Robert Emde – författare

Children are not simply molded by the environment; through constant inference and interpretation, they actively shape their own social world. This book is about that process. Elliot Turiel's work focuses on the development of moral judgement in children and adolescents and, more generally, on their evolving understanding of the conventions of social systems. His research suggests that social judgements are ordered, systematic, subtly discriminative, and related to behavior. His theory of the ways in which children generate social knowledge through their social experiences will be of interest to a wide range of researchers and students in child development and education.

This important book provides a comprehensive look, from a developmental perspective, of how children and adolescents come to understand themselves during the first two decades of life. It explores every aspect of this central area of social cognition, including the physical, social, active, and psychological aspects of self. The authors present data from several cross-sectional and longitudinal studies of children's and adolescents' self-conceptions, and they present alternative methods for interviewing children about themselves and for analyzing children's responses for developmental level and schematic orientation. They offer theoretical explanations about the processes that account for normal development of self-understanding and contrast these with abnormal processes that arise in populations of clinically disturbed youth. A chapter is also devoted to the study of children living in a remote agrarian setting, whose self-understanding is contrasted with the self-conceptions of children in the United States.

The "Development of Attachment and Affiliative Systems" was selected as the topic for a three-day workshop held at Estes Park, Colorado, in May, 1980. The papers which resulted from this effort not only reflect a recent intensity of research in this area, but also highlight a mounting need for ask­ ing questions across disciplines and for integrating theories. The sponsor of the workshop was the Developmental Psychobiology Research Group (DPRG) of the Department of Psychiatry, University of Colorado Medical School, a group which itself is interdisciplinary and which has met regularly since 1969 to criticize research, ask questions, and discuss findings. In 1974, the Group was awarded an endowment fund by the Grant Foundation after a request for a proposal initiated by Philip Sapir and Douglas Bond. The aims of this fund are to facilitate the research of young investigators, to encourage new research, and to provide seed money for collaborative ventures. Much of what is reported here results from that support. Thus, happily, not only are the contributions timely by virtue of converging on an important topic, but they also commemorate more than five years of Grant Foundation support. Once the topic was chosen, a small number of guests were invited to participate. The papers of Timiras, Sackett, Konner, and Lamb represent dif­ fering perspectives from neurobiology, primatology, cultural anthropology, and social psychology.