The Handbook of Life-Span Development, Volume 2

Social and Emotional Development

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• Publisher: Wiley
• Year: 2010
• ISBN:
  9781118026519
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Developmental Psychology
• Index: Psychology

In the past fifty years, scholars of human development have been moving from studying change in humans within sharply defined periods, to seeing many more of these phenomenon as more profitably studied over time and in relation to other processes. The Handbook of Life-Span Development, Volume 2: Social and Emotional Development presents the study of human development conducted by the best scholars in the 21st century. Social workers, counselors and public health workers will receive coverage of the social and emotional aspects of human change across the lifespan.

CHAPTER 1

Introduction

Social and Emotional Development across the Life Span

ALEXANDRA M. FREUND and MICHAEL E. LAMB

There are numerous handbooks on various aspects of psychology, covering topics as diverse as emotion, motivation, or social psychology. Handbooks of psychology typically include a volume on development, and there also exist two age-defined handbooks about development, the Handbook of Child Psychology, the sixth edition of which was edited by William Damon and Richard M. Lerner (2006), and the Handbook of Adolescent Psychology, the third edition of which was edited by Richard M. Lerner and Laurence Steinberg (2009). Although some of the finest chapters on life-span development were published in these handbooks, there was no high-level reference work reviewing theory and data about all aspects of psychology across the entire life span until the publication of the present Handbook. Our efforts to commission and edit the current volume were predicated on the assumption that a complete and satisfying understanding of any area of functioning requires adoption of a life-span perspective.

Most research and theory in developmental psychology is still clearly concerned with specific phases of the life span. This specialization by researchers has a pragmatic rationale; to work across the full age spectrum would require so much technical and methodological expertise and an understanding of so many different, topic-specific paradigms that one laboratory would not be capable of mastering them all. In addition, the training we provide students of developmental science militates against the acquisition and development of such integrative, life-span knowledge even today. Lecture classes or seminars typically deal with one phase of development, such as “emotional development in childhood” or “self and identity in adolescence.” This focus implies that separate age phases constitute meaningful units for studying development. Moreover, most students (especially at the postgraduate level) are likely to study either child development or adult development and aging, giving them expertise regarding one phase of development but not of the entire life span. With this Handbook of Life-Span Development, we hope to begin breaking that pattern by commissioning thorough overviews of development in various functional domains across the entire life span.

When conceptualizing this Handbook, we first took seriously the idea that development is a lifelong phenomenon. To the extent permitted by the knowledge base within each substantive area of focus included in this volume, the contributors have documented how the processes of development—despite qualitative or quantitative discontinuities (as well, of course, as continuities in these dimensions)—begin in utero and extend across the entire ontogenetic span, ending only with death. Unfortunately, however, variations in the extent to which this orientation to life-span developmental processes has come to characterize the study of different aspects of social and emotional development ensure that there are differences in the degree to which the areas of research reviewed in this volume have been studied across the life span.

As one might expect in a field that tends to describe and study development in such discrete age-graded phases as infancy, childhood, adolescence, adulthood, or old age, our requests of the contributors were daunting and demanding. Most had expertise regarding one or two phases, rather than the entire life span. Although readers will be impressed by how well the contributors have mastered the tasks assigned to them, they will also notice a tendency for many chapters to include more detailed analyses of some phases of life than others. To the extent that these differences in amount of detail reflect differences in the amount of research that has been conducted, we hope that the evident gaps will prompt students and scholars of development to embrace perspectives that encompass the entire life span in their future research and conceptualization.

Second, we have tried in this volume to cover all the diverse topics that comprise the field of social and emotional development. Of course, domains of development can be partitioned in many ways. In the end, the choices we made were largely dictated by the extent to which different topics had been conceptualized and studied, and the chapters included in the volume include different levels of analysis, ranging from the molecular focus on peptides, genes, hormones, and the neurological bases of development, to the macro-level analysis of such constructs as the development of self-efficacy and developmental psychopathology.

Third, when charting the terrain of emotional and social development across the life span, we also sought to cover different experiential or functional aspects of development, including emotions, motivation, and temperament, as well as social and intimate relationships. We do not want to imply that these functional domains are separate; they are not. Humans experience emotions in social contexts, and these experiences are influenced by their motivations as well as their temperaments, for example. However, the focus on different functional domains makes a project like this Handbook feasible, while helping to create a holistic understanding of development.

AN OVERVIEW OF THIS VOLUME

Our vision for this volume is instantiated in the chapters that it comprises. The chapters are organized into several areas of scholarship pertinent to social and emotional development.

Emotional Regulation across the Life Span

In the second and third chapters in this volume, Porges and Carter (Chapter 2) and Lewis, Todd, and Xu (Chapter 3) place considerable emphasis on the neurobiological factors that influence or control individual behavior across the life span.

Porges and Carter focus on the neurobiological factors that make social bonding and social interaction possible across the life span. The phylogenetic perspective they introduce draws extensively on research conducted using social animals, including voles, as well as research on individuals whose intrinsic characteristics make it easier to understand the underlying processes, either because they are especially young and immature or because they have conditions such as autistic spectrum disorders that compromise their capacities. Porges and Carter proceed to document the role of neuropeptides in promoting the development of social relationships, in part by inhibiting tendencies to reject or aggress against strangers (including offspring) and also explain how and why the brain, using the vagus nerve, modulates psychological reactions to different social stimulus. Interestingly, as they show, the same basic processes mediate interactions between individuals and their environments, especially but not exclusively their social environments, across the life span. Evidence regarding the ability of this model to explain key aspects of social behavior in childhood should, these authors hope, prompt more extensive research on the interface between neurobiological processes and social behavior at other stages of the life span.

Lewis, Todd, and Xu’s approach to emotional regulation, as presented in Chapter 3, also focuses on fundamental processes, including those that determine both the extent and nature of emotional arousal. Lewis and colleagues make clear that the underlying neural mechanisms tend to be quite immature at birth. Furthermore, although developmental change is rapid in the early years, changes continue to take place more or less across the life span, with mature or optimal function emerging only in early adulthood and with neurological changes underlying declines in behavioral function in later adulthood and old age. Thus, the capacity to regulate emotions, especially in response to challenges posed by intrinsic (e.g., pain, illness) and extrinsic (e.g., fear-provoking stimuli or separation from a source of comfort) factors, develops gradually, with significant individual differences attributable to variation in the behavior of others (especially parents and care providers) during the phase of life when regulatory capacity and control shift from extrinsic to intrinsic control.

As with Lewis and his colleague’s examination of emotional regulation, Labouvie-Vief, Grühn, and Studer’s analysis of the dynamic integration of emotion and cognition (Chapter 4) adopts a dynamic systems approach to the understanding of emotional development. Labouvie-Vief and colleagues present a model of emotional development inspired by Piaget’s seminal work on child development in two ways: by acknowledging the importance of striving for equilibrium in developing systems and by taking seriously the intricate interplay and connectedness of emotion and cognition. Their model seeks to explain how people develop by navigating between the needs for safety and well-being on one hand and the need for increased mastery and control on the other. According to their model, the opposing needs create a tension between resting in an equilibrium state and venturing into disequilibrium to develop more complex integrations of emotion and cognition. This model is a true life-span model of emotional development because it describes and explains how the contextual and cultural demands as well as biological changes across the life span interact in shaping the codevelopment of emotion and cognition. In this way, Chapters 3 (Lewis and colleagues) and 4 (Labouvie-Vief and colleagues) nicely complement each other.

Turning to self-regulation, Geldhof, Little, and Colombo (Chapter 5) present an organizing heuristic for the structures and elements of self-regulation that serves as a theoretical model for understanding the development of self-regulation. This heuristic integrates elements from various models developed in the rich literature on self-regulation and thereby helps structure a broad and somewhat confusing field that has produced not only many theoretical accounts of self-regulation but also a variety of rather disconnected empirical findings. Moreover, like both Lewis and colleagues and Labouvie-Vief and colleagues, Geldhof, Little, and Colombo invoke a multilevel approach to self-regulation that encompasses biological and neurocognitive as well as social-psychological and motivational constructs, in the process highlighting the importance of attention, cognitive schemas, expectancies, and immediate and future gains for self-regulation. Taking a developmental perspective highlights the extent to which the elements of self-regulation and their interaction change over time. Moreover, Geldhof and colleagues also review the outcomes of self-regulation, adopting the action-theoretical notion that individuals are not just the products but also the producers of development (Lerner & Busch-Rossnagel, 1981). Self-regulation is one of the hot topics in current psychological research because it is related to performance in many areas of functioning, including emotion, motivation, and cognition, and there is little doubt that the heuristic presented in Chapter 5 will help scholars and researchers gain a better understanding of self-regulation and its development across the life span.

Self, Identity, and Personality across the Life Span

Describing and structuring the development of self and identity across the life span, McAdams and Cox, the authors of Chapter 6, take us on a voyage through historical time and ontogenetic development, clearly demonstrating that any static analysis of self and identity obscures essential elements of these constructs because self and identity are both inherently subject to change as well as being agents of change and development. In their wide-ranging analysis, McAdams and Cox highlight the extent to which the concepts of self and identity are culturally embedded and have self-related and social functions that vary depending on whether the selves are actors, agents, or authors. From the perspective of the self as an author, for instance, telling people who you are communicates what others can expect from you in future interactions, thereby making social relationships more predictable and allowing people to shape their social relationships effectively. Telling their life stories, however, also helps individuals to make meaning of different, perhaps even separate events by drawing them together into a coherent narrative. Moreover, as research on generativity and redemptive life stories has shown, the way people tell their life stories predicts actual behavior, nicely illustrating how different levels of analysis complement one another: Cultural themes such as redemption that shape our sense of self and identity then find expression in life stories that reflect and reconstruct biographical life events and themes, which, in turn, are translated into actions that affect society (such as generative behavior) and foster experiences that transform our sense of self.

Despite a long tradition, research on temperament and personality across the life span typically places considerably less influence on the importance of social context and construction than is done by McAdams and Cox and is substantially less precise about neurobiological mechanisms than either Porges and Carter or Lewis et al.’s chapters; this area of research is eloquently summarized by Bates, Schermerhorn, and Goodnight in Chapter 7. Much of the relevant research is predicated on assumptions (and evidence) that fundamental individual differences in temperament and personality are inherited. Furthermore, there is an increasing body of evidence linking specific aspects of temperament to regulatory processes such as those that control attention (e.g., persistence and distractibility). Recent progress in this respect, as Bates and his colleagues’ document, is attributable in large part to consensus regarding at least some of the principal dimensions of temperament and personality. On the other hand, there continues to be a distinction between the major dimensions of temperament studied in infancy and early childhood, as opposed to the dimensions of temperament studied in adulthood, a divergence that has impeded life-span research. In addition, there has been relatively little research on the development of personality and temperament in later life.

Further building on the themes of personality development as well as the concepts of redemption and resilience discussed in the two preceding chapters, Staudinger and Bowen (Chapter 8) examine positive development from a life-span perspective (albeit with a focus on the age phases of adulthood and aging), emphasizing the processes of growth (i.e., improving levels of performance) and adjustment (i.e., maintaining levels of performance). According to Staudinger and Bowen, personality exerts an “executive function,” orchestrating the development of other psychological systems (such as cognition or emotion) by allocating resources in response to and in anticipation of a changing balance of gains and losses across the life span. In their view, the self manages and constrains developmental changes, while changing through interaction with the environment. As a result, although personality at the level of traits often appears to involve fixed dispositions that change slightly, if at all, after young adulthood (see Chapter 7), it reacts to and shapes developmental changes that help manage resources and adjustment. In this way, personality processes have fundamental implications for adjustment and growth throughout adulthood and into old age.

Complementing the earlier chapters on positive personality development, self-regulation, and emotion regulation, Aldwin, Yancura, and Boeninger describe the development of coping across the life span in Chapter 9. As their first sentence states and their chapter compellingly shows, “coping and development are inextricably intertwined,” with coping both dependent on resources and helping in the maintenance and creation of well-being (see also Staudinger and Bowen, Chapter 8). Echoing Geldhof and colleagues’ multilevel approach, Aldwin and her colleagues’ analysis of coping and its development across the life span draws on evidence regarding neurocognitive, cognitive, social, and emotional development. Not content to simply list and describe different coping styles and their relative prominence at different points across the life span, Aldwin and colleagues propose that coping should be viewed as self-regulation and problem solving in stressful contexts, with individual capacities developing in response to the interaction among these three factors over time. Because it includes proactive and anticipatory cognitions, coping becomes a process that does not merely involve reactions to stress but also helps individuals to create environments and to influence the world to suit their needs. Like the authors of the preceding chapters, therefore, Aldwin and her colleagues provide an interactive perspective on development, viewing coping as the product of development as well as one of the processes driving development. They illustrate this by reference to the resilience-vulnerability trajectory, describing upward and downward spirals of coping with losses. Their analysis thus raises issues discussed in several other chapters, including Dante Cicchetti’s account of developmental psychopathology (Chapter 14), in which resilience is a central concept.

Gender, Friendship, and Intimate Relations across the Life Span

In Chapter 10, Hines discusses the development of gendered behavior across the life span. Echoing Chapters 2 and 3, Hines makes extended references to prenatal biological development, noting that exposure to and uptake of specific compounds at critical biological stages have enduring influences on both anatomy and behavior. It is important to note, however, that these prenatal biological processes are not the sole factors affecting gendered behavior and, at least in some cases, appear to affect members of one gender more than the other. Indeed, as Hines explains, the behavioral dispositions influenced by prenatal hormones are typically reinforced by individual experiences after birth, notably the efforts initiated by parents and reinforced by many others (including peers and teachers) to bring their children’s behavior in line with socially prescribed norms. As Hines points out, behavioral differences between males and females are actually much less pronounced than most people think and they are quite varied across cultures and historical eras. Unfortunately, the research literature has focused fairly narrowly on the beginning of the life span, with precious little attention paid to adulthood and old age. As in other cases when the literature is so uneven, we hope that this volume may prompt further research on the “forgotten” phases of the life span.

The need to belong has long been recognized as one of the most central human needs (e.g., Baumeister & Leary, 1995) and thus a fundamental component of life-span developmental science is an understanding of how people form relationships and how both the relationships and the processes develop and change across the life span. Echoing some themes raised by Porges and Carter (Chapter 2), the authors of the next two chapters both address relationship formation. Whereas Diamond, Fagundes, and Butterworth focus on intimate relations (Chapter 11), Antonucci, Fiori, Birditt, and J...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Preface
• Contributors
• CHAPTER 1 - Introduction
• CHAPTER 2 - Neurobiological Bases of Social Behavior across the Life Span
• CHAPTER 3 - The Development of Emotion Regulation: A Neuropsychological Perspective
• CHAPTER 4 - Dynamic Integration of Emotion and Cognition: Equilibrium ...
• CHAPTER 5 - Self-Regulation across the Life Span
• CHAPTER 6 - Self and Identity across the Life Span
• CHAPTER 7 - Temperament and Personality through the Life Span
• CHAPTER 8 - Life-Span Perspectives on Positive Personality Development in ...
• CHAPTER 9 - Coping across the Life Span
• CHAPTER 10 - Gendered Behavior across the Life Span
• CHAPTER 11 - Intimate Relationships across the Life Span
• CHAPTER 12 - Convoys of Social Relations: Integrating Life-Span and Life-Course Perspectives
• CHAPTER 13 - Achievement Motives and Goals: A Developmental Analysis Goals:
• CHAPTER 14 - Developmental Psychopathology
• CHAPTER 15 - Developing Civic Engagement within a Civic Context
• CHAPTER 16 - Religious and Spiritual Development across the Life Span
• Author Index
• Subject Index