Penn State Series on Child and Adolescent Development – serie

The first volume in this new series from The Center for the Study of Child and Adolescent Development at The Pennsylvania State University focuses on the relationship between the biological stress circuits and the behavioral concomitants to stress in animals and humans. The participants at this conference, a tribute to Dean Evan G. Pattishall, Jr., discuss the developmental implications of their work in relation to the periods of infancy, childhood, and adolescence. For professionals, clinicians, and researchers in clinical, developmental, experimental, and health psychology, behavioral medicine, psychiatry, psychotherapy, and the neurosciences.

Derived from a conference honoring the legacy of Joachim Wohlwill, this volume is designed to reflect as many facets of the late scholar's wide-ranging work as possible. As its title indicates, the book identifies three broad areas in which Wohlwill made significant contributions: art and aesthetics, human-environment interaction, and concepts of development. In each of these areas Wohlwill made seminal contributions, helping to shape, maintain, and even change the direction of research and thought. Specific topics addressed here by his colleagues, students, and contemporaries include: the shape of development, the intermingling of perception and cognition, the balance between innate and acquired processes, the relation between environmental and ecological psychology, the development of the ability to use external representations of the physical environment, and the way world views underpin beliefs about the nature of development.

Adolescent researchers are increasingly aware that they must examine development both across time and across context. To do so, however, requires new conceptualizations and methodological approaches to the study of development, including attention to the pathways young people choose in adolescence and follow into adulthood. This volume assembles work by key researchers in the field who are struggling to understand how developmental trajectories are constructed and maintained throughout the adolescent period. A complete understanding of developmental pathways requires the recognition that adolescents' social contexts--family, school, neighborhood, and/or peer group--are important influences on the choices they make at this developmental period. Researchers have traditionally studied contexts in isolation rather than examining the interrelationships among contexts and their implications for adolescent development. The present volume seeks to address this gap in the literature, with attention given not only to the interrelationships among contexts for white, middle-class youth, but also to these issues for minority adolescents in neighborhoods that vary in terms of access to resources. It concludes with an examination of researcher-community collaboration as a strategy to move communities toward a greater awareness of adolescent development and the problems facing youth in their community, and as a means to promote potential avenues for policy change and intervention.

Derived from a conference honoring the legacy of Joachim Wohlwill, this volume is designed to reflect as many facets of the late scholar's wide-ranging work as possible. As its title indicates, the book identifies three broad areas in which Wohlwill made significant contributions: art and aesthetics, human-environment interaction, and concepts of development. In each of these areas Wohlwill made seminal contributions, helping to shape, maintain, and even change the direction of research and thought. Specific topics addressed here by his colleagues, students, and contemporaries include: the shape of development, the intermingling of perception and cognition, the balance between innate and acquired processes, the relation between environmental and ecological psychology, the development of the ability to use external representations of the physical environment, and the way world views underpin beliefs about the nature of development.

The first volume in this new series from The Center for the Study of Child and Adolescent Development at The Pennsylvania State University focuses on the relationship between the biological stress circuits and the behavioral concomitants to stress in animals and humans. The participants at this conference, a tribute to Dean Evan G. Pattishall, Jr., discuss the developmental implications of their work in relation to the periods of infancy, childhood, and adolescence. For professionals, clinicians, and researchers in clinical, developmental, experimental, and health psychology, behavioral medicine, psychiatry, psychotherapy, and the neurosciences.

This volume brings together a broad group of scholars from a diverse array of disciplines to write integratively about cutting-edge research issues pertinent to various facets of the study of early adolescence. All contributors speak to the idea of interdisciplinary integration as a means of advancing knowledge in particular focus areas of early adolescence; all approach their topic with an orientation to integrating levels of organization. In so doing, they testify to the importance of two interrelated integrations -- multidisciplinary and multiprofessional -- for furthering understanding of young adolescents.

Adolescent researchers are increasingly aware that they must examine development both across time and across context. To do so, however, requires new conceptualizations and methodological approaches to the study of development, including attention to the pathways young people choose in adolescence and follow into adulthood. This volume assembles work by key researchers in the field who are struggling to understand how developmental trajectories are constructed and maintained throughout the adolescent period. A complete understanding of developmental pathways requires the recognition that adolescents' social contexts--family, school, neighborhood, and/or peer group--are important influences on the choices they make at this developmental period. Researchers have traditionally studied contexts in isolation rather than examining the interrelationships among contexts and their implications for adolescent development. The present volume seeks to address this gap in the literature, with attention given not only to the interrelationships among contexts for white, middle-class youth, but also to these issues for minority adolescents in neighborhoods that vary in terms of access to resources. It concludes with an examination of researcher-community collaboration as a strategy to move communities toward a greater awareness of adolescent development and the problems facing youth in their community, and as a means to promote potential avenues for policy change and intervention.