Merrill-Palmer Quarterly articles from July 2004

Merrill-Palmer Quarterly archives from July 2004

Commentaries in honor of the 50th anniversary of Merrill-Palmer Quarterly: an introduction to the July 2004 and October 2004 issues.
July 1, 2004... This occasion in the journal's history provides a vantage point from which to appraise the scientific endeavors that have generated the contents of the Quarterly and its sister publications over the last half-century. To capitalize on this...

Children's friendships: shifts over a half-century in perspectives on their development and their effects.
July 1, 2004... Provocative ideas about the nature, development, and effects of children's friendships were included in the lectures of Harry Stack Sullivan, which were edited and published in the 1950s. Sullivan emphasized the love, intimacy, and...

Understanding children's family worlds: family transitions and children's outcome.
July 1, 2004... Increasing numbers of children experience parental separation and formation of stepfamilies. Research into the impact of these family transitions on children's adjustment by family sociologists and psychologists has greatly increased; changes...

Emotion-related regulation: an emerging construct.
July 1, 2004... Emotion-related regulation is a topic of considerable current interest; however, this was not always true. We briefly discuss the history of interest in the topic and then the current state of the field, including definitions of the construct....

The next 50 years: considering gender as a context for understanding young children's peer relationships.
July 1, 2004... The study of children's peer relationships has been well represented within the pages of Merrill-Palmer Quarterly. Particularly over the last decade, the pace of publishing studies on peer relationships has increased. Despite this upswing in...

Theory-of-mind development: retrospect and prospect.
July 1, 2004... This review begins with a brief history from Piagetian perspective-taking development, through metacognitive development, and into the past and present field of theory-of-mind development. This field has included research on what infants and...

The limitations of concepts in developmental psychology.
July 1, 2004... Many concepts in developmental psychology are inferred or confirmed from very particular experimental or naturalistic observations but investigators often generalize their validity to a broad domain of situations. This permissiveness is...

Conscience in childhood: past, present, and future.
July 1, 2004... We ask three questions: What are the components of young children's conscience? How are they organized? How does early conscience develop? We discuss the changing perspectives on each of those questions. We describe the shift from a focus on a...

Contextual factors in risk and prevention research.
July 1, 2004... This paper reviews how cascading levels of contextual influences, starting with family factors and extending to neighborhood and school factors, can affect children's behavioral and emotional development. The ability of contextual factors to...

Integrating developmental scholarship and society: from dissemination and accountability to evidence-based programming and policies.
July 1, 2004... Increasingly, practitioners and policy makers are demanding research evidence as a basis for funding programs and policies. The application of research to society has undergone several transitions, from a scholarly emphasis on the experimental...

Genetics and developmental psychology.
July 1, 2004... One of the major changes in developmental psychology during the past 50 years has been the acceptance of the important role of nature (genetics) as well as nurture (environment). Past research consisting of twin and adoption studies has shown...

Learning about learning.
July 1, 2004... The field of children's learning was thriving when the Merrill-Palmer Quarterly was launched; the field later went into eclipse and now is in the midst of a resurgence. This commentary examines reasons for these trends, and describes the...

Why we need to explore development in its cultural context.
July 1, 2004... Cultural context should be taken into account in our research so that we characterize how people behave in their everyday lives, not just a sterile laboratory environment. Much developmental research treats children as though they group in a...

Early child care: the known and the unknown.
July 1, 2004... Child care research during the last 20 years has made considerable progress in addressing questions about (a) the effects of child care quality, (b) the effects of amount and timing of early child care, and (c) the effects of different types of...