Human Growth and Development
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50 free Human Growth and Development trivia questions with answers — science & nature quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
Every person starts as a single cell and, with luck, ends as a great-grandparent with stories to tell. Developmental psychology is the study of everything in between: how genes and surroundings combine to shape a body, a mind and a personality, and how each of those keeps changing from the womb to old age. This quiz follows the course a human growth and development class takes. It opens with heredity and environment, the old nature and nurture argument, then moves through pregnancy and birth, the stage theories of childhood, the upheavals of puberty and the teenage years, and the less-charted territory of adult life and aging. Along the way you will meet famous twins, a record-breaking Frenchwoman, classic experiments and the thinkers whose names fill the textbooks. It suits students revising for a lifespan development or psychology exam, nursing and education students, and anyone curious about why people turn out the way they do. Every answer comes with a short explanation, so a wrong guess still teaches you something.
30 of 50 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Louise Brown, born in Oldham in 1978, was the first baby conceived through which medical procedure?
In vitro fertilization
In vitro fertilization joins egg and sperm outside the body, so the press called Brown a 'test-tube baby', though a Petri dish was used. Robert Edwards won a 2010 Nobel Prize for the work.
Q 02Which Frenchwoman, who said she met Vincent van Gogh as a girl, lived a verified record 122 years?
Jeanne Calment
Jeanne Calment died in 1997 aged 122 years and 164 days, the longest human life ever verified. She recalled the painter giving her a condescending look in her uncle's fabric shop.
Q 03Which phrase did psychoanalyst Elliott Jaques coin in a 1965 essay about creative geniuses?
Midlife crisis
Midlife crisis first appeared in his paper 'Death and the Midlife Crisis', published in a psychoanalysis journal. Jaques is also credited with originating the idea of corporate culture.
Q 04The 'Jim twins', reunited at 39 after being raised apart, were studied at which US state's university?
Minnesota
Minnesota psychologist Thomas Bouchard found both Jims had married a Linda and then a Betty, and each owned a dog called Toy. He noted that most separated twins are far less alike.
Q 05Elisabeth Kübler-Ross's 1969 book On Death and Dying set out five stages of grief, ending with which one?
Acceptance
Acceptance closes a sequence that opens with denial. Kübler-Ross drew the stages from her work with terminally ill patients, and later observed that people do not pass through them in strict order.
Q 06Auguste Deter, a Frankfurt patient who died in 1906, was the first person diagnosed with which condition?
Alzheimer's disease
Alzheimer's disease is named after Alois Alzheimer, the German psychiatrist who first described it in 1906. It is the most common cause of dementia, behind around 60–70% of cases.
Q 07In the familiar pyramid drawn from Abraham Maslow's hierarchy of needs, which need sits at the very top?
Self-actualization
Self-actualization, the drive to become all that one can be, crowns the pyramid, with physiological needs at its base. Maslow himself never drew the famous diagram.
Q 08Which brain region is among the last to mature, still developing well into a person's twenties?
Prefrontal cortex
Prefrontal cortex development is still under way through the teenage years, one reason adolescents may take more risks: the social rewards can outweigh the possible consequences.
Q 09The Up documentaries revisited the same British children every seven years, mirroring which kind of study?
Longitudinal
Longitudinal studies track the same people over long periods, so the changes they record are less likely to reflect differences between generations. The films began when the children were seven.
Q 10An extra copy of chromosome 21 causes which condition, first described by an English asylum doctor in the 1860s?
Down syndrome
Down syndrome is named after John Langdon Down, who ran the Earlswood Asylum in Surrey. The extra chromosome behind it was not discovered until 1959, almost a century after his reports.
Q 11Which Augustinian friar worked out the basic rules of heredity by cross-breeding pea plants?
Gregor Mendel
Gregor Mendel's findings were ignored by the scientific community in his lifetime and only rediscovered around 1900, more than three decades after he published them.
Q 12A smooth groove between nose and upper lip can signal that a baby was exposed in the womb to what?
Alcohol
Alcohol flattens that groove, the philtrum, in step with the amount of exposure, and doctors grade it against a five-point photo guide. No safe level in pregnancy has been established.
Q 13Which temporary organ, delivered after the baby in the third stage of labor, nourishes the fetus?
Placenta
Q 21Erik Erikson, who placed a search for the self at the heart of adolescence, coined which now-everyday phrase?
Identity crisis
Identity crisis was a subject Erikson knew at first hand: born Erik Salomonsen and raised as Erik Homburger, he replaced his stepfather's surname with one of his own invention.
Q 22Sigmund Freud named a young boy's supposed rivalry with his father after which king from Greek tragedy?
Oedipus
Oedipus unknowingly kills his father and marries his mother in Sophocles' play. Freud introduced the term in 1910, and rejected the 'Electra complex' that Carl Jung proposed for girls.
Q 23In Mary Ainsworth's Strange Situation test, which attachment pattern is the most common worldwide?
Secure
Placenta tissue also acts as a gland, producing hormones that regulate both the mother's and the baby's physiology throughout pregnancy.
Q 14Pregnant women are advised to take which B vitamin as a supplement to cut the baby's risk of spina bifida?
Folic acid
Folic acid lowers the risk of neural tube defects so reliably that more than 80 countries add it to certain foods, either by law or voluntarily.
Q 15Which English philosopher argued that the mind at birth is a blank slate, or tabula rasa?
John Locke
John Locke made the case in An Essay Concerning Human Understanding. The Latin phrase recalls the wax tablets Romans wrote on, which were heated and smoothed blank for reuse.
Q 16Which term, from the Greek for 'yoked', names the single cell formed when a sperm fuses with an egg?
Zygote
Zygote cells are diploid: the egg and the sperm each supply half of the chromosomes, 23 apiece in humans, so the new cell carries a complete set.
Q 17Studies of children raised in which country's orphanages in the 1980s and 1990s showed how neglect harms the brain?
Romania
Romania's orphanages filled after Nicolae Ceaușescu banned abortion and contraception. Research on the children raised there showed that babies need human contact as well as food.
Q 18Which Victorian polymath, a half-cousin of Charles Darwin, popularized the phrase 'nature versus nurture'?
Francis Galton
Francis Galton used the phrase to frame how far heredity or environment shapes ability. He proposed settling the question by comparing twins, anticipating modern behavior genetics.
Q 19Which term, built on a Greek word for 'monster', describes substances that can cause birth defects?
Teratogens
Teratogens vary in the harm they do with the dose and with timing: the damage depends on the stage of development the embryo has reached when it is exposed.
Q 20Health effects on babies carried through the Dutch 'hunger winter' of 1944–45 became a famous example in which field?
Epigenetics
Epigenetics studies changes in how genes are expressed without altering the DNA sequence. Babies exposed to the famine in the womb ran higher risks of diabetes and obesity as adults.
Secure babies explore freely while the caregiver is present, may be upset at being left and are happy at the reunion. Ainsworth made her first mother-infant observations near Kampala, Uganda.
Q 24Erik Erikson's eight psychosocial stages end in old age with which conflict, whose successful outcome is wisdom?
Integrity vs. despair
Integrity vs. despair turns on whether people can look back on their lives as meaningful. Erikson's wife and collaborator Joan later added a ninth stage for the eighties and nineties.
Q 25Which term did Jerome Bruner introduce for teaching support that is gradually removed as a learner improves?
Scaffolding
Scaffolding builds on Lev Vygotsky's zone of proximal development: the gap between what a child can do alone and what the child can reach with help from someone more knowledgeable.
Q 26Which psychologist, born in a Canadian town of roughly 400 people, originated social learning theory and self-efficacy?
Albert Bandura
Albert Bandura showed in his 1961 Bobo doll experiment that children who watched an adult attack a doll were more likely to beat it themselves, learning by observation alone.
Q 27Jean Piaget's final stage of cognitive development, when abstract reasoning emerges, is called what?
Formal operational
Formal operational thinkers can reason about the hypothetical: Piaget found that most children under twelve could not work out which variables affect the swing of a pendulum.
Q 28Alexander Thomas and Stella Chess sorted babies as easy, difficult or slow-to-warm-up to describe which inborn trait?
Temperament
Temperament in their New York study was rated on nine characteristics. About 40% of the babies fitted the easy pattern, 10% the difficult one and 15% were slow to warm up.
Q 29Jean Piaget asked children what a doll could see from across a model of three mountains to test for what?
Egocentrism
Egocentrism showed when four-year-olds chose the photograph matching their own view rather than the doll's. The model's three peaks were marked by snow, a red cross and a hut.
Q 30Which term did Erik Erikson coin in 1950 for a middle-aged adult's concern with guiding younger people?
Generativity
Generativity is set against stagnation in the seventh of his eight stages. After growing old himself, Erikson came to think it matters more in later life than he had first believed.