Human Development: A Cultural Approach, 4th edition

Published by Pearson (November 14, 2025) © 2026
  • Jeffrey Jensen Arnett
  • Lene Arnett Jensen

Title overview

For courses in Lifespan Development.

Help students understand how culture impacts development, and why it matters

Human Development: A Cultural Approach leads students to examine all stages of development through the engaging lens of culture. Authors Jeffrey Jensen Arnett and Lene Arnett Jensen integrate cross-cultural examples throughout the narrative to reveal the impact of cultural factors both in the US and around the world.

The 4th Edition offers updated coverage and current research throughout. Fresh topics include the effects of physical activity on the cognitive performance of Alzheimer’s patients, data showing how sex ratios at birth are becoming more equal in developing countries and more.

Hallmark features of this title

  • Chapters devoted to toddlerhood and emerging adulthood, sometimes overlooked stages of development, help paint a detailed picture of human development.
  • Examples of domestic culture integrated throughout the text show students that culture is present everywhere, both at home and abroad.
  • Cultural Focus features highlight how culture impacts various aspects of development, such as gross motor development and family relationships.
  • Research Focus features describe a particular research study, including its premises, methods, results and limitations.
  • Infographic maps help provide a geographic and cultural context for variations in development.
  • Personal anecdotes about the authors’ own children serve as enjoyable, real life-examples of developmental science.

New and updated features of this title

  • UPDATED: For the 4th edition, the authors have revised every chapter to incorporate the latest and most important human development research, as well as to enhance existing material. Highlights of new and updated content include:
    • Information on differences between countries in how much infants cry, and why those differences may exist in Chapter 3, Birth and the Newborn Child
    • Fresh material on how the benefits to language development of reading to infants and toddlers are affected by characteristics of the child, family socioeconomic status, and country in Chapter 5, Toddlerhood
    • Updated information on how and why the proportion of American high school students who are employed in any given year has declined dramatically in recent decades in Chapter 8, Adolescence
    • Coverage of a recent review reporting the finding that in South Asian countries, marital satisfaction is higher in arranged marriages than in “love marriages” in Chapter 10, Young Adulthood
    • The latest statistics on the continued dramatic decline in rates of heart disease in the US across ethnic groups in Chapter 13, Death and Afterlife Beliefs

Key features

Features of Revel for the 4th Edition

  • UPDATED: Chapter Introduction videos and Apply Your Knowledge as a Professional videos bring concepts to life. New clips highlight infancy in a Chinese American family, the work of a psychotherapist and a pediatrician, and more.
  • UPDATED: Additional brief videos highlight contemporary topics including adolescent media use, depression in emerging adulthood and more.
  • UPDATED: Two simulations in one, MyVirtualLife offers profound insights into development across the entire lifespan. After students parent a virtual child (by way of the included MyVirtualChild learning path), MyVirtualLife pivots to the first-person perspective of a virtual adult, providing a vivid sense of the impact of genetics, attitudes and decisions over the course of a lifetime. Version 3.0 includes updated scenarios involving marriage counseling, home ownership versus renting and more.
  • NEW: Flashcards at the end of each chapter boost comprehension of glossary terms and their definitions.
  • UPDATED: Breaking Developments features, updated twice a year, highlight the latest research findings to keep the course current.
  • UPDATED: Interactive Social Explorer world maps examine various regional patterns and statistics. New maps depict worldwide variations in obesity rates in children, life expectancy at age 65 and more.

Table of contents

  1. A Cultural Approach to Human Development
  2. Genetics and Prenatal Development
  3. Birth and the Newborn Child
  4. Infancy
  5. Toddlerhood
  6. Early Childhood
  7. Middle Childhood
  8. Adolescence
  9. Emerging Adulthood
  10. Young Adulthood
  11. Middle Adulthood
  12. Late Adulthood
  13. Death and Afterlife Beliefs

Author bios

About our authors

Jeffrey Jensen Arnett is a Senior Research Scholar in the Department of Psychology at Clark University in Worcester, Massachusetts. He received his Ph.D. in developmental psychology in 1986 from the University of Virginia and did 3 years of postdoctoral work at the University of Chicago. From 1992 through 1998 he was Associate Professor in the Department of Human Development and Family Studies at the University of Missouri, where he taught a 300-student life span development course every semester. In the fall of 2005, he was a Fulbright Scholar at the University of Copenhagen in Denmark, in 2010 and 2011 he was the Nehru Chair at Maharaja Sayajirao University in India, and in 2017 and 2018 he was a Visiting Professor at the University of Bordeaux in France.

His primary scholarly interest for the past 20 years has been in emerging adulthood. He coined the term, and he has conducted research on emerging adults concerning a wide variety of topics involving several different ethnic groups in American society. He is the Founding President and Executive Director of the Society for the Study of Emerging Adulthood (SSEA; www.ssea.org). From 2005 to 2014 he was the editor of the Journal of Adolescent Research (JAR), and currently he is on the editorial board of JAR and 5 other journals. He has published many theoretical and research papers on emerging adulthood in peer-reviewed journals, as well as the book Emerging Adulthood: The Winding Road from the Late Teens Through the Twenties (2024, 3rd Edition, Oxford University Press), among many others. For more information, visit the author’s website.

Lene Arnett Jensen is Senior Research Scientist in the Department of Psychology at Clark University in Worcester, Massachusetts. She received her Ph.D. in developmental psychology in 1994 from the University of Chicago and did a 1-year postdoctoral fellowship at the University of California–Berkeley. Prior to coming to Clark University, she taught at the University of Missouri and Catholic University of America. She has also been a visiting professor at Stanford University, Aalborg University in Denmark, Maharaja Sayajirao University in India, and the University of Bordeaux in France.

She aims through scholarship and professional collaboration to move the discipline of psychology toward understanding development both in terms of what is universal and what is cultural. She terms this a “cultural-developmental approach.” Her research addresses moral development and cultural identity formation. Together with her students, she has conducted research in countries such as Denmark, India, Namibia, Thailand, Turkey and the United States. Her publications include New Horizons in Developmental Theory and Research (2005, with Reed Larson, Jossey-Bass/Wiley), Immigrant Civic Engagement: New Translations (2008, with Constance Flanagan, Taylor-Francis), Bridging Cultural and Developmental Psychology: New Syntheses for Theory, Research and Policy (2011, Oxford University Press), the Oxford Handbook of Human Development and Culture (2015, Oxford University Press), Moral Development in a Global World: Research from a Cultural-Developmental Perspective (2015, Cambridge University Press) and the Oxford Handbook of Moral Development (2020, Oxford University Press). For more information, visit the author’s website.

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