Background: Animal research indicates that the neural substrates of emotion regulation may be persistently altered by early environmental exposures. If similar processes operate in human development then this is significant, as the capacity to regulate emotional states is fundamental to human adaptation. Methods: We utilised a 22-year longitudinal…

Nicholas Hobbs, a visionary in the field of psychology, believed strongly that how one defines a problem determines in large part the strategies that can be generated to solve it (Hobbs, 1982). He questioned the validity of psychiatric labels and other means of classification that pathologized children, believing that such approaches guided people…

Decades of studies show that children's behavior is shaped by relationships in the "social ecology" of family, peers, school, and community. But in recent decades the prevailing scientific dogma was that genes determine destiny. Now it is clear that experience changes genes. For better or worse, environmental experiences including nutrition,…