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This book offers an extensive exploration of the childhood factors that can lead to substance abuse and puts forward a dynamic cascade model of the development of adolescent substance-use onset.

This Monograph demonstrates that disruptions to young people's developing conceptions of personal or cultural persistence begin to explain the suicide rates among Aboriginal Canadian and non-Aboriginal Canadian youth.

Despite the importance of learning abilities and disabilities in education and child development, little is known about their genetic and environmental origins in the early school years.

Undertaken at orphanages in Russia, this study tests the role of early social and emotion experience in the development of children.

Study moderators examined interactions between children's parasympathetic and sympathetic nervous systems (PNS and SNS) activity in order to achieve a greater specificity in the prediction of externalizing problems in the context of interparental conflict.

We present a domain-general framework called constrained attentional associative learning to provide a developmental account for how and when infants form concepts for animates and inanimates that encapsulate not only their surface appearance but also their movement characteristics.

This Monograph examines the role that children's questions play in their cognitive development.

This Monograph reports a series of ten studies on the social-cognitive abilities of three young chimpanzees, ages to four years. * Compares outcomes to similar studies conducted on human infacts for a comparative understanding.

* Looks at what parents and other caregivers can do to facilitate healthy development in adolescents. * Reports on research that addresses the limitations of the three most widely accepted dimensions of parenting: support, behavior control, and psychological control.

In this monograph, early members of the Caucus describe its history through the first 25 years, 1973-97, in 15 chapters distributed among sections on Caucus history, teaching and mentoring, publications and research-related issues, and supportive academic institutions.

The role of quantitative methods in testing developmental hypotheses is widely recognized, yet even very experienced quantitative researchers often lack the knowledge required for good decision-making on methodology. The end result is a disconnect between research and practice in methods.

This work addresses three questions - how can we best describe childhood personality? How is personality related to the child's successes and failures? And what sort of factors are related to personality development?

The English and Romanian Adoptees (ERA) study constituted an invaluable "natural experiment" in which there was a rapid, easily-timed transition from a profoundly depriving environment in Romanian institutions to generally well-functioning adoptive families in England. Multimodal methods of assessment were used throughout the assessments at 4, 6, 11, and 15 years of age. Four key findings were particularly striking. First, institutional deprivation was associated with an apparently deprivation-specific pattern of combinations of quasiautism, disinhibited attachment, cognitive impairment, and inattention/overactivity. Second, longitudinal growth curves showed a relative deceleration of growth between 11 and 15 years (possibly due to early puberty). Third, institutional deprivation without subnutrition was associated with a major impairment in head growth. Fourth, the effects of institutional deprivation were as strong at 15 years as they had been earlier in childhood.

The influence of culture on cognitive development is well established for school age and older children. But almost nothing is known about how different parenting and socialization practices in different cultures affect infants' and young children's earliest emerging cognitive and social-cognitive skills.

Although comprehensive and ecological approaches to early childhood prevention are commonly advocated, there are few examples of long-term follow-up of such programs.

This monograph has two aims: first, to identify specific processes of the reversal phenomenon by using a developmental approach. Second, to use ambiguous figures as a research tool to shed more light onto children's developing understanding of pictorial representation. .

This work makes the claim that strategies of knowledge acquisition may vary significantly across (as well as within) individuals and can be conceptualized within a developmental framework.

Exclusion from social groups is a source of conflict, stress and tension in social life around the globe. How do children and adolescents evaluate exclusion based on group membership? This is the report of an investigation of social exclusion in the contexts of friendship, peer groups and school.

Flexibility and productivity are hallmarks of human language use. Competent speakers have the capacity to use the words they know to serve a variety of communicative functions, to refer to new and varied exemplars of the categories to which words refer, and in new and varied combinations with other words. When and how children achieve this flexibility--and when they are truly productive language users--are central issues among accounts of language acquisition. The current study tests competing hypotheses of the achievement of flexibility and some kinds of productivity against data on children's first uses of their first-acquired verbs. Eight mothers recorded their children's first 10 uses of 34 early-acquired verbs, if those verbs were produced within the window of the study. The children were between 16 and 20 months when the study began (depending on when the children started to produce verbs), were followed for between 3 and 12 months, and produced between 13 and 31 of the target verbs. These diary records provided the basis for a description of the pragmatic, semantic, and syntactic properties of early verb use. The data revealed that within this early, initial period of verb use, children use their verbs both to command and describe, they use their verbs in reference to a variety of appropriate actions enacted by a variety of actors and with a variety of affected objects, and they use their verbs in a variety of syntactic structures. All 8 children displayed semantic and grammatical flexibility before 24 months of age. These findings are more consistent with a model of the language learning child as an avid generalizer than as a conservative language user. Children's early verb use suggests abilities and inclinations to abstract from experience that may indeed begin in infancy.

Using data from the first 2 phases of the NICHD Study of Early Child Care, we examine the links between maternal employment in the first 12 months of life and cognitive, social, and emotional outcomes for children at age 3, at age 4.5, and in first grade. Drawing on theory and prior research from developmental psychology as well as economics and sociology, we address 3 main questions. First, what associations exist between 1st year maternal employment and cognitive, social, and emotional outcomes for children in the first seven years of life? Second, to what extent do any such associations vary by the child's gender and temperament or the mother's occupation? Third, to what extent do mother's earnings, the home environment (maternal depressive symptoms, sensitivity, and HOME scores), and the type and quality of child care mediate or offset any associations between 1st-year employment and child outcomes, and what is the net effect of 1st-year maternal employment once these factors are taken into account? We compare families in which mothers worked full time (55%), part time (23%), or did not work (22%) in the first year. Our main results pertain to non-Hispanic White children (N = 900) although we also carry out some analyses for a small sample of African-American children (N = 113). Our findings provide new insight as to the net effects of 1st-year maternal employment as well as the potential pathways through which associations between 1st-year maternal employment and later child outcomes, where present, come about. Our structural equation modeling results indicate that, on average, the associations between 1st-year maternal employment and later cognitive, social, and emotional outcomes are neutral because negative effects, where present, are offset by positive effects. These results confirm that maternal employment in the 1st year of life may confer both advantages and disadvantages and that for the average non-Hispanic White child those effects balance each other.

This monograph examines the interplay between behavioral and cognitive representations of attachmet during early childhood. We track the continued development of secure base support and use while assessing maternal co-construction processes and thier joint impact on children's secure base behavior and attachment representations. First, our investigation establishes that smoothly interacting dyads have mothers who continue to provide secure base support and children who use them as secure base across early childhood (mother sensitivity-child security links). Furthermore, the patterning of children's secure base behavior when interacting with the mother is related to the structure of children's knowledge about secure base relationships. Second, we introduce mother co-construction skills and evaluate their impact on the mother child relationship. Using two different co-construction tasks, we scored maternal co-construction in terms of skills that promote secure base script knowledge. Both tasks were related to maternal AAI coherence and attachment script knowledge. In addition, studies showed that maternal co-construction skills make unique contributions to both child secure base behvior and child script knowledge. Findings support the hypothesis that mothers' cognitive/verbal co-constructive skills during conversations about attachment and emotion-laden situations play a key role in organization of children's attachment behavior and representations. Finally, we demonstrate that maternal script knowledge not only impacts children's script knowledge (intergenerational transmission), but guides mothers' expectations and judgements of mother-child interactions. Throughout this monograph, we stress the importance of an interpersonal approach when investigating attachment relationships during early childhood, where mother-child interactions and communication about attachment-related issues are considered key to unveil co-constructive processes involved in the child's behavioral and cognitive organization of attachment relationships.

Research suggests chimpanzees may understand some of the epitemological aspects of visual perception, such as how the perceptual act of seeing can have internal several interpretations. These 15 studies were conducted with chimpanzees and young children on their understanding of visual perception.

A new model of child cognition and learning The Role of Central Conceptual Structures in the Development of Children's Thought explores child cognition and conceptual development to present the novel "Central Conceptual Structure" theory. The culmination of a six-year instructional research program, this study examines the idea of "core knowledge" that can be applied to any task, and shows how transforming this core knowledge affects future learning. This book explores this theory in depth, providing extensive support and analysis that will interest anyone involved in child development, cognitive science, or educational psychology.

This monograph presents a longitudinal investigation of child development and family well-being during the first decade of life for children with Down syndrome, motor impairment, or developmental delay of uncertain etiology. The findings suggest that changes in selected policies and practices can improve outcomes for children with disabilities.

Formulates a theoretical system that integrates information processing, individual differences, and developmental approaches to the study of the mind. This book explores relations among information processing efficiency, working memory, and thinking of children 8 to 16 years of age.

The attachment bond that develops between infant and mother is the first of many intimate relationships we form throughout life, and as such it has been the focus of much research. But how does the quality of the secure base phenomena that defines this bond vary among individuals and across cultures? What methods can be used to asses its presence and characteristics? Following an interview with Mary S. Ainsworth, the originator of the concept of secure base, this new Monograph brings together eleven papers that consolidate our understanding of the empirical advances that have occurred in attachment research. The collection is organized into three sections. Part One includes papers on the generalizability of attachment theory and data, including cross-cultural research. Part Two addresses both normative and individual differences among mothers, children, caregivers, and their interactions--and methods for the valid assessment of these. Part Three examines the mental representations that children use to depict their different attachment relationships. Together these papers will stimulate child development specialists and students to explore different assessment methods and to move beyond current understandings of attachment.

This work presents a theory of cognitive development, arguing that the mind develops across three fronts: a general processing system that defines the general potentials of mind to develop cognitive strategies and skills; a hypercognitive system that governs self-understanding; and self-regulation.

A monograph that looks at how mothers and young children talk about gender, to discover the potential role of language in fostering gender stereotypes.

This monograph concerns the psychological processes underlying the development of executive function, or the conscious control of thought and action. It has long been clear that these processes change considerably in early childhood, transforming a relatively stimulus--driven toddler into a child capable of flexible, goal--directed problem solving.

The Intentionality Model builds on the childa s engagement in a world of persons and objects, the effort that learning language requires, and the essential tension between engagement and effort that propels language acquisition.