Developmental Psychobiology and Behavioral Ecology
Developmental Psychobiology and Behavioral Ecology

Author: Elliott M. Blass

Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media

Published: 2012-12-06

Total Pages: 470

ISBN-13: 1468454218

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The previous volume in this series (Blass, 1986) focused on the interface between developmental psychobiology and developmental neurobiology. The volume emphasized that an understanding of central nervous system development and function can be obtained only with reference to the behaviors that it manages, and it emphasized how those behaviors, in tum, shape central development. The present volume explores another natural interface of developmental psy chobiology; behavioral ecology. It documents the progress made by developmental psychobiologists since the mid-1970s in identifying capacities of learning and con ditioning in birds and mammals during the very moments following birth-indeed, during the antenatal period. These breakthroughs in a field that had previously lain dormant reflect the need to "meet the infant where it is" in order for behavior to emerge. Accordingly, studies have been conducted at nest temperature; infants have been rewarded by opportunities to huddle, suckle, or obtain milk, behaviors that are normally engaged in the nest. In addition, there was rejection of the exces sive deprivation, extreme handling, and traumatic manipulation studies of the 1950s and 1960s that yielded information on how animals could respond to trauma but did not reveal mechanisms of normal development. In their place has arisen a series of analyses of how naturally occurring stimuli and situations gain control over behavior and how specifiable experiences impose limitations on subsequent development. Constraints were identified on the range of interactions that remained available to developing animals as a result of particular events.

The Ecology of Human Development
The Ecology of Human Development

Author: Urie BRONFENBRENNER

Publisher: Harvard University Press

Published: 2009-06-30

Total Pages: 349

ISBN-13: 0674028848

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Here is a book that challenges the very basis of the way psychologists have studied child development. According to Urie Bronfenbrenner, one of the world's foremost developmental psychologists, laboratory studies of the child's behavior sacrifice too much in order to gain experimental control and analytic rigor. Laboratory observations, he argues, too often lead to "the science of the strange behavior of children in strange situations with strange adults for the briefest possible periods of time." To understand the way children actually develop, Bronfenbrenner believes that it will be necessary to observe their behavior in natural settings, while they are interacting with familiar adults over prolonged periods of time. This book offers an important blueprint for constructing such a new and ecologically valid psychology of development. The blueprint includes a complete conceptual framework for analysing the layers of the environment that have a formative influence on the child. This framework is applied to a variety of settings in which children commonly develop, ranging from the pediatric ward to daycare, school, and various family configurations. The result is a rich set of hypotheses about the developmental consequences of various types of environments. Where current research bears on these hypotheses, Bronfenbrenner marshals the data to show how an ecological theory can be tested. Where no relevant data exist, he suggests new and interesting ecological experiments that might be undertaken to resolve current unknowns. Bronfenbrenner's groundbreaking program for reform in developmental psychology is certain to be controversial. His argument flies in the face of standard psychological procedures and challenges psychology to become more relevant to the ways in which children actually develop. It is a challenge psychology can ill-afford to ignore.

Developmental Psychobiology and Behavioral Ecology
Developmental Psychobiology and Behavioral Ecology

Author: Elliott M. Blass

Publisher: Springer

Published: 1988-03-31

Total Pages: 476

ISBN-13:

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The previous volume in this series (Blass, 1986) focused on the interface between developmental psychobiology and developmental neurobiology. The volume emphasized that an understanding of central nervous system development and function can be obtained only with reference to the behaviors that it manages, and it emphasized how those behaviors, in tum, shape central development. The present volume explores another natural interface of developmental psy chobiology; behavioral ecology. It documents the progress made by developmental psychobiologists since the mid-1970s in identifying capacities of learning and con ditioning in birds and mammals during the very moments following birth-indeed, during the antenatal period. These breakthroughs in a field that had previously lain dormant reflect the need to "meet the infant where it is" in order for behavior to emerge. Accordingly, studies have been conducted at nest temperature; infants have been rewarded by opportunities to huddle, suckle, or obtain milk, behaviors that are normally engaged in the nest. In addition, there was rejection of the exces sive deprivation, extreme handling, and traumatic manipulation studies of the 1950s and 1960s that yielded information on how animals could respond to trauma but did not reveal mechanisms of normal development. In their place has arisen a series of analyses of how naturally occurring stimuli and situations gain control over behavior and how specifiable experiences impose limitations on subsequent development. Constraints were identified on the range of interactions that remained available to developing animals as a result of particular events.

Developmental Psychobiology
Developmental Psychobiology

Author: Elliott M. Blass

Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media

Published: 2012-12-06

Total Pages: 632

ISBN-13: 1461512093

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ELLIOTT M. BLASS Fifteen years have passed since the first volume on developmental psychobiology (Blass, 1986) appeared in this series and 13 since the publication of the second volume (Blass, 1988). These volumes documented the status of the broad domain of scientific inquiry called developmental psychobiology and were also written with an eye to the future. The future has been revolutionary in at least three ways. First, there was the demise of a descriptive ethology as we had known it, to be replaced first by sociobiology and later by its more sophisticated versions based on quantitative predictions of social interactions that reflected relatedness and inclu sive fitness. Second, there was the emergence of cognitive science, including cogni tive development, as an enormously strong and interactive multidisciplinary effort. Making the "functional" brain more accessible made this revolution all the more relevant to our discipline. In the laboratory, immunocytochemical detection of immediate / early genes, such as los, now allows us to trace neuronal circuits activated during complex behaviors. The "functional" brain of primates, especially humans, was also made very accessible through neuroimaging with which we can look at and into brains as they solve and attempt to solve particular tasks. Those of us who were trained in neurology as graduate students two or three decades ago recognize only the people in white coats and patients in beds or on gurneys when we visit neurologi cal units today. The rest is essentially new.

Developmental Psychobiology
Developmental Psychobiology

Author: George F. Michel

Publisher: MIT Press

Published: 1995

Total Pages: 552

ISBN-13: 9780262133128

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This text is the first to provide a coherent theoretical treatment of the flourishing new field of developmental psychobiology which has arisen in recent years on the crest of exciting advances in evolutionary biology, developmental neuroscience, and dynamic systems theory. Michel and Moore, two of the field's key pioneers and researchers, integrate primary source information from research in both biological and psychological disciplines in a clear account of the frontier of biopsychological investigation and theorizing. Explicitly conceptual and historical, the first three chapters set the stage for a clear understanding of the field and its research, with particular attention to the nature-nurture question. The next three chapters each provide information about a basic subfield in biology (genetics, evolution, embryology) that is particularly relevant for developmental studies of behavior. These are followed by extended treatments of three spheres of inquiry (behavioral embryology, cognitive neuroscience, animal behavior) in terms of how a successful interdisciplinary approach to behavioral development might look. A final chapter comments on some of the unique aspects of development study. From this detailed and clearly organized text, students will achieve a firm grasp of some of science's most fertile questions about the relation between evolution and development, the relation between brain and cognitive development, the value of a natural history approach to animal behavior--and what it teaches us about humans--and much more. Each chapter contains material that questions the conventional wisdom held in many subdisciplines of biology and psychology. Throughout, the text challenges students to think creatively as it thoroughly grounds them in the field's approach to such topics as behavioral-genetic analysis, the concept of innateness, molecular genetics and development, neuroembryology, behavioral embryology, maturation, cognition, and ethology. A Bradford Book

Life-Span Developmental Psychology
Life-Span Developmental Psychology

Author: John R. Nesselroade

Publisher: Academic Press

Published: 2013-09-11

Total Pages: 381

ISBN-13: 1483274756

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Life-Span Developmental Psychology: Methodological Issues is based on a conference, held at West Virginia University in 1971, that focused on the general topic of Life-Span Developmental Psychology. The conference provided a forum for the discussion of a variety of methodological issues related to the study of developmental processes over the life-span. The principal objectives of the Life-Span Conference have been not only to explicate, by successive approximation, the range of empirical phenomena with which a life-span developmental psychology should be concerned, but also to explore issues about theory, measurement, design, and data analysis which bear upon it. The book opens with a chapter on ethical issues in developmental psychology. This is followed by separate chapters on topics such as cross-cultural research in developmental psychology; the implications of the two models that have had the greatest impact on developmental psychology—the mechanistic (reactive organism) model and the organismic (active organism) model; and research strategies and measurement methods for investigating human development

Theories of Developmental Psychology
Theories of Developmental Psychology

Author: Patricia H. Miller

Publisher: Macmillan

Published: 2002

Total Pages: 544

ISBN-13: 9780716728467

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This book places the major theories of development in historical and contemporary context, and provides frameworks for understanding and perceiving the significance of the research findings in developmental psychology.

The Oxford Handbook of Developmental Psychology, Vol. 1
The Oxford Handbook of Developmental Psychology, Vol. 1

Author: Philip David Zelazo

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2013-03-21

Total Pages: 1049

ISBN-13: 0199958459

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This handbook provides a comprehensive survey of what is now known about psychological development, from birth to biological maturity, and it highlights how cultural, social, cognitive, neural, and molecular processes work together to yield human behavior and changes in human behavior.

Life-Span Developmental Psychology
Life-Span Developmental Psychology

Author: Nancy Datan

Publisher: Academic Press

Published: 2013-09-03

Total Pages: 386

ISBN-13: 1483265773

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Life-Span Developmental Psychology: Dialectical Perspectives on Experimental Research is a compilation of papers that deals with the dialectical perspective focusing on the developmental process of the individual's interaction with the environment. Part 1 discusses the theoretical issues of psychological theorists such as Piaget and Kaplan. The text includes topics such as the dialectics of time and post-Newtonian metatheory for psychologists. One paper discusses the dialectic method and theory in the work of psychology as social proof structures, particularly when systems of action cause conflict with systems of thought. The text analyzes research versus theory through the Wundt-Titchener Laboratory example. Another paper addresses the status of dialectics in developmental psychology using the approach of theoretical orientation versus the scientific method. Part 2 presents research applications covering topics such as the phenomenological and a behavioral approach to remembering, as well as ""remembering"" in empiricism. Another paper addresses the dialectical perspectives of discriminative learning and transfer that includes both theory and research done on discriminative performance. This book will prove valuable for psychologists, behavioral therapists and researchers, and students in behavioral psychology.

Fetal Development
Fetal Development

Author: Jean-Pierre Lecanuet

Publisher: Psychology Press

Published: 2013-06-17

Total Pages: 525

ISBN-13: 1134782187

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Based on the presentations given by well-known specialists at a recent multidisciplinary conference of developmental psychobiologists, obstetricians, and physiologists, this book is the first exhaustive attempt to synthesize the present scientific knowledge on fetal behavior. Utilizing a psychobiological analytic approach, it provides the reader with an overview of the perspectives, hypotheses, and experimental results from a group of basic scientists and clinicians who conduct research to elucidate the role of fetal behavior in development. Experimental and clinical as well as human and animal data are explored via comparative developmental analysis. The ontogeny of fetal spontaneous activity -- via the maturation of "behavioral states" -- and of fetal responsiveness to sensory stimulation is studied in detail. Results are provided from studies of embryonic/fetal and newborn behavior in chicks, rats, sheep, primates, and humans. Knowledge of fetal behavior is crucial to the obstetrician, neonatologist, developmental psychologist, and even the future parents, in order to follow and assess the gradual development of spontaneous responsive movements of the fetus. While assessing this important information, this text also examines the neuro-behavioral events taking place during the fetal period as an aid to understanding normal and pathological life span development.