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Chapter 4 - Back and Forth with Life: Development of a Developmentalist

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  14 February 2025

By
Patricia M. Greenfield
Edited by
Frank Kessel
Frank Kessel
Affiliation:
University of New Mexico
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Summary

I have always been interested in research that was relevant to real life and the real world. I was never interested in phenomena that were confined to behavior in a laboratory. My research ended up connecting not just with other people’s lives, but with my own life. That is, my research influenced my life; and my life influenced my research. The latter was evident in my research on the development of language and communication in children, chimpanzees, and bonobos. The former was evident in my COVID research where I drew upon my longitudinal study of a Maya community to realize during the pandemic – and empirically demonstrate – that parenting, child behavior, adult activities, and values in a rural subsistence ecology are quickly revived in modern human beings when such responses are needed to adapt to survival threat and a contraction of the social world. Those findings, in turn, have reinforced my focus on the dynamic interaction of social change, cultural evolution, and human development.

Keywords

intellectual autobiographycultural psychologycognitive developmentUCLAHarvard PhDCOVIDlanguage and communication developmentsocial changecultural evolution
Type
Chapter
Information
Pillars of Developmental Psychology
Recollections and Reflections
 , pp. 32 - 43
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2025

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References

Suggested Reading

Greenfield, P. M. (1984). Mind and Media: The Effects of Television, Video Games, and Computers. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. (Translated into nine languages.) (2014). 30th Anniversary Classic Ed. New York: Psychology Press, with new introduction.Google Scholar
Greenfield, P. M. (2006). Applying developmental psychology to bridge cultures in the classroom. In Donaldson, S. I., Berger, D. E., & Pezdek, K. (Eds.), Applied Psychology: New Frontiers and Rewarding Careers (pp. 135–152). Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum.Google Scholar
Greenfield, P. M. (2009). Linking social change and developmental change: Shifting pathways of human development. Developmental Psychology, 45(2), 401–418.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Greenfield, P. M. (2012). Social change and human development: An autobiographical journey. In Gelfand, M., Hong, Y. Y., & Chiu, C. Y. (Eds.), Advances in Culture and Psychology, Vol. 2. New York: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Maynard, A. E., Greenfield, P. M., Childs, C. P., & Weinstock, M. (2023). Social change, cultural evolution, weaving apprenticeship, and development: Informal education across three generations and 42 years in a Maya community. Applied Developmental Science. https://doi.org.10.1080/10888691.2022.2151445.Google Scholar
Suzuki, L., Davis, H. M., & Greenfield, P. M. (2008). Self-enhancement and self-effacement in reaction to praise and criticism: The case of multi-ethnic youth. Ethos, 36(1), 78–97.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

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