Janette B. Benson

Positive youth development: Research and applications for promoting thriving in adolescence

Interests in the strengths of youth, the plasticity of human development, and the concept of resilience coalesced in the 1990s to foster the development of the concept of positive youth development (PYD). This chapter presents the features of the relational developmental systems theoretical model of the PYD developmental process, and then uses this model to describe the scholarship in the present volume. These contributions suggest that all young people have strengths that may be capitalized on to promote thriving across the adolescent years. We conclude that the findings reported in this volume provide a basis for optimism that evidence-based actions can be taken to enhance the chances for thriving among all young people.

Rapid Assessment of Infant Predictors of Adult IQ: Midtwin-Midparent Analyses

Infant predictors of adult IQ were assessed with same-sex infant twins (114 pairs) and their parents. The midtwin-midparent design permits the rapid assessment of infant measures to predict later behavior, because the midparent score serves as a proxy for the infants potential score at maturity. At 5, 7, and 9 months, Ss were observed on the Fagan Test of Infant Intelligence, hand preference, vocalizations, selected Bayley Scales of Infant Development items, and a modified Bayley Infant Behavior Record. At 8 months, Ss received the Visual Expectation Paradigm and an auditory discrimination task. Their parents received the Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale-Revised. Some infant measures, indicative of information processing, language ability, and temperament, predicted midparent IQ. This study extended and partially replicated findings from a previous midtwin-midparent cohort

Contextual Influences on Imitative Interactions between Mothers and Infants

It is a challenge for developmental psychology to understand how an individual’s experience is interlaced in the construction of competence, for experience is at once constrained by existing competence and a means for enhancing competence. As competence is utilized in different contexts, some features of experience are retained and influence future deployment of competence. Moreover, it is through experience that the lines of cultural and personal distinctiveness are introduced into the universal patterns of human development. Our purpose here is not to discuss the different ways that the role of experience may be understood nor the biological and social contexts within which experience takes shape, but to examine the structure of one kind of experience common during the first year of life—imitative interaction.

Season of birth and onset of locomotion: Theoretical and methodological implications*

Although empirical studies of motor development have tended to focus on physical and neurological factors, experiential factors are important as well. The hypothesis that season of birth would influence the onset of locomotion through experiential factors associated with variation in seasonal climate was examined. The primary measure was parental report of age of locomotor onset, collected on 425 infants, and was analyzed along with average monthly temperature. A seasonally effect was found, indicating that infants born in the summer and fall begin to crawl about 3 weeks later than infants born in the winter and spring. These data suggest that experiential factors, associated with seasonality and variation in climate, affect the timing of locomotor onset. The seasonality effect is discussed as a possible rate-limiting factor in motor development as described by dynamical systems approaches to motor development. The findings have methodological implications for studies of the organizing effects of the onset of self-produced locomotion.