Aging family caregivers: policies and practices

This review examines later life family support for adults with developmental disabilities from a life course perspective that takes into account social trends and changes in service patterns and in attitudes of families. Key issues addressed include: (1) trends affecting family caregiving, (2) health and social outcomes of life-long caregiving, (3) support needs of families, (4) family support policies and practices, and (5) recommendations for a research and policy agenda. Research examining outcomes of life-long caregiving has shown that most families adapt well to having a family member with disabilities. However, some families are at risk for poorer physical and mental health outcomes. These include cultural minorities and families of adults with behavioral challenges. Caregiving does seem to have a negative impact on maternal employment and family income as mothers often give up or cut back on employment to care for a child with developmental disabilities, who is more likely to continue living in the family home throughout adulthood than other adult children. Federal and state initiatives are addressing issues of family support through both the developmental disabilities and aging service systems.     

Counseling Issues for Adult Women in Career Transition

This article addresses current psychosocial issues facing women in career transition and the implications of those issues for career counselors. Specifically, psychosocial developmental trajectories, the roles of family and relationships, the importance of underlying physical and mental health issues, and sociocultural and contextual stressors are relevant for women in the midst of career change. The author discusses how career counselors can prepare for this complexity and addresses clients' current economic and social milieus. A checklist is provided to aid the career counselor in addressing the multiple issues that a new client brings to the 1st counseling encounter.     

Plasticity in development: Concepts and issues for intervention

Because of its pertinence both to key theoretical issues and to applied concerns, plasticity is a central concept within developmental psychology. Our concept of plasticity derives from a comparative developmental, probabilistic epigenetic perspective: Plasticity is the relative flexibility, or capacity to modify behavior to fit contextual demands, shown by a species (or individual) at its most advanced level of development. We argue that processes of development should be conceived of as plastic, and that they should be studied in relation to constancies and constraints on change. Finally, we indicate that, for intervenors, plasticity represents a double-edged sword: Processes available to be changed for the better may be also changed for tho worse. As such, we discuss several developmental and contextual issues that must be confronted by intervenors if a person's potential plasticity across life is to be actualized in the service of enhancing or optimizing the life course.     

Toward a More Comprehensive Understanding of Peer Maltreatment: Studies of Relational Victimization

Although many past studies of peer maltreatment have focused on physical victimization, the importance of an empirical focus on relational victimization has only recently been recognized. In relational victimization, the perpetrator attempts to harm the target through the manipulation of relationships, threat of damage to them, or both. We review what is currently known about relational victimization with three issues in mind: (a) developmental changes in the manifestation of relational victimization, (b) gender differences in the likelihood of being victimized, and (c) evidence that relational victimization is harmful.     

Fixation and Regression in the Family Life Cycle

In spite of the obvious fact that families differ significantly depending upon their current stage of the life cycle, most of the family therapy literature focuses on intervening in ongoing family interaction without specific attention to the dimension of family development. Family sociologists, on the other hand, while not dealing with modifying family functioning, have provided more detailed tools with which to understand variations in family functioning based on stages of family development. Our work with families in acute distress suggests the need to increase the specificity with which our assessments and interventions are tailored, by incorporating the family developmental view. This paper explores the utility of the family developmental view using the concepts of fixation and regression in the family life cycle. These concepts were found to be relatively refined and quite pragmatic assessment devices that assist therapists in specifying developmental issues of the family. Case examples of actual families in crisis are presented in order to demonstrate the utility of these conceptual tools.     

Day care: Promoting collaboration between research and policymaking

An agenda for day care research that is tailored to current policy concerns is presented. Familiar developmental issues related to the quality of day care are recast within a policy perspective. Largely unexamined issues pertaining to the costs and supply of day care, the preventative role of day care services, economic and employment-related effects, links between day care and other settings that comprise children's environments, and alternative approaches to day care such as employer-sponsored care, are also identified. It is argued that these issues extend current conceptualizations of interdisciplinary and ecological research. By way of introduction, an overview of recent sociodemographic trends and changes in federal day care policy is provided. A discussion of emerging policy issues that could profit from input by child development research then serves as background to detailed suggestions for research that can advance the dual goals of informing day care policy-makers and contributing to developmental theory.     

Promoting positive human development and social justice: Integrating theory,research and application in contemporary developmental science

The bold claim that developmental science can contribute to both enhancing positive development among diverse individuals across the life span and promoting social justice in their communities, nations and regions is supported by decades of theoretical, methodological and research contributions. To explain the basis of this claim, I describe the relational developmental systems (RDS) metamodel that frames contemporary developmental science, and I present an example of a programme of research within the adolescent portion of the life span that is associated with this metamodel and is pertinent to promoting positive human development. I then discuss methodological issues associated with using RDS‐based models as frames for research and application. Finally, I explain how the theoretical and methodological ideas associated with RDS thinking may provide the scholarly tools needed by developmental scientists seeking to contribute to human thriving and to advance social justice in the Global South.     

Menarche: A crossroads that previews developmental change

In recent years the developmental implications of menarche have garnered particular attention. Investigators have determined that this developmental event tends to affect three significant domains of the adolescent girl's function: psychological status, relationships with peers, and role in the family. This paper explores these issues and introduces a new technique, referred to as previewing, that may help the teenage girl acclimate to the status of sexual maturity. Derived from the early life interactions of caregiver and infant, previewing promotes representational skills and enhances self-esteem as the adolescent confronts developmental challenges.     

Life Review Through Meditative Journaling

ABSTRACT

I offer techniques and reflections for conducting workshops on life review through meditative journaling. Life review is a valuable way to encounter one's own aging. We explore simple forms of guided imagery meditation, modes of brief journaling, and ways of sharing resulting thoughts and feelings among participants. Two approaches, the developmental and the topical, are discussed. The developmental leads participants from earliest memories through youth, middle age and later years. The topical approach centers on negative and positive issues in the aging process. The meditative, journaling method can foster greater self-awareness and solidarity with persons facing similar issues.     

Motivation, personality organization, and the four psychologies of psychoanalysis

Four psychologies currently significant in psychoanalytic thinking are described. An attempt is made to (a) advance developmental proposals describing how the phenomena of each of the four achieve motivational status in the intrapsychic life of the individual and (b) develop a model for the understanding of personality organization across the four psychologies, based on the development of personal hierarchies that establish which issues are superordinate and which subordinate. Taken together, these two points are used to suggest that the four psychologies may not simply represent differing perspectives on intrapsychic phenomena (though they do that, in part) but that they also, simultaneously, represent relatively independent ways in which intrapsychic life is organized.     

Application of piecewise hierarchical linear growth modeling to the study of continuity in behavioral development of baboons (Papio hamadryas)

In behavioral science, developmental discontinuities are thought to arise when the association between an outcome measure and the underlying process changes over time. Sudden changes in behavior across time are often taken to indicate that a reorganization in the outcome-process relationship may have occurred. The authors proposed in this article the use of piecewise hierarchical linear growth modeling as a statistical methodology to search for discontinuities in behavioral development and illustrated its possibilities by applying 2-piece hierarchical linear models to the study of developmental trajectories of baboon (Papio hamadryas) mothers' behavior during their infants' 1st year of life. The authors provided empirical evidence that piecewise growth modeling can be used to determine whether abrupt changes in development trajectories are tied to changes in the underlying process.     

进化发展心理学：发展中的人类本性

进化发展心理学研究社会能力与认知能力发展背后的基因与环境机制,以及基因与环境机制在特定社会文化中的表现。进化发展心理学探讨的主要问题与设计到的主要概念包括：（1）自然选择在毕生发展的早期阶段发挥作用;（2）进化发展心理学特别重视适应在婴儿期及儿童期发展中的作用;（3）儿童期的延长有助于儿童学习人类社会的复杂性;（4）发展背景的方法可以用来理解成人外显行为的进化起源;（5）基因与环境因素相互影响约束个体发展;（6）认知能力与行为活动敏感于早期环境,但二者发展也具有可塑性     

The development of aggression and its linkages with violence and youth delinquency

Over the past decade studies of the development of violent juvenile delinquency have gained momentum. Large prospective longitudinal studies on different continents have shown the potential for a developmental approach to clarify the developmental course, determinants and malleability of violent delinquent behaviour by juveniles.

However, notwithstanding these accomplishments, one may wonder to what extent the potential benefits of a truly developmental approach have been brought to fruition to date. Based on a critical review of the literature, three major issues are identified: (1) prospective research has been highly explorative rather than hypothesis testing; (2) development has been described in terms of mean changes with age or static patterns rather than in terms of individual trajectories; and (3) there has been a strong focus on correlates and risk-factors instead of on causal mechanisms driving development. Suggestions are made to resolve these issues by formulating clear developmental theories to be tested with longitudinal experimental studies of individual developmental trajectories, their malleability, and mediators of change.     

Models of Developmental Research: Individuals and Families

This article discusses the unique problems and methods of studying developmental change in individuals and families. The authors describe and illustrate six developmental research designs: longitudinal; short-term longitudinal; historical (retrospective) interview; artificial life cycle; short-term longitudinal with controls; and combination. They also examine principal ethical issues of human behavioral research.     

Human reproduction: dominion and limits.

The general struggle throughout Christian history has been to seek the proper balance between dominion and limits, intervention and nonintervention, givenness, and creativity. This struggle has worked itself out in six areas that touch human life. In this essay, I will revisit the Catholic tradition's treatment of these in terms of dominion and limits to see whether we can discern developmental patterns that might suggest an approach to issues pertaining to the sources of life (reproductive ethics) as we move into the next century.     

Career Process: A New Concept for Vocational Behavior

Vocational guidance has been traditionally too concerned with helping individuals choose an occupation. There is need for more awareness of change in vocational life. The concept “career process” stresses the continual changes and the varied developmental tasks in occupational life. Implicit in the career process concept is that no final ohoicepoint in vocational behavior exists; rather, counselors should help the individual learn key developmental tasks that will ultimately better equip him to face the realities of change as a part of vocational life.     

Power and Pleasure

SUMMARY

In exploring issues of power and pleasure in relationships the author uses Erikson's (1965) developmental 'eight ages of man' as both a conceptual framework and a way of describing aspects of the developmental growth of boys as men, and he completes Erikson's (1968) epigenesis of the life cycle in relation to identity and intimacy. Drawing on literature on male psychology, his own experience and his experience as a counsellor and a Transactional Analysis (TA) psychotherapist in clinical training, the author focuses on male identity and men's capacity for intimacy in relationships. The use and abuse of power in achieving male identity, and the implications for mutual pleasure and interdependence in intimate relationships are outlined and practice issues for counselling and psychotherapy with men in relation to identity and intimacy issues are considered.     

“Don’t Give Up on Them”: Older Adults with Physical Limitations

Some older adults must learn to navigate the terrain of significant physical limitations due to disabling conditions or illnesses that may accompany the aging process. First-person accounts illustrate developmental stages of older adulthood and illuminate concepts and definitions of disability and dependence. Ultimately, older adults, though their lives may bear similarities to generalizations about later life, are unique and complex people. Congregational care to older adults with disabilities includes greater incorporation of them into the life of faith communities through acts of mutual hospitality.