Development Across the Life Span, Media & Research Update - Hardcover

Feldman, Robert S.

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0131899503 ISBN 13: 9780131899506

Publisher: Prentice Hall, 2004

Synopsis

This chronologically organized book provides a broad overview of the field of human development—from the moment of conception through death—focusing on physical, cognitive, and social and personality development. This book offers readers the most current, balanced coverage of theory and research—with a focus on the application of that research, woven into a rich presentation filled with useful learning tools. Topics present a global perspective, highlighting both the commonalties and diversity of today's multicultural society. Incorporates material relevant to diversity in all its forms: racial, ethnic, gender, sexual orientation, religion, and cultural. Presents current developmental research or research issues applied to everyday problems such as genetic engineering and cloning; toilet training; and pregnancy in late adulthood. Useful to those in many different backgrounds and careers dealing with any aspect of human development.

About this title

About the Author:

Robert S. Feldman is professor of psychology at the University of Massachusetts in Amherst, where he is Director of Undergraduate Studies and recipient of the College Distinguished Teacher Award. He is both a Hewlett Teaching Fellow and a Senior Online Teaching Fellow at UMass.

Professor Feldman was educated as an undergraduate at Wesleyan University, from which he graduated with High Honors, and received a M.S. and Ph.D. from the University of Wisconsin in Madison, where he specialized in social and developmental psychology.

Among his more than 100 books, chapters, and articles, he has edited Development of Nonverbal Behavior in Children (Springer -Verlag), Applications of Nonverbal Behavioral Theory and Research (Erlbaum), and co-edited Fundamentals of Nonverbal Behavior (Cambridge University Press). He is the recipient of grants from the National Institute of Mental Health and the National Institute of the Disabilities and Rehabilitation Research, which love supported his research on the development of nonverbal behavior in children. A past Fulbright lecturer and research scholar, he is a Fellow of the American Psychological Association and American Psychological Society.

During the course of nearly two decades as a college instructor, he has taught both undergraduate and graduate courses at Mount Holyoke College, Wesleyan University, Virginia Commonwealth University, in addition to the University of Massachusetts.

Professor Feldman loves music, is an enthusiastic, if not particularly accomplished, pianist, and is an excellent cook. He has three children, and he and his wife, a psychologist, live in Amherst, Massachusetts, in a home overlooking the Holyoke mountain range.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.:

This book tells a story: the story of our lives, and our parents' lives, and the lives of our children. It is the story of human beings and how they get to be the way they are.

Unlike any other area of study, lifespan development speaks to us in a very personal sense. It encompasses the range of human existence from its beginnings at conception to its inevitable ending at death. It is a discipline that deals with ideas and concepts and theories, but one that above all has at its heart people—our fathers and mothers, our friends and acquaintances, our very selves.

Development Across the Life Span seeks to capture the discipline in a way that sparks and nurtures and shapes readers' interest. It is meant to excite students about the field, to draw them into its way of looking at the world, and to build their understanding of developmental issues. By exposing readers to both the current content and the promise inherent in lifespan development, the text is designed to keep interest in the discipline alive long after students' formal study of the field has ended.

Overview of the Third Edition

Development Across the Life Span, third edition—like its predecessors—provides a broad overview of the field of human development. It covers the entire range of the human life, from the moment of conception through death. The text furnishes a broad, comprehensive introduction to the field, covering basic theories and research findings, as well as highlighting current applications outside the laboratory. It covers the life span chronologically, encompassing the prenatal period, infancy and toddlerhood, the preschool years, middle childhood, adolescence, early and middle adulthood, and late adulthood. Within these periods, it focuses on physical, cognitive, and social and personality development.

The book seeks to accomplish the following four major goals:

• First and foremost, the book is designed to provide a broad, balanced overview of the field of lifespan development. It introduces readers to the theories, research, and applications that constitute the discipline, examining both the traditional areas of the field as well as more recent innovations. It pays particular attention to the applications developed by lifespan development specialists, demonstrating how lifespan developmentalists use theory, research, and applications to help solve significant social problems.
• The second goal of the text is to explicitly tie development to students' lives. Findings from the study of lifespan development have a significant degree of relevance to students, and this text illustrates how these findings can be applied in a meaningful, practical sense. Applications are presented in a contemporaneous framework, including current news items, timely world events, and contemporary uses of lifespan development that draw readers into the field. Numerous descriptive scenarios and vignettes reflect everyday situations in people's lives, explaining how they relate to the field.
• The third goal is to highlight both the commonalities and diversity of today's multicultural society. Consequently, the book incorporates material relevant to diversity in ill its forms—racial, ethnic, gender, sexual orientation, religion, and cultural diversity—throughout every chapter. In addition, every chapter has at least one "Developmental Diversity" section. These features explicitly consider how cultural factors relevant to development both unite and diversify our contemporary, global society.
• Finally, the fourth goal is one that is implicit in the other three: making the field of lifespan development engaging, accessible, and interesting to students. Lifespan development is a joy both to study and teach, because so much of it has direct, immediate meaning to our lives. Because all of us are involved in our own developmental paths, we are tied in very personal ways to the content areas covered by the book. Development Across the Life Span, then, is meant to engage and nurture this interest, planting a seed that will develop and flourish throughout readers' lifetimes.

In accomplishing these goals, the book strives to be user-friendly. Written in a direct, conversational voice, it replicates as much as possible a dialogue between author and student. The text is meant to be understood and mastered on its own by students of every level of interest and motivation. To that end, it includes a variety of pedagogical features that promote mastery of the material and encourage critical thinking.

In short, the book blends and integrates theory, research, and applications, focusing on the breadth of human development. Furthermore, rather than attempting to provide a detailed historical record of the field, it focuses on the here-and-now, drawing on the past where appropriate, but with a view toward delineating the field as it now stands and the directions toward which it is evolving. Similarly, while providing descriptions of classic studies, the emphasis is more on current research findings and trends.

Development Across the Life Span is meant to be a book that readers will want to keep in their own personal libraries, one that they will take off the shelf when considering problems related to that most intriguing of questions: How do people come to be the way they are?

What's New in the Third Edition?

The third edition of Development Across the Life Span has been extensively revised in response to the comments of dozens of reviewers. Among the major changes are the following:

Additions of New and updated Material

The revision incorporates a significant amount of new and updated information. For instance, advances in such areas as brain development, mapping the human genome, cognitive development, and cultural approaches to development receive expanded and new coverage. Overall, hundreds of new citations have been added, with most of those from articles and books published in the last three years.

Several areas received special attention in this revision, particularly in terms of coverage of middle and late adulthood. In addition, new material on genetics and brain development was added, fueled by the rapid changes in our understanding of these areas.

New topics were added to every chapter. The following sample of new and revised topics featured in this edition provides a good indication of the currency of the revision:

• human genome
• number of human genes
• nonorganic failure to thrive
• affordances
• brain development
• corticotropin-releasing hormone (CRH)
• virginity pledges
• benevolent sexism
• referential and expressive language styles
• emotional intelligence
• interactional synchrony
• psychoneuroimmunology
• epigenetic theory
• expertise
• use of antidepressants in children
• regret
• fast mapping
• estrogen loss
• emotoion regulation
• age stratification
• early puberty onset
• passive and active euthanasia

Revisions to Foster Student Critical Thinking and Mastery of the Material

One thread that ran through the reviews of the previous edition was instructors' concerns regarding their students' thorough mastery of the material, permitting them to think critically about the material. In order to foster student mastery, a number of subtle changes were made to this edition to reinforce the existing features:

• Critical thinking questions added to captions. Many critical thinking questions were added to photo and figure captions, helping students to think more deeply about the material and to help students make connections between text concepts and the photo illustrations.
• End-of-part Bridges. Each major part of the book ends with a "Bridges" section. "Bridges" help students understand the relationship between the developmental achievements of the previous period and the upcoming one.

About this edition

• Publisher: Prentice Hall
• Publication date: 2004
• ISBN 10: 0131899503
• ISBN 13: 9780131899506
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 3
• Number of pages: 816