New attempts in psychological science at integrating developmental (individual-level) and evolutionary (population-level) accounts of phenotypic stability and variability have achieved increasing prominence of late. Foremost among such attempts is the field of evolutionary developmental psychology (EDP). EDP proposes that selective pressures in evolution inform psychological development through a synthesis of the Darwinian/neo-Darwinian selectionist perspective embraced by evolutionary psychology and the developmental dynamics perspective endorsed by developmental systems theory. We examine the theoretical assumptions behind selectionist and developmental perspectives and argue that both perspectives are ontologically incompatible. We provide an alternative framework for integrating developmental and evolutionary explanations that transcend this ontological division of selectional and developmental perspectives. This framework promotes a pluralistic approach that moves beyond traditional antecedent/consequent, mechanistic views of causality and embraces both functional (part-to-whole) and structural (whole-to-part) modes of explanation as distinct, equally legitimate, and simultaneously applicable perspectives in understanding phenotypic stability and variability over time.

Children and youth growing up in political violence and displacement have urgent needs to connect with others and to influence the course of their own and others' development. In that process, language is a major relational and developmental tool, especially with positive engagement in collectives addressing bad situations. This article presents a relational theory of development in practice-based research, focusing on the concepts “relational imagining” and “relational complexity”, illustrated with examples of young people's language use to make sense of war-affected environments in ex-Yugoslavia and Colombia. In those and other challenging and rapidly changing environments, dynamic storytelling workshops involved a range of narratives and other expressive media for individual and collective purposes to foster child, youth, and societal understandings and development. The theory-based relational research and practice design with dynamic storytelling illustrates processes and findings of child-society interactions during and after violent and rapid societal change.

The combination of two methodological resources - natural user interface and multimodal learning analytics - is creating opportunities for educational researchers to empirically evaluate theoretical models accounting for the emergence of concepts from situated sensorimotor activity. Seventy-six participants (9-14 years old) solved tablet-based presymbolic manipulation tasks designed to foster grounded meanings for the mathematical concept of proportional equivalence. Data gathered in task-based semi-structured clinical interviews included action logging, eye-gaze tracking, and videography. Analysis of these data indicates that successful task performance coincided with spontaneous emergence of stable dynamical gaze path patterns soon followed by multimodal articulation of strategy. Significantly, gaze patterns included unmanipulated, non-salient screen locations. We present cumulative evidence that these gaze patterns served as ‘‘attentional anchors'' mediating participants' problem solving. By way of further contextualizing our claim, we also present case studies from the various experimental conditions. We interpret the findings as enabling us to revisit, support, refine, and perhaps elaborate on seminal claims from Piaget's theory of genetic epistemology and in particular his insistence on the role of situated motor-action coordination in the process of reflective abstraction.

Social exclusion and inclusion from groups, as well as the distribution of resources, are fundamental aspects of social life, and serve as sources of conflicts that bear on issues of fairness and equality, beginning in childhood. For the most part, research on social exclusion and allocation of resources has not focused on the issue of group membership. Yet, social exclusion from groups and the denial of resources reflect societal issues pertaining to social inequality and its counterpoint, fair treatment of others. Social inequality occurs when opportunities and resources are distributed unevenly in society, often through group norms about allocation that reflect socially defined categories of persons. This occurs at multiple levels of societal organization, from experiences of exclusion in childhood such as being left out of a play activity, to being denied access to resources as a member of a group. These situations extend to larger-level experiences in the adult world concerning social exclusion from voting, for example, or participation in educational institutions. Thus, most decisions regarding social exclusion and the denial of resources involve considerations of group identity and group membership, implicitly or explicitly, which contribute to prejudice and bias, even though this has rarely been investigated in developmental science. Current research illustrating the role of group identity and autonomy regarding decision-making about social exclusion and the denial of resources is reviewed from the social reasoning developmental model, a theoretical perspective that integrates social domain theory and developmental social identity theories to investigate how children use moral, conventional, and psychological judgments to evaluate contexts reflecting group identity, group norms, and intergroup dynamics.