Cognitive Development, sexuality, and Mental health through the lifecycle.

1. Cognitive Development, sexuality, and Mental health through the lifecycle. Includes all the lovely soft topics you know and love

2. Disclaimer • Faculty has not reviewed or vetted the information contained herein. • If you think this material is any way accurate, you are mistaken. • Celebrity voices are impersonated

3. List the stages of cognitive development as proposed by Piaget and correlate them with the child’s age

5. Describe the sensorimotor phase

6. Investigating the world and their relationship to it via the senses • Infant realizes the external world is not an extension of themselves • Object permanence • Objects continue to exist even if out of site. • Attachment • Bond to parents and family • Ainsworth’s Strange Situation can be used to identify attachment patterns

7. Describe the pre-operative stage

8. Parallel play • Egocentrism • Everyone thinks as they think and shares their feelings and desires • Animism • Sense of oneness with the world leads to belief in magical omnipotence. • Nature is alive and controlable • Artificialism • Natural phenomenon are created by humans • Conservation • Shapes and volumes • Classification • Treating objects as groups

9. Describe concrete operations stage

10. Increased organization and logical thinking • Only extends to concrete objects • Cannot reason abstractly

11. Describe formal operations

12. Some people may never reach formal operations in any or all areas • Abstract thought • Mathematical reasoning • Ability to reason contrary to fact

13. List the primitive reflexes and postural reactions found in infants

14. Primitive • Moro response • Asymmetric tonic neck reflex • Galant reflex • Symmetric tonic neck reflex • Postural reactions • Landau reaction • Derotative righting • Propping • Parachute

15. Describe the relationship between reflexes and postural reactions. How are they predictive of injury or developmental problems in both children and adults?

16. Reflexes do not involve cortical processing whereas postural reactions do. Thus delays in achieving postural reactions indicate communication issues with the cortex. Re-emergence indicates degeneration of previously communicating pathways. For instance consider the re-emergence of babinski in adults with spinal cord damage.

17. What are the red flags for motor development

18. Absence of a reflex • Perserveration of a reflex beyond the normal range • Unequal bilateral response • Hyper and hypo active response • Milestones out of sequence

19. Describe the general pattern of motor development overlaid on the body

20. Cephalo -> caudal • Medial -> lateral • Ulnar -> radial

21. List the streams of development

22. Motor • Gross • Fine • Language • Receptive • Expressive • Problem solving • Visual spatial • puzzles • Visual motor • Drawing • Social • Adaptive (ADL’s)

23. Define biological sex

24. A bit tricky as it depends on perspective. You can interpret this as either genotype or phenotype or a combination. CAIS genotypic male with female external phenotype and testicles is…?

25. Define gender identity

26. If considering only two genders, male and female, a persons gender identity is an internal construct of themselves as male or female.

27. Define gender expression

28. A person’s outward expression of gender

29. Define gender dysphoria

30. Major psychological stress as a result of a disconnect between a person’s gender identity and gender expression

31. Define disorder of sexual development

32. The 2% of the population that does not meet the traditional definition of male and female sex. This includes individuals with atypical sex chromosomes or physical trait combinations that merge or deviate from the norm. • AKA - intersex

33. Define sexual orientation

34. The sex (gender?) toward which a person is oriented to for mating behavior.

35. Distinguish between hermaphrodites and pseudohermaphrodites

36. List several biologic causes of intersexuality, the genotype, the external phenotype

38. Distinguish child abuse from neglect

39. Definitions are not succinct in notes. • Abuse is active and involves direct action that causes harm and includes general physical abuse as well as sexual abuse. • Neglect appears to be passive in that children to not receive something they need for their health, safety, or development. Food, clean housing, love, etc.

40. Identify the time periods in which significant organic changes occurs in the developing brain

41. Fetal • Max density at 3-6 months • Pruning begins in late fetal life and continues through early childhood • Childhood • Increasing synaptic density from 6-12 years • Peaks a few years before puberty

42. Describe the general development pattern of the brain

43. Posterior to anterior (visual to pre-frontal)

44. List the immature areas of the teenage brain

45. Frontal lobe • Amygdala • Nucleus accumbens

46. Describe the functions of the pre-frontal cortex

47. Selective attention • Working memory • Decision making • Memory inhibition

48. Describe the deficiencies in the teenage amygdala and its consequences for behavior

49. Amygdala is over-active and the frontal lobe is under-active in teenagers compared to adults. Teens tend to misread facial expressions.

50. Describe how immaturity of the nucleus accumbens leads to risk taking behavior in teens