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One of the most important questions about children's development involves how knowledge acquisition depends on the effect of language experience. To what extent, and in what ways, is a child's cognitive development influenced by their early experience of, and access to, language? Likewise, what are the effects on development of impaired access to language? This book confronts directly the issue of how possessing an enhanced or impaired access to language influences children's development. Its focus is on learning environments, theory of mind understanding, and the process of deriving meaning from conversations. The book features chapters which are concerned with bilingualism, deafness, atypical child development, and development in cultures with limited vocabularies in areas such as number concepts. Throughout, it maps out what is known about the interface between language and cognitive development and the prospects for the future directions in research and applied settings.

Achieving College Dreams tells the story of a remarkable partnership between a public research university and charter district to create an exemplar early college high school for low-income and first-generation college youth—launched to make good on the American ideal of providing excellence with equity in secondary education. California College Preparatory Academy is the result of the more than 10-year collaboration between the University of California, Berkeley and Aspire Public Schools. Reflecting a diversity of voices from students to superintendents, this book charts the journey from the decision to open a school to the second class of high school graduates, all of whom were accepted into four-year colleges. It captures struggle, improvement, and possibility as it takes readers inside the workings of the partnership, the development of the school, and spillover of effects across district and university. Confronting the challenge of interweaving rigor and support, the authors explore such critical ingredients as teacher–student advisories; school transition; the home–school divide; a supportive college-preparatory culture; teaching with depth, relational power, and equity; forging an academic identity; and scaling up. At a time of sharply unequal schools and glaring disparities in college readiness, this book uniquely extends the knowledge base about how to better prepare underserved students for college eligibility and success. The book also serves as a clarion call for universities to step up to the plate and partner with districts in achieving transformative secondary school reform benefitting all students.

Volume I of the Advances in Culture and Psychology series showcases a number of cutting edge research programs in culture and psychology. The volume includes chapters on human culture in evolutionary perspective (Michael Tomasello), culture, emotion, and expression (David Matsumoto and Hyi-Sung Hwang), infectious disease and the creation of culture (Mark Schaller and Damian Murray), culture and attachment, learning and coping (Fred Rothbaum, Gilda Morelli, and Natalie Rusk), culturally situated linguistic ecologies and language use (Gün Semin), micro-macro dynamics of the cultural construction of reality (Toshio Yamagishi), and implications of horizontal and vertical individualism and collectivism for psychological processes (Sharon Shavitt, Carlos Torelli, and Hila Riemer).

Volume II of the Advances in Culture and Psychology showcases contributions from internationally renowned culture scholars who span the discipline of culture and psychology and represent diversity in the theory and study of culture within psychology. The volume includes cutting edge contributions on culture and neuroscience, culture and intelligence, culture and human development, culture and personality, culture and language, and culture change.

Volume III of the Advances in Culture and Psychology series showcases a number of cutting edge research programs in culture and psychology. The volume includes chapters on The Role of Language and Culture in Universality and Diversity of Human Concepts (Mutsumi Imai and Takahiko Masuda); Development—The Cultural Solution to Universal Developmental Tasks (Heidi Keller and Joscha Kärtner); From Chinese to Cross-cultural Personality Inventory: A Combined Emic-Etic Approach to the Study of Personality in Culture (Fanny Cheung, Shu Fai Cheung and Weiqiao Fan); Cultural Unity and Diversity in Compensatory Control Processes (Aaron Kay and Daniel Sullivan); Creating Cultures between Arctics and Deserts (Evert Van de Vliert); and Macro Cultural Psychology: Its Development, Concerns, Politics, and Future Direction (Carl Ratner).

With applications throughout the social sciences, culture and psychology is a rapidly growing field that has experienced a surge in publications over the last decade. Exciting developments have emerged in the relationship of culture to cognitive processes, human development, psychopathology, social behavior, organizational behavior, neuroscience, language, marketing, and other topics. In recognition of this exponential growth, this is the first annual series to offer state-of-the-art reviews of scholarly research in the growing field of culture and psychology. Representing diversity in the theory and study of culture within psychology, this book is an ideal resource for research programs and academics throughout the psychology community.

This book explores the causes and control of aggression from a broad scientific perspective. It discusses the methodological concerns involved and reviews representative studies of the contributions of biological, environmental, experimental, and social factors in producing aggression. It examines how many of these factors function as it discusses several areas of current concern: juvenile delinquency, physical and sexual child abuse, spousal abuse, rape, and aggression associated with psychiatric conditions.

This book was written for colleagues, students, and knowledgeable sports fans. Strong international and interdisciplinary themes underlie the presentation of the best and most recent findings on questions surrounding sports aggression. Topics range from those with a narrow focus on the personality of hooligans and others, the role of drugs both legal and illegal, sports heroes, and the media in relationship to interpersonal aggression. A broader focus encompasses topics that include environmental factors such as temperature and noise in addition to cultural influences that exert strong effects on human aggression. That most revered concept in sports, that is competition, is examined and clarified both with respect to its definition and relationship to aggression. A major portion of the book is dedicated to crowd violence at sporting and entertainment events. Questions of who riots, why they riot, and situations that favor their occurrence are addressed. Similarly, research into the underlying cause of crowd panics and the peculiar behavior of those caught up in panics is examined. A series of proposals intended to avert or minimize the severity of riots and panics accompanies both topics. A concluding feature of the book provides a brief introduction to the means by which social scientists investigate questions of aggression as well as a capsule summary of several traditional theories of aggression.

The concept of altruism, or disinterested concern for another's welfare, has been discussed by everyone from theologians to psychologists to biologists. In this book, evolutionary, neurological, developmental, psychological, social, cultural, and religious aspects of altruistic behavior are examined. It is a collaborative examination of one of humanity's essential and defining characteristics by researchers from various disciplines. Their integrative dialogue illustrates that altruistic behavior is a significant mode of expression that can be studied by various scholarly methods and understood from a variety of perspectives in both the humanities and the sciences. The book establishes a framework for scholarship on altruism by presenting definitions, a historical overview, a review of contemporary research, and debates in various disciplines, as well as a discussion of directions for future work.

This book takes a hard-science look at the possibility that we humans have the capacity to care for others for their sakes (altruism) rather than simply for our own (egoism). The look is based not on armchair speculation, dramatic cases, or after-the-fact interviews, but on an extensive series of theory-testing laboratory experiments conducted over the past 35 years. Part I details the theory of altruistic motivation that has been the focus of this experimental research. The theory centers on the empathy-altruism hypothesis, which claims that other-oriented feelings of sympathy and compassion for a person in need (empathic concern) produce motivation with the ultimate goal of having that need removed. Antecedents and consequences of empathy-induced altruistic motivation are specified, making the theory empirically testable. Part II offers a comprehensive summary of the research designed to test the empathy-altruism hypothesis, giving particular attention to recent challenges. Overall, the research provides remarkably strong and consistent support for this hypothesis, forcing a tentative conclusion that empathy-induced altruism is within the human repertoire. Part III considers the theoretical and practical implications of this conclusion, suggesting that empathy-induced altruism is a far more pervasive and powerful force in human affairs than has been recognized. Failure to appreciate its importance has handicapped attempts to understand why we humans act as we do and wherein our happiness lies. This failure has also handicapped efforts to promote better interpersonal relations and create a more caring, humane society.

Not only is the future of our public schools in jeopardy, so is our democracy. Public schools are central to a flourishing democracy, where children learn how to deliberate and solve problems together, build shared identities, and come to value justice and liberty. As citizen support for public schools wanes, our democratic way of life is at risk. While we often hear about the poor performance of students and teachers, the current educational crisis is at heart not about accountability, but rather about citizen responsibility. Yet citizens increasingly do not feel that public schools are our schools, that we have influence over them or responsibility for their outcomes. Citizens have become watchdogs of public institutions largely from the perspective of consumers, without seeing ourselves as citizens who compose the public of public institutions. Accountability becomes more about finding fault with and placing blame on our schools and teachers, rather than about taking responsibility as citizens for shaping our expectations of schools, determining the criteria we use to measure their success, or supporting schools in achieving those goals. This book sheds light on recent shifts in education and citizenship, helping the public to understand not only how schools now work, but also how citizens can take an active role in shaping them. It provides citizens with tools, habits, practices, and knowledge necessary to support schools. It offers a vision of how we can cultivate citizens who will continue to support public schools and thereby keep democracy strong.

Revealing that more than half of American students’ academic growth potential has been lost over the past several decades, this book reframes the war on achievement gaps as the ubiquitous challenge of discovering and realizing untapped potential for all students. The book extends the scope of analysis from the K-12 to the B-P-16 (from birth through college) education pipeline and from domestic racial/social group comparisons to international comparisons with a focus on South Korea. Through integrated analyses of national and international datasets, the book provides new evidence on the status and alterability of achievement gaps, the causes of these gaps, and the effects of educational policies on the gaps. Although underachievement prevails due to inadequate and inequitable learning environments in both homes and schools, the American education system has strengths and can still win the war on achievement gaps. The book presents a new vision and strategies for education reform to defeat statistical projections of the trend.

Do people have free will, or is universal belief an illusion? If free will is more than an illusion, what kind of free will do people have? How can free will influence behavior? Can free will be studied, verified, and understood scientifically? These are a few of the questions this book attempts to answer. People generally act as though they believe in their own free will: they don't feel like automatons, and they don't treat one another as they might treat robots. While acknowledging many constraints and influences on behavior, people nonetheless act as if they (and their neighbors) are largely in control of many if not most of the decisions they make. Belief in free will also underpins the sense that people are responsible for their actions. Psychological explanations of behavior rarely mention free will as a factor, however. Can psychological science find room for free will? How do leading psychologists conceptualize free will, and what role do they believe free will plays in shaping behavior? This book looks both at recent experimental and theoretical work directly related to free will and at the ways leading psychologists from all branches of psychology deal with the philosophical problems long associated with the question of free will, such as the relationship between determinism and free will and the importance of consciousness in free will. It also includes commentaries by leading philosophers on what psychologists can contribute to long-running philosophical struggles with this most distinctly human belief.

Humans have engaged in artistic and aesthetic activities since the appearance of our species. The expression of meaning using color, line, sound, rhythm, or movement constitutes a fundamental aspect of our species’ biological and cultural heritage. All known human societies have developed aesthetic systems that use diverse forms of visual representation, body art, music, literature, or performance to convey culturally important meaning. Art and aesthetics are, therefore, inherent constituents of the human mind, and contribute to our species’ identity, distinguishing it from its living and extinct relatives. Science faces the challenge of explaining the foundations of this trait and the way cultural processes nurture it into expression. How does the human brain bring about these sorts of behaviours? What neural processes underlie aesthetic appreciation? How does training modulate these processes? How are they impaired by brain lesions and neurodegenerative diseases? How did such neural underpinnings evolve? Are humans the only species capable of aesthetic appreciation, or are other species endowed with the rudiments of this capacity? Scientific aesthetics is today a thriving and respected research field. It has made substantial contributions to basic understanding of some of the unique features of the human mind, and to practical issues related to consumers’ decisions, judgments about others, and mate choice.

This book is really three-books-in-one, dealing with the topic of artifacts in behavioral research. It is about the problems of experimenter effects which have not been solved. Experimenters still differ in the ways in which they see, interpret, and manipulate their data. Experimenters still obtain different responses from research participants (human or infrahuman) as a function of experimenters' states and traits of biosocial, psychosocial, and situational origins. Experimenters' expectations still serve too often as self-fulfilling prophecies, a problem that biomedical researchers have acknowledged and guarded against better than have behavioral researchers; e.g., many biomedical studies would be considered of unpublishable quality had their experimenters not been blind to experimental condition. Problems of participant or subject effects have also not been solved. Researchers usually still draw research samples from a population of volunteers that differ along many dimensions from those not finding their way into our research. Research participants are still often suspicious of experimenters' intent, try to figure out what experimenters are after, and are concerned about what the experimenter thinks of them. That portion of the complexity of human behavior that can be attributed to the social nature of behavioral research can be conceptualized as a set of artifacts to be isolated, measured, considered, and, sometimes, eliminated. This book examines the methodological and substantive implications of sources of artifacts in behavioral research and strategies for improving this situation.

This book traces the developmental, social, cultural, and historical origins of the autobiographical self—the self that is made of memories of the personal past and of the family and the community. It combines rigorous research, compelling theoretical insights, sensitive survey of real memories and memory conversations, and fascinating personal anecdotes to convey a message: The autobiographical self is conditioned by one's time and culture. The book begins with an examination of parent-child reminiscing to illustrate the construction of the autobiographical self in the process of family storytelling situated in cultural contexts. It then contrasts the development of autobiographical writings in Western and Chinese literatures to reveal the cultural stance of the autobiographical self in historical time. It further examines the autobiographical self in personal time, analyzing everyday memories to reveal the role of culturally prioritized self-goals in modulating information processing and determining how the autobiographical self is remembered. Then focusing on the phenomenon of childhood amnesia, it addresses the question of when the autobiographical self begins from a cross-cultural perspective. The book explores some of the most controversial issues in current psychological research of autobiographical memory, such as memory representations versus memory narratives and silence versus voice in the construction of the autobiographical self. It ends with historical analyses of the influences of the larger social, political, and economic forces on the autobiographical self, and takes a forward look at the autobiographical self as a product of modern technology.

Who benefits, and who loses, when emotions are described in particular ways? How can metaphors such as “hold on” and “let go” affect people’s emotional experiences? Banned Emotions draws on the latest research in neuroscience and psychology to challenge popular ideas about emotions that should supposedly be suppressed. This interdisciplinary book breaks taboos by exploring emotions in which people are said to “indulge”: self-pity, prolonged crying, chronic anger, grudge-bearing, bitterness, and spite. By focusing on metaphors for these emotions in classic novels, self-help books, and popular films, Banned Emotions exposes their cultural and religious roots. Examining works by Dante, Dickens, Dostoevsky, Kafka, Forster, and Woolf in parallel with Bridesmaids, Fatal Attraction, and Who Moved My Cheese?, Banned Emotions reveals patterns in the ways emotions are represented that can make people so ashamed of feelings, they may stifle emotions that they need to work through. By analyzing the ways that physiology and culture combine in emotion metaphors, Banned Emotions shows that emotion regulation is a political as well as a biological issue. Banned Emotions considers the emotions of women abandoned by their partners and asks whether the psychological “attachment” metaphor is the best way to describe human relationships. Recent studies of emotion regulation indicate that reappraisal works better than suppression, which over time can damage a person’s health. Socially discouraged emotions such as self-pity emerge from lived experiences, often the experiences of people who hold less social power. Emotion metaphors like “move on” deflect attention from the social problems that have inspired emotions to the individuals who feel them—people who need to think about their emotions and their causes in the world.

The use of technology and teaching techniques derived from technology is currently a bourgeoning topic in higher education. Teachers at all levels and types of institutions want to know how these new technologies will affect what happens in and outside of the classroom. Many teachers have already embraced some of these technologies but remain uncertain about their educational efficacy. Other teachers have waited because they are reluctant to try tools or techniques that remain unproven or, as is often the case, lack institutional support. This book is designed to help both groups, so that those with technological expertise can extend their knowledge, while technological novices can “ramp up” at their own pace and for their own purposes. The authors apply and assess technology's impact on traditional, hybrid or blended, or completely online courses, relying on technology as a teaching tool for classroom management and interaction (e.g. Blackboard, PowerPoint, student response or “clicker systems,” multimedia tools), as well as student-based uses of technology largely independent of instructors (e.g. social networking on popular sites including Facebook and MySpace). Each chapter addresses how technological improvements can be connected to assessment initiatives, as is now routinely advocated in psychology and social science education. The book features current scholarship and pedagogy involving innovative technology that impacts on student learning in psychology and related disciplines, focusing also on student reactions to these novel technologies, and proper assessments of how well they promote learning.

This book identifies the major challenge facing higher education as preparing students for life-long learning and society’s 21^st century needs for civic minded individuals who have the intellectual and personal capabilities to constructively engage political, ethnic, and religious differences, work effectively, and live together with many different kinds of people in a more global society. A developmental science basis is adopted to inform the transformations in undergraduate educational practices that are necessary to empower students to act globally and constructively engage difference. Current scholarship is synthesized regarding the nature and development of three core capacities deemed essential: A personal epistemology that reflects a sophisticated understanding of knowledge, beliefs, and ways of thinking; empathy and the capacity to understand the mental states of others; and an integrated identity that includes values, commitments, and a sense of agency for civic and social responsibility. It is argued that to foster the development of these capabilities, colleges and universities must recommit to providing a formative liberal education and adopt a developmental model of undergraduate education as a process of intellectual and personal growth, involving empathy as well as reasoning, values as well as knowledge, and identity as well as competencies. The focus is on emerging adulthood as an especially dynamic time of reorganization and development of the brain that both influences, and is influenced by, the undergraduate experience, and advances in our understanding of human development and learning are synthesized with regard to the direct implications for undergraduate education practices.

Our longstanding view of memory and remembering is in the midst of a profound transformation. This does not only affect our concept of memory or a particular idea of how we remember and forget; it is a wider cultural transformation. In order to understand it we need to step back and consider what is meant when we say memory. The book’s far-ranging studies offer such a perspective, synthesizing our understanding of remembering in the neurosciences, humanities, and social studies, as well as in key works of autobiographical literature and life-writing. The aim is to radically rethink our very notion of memory as storage, as an archive of the past. In a long history of scientific, philosophical, and cultural reflections, this notion has gained an undisputed solidity, suggesting the natural existence of a distinctive human capacity (or a set of neuronal systems) enabling us to “encode,” “store,” and “recall” past experiences.But now a new picture is emerging. It shows that there are many cultural forms of remembering and forgetting, embedded in a broad spectrum of human activities and artifacts. This picture is more complex than any notion of memory as storage of the past would allow. It comes with a number of alternatives to archival memory. One of them is elaborated here under the name of narrative approach. It not only permits us to explore the storied weave of our most personal, namely, autobiographical form of remembering; it also sheds new light on the interrelations among memory, self, and culture.