This inaugural issue by the new editors-in-chief brings together a group of cutting-edge developmental scholars who each report on promising new lines of theory and research within their specialty areas. Their essays cover a selection of important topics including emotion-regulation, family socialization, friendship, self, civic engagement, media, and culture. In the succinct, engaging essays, all authors provide thought-provoking views of the horizons in the field.

This is the 109th volume of the Jossey-Bass quarterly report series New Directions for Child and Adolescent Development.

Reed W. Larson is the Pampered Chef Endowed Chair in Family Resiliency and a professor in the Departments of Human and Community Development, Psychology, Leisure Studies, Kinesiology, and Educational Psychology at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He is author of Divergent Realities: The Emotional Lives of Mothers, Fathers, and Adolescents (with Maryse Richards). He is also the author of Being Adolescent: Conflict and Growth in the Teenage Years (with Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi). He has conducted research on adolescents' media use, time alone, experience with friends, and school experience. He recently completed a study of middle-class adolescents in India, and he was the chair of the Study Group on Adolescence in the 21st Century, sponsored by the Society for Research on Adolescence. His current area of interest is adolescents' experience in extra-curricular activities, community-based programs, and other structured, voluntary activities in the after-school hours. He holds a B.A. in Psychology from the University of Minnesota and a Ph.D. in Human Development from the University of Chicago.

Lene Arnett Jensen is Associate Professor in the Department of Psychology at Clark University. One line of her research is in the area of moral development. This work takes a "cultural-developmental" approach, addressing how moral reasoning is both culturally and developmentally situated. Her work has included members of diverse religious communities in India and the United States. In more recent research, she has addressed cultural identity formation in the context of migration and globalization. A current project with adolescents and their parents who have immigrated to the United States from El Salvador and India, examines their cultural identity development as well as ties between cultural identity and engagement with civil society, school, and family. Dr. Jensen received her Ph.D. from the Committee on Human Development at the University of Chicago. Her dissertation received The William Henry Dissertation Prize from the University of Chicago, and the 1996 Dissertation Award from the Association for Moral Education. Dr. Jensen is a member of the editorial board of the Journal of Research on Adolescence. During the 2005-06 academic year, she is a Research Fellow with the Academy for Migration Studies in Denmark.