The Caring Child by Nancy Eisenberg

The Caring Child by Nancy Eisenberg

Much of this century’s empirical research in the social sciences has been devoted to understanding the causes and contributing factors of antisocial behavior. In studies of children’s moral reasoning and conduct, developmental psychologists have probed the cognitive and social bases of aggression, conflict, delinquency, and prejudice. In contrast to psychology’s lengthy preoccupation with negative behavior in children, the study of children’s altruistic, cooperative, and sharing behavior has a relatively short history. The Caring Child provides the most up-to-date account of our current understanding of the motivations behind prosocial behaviors and how these motives develop and are elicited in various situations. When do children first exhibit prosocial behavior, particularly altruism? How do helping, sharing, and comforting behaviors change with age? Why are some children more caring than others? Are differences among children’s prosocial behaviors a result of hereditary factors, of how children are raised, or both? Can prosocial tendencies be enhanced by parents’ and educators’ deliberate attempts to instill altruistic motives and to teach caring behaviors? Nancy Eisenberg broadens our concept of the moral potential of children as she shifts the focus from censoring antisocial behaviors to the active promotion of kindness and caring in children.

This brief but information-packed book, by an important and prolific contributor to the study of helpful and generous behavior in children, provides a useful review of the existing research on the caring child-- Ervin Staub * Contemporary Psychology *

Nancy Eisenberg is Regents' Professor of Psychology at Arizona State University.
Her books include The Caring Child (1992), The Roots of Prosocial Behavior in Children (with Paul Mussen, 1989), and How Children Develop (2nd edition with Robert Siegler and Judy DeLoache, 2006). She was president of the Western Psychological Association; associate editor of Merrill-Palmer Quarterly and Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin; and editor of Psychological Bulletin and a volume of the Handbook of Child Psychology. She is the founding editor of SRCD's new journal, Child Development Perspectives. Her research and writings pertain to emotion-related regulation and its relation to adjustment and social competence in children and adolescence, as well as the development of sympathy and prosocial behavior.

Claire Hofer (Ph.D., 2006, Arizona State University) is currently a post-doc at Arizona State University. Her research interests include studying children's and adolescents' social and emotional development with a particular interest in cross-cultural differences. She has conducted research in France, investigating the role of socialization, emotion regulation, and resiliency in adolescents' social functioning. She also has been interested in early contributors of young children's affective perspective taking ability.

Tracy L. Spinrad (Ph.D., 1997, The Pennsylvania State University) is Associate Professor in the Department of Family and Human Development at Arizona State University. Her research interests include the role of temperamental emotionality, emotion control/regulation and parental socialization on young children's social/emotional functioning.

Elizabeth T. Gershoff (Ph.D., 1998, University of Texas at Austin) is Assistant Professor of SocialWork and Assistant Research Professor at the Center for Human Growth and Development at the University of Michigan. Her research interests include understanding the impacts of parenting on child and youth development over time and in the contexts of exposure to poverty and community violence.

Carlos Valiente (Ph.D., 2003, Arizona State University) is an Assistant Professor of Family and Human Development at Arizona State University. His research focuses on the development of children's emotion regulation and the contributions of socialization processes and emotion regulation to children's social and academic competence. Sandra H. Losoya is a Research Assistant Professor of Psychology at Arizona State University. She received her Ph.D. in developmental psychology, specializing in social-emotional development, from the University of Oregon in 1994. Her research interests are in the area of emotion-related coping and sources of resilience in high-risk children and adolescents. She is currently engaged in a longitudinal, multisite study of serious adolescent offenders and the factors associated with the desistance from crime.

Qing Zhou (Ph.D., 2006, Arizona State University) is an Assistant Professor of Psychology at the University of California, Berkeley. Her interests are in children's regulation and coping, the socialization of socioemotional competence, and cultural influences on social and emotional development.

Amanda Cumberland (M.A., 2000, Arizona State University) is a graduate student in psychology at Arizona State University and works in the computer industry. Her interests are children's social and emotional competence and factors that affect their development.

Jeffrey Liew (Ph.D., 2005, Arizona State University) is an assistant professor in the Department of Educational Psychology at Texas A&M University. His research interests are broadly concerned with the roles of self-regulation and emotional reactivity in children's psychosocial and academic outcomes. In addition to intraindividual processes, he is interested in the types of parent-child, teacher-student, and peer interactions that facilitate or hinder children's psychosocial or school adjustment.

Mark Reiser (Ph.D., 1980, University of Chicago) is an associate professor in the School of Social and Family Dynamics at Arizona State University. His research interests include multivariate analysis, latent variable models, and goodness-of-fit tests for sparse cross-classified tables.

Elizabeth Maxon (M.A., 2002, Arizona State University) received her M.A. in educational psychology from Arizona State University and is a student in school psychology. Her interests are in children's school-related adjustment and success and children's social and emotional development.

Judith G. Smetana is a professor of psychology and Director of the developmental psychology Ph.D. program at the University of Rochester. Her research investigates adolescent-parent relationships in different ethnic and cultural contexts, children's moral and social reasoning, and parenting beliefs and practices.

Nancy Darling is a professor of psychology at Oberlin College. Her research investigates contextual variability in adolescent-parent and adolescent-peer relationships and the active role of adolescents in shaping their own experiences.

SKU	Unavailable
ISBN 13	9780674097261
ISBN 10	0674097262
Title	The Caring Child
Author	Nancy Eisenberg
Series	The Developing Child
Condition	Unavailable
Binding Type	Paperback
Publisher	Harvard University Press
Year published	1992-02-01
Number of pages	102
Cover note	Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary.
Note	Unavailable