Challenges in developmental psychology, a focus on Sustainable Development

Developmental psychology is traditionally of interdisciplinary nature with the aims to understand mechanisms of normative and individual changes and consistenciesthroughout the lifespan. The applied fields of developmental psychology target into health and educational sciences. The aims of developmental psychology cannot be reached without understanding and applying the underlying biological, senso-motoric, emotional, social, and cognitive processes that are intertwined with cultural context. The field changes in dependence on internal and external factors. First, the increase in knowledge, in each of the associated areas can change the focus of interest in subfields or the whole field of developmental psychology. Second, methodological inventions can boost the development of certain subfields or the whole field of developmental psychology. Third, sudden changes in cultural context, by global events, such as strikingly demonstrated recently during the COVID-19 pandemic, affect the focus of interest in certain periods in life, or in interventions. Fourth, there is a solid claim for a bias in research on and from Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich and Democratic (WEIRD) countries (Henrich et al., 2010), which affect inferences and impact from research in developmental psychology. Awareness toward the cultural context of research in developmental psychology, its limitations and generalizability, can change perspective and course of the field. In the following Specialty Grand Challenge, we would like to sketch the most important challenges we observe within the field of developmental psychology, which are dependent on the above-mentioned areas of change: changes in knowledge and methodology, changes or bias in environment by global events and cultural context