Human Development

Jeffrey Jensen Arnett is a Research Professor in the Department of Psychology at Clark University in Worcester, Massachusetts. He received his Ph.D. in developmental psychology in 1986 from the University of Virginia, and did three years of postdoctoral work at the University of Chicago. From 1992 through 1998 he was Associate Professor in the Department of Human Development and Family Studies at the University of Missouri, where he taught a 300-student life span development course every semester. In the fall of 2005, he was a Fulbright Scholar at the University of Copenhagen in Denmark; in 2010–2011 he was the Nehru Chair at Maharaja Sayajirao University in India; and in 2017–2018 he was a Visiting Professor at the University of Bordeaux in France.   His primary scholarly interest for the past 20 years has been in emerging adulthood. He coined the term, and he has conducted research on emerging adults concerning a wide variety of topics, involving several different ethnic groups in American society. He is the Founding President and Executive Director of the Society for the Study of Emerging Adulthood (SSEA; . From 2005 to 2014 he was the editor of the Journal of Adolescent Research, and currently he is on the Editorial Board of JAR and five other journals. He has published many theoretical and research papers on emerging adulthood in peer-reviewed journals, as well as the book Emerging Adulthood: The Winding Road from the Late Teens Through the Twenties (2015, 2nd edition, Oxford University Press), among many others.