
Nandita ChaudharyUniversity of Delhi | DU · Department of Human Development and Childhood Studies, Lady Irwin College
Nandita Chaudhary
Doctor of Psychology
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118
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Introduction
Publications
Publications (118)
There has been a rising call to decolonize global health so that it more fully includes the concerns, knowledge, and research from people all over the world. This endeavor can only succeed, we argue, if we also recognize that much of established global health doctrine is rooted in Euro-American beliefs, values, and practice rather than being cultur...
The article discusses psychological practices and knowledge from the Tenetehar-Tembé (an Indigenous people who live on many riverside regions in the states of Pará and Maranhão, Brazil) tradition. Their rites and narratives carry processes of construction of women as leaders. We argue that, through the community processes of construction of the per...
This chapter critically examines the concept of "optimal development" and its application to poverty, highlighting the limitations of a Western-centric approach that often disregards the cultural, historical, and present realities of communities with disadvantages. By framing poverty in purely economic terms, conventional models fail to account for...
Poverty is identified as a condition of disadvantage and instantly raises images of homelessness, hunger, and distress. This multidimensional phenomenon, characterised by the scarcity of resources to fulfill basic needs, affects individuals, families, and communities worldwide. To understand poverty, a range of factors need to be considered, like s...
The science and practice of Early Childhood Development (ECD) rely heavily on research from the Euro-American middle class—a minority of the world’s population—and research in or from the majority world is severely under-represented. This problem has been acknowledged in ECD, an applied field aiming to assess and improve child development globally,...
There has been an alarming rise in suicide attempts among Indigenous people in Brazil, leading to national concerns about the provision of psychosocial care and professional support. In this study, we make an attempt to understand the perspectives of professionals in assisting Indigenous people from a specific group, the Inỹ, and identify the speci...
This Element explores multifaceted linkages between feeding
and relationship formation based on ethnographic case studies in
Morocco, Madagascar, Sri Lanka, Taiwan, and Costa Rica. Research
demonstrates that there are many culturally valued ways of feeding
children, contradicting the idea of a single universally optimal feeding standard. It demonst...
There has been an alarming rise in suicide attempts among indigenous people in Brazil leading to national concerns about the provision of psychosocial care and professional support. In this study, we make an attempt to understand the perspectives of professionals in assisting indigenous people from a specific group, the Iny, and identify the specif...
Research on childhood in anthropology and neighboring disciplines has continuously broadened the range of the social partners that are
considered relevant for young children’s development—from parents to other caregivers, siblings, and peers. Yet most studies as well as
interventions in early childhood still focus exclusively on parents, who are pr...
Interventions to improve early childhood development (ECD) have moved to the center of the international development agenda. Organizations like UNICEF, WHO, and the World Bank are beginning to implement ECD interventions throughout the global South. This global ECD movement is driven by the conviction that early childhood development is causally li...
Global Early Childhood Development (ECD)-an applied field with the aim to improve the "brain structure and function" of future generations in the global South-has moved to the center of international development. Global ECD rests heavily on evidence claims about widespread cognitive, social, and emotional deficits in the global South and the benefi...
This inquiry proposes a theoretical-conceptual dialogue between Yoga and the philosophical bases of Gestalt therapy and mundane phenomenology. By expanding the gestaltic framework, we can better comprehend points of convergence and divergence between its theory and practice, vis-à-vis mundane phenomenology and Yoga philosophy. We posit that Yoga ca...
This contribution is a continuation of a debate in The Lancet Child & Adolescent Health about the scientific and ethical challenges associated with globalizing early childhood interventions. It consists of an original article , a critical response, and two replies.
Motherhood is a central construct in human development and childhood experiences worldwide. However, the cultural solutions in every community develop around specific cultural, ecological, historic and socio-religious beliefs and values that guide individual orientations. Among multiple generation, joint and extended families, the context of childh...
In Collaborative Realities, I will introduce and critically reflect collaborative realities, methods and practices probed during the artistic research project visions4people, that was realized in a cooperation between weißensee academy of art berlin and the Department of Psychiatry and Psychotherapy at Campus Charité Mitte by high degree students f...
Developmental Psychology is the science of human growth and development across the life span. Drawing from its parent discipline, Psychology’s developmental subdiscipline has continued with a focus on Western, industrialized, and educated populations while describing behavior. By eliminating cultural contexts from its discourse, the discipline of P...
Images are significant in shaping our understanding of the world around us. A picture has the potential of creating a story where the direction of a narrative is guided by an interface between symbolic meaning of the different perspectives, the picture itself and its viewers. The temporality locked in a picture frames several possible messages abou...
Adolescent aspirations are formed within cultural-historic reality. Accounting for diachronicity presents the stability, continuity, change, and transformation in personal aspirations and social expectations in a situated rationality. Additionally, cultural themes in personal values guide adolescents in their life course and self-development. The p...
Zagaria, Andò & Zennaro (2020) raise several issues for the study of the human condition, highlighting the precarious status of psychology on account of a core weakness: The absence of consensus about fundamental concepts. Using the metaphor of a giant, albeit one with feet of clay, the authors develop an argument about how evolutionary psychology...
In this article, we examine the place of culture in the human sciences with specific reference to psychology and the cultural histories of India. Despite the depth of scholarly writing on the intimate and inextricable ties between culture and psychological processes, core advancements and definitive positions in psychology have remained elusive. Th...
Play during early years gives rhythm to children’s lives, and although we make many investments in children’s play in our modern world, it is also true that children play under all conditions, even the most difficult ones. In recent times, social encounters and physical mobility have become impacted, and fear and uncertainty have become constant co...
Over the past several months, the world map has slowly transformed into darker and darker shades of red as the COVID-19 pandemic reached far, wide, and deep into the human population. Despite the differential spread in different countries, very few have been spared. It continues like a bad dream, but one that refuses to end. As the initial uncertai...
The working of the mind has fascinated human beings throughout history, and cultural traditions have developed about what it means to be human. The development of psychology as a discipline in India is relatively recent, stemming from twentieth-century Europe and America. Theories and methodological assumptions have been shaped by Euro-American bel...
Western Psychology reached India in the early twentieth century, but it was not until the 1960s and 1970s that cultural relevance became an issue. Indian Psychology gained attention as a discipline that derived from indigenous knowledge systems. The struggle between cultural relevance and global knowledge persists. Apart from this struggle, Indian...
This article contributes to a current debate on the ethical dimension of interventions into parenting and early childhood development (ECD) in low- and middle-income countries. On occasion of a recent paper by Weber and colleagues1 it contends that excessive scientific claims about the urgency and benefits of parenting interventions represent a maj...
The family in India is a vibrant, complex group that functions on the assumption of interdependence and complementarity of roles and relationships. Patriarchal and patrilocal joint families remain the ideal kin group for a large population of the subcontinent, but this can take many different forms related to co-residence, commensality, branches an...
Cultural psychology is a theoretical approach that treats human beings as intimately intertwined with the surrounding social world, which is filled with meanings conveyed through signs. It is based on the axiom that cultural contexts and psychological phenomena are assumed to be mutual, inseparable, and co-constructive. This focus fits the general...
Social changes and technological advancement have profoundly impacted the human condition, and the former world order has gradually become obsolete as domination and imperialism are no longer justifiable. In the social and developmental sciences, such a shift implies the expansion of theory, methods, and application to embrace diversity as a fundam...
There is a long history of studies of human development in different cultural groups, but studies of development that explicitly take globalization into account are more recent. Cultural practices change, but cultures have often been considered static. Studying developmental change in changing societies in dynamic global settings presents challenge...
Between the time this volume was conceptualized and its publication, the world has seen dramatic changes as a consequence of the COVID-19 pandemic, changes that have directly impacted international relations and globalization. Because this issue of Human Development deals with insights and alternatives regarding globalization, culture, and developm...
This volume asks for a fundamental shift in the application of the science of psychology. The principle of ‘evidence-based practice’ has become an established gold standard for clinical work that calls for scientific evidence to be used in standardized treatment manuals. In this chapter, I will focus on the use of this principle for family-based in...
The COVID-19 pandemic has led to a global surge in harassment and hate crimes against individuals of Asian descent, including Asian Americans. Misdirected blame and fear of COVID-19 is xenophobic, and simulates historical and systemic racism that frames Asian Americans as “perpetual foreigners.” Racial discrimination negatively impacts academic wel...
India’s cultural diversity is an illustration of sustainable engagement of people with their environment where cultural practices are in a delicate ecological balance often with meagre resources and harsh conditions. This balance is underestimated when programmes and services seek inspiration and guidance from global trends without adequate attenti...
The mind has been the subject of fascination since ancient times, and every cultural tradition has folk theories related to meaning-making, attributions, and explanations about being human. In this sense, the subject of Psychology is as old as humanity, although its rise as a global, scientific discipline is relatively recent, emerging from 20th-ce...
Theories from psychologists from the West have attempted to present a collective picture of children’s thinking and beliefs. This collective picture may or may not be representative of the developmental paths of children’s development worldwide. Psychological theories of child development in the formative years focus heavily on the growth of capabi...
The philosophy of Bruner transcends traditional boundaries in the study of the human mind with a new kind of psychology, one that frees the thinking mind from its opposition to feelings and also from the limitations of being considered an ‘inside-the-head’ phenomenon. It is with active engagement with the outside world that a child develops its und...
As a universal social institution, the family has always attracted much academic interest in multiple areas of study. This chapter examines the theory of family and explores family life in India. In order to provide an account of the Indian family in its multiple manifestations with its due place in academia, a critical examination of various theor...
In the original publication, the legends for Figs 4 and 5 were incorrect, such that each regression line was mislabeled with the incorrect country. Below are the correctly labeled countries. The authors apologize for any confusion or misinformation this error may have caused.
All countries distinguish between minors and adults for various legal purposes. Recent U.S. Supreme Court cases concerning the legal status of juveniles have consulted psychological science to decide where to draw these boundaries. However, little is known about the robustness of the relevant research, because it has been conducted largely in the U...
One of the central contexts of childhood apart from family is the school. That is, if the child does attend school. A staggering 1.4 million children between 6 and 11 years of age are out of school in India, among the top five nations in this category (Gohain, 2014). For these children, the fact of being out of school places several important limi...
This article examines the parent intervention program evaluated by Weber et al. (2017) and argues that there are scientific and ethical problems with such intervention efforts in applied developmental science. Scientifically, these programs rely on data from a small and narrow sample of the world's population; assume the existence of fixed developm...
The authors examined the association between working memory and response inhibition on the Stroop task using a cross-sectional, international sample of 5099 individuals (49.3% male) ages 10–30 (M = 17.04 years; SD = 5.9). Response inhibition was measured using a Stroop task that included “equal” and “unequal” blocks, during which the relative frequ...
Epidemiological data indicate that risk behaviors are among the leading causes of adolescent morbidity and mortality worldwide. Consistent with this, laboratory-based studies of age differences in risk behavior allude to a peak in adolescence, suggesting that adolescents demonstrate a heightened propensity, or inherent inclination, to take risks. U...
This article presents an accurate assessment of international aid and its failure to reach declared objectives. The reason for this widespread miscarriage is attributed to the inability to understand cultural differences. People’s opposition, resistance, or apathy toward interventions are credited to social-psychological predispositions. To save th...
This article considers claims of Mesman et al. (2017) that sensitive responsiveness as defined by Ainsworth, while not uniformly expressed across cultural contexts, is universal. Evidence presented demonstrates that none of the components of sensitive responsiveness (i.e., which partner takes the lead, whose point of view is primary , and the turn-...
This article explores ethical issues raised by parenting interventions implemented in communities in low- to middle-income countries (LMICs) with rural, subsistence lifestyles. Many of these interventions foster “positive parenting practices” to improve children’s chances of fulfilling their developmental potential. The practices are derived from a...
This paper examines the parent intervention program evaluated by Weber, Fernald and Diop (2017), and argues that there are scientific and ethical problems with such intervention efforts in applied developmental science. Scientifically, these programs: rely on data from a small and narrow sample of the world’s population; assume the existence of fix...
This paper considers claims of Mesman et al. (2017) that sensitive responsiveness as defined by Ainsworth, while not uniformly expressed across cultural contexts, is universal. Evidence presented demonstrates that none of the components of sensitive responsiveness (i.e., which partner takes the lead, whose point of view is primary, and the turn-tak...
This paper explores ethical issues raised by parenting interventions implemented in communities in low- to middle-income countries (LMICs) with rural, subsistence lifestyles. Many of these interventions foster “positive parenting practices" to improve children’s chances of fulfilling their developmental potential. The practices are derived from att...
Attachment theory is predicated on the assumption of dyadic relationships between a child and one or a few significant others. Despite its recognition of alloparenting in some cultural environments, current attachment research is heavily biased toward the mother as the major attachment figure in the life of the developing child. This chapter presen...
Attachment theory has its roots in an ethnocentric complex of ideas, longstanding in the United States, under the rubric of “intensive mothering.” Among these various approaches and programs, attachment theory has had an inordinate and wide-ranging influence on a wide range these four of professions concerned with children: family therapy, educatio...
Attachment theory has its roots in an ethnocentric complex of ideas, longstanding in the United States, under the rubric of "intensive mothering." Among these various approaches and programs, attachment theory has had an inordinate influence on a wide range of professions concerned with children (family therapy, education, the legal system, and pub...
This chapter presents an alternative view to classic attachment theory and research, arguing for systematic, ethnographically informed, approaches to the study of child development. It begins with the observation that the attachments children develop are locally determined, and insists that these features of attachment can only be captured through...
In India, people with a wide range of transgender-related identities, cultures, or experiences coexist—including Hijras, Aravanis, Kothis and Jogtas/Jogappas. These people have been part of the broader culture and were treated with respect in the past. Modernity has changed the situation for them, although on some occasions they are still accorded...
This book is about resistance in everyday life, illustrated through empirical contexts from different parts of the world. Resistance is a widespread phenomenon in biological, social and psychological domains of human cultural development. Yet, it is not well articulated in the academic literature and, when it is, resistance is most often considered...
Resistance is a notion that can be viewed both from a common-sense perspective and from a scientific one. This volume contains a diverse range of empirical evidences of common-sense resistance in different cultural conditions. In each case, there is linkage with theoretical dimensions. These experiences facilitate a focus on resistance as a potenti...
The dual systems model of adolescent risk-taking portrays the period as one characterized by a combination of heightened sensation seeking and still-maturing self-regulation, but most tests of this model have been conducted in the United States or Western Europe. In the present study, these propositions are tested in an international sample of more...
This book is about resistance in everyday life, illustrated through empirical contexts from different parts of the world. Resistance is a widespread phenomenon in biological, social and psychological domains of human cultural development. Yet, it is not well articulated in the academic literature and, when it is, resistance is most often considered...
Poetics has long been considered the preserve of the extraordinary person, one gifted enough to transcend everyday existence through his or her imagination. In its most limited sense, poetry is language in verse, and in its broadest, an approach to life itself. In this chapter, we will be using the latter meaning, exploring “poetic instants”, momen...
This book has integrated the realms of poetics in diverse ways. For instance, Octavio Paz’s (La Casa de la Presencia. Barcelona: Galaxia-Gutenberg, 1956/1999) masterful differentiation between poetic instants, poems, poets and poetry can serve as a platform for these variations. Some of the chapters deal with the poetic quality of specific events,...
This book explores the deep, imaginative, and creative power of poetry as part of the human experience. How poetry provides insight into human psychology is a question at the beginning of its theoretical development, and is a constant challenge for cultural psychologists and the humanities alike. Poetry functions, in all ages and cultures, as a rit...
According to the dual systems model of adolescent risk taking, sensation seeking and impulse control follow different developmental trajectories across adolescence and are governed by two different brain systems. The authors tested whether different underlying processes also drive age differences in reward approach and cost avoidance. Using a modif...
In the present analysis, we test the dual systems model of adolescent risk taking in a cross-national sample of over 5,200 individuals aged 10 through 30 ( = 17.05 years, = 5.91) from 11 countries. We examine whether reward seeking and self-regulation make independent, additive, or interactive contributions to risk taking, and ask whether these rel...
This study shows how Berlin (n = 35) and Delhi (n = 28) mothers scaffold a common and highly scripted social situation, namely gift giving, and enable cultural learning in 19-month-olds. Using modeling and prompting to encourage appropriate responses, mothers took culture-specific directions during scaffolding that were in line with the broader cul...
Frequently identified as collectivistic or inter-dependent in the mainstream, Indian society has long been known for dense social dynamics and interpersonal closeness among people, particularly within the context of the family. Although one could dispute simple categorizations, there is no denying that people are dominantly allocentric, even while...
This book brings together a group of scholars from around the world who view psychology as the science of human ways of being. Being refers to the process of existing - through construction of the human world – here, rather than to an ontological state. This collection includes work that has the goal to establish the newly developed area of cultura...
Families are social units that expand in time (across generations) and space (as a geographically distributed sub-structures of wider kinship networks). Understanding of intergenerational family relations thus requires conceptualization of communication processes that take place within a small collective of persons linked with one another by a flex...
Although fathers have received increased attention in developmental research studies, the centrality of mothers has remained largely uncontested. In several cultural settings children grow up in close contact with multiple caregivers in the family and community, but these caregivers are also discussed far less in developmental studies. In a changin...
Conventional psychological research has focused primarily on intrapersonal dimensions of human activity, often evading shared knowledge, interpersonal perspective-taking, and collective beliefs. The ideology of individualism and the ‘embryonic fallacy’ are largely responsible for the focus on the individual as an isolated entity. Most available met...
The overarching goal of the present study was to trace the development of mirror self-recognition (MSR), as an index of toddlers' sense of themselves and others as autonomous intentional agents, in different sociocultural environments. A total of 276 toddlers participated in the present study. Toddlers were either 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, or 21 months o...
The study was aimed at understanding moral reasoning given by children in the age group of 6 to 8 years under selected situations. Children's justifications for actions, presence of subjective responsibility, orientation towards justice/care, and sensitivity towards rewards are some of the phenomena that were explored. Age-wise trends were investig...
The present study investigates the relationship between mother-child interaction styles with 19 months and children's autobiographical memory with 3 years of age in two cultural contexts: New Delhi, India (n=25) and Berlin, Germany (n=33). Results demonstrate similarities as well as culture specificities. In both contexts, maternal elaborations dur...
This chapter discusses the specific strengths of Dialogical Self Theory for the exploration and explanation of the phenomenon of society of the mind as it is expressed in various intricate, culturally specific discourse strategies among Indians. By focusing on a recent social movement to demonstrate the particularity of cultural processes, personal...
The present study examined conversations of 164 mothers from seven different cultural contexts when reminiscing with their 3-year-old children. We chose samples based on their sociodemographic profiles, which represented three different cultural models: (1) autonomy (urban middle-class families from Western societies), (2) relatedness (rural farmin...
In a boundary-crossing and globalizing world, the personal and social positions in self and identity become increasingly dense, heterogeneous and even conflicting. In this handbook scholars of different disciplines, nations and cultures (East and West) bring together their views and applications of dialogical self theory in such a way that deeper c...
The present study explores the dialogical relationship between autobiographical remembering, self and culture from a developmental and trans-generational perspective. It draws on a comparative design including self-describing memories of 10 Indian students from Delhi and 13 German students from Osnabrueck. Moreover, stories often told about oneself...
Parents' beliefs and ethnotheories about family life in general and childcare in particular contain explicit and implicit ideas about the manner in which children ought to be raised. Cultural scripts, family situations, and parents' own beliefs and experiences have been known to guide parenting choices. Cultural practices in India have been deeply...
Using data from 195 dyads of mothers and children (age range = 8-12 years; M = 10.63) in four countries (China, India, the Philippines, and Thailand), this study examined children's perceptions of maternal hostility as a mediator of the links between physical discipline and harsh verbal discipline and children's adjustment. Both physical discipline...
In this cross-cultural study, we tested 2 main hypotheses: first, that an early self-concept along with self-other differentiation is a universal precursor of prosocial behavior in 19-month-olds, and second, that the importance attached to relational socialization goals (SGs) concerning interpersonal responsiveness (obedience, prosocial behavior) i...
This prospective longitudinal study is aimed at contributing to the understanding of cultural diversity concerning maternal parenting behaviors and conversational styles on one hand and continuity in parenting strategies on the other hand. It could be demonstrated that German middle-class families from Berlin and Indian Hindu middle-class families...
Cultures differ with respect to parenting strategies already during infancy. Distal parenting, i.e., face-to-face context and object stimulation, is prevalent in urban educated middle-class families of Western cultures; proximal parenting, i.e., body contact and body stimulation, is prevalent in rural, low-educated farmer families. Parents from urb...
The prevailing patterns of social relationships within a culture are important to consider during research. Since culture
is considered as constitutive for individual psyche, the manner in which research tasks are set-up also needs to appraisal
in the context of prevailing social networks in any given society. This paper deals with examples of rese...