Background: Teenagers experience wars not only in the actual war zones but also in the home, school, and street fronts. Sometimes they are the innocent victims of bullying. Often confused, they do not know how to survive in bullying situations. Adults such as movie makers and educators have taken on the responsibility of helping teenagers. The…

In September 1939, two days before declaring war on Germany, the British government evacuated over half a million children from London to supposedly safer areas in the country. Schoolchildren went there with their teachers and infants with their mothers. Immediately after the event (and ever since) the impact of the evacuation on the children--the…

Is human ontogenesis a product of evolution or a result of individual decisions and actions? In the present paper we aim at solving this apparent conflict between a behavioral genetics approach and an action-theoretical perspective to human development. After a discussion of the idea of active and intentional self-development and the role of genes…

In addition to his pioneering studies on prenatal development of social responses in the mallard, Gilbert Gottlieb made important theoretical contributions to the study of the evolution of behavior. This tribute to Gottlieb presents his early view that prenatal behavioral development is the product of evolution and his revision of this view in his…

Scholars often distinguish everyday creativity and creativity in more formal domains, such as the arts. However, everyday creativity has been rather neglected in research. This paper compares artistic and everyday creativity. Three studies examine the content of behavior in artistic and everyday creativity, as well as similarities and differences…

Modern managers expect staff to accept more responsibility. However, not all of them want to take more responsibility. Others complain of not having enough responsibility entrusted to them and expect more autonomy and decision-making. In this paper, responsibility is defined as being accountable and fulfilling one's duty while being in charge.…

The marriage of evolution and development to produce the new discipline "evo-devo" in biology is situated in the general history of evolutionary biology, and its significance for developmental cognitive science is discussed. The discovery and description of the highly conserved, robust and "evolvable" mechanisms that organize the vertebrate body…

This article explores some of the complexities of psychotherapy with an identical twin. The difficulty of developing in psychotherapy while so much of what is oneself is located in the other twin will also be explored. The use of the countertransference as a therapeutic method will be considered as the young person develops her unique, separate…

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…

The adherence of traditional developmental theories to a linear paradigm is incompatible with the nature of "spirit". Dynamic Systems Theory (DST), a recent contributor to understanding child development, offers an alternative which avoids these paradigmatic limitations. Concepts of agency, "top-down" causality, emergence and…

Higher levels of personal growth initiative (PGI; C. Robitschek, 1998) are associated with lower negative and higher positive affect (e.g., C. Robitschek & S. Kashubeck, 1999; C. Robitschek & C. L. M. Keyes, 2004). Two hypotheses that have been suggested for such findings are that (a) PGI moderates the relation between problems and affect and (b)…

The research reported here aims to develop understandings around the expectations and perceptions of Canadian students entering a Graduate Diploma of Education program in an Australian university. The study align well with the theme of "crossing borders", as the study focuses on international students "crossing borders" to…

This research investigated associations between classroom environment and student affective outcomes in Australian secondary schools. The Technology-Rich Outcomes-Focused Learning Environment Inventory (TROFLEI) was used to assess 10 classroom environment dimensions: student cohesiveness, teacher support, involvement, investigation, task…

The field of youth studies appears to have increasingly taken on a self-consciously "international" orientation, characterized by grappling with how to represent local youth identities and social practices within international, transnational, or global contexts. This challenge is repeated across many different types of study and worked…

Ludwig Wittgenstein taught only a couple of Australian philosophers, at Cambridge in the late 1940s, and one of them, Frank "Camo" Jackson (Chair, Philosophy, Monash University) taught the author epistemology and philosophical psychology in the 1970s. In this article, the author describes how this teaching was central to his subsequent…