The book provides conceptual and theoretical elaborations on human values from a cultural psychological approach. The authors illustrate their original contributions with empirical data, allowing for productive discussion on the topic of ontogenesis of values from a historical-cultural perspective.
Jaan Valsiner is a cultural psychologist with a consistently developmental axiomatic base that is brought to analyses of any psychological or social phenomena. He is the founding editor (1995) of the Sage journal Culture & Psychology. He is currently professor of psychology in the Department of Psychology at Clark University. He has published many books, the most recent of which are The Guided Mind (1998); Culture and Human Development (2000); and Comparative Study of Human Cultural Development (2001). He edited (with Kevin Connolly) the Handbook of Developmental Psychology (2003). He established the new journal on individual case analyses, International Journal of Idiographic Science (2005), and is the editor of Integrative Psychological and Behavioral Sciences and From Past to Future: Annals of Innovations in Psychology (2007). In 1995, he was awarded the Alexander von Humboldt Prize in Germany for his interdisciplinary work on human development. He has been a visiting professor in Japan, Australia, Estonia, Germany, Italy, the United Kingdom, and the Netherlands.