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This chapter reviews literature related to relationships between expertise and aging. It first considers how experts excel on domain-relevant tasks despite cognitive limitations and how these expertise-related advantages develop, which suggest ways in which adults can offset age-related cognitive constraints to maintain performance in later years. The chapter then reviews studies that examine two issues about how expertise influences performance as we age. First, to what extent high-level experts can retain superior levels of performance as they age, an issue often addressed in fairly narrow domains such as games, sports, and music. A second, broader issue concerns whether the benefits or costs associated with domain-general as well as domain-specific knowledge change with age. This second issue is central to lifespan theory: To what extent does knowledge and skill associated with experience offset age-related declines in abilities and function.

Although polysomnography is the gold standard for recording sleep, the use of actigraphy in conjunction with a sleep diary is now common in the study of sleep/wake patterns in infants, children, and adolescents. Actigraphy has the advantage of being able to record data over long periods of time while the subject carries out his or her normal routine. The devices are small, lightweight, and can be worn on the wrist in a similar manner to a wristwatch, or on the ankle as is often used in infant studies. A number of studies have validated actigraphy against polysomnography for determining sleep and found good agreements; however, the specificity for determining wake is low across all ages of children. In conjunction with a sleep diary, the accuracy of actigraphy is significantly improved. Conversely, accuracy of parental reporting of sleep and wake using a sleep diary can be significantly improved when used in conjunction with actigraphy. The use of actigraphy in clinical medicine is expanding as it provides important supplementary information to clinicians regarding a variety of sleep disorders.

Women experiencing depressive symptoms often do not seek timely treatment from a mental health professional. This review focuses specifically on adapted approaches and tailored interventions for perinatal depression that increase their acceptability and accessibility. The effects of these adapted depression interventions cover a broad range; to compare these new treatments only those resulting in statistically significant improvement are reviewed. Some adaptations, even those provided by non–mental health specialists, produced effects equal to or surpassing those achieved by traditional treatment strategies. Suggestions for future research have two foci. First, because depressed perinatal women are also likely to suffer from comorbid disorders such as anxiety, it is important to evaluate the effectiveness of adapted treatments on complex cases. Second, the implementation setting of adapted treatments has generally been limited. Evaluating how these interventions might be incorporated into new settings as part of a stepped-care approach moves research from the bench into clinical settings.

We concentrate on the psychosocial and developmental consequences of major life adversity on child and family mental health, with particular attention to regions affected by communal violence and regions affected by HIV/AIDS. In both of these contexts, there is an overlap of several forms of family adversity that commonly characterize large proportions of developing children and their caregivers. As opposed to a simplistic view of children in adversity which ascribes their long-term well-being as mainly linked to traumatic exposures or individual characteristics, a developmental and ecological lens is used to consider the many ways in which mental health and well-being are shaped by the interplay between individual, family, community, and societal factors. We conclude with a series of recommendations illustrating the interplay between building the evidence base, increasing political will to make change, and improving the implementation of high quality and sustainable services for children, youth, and families.

Two cultural frames (the nation-state and groupways) as lenses for understanding adolescent civic development are explored. The authors argue that distinct cultural models of citizenship reflect different definitions of the prerogatives and obligations that bind people in a political community. These models change as groups challenge the status quo and as younger generations become part of the body politic. Through their collective, public actions in the mediating institutions of civil society, adolescents construct their civic identities and, in the process, contribute to social stability and social change. Adolescents’ civic consciousness is built up over time via groupways (their everyday actions and relationships of power as members of cultural groups).

Adolescent birthrates in the United States are much higher than those in other developed countries, and the majority of adolescents who become mothers come from impoverished backgrounds. Not surprisingly, they experience significant adjustment difficulties, and both their own and their children's developmental outcomes are often compromised. In this chapter, we review the adolescent parenting literature with the goal of uncovering the unique patterns of factors that may enable young mothers to parent successfully despite their disadvantaged conditions. We start with a description of the historic trends in birthrates and the socioeconomic and demographic characteristics of adolescent mothers in the United States, to provide the context in which they are parenting their children. We then review the literature on factors related to their parenting behaviors and the developmental outcomes of their children, including individual, familial, sociodemographic and cultural risk and protective factors. Finally, we conclude and provide future directions for research in the field.

This chapter examines adolescent risk and resilience across cultures. It provides an overview of resilience theory and identifies constructs applicable to the study of adolescence as a developmental period. It then examines the role of culture in adolescent development. Next, the chapter examines how issues of risk and resilience play out in three specific adolescent populations: children growing up in immigrant families in the US, impoverished and homeless Brazilian youth, and war-affected children around the world. The final section contains recommendations for future research synthesizing the study of resilience, culture, and adolescent development. Integrating the study of resilience and the study of culture can result in a more nuanced way of understanding developmental risk and resilience.

A significant body of literature has examined human families from an evolutionary perspective. Another significant body of literature has examined adoptive families. Unfortunately, these two bodies of literature have generally been kept separate from each other. To address this gap, I examine adoption from an evolutionary perspective. My goal is to both better understand adoption via evolutionary theory, as well as to better understand the evolution of families via adoption. I examine several forms and functions of adoption, including adoption as a substitute for biological children, adoption as a means of kin support, and adoption as a means of social exchange and manipulation. From an evolutionary perspective, what stands out about adoption is its ubiquity and its diversity, its emphasis on biological kinship, and its potential utility as a social tool. I recommend further studies on the ecology of adoption, as well as unifying adoption with other modern approaches to families, including cognitive psychology and neuroscience.

This chapter focuses on adoptive parenting. At face value, adoption does not fulfill one of the primary goals of evolution: survival and eventual reproduction of one’s genes. Why, then, given our evolutionary history, and the relative difficulty of adoption, is adoption so widespread and usually successful? The chapter is devoted to examining adoption from an evolutionary perspective. It traces the history of adoption and reviews many reasons why adoption has been, and still is, widespread. The human history of adoption reflects many of our evolutionary goals and biological drives. However, one of the unique capacities of humanity is the ability to rise above our baser biology to use logic and reason to overcome gut reactions rooted in animal biology. Modern adoption theory and practice seek to recognize patterns rooted in biology, history, and culture, while encouraging more equitable practices that respect each individual involved in adoption.

This chapter examines early conceptual formulations of adult development in the U.S. and contrasts them with notably different conceptions of aging in Japan. Empirical research in both cultural contexts points to evidence of psychological change in personality traits, well-being, affect with aging in the U.S., whereas Japanese studies have linked the well-being of older persons to life roles and activities as well as examined the concept of ikigai (what makes life worthy). Gender differences are an emerging part of the story, especially in Japan. The authors delineate multiple avenues for future research to broaden the scope of scientific inquiries on adult development and aging in Japan as well as promote greater exchange between cultural psychologists and adult developmentalists. More work is also called for to link adult developmental changes to health and to examine historical changes in experiences of aging.

Research on literacy in deaf communities tends to concentrate on the literacy development and experiences of children and adolescents, overlooking the literacy practices that provide the foundation for effective and meaningful reading in adulthood. However, exploring the reading strategies that high-achieving deaf adults use can have a cascading impact on understandings of literacy through the lenses of neurobiology, culture, education, and beyond. This chapter synthesizes the body of research on effective reading strategies used by deaf adults, asking: What reading strategies do high-achieving deaf readers use? How do high-achieving deaf readers develop reading strategies? What do the reading strategies reveal about earlier stages of literacy development and the components of effective reading? After exploring these questions, the chapter concludes by identifying areas for future research and proposing applications of current research on adult reading strategies to improve reading experiences and instruction for deaf and hard-of-hearing children.

This article reviews the topics of affect, motivation, working memory, and their relationships to mathematics learning and performance. The underlying factors of interest, motivation, self-efficacy, and maths anxiety, as well as an approach concerning people’s beliefs about fixed versus malleable intelligence, can be grouped into an approach and an avoidance constellation of attitudes and beliefs, with opposite relationships to outcome measures of learning and mastery in maths. This article then considers the research on working memory, showing it to be central to arithmetic and maths processing, and also the principle mental component being disrupted by affective and emotional reactions during problem solving. After discussing the disruptive effects of maths anxiety, choking under pressure, and stereotype threat, the article closes with a brief consideration of how these affective disruptions might be minimized or eliminated.

This chapter is from the forthcoming The Oxford Handbook of Affective Computing edited by Rafael Calvo, Sidney K. D'Mello, Jonathan Gratch, and Arvid Kappas. Affective computing can illuminate early emotional dynamics and provide tools for intervention in disordered emotional functioning. This chapter reviews affective computing approaches to understanding emotional communication in typically developing children and children with an autism spectrum disorder (ASD). It covers the application of automated measurement of the dynamics of emotional expression and discusses advances in the modeling of infant and parent interactions based on insights from time-series analysis, machine learning, and recurrence theory. The authors discuss progress in the automated measurement of vocalization in infants and children and new methods for the efficient measurement of sympathetic activation and its application in children with ASD. They conclude by presenting translational applications of affective computing to children with ASD, including the use of embodied conversational agents (ECAs) to understand and influence the affective dynamics of learning, and the use of robots to improve the social and emotional functioning of children with ASD.

From their very origins, psychology and sociology have each tended to follow their own path, without taking the other into consideration. This mutual indifference is particularly problematic when studying processes of socialization. On the developmental psychological side, there is perhaps a tendency to consider the child as a “lone explorer,” while on the sociology side, the irreducibility of the social agent to their individual epistemic endeavor is, of course, central. However, socialization is essentially about transmission, from one generation to the next, of ways of doing, thinking, and feeling. In this chapter, the authors argue that culture is mostly about what is socially relevant, and that what is socially relevant can be learned by observing relevant others’ affective expressions. This affective social learning may help close the gap between psychology and sociology by providing different mechanisms that enable individuals to embody, via their developing emotions, the system of cultural relevance in which they live.

This chapter explores the role of aging and lifelong learning. It introduces the concept of aged heterogeneity, or the notion that older workers tend to be more heterogeneous than younger workers and therefore have more variation in needs when it comes to development and learning, to explain how and why older workers have different learning strategies and needs as they become increasingly heterogeneous in their needs and wishes in relation to their work. The chapter discusses how individual approaches are necessary and explains the ways through which organizations, managers, and employees themselves may benefit from more individualized approaches to lifelong learning, especially in later stages of the career.

Aggressive and antisocial acts need to be prevented because (1) they cause serious problems to the individuals who are at the receiving end, (2) they lead to fear and escalation in the community, and (3) they often indicate that the offender has a history of mental health problems. Physical aggression and many other forms of antisocial behavior appear during the first few years after birth. Although most learn to regulate them by the time they enter the formal school system, a substantial minority of children do not. This lack of socialization on their part often has important consequences well into adulthood. This chapter will not only review studies of antisocial behaviors globally, but will focus on subtypes of conduct disorder. Indeed, although there may be commonalities between antisocial behaviors, these may not necessarily follow the same developmental course, share the same correlates, or develop jointly. Further, these may be manifested differently in boys and girls. It is only with a better understanding of these developmental factors that we may improve the effectiveness of prevention and corrective interventions.

This chapter evaluates another kind of infant care: allomothering. Allomothering can be defined as helping to rear and take care of the young by any member of the group besides the mother. Therefore, the term allomothers could refer to siblings, aunts, uncles, fathers, or unrelated members of a group. Allomothering is an adaptive behavior that has evolved in many species under different conditions. The chapter focuses on allomothering that occurs in six simian species. These six monkey species were selected because all have been observed to engage in allomothering behavior and, therefore, have been studied more intensely than other monkey species. Ultimately, the chapter assesses the questions of what physical environments promote alloparenting and what social behaviors are observed that increase social bonds between group members leading to stable allomothering.

The aim of the current chapter is to describe alternative ways that can enhance literacy development for persons with deafblindness. The conventional concept of literacy, which concerns reading and writing, excludes persons with deafblindness from literacy experiences. Therefore, a broadened and more contemporary concept is supported, which incorporates communication. Within this broader concept, assistive technology can play an important role in the development of literacy and therefore facilitate the access of individuals who are deafblind in different domains of life. Furthermore, the paper emphasizes the critical role of teachers and the importance of training that will enable them to exploit assistive technology in order to enhance the literacy skills of persons who are deafblind.