This book unites an interdisciplinary body of experts in child development whose research and ideas challenge existing theories and conventional clinical practice in a variety of domains of early child development. This unique volume fills a gap in existing developmental research and offers applications for clinical practice to professionals, students, and researchers in developmental, social, and educational psychology.

This volume in the JPS Series is intended to help crystallize the emergence of a new field, "Developmental Social Cognitive Neuroscience," aimed at elucidating the neural correlates of the development of socio-emotional experience and behavior. No one any longer doubts that infants are born with a biologically based head start in accomplishing their important life tasks--genetic resources, if you will, that are exploited differently in different contexts. Nevertheless, it is also true that socially relevant neural functions develop slowly during childhood and that this development is owed to complex interactions among genes, social and cultural environments, and children's own behavior. A key challenge lies in finding appropriate ways of describing these complex interactions and the way in which they unfold in real developmental time. This is the challenge that motivates research in developmental social cognitive neuroscience. The chapters in this book highlight the latest and best research in this emerging field, and they cover a range of topics, including the typical and atypical development of imitation, impulsivity, novelty seeking, risk taking, self and social awareness, emotion regulation, moral reasoning, and executive function. Also addressed are the potential limitations of a neuroscientific approach to the development of social cognition. Intended for researchers and advanced students in neuroscience and developmental, cognitive, and social psychology, this book is appropriate for graduate seminars and upper-level undergraduate courses on social cognitive neuroscience, developmental neuroscience, social development, and cognitive development.

This volume in the JPS Series is intended to help crystallize the emergence of a new field, "Developmental Social Cognitive Neuroscience," aimed at elucidating the neural correlates of the development of socio-emotional experience and behavior. No one any longer doubts that infants are born with a biologically based head start in accomplishing their important life tasks genetic resources, if you will, that are exploited differently in different contexts. Nevertheless, it is also true that socially relevant neural functions develop slowly during childhood and that this development is owed to complex interactions among genes, social and cultural environments, and children's own behavior. A key challenge lies in finding appropriate ways of describing these complex interactions and the way in which they unfold in real developmental time. This is the challenge that motivates research in developmental social cognitive neuroscience.

The chapters in this book highlight the latest and best research in this emerging field, and they cover a range of topics, including the typical and atypical development of imitation, impulsivity, novelty seeking, risk taking, self and social awareness, emotion regulation, moral reasoning, and executive function. Also addressed are the potential limitations of a neuroscientific approach to the development of social cognition.

Intended for researchers and advanced students in neuroscience and developmental, cognitive, and social psychology, this book is appropriate for graduate seminars and upper-level undergraduate courses on social cognitive neuroscience, developmental neuroscience, social development, and cognitive development.

The chapters collected in this volume represent the "state-of-the-art" of research on the development of intentional action and intentional understanding--topics that are at the intersection of current research on imitation, early understanding of mental states, goal-directed behavior in nonhuman animals, executive function, language acquisition, and narrative understanding, to name just a few of the relevant foci. Collectively, the contributors demonstrate that intentionality is a key issue in the cognitive and social sciences. Moreover, in a way that was anticipated more than a century ago by the seminal work of J. Mark Baldwin, they are beginning to reveal how the control of action is related in development to children's emerging self-conscious and their increasingly sophisticated appreciation of other people's perspectives.
This volume brings together the world's leading researchers on early social and cognitive development in an in-depth exploration of children's understanding of themselves and others.

This book unites an interdisciplinary body of experts in child development whose research and ideas challenge existing theories and conventional clinical practice in a variety of domains of early child development. This unique volume fills a gap in existing developmental research and offers applications for clinical practice to professionals, students, and researchers in developmental, social, and educational psychology.

Research in developmental psychology-which examines the history, origins, and causes of behavior and age-related changes in behavior-seeks to construct a complex, multi-level characterization of behavior as it unfolds in time across a range of time scales, from the milliseconds of reaction time to the days and weeks of childhood, the decades of the human lifespan, and even beyond, to multiple generations. Behavior, in this view, is embedded within what is essentially a dynamic system of relations extending deep within individuals. Thorough and engaging, this handbook explores the impact of this research on what is now known about psychological development, from birth to biological maturity, and it highlights the extent to which the most cutting-edge developmental science reflects a new kind of intellectual synthesis: one that reveals how cultural, social, cognitive, neural, and molecular processes work together to yield human behavior and changes in human behavior. With insightful contributions from more than 50 of the world's leading developmental scientists, these two volumes will serve as an influential and informed text for students and as an authoritative desk reference for years to come.

This Special Issue showcases some of the latest and best research in an important emerging field, developmental social neuroscience, which is focused on the nature and development of the mechanisms involved in socially relevant human behavior. Recent work on the neural correlates of empathy, prosocial and antisocial behavior, and inter-personal communication, for example, is transforming our view of human development by revealing complex interactions among genes and environment, including culture, that are shaping brain and behavior throughout life. This work, like research in social neuroscience more generally, is also causing scientists to reassess longstanding assumptions about the meaning of constructs and (false) dichotomies such as cognition versus emotion, and behavior versus brain. What emerges is a more holistic view of human beings as dynamic, multidimensional phenomena that are simultaneously cognitive and emotional, behavioral and neural, social and individual, depending on how you approach the phenomena and how you measure them.

A prominent feature of this new research is the use of multiple methods in order to make measurements at multiple levels of analysis. What distinguishes the studies included here from other recent work in social neuroscience is the adoption of a developmental approach. From a developmental perspective, human beings are viewed as dynamic organisms, continually in flux; an effort is made to document the ontogenetic time series. The hope is that a developmental approach will provide a more comprehensive and hence, more complete description of human social function; namely, one that includes an understanding of the actual causal mechanisms by which this function emerges.

This is a special issue of the Journal of Cognition and Development in honour of Katherine Nelson, and examines the areas of developmental/lifespan psychology.

Developmental theorists have struggled with defining the relations among biology, psychology, and sociocultural context, often reducing psychological functions of a person to either biological functioning or the role of sociocultural context - nature or nurture - and considering each area of human development separately. New Perspectives on Human Development addresses fundamental questions of development with a unified approach. It encompasses theory and research on cognitive, social and moral, and language and communicative development, in various stages of life, and explores interdisciplinary perspectives. New Perspectives on Human Development revisits old questions and applies original empirical findings, offering new directions for future research in the field.

The Cambridge Handbook of Consciousness is the first of its kind in the field, and its appearance marks a unique time in the history of intellectual inquiry on the topic. After decades during which consciousness was considered beyond the scope of legitimate scientific investigation, consciousness re-emerged as a popular focus of research towards the end of the last century, and it has remained so for nearly 20 years. There are now so many different lines of investigation on consciousness that the time has come when the field may finally benefit from a book that pulls them together and, by juxtaposing them, provides a comprehensive survey of this exciting field. An authoritative desk reference, which will also be suitable as an advanced textbook.

Research in developmental psychology-which examines the history, origins, and causes of behavior and age-related changes in behavior-seeks to construct a complex, multi-level characterization of behavior as it unfolds in time across a range of time scales, from the milliseconds of reaction time to the days and weeks of childhood, the decades of the human lifespan, and even beyond, to multiple generations. Behavior, in this view, is embedded within what is essentially a dynamic system of relations extending deep within individuals. Thorough and engaging, this handbook explores the impact of this research on what is now known about psychological development, from birth to biological maturity, and it highlights the extent to which the most cutting-edge developmental science reflects a new kind of intellectual synthesis: one that reveals how cultural, social, cognitive, neural, and molecular processes work together to yield human behavior and changes in human behavior. With insightful contributions from more than 50 of the world's leading developmental scientists, these two volumes will serve as an influential and informed text for students and as an authoritative desk reference for years to come.

Developmental theorists have struggled with defining the relations among biology, psychology, and sociocultural context, often reducing psychological functions of a person to either biological functioning or the role of sociocultural context - nature or nurture - and considering each area of human development separately. New Perspectives on Human Development addresses fundamental questions of development with a unified approach. It encompasses theory and research on cognitive, social and moral, and language and communicative development, in various stages of life, and explores interdisciplinary perspectives. New Perspectives on Human Development revisits old questions and applies original empirical findings, offering new directions for future research in the field.

The Cambridge Handbook of Consciousness is the first of its kind in the field, and its appearance marks a unique time in the history of intellectual inquiry on the topic. After decades during which consciousness was considered beyond the scope of legitimate scientific investigation, consciousness re-emerged as a popular focus of research towards the end of the last century, and it has remained so for nearly 20 years. There are now so many different lines of investigation on consciousness that the time has come when the field may finally benefit from a book that pulls them together and, by juxtaposing them, provides a comprehensive survey of this exciting field. An authoritative desk reference, which will also be suitable as an advanced textbook.