| A | B |
|---|
| Life-Span Perspective | A view of human development that takes into account all phases of life , not just childhood and adulthood. |
| Cohort | A group of people who, because they were born within a few years of each other, experience many of the same historical and social conditions. |
| Culture | The set of shared values, assumptions, customs, and physical objects that are maintained by a group of people in a specific setting as a design for living daily life. |
| Scientific Method | The principles and procedures used in the systematic pursuit of knowledge, designed to reduce subjetive reasoning, biased assumptions, and unfounded beliefs. |
| Subjects | The people who are studied in a research project. |
| Independent Variable | The variable that is added or changed in an experiment. |
| Dependent Variable | The variable that might change as a result of changing of adding the independent variable in a experiment. |
| Cross-Sectional Research | A research design in which groups of people, each group different in age but similar in other important ways, are compared. |
| Longitudial Research | A research design in which the same people are studied over a long period of time to measure both change and stability as the age. |
| Psychoanalytic Theory | A grand theory of human development that hods that irrational, unconscious forces, many of them originating in early childhood, underlie behavior. |
| Learning Theory | A grand theory of development, bulit on behaviorism, that focuses on the sequences and processes by which behavior is learned. |
| Social Learning | A theory that learning occurs through observation and imitation of other people. |
| Cognitive Theory | A theory which holds that the way people think and understand the world shapes their perceptions,attitudes, and actions. |
| Sociocultural Theory | A theory which holds that hunan development results from the dynamic interaction between developing persons and the surrounding culture, primarily as espressed by the parents and teachers who transmit it. |
| Epigenetic Systems Theory | A development theory that emphasizes the genetic origins of behavior but also stresses that genes, over time, are directly and systematically affected by many enviromental forces. |
| Eclecitc Perspective | A perspective whose adherents choose what seem to be the best, or most useful, elemnts from the various theories, instead of adhering to only a single perspective. |
| Gamete | A reproducitve cell |
| Zygote | The single cell formed from the fusing of a sperm and an ovum. |
| Gene | The basic unit for the transmission of heredity instructions. |
| Human Genome Project | An international effort to map the complete human genetic code. |
| Syndrome | cluster of ditinct characteristics that tend to occur together in a given disorder. |
| Neural Tube | A fold of outer embryonic cells that appears about 3 weeks after conception and later develops into the central nervous system. |
| Age of Viability | The age at which a fetus can survive outsdside the mother's uterus if specialized medical care is available. |
| Teratogens | Agents and Conditions that can impair prenatal development and lead to bitrth defects and even death. |
