The dynamic systems (DS) approach has emerged as an influential and potentially unifying metatheory for developmental science. Its central platform--the argument against design--suggests that structure spontaneously and without prescription emerges through self-organization. In one of the most prominent accounts of DS, Thelen and her colleagues…

Migration induces complex processes of human transformation that are usually not reflected in theories that describe these changes. In most theories regarding these transformations, the implicit assumption is that immigrants undergo a transition to the culture of the mainstream population according to a modernization perspective. Based on a review…

This paper poses the following question: When, in spite of knowing that it is wrong, people go on to hurt others, what does this mean for the development of moral agency? We begin by defining moral agency and briefly sketching relations between moral agency and other concepts. We then outline what three extant literatures suggest about this…

For children from culturally and linguistically diverse backgrounds the ability to maintain flexible identities and integrate multiple facets of self is a crucial developmental task. We present a conceptual model for the development of expertise in navigating across cultures, delineating how community characteristics interact with family and…

The acculturation gap-distress model purports that immigrant children acculturate to their new culture at a quicker pace than their parents, leading to family conflict and youth maladjustment. This article reviews literature on the acculturation gap-distress model, showing that acculturation gaps function in unique ways depending on many social…

Adolescence is a period of marked change in the person's cognitive, physical, psychological, and social development and in the individual's relations with the people and institutions of the social world. These changes place adaptational demands on adolescents, ones involving relations between their actions upon the context and the action of the…

This article reviews Giyoo Hatano's ground-breaking theoretical, empirical, and methodological contributions to conceptual change research. In particular, his discovery of "vitalism" as part of children's legitimate and distinctive biology at early ages stands as a landmark. In addition, his work reinterpreted childhood "personification," changing…

This article focuses on the common and unique contributions of three major life-span theories in addressing improvement/maintenance and reorientation, which represent central processes of coping with major life change and loss. For this purpose, we review and compare the dual-process model of assimilative and accommodative coping, the model of…

This paper builds on Hatano and Inagaki's pioneering work on the role of experience and cultural models in children's biological reasoning. We use a category-based induction task to consider how experience and cultural models shape rural and urban children's patterns of biological reasoning. We discuss the implications of these findings for…