How we raise young children is one of today's most highly personalized and sharply politicized issues, in part because each of us can claim some level of "expertise." The debate has intensified as discoveries about our development-in the womb and in the first months and years-have reached the popular media. How can we use our burgeoning knowledge to assure the well-being of all young children, for their own sake as well as for the sake of our nation? Drawing from new findings, this book presents important conclusions about nature-versus-nurture, the impact of being born into a working family, the effect of politics on programs for children, the costs and benefits of intervention, and other issues. The committee issues a series of challenges to decision makers regarding the quality of child care, issues of racial and ethnic diversity, the integration of children's cognitive and emotional development, and more. Authoritative yet accessible, From Neurons to Neighborhoods presents the evidence about "brain wiring" and how kids learn to speak, think, and regulate their behavior. It examines the effect of the climate-family, child care, community-within which the child grows.

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From Neurons to Neighborhoods: The Science of Early Childhood Development

From the Publisher:
The old opposition of matter versus mind stubbornly persists in the way we study mind and brain. In treating cognition as problem solving, Andy Clark suggests, we may often abstract too far from the very body and world in which our brains evolved to guide us. Whereas the mental has been treated as a realm that is distinct from the body and the world, Clark forcefully attests that a key to understanding brains is to see them as controllers of embodied activity. From this paradigm shift he advances the construction of a cognitive science of the embodied mind.

/pdf/being-there-putting-brain-body-and-world-together-again-31tt4y51ml.pdf

Being There: Putting Brain, Body, and World Together Again

Emotion and Adaptation

One of life's great challenges is successfully regulating emotions. Do some emotion regulation strategies have more to recommend them than others? According to Gross's (1998, Review of General Psychology, 2, 271-299) process model of emotion regulation, strategies that act early in the emotion-generative process should have a different profile of consequences than strategies that act later on. This review focuses on two commonly used strategies for down-regulating emotion. The first, reappraisal, comes early in the emotion-generative process. It consists of changing the way a situation is construed so as to decrease its emotional impact. The second, suppression, comes later in the emotion-generative process. It consists of inhibiting the outward signs of inner feelings. Experimental and individual-difference studies find reappraisal is often more effective than suppression. Reappraisal decreases emotion experience and behavioral expression, and has no impact on memory. By contrast, suppression decreases behavioral expression, but fails to decrease emotion experience, and actually impairs memory. Suppression also increases physiological responding for suppressors and their social partners. This review concludes with a consideration of five important directions for future research on emotion regulation processes.

https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdf/10.1017/S0048577201393198

Emotion regulation: Affective, cognitive, and social consequences

There is disagreement in the literature about the exact nature of the phenomenon of empathy. There are emotional, cogni- tive, and conditioning views, applying in varying degrees across species. An adequate description of the ultimate and proximate mecha- nism can integrate these views. Proximately, the perception of an object's state activates the subject's corresponding representations, which in turn activate somatic and autonomic responses. This mechanism supports basic behaviors (e.g., alarm, social facilitation, vicar- iousness of emotions, mother-infant responsiveness, and the modeling of competitors and predators) that are crucial for the reproduc- tive success of animals living in groups. The Perception-Action Model (PAM), together with an understanding of how representations change with experience, can explain the major empirical effects in the literature (similarity, familiarity, past experience, explicit teach- ing, and salience). It can also predict a variety of empathy disorders. The interaction between the PAM and prefrontal functioning can also explain different levels of empathy across species and age groups. This view can advance our evolutionary understanding of empa- thy beyond inclusive fitness and reciprocal altruism and can explain different levels of empathy across individuals, species, stages of de- velopment, and situations.

/pdf/empathy-its-ultimate-and-proximate-bases-3gnr9okjki.pdf

Empathy: Its ultimate and proximate bases.

The onset of locomotion heralds one of the major life transitions in early development and involves a pervasive set of changes in perception, spatial cognition, and social and emotional development. Through a synthesis of published and hitherto unpublished findings, gathered from a number of converging research designs and methods, this article provides a comprehensive review and reanalysis of the consequences of self-produced locomotor experience. Specifically, we focus on the role of locomotor experience in changes in social and emotional development, referential gestural communication, wariness of heights, the perception of self-motion, distance perception, spatial search, and spatial coding strategies. Our analysis reveals new insights into the specific processes by which locomotor experience brings about psychological changes. We elaborate these processes and provide new predictions about previously unsuspected links between locomotor experience and psychological function. The research we describe is relevant to our broad understanding of the developmental process, particularly as it pertains to developmental transitions. Although acknowledging the role of genetically mediated developmental changes, our viewpoint is a transactional one in which a single acquisition, in this case the onset of locomotion, sets in motion a family of experiences and processes that in turn mobilize both broad-based and context-specific psychological reorganizations. We conclude that, in infancy, the onset of locomotor experience brings about widespread consequences, and after infancy, can be responsible for an enduring role in development by maintaining and updating existing skills.

/pdf/travel-broadens-the-mind-29zwnaku13.pdf

Travel broadens the mind

The chapter begins by addressing the theoretical platform endorsed by the authors that consists of an integration of functionalist perspectives with dynamic systems and social contextualism. This integrated perspective entails a flexible approach to emotional behavior: Expressive behavior, action tendencies, and cultural influence on emotion meaning all have their place in understanding emotional development. The chapter goes on to examine early emotional development, highlighting the importance of emotion communication as evidenced in infants through their emotional signaling to caregivers, their social referencing to significant others, and their growing skills at affective sharing with others. The final half of the chapter examines the development of eight specific skills of emotional competence, emphasizing their social effectiveness and individual adaptiveness. We conclude with a discussion of future research directions, including what may be the relational limits of emotion, individual differences in emotional responsiveness to contextual cues, attention processes, and emotion-related goals, some of which may become interiorized with development.


Keywords:

adolescent development;
childhood development;
emotion;
emotional competence;
functionalism;
infanct development;
social context;
social effectiveness

Emotional Development: Action, Communication, and Understanding

The field of emotion is changing rapidly and, in the process, shifting its philosophical orientation. The changes are surprisingly broad, ranging from new conceptualizations of how physiological systems are related to emotion to new conceptualizations of how culture is related to emotion. They bring new theoretical vigor to the field and open up previously dormant areas of study. The changes bring about new ways of measuring emotions and create the need for a new lexicon to describe the nature of emo-

A functionalist perspective on the nature of emotion.

Why do we have a chapter on temperament in a volume primarily devoted to the concepts of attachment and affiliation? Years ago, such a chapter would have been unthinkable because attachment and temperament appeared to refer to different phenomena. Classic theories of mother-infant relations such as those of Spitz (1965) and Bowlby (1951) leaned in the direction of a “tabula rasa” model of the human infant by proposing that emotional and drive-regulating experiences provided by the mother were crucial for the formation and maintenance of ego functions. The individual differences these theorists were interested in were those resulting from successes and failures of maternal interaction, although on occasion they did invoke genetic and constitutional factors to account for unusual tolerances or susceptibilities to the ill effects of maternal separation. Individual differences in temperament, then, were relegated to a shorthand description of the susceptibility of the “tabula rasa” to experience—how hard or soft the tablet was, so to speak. Little speculation took place about how such differences in the infant could be assessed or whether they played a role in attachment.

Toward a Theory of Infant Temperament

https://www.jstage.jst.go.jp/article/jsre1993/2/1/2_1_1/_pdf

Joseph J. Campos

Papers

Travel broadens the mind

Emotional Development: Action, Communication, and Understanding

A functionalist perspective on the nature of emotion.

Toward a Theory of Infant Temperament

A Functionalist Perspective on the Nature of Emotion