This volume posits two theories of behavioral pediatrics: that scientific and clinical study of organism--environment transactions requires investigators to alter recognize the importance of systemic models over mechanistic models; and that attention must be given to environmental contexts of development, and to the events in the environment that trigger and regulate the organization, development, and expression of human behavior.

Volume 1 of Theory and Research in Belwvioral Pediatrics drew attention to issues related to the assessment of the preterm infant, to organizational processes in infant development, and to the systemic nature of caregiver-infant relationships. Vol- ume 2 continued the theme of systemic organization while ex- amining various contextual and ecological factors that affect development during infancy and childhood. Volume 3 con- tinues these themes. Interdisciplinary and cross-disciplinary studies, cross-cul- tural comparisons, prospective longitudinal designs, and so- phisticated multivariate correlational models have encouraged developmentalists to formulate new conceptualizations of the dynamic relationships among those organismic, transactional, and ecological variables that regulate organizational processes. As a result, many traditional models of development have been discarded or, at minimum, have been markedly transformed. Similarly, many time-honored "facts" of development have been seriously challenged both theoretically and empirically. In Chapter 1, Philip R. Zelazo challenges traditional ap- proaches to infant developmental assessment. Zelazo goes a step beyond noting the poor predictive validity of infant devel- opmental examinations, by arguing that such examinations bias the evaluation of infants with handicapping conditions. The emphasis in standard developmental examinations on motor performance, receptive language, and behavioral compliance Vll Vlll PREFACE works against infants whose handicapping conditions involve neuromotor, attentional, or auditory dysfunctions. Zelazo's pro- posed alternative is to directly assess mental activity using cog- nitive-behavioral measures of mental competence derived from central processing models of schema formation.

Volume 1 of Theory and Research in Belwvioral Pediatrics drew attention to issues related to the assessment of the preterm infant, to organizational processes in infant development, and to the systemic nature of caregiver-infant relationships. Vol- ume 2 continued the theme of systemic organization while ex- amining various contextual and ecological factors that affect development during infancy and childhood. Volume 3 con- tinues these themes. Interdisciplinary and cross-disciplinary studies, cross-cul- tural comparisons, prospective longitudinal designs, and so- phisticated multivariate correlational models have encouraged developmentalists to formulate new conceptualizations of the dynamic relationships among those organismic, transactional, and ecological variables that regulate organizational processes. As a result, many traditional models of development have been discarded or, at minimum, have been markedly transformed. Similarly, many time-honored "facts" of development have been seriously challenged both theoretically and empirically. In Chapter 1, Philip R. Zelazo challenges traditional ap- proaches to infant developmental assessment. Zelazo goes a step beyond noting the poor predictive validity of infant devel- opmental examinations, by arguing that such examinations bias the evaluation of infants with handicapping conditions. The emphasis in standard developmental examinations on motor performance, receptive language, and behavioral compliance Vll Vlll PREFACE works against infants whose handicapping conditions involve neuromotor, attentional, or auditory dysfunctions. Zelazo's pro- posed alternative is to directly assess mental activity using cog- nitive-behavioral measures of mental competence derived from central processing models of schema formation.

The cries of infants and children are familiar to essentially all adults, and we all have our own common sense notions of the meanings of various cries at each age level. As is often the case, in the study of various aspects ofhuman behavior we often investigate what seems self evident to the general public. For example, if an infant cries, he or she needs atttention;if the cry is different than usual, he or she is sick; and when we areupsetby othermatters, children's crying can be very annoy ing. As a pediatric clinician often faced with discussing with parents their concerns or lack of them with respect to their children's crying, these usual commonsense interpretations were frequently inadequate. As this book illustrates, when we investigate such everyday behaviors as children's crying and adults' responses to crying, the nature of the problem becomes surprisingly complex. As a pediatrician working in the newborn nursery early in my career, I knew from pediatric textbooks and from nursery nurses, that newborn infants with high, piercing cries were often abnormal. In order to teach this interestingphenomenon to others and tounderstand under what circumstances it occurred, I found I needed to know what consti tuted a high-pitched cry or even a normal cry, for that matter, and how often this occurred with sick infants. Certainly I saw sick infants who did not have high-pitched cries, but I still wonderedif their cries were deviant in some other way."

How are children who have experienced adversity able to function competently? Why do some children appear to be resilient?

These fascinating, complex, and puzzling questions have been studied mostly from a behavioral and psychosocial perspective. Advances in neuroscience provide the opportunity to bring neurobiology to the study of resilience and to ask whether our knowledge of neurobiological processes and mechanisms can contribute to our understanding of resilience.

The goals of this volume are to examine both the behavioral-psychosocial and neurobiological aspects of resilience and to help move the field toward a model that integrates these two perspectives. The integration of the behavioral-psychosocial aspects with the "new biology" of resilience will provide an unprecedented understanding of processes of development in atypically and typically developing children and will have profound implications for preventive intervention programs.

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