Child Development

Written in a direct, conversational voice as a dialogue between author and reader, this book provides a balanced, chronologically-organized overview of the field of child and adolescent development--theories, research, and applications. Illustrating both the commonalties and diversities of our contemporary multicultural society, it shows the immediate relevance of the subject matter to everyday life. Each chapter is filled with frequent vignettes (and photos) of real children and adults--drawn from current news items, timely world events, and contemporary uses of child development. Links to sources on the World Wide Web are interspersed throughout. Covers the full range of childhood and adolescence--from the prenatal period, through infancy and toddlerhood, the preschool years, middle childhood, and adolescence. Within these periods, the focus is on physical, cognitive, and social and personality development. Each chapter features special boxes and sections, such as, From Research to Practice; Developmental Diversity; Speaking of Development (an interview with a person working in a field that uses the findings of child and adolescent development); Informed Consumer of Development (with practical, hands-on information readers can use in their everyday lives.) Highlights contemporary, in-the-news topics such as behavioral genetics, cloning, evolutionary approaches, and Vygotsky; ethnography, gene therapy, new breast-feeding guidelines, automaticity in information processing, the NICHD study on infant care, memory and eyewitness testimony of children, use of Prozac and childhood depression, emotional intelligence, adolescent Web surfing, the downside of self esteem, racial and ethnic identity formation. For anyone interested in Child and Adolescent Development or Developmental Psychology.

ROBERT S. FELDMAN is a professor of psychology at the University of Massachusetts in Amherst, where he is Director of Undergraduate Studies and recipient of the College Outstanding Teacher Award. He 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.

Among his more than 100 books, chapters, articles, and presentations, he has written Development Across the Life Span, edited Development of Nonverbal Behavior in Children (Springer-Verlag), Applications of Nonverbal Behavioral Theory and Research (Erlbaum), and coedited 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 have 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 is an avid, if not particularly accomplished, pianist, and an excellent cook, despite his children's aversion to his experimentation with exotic cuisine. He lives with his three children and wife, a psychologist, in Amherst, Massachusetts, in a home overlooking the Holyoke mountain range.