Jeffrey Jensen Arnett is the leading authority in the world on the age period from 18 to 29 that he named emerging adulthood. Dr. Arnett is a Senior Research Scholar in the Department of Psychology at Clark University in Worcester, Massachusetts. During 2005 he was a Fulbright Scholar at the University of Copenhagen, Denmark, and in 2017-18 he was a Visiting Professor at the University of Bordeaux, France. He is the author of the book Emerging Adulthood: The Winding Road from the Late Teens Through the Twenties, now in its 3rd edition, published in 2024 by Oxford University Press. He founded the Society for the Study of Emerging Adulthood (www.ssea.org) and served as its first Executive Director. He has also served as President of Division 1 of the American Psychological Association (General Psychology). Arnett has two children, twins Miles and Paris, born in 1999, and his wife, Lene Jensen, is also a professor at Clark. He has appeared on national television and frequently in print media, including a cover story in the New York Times Sunday magazine in August, 2010. His book (with Elizabeth Fishel) for parents of emerging adults, Getting to 30: A Parents Guide to the Twentysomething Years, was published in May 2013. For more information, see www.jeffreyarnett.com.
Lene Arnett Jensen is Senior Research Scientist in the Department of Psychology at Clark University, Massachusetts, USA. She received her Ph.D. from the Committee on Comparative Human Development at the University of Chicago. Dr. Jensen is the originator of the “cultural-developmental approach” to theory and research on human psychology. This approach addresses both what is universal and what is culturally distinctive about human development. For example, in Moral Development in a Global World published by Cambridge University Press, Dr. Jensen proposes that humans are born with a shared moral heritage and that, as we develop from childhood into adulthood, we branch off in increasingly developmentally diverse directions shaped by culture. Together with students and colleagues, Dr. Jensen has conducted research with diverse religious, ethnic, and socio-economic groups in countries such as Denmark, India, Kenya, Thailand, Turkey, and the United States. Dr. Jensen has edited a number of books, including The Oxford Handbook of Moral Development and The Oxford Handbook of Human Development and Culture, both published by Oxford University Press. For more than a decade, Dr. Jensen served as Editor-in-Chief of New Directions for Child and Adolescent Development. She and Jeffrey Jensen Arnett currently co-author four college textbooks on child development, adolescence and emerging adulthood, and lifespan development.
