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 1: Cognition, Biology, and Methods 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 of the biological and cognitive aspects of human change across the lifespan.
Richard M. Lerner is the Bergstrom Chair in Applied Developmental Science and the Director of the Institute for Applied Research in Youth Development in the Eliot-Pearson Department of Child Development at Tufts University. A developmental psychologist, he has been a fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences and is a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the American Psychological Association, and the American Psychological Society. Lerner is the author or editor of 65 books and more than 450 scholarly articles and chapters.
Dr. Willis (Bill) F. Overton is the Thaddeus Lincoln Bolton Professor of Psychology at Temple University in Philadelphia, PA. Dr. Overton has been Editor ofMonographs of the Society for Research in Child Development; Associate Editor ofDevelopmental Psychology, and board member of many developmental and cognitive-developmental journals.
Preface ix
Contributors xviii
1 Life-Span Development: Concepts and Issues 1
2 Emphasizing Intraindividual Variability in the Study of Development Over the Life Span: Concepts and Issues 30
3 What Life-Span Data Do We Really Need? 55
4 Brain Development: An Overview 89
5 Biology, Evolution, and Psychological Development 115
6 The Dynamic Development of Thinking, Feeling, and Acting over the Life Span 149
7 Structure and Process in Life-Span Cognitive Development 195
8 Fluid Cognitive Abilities and General Intelligence: A Life-Span Neuroscience Perspective 226
9 Memory Development across the Life Span 259
10 The Development of Mental Processing 306
11 The Development of Representation and Concepts 346
12 Development of Deductive Reasoning across the Life Span 391
13 Development of Executive Function across the Life Span 431
14 Language Development 467
15 Self-Regulation: Integration of Cognition and Emotion 509
16 The Development of Morality: Reasoning, Emotions, and Resistance 554
17 The Development of Social Understanding: A Relational Perspective 584
18 The Emergence of Consciousness and Its Role in Human Development 628
19 The Development of Knowing 671
20 Spatial Development 720
21 Gesturing across the Life Span 754
22 Developmental PsychopathologySelf, Embodiment, Meaning: A Holistic-Systems Perspective 792
23 The Meaning of Wisdom and Its Development Throughout Life 837
24 Thriving across the Life Span 882
Author Index 927
Subject Index 971