Cognitive Development and Defining Abnormality in Psychology

Running head: PSYCHOLOGY
PSYCHOLOGY
Name of the Student
Name of the university
Author’s note

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TAQ 1
Part A
Key concept: Cognitive development
concept Explanation
1. Schema According to Jean Piaget, schema can be
referred to as a cognitive framework or
concepts or blocks of concepts, that helps in
the interpretation of a vast amount of
information. Piaget termed schemas to be
‘units” of knowledge that provides a mental
representation of the world (Mandler 2014).
For example, when a little girl sees a cow
for the first time and initially calls it a horse,
but once, she is informed that it is a
different animal; she can modify the
existing schema and create a new schema
for a cow.
2. Accommodation Accommodation is a key process that is
essential to learning. Accommodation

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occurs when new information does not fit in
the existing schema, which means that the
existing schema needed modification or
designing for the accommodation of the new
information (Atkinson 2013). The
accommodation assists a person to adapt to
different customs and cultures. Students
sometimes require modifying their schemas
for accommodating information that they
have studies, when the previous schemas are
no longer of any use to get a desired result.
Part B
Key concept: Defining abnormality
concept Explanation
1. Deviation from social norms The behavior of a person can be considered
to be abnormal if the individual violates the
norms that is accepted to be right in a
particular social group. It is necessary to
consider as of the degree to which the rule is
violated or the violation is abnormal,

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eccentric or rude. One of the limitation of
the study is that the social norms might vary
from culture to culture and the norms might
vary with term.
2. Deviation from ideal mental health There are few criteria required for an ideal
mental health and lack or absence of any of
these characteristics might lead to deviation
from the mental health.
 Resistance to stressful condition
 Self actualization(Sue et al. 2015)
 Strong identity and self esteem
 Autonomy
 Accurate perception of what is real