The Child Development Transition: Dynamics of Social, Cultural and Familial Change
Saturday, 12:30 PM - 2:15 PM
Sheraton Commonwealth

Speaker: Patricia Greenfield, University of California, Los Angeles
Chair: Mary Gauvain, University of California, Riverside

Biographical Sketch
Patricia Greenfield received her Ph. D. from Harvard University and is currently Professor of Psychology at UCLA, where she directs the FPR-UCLA Center for Culture, Brain, and Development, and Children's Digital Media Center, UCLA. Her central theoretical and research interest is in the relationship between culture and human development. She is a past recipient of the American Association for the Advancement of Science Award for Behavioral Science Research, and has received teaching awards from UCLA and the American Psychological Association. Her books include Mind and Media: The Effects of Television, Video Games, and Computers (Harvard, 1984), which has been translated into nine languages. In the 90s she co edited (with R.R. Cocking) Interacting with Video (Elsevier, 1996) and Cross-Cultural Roots of Minority Child Development (Erlbaum, 1994). She has done field research on child development, social change, and weaving apprenticeship in Chiapas, Mexico since 1969. This cumulative work is presented in a book entitled Weaving Generations Together: Evolving Creativity in the Maya of Chiapas (SAR Press, 2004). Her research program includes basic and applied cross-cultural projects in Los Angeles, as well as cross-species and neural investigations linking the ontogeny and phylogeny of cultural processes in language and cognition.

Abstract
In this presentation, I argue for a new starting point for theory in cultural developmental psychology - the nature of larger social structures. For this theoretical starting point, I select Tonnies' (1887) contrast between Gemeinschaft (community) and Gesellschaft (society). These contrasting social structures are then integrated into our earlier theory of two cultural pathways through universal development - an individualistic pathway favoring the development of independent behaviors and a collectivistic pathway favoring the development of interdependent behaviors (Greenfield, Keller, Fuligni, and Maynard, 2003). Worldwide forces, both through internal social change and immigration, are constantly moving environments away from Gemeinschaft toward Gesellschaft characteristics. These demographic changes shift cultures from collectivistic to individualistic, while shifting social development from interdependent to independent and cognitive development from contextualized to abstract. The integration of social structure concepts with developmental theory can resolve two essential issues: 1) sociocultural environments are not static and therefore must be treated dynamically in developmental research; 2) both social and cognitive development are affected by the same forces and consequently need to be integrated into one unified theory of culture and human development. The explanatory power of the theoretical framework will be illustrated with empirical findings.