dysfunctional situations they have at home, the more emotionally skilled and competent they are. Peer Interaction • As children get older, their social world expands from the intimate environment of the home to include play with other children. Although attachment to the primary caregiver is important for the baby and young child, relations with other children have a big impact after early childhood. • Nothing influences the behavior of children like other children, their peers. • Peers are people who share equal standing or status. Peers often serve as important role models. Childhood Temperament and Personality Development • One longitudinal study evaluated 1,000 New Zealand children on many temperamental, cognitive, medical, and motor dimensions at age 3 and then again about every 2 to 2.5 years until they were 21 years old. • Ratings by parents at age 3 revealed three basic types of temperament: well adjusted, undercontrolled, and inhibited. • Eighteen years after the initial assessment, the individuals whose parents had classified them as “undercontrolled” (impulsive and prone to temper tantrums) at age 3, were impulsive and likely to engage in thrill-seeking behaviors, more likely to be aggressive and hostile, to have more relationship conflict, and to abuse alcohol. • At age 21, “inhibited” children were less likely to have social support and were more likely to avoid risk and harm, to be nonassertive and overcontrolled, and to suffer from prolonged depression. THE DEVELOPING ADOLESCENT • Adolescence is the transition period between childhood and adulthood, beginning at about age 11 or 12 and lasting until around age 18. Physical Development in Adolescence • Puberty is the period when sexual maturation begins, marking the beginning of adolescence. • During puberty, major hormonal changes prepare the body for reproduction. On average, girls reach puberty at about age 11 and boys at about age 13. • The beginning of puberty stems from the release of sex hormones. • First, the pituitary gland sends hormonal signals to the sex glands, telling them to mature. The sex glands, or gonads, then release sex hormones. • The male gonads are called testes. They release the male sex hormone testosterone, • The female gonads are the ovaries. They release estradiol. • In girls, breast development can start as early as age 10. The next major change is the onset of menstruation, known as menarche. The age of menarche is highly variable, but it often occurs by age 12. In most Western cultures, the age of menarche has dropped from about age 16 during the 1800s to 12 or 13 today. • In boys, the event that signals readiness to reproduce is spermarche, or the first ejaculation. Cognitive and Brain Development • During adolescence, children gain the ability to reason about abstract concepts and problems. This is the stage of cognitive development that Piaget termed the formal operational stage. • In this stage, teens may show the ability to engage in scientific reasoning and hypothesis testing. Adolescents and even adults do not all develop this reasoning ability to the same degree. • The extent to which people develop scientific reasoning skills is related to their ability to think and solve problems systematically, rather than relying on the trial-and-error method that children use. It is also related to the ability to distinguish one’s thoughts about how the world works from the evidence for how it really works. • Neuroscientists have only recently uncovered how changes in thinking correspond with changes in the adolescent brain. Indeed, many of the cognitive developments of adolescence, such as abstract reasoning and logical thinking, may be a consequence of brain development. • In particular, the last part of the brain to fully develop, the frontal lobes, continues to mature until late adolescence or early adulthood. • The frontal lobes are involved in planning, attention, working memory, abstract thought, and impulse control. It is not so much that the frontal lobes are growing in size as that they are growing in complexity. • Specifically, the adolescent brain develops more myelin around the axons as well as more neural connections. • Myelination proceeds from the back of the brain to the front, where the frontal lobes are, during the period from childhood to adolescence. • The onset of formal operational and scientific thinking occurs after the frontal lobes have developed more fully. • What effect does brain development have on intelligence? Researchers have known for decades that overall brain size is not correlated with overall intelligence. As it turns out, however, intelligence does seem to be associated with how the brain develops and, in particular, how the cortex develops. • At age 7 the highly intelligent children had thinner frontal cortexes, but by mid-adolescence their cortexes had become thicker than those of the children of average intelligence. Moreover, by age 19 the thickness of the cortex in the two groups was the same. These results suggest that the brains of highly intelligent people are more elastic and plastic and trace a different developmental path. Social Development in Adolescence • An important part of social development in adolescence is the search for identity. • Puberty brings profound changes not only in the body but also in relationships. Family becomes less central, and peer and sexual relationships become paramount. Having close, intimate friends during adolescence is associated with many positive social and emotional outcomes, such as self-confidence, better relationships with parents and authority figures, and better performance in school. • Compared to childhood, the most obvious change in adolescent social development is the emergence of sexual interest and sexual relationships. Teens not only become interested in sexual relationships, but sexual thoughts and feelings also occupy much of their attention and time. • The average age for first sexual intercourse for men and women is around 17 years old, although there is quite a bit of variability in when people start having sex. Personality Development in Adolescence • Erikson proposed a model of personality development with eight stages, each defined by an identity crisis or conflict. • An identity crisis is an opportunity for adaptive or maladaptive adjustment. Each stage consists of a conflict from which a person may develop a strength. • Identity versus identity confusion is the conflict during adolescence. Testing, experimenting, and trying on identities is the norm during adolescence. • For early adulthood, the period during one’s 20s, the conflict is between intimacy and isolation. Erikson defined intimacy as the ability to fuse one’s identity with another’s without the fear of losing it. THE DEVELOPING ADULT Early Adulthood Emerging Adulthood o The phase between adolescence and young adulthood emerging adulthood, which spans the ages 18–25 years. Emerging adulthood is a phase of transition between teenhood and adulthood. o The key changes during emerging adulthood center around coping, with increased responsibility and recognizing the need to make decisions about some of the things they have been exploring. o Numerous issues figure into identity formation. The primary three are: career identity, sexual identity, and ethnic identity. Young Adulthood o People enter young adulthood more by having made it through certain life transitions than by reaching a certain age, but usually this transition occurs in the 20s.  Marriage: Over the past 50 years, the average age at which people marry has increased from the early 20s to mid to late 20s for both men and women, though women tend to marry a bit earlier overall.  Parenthood: One clear marker of reaching adulthood is having a child, although about 15% of adults never have children and many people consider themselves to be adults before they become parents. The time at which people have their first child has increased steadily over the years, primarily due to the longer periods of settling down incurred by people during college years in industrialized nations. Personality may also play a role on whether and when people become parents.  Early Adult Personality Development: Having a solid sense of self and identity is important for early adulthood— the period during one’s 20s. In this stage, Erikson believed the primary conflict is between intimacy and isolation. Erikson defined intimacy as the ability to fuse one’s identity with another’s without the fear of losing it. Middle Adulthood o After establishing one’s career and settling down in long-term relationships and, often, having children, one moves into middle adulthood—generally acknowledged to be the ages between 40 and 60 or 65. Sensory and Brain Development  Many people experience some loss of vision or hearing or both by middle adulthood.  The brain remains plastic.  The rate of neurogenesis slows, but new neurons still form.  Some people also experience a loss of sensitivity to taste and smell, though these changes vary considerably among individuals.  As many as half the people over 65 demonstrate significant loss of smell. Personality Development During Middle Adulthood • The process of a person’s personality becoming whole and full is what Jung called individuation. • In adulthood, the stage that lasts from about 30 to 60 or 65 years of age, is what Erikson called generativity versus stagnation. • Generativity is the creation of new ideas, products, or people. • Stagnation is when the adult becomes more self-focused than oriented toward others and does not contribute in a productive way to society or family. • The scientific evidence for a midlife crisis is lacking. Late Adulthood o The older brain does not change as rapidly as the younger brain. Yet new experiences and mastery of new skills continue to give rise to neural branching and growth throughout life. o Fluid intelligence involves raw mental ability, pattern recognition, and abstract reasoning and is applied to a problem that a person has never confronted before. Problems that require finding relationships, understanding implications, and drawing conclusions all require fluid intelligence. o Knowledge that we have gained from experience and learning, education, and practice, however, is called crystallized intelligence. o One of the clearest developmental changes in adult intelligence is the gradual decline in fluid intelligence beginning in middle adulthood, but the strengthening of crystallized intelligence. o Normal changes in the brain occur with age. We used to think that the brain lost cells as part of normal aging. This appears to be an overstatement. Just as body mass gradually decreases with age, so too does brain mass. o One cognitive benefit of aging is wisdom. Wisdom is the ability to know what matters, live well, and show good judgment. o Dementia is a loss of cognitive functions, including memory problems and difficulty reasoning, solving problems, making decisions, and using language. Several neurological conditions, including stroke and Alzheimer’s disease, can lead to dementia in the elderly. o Alzheimer’s disease is a degenerative disease marked by progressive cognitive decline and characterized by a collection of symptoms, including confusion, memory loss, mood swings, and eventual loss of physical function. o Alzheimer’s accounts for 60–70% of the cases of dementia among the elderly. o Some evidence suggests that neurogenesis in the adult brain might offset or even prevent the kind of neural degeneration seen in Alzheimer’s and other age-related brain disorders. Personality Development in Late Adulthood • The final stage of Erikson's theory starts at age 60 or 65. • The conflict of this stage is between integrity and despair. Integrity is the feeling of being whole and integrated. It is the sense that all of one’s life decisions are coming together and make sense. Death and Dying • Death can be defined in medical terms, though the criteria have changed. Physicians used to pronounce people dead when vital signs, such as heart rate and breathing, ceased. Today, medical technology can keep a body alive when the brain is no longer functioning. Brain death occurs when no measurable electrical activity in the brain is evident, but life support equipment may maintain vital signs long after the brain has stopped functioning • In psychological terms, death is a complex event that marks the end of life. • Elizabeth Kübler-Ross (1969) detailed the stages people may move through after learning they are going to die. Initially they experience denial, a sense of utter disbelief that they are going to die. Next comes anger, in which the dying person feels the injustice of it all. At this stage, the dying person asks, “Why me?” In the bargaining stage, people start negotiating with God or whatever forces of nature they feel may control their fate to try to buy more time. Once the certainty of death sets in, depression may ensue. Finally, there is acceptance of death and the end of life. During this final stage people often come to terms with their own passing. BRINGING IT ALL TOGETHER: MAKING CONNECTIONS IN DEVELOPMENT: TECHNOLOGY ACROSS THE LIFESPAN • Technology is a fact of life in the modern world. From the moment we’re born to the moment of our death, technology shapes who we are, how we behave, and with whom we interact. Computers, the Internet, video games, cell phones, iPods, social networking sites, and tablets like the iPad pervade daily life. Infancy and Toddlerhood Cognitive and Brain Development and Technology  Television, because it is passive (the only action required to use it is viewing) is by far the most popular form of technology used in infancy. Although the American Academy of Pediatrics recommends children ages 0–2 watch no TV or videos at all, according to a recent survey, up to 20% of children ages 0 to 2 had TVs in their bedrooms and 63% had watched television on the day before the survey was completed by a parent (see Figure 5.31) (Vandewater et al., 2007). Only 4% of infants/toddlers had used a computer.  Data show that early computer use can help and hinder cognitive development. There is some evidence that infants who learn to use the computer and do tasks other than play games are more likely to be able to read later on than children who use the computer just to play games. Childhood Cognitive and Brain Development and Technology  It is true that children who watch the most TV tend to do slightly worse at school than children who watch little TV.  One of the central findings on early TV viewing and learning is that what children watch matters more than how much they watch. If they watch educational programs, they tend to do better in school, and if they watch non-educational programs they tend to do worse.  Certain kinds of video training may have positive effects on the brains of young children (e.g., mental rotation, video tracking).  Not all effects, however, are positive. Heavy technology users tend to have problems paying attention and keeping focused.  More than 10 hours a week of electronic media correlates with a lack of physical exercise and poor school performance. Social-Emotional Development and Technology  Social networking is not very common in children, mostly because parents and most sites do not allow elementary school-age children to have accounts and are concerned about safety issues. Adolescence Cognitive and Brain Development and Technology  Heavy multitaskers are less able to filter out irrelevant information and are more likely to get distracted while working on problem-solving tasks than light multitaskers. Social-Emotional Development and Technology  Teens, more than most any other age group, use social networking sites to nourish and maintain existing friendships, but also to obtain new friends (see Figure 5.32). Teens are more likely to instant message, Twitter, and text message than any other age group. Emerging adults use almost as many networking sites as teens.  Positive outcomes for social network use include: gaining self-esteem, increasing social circles, and lowering social anxiety.  Negative outcomes for social network use include: potential sexual predators, bullying, and harassment.  Cyberbulling has emerged as a serious pitfall of teen Internet use. Cyberbullying is the ‘‘willful and repeated harm inflicted through the medium of electronic text.’’ Cyberbullying can be more vicious and aggressive than offline bulling in many cases because of the anonymity of the hurtful language and insults. This enables more uninhibited insults, things someone would rarely say directly to a person’s face. Emerging and Early Adulthood Social-Emotional Development and Technology  Young adults are in the midst of two major life transitions: forming long-term romantic relationships and deciding on and entering a career. Technology is becoming more crucial for both of these tasks. Traditional ways of meeting potential life partners have begun to change over the last generation or two. Middle Adulthood  The literature on social networks in middle-aged adults clearly points to the positive effects of having both face-to-face and electronic networks. Late Adulthood Cognitive and Brain Development and Technology  By age 65, many people notice some degree of cognitive decline, especially in memory and selective attention, planning, and cognitive control. Most of these processes are working memory and executive functioning processes and involve frontal lobe activity.  Video gaming is not the only electronic activity that improves cognitive function in older adults. Internet searching can keep the brain nimble as well. Small and colleagues, for example, measured brain activation (using fMRI) during Internet searching and a text reading task. For experienced “searchers,” Internet searching activated more brain areas than simple reading, especially those involved in decision making and reasoning. KEY TERMS adolescence: the transition period between childhood and adulthood. Alzheimer’s disease: a degenerative disease marked by progressive cognitive decline and characterized by a collection of symptoms, including confusion, memory loss, mood swings, and eventual loss of physical function. animistic thinking: belief that inanimate objects are alive. attachment: the strong emotional connection that develops early in life between infants and their caregivers. concrete operational stage: Piaget’s third stage of cognitive development, which spans ages 6–11, during which the child can perform mental operations—such as reversing—on real objects or events. conservation: recognition that when some properties (such as shape) of an object change, other properties (such as volume) remain constant. conventional level: the second level in Kohlberg’s theory of moral reasoning, during which the person values caring, trust, and relationships as well as the social order and lawfulness. crystallized intelligence: this form of intelligence is influenced by how large your vocabulary is as well as your knowledge of your culture. cyberbullying: the willful and repeated harm inflicted through the medium of electronic text. dementia: a loss of mental function, in which many cognitive processes are impaired, such as the ability to remember, reason, solve problems, make decisions, and use language. egocentrism: viewing the world from one’s own perspective and not being capable of seeing things from another person’s perspective. embryo: the term for the developing organism from 2 weeks until about 8 weeks after conception. embryonic stage: the second prenatal stage, from 2 weeks to 8 weeks after conception, when all of the major organs form. emerging adulthood: the transitional phase between adolescence and young adulthood; it includes ages 18–25 years. emotional competence: the ability to control emotions and know when it is appropriate to express certain emotions. fetal alcohol spectrum disorder (FASD): a consequence of prenatal alcohol exposure that causes multiple problems, notably brain damage and mental retardation. fetal stage: the third prenatal stage, which begins with the formation of bone cells 8 weeks after conception and ends at birth. fluid intelligence: raw mental ability, pattern recognition, and abstract reasoning and is applied to a problem that a person has never confronted before. formal operational stage: Piaget’s final stage of cognitive development, from ages 11 or 12 on through adulthood, when formal logic is possible. generativity: a term Erik Erikson used to describe the process in adulthood of creating new ideas, products, or people. germinal stage: the first pre natal stage of development, which begins at conception and lasts two weeks. human development: the study of change and continuity in the individual across the life span. imprinting: the rapid and innate learning of the characteristics of a caregiver very soon after birth. individuation: the process of a person’s personality becoming whole and full. intimacy: the ability to fuse one’s identity with another’s without the fear of losing it. menarche: the first menstrual period. neural migration: the movement of neurons from one part of the fetal brain to their more permanent destination; occurs during months 3–5 of the fetal stage. object permanence: the ability to realize that objects still exist when they are not being sensed. preconventional level: the first level in Kohlberg’s theory of moral reasoning, focusing on avoiding punishment or maximizing rewards. prenatal programming: the process by which events in the womb alter the development of physical and psychological health. preoperational stage: the second major stage of cognitive development (ages 2–5), which begins with the emergence of symbolic thought. postconventional level: the third level in Kohlberg’s theory of moral reasoning, in which the person recognizes universal moral rules that may trump unjust or immoral local rules. pruning: the degradation of synapses and dying off of neurons that are not strengthened by experience. puberty: the period when sexual maturation begins; it marks the beginning of adolescence. securely attached: an attachment style characterized by infants who will gradually explore new situations when the caregiver leaves, and they initiate contact when the caregiver returns after separation. sensorimotor stage: Piaget’s first stage of cognitive development (ages 0–2), when infants learn about the world by using their senses and by moving their bodies. separation anxiety: the distress reaction shown by babies when they are separated from their primary caregiver (typically shown at around 9 months of age). social referencing: the ability to make use of social and emotional information from another person—especially a caregiver—in an uncertain situation. spermarche: the first ejaculation. stagnation: occurs when the adult becomes more self-focused than oriented toward others and does not contribute in a productive way to society or family. temperament: the biologically based tendency to behave in particular ways from very early in life. teratogens: substances that can disrupt normal prenatal development and cause lifelong deficits. theory of mind: ideas and knowledge about how other people’s minds work. young adulthood: usually happens by mid-20s, when people complete the key developmental tasks of emerging adulthood. zone of proximal development: the distance between what a child can learn alone and what the child can learn assisted by someone else, usually an adult. zygote: the single cell that results when a sperm fertilizes an egg. MAKING THE CONNECTIONS (Some of the connections are found in the text. Other connections may be useful for lecture or discussion.) Teratogens CONNECTION: Catching the flu virus while pregnant changes the way neurons grow in the developing fetus and increases vulnerability to schizophrenia later in life (Chapter 15). • Suggested Links: A straightforward, easy-to-read list of teratogens can be found at: http://www.neighborhoodlink.com/article/Homeowner/Teratogens. Remind students that the government’s list is far more comprehensive, as it includes chemicals one may come in contract with at a job. For example, if you are a dental assistant, nitrous oxide should not be used around you if you are pregnant. An overview of birth defects and teratogens can be found at the Merck Manual homepage: http://www.merckmanuals.com/home/sec23/ch265/ch265a.html • Discussion: You might want to ask how many people have a cat. Remind them that toxoplasmosis is from cat feces and thus pregnant women should not change the litter box. CONNECTION: Chronic stress creates a number of serious health problems, including a suppressed immune system, increased vulnerability to infection, and memory impairment (Chapter 12). • Suggested Link: The March of Dimes site is an excellent source of information on stress in pregnancy as well as the relationship between stress and PPD (postpartum depression) http://www.marchofdimes.com/pregnancy/lifechanges_indepth.html. Early Brain Development CONNECTION: Experience is crucial in the formation of synaptic connections and the growth of neurons (neurogenesis) in the brain throughout the life span. Pruning is nature’s way of making the brain more efficient (Chapter 3). • Discussion: This is a good time to discuss the concept of epigenetics. A great site on pruning is: http://faculty.washington.edu/chudler/plast.html. I typically show clips from the PBS series “The Secret Life of the Brain.” An overview of the series: http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/teenbrain/work/adolescent.html and the video links: the link for the infant: http://www.pbs.org/wnet/brain/episode1/video.html, the child: http://www.pbs.org/wnet/brain/episode2/video.html, and the teenager: http://www.pbs.org/wnet/brain/episode3/video.html. Theory of Mind CONNECTION: Autism is marked by a lack of social interest as well as by heightened interest in some things and a tendency for counting things. How might autism be related to deficits in theory of mind? • Discussion: Have students watch http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XDtjLSa50uk before coming to class. Ask them to write down 3 or 4 examples they have seen in their lives of theory of mind (or lack thereof) in children. Begin the discussion by asking them to provide examples and then discuss what it would be like without that knowledge in adulthood. Early Socioemotional Development CONNECTION: Attachment styles are stable throughout life and may set the blueprint for love relationships in adulthood (Chapter 14). • Discussion: Have students read: Hazan, C., and Shaver, P. (1987). Romantic love conceptualized as an attachment process. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 52 (3), 511–524. This article is about the relationship between adult attachment and child attachment. Have students discuss in class if they think this adequately represents their attachment style. There is a clip with Mary Main discussing therapy and adult attachment: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YJTGbVc7EJY. Developing Social Relationships and Emotions CONNECTION: One way we learn is by imitating someone else’s behavior. This type of learning, seen also in infant mimicry, may be based on mirror neurons systems in the brain (Chapters 3 and 8). • Discussion: This is a great time to discuss social learning theory (Chapter 8). If you are not prepared to go into discussing Bandura’s work on media effects on aggressive behavior in depth, it still can be a useful example of modeling and imitation. Social Development in Adolescence CONNECTION: Can Internet gaming and alternative realities and personalities (avatars) be an addiction for some people? (Chapter 15) • Discussion: Have students take the Internet Addiction Test (IAT): http://www.netaddiction.com/resources/internet_addiction_test.htm. Ask them if they feel that people can really be addicted to the Internet. What about their phones? Although they may be in a younger cohort, point out that the underlying issue here may not be checking Facebook over email but checking over conversations in real life. Ask students about other people’s behaviors. How often are they on the phone or Internet while sitting with someone else? Emerging Adulthood CONNECTION: Make Your Own Connection: Observe ways that you experiment with different identities. Pay attention to situations in which you are presenting yourself to others, such as choosing what clothes to wear, or when you post on a social network site. Do you notice whether you present a consistent image or play with more than one image? • Discussion: A great time to discuss what a person’s page says about them. As many of your students will soon be going off to get jobs and apply for graduate programs, ask them how many of them have things on their page that their mother or boss would be less than thrilled to see. Should they remove that information? An interesting site that has a smattering of research on Facebook usage is: http://www.thefacebookproject.com/. Bringing It All Together: Making Connections in Development CONNECTION: Can we really multitask? How does talking on the cell phone or texting affect your attention to driving? As we explain in the chapter on consciousness, how you allocate your attention affects your ability to remember (Chapter 6). • Discussion: If you are interested in evolutionary psychology, this is a great time to bring up that bipedalisim and talking were most likely the two interrelated skills that allowed for multitasking. Walking upright allows us to do things with our hands and talking allows us to be walking, communicating, and doing one or two more things. That does not necessarily mean that you can drink coffee, text, eat, and drive all at the same time. INNOVATIVE INSTRUCTION 1. Gender and Moral Development: Gilligan argues that psychology has underestimated sex differences in development and thinking. Specifically, she argued that the traditional view of moral development (Kohlberg’s) was unfair to women. She argued for a “caring” vs. “justice” orientation as opposed to the Kohlberg's view. For more information, see http://www.stolaf.edu/people/huff/classes/handbook/Gilligan.html. 2. Piaget: This is a great time to discuss the educational implications of Piaget’s work. Remind students that Piaget felt that peers only offered a state of disequilibrium and that was the only benefit. You may want to tie in Vygotsky’s zone of proximal development as a counter-perspective to this. You can also point out to students that Piaget believed children cause their own development. Montessori based her educational work on this perspective. You can show a clip of Montessori and her work: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q7a3Br6kPbU 3. Harlow: Start by showing a clip of Harlow’s work: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_O60TYAIgC4 4. Teratogens: Have students do a web search for different teratogens and bring a list to class. Then have students volunteer information they found. Some of this is obvious (FAS, smoking, crack, etc.); however, some of the things like lunch meat may lead to a lively discussion. 5. The Developing Infant and Child: The newborn human brain is especially responsive to the specific world around it, allowing nurture to shape human nature. You may want to stress the idea of epigenetics. This is also a good time to point out that Piaget’s theory is epigenetic in nature. That is, he believes that children are active and cause their own development as they interact with the world. Thus an impoverished environment (one with little chance for exploration with the baby stuck in a playpen or bounce seat all day) should lead to limited cognitive development. On the other hand, an environment that has many opportunities for exploration should lead to a more complex level of thought. You may want to have students discuss the ways to have a rich environment. 6. Human attachment is based on an affection-based bonding system that protects an infant from threats to survival. This is a great time to discuss the evolutionary adaptive value of imprinting and attachment. Here is a cute clip of ducks following a canoe: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kvtCpel96i4&feature=related. You may want to tie this in to how infant attachment most likely operates on a similar level. You could also relate this to Harlow and his monkeys showing autistic behaviors when left in isolation. 7. Extend your lecture on parenting to include helicopter parents and tiger moms. Ask students what these labels mean to them. Have they had any experiences surrounding helicopter parents and tiger moms? Ask them to describe those experiences. 8. Download the Kohlberg dilemmas from: http://www.haverford.edu/psych/ddavis/p109g/kohlberg.dilemmas.html. Place students in small 4- or 5-person groups and pass out different dilemmas to each group. Give students 20 minutes to read the scenario and fill out the questions according to each of the three levels of thinking. Then have each group provide a brief 5-minute synopsis to the class of their dilemma and how each level would respond. 9. Have students ask their parents what they were like as an infant and child and write two paragraphs: one reporting what their parents said and the second on how it maps onto the way they are today. That is, in their case was personality stable over time? 10. Have students look at http://www.psych.uiuc.edu/~rcfraley/attachment.htm, which has a great overview of how infant attachment correlates with adult attachment styles. Then have them go to http://www.web-research-design.net/cgi-bin/crq/crq.pl to take a quick survey on adult attachment style (it even plots where they are on the graph). Then have them write a paragraph summarizing infant attachment styles, a paragraph on adult attachment styles, and finally a paragraph on if they feel this assumption of adult effects is correct, based on their score. 11. This is a nice tie-in with the “Psychology in the Real World” section of the text. Have students read “Music Lessons Enhance IQ”: http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2006/09/060920093024.htm and write a brief 2-paragraph summary of the research described on the relationship between music and intelligence. 12. Have students complete the worksheet on Piaget’s stages at: http://psychology.about.com/library/quiz/bl_piaget_quiz.htm. Review with students that these stages are integral to Piaget’s work. You may also want to point out that Piaget’s stages revolve around being able to think a certain way, not necessarily the age itself. That said, Piaget firmly believed that chronological years were important, because that should dictate the amount of experience. 13. Observe ways that you experiment with different identities. Pay attention to situations in which you are presenting yourself to others, such as choosing what clothes to wear, or when you post on a social network site. Do you notice whether you present a consistent image or play with more than one image? 14. Musicians have better communication between the two sides of the brain than do people who have not had musical training. This finding suggests that the skills of music training enhance connectivity—in white matter—between the hemispheres. You may want to have students read: http://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/26388.php and then a BBC article on a disorder that strikes musicians to a greater extent than nonmusicians at: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/health/3490158.stm. Ask students what they think about these lines of research that show both advantages and disadvantages of musical training. Discuss what they think the reasons for these results are. Ask students how many of them took music lessons and for how long. Do they think they have advantages because of it? 15. Ask students to reflect on parenting. Ask them to describe three advantages of being a parent and three disadvantages of being a parent. Furthermore, ask them to describe three mistakes parents make when disciplining their children. 16. Ask students to describe themselves at age 75. What will they be like physically, cognitively, socially, and emotionally? How do they feel about aging? Have students share their answers. Look for similarities, differences, and myths about aging in students' answers. Suggested Media 1. An interview with David Elkind discussing Piaget: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o_EkfWS2Wks 2. A brief clip on Vygotsky’s theory: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-p_-0n2f35o 3. A brief overview of Mary Ainsworth and attachment: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4HHTohtXEq8 and http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QZdlLS2eTPU and http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9HG05AIlH6Y 4. The strange situation task: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QTsewNrHUHU 5. Erik Erikson’s work: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FpOtpuBnjbo 6. Montessori's work: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rZLq5Uttq8M 7. Bandura’s Bobo Doll Study: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eqNaLerMNOE 8. Cute clip of a conservation task: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YtLEWVu815o 9. NOVA clips on life’s greatest miracle: http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/miracle/program.html 10. Martin Seligman on positive psychology: http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/martin_seligman_on_the_state_of_psychology.html 11. The Forgetting: A Portrait of Alzheimer’s (Warner Home Video—PBS special) 12. The Baby Human: Geniuses in Diapers (Discovery Health) 13. Discovering Psychology—The Developing Child (Annenberg) 14. Gender Identity and Gender Roles http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-VqsbvG40Ww (Children describe their identity and roles) 15. Law of Conservation http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B65EJ6gMmA4 16. Egocentrism: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OinqFgsIbh0 17. Thirteen can be used for adolescent development. 18. About Schmidt can be used for issues facing older adults. 19. Teenage Brains and Risk Taking (McGraw-Hill Connect for Feist and Rosenberg, 3rd ed.) 20 Alzheimer's Disease (McGraw-Hill Connect for Feist and Rosenberg, 3rd ed.) 21. Widows Enjoy Life (McGraw-Hill Connect for Feist and Rosenberg, 3rd ed.) 20. Giraffe in Quicksand (humorous look at the stages of grief) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G_Z3lmidmrY Suggested Websites 1. The student page is great as a resource of Piaget’s work: http://www.piaget.org/ 2. Educational implications of Piaget’s theory: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science?_ob=ArticleURL&_udi=B6VD4-40V4CM7-8&_user=10&_rdoc=1&_fmt=&_orig=search&_sort=d&view=c&_version=1&_urlVersion=0&_userid=10&md5=9b8ba4e000130888c49d5efa3c628b7f 3. A great site on cognitive development: http://cogweb.ucla.edu/ 4. Piaget’s website: http://www.piaget.org/ 5. An overview of Piaget’s theory: http://www.edpsycinteractive.org/topics/cognition/piaget.html 6. An overview of Erikson’s theory: http://chiron.valdosta.edu/whuitt/col/affsys/erikson.html 7. An overview of Kohlberg’s stages: http://psychology.about.com/od/developmentalpsychology/a/kohlberg.htm 8. An overview of Harlow’s work: http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/aso/databank/entries/bhharl.html 9. Are you a super ager? https://www.livingto100.com/ 10. A quiz on Piaget’s stages: http://psychology.about.com/library/quiz/bl_piaget_quiz.htm 11. Some great psychology tests and quizzes, including excerpts from the Hazan and Shaver adult attachment inventory: http://psychology.about.com/lr/psychology_quizzes/2370/3/ 12. Another Kohlberg page: http://www.vtaide.com/blessing/Kohlberg.htm 13. A great Piaget page: http://www.learningandteaching.info/learning/piaget.htm 14. A great overview of developmental theories: http://tigger.uic.edu/~lnucci/MoralEd/overview.html 15. Fetal Development http://www.w-cpc.org/fetal.html 16. The Child Development Institute http://childdevelopmentinfo.com/ Suggested Readings Ainsworth, M., Blehar, M. C., Waters, M., & Wall, S. (1978). Patterns of attachment: A psychological study of the strange situation. Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum. Beilen, H. (1992). Piaget’s enduring contribution to developmental psychology. Developmental Psychology, 28, 191–204. Bruner, J. (1966). Studies in cognitive growth: A collaboration at the Center for Cognitive Studies. New York: Wiley & Sons. Buss, D. (2011). Evolutionary psychology: The new science of the mind. Pearson. Elkind, D. (1988). The hurried child: Growing up too fast too soon. New York: Addison-Wesley. Erikson, E. (1950). Childhood and society. New York: Norton. Galvan, A. (2013). The teenage brain: Sensitivity to rewards. Current Directions in Psychological Science, 22, 88–93. Gilligan, C. (1982). In a different voice: Psychological theory and women's development. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Gopnik, A. (2010). The philosophical baby: What children's minds tell us about truth, love, and the meaning of life. Picador. Legerstee, M., Haley, D. W., & Bornstein, M. H. (2013). The infant mind: Origins of the social brain. Guilford Press. Pearce, N. (2011). Inside Alzheimer’s. New York: APG Sales. Piaget, J. (1990). The child’s conception of the world. New York: Littlefield Adams. Piaget, J. (1965). The moral judgment of the child. The Free Press: New York. Power, F. C., Higgins, A., & Kohlberg, L. (1989). Lawrence Kohlberg's approach to moral education. New York: Columbia University Press. Shwalb, D. W., Shwalb, B. J., & Lamb, M. E. (2013). Fathers in cultural context. New York: Routledge. Vygotsky, L. (1986). Thought and language. Boston: MIT Press. Instructor Manual for Psychology: Perspectives and Connections Gregory J. Feist, Erika Rosenberg 9780077861872, 9781260397031