100.3 Preface

• Experiencing the Lifespan unfolds like a story. The main feature that makes this book special is the writing style. Experiencing the Lifespan reads like a conversation rather than a traditional text. Each chapter begins with a vignette constructed to highlight the material I will be discussing. I’ve designed my narrative to flow from topic to topic; and I’ve planned every chapter to interconnect. In this book, the main themes that underlie developmental science flow throughout the entire book. I want students to have the sense that they are reading an exciting, ongoing story. Most of all, I want them to feel that they are learning about a coherent, organized field.

• Experiencing the Lifespan is uniquely organized to highlight development. A second mission that has driven my writing is to highlight how our lives evolve. What exactly makes an 8-year-old mentally different from a 4-year-old, or a 60-year-old different from a person of 85. In order to emphasize how children develop, I decided to cover all of childhood in a single three-chapter part. This strategy allowed me to fully explore the magic of Piaget’s preoperational and concrete operational stages and to trace the development of aggression, childhood friendships, and gender-stereotyped play. It permitted me to show concretely how the ability to think through their actions changes as children travel from preschool through elementary school. I decided to put early and middle adulthood in one unit (Part IV) for similar reasons: It simply made logical sense to discuss important topics that transcend a single life stage, such as marriage, parenting, and work (Chapter 11) and adult personality and cognitive development (Chapter 12) together in the same place. In fact, I’ve designed this whole text to highlight development. I follow the characters in the chapter-opening vignettes throughout each several-chapter book part. I’ve planned each life-stage segment to flow in a developmental way. In the first infancy chapter, I begin with a discussion of newborn states. The second chapter in this sequence (Infancy: Socioemotional Development) ends with a discussion of toddlerhood. My three-chapter Early and Middle Adulthood book part starts with an exploration of the challenges of emerging adulthood (Chapter 10), then tackles marriage, parenthood, and career (Chapter 11), and culminates with a chapter tracking adult personality and intelligence through midlife, and exploring “older” family roles such as parent care and grandparenthood (Chapter 12). In Part VI, Later Life, I begin with a chapter devoted to topics, such as retirement, that typically take place during the young-old years. Then I focus on physical aging (Chapter 14, The Physical Challenges of Old Age) because sensory-motor impairments, dementing diseases, and interventions for late-life frailty become crucial concerns mainly in the eighties and beyond. Yes, this textbook does—for the most part—move through the lifespan stage by stage. However, it’s targeted to highlight the aspects of development—such as constructing an adult life in the twenties or physical disabilities in the eighties—that become salient at particular times of life. I believe that my textbook captures the best features of the chronological and topical approaches.

  

  For this grandmother, mother, and daughter, getting dressed up to visit this Shinto family shrine and pay their respects to their ancestors is an important ritual. It is one way that the lesson “honor your elders” is taught to children living in collectivist societies such as Japan from an early age.

  B. Tanaka/Getty

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  Experiencing the Lifespan is both shorter and more in-depth. Adopting this flexible, development-friendly organization makes for a more manageable, teacher-friendly book. With 15 chapters and at fewer than 475 pages, my textbook really can be mastered in a one-semester course! Not being locked into covering each slice of life in defined bits also gives me the freedom to focus on what is most important in special depth. As you will discover while reading my comprehensive discussions of central topics in our field, such as attachment, parenting, puberty, and adult personality consistency and change, omitting superficial coverage of “everything” allows time to explore the core issues in developmental science in a deeper, more thoughtful way.

  

  These teens are probably taking great pleasure in serving meals to the homeless as part of their school community-service project. Was a high school experience, like this one, life changing for you?

  Ariel Skelley/Blend Images/Getty Images

• Experiencing the Lifespan actively fosters critical thinking. Guiding students to reflect on what they are reading is actually another of my writing goals. A great advantage of engaging readers in a conversation is that I can naturally embed critical thinking into the actual narrative. For example, as I move from discussing Piaget’s ideas on cognition to Vygotsky’s theory to the information-processing approach in Chapter 5, I point out the gaps in each perspective and highlight why each approach offers a unique contribution to understanding children’s intellectual growth. On a policy-oriented level, after discussing day care, teenage storm and stress, or physical aging, I ask readers to think critically about how to improve the way our culture cares for young families, treats teenagers, and can make life more user-friendly for the baby boomers now traveling into their older years.

  

  As she translates an oath of naturalization to her non-English-speaking Iraq mom, this daughter is engaging in a role reversal that can be distressing, but can also offer a lifelong sense of empathy and self-efficacy.

  AP Photo/Lincoln Journal Star, Krista Niles

• Experiencing the Lifespan has a global orientation. Intrinsic to getting students to evaluate their own cultural practices is the need to highlight alternate perspectives on our developing life. Therefore, Experiencing the Lifespan is a firmly international book. I introduce this global orientation in the first chapter when I spell out the differences between collectivist and individualistic cultures and between the developed and developing worlds. In the childhood chapters, when discussing topics from pregnancy to parenting, I pay special attention to cultural variations. In the adulthood sections, standard “Setting the Context” heads, preceding the research, offer snapshots of love and marriage in different nations, discuss retirement around the world, and explore different societal practices and attitudes toward death. (In fact, “How do other groups handle this?” is a question that crops up when I talk about practically every topic in the book!)

• Experiencing the Lifespan highlights the multiple forces that shape development. Given my emphasis on cultural variations within our universal human experience, it should come as no surprise that the main theoretical framework I’ve used to organize this book is the developmental systems approach. Throughout the chapters, I explore the many influences that interact to predict life milestones—from puberty to physical aging. Erikson’s stages, attachment theory, behavioral genetics, evolutionary theory, self-efficacy, and, especially, the importance of looking at nature and nurture and providing the best person–environment fit—all are concepts that I introduce in the first chapter and continue to stress as the book unfolds. Another theme that runs through this text is the impact of socioeconomic status on shaping everything from breast-feeding practices to the rate at which we age and die.

• Experiencing the Lifespan is applications-oriented, and focused on how to construct a satisfying life. Because of my background as a clinical psychologist, my other passion is to concretely bring home how we can use the scientific findings to improve the quality of life. So most topics in this text end with “Interventions” sections spelling out practical implications of the research. With its varied Interventions, such as “How Can You Get Babies to Sleep Through the Night?” or “Using Piaget’s Theory at Home and at Work,” to its adulthood tables, such as “How to Flourish During Adulthood” and sections devoted to “Aging Optimally,” Experiencing the Lifespan is designed to show how the science of development can make a difference in people’s lives.

• Experiencing the Lifespan is a person-centered, hands-on textbook. This book is also designed to bring the experience of the lifespan home in a personal way. Therefore, in “Experiencing the Lifespan” boxes, I report on interviews I’ve conducted with people ranging from a 16-year-old (a student of mine) who was charged as an adult with second-degree murder to a 70-year-old man with Alzheimer’s disease. To entice readers to empathize with the challenges of other life stages, I continually ask students to “imagine you are a toddler” or “a sleep-deprived mother” or “an 80-year-old struggling with the challenges of driving in later life.”

  

  This new member of the Efé people of central Africa will be lovingly cared for by the whole community, males as well as females, from his first minutes of life. Because he sleeps with his mother, however, at the “right” age he will develop his primary attachment to her.

  BananaStock/Getty Images Plus

  Another strategy I use to make the research vivid and personal are questionnaires (often based on the chapter content) that get readers to think more deeply about their own lives: the checklist to identify your parenting priorities in Chapter 7; a scale for “using selective optimization with compensation at home and work” in Chapter 12; surveys for “evaluating your relationships” in Chapters 10 and 11; true/false quizzes at the beginning of my chapters on adolescence (Chapter 9), adult roles (Chapter 11), and later life (Chapter 13) that provide a hands-on preview of the content and entice students into reading the chapter so that they can assess the scientific accuracy of their ideas.

• Experiencing the Lifespan is designed to get students to learn the material while they read. The chapter-opening vignettes, the applications sections with their summary tables, the hands-on exercises, and the end-of-section questionnaires (such as “Evaluating Your Own Relationship: A Section Summary Checklist” in Chapter 10) are part of an overall pedagogical plan. As I explain in my introductory letter to students on page 2, I want this to be a textbook you don’t have to struggle to decode—one that helps you naturally cement the concepts in mind. The centerpiece of this effort is the “Tying It All Together” quizzes, which follow each major section. These mini-tests, involving multiple-choice, essay, and critical-thinking questions, allow students to test themselves on what they have absorbed. I’ve also planned the photo program in Experiencing the Lifespan to illustrate the major terms and concepts. As you page through the text, you may notice that the pictures and their captions feel organically connected to the writing. They visually bring the main text messages home. When it’s important for students to learn a series of terms or related concepts, I provide a summary series of photos. You can see examples in the photographs illustrating the different infant and adult attachment styles on pages 112 and 319, and in Table 3.7 on page 95, highlighting Jean Piaget’s infant circular reactions.

  

  If you can relate to this photo the next time you are tempted to text during that not-so-interesting class, keep this message in mind: Divided attention tasks make memory worse!

  © Sean Locke Photography/Shutterstock

• Outlines the basic contexts of development: social class, culture, ethnicity, and cohort.

• Traces the evolution of the lifespan over the centuries and explores the classic developmental science theories that have shaped our understanding of life.

• Spells out the concepts, the perspectives, and the research strategies I will be exploring in each chapter of the book.

• Introduces epigenetics and emerging research on environment-sensitive genes (to be discussed in subsequent chapters), and sets readers up for this edition’s focus on social media.

• Describes economic trends since the Great Recession.

• Includes psychoanalytic theory as a major perspective in developmental science.

• Revises items in the Tying It All Together quizzes and updates figures to offer data on recent demographic trends. (I’ve made similar changes to the quiz items and relevant figures throughout the book.)

• Provides a new example to teach students about correlational and experimental research.

• Discusses pregnancy rituals and superstitions around the world.

• Highlights the latest research on fetal brain development.

• Fully explores the experience of pregnancy from both the mother’s and father’s points of view and discusses infertility.

• Looks at the experience of birth historically and discusses policy issues relating to pregnancy and birth in the United States and around the world.

• Explores the impact of pregnancy stress on the fetus.

• Offers a more thorough look at the emotional effects of infertility.

• Provides international data on smoking and alcohol use during pregnancy.

• Updates material on c-sections and infant mortality worldwide.

• Covers the latest research on brain development.

• Focuses in depth on basic infant states such as eating, crying, and sleep.

• Explores breast-feeding and scans global undernutrition.

• Provides an in-depth, personal, and practice-oriented look at infant motor development, Piaget’s sensorimotor stage, and beginning language.

• Explores the cutting-edge findings on infant social cognition.

• Discusses physical hurdles to breast-feeding and explores variations in developed-world pressures for new mothers to nurse.

• Showcases research demonstrating that kangaroo care is superior to swaddling, at calming babies.

• Explores how visual pruning during the first year of life may smooth the path to racial prejudice.

• Amplifies my third-edition discussion of infant social cognition by discussing several recent studies suggesting that our basic sense of fairness and morality kicks in at a very young age.

• Includes a new figure illustrating the early neural correlates of emerging language.

• Provides unusually in-depth coverage of attachment theory.

• Offers an honest, comprehensive look at day care in the United States and discusses early childhood poverty.

• Highlights exuberant and shy toddler temperaments, explores research on the genetics of temperament, and stresses the need to promote the right temperament–environment fit for each child.

• Explores research suggesting plasticity genes may affect how vulnerable infants are to less-than-optimal attachment environments, influence how much attachment can change, and predict how young children adapt to day care. Bottom line: Our “genetics” may set us up to either be more or less reactive to environmental events.

• Updates research exploring the life paths of orphanage-reared babies.

• Introduces the hormones oxytocin and cortisol and discusses the impact of urban and rural poverty on later academic development.

• Begins by exploring why we have childhood, illustrating what makes human beings qualitatively different from other species.

• Covers childhood obesity, including its emotional aspects, in depth.

• Showcases Piaget’s, Vygotsky’s, and the information-processing models of childhood cognition—with examples that stress the practical implications of these landmark perspectives for parents and people who work with children.

• Discusses ADHD, autobiographical memory, and theory of mind.

• Explores new findings suggesting that complex fine-motor skills during early childhood foreshadow later academic performance.

• Offers the latest statistics on child overweight, expands on obesity’s epigenetics, and focuses directly on strategies to limit later obesity by changing the environment in utero and during the first months of life.

• Updates the research on ADHD, autobiographical memory, and theory of mind.

• Includes a new section on autism spectrum disorders (accompanied by a figure highlighting autism’s increasing prevalence).

• Discusses the development of self-understanding, prosocial behavior, aggression, and fantasy play, and explores friendships and popularity throughout childhood.

• Clearly spells out the developmental pathway to becoming an aggressive child.

• Highlights the challenge of emotion regulation, and focuses on internalizing and externalizing disorders.

• Covers the causes and consequences of bullying in older childhood.

• Includes a study showing that praising toddlers for effort enhances later academic self-efficacy.

• Tackles gender differences in prosocial behavior, in depth.

• Showcases findings that toddlers are naturally prosocial, and emphasizes how important it is to allow young children to spontaneously share.

• Explores (in the discussion on play) whether pretend play is crucial to development.

• Revises the popularity discussion (accompanied by a new figure and table) by exploring the impact of relational aggression in promoting high status during elementary school and discussing how children’s social goals in fifth grade relate to preteen popularity.

• Provides a new section on cyberbullying.

• This final childhood chapter shifts from the process of development to the major settings for development—home and school—and tackles important controversies in the field, such as the influence of parents versus peers versus genetics in shaping development and the pros and cons of intelligence testing.

• Offers extensive discussions of ethnic variations in parenting styles and describes the latest research on how to stimulate intrinsic motivation.

• Showcases schools that beat the odds and targets the core qualities involved in effective teaching.

• Expands on the discussion of cultural differences in parenting styles.

• Revises sections on child maltreatment and, especially, divorce; the latter includes an introduction to the concept of parental alienation and more material on custody issues and their impact on the child (this discussion features a new summary table and figure).

• Describes a newer edition of the WISC and updates the standard IQ diagnostic labels to reflect the new DSM-5 terminology.

• Presents the Common Core State Standards for education in a new concluding section.

• Offers an in-depth look at puberty, including the multiple forces that program the timing of this life transition, and looks at historical and cultural variations in puberty timetables.

• Explores the emotional experience of puberty (an “insider’s” view) and the emotional impact of maturing early for girls.

• Provides up-to-date coverage of teenage body image issues, eating disorders, and emerging sexuality.

• Offers new findings on pubertal progression rates, discusses the impact of being an early maturer for boys, and showcases a cross-national study (accompanied by a figure) suggesting that a nation’s norms determine the tendency for early-maturing girls to act out as teens.

• Links dieting problems during puberty to in-utero hormones, discusses binge-eating disorder, and greatly expands the discussion of eating-disorder treatments.

• Explores social-media research related to the sexual double standard, and highlights the global need for relationship education versus just sex education.

• Covers the developmental science research on teenage brain development and various facets of adolescent “storm and stress.”

• Spells out the forces that enable adolescents to thrive and explains what society can do (and also may not be doing!) to promote optimal development in teens.

• Explores parent–child relationships and discusses teenage peer groups.

• Showcases new fMRI research exploring preteens’ social sensitivities and impulsiveness.

• Offers a more thorough treatment of nonsuicidal self-injury, explores recent studies tracking adolescent child–parent separation, and pinpoints the issues that are most problematic for teens and parents in different world regions.

• Devotes a whole chapter to the concerns of emerging adulthood.

• Offers extensive coverage of diversity issues during this life stage, such as forming an ethnic and biracial identity, interracial dating, and issues related to coming out gay.

• Gives students tips for succeeding in college and spells out career issues for non-college emerging adults.

• Introduces career-relevant topics, such as the concept of “flow,” and provides extensive coverage of the research relating to selecting a mate and adult attachment styles.

• Focuses on current social policy issues such as the impact socioeconomic status makes on attending and completing college, and discusses “nest residing,” given that so many twenty-somethings now live at home.

• Includes an expanded leaving-the-nest discussion, focused more specifically on variations in different European nations.

• Updates the section on identity styles, and introduces a new term, ruminative moratorium.

• Discusses self-esteem changes, specifically during college.

• Presents a completely rewritten “Finding Love” section that features a variety of new topics such as on-line dating, the tendency for young people to put off having romantic relationships until later in their twenties, and how Facebook is changing contemporary love relationships. This section also features a new table entitled “Everything (or Some Interesting Things) You Wanted to Know About Cyberspace Love Relationships,” in addition to updating the research on same-sex relationships and offering a more nuanced look at the qualities we look for in a mate.

• Focuses directly on the core issues of adult life: work and family.

• Provides an extensive discussion of the research relating to how to have happy, enduring relationships, the challenges of parenting, and women’s and men’s work and family roles.

• Looks at marriage, parenthood, and work in their cultural and historical contexts.

• Offers research-based tips for having a satisfying marriage and career.

• Discusses job insecurity in our more fragile economy.

• Includes a rewritten demographics of marriage discussion that explores marriage in India and Iran, current cohabitation trends in the United States, varying attitudes toward cohabitation, and having babies outside of marriage, in different nations (accompanied by two new figures).

• Offers a new section (“Marriage the Second or Third or ‘X’ Time Around”) that discusses remarriage, as well as generally updating the research on what makes for happy marriages.

• Includes a revised parenthood section and features a new summary table entitled “Research Forces that Erode the Quality of the Day-to-Day Motherhood Experience.”

• Includes a new section in the Work discussion, entitled “A Final Status Report on Men, Women, and Work” (accompanied by a figure tracking parental leave in Sweden for women and men). This section also introduces the concept of career as a calling.

• Describes the complexities of measuring adult personality development.

• Anchors the research on adult intellectual change (the fluid and crystallized distinctions) to lifespan changes in creativity and careers.

• Offers thorough coverage of the research on generativity and adult well-being.

• Provides research-based advice for constructing a fulfilling adult life.

• Covers age-related changes in sexuality, menopause, grandparenthood, and parent care.

• Tracks the lifespan impact of conscientiousness in a new Hot in Developmental Science feature.

• Provides (in the section on Personality) additional data suggesting we get happier into later life and that adult stress can sometimes promote emotional growth. (To make these points, I’ve included several new figures as well as a new research summary table.)

• Introduces the concept of allostatic load (in the discussion on intelligence), and explores how this global index of physical functioning predicts midlife intellectual change.

• Includes a study of on-line relationships between grandparents and grandchildren, and elaborates on the forces that make for closeness or more distance in this core family relationship.

• Features a new section that specifically discusses research demonstrating that sex continues to be highly fulfilling in old age.

• Offers an extensive discussion of Carstensen’s socioemotional selectivity theory.

• Helps decode our contradictory stereotypes about later-life emotional states, the core qualities that make for a happy or unsatisfying old age, and offers a section on “aging optimally.”

• Describes the research on aging memory, retirement, and widowhood.

• Discusses salient social issues such as age discrimination in hiring and intergenerational equity.

• Looks at later life developmentally by tracing changes from the young-old to the old-old years.

• Provides an enhanced discussion of old-age perceptions and includes a new key term, ageism.

• Explores new neuroscience research on late-life memory and offers evidence that evoking age stereotypes impairs older people’s laboratory performance on memory tests.

• Includes a new term, age paradox (in the section on Personality), and showcases research revealing that happiness is high well into later life.

• Includes a new Hot in Developmental Science feature exploring current retirement realities in the United States (and other developed nations).

• Offers a rewritten widowhood section showcasing the latest research on spousal mourning, and highlights the importance, specifically, of friends in determining how well older women cope with this life event.

• Offers a clear developmental look at how normal aging shades into chronic disease and ADL impairments and looks at the impact of gender and socioeconomic forces on physical aging.

• Focuses on how to change the environment to compensate for sensorimotor declines.

• Provides an in-depth look at neurocognitive disorders, accompanied by compelling firsthand descriptions of their inner experience by people with Alzheimer’s disease.

• Explores alternatives to institutionalization and provides a full description of nursing home care.

• Strives to provide a realistic, honest, and yet action-oriented and uplifting portrait of the physical frailties of advanced old age.

• Includes a new head (Can we live to 1,000?) that summarizes the biological life-extension research and offers reasons why extending our human maximum lifespan, in the near future, is an unrealistic dream.

• 

  The huge domed ceilings are awe-inspiring, but combined with bare floors and the clatter of commuters they make New York City’s Grand Central Station an acoustic nightmare. However, thanks to the miracle of the hearing loop, people can now bypass that background noise via loudspeaker train announcements beamed directly to their hearing aids.

  Ties the socioeconomic health gap directly to biology, by looking at telomeres and allostatic load; explores the impact specifically of education on longevity; and introduces a new key term, healthy-life years.

• Expands the gender discussion by offering an E.U. nation-by-nation chart, graphically showing that women spend more time than men living frailer.

• Updates sections on vision and hearing, and also provides new data on late-life falling and driving (the latter in a new Hot in Developmental Science feature).

• Revises the diagnostic labels for serious aging pathologies such as Alzheimer’s disease and neurocognitive disorder (dementia) to conform with DSM-5, as well as exploring the latest findings relating to these conditions.

• Discussion in the section on options for the frail elderly section includes research on “social issues” related to moving to continuing care.

• Includes updates in the nursing home discussion.

• Explores cross-cultural variations in dying and offers an historical look at death practices from the Middle Ages to today.

• Discusses the pros and cons of the hospice movement, with its focus on dying at home.

• Offers a look at the pros and cons of different types of advance directives and explores controversial topics such as physician-assisted suicide.

• Includes a new Hot in Developmental Science feature devoted to mourning, accompanied by a table summarizing the research on children’s bereavement, and introduces new key terms, complex bereavement-related disorder and prolonged grief.

• Includes a new section devoted to the concerns caregivers face in providing home hospice care. (In this edition, I also discuss my experience caring for my husband in hospice—in a new Experiencing the Lifespan interview.)

• Offers data on how euthanasia attitudes vary in different European nations, how older people feel about physician-assisted suicide, and generally updates the findings on advance directives.

• Prebuilt units for each chapter, curated by experienced educators, with relevant media organized and ready to be assigned or customized to suit your course

• One location for all online resources, including an interactive e-Book, LearningCurve’s adaptive quizzing (see below), videos, activities, and more

• Intuitive and useful analytics, with a gradebook that lets you track how students in the class are performing individually and as a whole

• A streamlined and intuitive interface that lets you build an entire course in minutes

• A unique learning path for each student, with quizzes shaped by each individual’s correct and incorrect answers

• A personalized study plan to guide students’ preparation for class and for exams

• Feedback for each question with live links to relevant e-Book pages, guiding students to the resources they need to improve their areas of weakness

• LearningCurve: Formative Quizzing Engine. Developed by a team of psychology instructors with extensive backgrounds in course design and online education, LearningCurve combines adaptive question selection, personalized study plans, and state-of-the-art question analysis reports. LearningCurve is based on the simple yet powerful concept of testing-to-learn, with gamelike quizzing activities that keep students engaged in the material while helping them learn key concepts. A team of dedicated instructors have worked closely to develop more than 3,000 quizzing questions developed specifically for this edition of Experiencing the Lifespan.

• Downloadable Diploma Computerized Test Bank (for Windows and Macintosh). This Test Bank offers an easy-to-use test-generation system that guides you through the process of creating tests. The Diploma software allows you to add an unlimited number of questions, edit questions, format a test, scramble questions, and include pictures, equations, or multimedia links. The Diploma software will also allow you to export into a variety of formats that are compatible with many Internet-based testing products. For more information on Diploma, visit: www.brownstone.net/publishers/products/dip6.asp.