The Cambridge Handbook of Environment in Human Development

Families, communities, and societies influence children's learning and development in many ways. This is the first handbook devoted to the understanding of the nature of environments in child development. Utilizing Urie Bronfenbrenner's idea of embedded environments, this volume looks at environments from the immediate environment of the family (including fathers, siblings, grandparents, and day-care personnel) to the larger environment including schools, neighborhoods, geographic regions, countries, and cultures. Understanding these embedded environments and the ways in which they interact is necessary to understand development.

Dr Linda Mayes is the Arnold Gesell Professor of Child Psychiatry, Pediatrics and Psychology in the Yale Child Study Center, a department in the Yale School of Medicine. As a clinical investigator she works at the interface of three fields - pediatrics, developmental psychology and child psychiatry. Formally trained as a pediatrician and neonatologist, her work integrates perspectives from child development, behavioral neuroscience, psychophysiology, neurobiology, developmental psychopathology and neurobehavioral teratology. She is the author of nearly 200 peer-reviewed papers and more than 100 chapters and reviews. Dr Mayes is also the author of a book for parents, The Yale Child Study Center Guide to Understanding your Child. She is also special advisor to the dean in the Yale University School of Medicine.

Michael Lewis is University Distinguished Professor of Pediatrics and Psychiatry and Director of the Institute for the Study of Child Development at Robert Wood Johnson Medical School, University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey. He also is Professor of Psychology, Education, Cognitive Science and Biomedical Engineering at Rutgers University. Dr Lewis has published more than 300 articles in scientific journals and has written or edited more than 35 books, including Social Cognition and the Acquisition of Self (1979), Children's Emotions and Moods: Developmental Theory and Measurement (1983), Shame: The Exposed Self (1992) and Altering Fate: Why the Past Does Not Predict the Future (1997). He edited the Handbook of Developmental Psychopathology, 2nd edition (2001) and the Handbook of Emotions, 3rd edition (2009). He recently won the Urie Bronfenbrenner Award from the American Psychological Association for Lifetime Contribution to Developmental Psychology in the Service of Science and Society.