finished research paper about issues on human development

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• Published: 29 July 2021

The evolution of our understanding of human development over the last 10 years

• Ali H. Brivanlou   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0002-1761-280X 1 &
• Norbert Gleicher   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0002-0202-4167 2 , 3 , 4  

Nature Communications volume  12 , Article number:  4615 ( 2021 ) Cite this article

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• Developmental biology
• Embryogenesis

As it fulfills an irresistible need to understand our own origins, research on human development occupies a unique niche in scientific and medical research. In this Comment, we explore the progress in our understanding of human development over the past 10 years. The focus is on basic research, clinical applications, and ethical considerations.

What basic research has taught us about human development

Over the last decade, progress in understanding our own development was mostly driven by the emergence and combination of remarkable new technologies. New molecular biology tools such as single-cell RNA-sequencing (sc-RNA-seq) unveiled the earliest genetic signature of the three cell lineages of the human blastocyst and allowed for the discovery of human-specific signatures 1 , 2 , 3 . CRISPR/Cas9 genome editing has offered further access to in vitro functional studies in human blastocysts 4 . However, as we discuss below, an ethical line was crossed when a group claimed that genetically modified human embryos had been transferred, leading to births 5 when neither public opinion nor a consensus within the scientific community had been reached regarding whether crossing the germline in in vitro fertilization (IVF) was safe and ethically acceptable.

On the embryology side, the development of an in vitro attachment platform for human blastocysts offered a first glance into post-implantation events up to 12 days 1 , 3 , 5 , 6 . This paved the way for several important discoveries, including the observation that the human embryo can self-organize to generate embryonic and extraembryonic germ layers, yolk sac, and amniotic cavities in the absence of maternal influences 5 , 6 ; and the presence of a transient embryonic tissue of trophectodermal lineage, adjacent to the yolk sac, therefore named, yolk-sac trophectoderm ( ysTE ) 5 . The presence of these seemingly human-specific populations was independently confirmed by sc-RNA-seq 1 .

The marriage of stem cell biology with bioengineering gave birth to the field of synthetic embryology 7 , 8 , 9 , 10 , 11 , 12 , 13 . This technology uses human embryonic stem cells (hESCs) cultured on geometrically confined micropatterned substrates to generate 2D in vitro models of human conceptuses, such as models of the gastrula ( gastruloids ) 7 , 8 , 9 , 10 , 11 , 12 , 13 , or parts of the embryo, such as cerebroids and neuruloids 14 . Thousands of nearly identical self-organizing human embryonic structures allow for standardization and reproducibility, which cannot be achieved in standard organoid structures 15 . Cells within these structures can be tracked and quantified in real time with sub-cellular resolution, using sophisticated quantification code, including artificial intelligence 14 .

Human gastruloids induce formation of the primitive streak and have enabled the deciphering of the molecular network underlying gastrulation—the most crucial moment of our lives 7 , 8 , 9 , 10 , 11 , 12 , 13 . 3D models of human epiblasts can spontaneously break axial symmetry, thus providing an assay for the elucidation of molecular events underlying the emergence of antero–posterior polarity 11 , 16 . A highly homogenous population of self-organizing 3D models of amniotic ectoderm-like cells can be obtained by combining microfluidic and microculture approaches 17 .

Finally, the development of interspecies chimeras provided the most stringent in vivo validation of human embryo models 9 , 10 , 18 . Unimaginable in human models, inter-species chimeras have become the next best choice to test whether hESC behavior in self-organizing gastruloids , as observed on microchips, would also occur in an embryonic environment 10 , 18 , 19 . Human/bird chimeras generated from transplanting human gastruloids into early chick embryos in ovo unexpectedly proved more efficient than previous methods 9 , 19 . They allowed for the observation of an entire self-organizing embryonic axis in bird eggs 9 . As birds are closer to dinosaurs than to humans, this high rate of success with these chimeras further suggested that these early patterning events must be highly conserved.

Translational clinical applications that arose from basic research

The past 10 years bore witness to significant clinical progress in reproductive medicine, often translated from basic research. Successful human uterus transplantation and the subsequent birth of healthy offspring was, for example, only achieved after years of meticulous laboratory work in animals 10 . Significant improvements in cryopreservation technology for human eggs and ovarian tissue were also preceded by research in model systems 10 , 20 . Practical clinical applications have been developed for women in need of cancer treatment that are toxic to ovaries. In these cases, oocytes and/or ovarian tissue can be cryopreserved for later use in fertility treatments once the patient is cured of her cancer 21 . This ever-evolving technology has already proven to result in live births, and has also become an integral part of routine infertility treatments with IVF, giving rise to the brand-new concept of fertility extension through egg-freezing.

Diagnostic technologies to assess retrieved eggs and preimplantation-stage embryos in the IVF process have been disappointing. For example, tracking extended embryo culture to blastocyst-stage with time-lapse imaging failed to improve embryo selection 22 . That chromosomal-abnormal embryos increase with maternal (but not paternal) age has been interpreted to mean that chromosomal abnormalities were a principal cause for lower implantation chances and higher miscarriage risks among older women. This assumption led to the rapidly growing utilization of chromosomal testing of human embryos prior to embryo transfer in a procedure recently renamed preimplantation genetic testing for aneuploidy (PGT-A) 23 . The hypothesis behind PGT-A is to exclude chromosomal-abnormal embryos from the transfer, thereby improving implantation potentials of remaining euploid embryos.

Here too, clinical evidence was unable to confirm the hypothesis 24 . Moreover, basic research demonstrated a self-correction mechanism in mouse 25 and human embryos 26 , 27 , 28 , 29 that arose during embryogenesis that was cell lineage-specific to the embryonic cell lineage. In contrast, PGT-A biopsies are obtained from the extraembryonic-derived trophectoderm, rendering any diagnostic procedure at the blastocyst stage ineffective. In addition, mathematical modeling demonstrated that results from a single trophectoderm biopsy could not be extrapolated to the whole embryo 30 . Transfer of PGT-A “chromosomal-abnormal diagnosed embryos” has resulted in the births of over 400 chromosomal-normal offspring 20 , 21 .

In recent years, increasing attention has also been given to the quickly evolving understanding of how interdependent lifestyle and human fertility are 31 , 32 , 33 , including the influence of diet on the microbiome, as in many other areas of medicine.

The ethical significance of understanding human development

Whether in clinical medicine or in the research laboratory, human embryology has remained an ethical minefield, strongly influenced by socio-political and religious considerations. At the core of the controversy resides the special moral value of the human embryo, a subject that has come to the forefront again with the ascent of human embryonic stem cell research 34 . There is, however, little consensus as to how to answer a previously raised question: “ what is an embryo ?” 35 . The term pre-embryo, first introduced in 1986, was defined as the interval up to the appearance of the primitive streak, which marks biological individuation at ~14 days post-fertilization. This definition designated the period beyond 14 days as the time when a pre-embryo attains special moral status 36 , 37 . Paradoxically, the term pre-embryo has been replaced by the indiscriminate use of the term embryo, whether at preimplantation cleavage or blastocyst-stages or post-implantation before day 14. It was suggested that the distinction was important for ethical, moral, and biological relevance. The principal reason is simple: Until a pre-embryo becomes an embryo, there is no way of knowing whether implantation has taken place, whether a pregnancy is developing, whether there is a single pregnancy or twinning, or whether fertilization ended up in a benign (hydatidiform mole) or even in a malignant tumor (choriocarcinoma) 35 . Assigning advanced moral value to embryos at those early stages is, therefore, difficult to defend.

The past 10 years have witnessed innumerous ethical debates related to this subject, each with its own social, historical, and religious justifications, reflecting cultural diversities in human populations. Most are triggered by scientific breakthroughs. We summarize here the major ethical challenges preoccupying reproductive research and clinical practice.

We have already briefly referred to CRISPR/Cas9 genome editing. While the use of sc-RNA-seq to identify the molecular blueprint of human development has not elicited significant controversy, CRISPR/Cas9 genome editing of human embryos has been a topic of intense discussions and is currently permissible only in vitro 38 . An alleged attempt in China of implanting human genome-edited embryos into the uterus supposedly led to two births (one a twin birth). Though widely discussed in the media, neither attempt was published in the medical literature, and therefore cannot be verified 5 , 38 .

The ethical debates surrounding the 14-day rule, quiescent since the early IVF days, experienced a rebirth that was prompted by in vitro human embryo attachment studies and the emergence of synthetic human embryos. Within this context, we note that self-organizing embryo models are nothing more than cells in culture and are certainly not embryos. Regardless of scientific merits, in the U.S., the National Institutes of Health (NIH) currently prohibits the use of public funds for the study of synthetic embryos “for ethical reasons”. After being under an NIH moratorium for more than a year, research on chimeras is now, however, again permitted, though human/non-human primate chimeras remain prohibited.

These ongoing ethical debates mostly also mirror those surrounding the lack of U.S. federal funding for clinical IVF and related research, as well as hESCs-derived model embryos. In this context, the American Society for Reproductive Medicine (ASRM)’s Ethics in Embryo Research Task Force recently made an important statement: “ Scientific research using human embryos advances human health and provides vital insights into reproduction and disease ” 39 .

Provided certain guidelines and safeguards are followed, research with already existing embryos or embryos specifically produced for research should be ethically acceptable as a means of obtaining new knowledge that may benefit human health. ASRM also pointed out that scientists and society must understand which research questions necessitate the use of human embryos.

It is gratifying to acknowledge the history and vitality of ongoing debates, especially since they increasingly mimic decision-making processes in the medical field. These debates are meant to be based on cost-benefit and/or risk-benefit assessments. These debates will, unquestionably, continue and, indeed, considering that every intervention has consequences, must be decided based on careful considerations, including all relevant stakeholders and all parts of society.

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Acknowledgements

We like to thank Min Yang, Jean Marx Santel, Adam Souza, and Amir Brivanlou, for data gathering and critical reading of the manuscript, and constructive criticism.

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A.H.B. and N.G. are co-founders of OvaNova Inc. A.H.B. is a co-founder of Rumi Scientific Inc.

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Brivanlou, A.H., Gleicher, N. The evolution of our understanding of human development over the last 10 years. Nat Commun 12 , 4615 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-021-24793-3

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Child health and human development over the lifespan

Joav merrick.

1 National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, Jerusalem, Israel

2 Office of the Medical Director, Health Services, Division for Intellectual and Developmental Disabilities, Ministry of Social Affairs and Social Services, Jerusalem, Israel

3 Division of Pediatrics, Hadassah Hebrew University Medical Center, Mt. Scopus Campus, Jerusalem, Israel

4 Kentucky Children's Hospital, University of Kentucky, Lexington, KY, USA

The topic of child health and human development is a wide area of interest spanning from pregnancy, delivery, childhood, adolescence, adulthood, and end of life. A study of health, development, and well-being over the lifespan.

Before birth through young adulthood there is a wide range of health issues that affect our children, such as general childhood illnesses, eating and obesity, accidents and injuries, and particular stages of life, such as teenage independence. Childs health and pediatrics focus on the well-being of children from conception through adolescence, but human development is a life span issue, so research in childhood does not stop with the end of adolescence, but we need a long-term and lifelong study to observe and understand the development process. Pediatrics is vitally concerned with all aspects of children's growth and development and with the unique opportunity that each child has to achieve their full potential as a healthy adult.

Pediatrics or child health was once not a specific entity, just as adolescence really did not exist as a concept, since all was a part of adult medicine. This field emerged in the nineteenth and early twentieth century as a medical specialty, because of the gradual awareness that the health problems of children were different from those of adults and children's response to illness, medications, and the environment is very depending upon the age of the child.

This uniqueness of children, along with diseases that are particular to this age group, has been responsible for the development of pediatrics as a specialty and for the creation of children's hospitals for the care of children.

Child health research

These same factors have also driven the creation of child health research, but we are still only able to do a few large lifelong studies to see the effects of pregnancy or early childhood on health and well-being in adulthood and older age. Long-term birth cohort studies have been and are conducted in the United Kingdom under the auspices of the Centre for Longitudinal Studies in London, like the National Survey of Health and Development (NSHD) established in 1946, the National Child Development Study (NCDS) established in 1958, the 1970 British Cohort Study (BCS70), and the Millennium Cohort Study (MCS) established in 2000 ( 1 ). In Denmark with the Copenhagen Perinatal Birth Cohort of 9125 individuals born 1959–1961 at the maternity departments of the Copenhagen University Hospital, Rigshospitalet ( 2 ) and the Danish National Birth Cohort 1996–2002 of 101,042 pregnant women recruited in first trimester at first antenatal visit at the general practitioner with 96,986 children resulting from the pregnancies ( 3 ). In the United States the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development has recently also initiated a large prospective life-history study, the National Children's Study, examining the effects of the environment and genetics on the growth, development, and health of children with more than 100,000 children who will be followed up from conception to age 21 years ( 4 ).

Such cohort studies of child health and human development over the lifespan are very important for our understanding of trends in health and well-being, quality of life, and quality of care, which will reveal emerging of “new morbidities” as we have seen over the past 50 years in pediatrics ( 5 ), but such cohort studies are very expensive, huge logistics involved and not always possible to conduct.

Growth and development

A healthy development begins before conception with parental health and their genetic composition and continues on to conception and through the prenatal period. Once delivered, new issues emerge, such as breastfeeding, newborn screening tests, health care appointments, and immunizations. Development constitutes a continuum and a child changes amazingly during the neonatal, newborn period, and early infancy. During this period there are many challenges both for the child, the parents, and the family and before you know it the child enter adolescence and adulthood.

Current issues

CS Mott Children's Hospital at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor conducts a National Poll on Children's Health in order to monitor the future. In their collaboration with Knowledge Networks in this nationally representative household survey they administer to a randomly selected, group of adult with and without children of about 2000 person that closely resembles the United States population. In 2010, the following overall health concerns for US children in 2010 and the percentage of adults who rate each as a “big problem” included ( 6 ):

• Childhood obesity, 38%
• Drug abuse, 30%
• Smoking, 29%
• Internet safety, 25%
• Stress, 24%
• Bullying, 23%
• Teen pregnancy, 23%
• Child abuse and neglect, 21%
• Alcohol abuse, 20%
• Not enough opportunities for physical activity, 20%
• Chemicals in the environment, 18%
• Sexting, 16%
• Depression, 15%
• Sexually transmitted infections, 15%
• School violence, 13%
• Asthma, 10%
• Neighborhood safety, 8%
• Suicide, 8%

But the perception of the parent does not always portray the view of the child and researchers have therefore become concerned with the children's own perception of health. One study from Portugal ( 7 ) used creative drawing language to identify external factors perceived as negative or positive to health by children. The sample consisted of 130 children in 3rd and 4th classes from four randomly selected schools found that children value healthy food, physical activity, mental health, prevention of inappropriate substance consumption and health and environment. The drawings and comments showed links between diet and physical exercise, and between mental health and interpersonal relationships ( 7 ).

Conclusions

Just a few decades ago, children born with significant congenital anomalies or genetic and metabolic diseases perished at an early age and very few survived into their teens and even less into adulthood. Congenital heart disease, major errors in metabolism, cancer, cystic fibrosis, and many other major diseases were fatal. Because of that many physicians in adult primary care did not have the opportunity to see patients with these problems and thus were unable to learn how to care for them.

With major advancements in medical knowledge, technology, imaging techniques, surgical skills, and pharmaceutical products as well as prosthetic devices, many of these patients now live much longer life and sometimes even close to the average life expectancy for the country at least in the developed world. With that, a new medical care challenge has been created and we have to take a life span approach.

In the Frontier of Child Health and Human Development we would like to provide an academic focal point for the scholarly interdisciplinary study of child life, health, public health, welfare, disability, rehabilitation, intellectual disability, and related aspects of human development over the life span. Research, clinical work, public service activities in the field of child health and human development over the life span will be important topics for this journal.

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2 Ethical Considerations in Research on Human Development and Culture

Department of Psychology, New School for Social Research, New York, NY, USA

Namrata Goyal, Columbia University, New York, NY, USA

Matthew Wice, State University of New York, New Paltz, New Paltz, NY, USA

• Published: 05 December 2014
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This chapter focuses on ethical issues in culturally based research on human development. The authors consider ethics both in terms of ways to guarantee the cultural adequacy of procedures for the protection of human subjects and of ways to enhance the cultural sensitivity of the theory and methods underlying psychological inquiry. After briefly discussing the historical context in which human subjects protocols emerged, the chapter focuses on cultural issues entailed in achieving informed consent, safeguarding the privacy of research participants, and protecting research participants from harm. It then focuses on ethical issues involved in ensuring the cultural adequacy of research findings, including issues of sampling and generalization, avoiding bias in assessment, and cultural broadening of research constructs. It concludes by underscoring respects in which taking cultural meanings and practices more fully into account makes it possible to enhance both the ethics of research and its quality.

Research ethics is concerned with protecting the human rights of research participants, including, most basically, the right to privacy and to protection from harm. Professional codes of ethics have been elaborated in response to ethical abuses that have occurred in research, as well as to changing sensitivities to human rights issues and to the growth of new methodologies and study populations. Codes of research ethics thus represent historical and cultural creations, even as they seek to embody timeless principles. In this chapter, we consider issues of research ethics that arise in culturally based research over the life span.

To illustrate the types of ethical challenges that exist in research on culture and human development, we provide here an example of an ethical issue that one of the authors of this chapter encountered in conducting research among Indian and US populations. She had plans to conduct an interview study on social attribution with a university population in southern India and approached a university psychology professor with the request to recruit participants from her class. Arriving to class that day, however, the professor not only graciously introduced the author to the students and gave a brief description to the class of the type of research that she was conducting, but also announced to everyone that they would all be taking part in the study. The students greeted this announcement with equanimity, as an appropriate expectation with which they were not only comfortable but also all ready to comply.

In this context, the consent form took on a foreign and almost superfluous air. It was foreign in the sense that it was not a practice that was indigenous to the local cultural context, but rather one that had been introduced by Western researchers. It was also superfluous, in the sense that, in this context, students were motivated to meet the expectations of their professor to participate in the project and did not approach the situation as one in which the decision about whether or not to participate was theirs alone. In showing a willingness to participate in the project, the students were fulfilling what they viewed as their role-related responsibilities to meet the expectations of their professor. Although the students potentially could have declined to participate, they shared a tacit understanding that being responsive to the foreign researcher was being responsive to a guest, in accord with the expectations of their professor. Nonparticipation would have meant a loss of face for the professor that would be shared by the students.

The author’s response to this situation, as is often the case, was improvised, in that the ethical guidelines of institutional review board (IRB) committees do not typically address how to make accommodations in this type of situation and may even differ in terms of what types of accommodations, if any, are considered appropriate. She collected the consent forms from the students, all of whom had signed the form indicating their willingness to participate, but later went out of her way, in a procedure that would not have been necessary with a US population, to emphasize with each student individually the acceptability of declining to participate. In response to this further informal elaboration of the consent agreement, a few students later declined to participate, even students who had initially signed the consent form. In this way, a real option to decline to participate was afforded to the students by acting in a way that more fully took into account local cultural norms and that had not been achieved by the written consent form required by the IRB and which everyone had signed.

In this chapter, we present an overview of ethical issues arising in culturally based research on human development in terms of both the considerations taken into account in contemporary human subjects procedures that are stipulated in IRB protocols, as well as in terms of more general concerns in cultural psychology with ensuring that the content of research is both culturally sensitive and culturally fair. In the first half of the chapter, we address the cultural adequacy of procedures for the protection of human subjects. In the second half, we consider steps that are necessary to ensure the cultural sensitivity of the constructs, methods, and conclusions of psychological research.

Cultural Adequacy of Procedures for Protection of Human Subjects

In this section, we discuss cultural challenges that arise in protecting the human rights of research participants. After briefly describing the historical and cultural context in which human subjects protocols developed, we focus on cultural issues entailed in achieving informed consent, ensuring the privacy of research participants, and protecting research participants from harm.

Historical Context of IRB

The evolving and historically sensitive nature of human subjects concerns is seen in their recent evolution and elaboration in relation to harmful protocols adopted in actual medical and social science research. The concerns with protection of research subjects first came to prominence with the extreme conduct of Nazi doctors and scientists during World War II. Concentration camp inmates and other prisoners were commandeered into research without having given consent and were subject to medical interventions that resulted in great harm, frequently leading to death. In response to these abuses, The Hague Court formulated the first written statement of ethical guidelines in the Nuremberg Code, a code that stipulates the necessity of informed consent, balancing risks with anticipated benefits, and avoidance of harm.

Whereas many researchers distanced themselves from the conclusions of the Nuremberg Code in assuming that no such extreme practices existed in research practices elsewhere, abuses that arose in medical and social science research increasingly made clear that harmful practices occur more widely in scientific inquiry and represent an ever-present hazard. One of the most cited examples of ethical violations in medical practice occurred in the Public Health Service Syphilis Study (1932–1971), known also as the Tuskegee Syphilis Experiment ( Jones, 1993 ). A sample of African American men had been recruited, without their informed consent, into a multiyear longitudinal study that explored treatments for syphilis. The study enrolled hundreds of men who had contracted syphilis and a comparison group of hundreds who were syphilis-free to serve as controls. In terms of ethical problems, study participants were given false information about the need for certain extremely painful study procedures, such as spinal taps. Also, the longitudinal study was continued with the study participants being denied access to antibiotics even after penicillin had been shown, during the 1940s, to be a safe and effective treatment for syphilis. The study raised questions about the potential for harm in medical experimentation and the need to fully inform participants about the risks of research, as well as broader questions about the potential for discrimination and bias, with questionable practices having been undertaken with a minority population.

Psychological investigators became particularly sensitive to the potential for harm in psychological research in response to the human subjects abuses associated with some of the classic and highly influential controlled experiments undertaken by US social psychologists in the mid-20th century ( De Vos, 2010 ). For example, this occurred in the Milgram obedience to authority study ( Milgram, 1963 ) that documented the tendency for respondents to comply with the admonitions of an authority to administer ever-increasing levels of shock to a confederate in a learning task. Although providing a powerful demonstration of obedience to authority, the research came under fire in later years for having subjected participants to the psychological harm of believing that they had inflicted severe physical pain on a fellow research participant and for engaging in deception in feigning the situation presented to subjects, with no actual shock having taking place ( Brandt, 1971 ; Kaufmann, 1967 ).

Notably, other contemporary social psychological studies that also provided dramatic demonstrations of the power of the situation and that prompted individuals to engage in harmful behavior were also not identified at the time as ethically problematic ( Zimbardo, 1973 ). For example, similar types of harm occurred in a prison experiment conducted at Stanford University by Zimbardo and his colleagues ( Zimbardo, Haney, Banks, & Jaffe, 1973 ). This study involved research participants being assigned to roles as guards and prisoners in a simulated prison, in a procedure that continued for 6 days despite evidence of participants experiencing extreme distress, with the “guards” acting in ways that were physically and psychologically abusive to the “prisoners.”

Other contemporary studies employing less reactive behavioral observation techniques also were later recognized to involve human rights violations, such as an ethnographic study ( Humphreys, 1970 ) that involved surreptitiously conducting observations of homosexual practices in public restrooms. Although producing findings of great interest at the time, the study was later recognized as involving ethically problematic behaviors such as invasion of privacy, exploitation of a vulnerable population, and lack of informed consent.

In response to the increasing recognition of questionable ethical practices existing not only in medical research but more broadly in all research with human subjects, the US Department of Health and Human Services became involved in the formal regulation of the conduct of research, with the National Research Act (1974) mandating the establishment of IRBs to protect the rights and safety of research participants. This was followed in 1979 by the publication of the Belmont Report, which articulated the basic ethical principles that underlie all contemporary research with human subjects. Centering on human rights and moral values, these principles include (a) the principle of respect for persons as autonomous agents capable of making their own decisions, which underlies such considerations as the requirement to obtain informed consent and to respect the privacy of research participants; (b) the principle of beneficence, which underlies such considerations as minimizing risks and maximizing benefits, as well as maintaining confidentiality; and (c) the principle of justice and fairness, which underlies such considerations as selection of research subjects in ways that are equitable and that avoid the exploitation of vulnerable populations.

Procedures for the protection of human rights in research and for the realization of the standards set forth by the Belmont Report are widely available, with major professional organizations of psychologists articulating codes of conduct based on these considerations. For example, the American Psychological Association’s (APA) “Ethical Principles of Psychologists and Code of Conduct” elaborates the standards that must be met to protect the rights of research participants ( American Psychological Association, 2002 ), while more specialized professional organizations, such as the Society for Research in Child Development, disseminate ethical standards specifically applicable to particular research populations, such as children (Society for Research in Child Development, 2007).

Our discussion here does not seek to replicate this type of widely available information but rather points to ways human subject guidelines need to be elaborated to ensure that they are responsive to the challenges of cultural research. Our discussion in this section focuses on three of the central issues considered in contemporary human subjects protocols: informed consent, protecting privacy, and minimizing harm.

Informed Consent

Informed consent involves providing individuals with prior information about the nature of the research procedures in which they are being asked to engage, as well as about the benefits and potential for harm involved. In the case of children, IRB procedures involve additional complexity because of the assumption that children lack the legal right to consent to research or the perceived power to refuse to participate, nor do they possess, in many cases, the cognitive maturity to fully understand research procedures. To address these developmental concerns, it is recognized as important for researchers to obtain consent from parents or legal guardians, as well as from school teachers or principals who may be interacting with or overseeing the child’s activities during the period of the study, as well as to secure the child’s verbal and/or written assent to participate. In conducting research in diverse cultural contexts, however, additional challenges arise in (a) ensuring that respondents fully understand the nature of the procedures and the risks involved, (b) securing consent from the relevant parties, and in (c) making certain that any consent given is fully voluntary.

To achieve informed consent, efforts must be made to address the limited prior familiarity of certain populations with the theoretical concepts motivating research and with negative aspects of the research procedures to be employed. These types of issues have been documented in research with children from Western cultures. For example, in a series of studies conducted among elementary-school aged Canadian children, the children proved accurate in describing the purpose of the studies being conducted but did not fully appreciate potential negative consequences involved in participating, such as feelings of being embarrassed or upset by their performance on cognitive tests or of being bored by the length of study procedures ( Abramovitch, Freedman, Henry, & Van Brunschot, 1995 ). These same kinds of concerns may be even more pronounced in the case of cultural populations who have limited familiarity with the norms of experimentation. In such cases, individuals may not anticipate respects in which psychological research may involve relatively impersonal modes of interaction and thus may react particularly negatively to research contexts. For example, in a study on AIDS conducted among African Americans, investigators observed that research participants interpreted structured tests, with their repetitive items, as a sign that the researchers lacked respect for their feelings and experiences ( Stevenson, DeMoya, & Boruch, 1993 ). In these types of situations, the impersonality of informed consent procedures may lead individuals to be reluctant to agree to participate in research, with study procedures experienced as violating local cultural norms, such as the value placed among Hispanics on an individual’s ability to be simpatico to others in everyday social interaction ( Browner, Preloran, & Cox, 1999 ). To address these concerns, researchers not only need to add information to informed consent agreements that explain more fully the nature and potential benefits and risks associated with the research, but to make efforts to ensure that the language of consent agreements is written in as clear and culturally familiar a way as possible and that it accords as much as possible with local cultural norms ( Freeman, 1994 ).

Attention also needs to be given to cultural variation in conceptions of authority that may affect the range of parties from whom consent needs to be secured. For example, in the case of American Indian or Alaska Native tribes, it is important to consult with and obtain the prior approval of tribal leaders about whether and how investigators should approach potential child and adolescent research participants and their families ( Beauvais & Trimble, 1992 ; Norton & Manson, 1996 ). Given the family-oriented values emphasized in certain Asian cultures ( Tai & Lin, 2001 ), consent may tend to be viewed as a family right, meaning that informed consent must be secured from parents, guardians, or even grandparents, even in cases in which the child is above the age of legal consent.

Extra care also needs to be taken to ensure the voluntariness of consent in research conducted in diverse cultural contexts. Whereas consent forms include a stipulation that respondents are free to withdraw their participation from a study at any time without negative repercussions, this freedom may not be experienced by research participants. In this regard, it has been demonstrated that children tend to be reluctant to withdraw from a study unless the experimenter reiterates this freedom to withdraw during the actual course of the study procedures, such as by explicitly stating that he or she would not be upset by the child stopping participation ( Abramovitch et al., 1995 ). A tendency not to recognize the acceptability of withdrawing from a study once it has begun, however, may be particularly pronounced in cultural communities in which individuals are particularly inclined to defer to the authority of the researcher or where they may be even less familiar with the norms of psychological research than are study participants from middle-class European-American contexts.

Attention also needs to be given to the contrasting meanings of research compensation in groups of different cultural and socioeconomic backgrounds. For example, in cases in which family beliefs support the child’s participation in research as an altruistic act, getting paid for participation may tend to be perceived negatively as an infringement on family values ( Sanchez, Salazar, Tijero, & Diaz, 2001 ). Likewise, researchers need to take special care to ensure that any compensation offered is both fair and noncoercive. This means, on the one hand, adequately compensating research participants for their time and effort and for any financial costs that they may have incurred, such as travel expenses or loss of time at work, while, on the other hand, ensuring that the compensation offered is not so great as to be experienced as compelling participation.

Protecting Privacy

Privacy in the conduct of research involves many different types of considerations. As Allen (1999) notes, research privacy entails concerns with (a) physical privacy, in terms of providing spatial seclusion; (b) informational privacy, in terms of assuring confidentiality and protection of data; (c) decisional privacy, in terms of allowing individuals and families to make important decisions for themselves, such as those concerning sex, reproduction, or religion; and (d) proprietary privacy, in terms of control over names and other indicators of personal identity. Assuring each type of privacy, however, can only be achieved through taking into account the ecological constraints of different social settings and contrasting cultural definitions and practices related to privacy.

Standard IRB requirements focus on protecting the privacy of the data collected, including undertaking such measures as using participant codes, rather than names, and employing secure methods of data storage. However, such strategies may be insufficient to protect participant privacy in the case of small, close-knit communities, in which recruitment efforts and participation in research may tend to become widely known public activities. In such cases, media reports of research may lead to the public identification and thus violation of the anonymity of members of distinctive cultural or linguistic subgroups ( Norton & Manson, 1996 ).

Contrasting cultural norms concerning privacy may also affect the meaning and desirability of physical and informational privacy in the conduct of the research itself. This was illustrated dramatically in a recent public health interview study conducted in Sri Lanka, which compared the outlooks of Ayurvedic, Buddhist, and Western healers ( Monshi & Zieglmayer, 2004 ). In seeking to protect the privacy of the information collected, interviews were first undertaken, in accord with Western norms, in an enclosed terrace in the home of one of the healers. Participants, however, accepted this setting with resistance. As the local interpreter explained to the foreign researchers, respondents were uncomfortable with the seclusion of what they viewed as this “hidden” interview space. It was only when the researchers moved the interviews to the public space of an open patio that the Sri Lankan healers participated in the interviews without hesitation or unease. Furthermore, as is common in many other cultural settings, research participants came to the interviews accompanied by significant others, including young children in their care, as well as adult family members and close friends. Not only were the participants unconcerned about disclosing information in front of these bystanders, but they also experienced such open communication as normatively appropriate and desirable, leading the participants to feel more comfortable and to be more forthcoming in their responses than had the researchers interviewed them alone. Also, in many instances, the bystanders contributed their own responses to the interviews, in ways that enhanced the readiness of the research participants to speak freely with the interviewer.

Variation in the cultural values underlying decisional privacy also must be taken into account in determining who should be given information that an individual is participating in research or given access to information being collected on an individual as part of a study. In this regard, a central issue that arises is the weight to be given to the rights of adolescents to control their own behavior versus the rights and responsibilities of parents to oversee the behavior of their offspring. It is recognized that older adolescents not only have the cognitive capacities of adults but also the societal right to engage in consequential adult-like behaviors, such as drinking alcohol or driving. Thus, the cognitive immaturity of the adolescent or his financial dependence on his parents no longer constitutes clear grounds for giving priority to the parent’s rights to decision making in research over the rights of the adolescent himself. However, how such conflicts between the rights of adolescents and those of their parents need to be resolved is culturally variable.

In recent work conducted with US samples, researchers have concluded that in cases involving major health care decisions, such as seeking care at a family planning clinic, where the rights of a youth to control her own behavior conflict with the authority of her parents to oversee the youth’s conduct, priority should be given to the rights of the adolescent: “a youth’s rights to care must supersede a parent’s rights to know what is happing to their youth” ( Brooks-Gunn & Rotheram-Borus, 1994 , p. 120). It is argued that, in these cases, the youth should have autonomy over her own behavior and that involvement of the parents may preclude the adolescent from gaining access to the care she needs.

However, in many non-Western cultural communities, or even in the case of certain minority subgroups within the US, families play a greater normative role in the planning of the adolescent’s life, with the expectation by the parents and by the adolescents themselves that the family will be consulted and involved in major life decisions. Thus, it tends to be experienced as disrespectful of the parental role or an intrusion on parent–child communication to bypass parents in health care matters involving adolescent children, with the adolescents themselves generally viewing parental involvement and input as legitimate and valuable ( Casas & Thompson, 1991 ; Fisher, 2002 ). Also, in terms of proprietary privacy, the requirement of nondisclosure of information obtained in research may be rejected in such cases as being in conflict with the perceived goals of research. Thus, it has been found that teenagers who self-identify as members of minority subgroups in the US commonly expect researchers to assist them with obtaining help with any problems uncovered as part of the research and thus support the disclosure of information about their experiences to third parties, including not only family members but also social service and public health agencies ( O’Sullivan & Fisher, 1997 ).

The present considerations underscore the extent to which culturally variable notions of privacy must inform research procedures, or, as Prost and Vincent (1993) argue “The private life is not a natural fact; it is a historical reality that is constructed in different ways by various societies” (p. 12). Respecting privacy as it is understood in culturally variable terms and in the context of contrasting local sociocultural constraints has the potential to better meet the needs and expectations of research participants while also yielding better quality research data.

Minimizing Harm

Research with human subjects, as noted earlier, seeks to balance benefits that derive from research with risks to the human subjects involved. These risks, however, may be heightened in research to the extent that the procedures employed are culturally inappropriate or involve vulnerable populations.

Most procedures adopted in research with children have been created taking into account the cultural expectations and practices of middle-class European-American families. Although these procedures may induce some stress in children, the stress is generally judged to be temporary and to be no greater than that experienced in everyday family life. However, to the extent that research procedures violate the socialization practices emphasized in particular cultural communities, they may entail greater potential for harm or discomfort.

This type of potential for greater harm or discomfort may be seen in the cross-cultural use of the Strange Situation procedure to assess attachment ( Rothbaum, Pott, Azuma, Miyake, & Weisz, 2000 ). As created by Ainsworth (1963) , the Strange Situation procedure is designed to assess secure base behavior by subjecting the infant to what is intended to be a mild level of stress related to a temporary separation from the mother or other caregiver. During the course of the procedure, the child is put in a situation in which, for brief periods, he or she interacts with an unfamiliar adult and also, in turn, is left alone. Although this procedure invariably evokes some distress for the child, the distress is judged to be warranted as a means to gain insight into processes of attachment and is routinely approved by Human Subjects Reviews Committees as entailing an acceptable level of risk. According to Ainsworth and her colleagues ( Ainsworth, Blehar, Waters, & Wall, 1978 ), the procedure is congruent with commonly experienced American parenting practices, with American mothers generally comfortable with taking their babies into unfamiliar environments and leaving them for a few minutes with a stranger or, even briefly, alone. However, as Takahashi (1982) notes, this type of behavior rarely occurs among Japanese mothers who seldom go out leaving the child with another caregiver, even with a grandmother or father. In cases in which the Strange Situation has been administered to a sample of Japanese infants ( Takahashi, 1986 ), the anxiety involved for the Japanese infants has been found to be intense, leading the infants to display patterns of response that appeared to be more reflective of their efforts to cope with the stress of the procedure than of enduring patterns of attachment.

The Strange Situation procedure also may cause significant anxiety for the mothers who are expected, as part of the procedure, to expose their children to a highly unusual and anxiety-provoking experience. Although mothers may routinely comply with the experimenters’ requests to separate from their infants during the Strange Situation procedure, given the deference accorded to science, they may also feel that, in doing this, they are failing to protect their infants from a negative psychological experience and thus breaching, at least temporarily, their protective role as a parent. However, although this type of concern may be experienced to some degree by all mothers, it is likely to be even greater in cultural contexts in which the separation from the caregiver involved in the Strange Situation procedure is more discordant with everyday parenting practices and conceptions of good parenting.

The potential for discomfort or risk in psychological research may also be seen in other topic domains, given the relatively common use of stressful experimental procedures in research with very young children. To give another example, the Still Face paradigm is a widely used laboratory procedure in which, after a 2-minute period of face-to-face play, mothers are asked to maintain a still face while looking toward their infant for 2 minutes, followed by 2 minutes of reunion play ( Tronick, Als, Adamson, Wise, & Brazelton, 1978 ; Tronick & Cohn, 1989 ). The interaction is later coded for such features as the infant’s capacity to maintain affective self-regulation during the period of the still-face, maternal expressive behavior, and the level of coordination achieved in mother–infant interaction during the reunion period. It is anticipated that all infants will show emotional distress in this task, in that the mother’s behavior is unexpected and highly troubling in its sudden and extreme nonresponsiveness. However, none of the safeguards are present that are routinely employed in research with adults. Thus, no effort is made to obtain the child’s assent to participate or to inform him or her in advance about the upcoming stress, and no experimental effort is undertaken to debrief the infant by informing him or her of the deception involved in their caregiver having feigned nonresponsiveness. The Still Face Procedure, however, is considered ethically acceptable by Human Subjects Review Committees in that the discomfort induced is only relatively short-term in duration and is generally congruent with what are assumed to be everyday parenting practices in which infants commonly experience delays in maternal responsiveness.

The Still Face procedure, like the Strange Situation paradigm, however, is discordant with parenting practices and beliefs in cultural communities outside the dominant white, middle-class model that is taken by default to be normative in developmental psychology and thus may induce much greater stress among infants and mothers in such communities than among middle-class European-American mothers. Marked cultural differences exist in caregiver responsiveness to babies’ fussing and cries and in the processes through which self-regulation is achieved ( Meléndez, 2005 ). To give an example, whereas 98% of the time the !Kung San hunter–gatherers of Botswana respond to babies’ frets within 10 seconds, Western mothers tend to refrain from responding to their infant’s cries in as much as 40% of the cases ( Barr, 1999 ) and may not even identify a baby’s crying as requiring of a response until the crying has persisted for as long as 10 minutes ( Small, 1998 ). Furthermore, in many cultures of Africa and Southeast Asia, a contrasting style of self-regulation has developed in which infants come to self-regulate before making a full-blown cry ( Papousek, 2000 ). Given this expectation of relatively immediate parental responsiveness to infant distress among such infants and their parents, the Still Face paradigm then would tend to involve much greater likelihood of psychological harm than among middle-class European-American mothers.

In terms of the Strange Situation and the Still Face Paradigm, as well as of other similar experimental paradigms that induce culturally variable levels of stress, there is a need to make significant modifications in the consent agreements, if not also in the procedures of the experimental paradigm itself, to minimize any potential for harm. In terms of consent agreements, it is important to more fully inform parents in advance of the risks involved. Thus, although it may be reasonable among middle-class European-American parents to portray such experimental procedures as eliciting no more than routine levels of distress among infants or as not exposing children to experiences that are highly unusual in terms of their everyday lives, this type of assurance does not apply in the case of cultural communities in which parenting practices differ markedly. Also, it is important to modify the procedures themselves in ways that reduce the level of harm or discomfort induced while still preserving the construct validity of the theoretical concepts being assessed, such as by markedly shortening the duration of the stressful interactions in these tasks.

Greater potential for harm also exists in the case of research conducted among populations who are particularly vulnerable because of mental or physical problems, immaturity, or particular historical-political circumstances ( Macklin, 1999 ). Hernandez et al. (2013) provide a convincing case for the designation of immigrant populations as vulnerable due to many potential factors including lack of language proficiency, undocumented status, and poverty. Moreover, research conducted in war zones constitutes another example of a context in which sensitivity to population vulnerability extends beyond the IRB emphasis on disability and immaturity. Goodhand (1999) notes, in writing about the challenges of conducting research in the context of contemporary conflict areas such as Afghanistan, that the issues of physical security and the threat of harm from participation in the research arise not only for the investigators themselves, but also for research participants. It is noted that when choosing issues for discussion, researchers must be aware of the political sensitivity of particular issues and avoid topics that are not only taboo but that would put the participants at physical risk—such as discussion of the opium economy in Afghanistan or issues of caste in the case of Sri Lanka. In the case of research conducted in conflict zones, researchers also need to be sensitive to the tensions that arise between the need to maintain confidentiality versus addressing extreme threats to human safety and security. Researchers also must seek to give back to the local community while avoiding creating false impressions of the improvements that individuals may expect in their conditions of life from involvement in the research.

Cultural Adequacy of Conclusions Drawn from Research

In this section, our discussion goes beyond topics typically addressed by Human Subjects Review committees to consider issues that are critical in conducting research that is fair to diverse cultural populations in the sense of adequately tapping and representing their outlooks in psychological inquiry. These issues involve not only questions of sampling and of avoiding bias in the conclusions drawn, but also of working to culturally broaden the constructs, methods, and conclusions of psychological inquiry.

Sampling and Generalization from Research

Sampling involves issues of fair treatment in that it bears on representing cultural perspectives in a way that is inclusive while avoiding either engaging in stereotyping or in otherwise oversimplifying the nature of particular cultural outlooks. Psychology presently rests on a skewed sampling of the world’s populations, with researchers in many cases making claims that are presented as generalizing to all of humanity on the basis of samples drawn from a highly skewed database consisting primarily of individuals from Western industrialized societies ( Arnett, 2008 ; Henrich, Heine, & Norenzayan, 2010 ). As critics have charged, psychological research tends to proceed as though the cultural context for human development is homogenous, with middle-class European Americans treated as the default or unmarked subject of research:

Culture … has been assumed to be homogeneous, that is based on a standard set of values and expectations primarily held by White and middle-class populations … For example, in developmental psychology, children means White children ( McLoyd, 1990 ); in psychology of women, women generally refers to White women ( Reid, 1988 ). When we mean other than White, it is specified. ( Reid, 1994 , p. 525)

Strikingly, not only has culture and ethnicity been neglected in research on human development, but limited attention has been given to social class. As Fernald (2010) notes in underscoring this neglect at the 2010 International Conference on Infant Studies, fewer than 1% of the research presentations sampled children from disadvantaged families, despite 20–40% of children in the United States living in poverty.

In seeking to broaden the database on which conclusions are drawn in psychological inquiry, however, it is vital not only to adopt more culturally inclusive sampling practices, but also to avoid tendencies to approach culture, ethnicity, and social class in ways that involve overly global claims. For example, overgeneralization can be seen in the heavy reliance on the individualism-collectivism construct and the related construct of an independent versus interdependent cultural view of self-formulations that presently dominate much developmental and social psychological research on culture. In this work, although the populations sampled involve primarily individuals from particular national groups, such as Japanese, claims are made that apply to all East Asians or to all Asians, or even to all Easterners, with similar broad generalizations made to all Westerners on the basis of research conducted exclusively in the United States or Canada (e.g., Nisbett, 2003 ). Likewise, little attention tends to be given to variation linked to ethnicity despite findings that the perspectives of minority group populations, such as African Americans, may not only differ from those of European Americans, but also show distinctive patterns of cross-cultural variation ( Miller, Kapadia, & Akiyama, 2013 ). These same kinds of considerations also apply in the case of work on social class, with an onus on investigators to avoid making global claims about the impact of social class or assimilating social class differences to the same processes seen as underlying cultural differences. For example, as observed in work on attachment conducted among Puerto Rican and European-American families ( Harwood, Miller, & Irizarry, 1995 ), the nature of any social class differences observed may vary depending on the values and practices emphasized in different cultural contexts.

It is also critical to avoid the stereotypical stance that results from relying on pan-ethnic or pan-cultural labels or from making pejorative assumptions in efforts to “measure” culture as an individual difference variable. For example, investigators note that the common tendency to categorize respondents into subgroups in terms of general national labels (such as Hispanic or American Indian) obscures the moderating effects of national origin, immigration, and religion, as well as of social and personal histories on psychological outlooks, and may be insensitive to mixed race or bicultural self-identification ( Fisher, 2002 ). An over-homogenizing stance in cultural research is also exacerbated by the use of scale measures of culture that promote categorization of populations into dichotomous categories and often embody pejorative assumptions. For example, on scale measures of collectivism, such as the widely used measure assessing independent versus interdependent self-construal ( Singelis, 1994 ), interdependence is tapped in terms of items such as “I will sacrifice my self-interest for the benefit of the group that I am in,” which portray collectivism as a nonagentic stance that is emotionally nonsatisfying. As critics have charged (e.g., Miller, 2002 ), this type of claim involves a problematic tendency to view collectivistic outlooks in terms of an assumed tension or opposition between the desires of the individual and social requirements—a tendency that, although it may reflect certain Western cultural outlooks, does not characterize collectivist cultural outlooks that view the social and the natural as inherently mutually constitutive rather than as in tension (e.g., Marriott, 1976 ; Miller, Das, & Chakravarthy, 2011 ).

Avoiding Bias in Assessment

To achieve fairness in the conclusions drawn from research, it is also vital to ensure that assessment procedures are interpreted in the same way in different cultural contexts and thus provide valid indices of the constructs being assessed. This assumption is often violated when research instruments do not adequately take into account the conditions of life or cultural viewpoints emphasized in different cultural contexts and fail to consider cultural variation in familiarity with research.

Assessment of attachment with the Strange Situation procedure provides an example of ways in which a standard behavioral assessment procedure may be interpreted differently than intended in a particular cultural context and thus be tapping other dimensions than those planned. As discussed earlier, in the context of the close parent–child contact maintained in Japanese families, the Strange Situation typically ends up inducing more stress than tends to occur among American populations ( Takahashi, 1986 ). In creating this stress, however, the validity of the procedure as an index of attachment is called into question. It thus becomes difficult, if not impossible, to assess whether findings of greater insecurity in the Strange Situation among Japanese as compared with US children arise from variation in attachment or from the different meaning of the task in each cultural context.

Notably, a similar problem of cultural differences in the fairness of research procedures has been noted in the Adult Attachment Interview (AAI), presently the most respected and widely used instrument for assessing attachment among adults ( Hesse, 1999 ; Main, 1995 ). The measure involves an open-ended interview that is tape-recorded and later transcribed, in which the participant is asked to narrate real-life autobiographical memories of relationships with their parents during childhood, as well as to generate five adjectives that best describe these relationships and to provide episodic memories to illustrate why they have selected the adjectives. The open-ended free response nature of the interview might suggest that it is a culturally fair measure. However, cultural differences in discourse norms and in the meaning of the interview context introduce cultural bias in the responses given. Takahashi and Hatano (2009) note that Japanese respondents tend not to be forthcoming in their responses to the AAI, often responding by saying “I do not remember” or by giving very brief answers because the interview context violates Japanese norms that discourage disclosure of private information about the family to strangers. Japanese respondents also tend to give more measured responses than would typically be observed in a US sample because of their maintaining contrasting culturally based conversational styles, and they are particularly reluctant to speak of negative family experiences, particularly in relation to mothers. Takahashi and Hatano (2009) point out that, although a literal scoring of the responses given by Japanese respondents to the AAI might show respondents to be unconsciously idealizing their relationships with their parents, this scoring would lack validity in that it fails to take into account the noncomparability of the meaning of the AAI probes and interview among Japanese as compared with among the Western populations on which it has been normed. Rather than responding in a defensive way to the AAI, Japanese respond in a way that is considered culturally appropriate in what to them is a socially uncomfortable interview context.

Contrasting culturally based presuppositions about the purpose and nature of experimentation may also lead to bias in measurement that undermines the validity of results. Greenfield (1997) illustrates such a situation in describing the contrasting performance displayed by Zinacantecan Mayan child weavers in a task assessing their abilities to continue striped patterns. The children displayed great competence on this task when it was presented in a familiar everyday form in which the sticks were arrayed in a wooden frame and the children were asked to continue the pattern with additional sticks. However, they failed at the task when it was presented in the format of a multiple choice procedure in which they were asked to select which among three different possible patterns arrayed in front of them correctly continued the pattern. Their response to the multiple–choice format involved an effort to construct something meaningful, such as by pairing choices with each other to make some kind of a larger pattern, rather than identifying the one best response. As Greenfield (1997) suggests, the issue is not only the children’s unfamiliarity with the multiple–choice format per se, but also their adherence to the broader conversational assumption that communication should serve a functional purpose and their lack of understanding that experimentation involves specialized norms in which information is given solely for the purpose of testing understanding, without regard to the practical relevance of this information.

Cultural Broadening of Constructs

Finally, to achieve fairness in the conclusions drawn in research, it is important to attend to the cultural inclusiveness and sensitivity of the constructs and theories being assessed. Even in cases in which respondents are familiar with research procedures and experience them in a way that is congruent with local cultural norms, the research may fail to capture the perspective of a particular cultural group because the constructs being assessed embody culturally specific conceptual assumptions.

This type of concern may be seen, for example, in research that has called attention to the need for cultural broadening of the meaning of parental control. In the dominant models of parenting behavior, a distinction is drawn between “behavioral control,” which involves the active guidance and direction of behavior and that is assumed to have adaptive consequences, particularly with younger children, as compared with “psychological control,” which involves the use of strategies such as manipulation, guilt induction, and coercion and that is assumed to have negative consequences at any age ( Barber, Olsen, & Shagle, 1994 ). Authoritative parenting, which is based on behavioral control, is seen as leading to close parent–child relationships and is positively related to academic achievement among European Americans, whereas authoritarian parenting, which is based on psychological control, is seen as leading to affectively distant parent-child relationships and is negatively related to academic achievement among European Americans ( Baumrind, 1966 , 1996 ; Conger, Conger, Elder, Lorenz, Simons, & Whitbeck, 1992 ). However, unexpected relationships have been observed when parenting measures based on these distinctions are employed among cultural groups other than those on whom they were originally developed. For example, authoritarian parenting has been associated with positive academic performance among Asian youth and observed to have no associations with academic performance among African-American youth ( Dornbusch, Ritter, Leiderman, Roberts, & Fraleigh, 1987 ). Research has also shown that affective warmth tends to be experienced in the case of Asian Americans whose parenting is characterized as being authoritarian ( Chao, 1994 ; 1995 ).

These unexpected findings appear to arise from the same parenting behaviors having contrasting affective meaning in different cultural communities. This was demonstrated in a study documenting cultural variation in the affective associations made to items from standard parenting scales—such as the following item in the Child Report of Parenting Behavior Inventory (CRPBI; Schaefer, 1965 ): “[my mother or primary caregiver] says if I really cared for her, I would not do things that cause her to worry ” ( Mason, Walker-Barnes, Tu, Simons, & Martinez-Arrue, 2004 ). All youth associated feelings of being controlled and manipulated with this “control through guilt” item and other similar items. However, African Americans linked the item and other similar items with greater feelings of being loved or cared for than did European Americans.

Attention to the contrasting cultural meanings accorded to parental control is important in ensuring the validity of theoretical claims being made. As Mason et al. (2004) point out, parenting that researchers may have classified as authoritarian according to distinctions made on conventional parenting scale measures may actually be reflective among Asian Americans of a “training” style of parenting. Also, it is unclear whether what is presently scored as authoritarian among African Americans actually is reflective of such an orientation, given the positive affective meanings that African Americans tend to associate with parental control. Attention must also be given to local cultural meanings in order to avoid any unintended harm resulting from the real-world application of psychological findings. For example, a parent education program might inadvertently encourage parents to behave in ways that may lead their children to feel rejected or unloved or to make the parents feel that their own parenting practices are being disparaged unless the program and the research on which it is based has taken into account the affective meanings linked with the parenting practices being displayed in the specific cultural communities under consideration.

The need for cultural sensitivity in the constructs underlying research and in associated measuring instruments may also be seen in work on motivation in the context of the tradition of self-determination theory (SDT) ( Deci & Ryan, 1985 ; 1987 ; 2002 ). In the case of all scale measures developed to assess self-determination (Self-determination theory, n.d.), references to role expectations are included only as either introjected or external scale items, which are items designed to tap a noninternalized and thus nonagentic stance. Work in the tradition of self-determination theory acknowledges that individuals may internalize social expectations as fully in collectivist cultures as in individualistic cultures ( Chirkov, Ryan, Kim, & Kaplan, 2003 ). However, this feature of the scale items means that anyone who sees themselves as acting in response to role expectations would invariably be scored as lower in agency than someone who does not see his or her behavior as responsive to role expectations, since this is the only place on SDT scale measures where social expectations are mentioned. Given the greater emphasis placed on role expectations in social attribution and moral reasoning in collectivist than individualistic cultures, this may then lead to the conclusion that collectivist populations tend to be less agentic than individualistic cultural populations (e.g., Bontempo, Lobel, & Triandis, 1990 ) or that individuals with collectivist cultural backgrounds experience a type of agency that does not involve a subjective sense of choice (e.g., Iyengar & Lepper, 1999 ; Markus & Kitayama, 2003 ). However, when effort is made to treat conceptions of duty as potentially internalized motivational stances associated with a subjective sense of choice, certain collectivist populations have been found to score high in agency even when giving greater overt emphasis to duty or obligation than do Americans ( Miller et al., 2011 ).

Taking cultural considerations into account in research on human development is integral not only to ensuring the ethics of research, but also to ensuring its quality. Research, it has been seen, can only be conducted in an ethically sensitive way by incorporating local cultural practices and outlooks, just as incorporating such practices and outlooks is vital to ensuring the construct validity of the data being collected and the theoretical significance of the findings obtained. Systems of research ethics, as formulated by IRBs, need to be treated in a flexible way that recognizes that they have been formulated at particular historical points in time from particular cultural viewpoints, with these guidelines unable to anticipate all of the considerations that must be taken into account to ensure that any ethical standards being applied are culturally inclusive. As research on human development comes increasingly to utilize new types of methodologies and to become increasingly international, the types of ethical challenges that the field faces will continue to change, with attention to culture a key part of responding to such challenges.

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Studying Adolescent Psychology

Key issues in human development.

There are many different theoretical approaches regarding human development. As we evaluate them in this course, recall that development focuses on how people change, and the approaches address the nature of change in different ways:

• Are changes an active or passive process?
• Is the change smooth or uneven (continuous versus discontinuous)?
• Is this pattern of change the same for everyone, or are there different patterns of change (one course of development versus many courses)?
• Are there prescribed periods in which change must occur (critical and sensitive periods)?
• How do genetics and environment interact to influence development (nature versus nurture)?

Is Development Active or Passive?

How much does one play a role in their developmental path? Are we at the whim of our genetic inheritance or the environment that surrounds you, or are we able to decide and steer our development? Some theorists believe that humans play a much more active role in their development. Piaget, for instance, believed that children actively explore their world and construct new ways of thinking to explain the things they experience. Humanist theorists forward that people have self-determination. In contrast, many behaviorists view humans as being more passive in the developmental process, with outcomes being determined by their experiences. Evolutionary psychologists emphasize the role of heredity in determining development. As we explore various theories, ask yourself whether each approach considers development to be an active or passive process.

Is Development Continuous or Discontinuous?

Is human development best characterized as a slow, gradual process, or as one of more abrupt change? The answer to that question often depends on which developmental theorist you ask and which topic is being studied. Continuous development  theories view development as a cumulative process, gradually improving on existing skills (see figure below). With this type of development, there is a gradual change. Consider, for example, a child’s physical growth: adding inches to their height year by year. In contrast, theorists who view development as  discontinuous  believe that development takes place in unique stages and that it occurs at specific times or ages. With this type of development, the change is more sudden, such as an infant’s ability to demonstrate awareness of object permanence (which is a cognitive skill that develops toward the end of infancy, according to Piaget’s cognitive theory—more on that theory in the next module).

Figure 1.3.1.  Visualizations of continuous and discontinuous development.

Is There One Course of Development or Many?

Is development essentially the same, or universal, for all children (i.e., there is one course of development) or does development follow a different course for each child, depending on the child’s specific genetics and environment (i.e., there are many courses of development)? Do people across the world share more similarities or more differences in their development? How much do culture and genetics influence a child’s behavior?

Stage theories hold that the sequence of development is universal. For example, in cross-cultural studies of language development, children from around the world reach language milestones in a similar sequence (Gleitman & Newport, 1995). Infants in all cultures coo before they babble. They begin babbling at about the same age and utter their first word around 12 months old. Yet we live in diverse contexts that have a unique effect on each of us. For example, researchers once believed that motor development followed one course for all children regardless of culture. However, childcare practices vary by culture, and different practices have been found to accelerate or inhibit the achievement of developmental milestones such as sitting, crawling, and walking (Karasik, Adolph, Tamis-LeMonda, & Bornstein, 2010).

For instance, let’s look at the Aché society in Paraguay. They spend a significant amount of time foraging in forests. While foraging, Aché mothers carry their young children, rarely putting them down to protect them from getting hurt in the forest. Consequently, their children walk much later: They walk around 23–25 months old, in comparison to infants in Western cultures who begin to walk around 12 months old. However, as Aché children become older, they are allowed more freedom to move about, and by about age 9, their motor skills surpass those of U.S. children of the same age: Aché children can climb trees up to 25 feet tall and use machetes to chop their way through the forest (Kaplan & Dove, 1987). As you can see, our development is influenced by multiple contexts, so the timing of basic motor functions may vary across cultures. However, the functions are present in all societies.

Figure 1.3.2.  All children across the world love to play. Whether in (a) Florida or (b) South Africa, children enjoy exploring sand, sunshine, and the sea.

Are there Critical or Sensitive Periods of Development?

Various developmental milestones are universal in timing.  For example, most children begin learning and expressing language during their first year. However, what happens if a person misses that window of typical experience? What if the child were not exposed to language early in life, could they learn language in later years? Does the timing of experience influence development, and can it be corrected later?

Psychologists believe that there are time spans in which a person is biologically ready for certain developments, but successful progress is reliant on the person having essential experiences during that time. If these experiences fail to occur or occur after the time span ends, then the person will not develop normally or may not fully recover, even with later intervention.

Some aspects of development have critical periods; finite time spans in which specific experiences must occur for successful development. Once this period ends, later experiences would have no impact on this aspect of development. Failure to have the necessary experiences during the critical period will result in permanent impairments. For instance, a person that does not receive minimal nutrition during childhood would not reach their full height potential by adulthood. Even with excellent nutrition during adulthood, they would never grow taller because their critical period of growth has ended.

More often, developmental aspects are considered to have sensitive periods. Like critical periods, a sensitive period requires particular experiences during a specific time for development to occur. However, with sensitive periods, experiences after the period ends can support developmental gains later in life. It is not to say that post-period interventions will always be simple or successful. For example, someone that was not exposed to language in early childhood, with intervention and great effort, may be able to make some gains in late childhood, but may not fully recover all language-related skills.

Video 1.3.1.  Sensitive vs Critical Periods of Learning explains the differences between the two

How Do Nature and Nurture Influence Development?

Are we who we are because of genetics, or are we who we are because of our environment? For instance, why do biological children sometimes act like their parents—is it because of genetics or because of early childhood environment and what the child has learned from their parents? What about children who are adopted—are they more like their biological families or more like their adoptive families? And how can siblings from the same family be so different?

This longstanding question is known in psychology as the nature versus nurture debate. For any particular aspect of development, those on the side of nature would argue that heredity plays the most important role in bringing about that feature. While those on the side of nurture would say that one’s environment is most significant in shaping the way we develop. However, most scholars agree that there is a constant interplay between the two forces. It is difficult to isolate the root of any single outcome as a result solely of nature or nurture.

We are all born with specific genetic traits inherited from our parents, such as eye color, height, and certain personality traits. Beyond our basic genotype, however, there is a deep interaction between our genes and our environment. Our unique experiences in our environment influence whether and how particular traits are expressed, and at the same time, our genes influence how we interact with our environment (Diamond, 2009; Lobo, 2008). There is a reciprocal interaction between nature and nurture as they both shape who we become, but the debate continues as to the relative contributions of each.

Video 1.3.2.  Gene-Environment Interaction explains how nature and nurture interact to influence development.

• Key Issues in Human Development. Authored by : Nicole Arduini-Van Hoose. Provided by : Hudson Valley Community College. Located at : https://courses.lumenlearning.com/adolescent/chapter/key-issues-in-human-development/ . License : CC BY-NC-SA: Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike
• Human Development. Authored by : Margaret Clark-Plaskie. Provided by : Lumen Learning. Located at : https://courses.lumenlearning.com/wmopen-lifespandevelopment/chapter/human-development/ . License : CC BY: Attribution
• Gene Environment Interaction. Authored by : Ryan Scott Patton. Provided by : Khan Academy. Located at : https://youtu.be/sMyZO9YDlk8 . License : CC BY-NC-SA: Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike
• Sensitive vs Critical periods of learning - VCE Psychology. Authored by : Andrew Scott. Located at : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ytRC15vIA24 . License : All Rights Reserved

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