Name Marc Lewis | ||
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Books The Biology of Desire, Bed Timing: The "Whe, Memoirs of an Addicted, Bedtiming: The Parent’s, Sin to Win: Seven Deadly St | ||
Marc David Lewis, PhD (born 1951) is a developmental neuroscientist known for dynamic systems approaches to understanding the development of emotions and personality. He is currently a professor at the Radboud University in Nijmegen in the Netherlands.
Contents
Career
Marc Lewis received his Ph.D. in applied psychology at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education at the University of Toronto in 1989. He was supervised by Robbie Case and can trace his academic lineage back to Jean Piaget through Case's mentor Juan Pascual Leone. From this neo-Piagetian origin, Marc Lewis began investigating cognition-emotion interactions: the influence of cognitive development on emotional and personality development, and the influence of emotion on cognitive and personality development, as a professor at the University of Toronto. This early theory and research led Lewis to incorporate the dynamic systems approaches to development that were emerging in the early 1990s. Following the work of Esther Thelen, Paul van Geert, Alan Fogel, and others, Lewis developed an integrated account of development as self-organization at multiple time scales to explain both the stability and change of emotional aspects of personality.
Through a sabbatical at the University of Oregon in 2000-2001, Lewis took the next step in developing his integrated model by delving into the neural underpinnings of emotion regulation. His current research program tests this model by examining brain and behavior in normal and clinically referred children and assessing neural changes corresponding with successful treatment. His papers on the contribution of dynamic systems theory and affective neuroscience to understanding human development and clinical syndromes have appeared in journals such as Child Development, Behavioral and Brain Sciences, Development and Psychopathology, and Perspectives on Psychological Science. He has also co-authored two books with his wife, Dr. Isabela Granic. The first is an edited volume of dynamic systems approaches to emotional development. The second is a guide for parents about when to attempt sleep training with toddlers.
Dr. Lewis' most recent book, Memoirs of an Addicted Brain, is an account of his addiction to drugs as a young man with accompanying explanations of the neurobiological processes underlying various drug experiences as well as the process of addiction itself.
Theoretical Model of Emotional Development
Lewis' theory of emotional development relates multiple time scales using characteristics of self-organizing dynamic systems as causal mechanisms. This theoretical model relates the moment-to-moment emotional experiences in real time to the moods that persist for longer stretches at a middle or meso-time scale. These events consolidate through the strengthening or pruning of brain connections to become the habits and tendencies of personality at a developmental time scale of years. A further extension of this model incorporated the evolutionary time scale in an attempt to resolve the dispute about whether basic emotions are "natural kinds".