DSST Lifespan Developmental Psychology cheat sheet

Informed consent requires capacity, voluntariness, and disclosure; with minors, parental permission plus child assent is standard, and assent is typically sought from about age 7 upward.

Institutional review boards (IRBs) apply the Belmont principles: respect for persons, beneficence, and justice; these map to consent, risk-benefit balancing, and fair subject selection.

Minimal risk means the probability and magnitude of harm is no greater than that encountered in daily life or routine examinations; greater-than-minimal-risk research with children needs stronger justification.

Deception must be justified by scientific necessity, must not conceal risks that would affect willingness to participate, and requires prompt debriefing.

Confidentiality limits must be disclosed in advance: suspected child abuse, imminent danger to self or others, and court orders override promised confidentiality.

Vulnerable populations include children, prisoners, pregnant women, cognitively impaired adults, and economically disadvantaged persons; they require additional safeguards.

Longitudinal studies raise attrition and re-consent issues; participants must be able to withdraw at any time without penalty, and stored data/specimens need specified retention and destruction rules.

Cross-cultural research requires culturally appropriate consent procedures and translators; Western individual-consent norms may conflict with collective decision-making traditions.

Mandated reporting laws generally require researchers to report observed or disclosed child maltreatment regardless of study promises, so consent forms must state this limit.

Prenatal periods: germinal (weeks 0-2, zygote implantation), embryonic (weeks 3-8, organogenesis, greatest teratogenic vulnerability), fetal (week 9 to birth, growth and myelination).

Teratogen impact follows dose, timing, and genetic susceptibility rules; the embryonic period is when structural anomalies are most likely, while later exposure tends to produce growth or functional deficits.

Cephalocaudal (head-to-tail) and proximodistal (center-to-outward) sequences describe motor and physical growth gradients.

Myelination and synaptic pruning continue into adolescence and early adulthood; prefrontal cortex matures later than limbic regions, a pattern invoked to explain adolescent risk-taking.

Puberty timing: girls typically begin the growth spurt and breast development around ages 8-13; boys around 9-14; menarche occurs late in the sequence, roughly 2-2.5 years after breast budding.

Brain development includes proliferation, migration, synaptogenesis, pruning, and myelination; experience-expectant processes rely on species-typical input, experience-dependent processes on individual input.

Aging changes: decline in fluid abilities and sensory acuity, reduced reaction speed, presbycusis (high-frequency hearing loss), and presbyopia; crystallized abilities hold or grow.

Menopause is defined retrospectively, typically 12 months after the final menses, average onset near age 51; andropause in men is gradual with declining testosterone.

Genotype-environment interplay includes passive, evocative, and active (niche-picking) correlations; heritability estimates are population statistics, not individual destiny.

Newborns see about 20/400 acuity, prefer high-contrast and face-like patterns, and can discriminate their mother's voice and odor within days.

Visual cliff studies show depth perception emerges around 6-8 months, coinciding with crawling experience; experienced crawlers show wariness earlier than non-crawlers.

Preferential looking and habituation-dishabituation are the standard infant perception methods; looking time indexes discrimination and novelty detection.

Intermodal perception (matching sight and sound) appears in early infancy; newborns turn toward a sound matching a visible object's location.

Perceptual narrowing: infants discriminate non-native speech sounds and other-race faces early in life, with discrimination declining over the first year with limited exposure.

Size constancy and shape constancy are present in infancy; object permanence (Piaget) is a related but distinct cognitive achievement, typically by 8-12 months.

Presbyopia (lens stiffening) begins near age 40; contrast sensitivity, dark adaptation, and color discrimination (especially blue-violet) decline in later adulthood.

Depth cues divide into binocular (convergence, retinal disparity) and pictorial/monocular (linear perspective, occlusion, texture gradient); infants use kinetic and binocular cues before pictorial ones.

Classical conditioning: neutral stimulus paired with unconditioned stimulus becomes conditioned stimulus; extinction is not erasure but new inhibitory learning, so spontaneous recovery can occur.

Operant conditioning: reinforcement increases behavior, punishment decreases it; negative reinforcement removes an aversive stimulus and is not punishment.

Schedules of reinforcement: variable ratio produces the highest and most resistant response rates; fixed interval produces scalloped responding.

Observational learning (Bandura) requires attention, retention, reproduction, and motivation; modeling of aggression was demonstrated with the Bobo doll paradigm.

Infant memory: habituation and conjugate reinforcement (mobile task) show retention that increases with age; infantile amnesia means most memories before about age 3 are not retained in adulthood.

Working memory capacity grows through childhood; short-term span is roughly 4 items in early childhood and about 7 in adolescence and adulthood.

Long-term memory types: explicit/declarative (episodic, semantic) versus implicit/nondeclarative (procedural, priming, conditioning); aging spares procedural memory more than episodic recall.

Aging memory: source memory and free recall decline while recognition and semantic knowledge are relatively preserved; prospective memory suffers more on time-based than event-based tasks.

Piaget's stages: sensorimotor (0-2, object permanence), preoperational (2-7, egocentrism, conservation failure), concrete operational (7-11, conservation, reversibility), formal operational (11+, abstract hypothetical reasoning).

Vygotsky: zone of proximal development is the gap between independent and assisted performance; scaffolding and inner speech support development, and culture shapes tools of thought.

Information processing views cognition as attention, encoding, storage, and retrieval; processing speed and inhibition improve markedly across childhood.

Kohlberg's moral stages: preconventional (punishment/obedience, instrumental exchange), conventional (interpersonal conformity, law and order), postconventional (social contract, universal principles).

Language milestones: cooing around 2 months, canonical babbling around 6-7 months, first words around 12 months, two-word combinations around 18-24 months, vocabulary spurt in the second year.

Overextension (calling all animals 'doggie') and underextension are typical early semantic errors; overregularization ('goed', 'mouses') signals rule learning, not error.

Chomsky's nativist view posits a language acquisition device and universal grammar; Skinner's behaviorist account relies on imitation and reinforcement; interactionist views emphasize social input.

Aging cognition: fluid intelligence declines from early adulthood; crystallized intelligence rises into middle age and holds; dementia involves multiple cognitive domains and functional decline, delirium is acute and fluctuating.

Temperament (Thomas and Chess): easy, difficult, slow-to-warm-up; goodness of fit between temperament and environment predicts adjustment better than temperament alone.

Attachment (Ainsworth): secure, insecure-avoidant, insecure-resistant/ambivalent, and disorganized; the strange situation is used at about 12-18 months, and secure base behavior is the marker of secure attachment.

Erikson's psychosocial stages in order: trust/mistrust, autonomy/shame, initiative/guilt, industry/inferiority, identity/role confusion, intimacy/isolation, generativity/stagnation, integrity/despair.

Emotion development: basic emotions appear in the first year; self-conscious emotions (shame, guilt, pride) require self-awareness and emerge around 18-24 months; emotional regulation improves with age and language.

Identity statuses (Marcia): diffusion, foreclosure, moratorium, achievement, defined by exploration and commitment; moratorium is active exploration without commitment.

Self-concept shifts from concrete and physical in early childhood to psychological and comparative in middle childhood, and to abstract and differentiated in adolescence.

Gender development: labeling around age 2-3, gender constancy by about 5-7 (Kohlberg), with gender schema theory emphasizing learned categories and stereotypes.

Adult personality shows mean-level change (conscientiousness and agreeableness rise, neuroticism declines) alongside high rank-order stability; the 'maturity principle' summarizes this pattern.

Prosocial behavior increases across childhood; empathy, perspective taking, and moral norms predict helping; diffusion of responsibility reduces bystander intervention as group size grows.

Aggression types: instrumental versus hostile, and physical versus relational; relational aggression (exclusion, rumor) is more common and more socially damaging in adolescence.

Parenting styles (Baumrind): authoritative (high warmth, high control) is associated with the best outcomes; authoritarian, permissive, and uninvolved differ on the same two dimensions.

Peer status categories: popular, rejected, neglected, controversial, average; rejected-aggressive children are at highest risk for later conduct problems.

Moral development includes empathy-based and rule-based components; prosocial moral reasoning differs from justice reasoning and often emerges earlier.

Social learning of aggression involves modeling, reinforcement, and normative beliefs; media violence effects are small but consistent, and hostile attribution bias predicts reactive aggression.

Friendship changes from shared activity in childhood to intimacy and self-disclosure in adolescence; cliques and crowds peak in adolescence and decline in late adolescence.

Social convoy and socioemotional selectivity theory: network size shrinks with age while emotional closeness and satisfaction with remaining ties are maintained or increase.

Family life cycle stages (Carter and McGoldrick): leaving home, joining families through marriage, families with young children, families with adolescents, launching children, later life.

Transition to parenthood: marital satisfaction often declines after the first child, modestly and temporarily; shared meaning and fairness in division of labor moderate the drop.

Parenting a child with a disability shifts roles and increases caregiving demands; sibling relationships and family routines are key protective factors.

Divorce: most children show a temporary dip in adjustment, with recovery within about 2 years; conflict level between parents predicts child outcome better than family structure.

Blended and stepfamily formation requires renegotiation of roles; stepparent discipline is more effective after a warm relationship is established.

Boomerang and multigenerational households are increasing; caregiving for aging parents (often by midlife women) can create role strain and 'sandwich generation' pressures.

Empty nest effects are neutral to positive for most parents; marital satisfaction often rises after children leave when the couple relationship is strong.

Later-life family tasks include grandparenting roles (distant, companionate, involved), widowhood, and legal planning such as wills and advance directives.

Lazarus and Folkman: stress is appraisal-based; primary appraisal judges threat or challenge, secondary appraisal judges resources and coping options.

Coping types: problem-focused (change the stressor) versus emotion-focused (regulate distress); problem-focused coping fits controllable stressors, emotion-focused fits uncontrollable ones.

General adaptation syndrome (Selye): alarm, resistance, exhaustion; chronic stress impairs immune function and increases cardiovascular risk.

Resilience is common, not exceptional; protective factors include social support, self-efficacy, cognitive reappraisal, and stable routines.

Kubler-Ross stages (denial, anger, bargaining, depression, acceptance) describe reactions to loss but are not a fixed sequence and are not a required pathway.

The social readjustment rating scale ranks life events by change units; cumulative change, not a single event, predicts illness risk.

Burnout has three components: emotional exhaustion, depersonalization/cynicism, and reduced personal accomplishment; it is job-related, not a clinical disorder.

Posttraumatic growth refers to positive change after adversity (relationships, priorities, self-view); it can coexist with distress and does not imply the event was beneficial.

Grief terminology: bereavement is the loss event, grief is the response, mourning is the culturally patterned expression.

Attachment style predicts grief: secure attachment is associated with integrated grieving; anxious attachment with prolonged distress; avoidant attachment with delayed or suppressed expression.

Dual-process model (Stroebe and Schut): healthy grieving oscillates between loss-oriented and restoration-oriented coping rather than moving through fixed stages.

Prolonged grief disorder requires persistent, intense yearning or preoccupation plus functional impairment lasting beyond expected norms (about 12 months for adults in current criteria).

Worden's tasks of mourning: accept the reality of loss, process the pain, adjust to a world without the deceased, and find an enduring connection while moving forward.

Children's grief is intermittent and expressed in behavior; concrete understanding of death's finality typically develops around ages 5-7, with universality and inevitability following.

Continuing bonds theory reframes maintaining a relationship with the deceased as adaptive, replacing the older 'letting go' model.

Complicated risk factors include sudden or violent death, loss of a child, prior mental health problems, low social support, and multiple concurrent losses.

Cultural rules govern mourning rituals, display norms, and roles; grief support should be matched to the family's cultural and religious framework.