The standard model of the role of early experience in human development assumes that children's environments in their first years of life are dominant influences on who they become as adults. The standard model favors interventions to improve children's long-term outcomes that start early in life and are intensive in time and attention from…

Symbolic play is a powerful vehicle for supporting emotional development and communication. It embraces all developmental capacities. This article describes how symbols are formed and how emotional themes are symbolized whereby children reveal their understanding of the world, their feelings and relationships, and how they see themselves in the…

A counselor/teacher explains a process to help students realize greater emotional competency in classroom learning: using the Human Dynamics model for understanding learning differences; having teachers and students collaborate on the student- identified learning dynamic and identify necessary emotional competencies; and completing student…

Interprets literature on contributions of social cognitive and emotion processes to children's social competence in the context of an integrated model of emotion processes and cognition in social information processing. Provides neurophysiological and functional evidence for the centrality of emotion processes in personal-social decision making.…

Extrapolating from current developmental theory and using practice-to-theory/theory-to-practice methods, the authors propose a framework for individual diversity development among faculty, staff, and students. The model offers individuals in-depth cognitive, affective and behavioral frameworks of development toward consciously valuing complex and…

This article describes how the "developmental structuralist" theory of emotional development has evolved over 25 years into the developmental-individual difference-relationship (DIR[R]) approach to assessment and intervention. ZERO TO THREE and the Interdisciplinary Council for Developmental and Learning Disorders (ICDL) trace their roots to the…

Most identity development models are unidimensional and mutually independent. They rarely acknowledge multiple cultural identifications or their relationship to diversity-awareness training. This article discusses this relationship in a four-stage conceptual model for diversity identity development and its implications for the design, structuring,…

Argues that a new definition of affect that focuses on the subjective understanding of interpersonal events, can be used to expand models of how observed family behaviors are related to adolescent psychosocial outcomes. A method for examining adolescents' subjective understanding of family behaviors, the video-recall method, is illustrated in a…

It is difficult to make progress in the study of emotions and emotional development if the meanings assigned to central constructs vary widely across investigators. This book clarifies and synthesizes the different ways in which emotion researchers approach fundamental questions about the nature of emotion and emotional development. Theorist and…

Despite the apparent universality of loneliness and its link to psychosocial maladjustment, research on loneliness has emerged rather recently in the history of psychology. This book brings together varied theories and lines of research on loneliness among children and adolescents to provide a source for future research. The chapters are: (1)…

A study of the advantages and disadvantages of various types of infant care provided by someone other than the mother is presented. Problems listed as occurring in intervention programs include: maternal-child attachment, individual differences among infants, planning problems, and emotional-social development. Types of intervention studied are:…