This book documents my return to a topic that has always been one of my closest interests: the systematic study of intellectual and political history. I became involved in historical studies while in high school and continued this work during the years that I spent as a metalworker in a shipyard and in a factory. Indeed, I succeeded in being admitted to the University of Hamburg only after submitting a comparative analysis of the history of early Greek and early Western philosophy to the late Professor G. Ralfs. He gave me much encouragement and remained one of my main academic sponsors...

This volume is an attempt to integrate the theory and data of social and personality development within a modem evolutionary framework. The various chapters are not meant to be read in isolation from one another but rather are intended to form an integrated whole. There is thus a great deal of cross-referencing between chapters and to some extent they all stand or fall together. This also suggests that the accuracy (or usefulness) of a particular chapter cannot be judged until the book is comprehended as a whole. Chapter 1 deals with the theoretical foundations of this enterprise, and the...

Like the lines of a secret map made dimly apparent by the chemical potion brushed on a piece of paper from a child's detective kit, the outlines of what may be a substantial behavioral biology of human life seem to be coming clear. From genetic science at its most molecular to demography with its assessment of the vital experience of massive populations, there is a growing understanding of the various ways in which the human species reveals underlying commonalities of experi ence through the life cycle and over the web of interactions that constitutes the basic matter of social life. At the...

This is a book about the development of action and skill in the first years of life. But it differs in an important way from most past treatments of the subject. The present volume explores how the development of ac- tion is related to the contexts, especially the social ones, in which actions function. In past work, little attention has focused on this relationship. The prevailing view has been that infants develop skills on their own, independent of contributions from other individuals or the surrounding culture. The present volume is a challenge to that view. It is based on the premise...

Our knowledge of the cognitive and social-emotional functioning of developmentally disabled infants and preschoolers derives, in large part, from our assessment of such children. This book has been developed to familiarize readers with the characteristics of developmentally disabled children, and to introduce to readers aspects of measurement that are of relevance to the assessment of atypical infants and preschoolers. The book has been developed with clinicians and prospective clinicians in mind. These are individuals who are committed to the care and education of developmentally disabled...

It gives me great pleasure to introduce this important and fascinating book on the internal dilemmas youngsters face in school, which often cause them to stop learning. We are all too ready to ascribe learning problems to an inability to learn and leave it at that. This book should go a long way toward convincing us that using such simpleminded explanations and remedial efforts based on them do not work. Unlike other books that identify the causes of learning disabilities in children or that detail society's impact on the so-called helpless child, The Risks of Knowing is an in-depth study of...

Social development over one's lifetime is a complex area that has received consider- able attention in the psychological, social-psychological, and sociological literature over the years. Surprisingl however, since 1969, when Rand McNally published Goslin's Handbook of Socialization, no comprehensive statement of the field has appeared in book form. Given the impressive data in this area that have been adduced over the last two decades, we trust that our handbook will serve to fill that gap. In this volume we have followed a lifespan perspective, starting with the social interactions that...

The Different Faces of Motherhood began during a conversation between the two editors, developmental psychologists who have spent our professional careers working with infants and very young children. We are well aware of the impor- tance of infants to their mothers and of mothers to their infants. However, we were particularly aware of the fact that, whereas our knowledge about infants increases exponentially . each decade, our assumptions about mothers change relatively little. We were concerned about the theories that underlie the advice given to mothers and also about the assumption that...

Like hiking off the well-traveled trail, attempting to bridge foreign do- mains of research and practice entails certain risks. This volume repre- sents an effort to explore the relatively uncharted territory of cognitive and social-cognitive processes embedded in child psychotherapy. The territory is largely uncharted, not because of a lack of interest in children and cognition, but because child psychotherapy has been chronically neglected by clinical researchers. For example, recent meta-analyses of the effectiveness of child psychotherapy draw on less than 30 non- behavioral studies of...

Here, Daniel A. Hart analyzes the results of an intensive twenty-year longitudinal study of men's development. Integrating a wide range of research approaches, Hart assesses personality trait, structural-developmental, and crisis-transformational factors in the study of lives followed over time. The author then develops an original framework for understanding the psychological similarities and differences in men's lives.