The purpose of this research is to examine issues surrounding the emotional development of children exposed to drugs at the prenatal stage. The plan of the research will be to set forth a working definition of emotional development and more generally the context for investigating this topic, and then to discuss ways in which emotional development is compromised by prenatal exposure to drugs known to have toxic properties at each developmental stage, as well as programs that may be available to both parents and children that come within the meaning of the problem area.
Human development has been described as "the study of the way cultural traditions and social practices regulate, express, transform, and permute the human psyche, resulting less in psychic unity for humankind than in ethnic divergences in mind, self, and emotion" (Shweder, 1990, p. 1). The traditional assumption is that human psychology and emotion have universality by reason of "central processing mechanism" and that there is "a fundamental division" between that mechanism and the "context," or external environment in which the psyche is made to function (Shweder, 1990, p. 5). Human development has as its starting point of analysis not the individual central processing mechanism but rather context per se. As Goodnow, Miller, and Kessel put it (1995, p. 2), the discipline "offers a unified view of development and culture as intertwined processes." Shweder's formulation is that human cognition, learning, and selfhood interpenetrate one another and the culture in which they emerge: "you can't take the stuff out of the psyche and you can't take the psyche out of the stuff" (Shweder, 1990, p. 22).
Shweder distinguishes between human development and "general psychology" (1990, p. 19, et passim), in rejection of the idea that the conception of human nature as "transcendent and abstract and fixed and universal" (p. 19). Human development within this context asserts that hu...