Attachment--and loss.

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

A Treatise on the Family. G. S. Becker. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. 1981. Gary Becker is one of the most famous and influential economists of the second half of the 20th century, a fervent contributor to and expounder of the University of Chicago free-market philosophy, and winner of the 1992 Nobel Prize in economics. Although any book with the word "treatise" in its title is clearly intended to have an impact, one coming from someone as brilliant and controversial as Becker certainly had such a lofty goal. It has received many article-length reviews in several disciplines (Ben-Porath, 1982; Bergmann, 1995; Foster, 1993; Hannan, 1982), which is one measure of its scholarly importance, and yet its impact is, I think, less than it may have initially appeared, especially for scholars with substantive interests in the family. This book is, its title notwithstanding, more about economics and the economic approach to behavior than about the family. In the first sentence of the preface, Becker writes "In this book, I develop an economic or rational choice approach to the family." Lest anyone accuse him of focusing on traditional (i.e., material) economics topics, such as family income, poverty, and labor supply, he immediately emphasizes that those topics are not his focus. "My intent is more ambitious: to analyze marriage, births, divorce, division of labor in households, prestige, and other non-material behavior with the tools and framework developed for material behavior." Indeed, the book includes chapters on many of these issues. One chapter examines the principles of the efficient division of labor in households, three analyze marriage and divorce, three analyze various child-related issues (fertility and intergenerational mobility), and others focus on broader family issues, such as intrafamily resource allocation. His analysis is not, he believes, constrained by time or place. His intention is "to present a comprehensive analysis that is applicable, at least in part, to families in the past as well as the present, in primitive as well as modern societies, and in Eastern as well as Western cultures." His tone is profoundly conservative and utterly skeptical of any constructive role for government programs. There is a clear sense of how much better things were in the old days of a genderbased division of labor and low market-work rates for married women. Indeed, Becker is ready and able to show in Chapter 2 that such a state of affairs was efficient and induced not by market or societal discrimination (although he allows that it might exist) but by small underlying household productivity differences that arise primarily from what he refers to as "complementarities" between caring for young children while carrying another to term. Most family scholars would probably find that an unconvincingly simple explanation for a profound and complex phenomenon. What, then, is the salient contribution of Treatise on the Family? It is not literally the idea that economics could be applied to the nonmarket sector and to family life because Becker had already established that with considerable success and influence. At its core, microeconomics is simple, characterized by a belief in the importance of prices and markets, the role of self-interested or rational behavior, and, somewhat less centrally, the stability of preferences. It was Becker's singular and invaluable contribution to appreciate that the behaviors potentially amenable to the economic approach were not limited to phenomenon with explicit monetary prices and formal markets. Indeed, during the late 1950s and throughout the 1960s, he did undeniably important and pioneering work extending the domain of economics to such topics as labor market discrimination, fertility, crime, human capital, household production, and the allocation of time. Nor is Becker's contribution the detailed analyses themselves. Many of them are, frankly, odd, idiosyncratic, and off-putting. …

A Treatise on the Family

Mother Nature knows best--How engineered organizations of the future will resemble natural-born systems.

Persuasive Technology: Using Computers to Change What We Think and Do

The culture of education

Scientists and philosophers have searched for centuries for a parsimonious answer to the question of what constitutes beauty. We approached this problem from both an evolutionary and information-processing rationale and predicted that faces representing the average value of the population would be consistently judged as attractive. To evaluate this hypothesis, we digitized samples of male and female faces, mathematically averaged them, and had adults judge the attractiveness of both the individual faces and the computer-generated composite images. Both male (three samples) and female (three samples) composite faces were judged as more attractive than almost all the individual faces comprising the composites. A strong linear trend also revealed that the composite faces became more attractive as more faces were entered. These data showing that attractive faces are only average are consistent with evolutionary pressures that favor characteristics close to the mean of the population and with cognitive process...

https://www.jstor.org/stable/pdfplus/40062595.pdf

Attractive Faces Are Only Average

Deux experiences etudient aupres d'enfants âges de 2 a 3 mois et de 6 a 8 mois les preferences envers des visages de femmes dont le caractere attractif a ete evalue par des adultes

Infant preferences for attractive faces: Rudiments of a stereotype?

We reported in this journal (Langlois & Roggman, 1990) findings showing that attractive faces are those that represent the mathematical average of faces in a population These findings were intriguing because they provided a parsimonious definition of facial attractiveness and because they supported explanations of attractiveness from the point of view of both evolutionary and cognitive-prototype theory Since our 1990 report, several alternative explanations of our findings have been offered In this article, we show that none of these alternatives explains our results adequately

What Is Average and What Is Not Average About Attractive Faces

Three studies examined infant preferences for attractive faces in four types of faces: White adult male and female faces, Black adult female faces, and infant faces. Infants viewed pairs of faces, previously rated for attractiveness by adults, in a visual preference paradigm. Significant preferences were found for attractive faces across all facial types. The results confirm earlier reports of this phenomenon and extend those results by showing that infant preferences for attractive faces generalize across faces differing in race, gender, and age. Two potential explanations for these observed infant preferences are discussed. We recently reported several studies showing that young infants visually discriminate among adult female faces based on the adult-judged attractiveness of the faces and that infants exhibit both visual and behavioral preferences for attractive compared with unattractive female faces (Langlois et al., 1987; Langlois, Roggman, & Rieser-Danner, 1990). These results were surprising to many people because infants were not expected to be able to make such subtle discriminations. In addition, most researchers interested in the effects of physical attractiveness have assumed that preferences for attractiveness are only gradually learned through a lengthy period of cultural transmission and through exposure to the standards of attractiveness extant in the contemporary media and society. However, these behaviors of young infants suggested that preferences for attractiveness in faces are present much earlier than has been assumed. Other researchers have also found that infants look longer at and seem to prefer attractive compared with unattractive female faces. Samuels and Ewy (1985) and Shapiro, Hazan, and Haith (1984) showed both adult male and adult female faces that were rated as high or low in attractiveness by adult judges to infants ranging from 3 to 6 months of age. The infants in these studies looked significantly longer at both the male and the female attractive faces compared with unattractive faces. Although some methodological limitations of these two studies prevent a clear-cut interpretation of their results, they at least suggest that infants can discriminate attractiveness in two different types of faces, male and female. Given the challenge that these findings from infants pose to the widely accepted assumptions about the origins of preferences for attractiveness (Langlois et al., 1987), it is important to investigate the generality of these preferences across different

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Facial Diversity and Infant Preferences for Attractive Faces

We expand our 2007 heuristic model of father involvement using recent research on the dynamic and reciprocal processes by which fathers influence children's development over time. Based on new evidence, our expanded model incorporates more dynamic reciprocity, temporal factors, and nuanced considerations of context in which fathers parent. We identify aspects of context as well as fathers' personality and behavior that are central to the next generation of studies on fathers. We highlight studies related to fathering versus mothering, discuss ecological theory and how it has been used to understand fathering, and present an expanded version of our model.

Lori A. Roggman

Papers

Attractive Faces Are Only Average

Infant preferences for attractive faces: Rudiments of a stereotype?

What Is Average and What Is Not Average About Attractive Faces

Facial Diversity and Infant Preferences for Attractive Faces

The Ecology of Father‐Child Relationships: An Expanded Model