Books by Nebraska Symposium

Variations in childhood development are nowhere more conspicuous or important than in the development and expression of emotions. A child’s capacity to understand another’s feelings, to experience guilt or shame, to manipulate others emotionally, to anticipate the response of parents to displays of anger of distress, to exercise emotional control—all of these are aspects of socioemotional development. A concern with it is reflected in the efforts of researchers to understand the long-term consequences of the parent-infant attachment, the effects of maltreatment on young children, the influence of congenital disorders on their social and emotional functioning, and the origins of depression. Thus the topic of socioemotional development has far-reaching and fascinating applications to everyday life, as the essays in this volume reveal. In Socioemotional Development leading scholars approach the topic from diverse perspectives, summarizing findings and discussing original research. They also address a number of broad developmental concerns: What are the lasting effects of early influence? What can account for the long-term consistency of individual characteristics? What are the origins of psychological disorders? To what extent is emotional experience socially constructed? How does biology affect emotion?The contributors and their works are Carol Z. Malatesta, “The Role of Emotions in the Development and Organization of Personality”; Inge Bretherton, “Open Communication and Internal Working Models: Their Role in the Development of Attachment Relationships”; Carolyn Saarni, “Emotional Competence: How Emotions and Relationships Become Integrated”: Carolyn Zahn-Waxler and Grazyna Kochanska, “The Origins of Guilt”; Dante Cicchetti, “The Organization and Coherence of Socioemotional, Cognitive, and Representational Development: Illustrations through a Developmental Psychopathology Perspective on Down’s Syndrome and Child Maltreatment.”

Psychological theory has traditionally attempted to explain events in terms of motivation, emotion, or cognition. Over the past decade, psychology has come to be viewed as a paradigmatic science; the new paradigm being the understanding of behavior in terms of cognitive representations. This cognitive revolution has fostered a view of the passing of information back and forth between perceptual, memory, and motor components of an integrated system, known as the ΓÇ£computational metaphor.ΓÇ¥ With cognition as the new paradigm, can we expect that the explanatory scope of psychology will be clarified? Will a cognitive perspective be extended to phenomena that have traditionally fallen under the rubric of motivation and emotion?The psychologists involved in this volume of the Nebraska Symposium address these questions specifically. Their contributions stimulate a hypothesis that the cognitive paradigm has begun to move psychology toward a ΓÇ£unified field theoryΓÇ¥ of behavior and experience.Herbert A. Simon tests the limits of a pure information processing paradigm. A basic tenet of this theoretical approach is that information exists independent of the medium by which it is represented. By analyzing the information processing capabilities of nonbiological systems, or ΓÇ£artificial intelligence,ΓÇ¥ we may determine which aspects of motivation and emotion require the biological substrate of cognition.Muriel D. Lezak raises a similar question by focusing on the biological substrate itself and by analyzing the constraints and determinations that it imposes. Howard Gardner considers the medium and the information it processes; thus he lays a conceptual foundation for making the facts of biological brain science congruent with the richness of human behavior and experience.

Recent media coverage of the controversial theory of sexual violence as a product of biological evolution has once again brought the question of the origins of human motivation into the public eye. In this volume, leading scholars in behavioral studies examine the value of evolutionary perspectives in understanding psychological motivations. Beginning with the fundamental fact that humans are part of the biological world, evolutionary psychologists contend that human motivations and mental processes should be understood as by-products of natural selection. By viewing human psychologyΓÇöboth normal and abnormalΓÇöwithin this framework, evolutionary psychologists intend to bridge the disciplinary divide between traditional psychology and fields such as biology.

Features essays on child abuse and public policy. In this book, the concept of motivation is used to shed light on a range of complex issues surrounding the maltreatment of children.

Modern conceptualization of the multidimensional nature of anxiety, panic, and fear are examined from a variety of perspectives, including theories of emotion and cognition, neuropsychology, and conditioning. Carroll E. Izard and Eric A. Youngstrom open with a review of Differential Emotions Theory. In the second chapter, Jeffrey A. Gray and Neil McNaughton summarize and update Gray''s neuropsychological theory of anxiety. Susan Mineka and Richard Zinbarg consider what modern conditioning theory contributes to the understanding of emotion, and Richard J. McNally offers an overview of the application of experimental cognitive paradigms to fear, panic, and anxiety.The volume concludes with a new version of David H. Barlow''s theory of emotional disorders. Barlow, Bruce F. Chorpita, and Julia Turovsky draw from work on emotion, neurophysiology, attributions, learning, ethology, attention, and child development to describe how the inappropriate activation of fear (e.g., a panic attack) can trigger events that may eventually become a clinical anxiety disorder.Perspectives on Anxiety, Panic, and Fear confirms that anxiety, panic, and fear are complex phenomena requiring a multidimensional approach that ranges from neuroanatomy to conditioning.

In what ways do individuals influence the course of their lives? How do people construct a life path within the opportunities and constraints afforded by their world? This book investigates the specific ways in which personal characteristics and contextual variables play a role in shaping individual lives.

Does knowing a person's gender give us a reliable sense of how aggressive, competitive, or emotional he or she is? In this volume, leading scholars address the relationship between gender and aggression, competition and emotion.

Motivational concepts pervade the classic theories of delinquency. And yet, there has been little detailed analysis of the relationship between motivation and delinquency. In this 44th volume of the Nebraska Symposium on Motivation, a group of leading scholars in a broad range of fields make up for that scholarly negligence, giving explicit and systematic attention to the subject. Joan McCord opens the volume by considering fundamental questions about relationships between motivation, explanation, blame, and free will, thereby developing a base from which she poses a theory of motivation for crime. Michael Rutter and colleagues review findings concerning factors ranging from social organization to behavioral genetics; throughout, they grapple with various forms of delinquency, from common misbehavior to persistent personality disorder. Gerald Patterson and Karen Yoeger¿s chapter on late-onset delinquency extends their influential work and illustrates the application of behaviorist psychology that Patterson has been developing for over twenty years. James Tedeschi examines juvenile delinquency from the perspective of his social interactionist theory of violence; this theory, based on the social psychology of interdependence, construes violence as a coercive attempt at social influence. Finally, Karen Heimer and Ross Matsueda compare the study of delinquency by social psychologists in the fields of psychology and sociology and present their own symbolic interactionist theory of delinquency.

A collection of eight essays that probe behavioral, cognitive, evolutionary, and physiological perspectives involved in drug abuse.

Describes contemporary approach to the modeling of complex cognitive and behavioral processes. This book provides examples of translational research ranging from clinical neuropsychology to self-actualization, from medical informatics to industrial psychology, from programmed learning to psychiatric rehabilitation.

Focuses on moral development theory and research, an area of academic study that began early in the twentieth century. This book deals with such themes as: what motivates moral behavior; are there certain universal moral values; and, does an individual's will or an individual's environment play a greater role in determining moral conduct.

Features research in a dynamic area of inquiry and practice. This book considers cross-cultural differences in the idea of the person and in models of balancing obligations to the self, family, and community. It also questions the concepts of self and self-worth.