The Story of Human Development

For undergraduate courses in Lifespan Development

The Story of Human Development creates an engaging and original framework by integrating material on the typical individual's physical, cognitive, emotional, and social developments with how they might develop in different environmental contexts.

Faced with the challenge of authoring a text that could be current, scholarly, and comprehensive while also being readable and practical, authors Debra Poole, Amye Warren, and Narina Nuñez created The Story of Human Development 1.e, a far departure from the ordinary human development text. By organizing the text with each age bracket represented by a two-chapter pair, the authors are able to examine all aspects of the development process. With a narrative infused with the rich and diverse stories of people’s lives, compelling arrangement, unique connecting summaries, and a focus on guiding developmental principles, this text puts the science of human development into a framework that better explains and explores how a whole person develops within varying environmental contexts. 

Debra Poole received her bachelor’s degree from the University of Connecticut and her Ph.D. in developmental psychology from the University of Iowa. She began her career at Beloit College in Wisconsin and then relocated to Central Michigan University, where she is a professor in the Department of Psychology. Deb is an expert on children’s eyewitness testimony, false memories, and techniques for interviewing children and a Fellow of the Association for Psychological Science. She drafted the forensic interviewing protocol that is used in Michigan using recommendations from her book with Michael Lamb, Investigative Interviews of Children: A Guide for Helping Professionals (1998), as the model.

Amye Warren attended the Georgia Institute of Technology as a National Merit Scholar for her bachelor’s degree and stayed to earn a doctoral degree in applied and experimental psychology with concentrations in developmental and cognitive psychology. She then began her career-long position in the Psychology Department at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga (UTC), where she holds the Patricia Draper Obear Distinguished Teaching Professorship. She has published numerous articles on children’s language and memory development, the abilities of children as witnesses in the legal system, proper and improper techniques for interviewing child witnesses, and the relation between early language development and later reading abilities.

Narina Nuñez earned her bachelor’s degree from the State University of New York at Cortland and her Ph.D. in developmental psychology from Cornell University. She then joined the psychology faculty at the University of Wyoming where she currently serves as chair of the department with a joint appointment in the Department of Criminal Justice. Her research has included studies of the impact of child maltreatment on development, how jurors perceive children and adolescents, and whether modifications in interviewing techniques can improve children’s testimony. Nuñez serves on the editorial board of the journal, Child Maltreatment, and recently received the George Duke Humphrey Outstanding Faculty Award from her university.