The first two years of life are a period of unparalleled growth and change. Within a state-of-the-art biopsychosocial framework, this innovative volume explores the multiple contexts of infant development--the ways in which genes, neurobiology, behavior, and environment interact and shape each other over time. Methods for disentangling, measuring, and analyzing complex, nonlinear developmental processes are presented. Contributors explore influences on the infant's growth in major domains, including cognitive and socioemotional functioning and mental health. The consequences of family stress, poverty, and other adversities are probed, and promising directions for prevention and intervention identified.
The first two years of life are a period of unparalleled growth and change. Within a state-of-the-art biopsychosocial framework, this innovative volume explores the multiple contexts of infant development--the ways in which genes, neurobiology, behavior, and environment interact and shape each other over time. Methods for disentangling, measuring, and analyzing complex, nonlinear developmental processes are presented. Contributors explore influences on the infant's growth in major domains, including cognitive and socioemotional functioning and mental health. The consequences of family stress, poverty, and other adversities are probed, and promising directions for prevention and intervention identified.
This multidisciplinary volume features many of the world's leading experts of infant development, who synthesize their research on infant learning and behaviour, while integrating perspectives across neuroscience, socio-cultural context, and policy. It offers an unparalleled overview of infant development across foundational areas such as prenatal development, brain development, epigenetics, physical growth, nutrition, cognition, language, attachment, and risk. The chapters present theoretical and empirical depth and rigor across specific domains of development, while highlighting reciprocal connections among brain, behavior, and social-cultural context. The handbook simultaneously educates, enriches, and encourages. It educates through detailed reviews of innovative methods and empirical foundations and enriches by considering the contexts of brain, culture, and policy. This cutting-edge volume establishes an agenda for future research and policy, and highlights research findings and application for advanced students, researchers, practitioners, and policy-makers with interests in understanding and promoting infant development.
This handbook collates research evidence and presents the most up-to-date findings on child development in Sub-Saharan Africa. It discusses complex risk factors and medical conditions affecting childhood outcomes, and spotlights emerging programs for enhancing literacy and cognitive development. The panel of expert contributors offer needed context and knowledge to the discussion of previously understudied topics. Chapters present proven intervention strategies currently in use across the diverse region. In addition, this handbook provides guidelines for culturally sensitive and ethical research that will inform practice and help shape policy goals and initiatives. Topics featured in the Handbook include: · Fatherhood in the African context. · Sibling care-giving and its implications in Sub-Saharan Africa. · Nutritional status, infections, and child development · Diabetes in Sub-Saharan African children. · How to adapt tests for Sub-Saharan Africa. · Interventions aimed at children and caregivers. · A culturally sensitive approach to conducting research and promoting initial literacy development in Africa The Handbook of Applied Developmental Science in Sub-Saharan Africa is a must-have resource for researchers, professionals/scientist-practitioners, and graduate students in child, school, and developmental psychology, as well as pediatrics, social work, public health, and education.
This comprehensive guide offers a rich introduction to research methods, experimental design and data analysis techniques in developmental science, emphasizing the importance of an understanding of this area of psychology for any student or researcher interested in examining development across the lifespan. The expert contributors enhance the reader’s knowledge base, understanding of methods, and critical thinking skills in their area of study. They cover development from the prenatal period to adolescence and old age, and explore key topics including the history of developmental research, ethics, animal models, physiological measures, eye-tracking, and computational and robotics models. They accessibly explore research measures and design in topics including gender identity development, the influence of neighborhoods, mother-infant attachment relationships, peer relationships in childhood, prosocial and moral development patterns, developmental psychopathology and social policy, and the examination of memory across the lifespan. Each chapter ends with a summary of innovations in the field over the last ten years, giving students and interested researchers a thorough overview of the field and an idea of what more is to come. Conducting Research in Developmental Psychology is essential reading for upper-level undergraduate or graduate students seeking to understand a new area of developmental science, developmental psychology, and human development. It will also be of interest to junior researchers who would like to enhance their knowledge base in a particular area of developmental science, human development, education, biomedical science, or nursing.
This highly anticipated third edition of the Handbook of Parenting brings together an array of field-leading experts who have worked in different ways toward understanding the many diverse aspects of parenting. Contributors to the Handbook look to the most recent research and thinking to shed light on topics every parent, professional, and policymaker wonders about. Parenting is a perennially "hot" topic. After all, everyone who has ever lived has been parented, and the vast majority of people become parents themselves. No wonder bookstores house shelves of "how-to" parenting books and magazine racks in pharmacies and airports overflow with periodicals that feature parenting advice. However, almost none of these is evidence-based. The Handbook of Parenting is. Period. Each chapter has been written to be read and absorbed in a single sitting, and includes historical considerations of the topic, a discussion of central issues and theory, a review of classical and modern research, and forecasts of future directions of theory and research. Together, the five volumes in the Handbook cover Children and Parenting, the Biology and Ecology of Parenting, Being and Becoming a Parent, Social Conditions and Applied Parenting, and the Practice of Parenting. Volume 1, Children and Parenting, considers parenthood as a functional status in the life cycle: Parents protect, nurture, and teach their progeny, even if human development is more dynamic than can be determined by parental caregiving alone. Volume 1 of the Handbook of Parenting begins with chapters concerned with how children influence parenting. Notable are their more obvious characteristics, like child age or developmental stage; but subtler ones, like child gender, physical state, temperament, mental ability, and other individual-differences factors, are also instrumental. The chapters in Part I, on Parenting across the Lifespan, discuss the unique rewards and special demands of parenting children of different ages and stages – infants, toddlers, youngsters in middle childhood, and adolescents—as well as the modern notion of parent-child relationships in emerging adulthood, adulthood, and old age. The chapters in Part II, on Parenting Children of Varying Status, discuss common issues associated with parenting children of different genders and temperaments as well as unique situations of parenting adopted and foster children and children with a variety of special needs, such as those with extreme talent, born preterm, who are socially withdrawn or aggressive, or who fall on the autistic spectrum, manifest intellectual disabilities, or suffer a chronic health condition.
The Handbook of Research on the Education of Young Children is the essential reference on research on early childhood education throughout the world. This outstanding resource provides a comprehensive research overview of important contemporary issues as well as the information necessary to make knowledgeable judgments about these issues. Now in its fourth edition, this handbook features all new sections on social emotional learning, non-cognitive assessment, child development, early childhood education, content areas, teacher preparation, technology, multimedia, and English language learners. With thorough updates to chapters and references, this new edition remains the cutting-edge resource for making the field’s extensive knowledge base readily available and accessible to researchers and educators. It is a valuable resource for all of those who work and study in the field of early childhood education including researchers, educators, policy makers, librarians, and school administrators. This volume addresses critical, up-to-date research on several disciplines such as child development, early childhood education, psychology, curriculum, teacher preparation, policy, evaluation strategies, technology, and multimedia exposure.
The Development of Memory in Infancy and Childhood provides a thorough update and expansion of the previous edition and offers new research on significant themes and ideas that have emerged in the past decade such as the cognitive neuroscience of memory development, autobiographical memory and infantile amnesia, and the cognitive and social factors that underlie memory for events. In this volume, Courage and Cowan bring together leading international experts to review the current state of the science of memory development in their own research areas. They note questions of theory and basic science addressed in their research, highlight the real-world applications of those findings, and propose an agenda for future research. The book also considers the implications of their work for the development of atypical children, specifically, how these new findings might be adapted to enrich the lives of those children and to inform and validate our current expectations of individual differences in the development of typical children. The first of three groups of chapters focuses on basic neurobiological, perceptual, and cognitive processes that underlie memory and its development (i.e., encoding, consolidation and storage, retrieval). The second group focuses primarily on the social, contextual, and cultural factors that enable, shape, and mediate these basic processes, while the rest of the chapters focus on practical applications of this knowledge to real-world settings and issues. The book provides a new look at memory development, including new topics such as spatial representation and spatial working, prospective memory, false memories, and memory and culture. This classic yet contemporary volume will appeal to senior undergraduate and graduate students of developmental and cognitive psychology, as well as to developmental psychologists who want a compendium of key topics in memory development.
