{"id":75919,"date":"2013-04-15T10:30:57","date_gmt":"2013-04-15T14:30:57","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/?p=75919"},"modified":"2015-08-11T16:45:22","modified_gmt":"2015-08-11T20:45:22","slug":"family-studies-professor-elected-to-national-committee-for-psychology","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/2013\/04\/family-studies-professor-elected-to-national-committee-for-psychology\/","title":{"rendered":"Family Studies Professor Elected to National Committee for Psychology"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"Charles<\/a>
Charles Super, professor of human development and family studies. (Ariel Dowski ’14 (CLAS)\/UConn Photo)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Charles M. Super, professor of human development and family studies in the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences and professor of pediatrics at the UConn Health Center was recently elected to the U.S. National Committee for Psychology, an organization supported by the National Academy of Sciences.<\/p>\n

As one of 12 members on the committee, Super will represent the United States\u2019 psychological science community with the International Union of Psychological Science (IUPsyS), a worldwide organization charged with the development, representation, and advancement of psychology as a basic and applied science.<\/p>\n

Currently, the United States is one of 82 nations that are members of IUPsyS, and the number of nations is expanding, as countries from Africa, Asia, and Eastern Europe apply for inclusion.<\/p>\n

Super notes that for the last half century or more, psychology as a social science has been \u2018a largely American enterprise\u2019 guided by such important contributors as B. F. Skinner, Albert Bandura, and others, who rose to prominence after the end of World War II when German and English influence on the science waned.<\/p>\n

In developmental psychology, the time has come to change the aphorism \u2018think globally, act locally\u2019 into something akin to \u2018think locally, act globally\u2019 \u2013 to emphasize that \u00a0it is only through an understanding of an individual\u2019s local experiences that we can we generalize to a more global theory.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

\u201cOne of the ways psychology has evolved over the last few decades,\u201d Super says, \u201cis that it has become something akin to one of the core disciplines in most American colleges and universities. You now find psychologists in all sorts of academic areas, including everything from business to natural resources, as well as in traditional psychology departments.<\/p>\n

\u201cAnd while this growth and development is good, what we\u2019re beginning to realize is that we have been constructing all sorts of theories of human development based on a model of how middle-class Americans and middle-class Europeans behave. With the globalization of the world, and with an increasing number of exchange students from virtually every country, we realize that we need to rethink some aspects of early education and child development. We have to ask ourselves to what degree to we feel comfortable exporting the way we do things to Africa or Asia.\u201d<\/p>\n

Super has served as chair of the international committee of the Society for Research in Child Development and is co-editor of the recently released Handbook of Early Childhood Development Research and Its Impact on Global Policy<\/i> (Oxford University Press; 2013), in which early child development in both developed and developing countries is explored. It is this interest in cross-cultural research that he credits for his selection to the NAS committee.<\/p>\n

\u201cPart of my personal mission, and I think that\u2019s to some degree why I was elected to this committee, is to facilitate communication and the conduct of both basic and applied research across cultural lines,\u201d he says, \u201ctrying to recognize that there will be differences and part of our job [as psychologists] is to figure out a way to talk about those differences that is, first of all, not pejorative, and secondly that is technically sound and useful.\u201d<\/p>\n

Super comments that during his years of teaching, first at Harvard and Penn State and, for the past 17 years at UConn, students have changed in the way they view the world. \u201cThey are much more openly accepting of important cultural differences,\u201d he says. \u201cThey don\u2019t necessarily come equipped to understand them or see their implications for parenting and child development, but I don\u2019t have to say \u2018Guess what \u2026 culture matters!\u2019 any more. They know that. And now we can go on and ask how it matters and what, if anything, do we want to do about those differences.\u201d<\/p>\n

Super says that serving on the national committee \u201cis a chance to put the understanding of human variation into a global context. In developmental psychology, the time has come to change the aphorism \u2018think globally, act locally\u2019 into something akin to \u2018think locally, act globally\u2019 \u2013 to emphasize that \u00a0it is only through an understanding of an individual\u2019s local experiences that we can we generalize to a more global theory.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Charles Super, an expert on cross-cultural differences in child development, will represent the U.S. psychological science community internationally.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":21,"featured_media":75298,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_crdt_document":"","wds_primary_category":0,"wds_primary_series":0,"wds_primary_attribution":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"magazine-issues":[],"coauthors":[56],"class_list":["post-75919","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"pp_statuses_selecting_workflow":false,"pp_workflow_action":"current","pp_status_selection":"publish","acf":[],"publishpress_future_action":{"enabled":false,"date":"2026-04-25 23:15:28","action":"change-status","newStatus":"draft","terms":[],"taxonomy":"category","extraData":[]},"publishpress_future_workflow_manual_trigger":{"enabledWorkflows":[]},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/posts\/75919","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/users\/21"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=75919"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/posts\/75919\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":103836,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/posts\/75919\/revisions\/103836"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/media\/75298"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=75919"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=75919"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=75919"},{"taxonomy":"magazine-issue","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/magazine-issues?post=75919"},{"taxonomy":"author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/coauthors?post=75919"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}