Handbook of Child Psychology and Developmental Science, Socioemotional Processes

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• Publisher: Wiley
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781118953891
• Edition: 7
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Psychotherapy
• Index: Psychology

The essential reference for human development theory, updated and reconceptualized

The Handbook of Child Psychology and Developmental Science, a four-volume reference, is the field-defining work to which all others are compared. First published in 1946, and now in its Seventh Edition, the Handbook has long been considered the definitive guide to the field of developmental science.

Volume 3: Social, Emotional, and Personality Development presentsup-to-date knowledge and theoretical understanding of the several facets of social, emotional and personality processes. The volume emphasizes that any specific processes, function, or behavior discussed in the volume co-occurs alongside and is inextricably affected by the dozens of other processes, functions, or behaviors that are the focus of other researchers' work. As a result, the volume underscores the importance of a focus on the whole developing child and his or her sociocultural and historical environment.

• Understand the multiple processes that are interrelated in personality development
• Discover the individual, cultural, social, and economic processes that contribute to the social, emotional, and personality development of individuals
• Learn about the several individual and contextual contributions to the development of such facets of the individual as morality, spirituality, or aggressive/violent behavior
• Study the processes that contribute to the development of gender, sexuality, motivation, and social engagement

The scholarship within this volume and, as well, across the four volumes of this edition, illustrate that developmental science is in the midst of a very exciting period. There is a paradigm shift that involves increasingly greater understanding of how to describe, explain, and optimize the course of human life for diverse individuals living within diverse contexts. This Handbook is the definitive reference for educators, policy-makers, researchers, students, and practitioners in human development, psychology, sociology, anthropology, and neuroscience.

Chapter 1
Processes Underlying Social, Emotional, and Personality Development

A Preliminary Survey of the Terrain

Michael E. Lamb

Introduction

Cross-Cutting Conceptual Issues

Organizational Developmental Contextualism

The Focus on Individual Differences

Diversity and Internationalism

Prominent Phases of Development

Outline of the Volume

Conclusions

References

Introduction

The aim of this volume is to provide a comprehensive assessment of developmental scientific scholarship in relation to social, emotional, and personality development. As with the other volumes in this Handbook, contributing authors were selected on the basis of their ability to summarize and synthesize what is known about their designated topics while identifying crucial issues that seem destined to become the focus of important theory-driven research in the years ahead. Whereas contributors to the first edition of this Handbook (then, the Manual of Child Psychology; Carmichael, 1946) could plausibly claim to have surveyed and cited essentially all scholarly work on their chosen topics, the voluminous literature that has accumulated with increasing pace in the decades since has made that aspiration not only impossible but also undesirable. Readers need informed guidance when either distinguishing between truly important and mundane contributions or discerning those interesting and important lines of inquiry likely to dominate scholarship in the immediate future. Time alone will tell whether our contributors have been prescient, but every reader can recognize the authors' mastery, synthetic ability, and interpretive perspectives.

The 22 chapters that follow provide authoritative and eloquent introductions to topics that lie at the forefront of contemporary scholarship, and it would be impossible to do justice to their richness, originality, or points of intersection in this brief introduction. Instead, my goal is considerably more modest. In the next section, I draw attention to four overarching themes explored and illustrated in the chapters that follow. Thereafter, I briefly introduce each of the chapters, drawing attention to key themes or insights, especially those that might represent useful points of intersection or cross reference for readers and scholars eager to reassemble the developmental science necessarily disaggregated into the more manageably sized chunks and topically organized chapters of which this volume is comprised.

Cross-Cutting Conceptual Issues

The contributors to this volume explore a variety of topics, but their chapters share a number of significant features that are briefly highlighted in this introductory chapter.

Organizational Developmental Contextualism

Like contributors to the other volumes in the seventh edition of the Handbook of Child Psychology and Developmental Science, the contributors to this volume have all embraced organizational developmental contextual frameworks to guide their conceptualization of ontogenetic processes (see Overton & Molenaar, Chapter 1, this Handbook, Volume 1, for a discussion of the relational developmental systems paradigm within which these frameworks are conceptually embedded). This nearly universal convergence of theoretical orientation is noteworthy, representing as it does the transformation of a subdiscipline that was once dominated by the proponents and adherents of grand theories. Viewed in retrospect, there is little doubt that the research motivated by the grand theorists and conducted by themselves and their acolytes enormously advanced our understanding of human development, as documented in many of the landmark chapters published in previous editions of the Handbook/Manual, all the way back to the first edition in the Wiley series published about 70 years ago. By the same token, the steady accumulation of evidence held the keys to the destruction of these grand theoretical edifices, as it became apparent that their ability to account for significant portions of the variance in developmental outcomes left most of the variance unexplained.

One response to this realization was to incorporate ideas and findings central to competing theoretical frameworks, simultaneously expanding researchers' ability to explain aspects of development while undermining the purity and coherence of specific theoretical approaches. As documented more fully and eloquently in Volume 1, the frameworks that have since evolved reflect awareness that development is multiply determined and that single-minded focus on any one type of influence is almost certainly misleadingly incomplete. Instead, as several contributors show in the chapters that follow, human development is shaped by both those species-specific and individually differentiating biological processes that are the product of evolutionary and intergenerational transmission; that these biogenic propensities are shaped by sociogenic experiences of ancestors and of the individuals themselves from the time of conception; that each individual's phenomenological construction of interactions and relationships from the onset of postnatal life, constrained as they are by cognitive developmental structures, condition the effects of social experience on the developing sense of self and on a range of behavioral propensities; and that the behavior and beliefs of both the socialization agents and developing children are profoundly influenced by dynamically changing aspects of the behavioral and sociocultural context. It remains to be seen whether developmental scientists can create one or more theoretical frameworks that simultaneously represent and recognize the complexity of human developmental processes while generating testable predictions and hypotheses.

Few developmental scientists would contest the evidence regarding the importance of each of the formative factors mentioned above, although researchers (like the contributors to this volume) tend to focus their attention selectively on a subset of the formatively significant factors. This strategy has fueled explosive growth in the number of published papers exploring aspects of social, emotional, and personality development. The absence of strict and definitive theoretical predictions, however, have allowed researchers to focus attention on easily answered questions while sidestepping the more theoretically challenging and (often) more central questions. Whether developmental science continues to advance our understanding of human behavior in the next few decades will depend, in large part, on the success of efforts to address these complex but seldom explored interdisciplinary questions about poorly understood and vaguely described developmental processes. Readers who are so motivated will find the following chapters invaluable, because all of the authors have clearly identified not only what we (as a discipline) currently know and believe, but also what questions need to be framed and addressed if we are to advance our collective understanding.

The Focus on Individual Differences

The ascendance to prominence of the organizational contextual developmental framework was potentiated by a shift in the 1970s from a focus on normative aspects of social, emotional, and personality development to an emphasis on individual differences, a shift that made evident the inability of any of the grand theories to account for the rich diversity of developmental trajectories and outcomes that were readily apparent. This concern with individual differences continues to the present, and dominates each of the chapters in this volume, although the contributing authors painstakingly analyze the factors accounting for individual differences in the context of normative processes, thereby creating more coherent and persuasive portraits of human developmental processes than would otherwise be the case.

Diversity and Internationalism

By the same token, the nearly universal embrace of the developmental organizational contextual approach is responsible for another common feature of these chapters: Recognition that developmental trajectories and contexts are extremely diverse despite the fact that most of our knowledge has been derived from studies of individuals growing up in a small number of quite unrepresentative socioecological contexts. Although developmental science is an increasingly international field, as the list of contributors makes clear, it has long been dominated by the United States, with disproportionate representation of research participants from relatively advantaged White European American backgrounds. Relative to that template, scholars decades ago began bemoaning the implicit assumption that those whose backgrounds deviated from this norm must be deficient in some ways, although serious focus on representative populations emerged much later, and until two decades ago, children growing up outside the United States were seldom studied except, on rare occasions, when select groups of children from other countries were misleadingly portrayed as representative of comparison cultures.

Meaningful cross-cultural research is increasingly common today, fortunately, supported by a growing number of developmental scientists who grew up outside North America, and the urgent need to recognize and study more diverse groups within and outside the United States is universally recognized. Although concerns with diversity have not animated scholarship on all aspects of developmental science equally, as perusal of the following chapters makes clear, it is widely recognized as a pressing need, and the amount of attention to this topic provides a sharp point of distinction between contributions to this as opposed to earlier editions of this Handbook.

Prominent Phases of Development

One final historical change that also deserves mention is the phase of development accorded the greatest attention by researchers and scholars. During the 1960s, students of social, emotional, and personality development focused most attention on children in early to middle childhood. There was relatively little concern with infancy, and when adolescents were studied, they were the university students who could easily be surveyed by instructors doubling as researchers. In the 1970s, however, the focus switched to infancy, driven in part by the publication of Bowlby's (1969) seminal treatise on attachment theory and the resultant spirited debates between attachment and social learning theorists about the ways in which early social relationships shaped development. Over the ensuing decades, the focus on infancy has declined and scholars have increasingly recognized the importance of adolescence, with more recent recognition that the newly designated phase, early adulthood, might deserve much more attention than it has been accorded hitherto. Readers of this volume will accordingly observe that the contributing authors have predominantly focused on childhood and subsequent phases of development rather than on the earliest years of life. There are significant exceptions, however, with many contributors emphasizing the formative importance of infancy for aspects of development more typically associated with (and studied in) later years of life.

Outline of the Volume

Contrasts between earlier editions and the seventh abound, and the differences are perhaps most dramatic and obvious when examining the methods employed by researchers seeking to explore social, emotional, and personality development. Particularly when seeking to understand the infant's mind, earlier generations relied on parental reports, fanciful speculation, and the occasional observational diary kept by distinguished biographers such as Darwin, Piaget, and Preyer. Only in the 1960s did researchers begin to deploy techniques such as visual preference and habituation paradigms to explore infant abilities and tendencies, especially in the perceptual realm, as evident in Kessen, Haith, and Salapatek's (1970) masterful and encyclopedic contribution to the third edition of the Handbook/Manual published the year after Bowlby's (1969) influential book on attachment and before the resultant wave of research on infant social and emotional development crested. Fittingly, the present volume—like the first in the Wiley series in 1946—opens with a broad and engaging introduction to the ingenious ways in which contemporary developmental scientists study social and emotional behavior in their efforts to elucidate developmental processes. In their chapter, Brownell, Lemerise, Pelphrey, and Roisman (Chapter 2) describe in turn how and why researchers use observational, verbal report, and psychobiological measurement strategies, the strengths and weaknesses associated with each of these, and how researchers can maximize the reliability and validity of the information they obtain. Brownell and her colleagues make clear that the most useful insights have come, and surely will come in the future, from research driven by clear theories and hypotheses and from studies employing multiple complementary methods, rather than any single approach, with its inevitable weaknesses and limitations. Sadly, a scan of most journal tables of contents reveals how frequently contemporary researchers ignore these fundamental admonitions, whereas close readers of later chapters will observe just how frequently the seminal and enduring contributions to the scholarly literature are all marked by careful adherence to Brownell and colleagues' admonitions and guidance. Where Chapter 2 underscores the role of sound methodology in the generation of knowledge and understanding, Chapter 3 addresses a topic typically dominated by atheoretical and jumbled observation by illustrating the transcendent value of coherent and organizing theoretical frameworks. Specifically, Coall, Callan, Dickins, and Chisholm richly document how the prenatal period of human development has implications for later development by drawing on an evolutionary life history approach. Whereas evolutionary psychologists are often criticized for using a caricature of evolutionary theory to generate post-hoc and untestable explanations of contemporary human behavior, Coall and his colleagues powerfully demonstrate how a thorough understanding of biological processes at both the population and molecular levels (and everywhere in between) allows us to conceptualize the dynamic nature of the relationship between gestating mothers and the organisms (concepti, fetuses) growing within them in a coherent way that explains why, how, and how much experiences during the prenatal period influence later individual development, as well as the development of offspring and subsequent generations of descendants.

In recounting formative prenatal processes (which were, coincidentally, the focus of Carmichael's own contributions to the 1946, 1954, and 1970 editions of the manual that once bore his name), Coall and his colleagues focus attention on the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal (HPA) axis that, among other things, modulates and mediates reactions to psychological challenges and stresses. Discussion of the HPA axis is also at the heart of Chapter 4, in which Gunnar, Doom, and Esposito introduce and explain the conceptualization of the psychoneuroendocrinology of stress. As noted by Brownell and her colleagues in Chapter 2, developmentalists (along with many other psychologists and neuroscientists) have taken advantage of the ease with which cortisol levels can be assessed noninvasively to add measures of cortisol to studies in which stress might be anticipated or feared. Gunnar and her colleagues clearly document how much we have learned about the developing HPA axis and its role in mediating individual reactions to psychological challenges. As we might expect, a burgeoning understa...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Table of Contents
• Dedication
• Foreword to the Handbook of Child Psychology and Developmental Science, Seventh Edition
• Preface
• Volume 3 Preface
• Contributors
• Chapter 1: Processes Underlying Social, Emotional, and Personality Development: A Preliminary Survey of the Terrain
• Chapter 2: Measuring Socioemotional Development
• Chapter 3: Evolution and Prenatal Development: An Evolutionary Perspective
• Chapter 4: Psychoneuroendocrinology of Stress: Normative Development and Individual Differences
• Chapter 5: Temperament and Personality
• Chapter 6: Relationships, Regulation, and Early Development
• Chapter 7: Resilience and Adversity
• Chapter 8: Socioemotional Consequences of Illness and Disability
• Chapter 9: Developmental Implications of Discrimination
• Chapter 10: Race, Class, and Ethnicity in Young Adulthood
• Chapter 11: Socioemotional Development in Changing Families
• Chapter 12: Children and the Law
• Chapter 13: Child Maltreatment
• Chapter 14: A Social Perspective on Theory of Mind
• Chapter 15: Prosocial Development
• Chapter 16: Development of Achievement Motivation and Engagement
• Chapter 17: Origins and Development of Morality
• Chapter 18: Development of the Self
• Chapter 19: Aggressive and Violent Behavior
• Chapter 20: Gendered Development
• Chapter 21: The Development of Sexuality
• Chapter 22: Friendships, Romantic Relationships, and Peer Relationships
• Chapter 23: Religious and Spiritual Development
• Author Index
• Subject Index
• End User License Agreement