PSYCH 464 - Unit 1 Questions and Answers
cross-sectional study
Ans: design in which people of different cohorts are observed at one
time of measurement
longitudinal study
Ans: a developmental research design that measures one cohort over
two or more times of measurement
microgenetic study
Ans: longitudinal design in which participants are tested repeatedly over
a span of days or weeks
sequential design
Ans: developmental research design based on cross-sectional and
longitudinal designs
Gerontology
Ans: the study of aging from maturity through old age
Life-spanning perspective
Ans: division of human life into two phases: childhood/adolescence and
young/middle/late adulthood
biological force
Ans: one of four basic forces of development that includes all genetic
and health-related factors
psychological force
© 2025 All rights reserved
, 2 | Page
Ans: one of four basic forces of development that includes all internal
perceptual, cognitive, emotional, and personality factors
sociocultural force
Ans: one of the four basic forces of development that include
interpersonal, societal, cultural, and ethnic factors
life-cycle force
Ans: reflection of how the same event or combination of forces affects
people at different points in life
biopsychosocial framework
Ans: way of organizing the biological, psychological, and socioculture
forces on human development
cohort
Ans: a group of people born at the same point or specific time span in
historical time
normative age-graded influence
Ans: experience caused by biological, psychological, and sociocultural
forces closely related to a person's age
normative history-graded influence
Ans: event that most people in a specific culture experience at the same
time
nonnormative influence
Ans: random event that is important to an individual but does not
happen to most people
primary aging
Ans: normal, disease-free development during adulthood
secondary aging
© 2025 All rights reserved
, 3 | Page
Ans: developmental change related to disease, lifestyle, and other
environmental changes that are not inevitable
tertiary aging
Ans: rapid losses occurring shortly before death
emerging adulthood
Ans: a period when individuals are not adolescents but are not yet fully
adults
plasticity
Ans: the belief that capacity is not fixed, but can be learned or improved
with practice
reliability
Ans: ability of a measure to produce the same value when used
repeatedly
validity
Ans: degree to which an instrument measures what it is supposed to
measure
systematic observation
Ans: measurement involving watching people and carefully recording
what they say or do
self-reports
Ans: people's answers to questions about the topic of interest
experiment
Ans: study in which an independent variable is manipulated to observe
effects on a dependent variable
independent variable
© 2025 All rights reserved