Social Psychology

One of the most important questions about children's development involves how knowledge acquisition depends on the effect of language experience. To what extent, and in what ways, is a child's cognitive development influenced by their early experience of, and access to, language? Likewise, what are the effects on development of impaired access to language? This book confronts directly the issue of how possessing an enhanced or impaired access to language influences children's development. Its focus is on learning environments, theory of mind understanding, and the process of deriving meaning from conversations. The book features chapters which are concerned with bilingualism, deafness, atypical child development, and development in cultures with limited vocabularies in areas such as number concepts. Throughout, it maps out what is known about the interface between language and cognitive development and the prospects for the future directions in research and applied settings.

Research has traditionally shown high schools to be hostile environments for gay youth. Boys have used homophobia to prove their own masculinity and distance themselves from homosexuality. While this has been a consistent finding for over three decades, The Declining Significance of Homophobia tells a different story. Drawing on fieldwork and interviews of teenage boys in three British high schools, Dr. Mark McCormack shows how heterosexual male students’ attitudes toward their gay peers have dramatically improved. Heterosexual male students are proud of their pro-gay attitudes and friendship with openly gay students. Indeed, homosexuality is not an important variable in determining a boys’ popularity. However, The Declining Significance of Homophobia goes beyond documenting this important shift. It also examines how decreased homophobia results in the expansion of gendered behaviors available to teenage boys. Dr. McCormack shows that in these British schools, heterosexual boys are able to develop meaningful and loving friendships. Furthermore, their friendships span across different groups of boys, so that jocks can befriend those more concerned with their school work. These boys have replaced peer violence, misogyny and homophobia with hugging and emotional intimacy. Free from the constant threat of social marginalization, boys are able to speak about once-feminized activities without censure. Incisive and accessible, The Declining Significance of Homophobia is essential reading for all those interested in the damage that homophobia brings to both gay and straight youth. Whether teacher, parent, student or academic, you will find this research to be remarkably uplifting. The sophisticated analysis and accessible language make this a truly insightful examination of the changing nature of teenage masculinity.

This book is about digital spaces that can support positive youth development. This book is driven by values and by a sense of urgency —as the design of our digital landscape is increasingly guided by commercial purposes and not by developmental concerns. Designers of digital landscapes that promote positive development, must take into consideration the children’s social, emotional, cognitive, physical, civic and spiritual needs. But should also consider the unique design features of each technology and the practices and policies that shape different interactions in the digital landscape. Although this book is about new technologies, it is inspired by an old question: “How should we live?” This book presents an approach to help children gain the technological literacies of the 21st century while developing a sense of identity, values and purpose. Too often youth’s experiences with technology are framed in negative terms. This book acknowledges problems and risks, and takes an interventionist perspective. It invites readers to not only observe and describe the digital landscape, but to actively engage in co-designing it by focusing on positive behaviors that can be promoted by new technologies. Based on over a decade and a half of research, this book provides a theoretical framework for guiding the implementation of experiences that take advantage of new technologies to support learning and personal development, as well as examples from concrete experiences. These engage children in playful learning by supporting content creation, creativity, choices of conduct, communication, collaboration and community building. These are the six C’s proposed by the Positive Technological Development framework presented in this book. They can guide the design and the evaluation of experiences from early childhood to adolescence. This book offers a possible path to help children out of the playpens into the playgrounds of this technological era.

Deaf and hard-of-hearing individuals develop their identities within environments that convey and reinforce preconceived assumptions of what it means to hear or see the world differently. These assumptions ultimately influence identity evolution and psychological well-being. A Lens on Deaf Identities explores multiple factors, both past and present, with significance for deaf/hard-of-hearing identities. These factors include explanatory paradigms of how deaf and hard-of-hearing people are understood within the context of disability and sociolinguistics; the formal recognition of a Deaf culture and the emergence of bicultural frames of reference; the appearance of deaf identity theories in the psychological literature; the influence of families and schools, and historical and social contexts; the acknowledgment of diversity in this population; and the technology that affects the identity of deaf people in different ways (e.g., cochlear implants as bionic ears, telecommunications that bring deaf people together with each other as well as with hearing people, and advances in genetics that counter the acceptability of hearing differences). Personal experiences, theoretical formulations, and research data are used to examine interfaces within and between each of these areas and how the tensions emerging at these junctures influence deaf and hard-of-hearing identity formation in complex, multifaceted ways that defy pervasive stereotypes of deaf and hard-of-hearing persons. This book will appeal to readers interested in d/Deaf/hard-of-hearing lives, Deaf studies and deaf education, and those interested in identity formation in the presence of “disability”.

Nowadays, it is widely accepted that there is no single influence (be it nature or nurture) on cognitive development. Cognitive abilities emerge as a result of interactions between gene expression, cortical and subcortical brain networks, and environmental influences. In recent years, our study of neurodevelopmental disorders has provided much valuable information on how genes, brain development, behaviour, and environment interact to influence development from infancy to adulthood. This book presents evidence on development across the lifespan across these multiple levels of description (genetic, brain, cognitive, environmental). It chooses a well-defined disorder, Williams syndrome (WS), to explore the impact of genes, brain development, behaviour, as well as the individual's environment on development. WS is used as a model disorder to demonstrate the book's approach to understanding development, whilst being presented in comparison to other neurodevelopmental disorders — autism, developmental dyscalculia, Down syndrome, dyslexia, fragile X syndrome, Prader–Willi syndrome, Specific Language Impairment, Turner syndrome — to illustrate differences in development across neurodevelopmental disorders. WS is particularly informative for exploring development. Firstly, it has been extensively researched at multiple levels: genes, brain, cognition, and behaviour as well as in terms of the difficulties of daily living and social interaction. Secondly, it has been studied across the lifespan, with many studies on infants and toddlers with WS as well as a large number on children, adolescents, and adults. The book also explores a number of domain-general and domain-specific processes in the verbal, non-verbal, and social domains, across numerous neurodevelopmental disorders. This illustrates, among other factors, the importance of developmental timing, i.e., that the development of a cognitive skill at a specific timepoint can impact on subsequent development within that domain, but also across domains. In addition, the chapters discuss the value of investigating basic-level abilities from as close to the infant start-state as possible, presenting evidence of where cross-syndrome comparisons have shed light on the cascading impacts of subtle similarities and discrepancies in early delay or deviance, on subsequent development.

This book examines aspects of aging that are commonly overlooked by dominant conceptual models in gerontology, which focus on the observable, measurable, or “outside” dimensions of aging. Drawing on the emerging field of narrative gerontology, it provides conceptual-theoretical support to scholars of aging who are interested in bringing such topics as reminiscence and life review more into the center of gerontological inquiry. Although aging has often been framed in terms of a narrative of inevitable decline, a more positive portrayal of aging becomes possible as the focus is placed on the intricate psychological dimensions or “inside” of aging, and as the storied nature of human experience is taken explicitly into account. The book looks at aging as, potentially, a process of poeisis: a creative endeavor of fashioning meaning from the ever-accumulating, ever-thickening texts — memories and reflections — that constitute our inner worlds. At its center is the conviction that, although we are constantly reading our lives to some degree anyway, doing so in a mindful manner is critical to our development, or growth, in the second half of life. The book employs a narrative, and thus interdisciplinary, perspective to link together topics that have tended to be of marginal interest within mainstream gerontology, specifically memory, meaning, wisdom, and spirituality. It does this by exploring the convergence of ideas from literary theory regarding reader-response; of advances in neuroscience regarding the narrative basis of consciousness itself; and of thinking about narrative development and narrative identity within psychology, in particular the psychology of aging.