Welcome from Lab Director, Prof. Patricia Greenfield

Our research explores how values, behavior and cognition are shaped by social change. Our current studies in Mexico, China, and Israel investigate human development within a changing social ecology that include variables such as urbanization, education and commercialization.

For information on our studies of the implications of technology for human development, please go to cdmc.ucla.edu. For information on our work on the implications of social change for cognitive development, learning, and textile design in a Maya community in Chiapas, Mexico, please go to weaving-generations.psych.ucla.edu

For earlier research on evolution and primate studies, language acquisition, cultural studies, grammars of action, and neuroscience, please go to the publication page.

JUST PUBLISHED

Pillars of Developmental Psychology

Patricia Greenfield selected as a pillar of developmental psychology. Title of her autobiographical chapter: “Back and forth with life: Development of a developmentalist.”

Social change and creativity change: How creative products and the nature of creativity differ in subsistence ecologies with high mortality and commercial ecologies with low mortality

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Scientific American article about COVID studies

Greenfield receives
2019 OUTSTANDING CONTRIBUTIONS TO CULTURAL PSYCHOLOGY AWARD

Madsen Marble Pull Exercise

Greenfield demonstrating the Madsen marble pull. A research study in collaboration with Dr. Camilo Garcia and students at Veracruz University, Mexico, used this apparatus to document an historical reduction in Mexican children’s cooperative behavior over many decades.

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The decline of cooperation, the rise of competition: developmental effects of long-term social change in Mexico