Series Editor

A fundamental quest of the developmental social and behavioral sciences is to specify the necessary and sufficient early experiences that lead to typical human development in childhood and adulthood. Because the opportunity to experimentally manipulate early human experiences is very limited, one ap-proach is to observe the development and long-term outcomes of children who are tragically reared in atypically deficient early environments. Unfortunately, these studies usually are limited by a variety of con-founds (J. McCall, 1999), among them sample selection, selective adoption, and the multifaceted nature of the early experience. For example, children reared in substandard orphanages (i.e., those in which some aspect of care is substantially inferior to that suggested by best practices) display develop-mental delays in most physical and behavioral domains, and such children who are later adopted into advantaged homes have higher frequencies of extreme behaviors and problems than nonorphanage children. But are these contemporary and long-term outcomes associated with the particula