The Cambridge Handbook of Environment in Human Development: (Cambridge Handbooks in Psychology)

Families, communities and societies influence children's learning and development in many ways. This is the first handbook devoted to the understanding of the nature of environments in child development. Utilizing Urie Bronfenbrenner's idea of embedded environments, this volume looks at environments from the immediate environment of the family (including fathers, siblings, grandparents and day-care personnel) to the larger environment including schools, neighborhoods, geographic regions, countries and cultures. Understanding these embedded environments and the ways in which they interact is necessary to understand development.

Table of Contents:
Introduction Linda Mayes and Michael Lewis; 1. Proximal to distal environments in child development: theoretical, structural, methodological, and empirical considerations Marc Bornstein; 2. Risk and adversity in developmental psychology Jelena Obradovic, Anne Shaffer and Anne Masten; 3. Maternal care as the central environmental variable Lynne Murray and Marc de Rosnay; 4. Novel assessment techniques aimed at identifying proximal and distal environmental risk factors for children and adolescents Linda Mayes, Stacey P. Daughters and Jessica M. Richards; 5. Beyond the Dyad Michael Lewis; 6. Social agents and genes: comments on the ontogenesis of the 'social genome' Elena Grigorenko and Sarah Ward; 7. The dynamic systems perspective: what is the system? Tom Hollenstein; 8. New approaches to the notion of 'environmental risk' Jeanne Brooks-Gunn, Aliza W. Pressman and Pamela Klebanov; 9. Environment across time Ronald Seifer; 10. Parental care and attachment Peter Fonagy and Michelle Sleed; 11. Understanding the developmental influences of the family environment Sharon Landesman Ramey and Craig T. Ramey; 12. Measuring the environments of early care, education, and intervention programs for children in poverty William Gilliam and Laura Stout Sosinsky; 13. School influences on human development Jacquelynne Eccles and Robert W. Roeser; 14. Siblings and peers in the adult-child-child triadic context Sybil L. Hart; 15. Neighborhood environments: a multi-measure, multi-level approach Ross D. Parke, Shoon Lio, Thomas J. Schofield, Louis Tuthill, Eric Vega and Scott Coltrane; 16. Rural versus urban environments Robert H. Bradley; 17. Current research and new dimensions Stephanie M. Jones, Monica Yudron, Aeliecia Pisciella and Hadas Eidelman; 18. Social networks Mary J. Levitt; 19. Marital health E. Mark Cummings and Lauren M. Papp; 20. Parental psychopathology: a developmental perspective on mechanisms of transmission Nancy E. Suchman and Cindy DeCoste; 21. Early exposure to trauma: domestic and community violence Alicia Lieberman and Patricia Van Horn; 22. Child maltreatment: a pathogenic relational environment across development Julia Kim-Cohen, Sarah Rabbitt, Jessica Henry and Andrea L. Gold; 23. The cultural organization of children's environment Sara Harkness and Charles M. Super; 24. Children and electronic media Sandra L. Calvert; 25. Parenting behavior as the environment where children grow Ruth Feldman; 26. HOME inventory Robert H. Bradley; 27. Measurement and model building in studying the influence of socioeconomic status on child development Erika Hoff, Brett Laursen and Kelly Bridges; 28. Assessment of parental psychopathology and adaptive functioning Thomas Achenbach; 29. Assessment of social support, social network, and social capital Brenda K. Bryant; 30. Stress reactivity in child development research: indices, correlates, and future directions Jelena Obradovic and W. Thomas Boyce; 31. Mixed model analyses for repeated-measures data Peter J. Molfese, Yaacov Petscher and David L. Molfese.

About the Author :
Dr Linda Mayes is the Arnold Gesell Professor of Child Psychiatry, Pediatrics and Psychology in the Yale Child Study Center, a department in the Yale School of Medicine. As a clinical investigator she works at the interface of three fields - pediatrics, developmental psychology and child psychiatry. Formally trained as a pediatrician and neonatologist, her work integrates perspectives from child development, behavioral neuroscience, psychophysiology, neurobiology, developmental psychopathology and neurobehavioral teratology. She is the author of nearly 200 peer-reviewed papers and more than 100 chapters and reviews. Dr Mayes is also the author of a book for parents, The Yale Child Study Center Guide to Understanding your Child. She is also special advisor to the dean in the Yale University School of Medicine. Michael Lewis is University Distinguished Professor of Pediatrics and Psychiatry and Director of the Institute for the Study of Child Development at Robert Wood Johnson Medical School, University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey. He also is Professor of Psychology, Education, Cognitive Science and Biomedical Engineering at Rutgers University. Dr Lewis has published more than 300 articles in scientific journals and has written or edited more than 35 books, including Social Cognition and the Acquisition of Self (1979), Children's Emotions and Moods: Developmental Theory and Measurement (1983), Shame: The Exposed Self (1992) and Altering Fate: Why the Past Does Not Predict the Future (1997). He edited the Handbook of Developmental Psychopathology, 2nd edition (2001) and the Handbook of Emotions, 3rd edition (2009). He recently won the Urie Bronfenbrenner Award from the American Psychological Association for Lifetime Contribution to Developmental Psychology in the Service of Science and Society.

Review :
'This book will be a force for good.' John Goodier, Reference Reviews