Moral meta-narratives, marginalization, and youth development.

Morality, a central dimension of culture, is crucial for research on the development of youth experiencing marginalization. In this article, we discuss two main meta-narratives as moral frameworks that provide different meaning to the past and to cultural change: liberal progress, focused on the struggle of those who have historically experienced marginalization (e.g., racial/ethnic minorities), and community lost, focused on those who are experiencing some forms of marginalization in response to cultural and economic changes (e.g., rural Whites). Because these two meta-narratives represent a false dichotomy, we use relational epistemology principles-holism, identity of opposites, opposites of identity, and synthesis of wholes-to formulate an integrated metanarrative, community progress, to overcome this polarity and promote research on the development of all youth experiencing marginalization. Acknowledging and understanding these moral meta-narratives is crucial because they influence scientific discourse, political action, and policy that impacts marginalization and youth development. (PsycINFO Database Record

Relationism and relational developmental systems: a paradigm for developmental science in the post-Cartesian era.

This chapter argues that the Cartesian-split-mechanistic scientific paradigm that until recently functioned as the standard conceptual framework for subfields of developmental science (including inheritance, evolution, and organismic--prenatal, cognitive, emotional, motivational, sociocultural--development) has been progressively failing as a scientific research program. An alternative scientific paradigm composed of nested metatheories with relationism at the broadest level and relational developmental systems as a midrange metatheory is offered as a more progressive conceptual framework for developmental science. Termed broadly the relational developmental systems paradigm, this framework accounts for the findings that are anomalies for the old paradigm; accounts for the emergence of new findings; and points the way to future scientific productivity.

Relational developmental systems: a paradigm for developmental science in the postgenomic era.

This commentary argues that the anomalies suffered by the population behavior genetics paradigm are more widespread than suggested by Charney, including many made in the field of developmental science. Further, it is argued that, according to the criteria established by Kuhn, there is and has been available an alternative scientific paradigm that provides the formative context for Charney's postgenomic view. This is the relational developmental systems paradigm.

Dual-systems and the development of reasoning: competence-procedural systems.

Dual-system, dual-process, accounts of adult cognitive processing are examined in the context of a self-organizing relational developmental systems approaches to cognitive growth. Contemporary adult dual-process accounts describe a linear architecture of mind entailing two split-off, but interacting systems; a domain general, content-free 'analytic' system (system 2) and a domain specific highly contextualized 'heuristic' system (system 1). In the developmental literature on deductive reasoning, a similar distinction has been made between a domain general competence (reflective, algorithmic) system and a domain specific procedural system. In contrast to the linear accounts offered by empiricist, nativist, and/or evolutionary explanations, the dual competence-procedural developmental perspective argues that the mature systems emerge through developmental transformations as differentiations and intercoordinations of an early relatively undifferentiated action matrix. This development, whose microscopic mechanism is action-in-the-world, is characterized as being embodied, nonlinear, and epigenetic. WIREs Cogni Sci 2011 2 231-237 DOI: 10.1002/wcs.120 For further resources related to this article, please visit the WIREs website.

Thinking about thinking - thinking about measurement: a Rasch analysis of recursive thinking.

Two studies were conducted to examine the dimensionality and hierarchical organization of a measure of recursive thinking. In Study 1, Rasch analysis supported the claim that the recursive thinking task measures a single underlying dimension. Item difficulty, however, appeared to be influenced not only by level of embeddedness but also by syntactic features. In Study 2, this hypothesis was tested by adding new items to the recursive thinking measure. Rasch analysis of the modified recursive thinking task produced evidence for the undimensionality and segmentation. However, Study 2 did not support the idea that syntactic features influence item difficulty.

The role of negative priming in preschoolers' flexible rule use on the dimensional change card sort task.

Four experiments examined the development of negative priming (NP) in 3-5-year-old children using as a measure of children's executive function (EF) the dimensional change card sort (DCCS) task. In the NP version of the DCCS, the values of the sorting dimension that is relevant during the preswitch phase are removed during the postswitch phase. The experiments showed that the NP effect observed in the DCCS decreased during the preschool years, and they clarified the circumstances in which NP occurs. Taken together, the findings suggest that the development of EF in early childhood consists in part in disinhibiting attention to information that has previously been suppressed.