Here is a book that challenges the very basis of the way psychologists have studied child development. According to Urie Bronfenbrenner, one of the world’s foremost developmental psychologists, laboratory studies of the child’s behavior sacrifice too much in order to gain experimental control and analytic rigor. Laboratory observations, he argues, too often lead to “the science of the strange behavior of children in strange situations with strange adults for the briefest possible periods of time.” To understand the way children actually develop, Bronfenbrenner believes that it will be necessary to observe their behavior in natural settings, while they are interacting with familiar adults over prolonged periods of time. This book offers an important blueprint for constructing such a new and ecologically valid psychology of development. The blueprint includes a complete conceptual framework for analysing the layers of the environment that have a formative influence on the child. This framework is applied to a variety of settings in which children commonly develop, ranging from the pediatric ward to daycare, school, and various family configurations. The result is a rich set of hypotheses about the developmental consequences of various types of environments. Where current research bears on these hypotheses, Bronfenbrenner marshals the data to show how an ecological theory can be tested. Where no relevant data exist, he suggests new and interesting ecological experiments that might be undertaken to resolve current unknowns. Bronfenbrenner’s groundbreaking program for reform in developmental psychology is certain to be controversial. His argument flies in the face of standard psychological procedures and challenges psychology to become more relevant to the ways in which children actually develop. It is a challenge psychology can ill-afford to ignore.

"A leading cognitive scientist argues that a deep sense of good and evil is bred in the bone. From Sigmund Freud to Lawrence Kohlberg, psychologists have long believed that we begin life as amoral animals. After all, isn't it the parents' role to turn babies into civilized beings who can experience empathy and shame, and override selfish impulses? In Just Babies, Paul Bloom argues that humans are in fact hardwired with a sense of morality. Drawing upon years of original research at his Yale lab, he shows that babies and toddlers can judge the goodness and badness of others' actions; that they act to soothe those in distress; and that they feel guilt, shame, pride, and righteous anger. Yet this innate morality is tragically limited. Our natural strong moral feelings toward those in our own group--same family, same race--are offset by ingrained dislike, even hatred, of those in different groups. Put more simply, we are natural-born bigots. Vivid and intellectually probing, Just Babies argues that through intelligence and creativity we can transcend the primitive sense of morality we are born with. This erudite yet accessible book will captivate readers of Steven Pinker, Philip Zimbardo, and Robert Wright"--

Through the evaluation and integration of developmental theories, this volume proposes a new structural/behavioral model of development. Dr. Horowitz's model helps account for both the behavioral development of children (with extensions across the life-span) and for the universal and non-universal characteristics in human behavioral development. Exploring Developmental Theories also sheds a new and different light on the nature- nurture or heredity-environment controversy and on the topic of continuity and discontinuity in development. Exploring Developmental Theories: *examines the concepts of stage, structure, and systems; organismic theory; and general system theory; *analyzes open and closed systems as well as organismic and mechanistic world views; *integrates the concepts associated with organismic and mechanist world views; *examines learning mechanisms and processes that foster the acquisition of behavior, and *discusses the strengths and weaknesses of Gessel, Piaget, and behaviorism in accounting for behavioral development.