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Historically, developmental investigators have tended to assess phenomena of interest in one way at one age in one culture. In this essay, I explore some rationales and advantages for a multiculture, multiage, multimethod science.

Cultural differences in basic color categorization or nomenclature have been variously explained by biological evolution, linguistic relativism, or semantic evolution. This paper reviews these theories and their implied philosophical antecedents. Furthermore, it brings recent ethological, electrophysiological, behavioral, and psychophysical data to bear on this formerly linguistic question. In both behavioral and psychophysical studies, natural categories of hue have been shown to exist in infrahuman species and in human infants and adults. The psychological salience of selected features of these hue categories in adult and infant humans has been found to correspond to neural functioning in brain. Moreover, recent psychophysiological evidence suggests that certain cultures may vary from a uniform pattern of categorization of basic hues because certain peoples may actually perceive colors differently and therefore categorize them differently.

Socioeconomic Status, Parenting, and Child Development presents cutting-edge thinking and research on linkages among socioeconomic status, parenting, and child development. The contributors represent an array of different disciplines, and approach the issues from a variety of perspectives. Accordingly, their ""take"" on how SES matters in the lives of children varies. This volume is divided into two parts. Part I concerns the constructs and measurement of SES and Part II discusses the functions and effects of SES. Each part presents four substantive chapters on the topic followed by an interp

Abstract Perceiving emotions correctly is foundational to the development of interpersonal skills. Five‐month‐old infants' abilities to recognize, discriminate and categorize facial expressions of smiling were tested in three coordinated experiments. Infants were habituated to four degrees of smiling modeled by the same or different people; following habituation, infants were presented with a new degree of smile worn by the same and by a new person (Experiment 1), a new degree of smile and a fearful expression worn by the same person (Experiment 2) or a new degree of smile and a fearful expression worn by new people (Experiment 3). Infants showed significant novelty preferences for the new person smiling and for the fearful expressions over the new degree of smiling. These findings indicate that infants at 5 months can categorize the facial expression of smiling in static faces, and yet recognize the same person despite changes in facial expression; this is the youngest age at which these abilities have been demonstrated. The findings are discussed in light of the significance of emotion expression face processing in social interaction and infants' categorization of faces.

Positive character involves a system of mutually beneficial relations between an individual and the context that coherently vary across ontogenetic time and enable the individual to engage the social world as a moral agent. We present ideas about the development of positive character attributes using three constructs associated with relational developmental systems (RDS) metatheory: the specificity of mutually beneficial individual context dynamics across time and place; holistic integration of dynamic processes of an individual with both the context and all cognitive, affective, and behavioral processes; and integration of the character system with other facets of the self-system. These features of RDS-based ideas coalesce on the embodiment of positive character development. We discuss the need for a more robust interrogation of embodied features of the character development system by suggesting that the coaction of morphological/physiological processes with cultural processes becomes part of a program of the integrated individual <=> contextual processes involved in the description, explanation, and optimization of the development of positive attributes of character. We discuss moments of programmatic research that should be involved in this interrogation, and we point to the potential contribution of theory-predicated research about the embodied development of positive attributes of character to enhancing the presence of moral agency and social justice in the world.

This article focuses on the interplay of research and practice (research⇔practice integration) in advancing international efforts to understand and enhance positive youth development (PYD). We discuss 3 facets of PYD research and application that have cross-cutting relevance to theory, to the use of theory for designing principles of PYD programs, and to evaluating whether specific instances of youth development programs have features that promote PYD. Using dynamic, relational developmental-systems-based concepts, we discuss the process of development involved in PYD, the use of the specificity principle to frame research and practice and, as a sample case illustrating how PYD research and practice can be advanced through the use of the specificity principle, we focus on one facet of PYD, that is, positive character, or character virtues. We point to important future directions for further illuminating the specificity of PYD process through assessing the developmental neurobiology of PYD, and we emphasize the important contributions that PYD research and practice integration can make worldwide to enhancing youth contributions to equity, social justice, and democracy.

"Development in Infancy reflects many new discoveries that have transformed our understanding of infants and their place in human development, with an emphasis on 21st century research. Organized topically, the book covers physical, perceptual, cognitive, language, and social development, in addition to describing theories of development, contexts of development, research methods, and implications of research in infancy for social policies and interventions. Key issues in infancy studies-those having to do with how nature and nurture transact and with interrelations among diverse domains of development-are woven throughout the text. The text also emphasizes infancy as a unique stage of the life cycle"--