Search Results

This chapter details the cultural-developmental approach to moral psychology. This conceptual framework lays out life-course “templates” for the three Ethics of Autonomy, Community, and Divinity. These life course trajectories are not fixed but accommodate to cultural variability by addressing: (1) whether or not an Ethic emerges, (2) when it emerges, and (3) the slope and specific characteristics of its development. As described, the formulation of the cultural-developmental approach was based on a large body of long-standing research findings, as well as research with religiously conservative and liberal groups divided by the so-called “culture wars.” Recent research has also extended the cultural-developmental hypotheses and validated new measures of the three Ethics. The conclusion proposes future research directions for moral psychology, and the application of the conceptual idea of cultural-developmental templates to other areas of psychology.

This chapter provides a comprehensive review of the core concepts and issues involved in the study of adults who are lesbians, homosexuals, and bisexuals shifting the attention away from beliefs of foreseeable decline in late life. The developmental approach is utilized to study the coming out process and coming to terms with one's sexual orientation for lesbians, gay males, and bisexuals. Moreover, the appearance of psychological strengths when faced with consequent challenges and the life strains of aging can be said to be the results from a non-standard life transition. Continuous studies have challenged and clarified existing misbeliefs and stereotypes on lesbians and gay males. These studies likewise shift our attention to the implications of the cultural context and cultural alteration. Certain levels of cultural and contextual upbringing can serve as a supportive tool to lesbians, homosexuals, and bisexuals to progress and improve.

Intellectual disability is a neurodevelopmental disorder that continues throughout the life span of the affected person. It is essential to understand how persons with intellectual disability progress throughout their life span from infancy to old age. The maturation of the brain, their environmental experiences, and the mastery of developmental challenges and tasks must all be considered. A focus on brain development is in keeping with neuroscience research indicating that progressive brain maturation is accompanied by successive synaptic reorganization as one moves from one developmental stage to the next. Anatomical Magnetic Resonance Imaging Studies are playing a major role in understanding the developmental trajectories of normal brain development (Durston et al., 2001; Giedd et al., 1999). Understanding the developmental trajectories of normal brain development is crucial to the interpretation of brain development in neurodevelopmental disabilities. During normal development, white matter volume increases with age, and although gray matter volumes increase during childhood, they decrease before adulthood. These changes in the brain are accompanied by changes in cognitive processing; for example, executive functioning shows a progressive emergence from the preschool years (Espy et al., 1999) into the adolescent years. Working memory and inhibitory processes may be measured during the preschool years. By adolescence, abstract reasoning, anticipatory planning, and mental judgment have emerged and may be measured. Cognitive abilities in adolescence are qualitatively different from those of young children as a result of the reorganization of the prefrontal cortex during maturation. How genetic background and environment interact in producing these changes is the object of ongoing study, yet investigators are beginning to understand how physiological processes of synaptic development, circuits, and neuronal network formation relate to processes of cognitive development (Fossella et al., 2003). The development of persons with intellectual disability is now being evaluated systematically, and developmental trajectories are being established for known neurogenetic syndromes. These studies are making up for a surprising lack of application of a developmental perspective to persons with intellectual disability. Developmental theorists have, for the most part, monitored and measured development in normally intelligent persons in establishing developmental landmarks.

The question of the relation between the collective and the individual has had a long but patchy history within both philosophy and psychology. In this chapter we consider some arguments that could be adopted for the primacy of the we, and examine their conceptual and empirical implications. We argue that the we needs to be seen as a developing and dynamic identity, not as something that exists fully fledged from the start. The concept of we thus needs more nuanced and differentiated treatment than currently exists, distinguishing it from the idea of a ‘common ground’ and discerning multiple senses of ‘we-ness’. At an empirical level, beginning from the shared history of human evolution and prenatal existence, a simple sense of pre-reflective we-ness, we argue, emerges from second-person I-you engagement in earliest infancy. Developmentally, experientially and conceptually, engagement remains fundamental to the we throughout its many forms, characterized by reciprocal interaction and conditioned by the normative aspects of mutual addressing.

The capacity to adapt to disability and assist others with disability may have an evolutionary origin. De Waal (1996) describes assistance to an injured group member among primates as evidence of altruistic behavior. Mother monkeys will provide additional care to compensate for injuries, and other members of the group may “babysit” injured infants, as do other young of the group. If the risk of predation is low and food is adequate, handicapped animals may live to adulthood. In human evolution, Berkson (1993) described an adult Neanderthal male with severe arm and head injuries that occurred at an early age. Apparently, this individual adapted to the injury by using his teeth to hold objects. Other conditions, such as disabling arthritis, were found in Neanderthals as well. Thus, individuals with minor or even significant impairments in primate and human societies before the evolution of modern humans, in some instances, received adaptive assistance from other members of the group. Drawing on these possible evolutionary origins of assistance to others in need, this chapter reviews the historical background of care for persons with intellectual disability and discusses environmental provisions and supports, education and skill development, normalization and self-determination, and interventions for those with co-occurring mental and behavioral disorders (psychotherapy, behavioral interventions, and psychopharmacologic treatments). The modern developmental approach to understanding learning and development began with Jean Itard, at the end of the eighteenth century. As a member of the medical staff at the Institute for Deaf Mutes in Paris, he considered the link between deafness and learning. Because of this background, he was asked to study a feral child discovered living alone in the wild in southern France. It was thought that this boy might approximate “man in the state of nature.” Because the child was mute, he entered a school for the deaf in Paris although he was not deaf. Pinel (1809), the leading psychiatrist of the time, proposed that the boy, named Victor, was not teachable. Yet Itard, during the next five years, sought to instruct Victor, using approaches established for deaf persons.

This chapter concludes that, contrary to conventional wisdom, adversarial legalism does not “crowd out” other forms of politics, create uniquely path-dependent outcomes, or generate a unified backlash. Instead, it generates a more fractious politics as compared to bureaucratic legalism. In the cases in the book, the politics of adversarial legalism starts in a decentralized way, with individual lawsuits against individual defendants. When litigation gains momentum, however, a fractious interest group politics develops in Congress, with parties divided among winners and losers, victims and villains. The bureaucratic legalism cases in the book had an inverse trajectory, in which the scope of political conflict narrowed over time. In those cases creation was the most contentious stage, but after that a less-contested interest group politics emerged, with business interests largely deferring to key members of Congress and experts. The chapter ends by urging scholars to adopt the book’s comparative developmental approach to studying the politics of judicialization in other contexts.

This chapter introduces the core question of the book—how does reliance on rights, courts, and litigation in public policy shape politics?—and argues that this question implies a comparison of the politics of “judicialization” versus “non-judicialization.” The key to this comparison lies in identifying policies in the same issue area with different structures—adversarial legal policies versus bureaucratic legal policies. The chapter introduces the book's “comparative developmental approach”, which traces bureaucratic and adversarial legal policies over time from creation to expansion and attempted retrenchment. The book shows that many of the standard political criticisms of adversarial legalism—that it crowds out other forms of advocacy, that it creates path dependence, and that it engenders a polarizing backlash—are overstated. Instead, the book argues, adversarial legalism tends to individualize politics, resulting in a more fractious politics as compared to bureaucratic legalism.

The authors’ study is the first to reveal that survival-related information amplifies the susceptibility to suggestion-based false memories in both children and adults. So, although evidence is increasing that our memory is often better in a survival-related context, it also leads to increased flexibility, thereby creating memory illusions. Whether these memory illusions are truly adaptive or are merely simple byproducts of our memory is completely open for future research endeavors.

The preceding interdisciplinary examination of what determines transitions between stages in the development of problem substance use and problem gambling offers new insights into a topic of great interest to policy makers and wider society. Examination of the development of problematic substance use and gambling permits a better analysis of the different determinants of early and late stages of problem behaviour as well as better stage-specific interventions to reduce long-term severe consequences. An interdisciplinary approach, separating three levels of analysis (social, economic and political environment, individual, and cellular and molecular) allows the development of new, more targeted interventions and highlights the need for analysis of how determinants in different levels interact. Interdisciplinary working is also a scientific challenge which can help to draw together coherent policy suggestions presented in a common scientific language and this chapter offers such policy suggestions which have emerged from the work of this project.