How malleable is human nature? Can an individual really change in meaningful ways? Or, are there immutable limits on the possibilities of human growth set in place by genes and early childhood experiences? These questions touch our deepest political and personal concerns, and have long been a matter of fierce debate in the behavioral sciences.

The final volume in this significant series, this publication mirrors the broad scientific attention given to ideas and issues associated with the life-span perspective: constancy and change in human development; opportunities for and constraints on plasticity in structure and function across life; the potential for intervention across the entire life course (and thus for the creation of an applied developmental science); individual differences (diversity) in life paths, in contexts (or the ecology) of human development, and in changing relations between people and contexts; interconnections and discontinuities across age levels and developmental periods; and the importance of integrating biological, psychological, social, cultural, and historical levels of organization in order to understand human development.

This volume continues the tradition of the Life-Span Development Series, presenting overviews of research programs on a variety of developmental topics. Research and theory in life-span development have given increased attention to the issues of constancy and change in human development and to the opportunities for, and constraints on, plasticity in structure and function across life. Acknowledging the need for and existence of interconnection between age and developmental periods, it focuses on conditions for possibly discontinuous development that emerge at later periods. Contributors to this series are sensitive to the restrictive consequences of studying only specific age periods, such as old age, infancy, or adolescence. Each scholar attempts to relate the facts about one age group to similar facts about other age groups, and to move toward the study of transformation of characteristics and processes over the life span.

First published in 1987. There is a wide gap between life-span research and mainstream social psychology, and this book strikes a bright spark between these poles. promising as a corrective to narrowness and sterility. The chapters reflect a wide variety of approaches in social psychology, as well as considerable breadth in the range of ideas from life-span human development that are brought to bear.

Drawing on philosophy, the history of psychology and the natural sciences, this book proposes a new theoretical foundation for the psychology of the life course. It features the study of unique individual life courses in their social and cultural environment, combining the perspectives of developmental and sociocultural psychology, psychotherapy, learning sciences and geronto-psychology. In particular, the book highlights semiotic processes, specific to human development, that allow us to draw upon past experiences, to choose among alternatives and to plan our futures. Imagination is an important outcome of semiotic processes and enables us to deal with daily constraints and transitions, and promotes the transformation of social representation and symbolic systems - giving each person a unique style, or 'melody', of living. The book concludes by questioning the methodology and epistemology of current life course studies.

This special issue is devoted to the topic of "risk and resilience" in human development, a topic that epitomizes the complexity of human development as a process of constancy and change throughout life. The three empirical papers in this issue represent strong contributions to the growing corpus of research on risk and resilience in human development. The first one focuses on the uniquely vulnerable population of urban ethnic minority adolescent males. The second paper focuses on the risk and resilience from trauma in a sample of mostly Caucasian individuals from rural Iowa, who were at the last assessment, in the midst of transition into young adulthood. It measures an array of mental disorders outcomes and reveals the theoretical importance of timing of the risk factor. The last paper is a study begun in 1978 of a cohort of individuals with serious adolescent-onset mental disorder. It compares these individuals against the risk and resilience profiles of a matched sample without serious adolescent-onset psychiatric disorder. In sum this issue adds to the corpus of the frontiers of resilience research.

Part of the authoritative four-volume reference that spans the entire field of child development and has set the standard against which all other scholarly references are compared. Updated and revised to reflect the new developments in the field, the Handbook of Child Psychology, Sixth Edition contains new chapters on such topics as spirituality, social understanding, and non-verbal communication. Volume 1: Theoretical Models of Human Development, edited by Richard M. Lerner, Tufts University, explores a variety of theoretical approaches, including life-span/life-course theories, socio-culture theories, structural theories, object-relations theories, and diversity and development theories. New chapters cover phenomenology and ecological systems theory, positive youth development, and religious and spiritual development.