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The Origins of You by Jay Belsky, Avshalom Caspi, Terrie E. Moffitt & Richie Poulton

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The Origins of You

How Childhood Shapes Later Life

by Jay Belsky, Avshalom Caspi, Terrie E. Moffitt & Richie Poulton

Narrator Susie Berneis

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Length 16 hours 52 minutes

Language English

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Summary
About the authors
About the narrator

After tracking the lives of thousands of people from birth to midlife, four of the world’s preeminent psychologists reveal what they have learned about how humans develop.

Does temperament in childhood predict adult personality? What role do parents play in shaping how a child matures? Is daycare bad—or good—for children? Does adolescent delinquency forecast a life of crime? Do genes influence success in life? Is health in adulthood shaped by childhood experiences?

In search of answers to these and similar questions, four leading psychologists have spent their careers studying thousands of people, observing them as they’ve grown up and grown older. The result is an unprecedented insight into what makes each of us who we are.

In The Origins of You, Jay Belsky, Avshalom Caspi, Terrie Moffitt, and Richie Poulton share what they have learned about childhood, adolescence, and adulthood, about genes and parenting, and about vulnerability, resilience, and success. The evidence shows that human development is not subject to ironclad laws but instead is a matter of possibilities and probabilities—multiple forces that together determine the direction a life will take. A child’s early years do predict who they will become later in life, but they do so imperfectly. For example, genes and troubled families both play a role in violent male behavior, and, although health and heredity sometimes go hand in hand, childhood adversity and severe bullying in adolescence can affect even physical well-being in midlife.

Science & Technology Family & Relationships Nonfiction Psychology

Jay Belsky is the Robert M. and Natalie Reid Dorn Professor of Human Development at the University of California, Davis. He was a founding investigator of the NIH Study of Early Child Care and Youth Development in the United States and the National Evaluation of Sure Start in the United Kingdom. He received the Urie Bronfenbrenner Award from the American Psychological Association.

Avshalom Caspi is the Edward M. Arnett Professor of Psychology and Neuroscience at Duke University and a Professor of Personality Development at King's College London. He is a recipient of the American Psychological Association Award for Distinguished Scientific Contributions to Psychology.

Terrie E. Moffitt is the Nannerl O. Keohane University Professor at Duke University and a Professor of Social Behaviour and Development at King's College London. She has received a host of honors including the Stockholm Prize in Criminology and is a member of the National Academy of Medicine.

Richie Poulton is the Professor of Psychology at the University of Otago in New Zealand, where he serves as co-director of the National Centre for Lifecourse Research. An elected fellow of the Royal Society of New Zealand, he received the New Zealand Prime Minister's Science Prize for the Dunedin Multidisciplinary Health and Development Study.

Susie Berneis is a versatile voiceover artist with numerous narration credits to her name. She has an ear for dialect and a love for the process of developing characters, which has been cultivated through her twenty-plus years of experience as a community and regional stage actress. Based in Ann Arbor (home of the University of Michigan, where she received her BA in English and theatre), she now takes great joy in playing all the characters she encounters in her narration.