Lifespan Development - Assignment Example

Lifespan Development Question Prenatal care is the care given by a health care provider such as a midwife or doctor during pregnancy and begins immediately you know you are pregnant. During this visits, your health care provider makes sure you and the developing fetus are strong and healthy. Prenatal care helps you learn how to handle the discomforts that come with pregnancy, have any needed tests, identify warning signs and ask any relevant questions you have. The first visit is the longest and the examination is thoroughly done. Questions about your medical history, your family’s and that of your partner are asked. There is a complete physical exam and your height blood pressure, weight, breathing and pulse are measured. There will be a gynecological exam that includes; a breast exam, a pap test, test for Chlamydia and gonorrhea. There are also blood or skin tests that check for anemia, blood type, certain inherited diseases, HIV/AIDS, some STIs and TB among others. And you may also be given urine tests to check for diabetes or other infections. They will also advice you on the changes to make on lifestyle and habits during pregnancy that will help in a healthy pregnancy. This includes change of diet e.g. intake of folic acid a B vitamin daily to prevent serious birth defects, exercises and foods that are nutritious. These visits depend on the risk of the pregnancy there is low-risk and high risk pregnancy. For the low risk pregnancy the visits plans are; for every 4 or6 weeks from the first to the seventh month of pregnancy, every 2 or 3 weeks in the eighth month and every week in the ninth month. But for the high risk pregnancy it is advisable to visit more often. During the follow up prenatal care visits, more checks and tests will be done and the progress of the pregnancy monitored. This will include prenatal test that include ultra sounds screening among others that can help confirm the due date and also find certain abnormalities. Question 2 This experiment was created by psychologists Eleanor and Walk to investigate the depth perceptions in humans and animals. They hypothesized that depth perception is natural as opposed to a learned process. The visual cliff consisted of a sheet of Plexiglas which covered a cloth with a high difference checkerboard pattern. On one side the cloth was placed instantly beneath the Plexiglas and on the other side the cloth was dropped 4 feet below. When the infant was placed on the opaque end of the platform the parent of care giver stood on the other side of the transparent Plexiglas calling on the infant to come or holding a toy for them to get it. If the infant was reluctant to crawl towards the care giver it was assumed that the infant perceived depth, believing that it was an actual cliff. The infants knew the platform was solid through patting it, but they still did not cross. They all relied on their vision for them to steer across the equipment. Mary should allow Joe to go upstairs but she should be present just in case of an accidents. According to the Visual Cliff experiment, Joe can perceive depth and can also find a solid platform while he is crawling and he can rely on his vision to navigate across the staircase. The fear of heights is not inborn it can be overcome by facing the fears and allowing the infant to learn. The study also shows that the parents who posed joy on the other side helped the infants cross over but the parents who posed fear and anger, their infants did not cross the apparatus. The mother’s emotional expressions affect the infants especially when they are uncertain about a situation. So Mary being afraid and showing fear to Joe will make him uncertain and scared to go upstairs but if Mary motivates ,encourages and shows assurance of her presence for Joe then the infant will trust his mother and will be able to upstairs with less or no fear. Question 3 Development continues in our lives and there a handful of ways to conduct research on the people of ages five to twenty five of age, which will provide you with the exceptional information on the memory development skills. There are two main designs you can use for this study. The Longitudinal study design and the cross sectional design Longitudinal design is a research design where a sample of the population is studied at intervals in order to scrutinize the effects of the memory development. In this case we would start with those aged five years and follow them up twenty years later to see what has changed. Cross-sectional study design on the other hand implies that groups are sampled along a developmental path with an aim of determining the impact of development on research variable. For this design we would have groups may be four of them and categorize them according to age groups and study them now this helps in saving of time and resources. The main advantage of longitudinal is that it allows for the recordings of individual differences, meaning that we can later on go back and sees if something peculiar is happening in the data collected and for cross-sectional designs it saves time. Instead of conducting a research over many years, the study can be completed in a short amount of time and there is the added advantage of no follow ups for the subjects involved in the study. The main disadvantage of longitudinal study design is the time and resources wastage due to the follow up and for cross-sectional design study is the lack of follow-up and thus any new information on the study may not be recorded in case of any changes. Question 4 Operational thought level includes: Hypothetico-deductive reasoning which means individuals can make hypotheses and test them and is found in the people who are around thirteen years. Propositional reasoning which involves making conclusions from grounds which are presented as true and horizontal decalage which is the acquisition of skills for different content areas. An adolescent in this level can be able to deal with conceptual and generate hypotheses which lead to systematic problem solving. They help people think more critically and flexibly and one has a sense of identity. They are able to argue more skillfully with grownups using simple multiple view points, skillful in their social lives, can assimilate knowledge and wisdom of culture easily and they can understand philosophical and abstract topics in schools and work place thus providing harmony. On the other hand concrete operational thinkers focus on observable objects and events. This stage only allows a person to solve problems that apply to actual events or objects and not abstract concepts since understanding and knowing how to use full common sense is still not completely clear at this stage. There is also the limitation of using inductive logic, this is usage of general principles to predict outcomes of a specific event, and it includes mental reversibility and thus cannot make good decisions and solve problems at work or in the university. Question 5 Mendel’s rule is applied to explain how humans inherent certain types of disorders. They describe how human traits and genetical disorders are inherited. Some disorders are caused by recessive allele while others by single dominant allele. Red-green color blindness disorder is a sex-linked inheritance disorder. People who have this disorder cannot differentiate red and green and they often see these colors as shades of brown. Boys are more likely to be colorblind than girls this is because color blindness is a sex-linked recessive trait. Boys have only one X chromosome, and if that chromosome carries the gene for color blindness they will be color blind whereas girls have two X chromosomes. A girl can have one X chromosome with the color vision gene and the other with the color blind gene and since the colorblindness gene is recessive, the normal dominant gene will mask the recessive colorblindness gene. But in some instances the girl can inherit through both genes thus becoming color blind. Down syndrome is a chromosomal disorder which leads to mental retardation and physical abnormalities. It occurs as a result of an extra chromosome that is transferred from a parent to a baby. Normally a child has one chromosome 21from the mother and one chromosome 21 from the father, but for the case of Down syndrome there are 3 copies of chromosome 21. That’s why it also known as Trisomy 21. Huntington’s tons disease, it is an inherited disease in which people in midlife begin having occasional spasms and gradual loss of brain cells which progresses to chorea, athetosis and mental deterioration. The gene is dominant and therefore children of people who have this disease have a 50 percent chance of developing it. Question 6 Babies respond to stimuli like sound, interesting sights and even touch. A neonate usually has involuntary responses to external stimuli in which some help in the survival skills of the baby but they disappear during the first year of life. The auto-stimulation theory states that infants should spend more than twice as much as adults in sleep because it helps stimulates higher brain centers that in turn help in the development of the central nervous system. Infants sensations and perceptions can be investigated by the use of Brazelton Neonatal Assessment Scale, usage of the infant’s tendency to habituate and the visual preference method. During birth babies are sensitive to high-pitched sounds and thus they can only detect it if the sound is loud, but they can differentiate among different kinds of sound and tell what direction the sound came from. They can also recognize human voices which is important for later social and language development. Newborns do not have visual acuity at distances beyond close range but it improves in the first three months of life. They are sensitive to brightness and movement; they can track moving objects and even differentiate colors. They are later on able to recognize patterns even the patterns of human faces. As the age improves, their accuracy improves and they begin to coordinate their two eyes and make use of the stereoscopic vision. By the time the infants are 6 to 14 months old, they are capable of depth perception according to the visual cliff experiment. Infants are able to distinguish among a variety of odors and by 1 week of age they can differentiate the smell of their mother from other people. They are also able to distinguish between sweet over sour or bitter. As for the sense of touch, it is present even before birth. They are responsive to both positive and negative types of touch and are highly sensitive to pain. Intermodal perception helps infants integrate information from two different senses such as the sounds that accompany a certain sight. The classical and operational conditions deal with the observations of the infants reactions to different stimuli. An infant can be classically conditioned when a previous neutral stimulus is repeatedly paired with a pleasant stimulus that naturally leads to involuntary response when the previous stimulus is repeated alone the reaction is the same. As for operant conditioning, the infant learns to emit certain behavior when that behavior is repeated Question 7 The ecological model holds that we encounter different environments throughout our life span and they may influence our behaviors in varying degrees. I will discuss on three of them; The micro system which is the direct environment we have in our lives. It includes family, teachers, friends, neighbors and any other person in direct contact with you. The positive family influence and support has led to the understanding of harmony and peace while working with other people. Teachers have instilled more discipline and increased knowledge in my development. The meso system is the relationship between the micro system and one’s life. For instance a hostile neighbor can make one have no interest with other neighbors and thus prefer to not socialize with them at all. The exosystem is the settling characterized by a person participating in a context where he is not entitled to any active role. The attachment between a specific math teacher who is later transferred leads to the student failing that subject or being in conflict with the new math teacher. Question 8 Piaget’s theory is important in trying to ensure the focus of preoperational and cognitive thinkers. In class the teacher should focus on the process of the children’s thinking and not just the products. It should not all be about correct answers but also emphasis on the child’s understanding and process used to arrive at that answer. Encourage the students to discover themselves through natural interactions with the environment not on fully dependence of ready-made knowledge. Emphasis on practices to help the children have adult like in their thinking and acceptance of individual differences in developmental progress which means the teacher ought to segregate the class into groups and teach them or offer individual lessons instead of the entire class. The teacher should facilitate learning by providing various experiences for the students. She should use concrete props and visual aids such as time lines, usage of familiar examples to explain complex ideas, offer opportunities to the students to classify and group information to help in assimilation and the teacher can present problems that require logical analytic thinking e.g. brain teasers. References Atilola, O. (2014). Child Mental-Health Policy Development in Sub-Saharan Africa: Broadening The Perspectives Using Bronfenbrenners Ecological Model. Health Promotion International Webb, P. (1980). Piaget: Implications for Teaching. Theory into Practice, 19(2), 93-97. Read More