Experiencing the lifespan 4th edition pdf download free

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See our User Agreement and Privacy Policy. See our Privacy Policy and User Agreement for details. Submit Search. Experiencing the Lifespan - Janet Belsky Developmental Psychology Adolescence The pear-shaped muscular organ in a woman's abdomen that houses a developing baby is the: A cervix.

B uterus. C fallopian tube. D ovum. Jeanine has had surgery on the pair of slim, pipe-like structures that connect her ovaries with her uterus.

Jeanine has had surgery on her: A fallopian tubes. Relative to other cognitive domains, its development is slow and decline begins early in late adulthood. As such, it is particularly sensitive to variations in environments and experiences, and there is growing evidence that it is susceptible to intervention — important because of its link to a wide range of important life outcomes. The volume is made up of four sections. The second section presents insights into mechanisms of executive function, as provided by a variety of methodological approaches.

Skip to content. Experiencing the Lifespan. Experiencing the Lifespan Book Review:. Study Guide for Experiencing the Lifespan. Experiencing the Lifespan Study Guide. Loose leaf Version for Experiencing the Lifespan. IRM Experiencing the Lifespan. Experiencing the Lifespan Toolkit. Experiencing the Lifespan Toolkit Book Review:. Whatever the answer, it is clear that our economic situation is another vital marker that shapes how we think, develop, and behave.

How exactly does being affluent or poor affect our passage through life? The Impact of Socioeconomic Status This question brings up the impact of socioeconomic status SES a term referring to our education and incomeon our unfolding lives. As you will vividly see throughout this book, living in poverty makes people vulnerable to a cascade of problems. Great Recession of Dramatic loss of jobs and consumer spending that began with the bursting of the U.

Specifically, when income inequality is wide, a nation has a few very affluent residents and a mass of disadvantaged citizens.

Not only do developmentalists rank individuals by socioeconomic status, but they rank nations, too. Developed-world nations are defined by their wealth, or high median per-person incomes. Technology is advanced. People have widespread access to education and medical care, and can enjoy the latest advances of twenty-first-century life. Traditionally, the United States, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and Japan, as well as every Western European nation, have been classified in this most affluent category, although its ranks may be expanding as the economies of nations such as China, India, and Brazil explode.

Developing-world countries stand in sharp contrast to these most affluent or advancing regions of the world. Here, poverty is rampant and income inequalities are extreme. In the least developed nations, residents may not have indoor plumbing, clean running water, or access to education. People may die at a young age from curable infectious disease. Babies born in the most disadvantaged regions of the globe face a twenty-first-century lifespan that has striking similarities to the one developedworld children faced more than a century ago.

For this grandmother, mother, and daughter, getting dressed up to visit this Shinto family shrine and pay their respects to their ancestors is an important ritual.

It is one way that the lesson honor your elders is taught to children living in collectivist societies such as Japan from an early age. Residents of developing nations often have shorter, more difficult lives. Still, if you visited these places, you might be struck by a shared sense of community and family commitment that we might not find in the West. Can we categorize societies according to their basic values, apart from their wealth?

Developmentalists who study culture answer yes. Collectivist cultures place a premium on social harmony. The family generations expect to live together, even as adults.

Children are taught to obey their elders, to suppress their feelings, to value being respectful, and to subordinate their needs to the good of the wider group. Individualistic cultures emphasize independence, competition, and personal success. Children are encouraged to openly express their emotions, to believe in their own personal power, to leave their parents, to stand on their own as self-sufficient and independent adults. Traditionally, Western nations score high on indices of individualism.

Imagine how your perspective on life might differ if becoming independent from your parents or honestly sharing your feelings was viewed as an inappropriate way to behave. How would you treat your children, choose a career, or select a spouse? What concerns would you have as you were facing death? As we scan development around the world, I will regularly distinguish between collectivist and more individualistic societies.

Ill highlight the issues families face when they move from these traditional cultures to the West, and explore research relating to the major U. How does being an ethnic minority affect everything from emerging adult attitudes to the chance of developing age-related diseases?

As you read this information, keep in mind that what unites us as people far outweighs any distinctions based on culture, ethnicity, or race. Moreover, making diversity generalizations is hazardous because of the diversity that exists within each nation and ethnic group. In the most traditionally individualistic country no surprise, thats the United States , people have a mix of collectivist and individualistic worldviews.

As their economies have flourished, residents of classic collectivistic cultures, such as China and Japan, have developed more individualistic, Western worldviews. If the census labels you as Hispanic American or Asian American, you also are probably aware that this broad label masks more than it reveals.

As a third-generation Cuban American, do you really have much in common with a recent immigrant from Mexico or Belize? Given that people arrive in the United States from hundreds of culturally different countries, does it really make sense to lump our citizens into a small number of ethnic groups?

There is, however, one distinction that we can agree on. Its called being female or male. The Impact of Gender Obviously, our cultures values shape our life path as males and females. Are you living in a society or at a time in history when men are encouraged to be househusbands and women to be corporate CEOs? But biology is crucial in driving at least one fundamental difference in the pathways of women and men: Throughout the developed world, females outlive males by more than 4 years.

Because they must survive childbearing and carry an extra X chromosome, women are the physiologically hardier sex. Are boys more aggressive than girls?

Throughout this book, Ill examine these questions as we explore the scientific truth of our gender stereotypes and spell out other fascinating facts about sex differences, too. To set you up for this ongoing conversation, you might want to take the Is It Males or Females? Keep a copy handy. As we travel through the lifespan, you can check the accuracy of your ideas. Now that you understand that our lifespan is a continuing work in progress that varies across cultures and historical times, lets get to the science.

After you complete this sections Tying It All Together review quiz on page 12, I will introduce the main theories, research methods, concepts, and scientific terms in the chapters to come. Notice, in particular, the huge increase in the fraction of Hispanic Americans, and the fact that by the mid-twenty-first century the percentage of people who label themselves as mixed race is expected to double.

Census Bureau, community survey; U. White Population a Minority by Who are more likely to survive the hazards of prenatal development, male or female fetuses? You will find the answer in Chapter 2. Who are more likely to be diagnosed with ADHD, girls or boys? You will find the answer in Chapter 5. Who are more aggressive, boys or girls? You will find the answer in Chapter 6.

Who are more likely to be diagnosed with learning disabilities in school, boys or girls? You will find the answer in Chapter 7. Who, when they reach puberty at an earlier-than-typical age, are more at risk of developing problems, boys or girls?

You will find the answer in Chapter 8. Who are likely to stay in the nest at home longer during the emerging-adult years, men or women? You will find the answer in Chapter Who tend to earn more today, women or men?

Who are more at risk of having enduring emotional problems after being widowed, men or women? Who are apt to live longer, sicker men or women? You will find the answer throughout this book.

Tuan, a historian, is arguing that over this century, conditions for children changed dramatically in very positive ways. He should mention all of the following examples except check the statement that is false : a. Child mortality used to be high. Today, it is low in the developed world. Children used to be beaten and abandoned. Today, these practices are severely condemned.

Children used to start their work lives at a young age. Today, childhood extends through and even beyond the adolescent years. Children are more likely to grow up in two-parent families today than a halfcentury ago. Maria just became a grandmother; Sara just retired from her job; Rosa just entered a nursing home. If these women live in the United States and are middle class, roughly how old are they likely to be?

Jim and Joe are arguing about the impact of the s lifestyle revolution. Jim believes that life is much better now that we have more freedom. Joe says that actually we are worse off. Argue Jims position, then Joes, backing up your points by using the information in this section. Pablo says, I would never think of leaving my parents or living far from my brothers and sisters. A person must take care of his extended family before satisfying his own needs.

Peter says, My primary commitment is to my wife and children. A person needs, above all, to make an independent life. List and possibly discuss with the class some ways the Great Recession of may have changed your own or your familys life plans.

Answers to the Tying It All Together questions can be found at the end of this chapter. Theories allow us to predict behavior and also suggest how to intervene to improve behavior.

During his twenties, David was searching for his identity. Manuels mechanical talents must be hereditary. If Elissas mother gives her a lot of love during her first years of life, she will grow up to be a loving, secure adult.

If any of these thoughts entered your mind while reading about the people in the opening chapter vignette, you were using a major theory that developmentalists use to understand human life.

Theories offer insights into that crucial why question. They attempt to explain what causes us to act as we do. They may allow us to predict the future. Ideally, they give us information about how to improve the quality of life. Theories in developmental science may offer broad general explanations of behavior that apply to people at every age.

Or they may focus on describing specific changes that occur at particular ages. This section provides a preview of both kinds of theories. Lets begin by outlining some very broad theories one is actually a research discipline that offer general explanations of behavior. Ive organized these theories somewhat chronologicallybased somewhat on when they appeared during the twentieth centurybut mainly according to their position on that core issue in our field: Is it the environment, or the wider world, that determines how we develop?

Are our personalities, talents, and traits shaped mainly by biological or genetic forces? This is the famous nature biology versus nurture environment question.

This photo shows B. Skinner with his favorite research subject for exploring operant conditioningthe pigeon. By charting how often pigeons pecked to get reinforced by food and varying the patterns of reinforcement, this famous behaviorist was able to tell us a good deal about how humans act.

According to Skinner, the general law of learning that causes each voluntary action, from forming our first words to mastering higher math, is operant conditioning. Responses that we reward, or reinforce, will be learned. Responses that are not reinforced go away or are extinguished. So what accounts for Watsons beggar men and thieves, the out-of-control kids, all of the marriages that start out so loving and then fall apart?

According to Skinner, the reinforcements are operating as they should. The problem is that instead of reinforcing positive behavior, we often reinforce the wrong things. One excellent place to see Skinners point in action is to take a trip to your local Walmart or your favorite restaurant.

Notice how when children act up at the store parents often buy them a Imagine wheeling this whining todtoy to quiet them down. At dinner, as long as a toddler is playing dler through your Walmart grocery quietly, adults ignore her. When she starts to hurl objects off the table, they pick aisle. Wouldnt you be tempted to her up, kiss her, and take her outside.

Then, they complain about their childs reinforce this unpleasant behavior by difficult personality, not realizing that its source is really them. Their own reinsilencing the child with an enticing object on the shelf? One of Skinners most interesting concepts, derived from his work with pigeons, relates to variable reinforcement schedules. This is the type of reinforcement that typically occurs in daily life: We get reinforced at unpredictable times, so we learn to keep traditional behaviorism The responding, realizing that if we continue, at some point we will be reinforced.

Readers original behavioral worldview that focused on charting and with children will understand just how difficult it is to follow the basic behavioral prinmodifying only objective, ciple to be consistent or not let a negative variable schedule emerge. At Walmart, even visible behaviors. It simply is more reinforcing to you to avoid the other shoppers dising to the traditional behavapproving stares What an out-of-control mother and bratty kid!

Unfortunately, your ioral perspective, the law of learning that determines any child has learned a valuable lesson: If I keep whining, eventually Ill get what I want. SpecifiReinforcement and its opposite process, extinction is a powerful force for both cally, we act the way we do good and bad. It explains why, if a child starts out succeeding early in elementary because we are reinforced school being reinforced by receiving As , hes likely to study and become more for acting in that way.

If a kindergartner begins failing socially does not get reinforcement Behavioral term for reward. So proclaimed the early-twentieth-century psychologist John Watson as he spelled out the nurture-is-all-important position of traditional behaviorism.

Intoxicated by the scientific advances that were transforming society and allowing most people to live to old age, Watson and his fellow behaviorist B. Skinner , dreamed of a science of human behavior that would be as rigorous as physics. These pioneering theorists believed that psychologists could not study feelings and thoughts because inner experiences could not be observed. In their view, it was vital to chart only measurable, observable responses.

Moreover, according to these traditional behaviorists, a few general laws of learning explain behavior in every life situation at every time of life. Cognitive behaviorists focus on charting and modifying peoples thoughts. When you are not being reinforced by people, wouldnt you withdraw or generally start acting in socially inappropriate ways?

Behaviorism makes sense of why, after starting out so loving, marriages can end in divorce court. As newlyweds, couples are continually reinforcing each other with expressions of love.

Then, over time, husbands and wives tend to ignore the good parts of their partner and pay attention when there is something wrong. Actually, as you will read in Chapter 11, one psychologist finds that he can predict which marriages will break up, simply by charting the ratio of positive to negative comments spouses make while discussing an issue in their lives.

Behaviorism even offers an optimistic environmental explanation for the physical and mental impairments of old age. If you were in a nursing home and werent being reinforced for remembering or walking, wouldnt your memory or physical abilities decline? The key to producing well-behaved children, enduring, loving marriages, and fewer old-age disabilities is simple.

According to traditional behaviorists, we simply need to reinforce the right things. However, things are not quite that simple. Human beings do think and reason. People do not need to be personally reinforced to actually learn. This student is obviously far from thrilled at getting a humiliating grade.

But if he has high selfefficacy, he should view this failure as a challenge: If I study twice as hard, Ill get an A next time. How would you react if you failed the first exam in this class? Enter cognitive behaviorism social learning theory , launched by Albert Bandura ; and his colleagues in the s, in studies demonstrating the power of modeling, or learning by watching and imitating what other people do.

Because we are a social species, modeling both imitating other people, and others reciprocally imitating us is endemic in daily life. Given that we are always modeling everything, from the expressions of the person we are talking with, to the latest hairstyle, who are we most likely to generally model as children and adults?

Banduras studies suggest that we tend to model people who are nurturing, or relate to us in a caring way. The good news here is that being a loving, hands-on parent is the best way to naturally embed your values and ideas. We model people whom we categorize as being like us. At age 2, you probably modeled anything from the vacuum cleaner to the behavior of the family dog. As we grow older, we tailor our modeling selectively, based on our understanding of who we are.

It makes sense of why at-risk teenagers gravitate to the druggies group at school, and then model the leader who most embodies the group norms see Chapter 9. While I will use modeling to explain behavior at several points in this book, another conceptalso devised by Bandurawill be a genuine foundation in the chapters to come: self-efficacy.

Self-efficacy refers to our belief in our competence, our sense that we can be successful at a given task. According to Bandura , , , efficacy feelings determine the goals we set. They predict which activities we engage in as we travel through life. When self-efficacy is low, we decide not to tackle that difficult math problem.

We choose not to ask a beautiful stranger for a date. When self-efficacy is high, we not only take action but continue to act long after the traditional behavioral approach suggests that extinction should occur. Lets imagine that your goal is to be a nurse or psychologist, but you get an F on this first test. If your academic self-efficacy is low, you might conclude: Im a terrible student. Ill never make it.

Im basically not smart. You might not put forth. You might even drop out of school. But if you have high self-efficacy, your reaction will be the opposite: I just need to work harder. I can do it. Im going to get a good grade in this class! How do children develop low or high self-efficacy?

Can efficacy feelings predict success decades later in life? What role does self-efficacy play in our happiness as adults? These are the kinds of questions we will explore in examining the role that efficacy feelings play from elementary school to old age. By now, you may be impressed with the power of behaviorisms simple, actionoriented concepts. Be consistent. Dont reinforce negative behavior. Reinforce positive things from traditional behaviorism.

Draw on the principles of modeling and stimulate efficacy feelings to help children and adults succeed from cognitive behaviorism. Still, many developmentalists, even people who believe that nurture or the environment is important, find behaviorism unsatisfying. Arent we more than just a collection of efficacy feelings or reinforced responses? Isnt there a basic core to personality, and arent the lessons we learn in childhood vital in shaping adult life?

Notice that behaviorism doesnt address that core question: What really motivates us as people? The child crawls. The mother fondles her child, kisses it and holds it p. Wait a second! Isnt that the way parents and children are supposed to behave? According to attachment theory, the answer is yes. Attachment theory, put forth by British psychiatrist John Bowlby during the mid-twentieth century, has the same basic theme as traditional Freudian psychoanalytic theory.

As you will learn in a bit more depth on page 20, Sigmund Freud revolutionized our culture by arguing that the way our parents treat us during early childhood determines our lifelong mental health. Bowlby agreed that our early experiences with caregivers shape our adult ability to love, but he focused on what he called the attachment response.

In observing young children separated from their mothers, Bowlby noticed that babies need to be physically close to a caregiver during the time when they are beginning to walk Bowlby, , ; Karen, Disruptions in this biologically programmed attachment response, he argued, if prolonged, can cause serious problems later in life.

Moreover, our impulse to be close to a significant other is a basic human need during every stage of life. How does the attachment response develop during infancy?

Is Bowlby and Freud right that the quality of our early attachments determines our adult mental health? How can we draw on attachment theory to understand everything from adult love relationships to widowhood to our concerns as we approach death? Stay tuned for answers as we explore the principles of this influential theory throughout this book. Today, Freuds theory is seen as outdated more about this later. But researchers draw on attachment theory as a major perspective for understanding human beings.

One reason is that Bowlbys ideas fit with a seismic late-twentieth-century shift in. Bowlby believes that the intense, loving bond between this father and his infant son will set the baby up for a fulfilling life. Do you agree with this basic principle of attachment theory? Yes, Bowlby did believe in the power of caregiving nurture , but he firmly anchored his theory in nature genetics. Bowlby , , argued that the attachment response is genetically programmed into our species to promote survival.

Bowlby, as it turns out, was an early evolutionary psychologist. Evolutionary Psychology: Theorizing About the Nature of Human Similarities Evolutionary psychologists are the mirror image of behaviorists. They look to nature, or inborn biological forces that have evolved to promote survival, to explain how we develop and behave.

Why do pregnant women develop morning sickness just as the fetal organs are being formed, and why do newborns prefer to look at attractive faces rather than ugly ones?

Thats actually true! According to evolutionary psychologists, these reactions cannot be changed by modifying the reinforcers. They are based in the human genetic code that we all share. Evolutionary psychology lacks the practical, action-oriented approach of behaviorism, although it does alert us to the fact that we need to pay close attention to basic human needs.

Still, as I describe how far-flung topicsfrom birth weight Chapter 2 , to the timing of puberty Chapter 8 , to the purpose of grandparents Chapter 12 can be viewed through an evolutionary psychology lens, you will realize just how influential this look to the human genome perspective has become in our field.

What first convinced developmentalists that genetics is important in determining the person we become? A simple set of research techniques.

How genetic are these childrens friendly personalities? To answer this question, researchers compare identical twins, such as these two girls left , with fraternal twins, like this girl and boy right. If the identicals who share exactly the same DNA are much more similar to each other than the fraternals in their scores on friendliness tests, friendliness is defined as a highly heritable trait.

Behavioral genetics is the name for research strategies devoted to examining the genetic contribution to the differences we see between human beings. How genetic is the tendency to bite our nails, develop bipolar disorders, have specific talents and attitudes about life? To answer these kinds of questions relating to the variations that make us special, scientists typically use two strategies: twin and adoption studies. In twin studies, researchers typically compare identical monozygotic twins and fraternal dizygotic twins on the trait they are interested in playing the oboe, obesity,.

Identical twins develop from the same fertilized egg it splits soon after the one-cell stage and are genetic clones. Fraternal twins, like any brother or sister, develop from separate conceptions and so, on average, share 50 percent of their genes. The idea is that if a given trait is highly influenced by genetics, identical twins should be much more alike in that quality than fraternal twins. For instance, suppose you decided to conduct a twin study to determine the heritability of friendliness.

First, you would select a large group of identical and fraternal twins and give both sets of twins various tests measuring their outgoing attitudes. You would then compare the strength of the test score relationships you found for each twin group. Lets say the identical twins scores tended to be incredibly similaralmost like the same person taking the tests twiceand the fraternal twins test scores tended to vary much more from each other. Your heritability statistic would be high, and you then would conclude: Friendliness is a mainly genetically determined trait.

In adoption studies, researchers compare adopted children with their biological and adoptive parents. Here, too, they evaluate the impact of heredity on a trait by looking at how closely these children resemble their birth parents with whom they share only genes and their adoptive parents with whom they share only environments.

Twin studies of children growing up in the same family and simple adoption studies are not difficult to carry out. If Joe and James, who have exactly the same DNA, have very similar abilities, traits, and personalities, even though they grew up in different families, this would be strong evidence that genetics plays a crucial role in making us who we are.

Researchers combed national registries to find identical and fraternal twins adopted into different families in that countrywhere birth records of every adoptee are kept. While specific qualities varied in their heritabilities, you might be surprised to know that perhaps the most genetically determined quality was overall IQ Pedersen, In fact, if one twin took the standard intelligence test, statistically speaking we could predict that the other twin would have an almost identical IQ despite living apart for almost an entire lifetime!

Behavioral genetic studies such as these have opened our eyes to fact that nature genetics plays a role in determining virtually every aspect of who we are Turkheimer, These studies have given us tantalizing insights into the meaning of nurture. Its tempting to assume that children growing up in the same family share the same nurture, or environment.

But as you can see in the How Do We Know research box on page 18, that assumption is wrong. We inhabit very different life spaces than our brothers and sisters, even when we eat at the same dinner table and share the same room. These environments are shaped in part by our genes Rowe, The bottom line is that there is no such thing as nature or nurture.

To really understand human development, we need to explore how nature and nurture combine. That is exactly how developmental scientists conceptualize the lifespan today. For much of the twentieth century, developmentalists assumed that parents treated all of their children the same way. We could classify mothers as either nurturing or rejecting, caring or cold. Researchers asked middle-aged identical twins who had been adopted into different families as babies to rate their parents along dimensions such as caring, acceptance, and discipline styles.

They were astonished to find similarities in the ratings, even though the twins were evaluating different families! What was happening here? The answer, the researchers concluded, was that the genetic similarities in the twins personalities created similar family environments. If Joe and Jim were both easy, kind, and caring, they evoked more loving parenting. If they were both temperamentally difficult, they caused their adoptive parents to react in more rejecting, less nurturant ways.

I vividly saw this evocative, child-shapes-parenting relationship in my own life. Because my adopted son has dyslexia and is very physically active, in our house we ended up doing active things like sports. As Thomas didnt like to sit still for story time, I probably would have been described as a less than optimally stimulating parent had some psychologist come into my home to rate how much I read to my child.

And now, the plot thickens. When I met Thomass biological mother, I found out that she also has dyslexia. Shes tremendously energetic and peppy. Its one thing to see the impact of nature in my son, as his mother revealed.

But I cant help wondering. Maureen is a very different kind of person than I am although we have a terrific time togethertraveling and doing active things. Would Thomas have had the same kind of upbringing at least partly that I gave my son if he had not been adoptedand had grown up with his biological mom?

Nature and Nurture Combined Now lets look at two nature-plus-nurture principles that I will be drawing on again and again in this book. Imagine how you and other people would respond to this grumpy boy versus a sunny, upbeat child and you will understand how evocative influences work to make us more like ourselves genetically and why all human relationships are bidirectional. Developmentalists now understand that it doesnt make sense to separate nature and nurture into independent entities see Diamond, ; Turkheimer, Our genetic tendencies mold and shape our wider world experiences in two distinctive ways.

Evocative forces refer to the fact that our inborn talents and temperamental tendencies naturally evoke, or produce, certain responses from the human world. A joyous child elicits smiles from everyone. A child who is temperamentally irritable, hard to handle, or has trouble sitting still is unfortunately set up to get the kind of harsh parenting she least needs to succeed. Human relationships are bidirectional.

Just as you get grumpy when with a grumpy person, fight with your difficult neighbor, or shy away from your colleague who is paralyzingly shy, who we are as people causes other people to react to us in specific ways, driving our development for the good and the bad.

Active forces refer to the fact that we actively select our environments based on our genetic tendencies. A child who is talented at reading will gravitate toward devouring books, and so become an even better reader. His brother, who is well coordinated, may play baseball three hours a day and become a star athlete in. Developmentalists understand that even if a quality is mainly genetic, its expression can be percent dependent on the outside world.

Lets illustrate by returning to the high heritabilities for overall intelligence. Suppose you lived in an impoverished developing country, were malnourished, and forced to work as a laborer in a field.

In this environment, having a genius-level IQ might be irrelevant, as there Because this musically talented would be little chance to demonstrate your hereditary gifts. You might be astonished to know that, based on performance on fact that we actively shape our the IQ test, our species has been getting much more intelligent. As with any test environment to fit our genetic graded on a curve, in determining the IQ score, psychologists rank a given child tendencies and talents.

But in each successive cohort, the competition is getting stiffer. The same number of correct items a twenty-first-century teenager needs to get an average IQ meaning a score of on the test would have boosted that same child into the top third of the population in l If that adolescent time-traveled back a century to take the test and got the identical number of items correct, he would have been labeled as gifted with an IQ of , in the top 2 percent of his peers Pinker, !

What is responsible for this remarkable upward shift in test performance, called the Flynn effect? Obviously, our basic genetic intellectual potential cant have changed over the past years.

Its just that as human beings have become better nourished, more educated, and far more technologically adept, they generally perform better, especially on the kinds of abstractreasoning items on the IQ test see Flynn, ; Pinker, So even when individual differences in IQ are genetic, the environment makes a dramatic difference in how people perform. My discussion brings home the fact that to promote our species-specific If this l7-year-old Civil War soldier took genetic human potential, we need to provide the best possible overall envi- an intelligence test, compared to twentyfirst-century teens, he would probably be ronment that is, society.

On a personal or behavioral-genetic level, we also labeled mentally slowshowing the need to provide the environment that best promotes our unique capacities, role our environment growing up in an talents, and traits. Therefore, a core goal of developmental science is to foster advanced society makes on the most biothe correct personenvironment fitmaking the wider world bring out our logically determined traits.

Actually, rather than making what we doas parents, teachers, and health-care personenvironment fit The professionalsirrelevant, our appreciation of the importance of genetics makes the extent to which the environenvironment we provide more crucial.