Life‐Span Development: Concepts and Issues
Abstract
A conceptual exploration of the nature of life-span development is presented. It is argued that meanings and methods of “Life Span Development” are contextualized by broad metatheoretical groundings. Split metatheoretical groundings cut the nature of development into sets of dualistic competing alternatives. On the other hand, a relational metatheoretical grounding provides an integrative perspective on development and developmental issues. Relationism—a synthesis of the metatheoretical worldviews contextualism and organicism—conceptualizes development as a holistic, self-organizing/self-regulating system; a relational developmental system in which variational and transformational change, continuity and novelty, biology and culture, structure and function, constructivism and information processing operate as integrative, interpenetrating/coactive components. From split approaches, forces external to the psychological organism—environmental or biological—drive psychological development. Within a relational developmental systems approach, the self-organizing system's actions-in-the-world constitutes the overriding micro-mechanism of development, whereas biology and culture constitute system resources. Split perspectives faced with life-span issues of growth and decline find resolution by assuming competing alternative processes: one “developmental,” one “aging.” Relational developmental systems resolve the same issues through a dual-trajectory understanding of a single overarch…
Integrity signals
Registry
Cites
Statistics
Claims the paper makes
Claims other papers make about this one
Each is checked against this paper’s own text: does it say what the citing paper says it does?
Motivational systems are activated when the person-context relationship is adaptive for both the individual and the context.
“Motivational systems are activated when the person-context relationship is adaptive for both the individual and the context (Lerner, 2006;Overton, 2010), and tailored external supports and sense of belonging can reinforce self-regulated learning behaviors (e.g., Furrer, Skinner, & Pitzer, 2014;Walton & Brady, 2017).”
From Malleability, plasticity, and individuality: How children learn and develop in context<sup>1</sup> (2019) · cites this paper as Overton, 2010
Cites
The Bioecological Model of Human Development
Bronfenbrenner, U., & Morris, P. A. (2007) · Handbook of Child Psychology · doi:10.1002/9780470147658.chpsy0114 · Cited by 5,760 · see citing works
Lerner, R. M., Lerner, J. V., Almerigi, J. B., Theokas, C., Phelps, E., Gestsdottir, S., Naudeau, S., Jelicic, H., Alberts, A., Ma, L., et al. (2005) · The Journal of Early Adolescence · doi:10.1177/0272431604272461 · Cited by 1,477 · see citing works
Navigating Cultural Worlds and Negotiating Identities: A Conceptual Model
Mistry, J., & Wu, J. (2010) · Human Development · doi:10.1159/000268136 · Cited by 88 · see citing works
Flagged first, then by citations
Cited by
Sorted by citations
Osher, D., Cantor, P., Berg, J., Steyer, L., & Rose, T. (2020) · Applied Developmental Science · doi:10.1080/10888691.2017.1398650 · Cited by 484 · see citing works
Malleability, plasticity, and individuality: How children learn and develop in context<sup>1</sup>
Cantor, P., Osher, D., Berg, J., Steyer, L., & Rose, T. (2019) · Applied Developmental Science · doi:10.1080/10888691.2017.1398649 · Cited by 328 · see citing works
“Motivational systems are activated when the person-context relationship is adaptive for both the individual and the context (Lerner, 2006; Overton, 2010), and tailored external supports and sense of belonging can reinforce self-regulated learning behaviors (e.g., Furrer, Skinner, & Pitzer, 2014;…”
BackgroundGenetic Differential Sensitivity to Social Environments: Implications for Research
Mitchell, C., McLanahan, S., Brooks-Gunn, J., Garfinkel, I., Hobcraft, J., & Notterman, D. (2013) · American Journal of Public Health · doi:10.2105/ajph.2013.301382 · Cited by 42 · see citing works
- Authors
- Overton, W. F.
- Affiliations
- Temple University (US)
- Corresponding author
- Overton, Willis F.
- Venue
- The Handbook of Life‐Span Development
- Publisher
- Wiley
- Published
- 2010-07-26
- OpenAlex
- W2789260948
- Cited by
- 200
- References
- 3
- Citations by year
- 2026: 4 · 2025: 7 · 2024: 6 · 2023: 19 · 2022: 6 · 2021: 10 · 2020: 26 · 2019: 7 · 2018: 6 · 2017: 5 · 2016: 10 · 2015: 7 · 2014: 23 · 2013: 21 · 2012: 11
- Type
- other
- Language
- en
- Open access
- closed
- Topics
- Social Sciences › Psychology › Developmental and Educational Psychology › Psychology of Development and Education
- Social Sciences › Psychology › Clinical Psychology › Ego Development and Educational Practices
- Social Sciences › Psychology › General Psychology › Academic and Historical Perspectives in Psychology
- Keywords
- lifespan development, metatheory, relational developmental systems, relationalism, contextualism, organicism, self-organization, self-regulation, biology and culture, constructivism, information processing, aging
About these checks
Registry, retraction, Cites and statistics results are computed, not judged, with one exception: a printed reference that no index lists is read once by a model before it counts as a citation error. Claims are extracted by a model and kept only when their quote appears verbatim in the text; each cited source is then checked, with a model’s help, for whether it says what the claim relies on. Those verdicts can be wrong — read the claim’s quote and the cited source before relying on one.
Statistics and arithmetic are recomputed, not judged.
Confidence bands are shown only for fields calibrated on our annotated test set. None is calibrated yet, so no band is shown.
What counts as a claim ›How we measure confidence ›How we check this ›
Are you an author, or do you see a problem with this page? Request a review
