Psychology of Adulthood and Aging Exam I Study Guide
You should be able to:
- Define and provide examples of ageism
- Explain how age may have multiple meanings.
- Know the difference between young-old and old-old
- Describe the mechanistic perspective on adult development and aging
- Describe the organismic perspective on adult development and aging
- Describe the contextual perspective on adult development and aging
- Compare and contrast the principal assumptions of the mechanistic, organismic, and contextual perspectives with the life-span developmental approach
- Define the Life-span Developmental Perspective
- Define developmental psychology paying attention to both intraindividual change and interindividual change.
- Compare qualitative changes and quantitative changes.
- Contrast stage-like changes and continuous changes, and explain why many investigators doubt the stage concept.
- Discuss the roles of plasticity and reserve capacity in adult development and aging.
- Compare developmental ideas that assume a unidirectional view of development with those that assume multidirectionality.
- Define and provide examples of normative age-graded, normative history-graded,
and nonnormative influences
- Describe each of the domains of development: biological and physical domain, cognitive domain, personality domain and social domain.
- Describe the major characteristics of case studies, observational/naturalistic research,
experiments, and quasi-experiments. Explain the advantages and disadvantages
of each.
- Describe the characteristics of cross-sectional studies. Define cohort, and explain how
age and cohort effects are confounded in cross-sectional designs.
- Describe the characteristics of longitudinal studies. Explain the various problems with
validity in the longitudinal design.
- Describe the characteristis of sequential designs. Explain the advantages and disadvantages
to this design.
- Explain the ethical principles guiding research in adult development and aging.
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