Skip to main content Accessibility help
×
Hostname: page-component-7479d7b7d-767nl Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-07-11T15:40:36.461Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

4 - Developmental Psychobiological Theory

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  09 November 2009

Glen H. Elder
Affiliation:
University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill
Elizabeth Jane Costello
Affiliation:
Duke University, North Carolina
Get access

Summary

In recent years, what might be called a “systems view” of individual development has been slowly catching on in both biology and psychology. The developmental psychobiological systems view sees individual development as hierarchically organized into multiple levels (e.g, genes, cytoplasm, cell, organ, organ system, organism, behavior, environment) that can influence each other. The traffic is bidirectional, exclusively neither bottom-up nor top-down. (A formal treatment of hierarchy theory can be found in Salthe, 1985, esp. Chap. 4.) Frances Degen Horowitz's (1987) review makes the systems case for developmental psychology, at least up to a point. (She still accepts some aspects of infant behavior as strictly genetically canalized, or “hard wired”, and makes no mention of the possible prenatal experiential influences on infant behavior.) The geneticist Sewall Wright (1968) and the embryologists Ludwig von Bertalanffy (1933/1962) and Paul Weiss (1959) have long been championing such a systems view for developmental genetics and developmental biology. The systems view includes developmental approaches and theories that have been called ecological (Bronfenbrenner, 1979), transactional (Dewey & Bentley, 1949; Sameroff, 1983), contextual (Lerner & Kaufman, 1985), interactive (Cairns, 1979; Johnston, 1987; Magnusson, 1988), probabilistic epigenetic (Gottlieb, 1970), and individual-socioecological (Valsiner, 1987). For the present purposes, the metatheoretical developmental psychobiological systems view can be fairly represented by the schematic presented in Figure 1.

Type
Chapter
Information
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 1996

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Save book to Kindle

To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure coreplatform@cambridge.org is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.

Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.

Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.

Available formats
×

Save book to Dropbox

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.

Available formats
×

Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

Available formats
×