Darcia Narvaez

Last updated
Darcia Narvaez
Born
Darcia Fe Narvaez

(1952-06-08) June 8, 1952 (age 71)
Minneapolis
Alma mater
Known for Moral development
Scientific career
Fields Evolutionary Developmental Moral Psychology
Institutions
Thesis  (1993)
Doctoral advisor Paul van den Broek

Darcia Narvaez (dar-sha narv-eyes) is a Professor of Psychology Emerita at the University of Notre Dame who has written extensively on issues of character, moral development, and human flourishing.

Contents

Biography

Narvaez was born in Minneapolis, Minnesota. Her father, Richard Narvaez, was a professor of Spanish linguistics at the University of Minnesota. Darcia Narvaez spent part of her childhood in Puerto Rico, Mexico, Colombia, and Spain. Her first job was with the local public television station (KTCA) in St. Paul, Minnesota, as a 8- and 9-year-old: she was the voice of the puppet, Maria, on the Spanish-language-teaching program Ya Hablamos Español.[ citation needed ]

Narvaez subsequently worked as a church musician (organist, choir director), classroom and private music teacher (Brent International School in Baguio, Philippines; King of Kings School in Roseville, Minnesota), middle school Spanish teacher (The Blake School in Hopkins, Minnesota), and business owner. She also earned a master of divinity degree from Luther Seminary in St. Paul and is a published poet.

Narvaez earned her PhD in educational psychology from the University of Minnesota in 1993 and joined the College of Education and Human Development there in the Department of Curriculum and Instruction and the Department of Educational Psychology. In 2000, she joined the Department of Psychology at Notre Dame.

Narvaez was married to Professor James Rest until his death in 1999. She is married to Daniel Lapsley, a professor of psychology at Notre Dame.

Career

Narvaez was the design leader of the Minnesota Community Voices and Character Education project funded with $1 million by the US Department of Education during 1998–2002. She is co-author with James Rest, Steve Thoma and Muriel Bebeau of the book Postconventional Moral Thinking (1999).

Narvaez was one of five psychologists to be invited to speak at the White House's Conference on Character in Community in 2002. [1]

Narvaez's work emphasizes moral development over a lifespan, and the interaction between implicit and explicit processes in moral functioning. [2] She emphasizes the importance of early experience in shaping moral capacities. [3] Her current work is on the evolved developmental niche for young children (natural birth, extensive on-demand breastfeeding, frequent affectionate touch, caregiver responsiveness, self-directed social free play, multiple adult caregivers and extensive positive social support). [4] She studies the effects of early life experience on sociality, morality and thriving. [5]

In her work for the public, she hosts the website EvolvedNest.org which emphasizes the importance of nestedness for all ages in order to maintain wellbeing and compassionate morality. She co-created the film Breaking the Cycle. [6]

A recent emphasis in Narvaez's work involves indigenous wisdom, starting with her 2013 paper "The 99%--Development and socialization within an evolutionary context: Growing up to become 'A good and useful human being.'" She organized a conference in September 2016 called "Sustainable Wisdom: Integrating Indigenous Knowhow for Global Flourishing" resulting in the volume, Indigenous Sustainable Wisdom (2019). She and Four Arrows have a 2022 book, Restoring the Kinship Worldview. [7]

Narvaez's blog, "Moral Landscapes," at Psychology Today has over 15 million hits (as of early 2022) with the most popular posts being "Dangers of 'Crying it Out'" with over 3.1 million hits, [8] Five Things NOT to do to Babies, [9] and Myths about Circumcision You Likely Believe. [10]

Honors

Narvaez is a fellow of the American Psychological Association, the American Educational Research Association, the American Psychological Association and the American Association for the Advancement of Science. [11] She is former editor-in-chief of the Journal of Moral Education .

Narvaez's book Neurobiology and the Development of Human Morality: Evolution, Culture and Wisdom won the 2015 William James Book Award from Division I of the American Psychological Association. It also won the 2017 Expanded Reason Award. [12]

Several of Narvaez's books have won awards from the special interest group Moral Development and Education at the American Educational Research Association:

Selected publications

Books

Peer-reviewed papers

Gleason, T. R.; Tarsha, M. S.; Kurth, A. M.; Narvaez, D. (2021). "Opportunities for free play and young children's autonomic regulation". Developmental Psychobiology. Wiley. 63 (6): e22134. doi:10.1002/dev.22134. ISSN   0012-1630. PMID   34196394. S2CID   235696832.

Podcasts

Films

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Evolutionary psychology</span> Branch of psychology

Evolutionary psychology is a theoretical approach in psychology that examines cognition and behavior from a modern evolutionary perspective. It seeks to identify human psychological adaptations with regards to the ancestral problems they evolved to solve. In this framework, psychological traits and mechanisms are either functional products of natural and sexual selection or non-adaptive by-products of other adaptive traits.

Lawrence Kohlberg was an American psychologist best known for his theory of stages of moral development.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Kindness</span> Behavior marked by ethical characteristics, a pleasant disposition, and concern for others

Kindness is a type of behavior marked by acts of generosity, consideration, rendering assistance or concern for others, without expecting praise or reward in return.

Moral reasoning is the study of how people think about right and wrong and how they acquire and apply moral rules. It is a subdiscipline of moral psychology that overlaps with moral philosophy, and is the foundation of descriptive ethics.

Michael A. Slote is a professor of ethics at the University of Miami and an author of a number of books.

Moral psychology is a field of study in both philosophy and psychology. Historically, the term "moral psychology" was used relatively narrowly to refer to the study of moral development. Moral psychology eventually came to refer more broadly to various topics at the intersection of ethics, psychology, and philosophy of mind. Some of the main topics of the field are moral judgment, moral reasoning, moral sensitivity, moral responsibility, moral motivation, moral identity, moral action, moral development, moral diversity, moral character, altruism, psychological egoism, moral luck, moral forecasting, moral emotion, affective forecasting, and moral disagreement.

Lawrence Kohlberg's stages of moral development constitute an adaptation of a psychological theory originally conceived by the Swiss psychologist Jean Piaget. Kohlberg began work on this topic as a psychology graduate student at the University of Chicago in 1958 and expanded upon the theory throughout his life.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Evolutionary developmental psychology</span> Psychology field concerned with Darwinian evolution

Evolutionary developmental psychology (EDP) is a research paradigm that applies the basic principles of evolution by natural selection, to understand the development of human behavior and cognition. It involves the study of both the genetic and environmental mechanisms that underlie the development of social and cognitive competencies, as well as the epigenetic processes that adapt these competencies to local conditions.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Jean Decety</span>

Jean Decety is an American-French neuroscientist specializing in developmental neuroscience, affective neuroscience, and social neuroscience. His research focuses on the psychological and neurobiological mechanisms underpinning social cognition, particularly social decision-making, empathy, moral reasoning, altruism, pro-social behavior, and more generally interpersonal relationships. He is Irving B. Harris Distinguished Service Professor at the University of Chicago.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Positive adult development</span>

Positive adult development is a subfield of developmental psychology that studies positive development during adulthood. It is one of four major forms of adult developmental study that can be identified, according to Michael Commons; the other three forms are directionless change, stasis, and decline. Commons divided positive adult developmental processes into at least six areas of study: hierarchical complexity, knowledge, experience, expertise, wisdom, and spirituality.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Jonathan Haidt</span> American social psychologist

Jonathan David Haidt is an American social psychologist and author. He is the Thomas Cooley Professor of Ethical Leadership at the New York University Stern School of Business. His main areas of study are the psychology of morality and moral emotions.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Linda Skitka</span> Psychologist

Linda J. Skitka is a professor of psychology at the University of Illinois at Chicago. Skitka's research bridges a number of areas of inquiry including social, political, and moral psychology.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Melanie Killen</span> American psychologist

Melanie Killen is a developmental psychologist and Professor of Human Development and Quantitative Methodology, and Professor of Psychology (Affiliate) at the University of Maryland, and Honorary Professor of Psychology at the University of Kent, Canterbury, UK. She is supported by funding from the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (NICHD), and the National Science Foundation (NSF) for her research. In 2008, she was awarded Distinguished Scholar-Teacher by the Provost's office at the University of Maryland. She is the Director of the Social and Moral Development Lab at the University of Maryland.

Moral development focuses on the emergence, change, and understanding of morality from infancy through adulthood. The theory states that morality develops across a life span in a variety of ways and is influenced by an individual's experiences and behavior when faced with moral issues through different periods of physical and cognitive development. Morality concerns an individual's reforming sense of what is right and wrong; it is for this reason that young children have different moral judgment and character than that of a grown adult. Morality in itself is often a synonym for "rightness" or "goodness." It also refers to a specific code of conduct that is derived from one's culture, religion, or personal philosophy that guides one's actions, behaviors, and thoughts.

Moral foundations theory is a social psychological theory intended to explain the origins of and variation in human moral reasoning on the basis of innate, modular foundations. It was first proposed by the psychologists Jonathan Haidt, Craig Joseph, and Jesse Graham, building on the work of cultural anthropologist Richard Shweder. It has been subsequently developed by a diverse group of collaborators and popularized in Haidt's book The Righteous Mind. The theory proposes six foundations: Care/Harm, Fairness/Cheating, Loyalty/Betrayal, Authority/Subversion, Sanctity/Degradation, and Liberty/Oppression. Its authors remain open to the addition, subtraction, or modification of the set of foundations.

The triune ethics theory (TET) is a metatheory in the field of moral psychology, proposed by Darcia Narvaez and inspired by Paul MacLean's triune brain model of brain development. TET highlights the relative contributions of biological inheritance, environmental influences on neurobiology, and culture to moral development and reasoning. TET proposes three ethics that are the foundation or motivation for all ethics: security, engagement, and imagination. They differ not only in the recency of evolutionary development but also in their relative capacity to override one another.

Moral emotions are a variety of social emotion that are involved in forming and communicating moral judgments and decisions, and in motivating behavioral responses to one's own and others' moral behavior. As defined by Jonathan Haidt, moral emotions "are linked to the interests or welfare either of a society as a whole or at least of persons other than the judge or agent". A person may not always have clear words to articulate, yet simultaneously, that same person knows it to be true deep down inside.

Moral identity is a concept within moral psychology concerning the importance of morality to a person’s identity, typically construed as either a trait-like individual difference, or set of chronically accessible schemas.

Mark Alfano is an American philosopher and Associate Professor of Philosophy at Macquarie University. He is the editor of The Moral Psychology of the Emotions, a series of books published by Rowman & Littlefield. Alfano is known for his research on virtue ethics., virtue epistemology, social epistemology, and Friedrich Nietzsche.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Ross Thompson (professor)</span> American research psychologist

Ross A. Thompson is an American author and research psychologist. He is distinguished professor of psychology at the University of California, Davis, and is director of the Social & Emotional Development Lab. Thompson is known for his work on the psychological development of young children. His influences on developmental research and public policy were recognized in the Urie Bronfenbrenner Award for Lifetime Contribution to Developmental Psychology in the Service of Science and Society in 2018 by the American Psychological Association, the Ann L. Brown Award for Excellence in Developmental Research in 2007.

References

  1. "The White House Conference on Character and Community". Her speech was published: Narvaez, D. (July–August 2002). "The Expertise of Moral Character" (PDF). Education Matters. Vol. 7, no. 6.
  2. Narvaez, D. (2010). "Moral complexity: The fatal attraction of truthiness and the importance of mature moral functioning." Perspectives on Psychological Science, 5(2), 163-181.
  3. Narvaez, D. (2008). "Triune ethics: The neurobiological roots of our multiple moralities." New Ideas in Psychology, 26, 95-119.
  4. Narvaez, D., Panksepp, J., Schore, A., & Gleason, T. (Eds.) (2013). Evolution, Early Experience and Human Development: From Research to Practice and Policy. New York: Oxford University Press.
  5. Narvaez, D., Wang, L., Gleason, T., Cheng, A., Lefever, J., & Deng, L. (2013). "The Evolved Developmental Niche and sociomoral outcomes in Chinese three-year-olds." European Journal of Developmental Psychology, 10(2), 106-127.
  6. 1 2 "Home". Breaking the Cycle. Archived from the original on 2022-02-14. Retrieved 2022-02-16.
  7. "Restoring the Kinship Worldview".
  8. "Dangers of 'Crying It Out'".
  9. "Five Things NOT to do to Babies".
  10. "Myths about Circumcision You Likely Believe".
  11. "2021 AAAS Fellows". American Association for the Advancement of Science.
  12. "The Expanded Reason Awards winners have been selected". Archived from the original on 2017-09-08. Retrieved 2017-09-07.