Charles M. Super

Charles M. Super, Ph.D., Co-Director of the Center for the Study of Culture, Health, and Human Development, earned his B.A. in psychology at Yale University and his Ph.D. in developmental psychology at Harvard University.  Dr. Super’s research interests center on development in infancy and childhood, particularly as it is regulated by cultural factors; on parents’ and professionals’ theories of child development and behavior; and on interventions to promote the physical and mental health of children and families.& Placing health development in the cultural system is the core of Dr. Super’s interests, thus his concern is with the integrative features, which the Center can address by brining together scientists with varied disciplinary backgrounds and interests. Dr. Super’s research has been funded by federal agencies and private foundations, including the National Institutes of Health, the National Science Foundation, the Spencer Foundation, and the W. T. Grant Foundation.

Currently, Dr. Super is a Principal Investigator on the International Baby Study; the goal of this study is to expand our knowledge of the early development of state control (including arousal, attentional, and affective behaviors), as it is shaped by culturally specific caretaking practices. The core of the project is an NIH-funded effort to capitalize on a natural experiment created by distinct cultural patterns of parental practices in two different communities, each from an educated, economically advanced democracy: the Netherlands and the USA. Overall the study evaluates the hypothesis that the effects of culturally organized caretaking on reactivity and self-regulation, and the processes that underlie them, constitute an important but largely unrecognized early influence on the foundation of children's later performance at home, in school, and with peers. The product of this study will be new knowledge about how culturally organized environments interact over time with developing biological and behavioral systems to yield specific developmental outcomes. The results will inform current discussion about the causes of poor arousal regulation, attentional difficulty, and sleep deprivation, and their consequences for social, cognitive, and self-regulatory functioning in the preschool years.

Selected Publications

Super, C. M. (2005). The globalization of developmental psychology. In D. Pillemer S. H. White (Eds.), Developmental psychology and social change (pp. 11-33). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Super, C. M., Harkness, S. (2003). The metaphors of development. Human Development, 46(1), 3-23.