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A growing body of research in the United States and Western Europe documents significant effects of the physical environment (toxins, pollutants, noise, crowding, chaos, housing, school and neighborhood quality) on children and adolescents’ cognitive and socioemotional development. Much less is known about these relations in other contexts, particularly the global South. We thus briefly review the evidence for relations between child development and the physical environment in Western contexts, and discuss some of the known mechanisms behind these relations. We then provide a more extensive review of the research to date outside of Western contexts, with a specific emphasis on research in the global South. Where the research is limited, we highlight relevant data documenting the physical environment conditions experienced by children, and make recommendations for future work. In these recommendations, we highlight the limitations of employing research methodologies developed in Western contexts (Ferguson & Lee, 2013). Finally, we propose a holistic, multidisciplinary and multilevel approach based on Bronfenbrenner’s (1979) bioecological model to better understand and reduce the aversive effects of multiple environmental risk factors on the cognitive and socioemotional development of children across the globe.

In this study, we examined developmental changes in infants' processing of own-versus other-race faces. Caucasian American 8-month-olds (Experiment 1) and 4month-olds (Experiment 2) were tested in a habituation-switch procedure designed to assess holistic (attending to the relationship between internal and external features of the face) versus featural (attending to individual features of the face) processing of faces. Eight-month-olds demonstrated holistic processing of upright own-race (Caucasian) faces, but featural processing of upright other-race (African) faces. Inverted faces were processed featurally, regardless of ethnicity. Four-month-olds, however, demonstrated holistic processing of both Caucasian and African upright faces. These results demonstrate that infants' processing of own-versus other-race faces becomes specialized between 4 and 8 months.Correspondence should be addressed to PROCESSING OF OWN-VERSUS OTHER-RACE FACESOnly recently have processing differences in own-versus other-race faces been directly tested. Many of these studies compare whether adults attend to the individual features of the faces, known as featural processing, versus the configuration of the features, known as configural processing, which is considered to be the more advanced form of face processing. What is meant by configural processing, however, varies across studies. According to Maurer, LeGrand, and Mondloch (20021, there are several different kinds of configural processing, including (a) sensitivity to first-order relations (i.e., the configuration of two eyes above a nose, which are SPECIALIZED PROCESSING OF OWN-RACE FACES 265 above a mouth), (b) holistic processing (i.e., gluing together the features of a face into a gestalt), and (c) sensitivity to second-order relations tie., perceiving the distances among facial features). Recent studies have now shown that both holistic second-order relational processing (Rhodes, Hayward, & Winkler, 2006) are affected when adults view other-race faces.Although adults show processing differences for own-versus other-race faces, little is known about how or when this specialized processing might emerge prior to adulthood. Most studies investigating the ORE in infants have focused on preferences or recognition, but not processing. For example, Kelly et al. (2005) found that infants as young as 3 months prefer to look at own-versus other-race faces, whereas newborns do not show this preference. Similarly, Bar-Haim, Ziv, Lamy, and Hodes (2006) found an own-race face bias when they tested Israeli Caucasian and Ethiopian African 3-month-olds on their preferences for Caucasian versus African faces. Kelly, Liu, et al. (2007) recently demonstrated a similar bias in Chinese 3-month-olds.In terms of recognition, Sangrigoli and de Schonen (2004b) demonstrated that, when shown faces wearing a shower cap, infants at 3 months of age are better at recognizing own-race faces than other-race faces under certain test conditions. Specifically, in a visual paired-comparison task, when familiarized wi...

One impact of globalisation is that adolescents today are frequently exposed to the values, attitudes and norms of other nations without leaving their own backyards. This may lead to remote acculturation-cultural and psychological changes experienced by non-migrant individuals having indirect and/or intermittent contact with a geographically separate culture. Using quantitative and qualitative data, we examined multidimensional remote acculturation among 83 urban Zambian adolescents who are routinely exposed to U.S., U.K. and South African cultures through traditional and social media and materials/goods. Cluster analyses showed 2 distinct groups of adolescents. "Traditional Zambians, TZs" (55.4%) were significantly more oriented towards Zambian culture and reported a higher level of obligation to their families and greater interdependent self-construal compared with "Westernised Multicultural Zambians, WMZs" (44.6%), who were more oriented towards U.S., U.K. and South African cultures. Furthermore, remote acculturation predicted somewhat lower life satisfaction among WMZs. These results demonstrate that individuals' behaviours, values and identity may be influenced by multiple geographically distant cultures simultaneously and may be associated with psychological costs.

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