Filling a gap in current literature on human development, this volume explores the influence of psychophysiological, behavioral, and social factors on stability and continuity in the development of the mind during human infancy. The book reviews existing literature, presents new data, and discusses issues of substance in mental development, methodology, and interpretation. Commentaries by recognized experts interpret the research results from the previous chapters.

Lifespan human development is the study of all aspects of biological, physical, cognitive, socioemotional, and contextual development from conception to the end of life. In approximately 800 signed articles by experts from a wide diversity of fields, The SAGE Encyclopedia of Lifespan Human Development explores all individual and situational factors related to human development across the lifespan. Some of the broad thematic areas will include: Adolescence and Emerging Adulthood Aging Behavioral and Developmental Disorders Cognitive Development Community and Culture Early and Middle Childhood Education through the Lifespan Genetics and Biology Gender and Sexuality Life Events Mental Health through the Lifespan Research Methods in Lifespan Development Speech and Language Across the Lifespan Theories and Models of Development. This five-volume encyclopedia promises to be an authoritative, discipline-defining work for students and researchers seeking to become familiar with various approaches, theories, and empirical findings about human development broadly construed, as well as past and current research.

Children are already learning at birth, and they develop and learn at a rapid pace in their early years. This provides a critical foundation for lifelong progress, and the adults who provide for the care and the education of young children bear a great responsibility for their health, development, and learning. Despite the fact that they share the same objective - to nurture young children and secure their future success - the various practitioners who contribute to the care and the education of children from birth through age 8 are not acknowledged as a workforce unified by the common knowledge and competencies needed to do their jobs well. Transforming the Workforce for Children Birth Through Age 8 explores the science of child development, particularly looking at implications for the professionals who work with children. This report examines the current capacities and practices of the workforce, the settings in which they work, the policies and infrastructure that set qualifications and provide professional learning, and the government agencies and other funders who support and oversee these systems. This book then makes recommendations to improve the quality of professional practice and the practice environment for care and education professionals. These detailed recommendations create a blueprint for action that builds on a unifying foundation of child development and early learning, shared knowledge and competencies for care and education professionals, and principles for effective professional learning. Young children thrive and learn best when they have secure, positive relationships with adults who are knowledgeable about how to support their development and learning and are responsive to their individual progress. Transforming the Workforce for Children Birth Through Age 8 offers guidance on system changes to improve the quality of professional practice, specific actions to improve professional learning systems and workforce development, and research to continue to build the knowledge base in ways that will directly advance and inform future actions. The recommendations of this book provide an opportunity to improve the quality of the care and the education that children receive, and ultimately improve outcomes for children.

Written by the foremost experts in human intelligence. It not only includes traditional topics, such as the nature, measurement, and development of intelligence, but also contemporary research into intelligence and video games, collective intelligence, emotional intelligence, and leadership intelligence. In an area of study that has been fraught with ideological differences, this Handbook provides scientifically balanced and objective chapters covering a wide range of topics. It does not shy away from material that historically has been emotionally charged and sometimes covered in biased ways, such as intellectual disability, race and intelligence, culture and intelligence, and intelligence testing. The overview provided by this two-volume set leaves virtually no area of intelligence research uncovered, making it an ideal resource for undergraduates, graduate students, and professionals looking for a refresher or a summary of the new developments.

K. Warner Schaie I am pleased to write a foreword for this interesting volume, particularly as over many years, I have had the privilege of interacting with the editors and a majority of the con tributors in various professional roles as a colleague, mentor, or research collaborator. The editors begin their introduction by asking why one would want to read yet another book on human development. They immediately answer their question by pointing out that many developmentally oriented texts and other treatises neglect the theoretical foundations of human development and fail to embed psychological constructs within the multidisciplinary context so essential to understanding development. This volume provides a positive remedy to past deficiencies in volumes on hu man development with a well-organized structure that leads the reader from a general introduction through the basic processes to methodological issues and the relation of developmental constructs to social context and biological infrastructure. This approach does not surprise. After all, the editors and most of the contributors at one time or an other had a connection to the Max Planck Institute of Human Development in Berlin, whether as students, junior scientists, or senior visitors. That institute, under the leader ship of Paul Baltes, has been instrumental in pursuing a systematic lifespan approach to the study of cognition and personality. Over the past two decades, it has influenced the careers of a generation of scientists who have advocated long-term studies of human development in an interdisciplinary context.

The Child Psychology Series: The Study of Behavioral Development concerns the formulation of general laws of development, transcending the realm of the development of the individual from infancy to maturity. This book provides a systematic treatment of problems of research design, strategy, and data analysis that relate specifically to the study of developmental changes in behavior. The topics discussed include developmental psychology in the 1970s, age variable in psychological research, and programmatic view of the task of developmental psychology. The problems of measurement and quantification in developmental psychology, correlational methods in the study of developmental change, and experimental manipulation of developmental change are also elaborated. This publication is recommended for psychologists, specialists, and students learning the nature of behavioral change.

How we raise young children is one of today's most highly personalized and sharply politicized issues, in part because each of us can claim some level of "expertise." The debate has intensified as discoveries about our development-in the womb and in the first months and years-have reached the popular media. How can we use our burgeoning knowledge to assure the well-being of all young children, for their own sake as well as for the sake of our nation? Drawing from new findings, this book presents important conclusions about nature-versus-nurture, the impact of being born into a working family, the effect of politics on programs for children, the costs and benefits of intervention, and other issues. The committee issues a series of challenges to decision makers regarding the quality of child care, issues of racial and ethnic diversity, the integration of children's cognitive and emotional development, and more. Authoritative yet accessible, From Neurons to Neighborhoods presents the evidence about "brain wiring" and how kids learn to speak, think, and regulate their behavior. It examines the effect of the climate-family, child care, community-within which the child grows.

This volume presents an up-to-date review of developmental aspects of human attention by leading researchers and theorists. The papers included in the first section consider the ways in which newborns are pretuned to visual, auditory, linguistic, and social features of their environment, as well as how selectivity to these features changes in the first year of life. The following section examines properties of the visual and auditory world that are attention-getting for children. Developmental increases in capacity and strategy are also examined in this section through the study of perception, memory, problem-solving and language. Section III explores several ways in which selective processing can fail in development (e.g. autism, hyperactivity, and psychopathy) while Section IV reports on those aspects of selectivity that are lost (and preserved) in the aging process.

Research on the development of human infants has revealed remarkable capacities in recent years. Instead of stressing the limitations of the newborn, the modern approach is now more optimistically based on an assessment of the adaptive capabilities of the infant. Innate endowment, coupled with interaction with the physical and social environment, enables a developmental transition from processes deeply rooted in early perception and action to the cognitive and language abilities typical of the toddler.; This book reviews a number of issues in early human development. It includes a reconceptualization of the role of perception at the origins of development, a reconciliation of psychophysical and ecological approaches to early face perception, and building bridges between biological and psychological aspects of development in terms of brain structure and function. Topics covered include basic exploratory processes of early visual systems in early perception and action; face perception in newborns, species typical aspects of human communication, imitation, perception of the phonetic structure of speech, origins of the pointing gesture, handedness origins and development, theoretical contributions on perception and cognition, implicit and explicit knowledge in babies; sensory-motor coordination and cognition, information processing and cognition, perception, habituation and the development of intelligence from infancy.