Our primary aim is to tell the story of Life Unfolding by introducing students to the average changes we expect to see in the human journey and then to revisit those changes again considering factors that can shift development in varied contexts. Too often developmental psychology texts try to impart too much into a limited space. Authors forget that students need to hear content multiple times and that it needs to be distilled and direct. Otherwise, we lose the audience before they really engage with material and learning can begin.
Life Unfolding is intended to simplify the basics of biological, cognitive, and socio-emotional development using the less is more approach. We artificially separate and introduce the typical patterns of development without mention of contextual factors. This we call the Profile . After the reader grasps the “average,” we present diverse factors that underlie the range of developmental patterns. These factors and variations are covered in the sections we call the Pathways.
Alicia Drais-Parrillo, Ph.D., is a Teaching Professor at the Pennsylvania State University. Dr. Drais-Parrillo teaches courses on personality, interpersonal relationships, development, gender, and multicultural psychology. She has been teaching at Penn State since 2012. Prior to joining the Psychology Department, Dr. Drais-Parrillo taught at several small liberal arts colleges and a preschool and worked as a principal investigator in the research department at Child Welfare League of America. She received her doctorate in Human Development and Family Studies from the Pennsylvania State University. Dr. Drais-Parrillo also holds a B.A. in Liberal Arts, an M.S. in Child Development and Family Studies, and an M.A. in Early Education, as well as a minor degree in Statistics.