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Unit 3
15–25% of examThis unit follows how people change from before birth to old age: in their bodies, their thinking, their language and their relationships. It also covers how you learn from experience, by linking events together, by facing consequences and by watching other people. Together these ideas explain everything from a toddler's first words to why your phone's notification sound grabs your attention.
Longer videos that cover the whole unit. Good for a first pass or a final review.
Developmental psychologists keep returning to a few big questions: how much comes from genes versus experience, whether change is gradual or happens in stages, and which traits stay stable over a lifetime. To study change, they either compare different age groups at the same time (cross-sectional) or follow the same people for years (longitudinal).
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Your body develops in a mostly predictable order, though the timing varies from person to person. Before birth, teratogens (harmful substances such as alcohol) can affect development. Babies are born with reflexes like rooting, visual cliff studies show they can sense depth early, and some skills such as language come most easily during a critical period (some animals, like ducklings, imprint on the first moving thing they see). Teens go through puberty, and adults gradually lose some speed, flexibility and sharpness of sight and hearing.
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Sex refers to biological characteristics, while gender refers to the roles and behaviors a culture links with being male or female, and gender identity is a person's own sense of their gender. This topic looks at how sex and gender shape socialization, meaning how family, friends, school and media teach expectations as you grow up, and it also covers sexual orientation, which is about whom a person is romantically or sexually attracted to.
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Piaget argued that children build mental frameworks called schemas and pass through four stages, from learning by touching and looking as babies to thinking abstractly as teens. Vygotsky stressed that children learn best with support from others on tasks just beyond what they can do alone, and in adulthood the knowledge you've built up stays steady while quick, flexible reasoning tends to slow.
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Language is a shared system of symbols built from basic sounds (phonemes) and units of meaning (morphemes), with rules (syntax) that let you create endless new sentences. Babies in every culture move through the same stages, from cooing and babbling to single words and then short telegraphic phrases like "want milk," often overgeneralizing rules along the way ("I goed").
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Your relationships grow and change across life, from attachment to caregivers as a baby, through parenting styles and friendships, to forming adult families. Theories such as Erikson's psychosocial stages and the ecological systems theory explain how each life stage and each layer of your surroundings shapes who you become, including how teens work out their identity.
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Classical conditioning is learning to link two events, like Pavlov's dogs drooling at a sound that always came before food. Once a link forms it can fade (extinction), come back after a pause (spontaneous recovery) or spread to similar things (generalization), and it helps explain learned fears and why one bad meal can put you off a food for years.
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In operant conditioning, consequences shape behavior: reinforcement makes a behavior more likely and punishment makes it less likely. "Positive" means something is added and "negative" means something is taken away, and the schedule of reinforcement (every time, or after a set or varying number of responses or amount of time) changes how fast you learn and how long the behavior lasts.
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You can learn without being rewarded yourself, just by watching a model, as Bandura's Bobo doll studies showed. Learning can also come as a sudden flash of insight, or build up quietly (latent learning) and only show once you have a reason to use it, like a rat that learned a maze while just wandering it.
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