Highlighting the interplay between basic research and intervention, this volume focuses on common stressful life experiences that present significant challenges to children's healthy development. Fifteen stressors are discussed with regard to both short-and long-term effects. The authors identify factors that explain variability in children's adjustment to these stressors and evaluate preventive interventions designed to facilitate coping. Notable chapters include a discussion of the many uncontrollable stressors to which inner-city youth are exposed and a thorough treatment of children's adaptation to divorce. Each chapter follows a common outline, allowing comparison among stressors.

This volume presents the reader with a stimulating rich tapestry of essays exploring the nature of action and intentionality, and discussing their role in human development. As the contributions make clear, action is an integrative concept that forms the bridge between our psychological, biological, and sociocultural worlds. Action is also integrative in the sense of entailing motivational, emotional, and cognitive systems, and this integration too is well represented in the chapters. Action is defined, and distinguished from behavior, according to its intentional quality. Thus, a constantly recurring theme in the volume involves the dialectic of action-intentionality, and specifically the questions of how and when these concepts are to be distinguished. For action theorists, action—as distinguished from behavior—constitutes the fundamental mechanism of human development. This commitment is detailed in several essays that explore the life-span implications of action. This timely volume will be must reading for all who want to learn about, or stay current with, contemporary action theoretical approaches to human development. – Willis F. Overton, Temple University The present volume advances the view that we cannot go far in understanding development over the life span without paying heed to self-reflective processes. In a reciprocal way, self-reflection links developmental change in the ways in which the person constructs his or her own development over the life span. Development, action, and intentionality exist, then, in an intimate relationship: As development forms the social and historical settings within which intentional activity is embedded, thus become indispensable categories for developmental theory and research. Due to their potential to integrate culture, history, and personality, action-theoretical concepts have made strong inroads in many areas of social and behavioral research. Within the field of developmental psychology, researchers have come to recognize that developmental patterns, and their variation across historical and social contexts, cannot easily be reduced to invariant laws. Instead, they reflect the agency of both the culture and the person. Issues of intentional self-development gain particular importance within the developmental settings of modernity. Under conditions of cultural acceleration, globalization, and pluralization of life forms, normative "scripts" and timetables of development have become blurred, and people are increasingly forced to take a planful, self-monitoring, and optimizing stance toward their own behavior and development. As will become evident throughout this ground-breaking book, an action perspective on development covers a broad spectrum of theoretical approaches. Concepts such as "personal goals," "personal projects," "life themes," "meaning," "life planning," "compensation," or "intentional self-development" have become the nuclei of innovative research programs. The chapters collected in this volume, by scholars on the forefront of action theory and research, provide an indication of the promise that these notions hold for life-span developmental psychology, motivation research, and research on aging.

This book traces the development of coping from birth to emerging adulthood by building a conceptual and empirical bridge between coping and the development of regulation and resilience. It offers a comprehensive overview of the challenges facing the developmental study of coping, including the history of the concept, critiques of current coping theories and research, and reviews of age differences and changes in coping during childhood and adolescence. It integrates multiple strands of cutting-edge theory and research, including work on the development of stress neurophysiology, attachment, emotion regulation, and executive functions. In addition, chapters track how coping develops, starting from birth and following its progress across multiple qualitative shifts during childhood and adolescence. The book identifies factors that shape the development of coping, focusing on the effects of underlying neurobiological changes, social relationships, and stressful experiences. Qualitative shifts are emphasized and explanatory factors highlight multiple entry points for the diagnosis of problems and implementation of remedial and preventive interventions. Topics featured in this text include: Developmental conceptualizations of coping, such as action regulation under stress. Neurophysiological developments that underlie age-related shifts in coping. How coping is shaped by early adversity, temperament, and attachment. How parenting and family factors affect the development of coping. The role of coping in the development of psychopathology and resilience. The Development of Coping is a must-have resource for researchers, professors, and graduate students as well as clinicians and related professionals in developmental, clinical child, and school psychology, public health, counseling, personality and social psychology, and neurophysiological psychology as well as prevention and intervention science.

This is the second volume based on the annual University of Miami Symposia on Stress and Coping. The present volume is focused on some representative stresses and coping mechanisms that occur during different stages of development including infancy, childhood, and adulthood. Accordingly, the volume is divided into three sections for those three stages.

How do people cope with stressful experiences? What makes a coping strategy effective for a particular individual? This volume comprehensively examines the nature of psychosocial stress and the implications of different coping strategies for adaptation and health across the lifespan. Carolyn M. Aldwin synthesizes a vast body of knowledge within a conceptual framework that emphasizes the transactions between mind and body and between persons and environments. She analyzes different kinds of stressors and their psychological and physiological effects, both negative and positive. Ways in which coping is influenced by personality, relationships, situational factors, and culture are explored. The book also provides a methodological primer for stress and coping research, critically reviewing available measures and data analysis techniques.

This edited volume focuses on different views of happiness and well-being, considering constructs like meaning and spirituality in addition to the more standard constructs of positive emotion and life satisfaction. A premise of the volume is that being happy consists of more than having the right things happen to us; it also depends on how we interpret those events as well as what we are trying to achieve. Such considerations suggest that cognitive-emotional factors should play a fairly pronounced role in how happy we are. The present volume pursues these themes in the context of 25 chapters organized into 5 sections. The first section centers on cognitive variables such as attention and executive function, in addition to mindfulness. The second section considers important sources of positive cognition such as savoring and optimism and the third section focuses on self-regulatory contributions to well-being. Finally, social processes are covered in a fourth section and meaning-related processes are covered in the fifth. What results is a rich and diverse volume centering on the ways in which our minds can help or hinder our aspirations for happiness.

Edited by Steven C. Hayes and Stefan G. Hofmann, and based on the new training standards developed by the Inter-Organizational Task Force on Cognitive and Behavioral Psychology Doctoral Education, this groundbreaking textbook presents the core competencies of cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) in an innovative, practically applicable way, with contributions from some of the luminaries in the field of behavioral science. CBT is one of the most proven-effective and widely used forms of psychotherapy today. But while there are plenty of books that provide an overview of CBT, this is the first to present the newest recommendations set forth by a special task force of the Association for Behavioral and Cognitive Therapies—and that focuses on the application of these interventions based on a variety of approaches for doctoral-level education and training. Starting with an exploration of the science and theoretical foundations of CBT, then moving into a thorough presentation of the clinical processes, this book constitutes an accessible, comprehensive guide to grasping and using even the most difficult competencies. Each chapter of Process-Based CBT is written by a leading authority in that field, and their combined expertise presents the best of behavior therapy and analysis, cognitive therapy, and the acceptance and mindfulness therapies. Most importantly, in addition to gaining an up-to-date understanding of the core processes, with this premiere text you’ll learn exactly how to put them into practice for maximum efficacy. For practitioners, researchers, students, instructors, and other professionals working with CBT, this breakthrough textbook—poised to set the standard in coursework and training—provides the guidance you need to fully comprehend and utilize the core competencies of CBT in a way that honors the behavioral, cognitive, and acceptance and mindfulness wings of the tradition.