The essay integrates the psychometric intelligence approach with the cognitive-developmental approach or the stage theory erected by Piaget and his disciples. The latter led to Piagetian Cross-Cultural Psychology and the accumulation of an immense body of data. It shows that different IQ levels are indicative of the peculiar stages of cognitive…

Dabrowski's theory of positive disintegration describes patterns and explains mechanisms of human development and has been successfully applied to understanding of gifted individuals. This article shows how the concepts of chaos theory and self-organization such as the sensitivity to initial conditions, positive and negative feedback, bifurcation…

Personality is defined as the dynamic organization, within an individual, of the systems that determine his or her characteristic behavior or thought. The study of personality involves many aspects of human behavior. Four approaches used to study personality are presented in this document: (1) Social Learning theory; (2) Trait theory; (3)…

In generic psychiatry there has been increasing interest among scientists for the developmental perspective. However, professionals active in the mental health care of people with intellectual disability (ID) have not shown the same degree of interest. The author of this article, who has had a liberal amount of rewarding experiences with the…

Researchers in the fields of cognitive and language development have made less use of large-scale longitudinal designs and of person-centered approaches to data analysis than have researchers in the fields of social and personality development. It is argued that differences among domains of developmental psychology in the research methods employed…

Personality development and structure formation were studied in 60 preadolescent children (aged 9 to 13). Six major aspects of preadolescent individuality were assessed: cognitive controls, performance on the Holtzman Inkblot Test, intellectual abilities, general response to clinical testing, general response to laboratory testing, and defense…

This report surveys writings by National Institute of Mental Health grant recipients who have investigated this first five years of life. The authors attempted to identify and correlate ideas, themes, perspectives and issues which can be useful in the formulation and evaluation of social policies related to infant and child development. Major…