Psychology

This book presents a new theory of cognitive development in infancy, focusing on the processes through which perceptual information is transformed into concepts. Drawing on extensive research, the book explores preverbal conceptualization and shows how it forms the basis for both thought and language. It also emphasizes the importance of distinguishing automatic perceptual processes from attentive conceptualization, and argues that these two kinds of learning follow different principles, so it is crucial to specify the processes required by a given task. Countering both strong nativist and empiricist views, the book provides a markedly different perspective on early cognitive development, painting a new picture of the abilities and accomplishments of infants and the development of the mind.

Globally, young children bear the greatest burden of poverty, disease, neglect, and lack of educational opportunities. This volume’s goal is to promote evidence-based policies for advancing the positive development of young children everywhere, with a specific focus on developing countries. It brings scientific knowledge about early child development in both developed and developing countries to bear on international programs and policies that affect young children and families, focusing on the whole child. The evidence framework is presented from multiple disciplinary and analytical perspectives. The volume includes traditional sectoral approaches (e.g., health, nutrition, and education), as well as newer sectors such as child protection, social assistance, and child rights; and it addresses nongovernmental actors, such as community- and faith-based agencies, nonprint media, and the private sector. The volume also focuses on the “how to” of using evidence to address the greatest challenges to program quality, sustainability, and “scaling up"—the challenges of capacity building, governance, and finance. Also presented is a clear set of recommendations for future research, policy, and programmatic directions for the field, addressing not only the implications of evidence, but also recognizing the importance of including families and serving vulnerable and disadvantaged populations. The comprehensive nature of this book and its compelling use of evidence are thanks to its contributors—researchers, policymakers, and practitioners from around the world—and its organizational sponsorship by the Society for Research in Child Development (SRCD) and the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF), both leading organizations in promoting children’s well-being.

A tremendous outpouring of psychological research on sexual orientation has occurred in recent years, and interested readers have been hard-pressed to keep up with the pace of scholarship in this field. In particular, the last decade has seen a great increase in research on psychology and sexual orientation. This book contains a review of contemporary psychological research and theory on sexual orientation in their specific fields of work. The book is divided in four parts: concepts, theories, and perspectives; development over the life course; domains of experience; and communities and contextual issues. Individual chapters focus on topics such as bisexual and transgender identities, biological foundations of sexual orientation, emergent adulthood in lesbian and gay lives, same-sex romantic relationships, sexual orientation and mental health, family formation and parenthood, sexual orientation and hate crimes, and race and ethnicity among lesbian, gay, and bisexual communities, along with many more relevant areas.

Currently enrolling approximately 900,000 poor children each year, Head Start has served 25 million children and their families since it was established 43 years ago. Presidents and policymakers have embraced and scorned it. At times, scientists have misguided it and the media has misunderstood it. Despite its longevity and renown, much of Head Start's story has never been disclosed to the general public. This book gives a detailed account of the remarkable program, surveying projects that were forerunners of Head Start, its birth during the Johnson administration, its fate during the presidency of George W. Bush, and the many years between; as well as what the future may hold in store for it. The authors offer an inside view of the program's decades of service, detailing the ever-changing waves of politics, ideology, science, media interest, and public mood, which oftentimes threatened the program's very existence. Providing a balanced assessment of Head Start's effectiveness, which has been a matter of debate since its inception, this study strives to answer questions that continue to pervade discussions about the program and its future. For example, why is Head Start, a leader of early childhood services, still struggling to prove itself? Why does it serve such a narrow segment of the population? And how can Head Start continue its mission, as universal pre-school becomes a reality?

How do we manage to speak and understand language? How do children acquire these skills and how does the brain support them? These psycholinguistic issues have been studied for more than two centuries. Though many Psycholinguists tend to consider their history as beginning with the Chomskyan ‘cognitive revolution’ of the late 1950s/1960s, the history of empirical psycholinguistics actually goes back to the end of the eighteenth century. This book tells the fascinating history of the doctors, pedagogues, linguists, and psychologists who created this discipline, looking at how they made their important discoveries about the language regions in the brain, about the high-speed accessing of words in speaking and listening, on the child's invention of syntax, on the disruption of language in aphasic patients and so much more. Psycholinguistics has four historical roots, which, by the end of the nineteenth century, had merged. By then, the discipline, usually called the psychology of language, was established. The first root was comparative linguistics, which raised the issue of the psychological origins of language. The second root was the study of language in the brain, with Franz Gall as the pioneer and the Broca and Wernicke discoveries as major landmarks. The third root was the diary approach to child development, which emerged from Rousseau's Émile. The fourth root was the experimental laboratory approach to speech and language processing, which originated from Franciscus Donders' mental chronometry. Wilhelm Wundt unified these four approaches in his monumental Die Sprache of 1900. These four perspectives of psycholinguistics continued into the twentieth century but in quite divergent frameworks. There was German consciousness and thought psychology, Swiss/French and Prague/Viennese structuralism, Russian and American behaviorism, and almost aggressive holism in aphasiology. As well as reviewing all these perspectives, the book looks at the deep disruption of the field during the Third Reich and its optimistic, multidisciplinary re-emergence during the 1950s with the mathematical theory of communication as a major impetus.

This book provides a review of key studies that have shaped the way we view homophobia in educational contexts. Using theories and ideas drawn from various disciplines, the book demonstrates how bullying is a complex social process wherein perpetrators are supported by active confederates, passive bystanders and indifferent onlookers. Homophobic Bullying includes primary data drawn from various studies that have been conducted together with discussions of key studies conducted by other international researchers. A key feature of this book is the integration of primary quantitative and qualitative data, case studies from parents, and reports of recent legal actions. Exemplar lesson plans developed for the U.K. education system are provided. Finally, this book looks to the future and the changing face of schools, the gradual erosion of homophobia as an accepted ‘norm’ within society and the insitutions that train future generations.

Studies of language acquisition often assume that children will simply begin to learn language, without questioning what sets the whole process in motion. This book examines the often-neglected topic of how children discover the possibility of language and demonstrates that pre-language development involves a dynamic system of social, cognitive, and vocal variables that come together to enable the transition to referential language. The relationship with a caregiver is integral to this development because language is a system of symbolic communication that can emerge only with children's recognition that they are separate from others. This book sees language learning as constructed equally from needing to develop meanings and learning to produce the sounds sequences that represent them. In order for this dual construction to be effective, however, children must discover their capacity to refer to objects and events in the world by having their internal states of focused attention accompanied by an autonomic, physiologically based vocalization, which is the grunt that results from physical or mental effort. When the grunt is intensified and directed at a conversational partner, as when children attempt to convey an internal state, it becomes their first protoword.

This book provides qualitative researchers with a guide to inquiry that learns from, with and about children.  From fieldwork done during participant observation, to focus groups and depth interviews, to the use of artwork, photography, play and metaphors, viable methods to foreground children’s views are featured. The tools for child-centered research and its interpretation are drawn from both academic and applied qualitative inquiry, providing broad instruction across a range of kid-attuned approaches. The book takes stock of a blossoming world-wide child-centered research movement, and its promise of better grasping children’s lives. Child-focused inquiry, the book insists, has relevance to both academic theory and practical application, including public policy.

Everyone longs for the ideal love, but as the song goes, love hurts. This book is about the romantic ideology of love and the ironic dangers that goes with it. The chapters argue that romantic ideology implies extreme behavior. Love is generally considered a moral, altruistic, and well-intentioned emotion; however, this idealized notion of love is far from realistic. People have committed the most horrific crimes in the name of the altruistic ideals of religion and love. Even if popular media depicts that love is all we need, recent statistics in the United States show a remarkable number of the victims of love. There is a reported increase in the number of sufferers depression and suicide after a bad breakup or divorce. This book includes a major case study concerning men who have murdered their wives or partners allegedly ‘out of love’. It is estimated that over 30% of all female murder victims in the US die at the hands of a former or present spouse or boyfriend. Killing the one you love is not an example of ‘loving too much’ but of how love can go wrong when totalitarianism and extremism, rather than compromise and accommodation, are the guiding principles. The murderous dictator who proclaims that he ‘loves his people too much’ fits neatly into this category.

The cognitive revolution in the 1950s and 1960s led researchers to view the human mind like a computer—an information-processing system that encodes, represents, and stores information and is constrained by limits on hardware (the brain) and software (learning strategies and rules). The emergence of new behavioral, computational, and neuroscience methodologies, has deeply expanded psychologists' understanding of the workings of the infant, child, and adult mind. One result is that research has focused on the mechanisms of change, over developmental time, in the information-processing mind. This book brings together the recent findings and theories about the origins and early development of the information-processing mind, and provides insight into the future directions in the study of infant perception and cognition. The contributions represent a wide-range of research area in the study of infant perception and cognition, which emphasize the use of diverse methodological techniques to address key questions about development. The chapters demonstrate how the combination of historical perspectives on the information-processing approach to cognition and recent advances in behavioral, computational, and neuroscience approaches to cognition has contributed to our understanding of how abilities ranging from visual attention to face processing to object categorization have developed during infancy. Across this broad range of topics, it is clear that much of our modern understanding of infant perceptual and cognitive development emerges from the foundation of classic information-processing models of development, such as that of Leslie B. Cohen (1991). The recent advances illustrated in this book show how researchers have built on this foundation to uncover the mechanisms that drive developmental change.