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…

The symposium is described as being devoted to the question of whether and to what extent action may constitute a useful paradigm for developmental psychology, where action is understood as voluntary behavior employed by the agent as a means of attaining certain ends. (Author/RH)

To illustrate the need for careful analysis, discusses (1) intrapersonal versus interpersonal paradigms of intention and (2) differentiation between reason and cause and their joint consideration.(RH)

Proposes an extension of multivariate, structural analyses for studying organism-environment interactions. Based on characteristics of the assumed feedback mechanisms between behavioral and environmental systems, it appears possible to analyze longitudinally ordered sequences in terms of recursive versus nonrecursive and distal versus proximal…

The paradigm of theoretical behaviorism which rests on the premise of a passive organism is discussed. It is argued that the learning-theory movement promoted scientific understanding of the active organism which, in an ideological sense, it tended to deny. (MS)

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…

Views developmental schemes as closed formal depictions of the dialectic which cannot account for their own existential relativity within experience. Shows how the internal logic of a scheme depends on the experimental perspective from which it is posited. Argues for the possibility of constructing a "positional logic" that would relate…

This paper shows how an open-ended nonlinear dialectic process can be depicted as a self-linearizing form which reveals transition structures as nodal points of self-reflection. (MS)

Points out that while some symposium papers pursue a model of the individual mind, others explore the social mind. Argues that concepts of cognitive theory originally based on social existence have been deformed to emphasize the individual as a self-contained entity.(RH)

Summarizes the general perspectives represented in the symposium and attempts to reconcile them by reconstructing a dialog between them. Issues addressed include the intersubjective nature of intentionality, the nature of action theoretical explanations, and the distinctive characteristics of action theory. (RH)