Family and Contexts of Development

Mariano Rosabal-Coto is a retired Researcher in the Institute of Psychological Research and Department of Pscyhology at the University of Costa Rica. He completed his graduate studies at the University of Costa Rica and his doctoral studies at the University of Osnabrück, Germany. Rosabal-Coto's research areas have been cultural psychology and cross-cultural developmental psychology, and his main research topics are parenting and culture, divorce and parenthood, familism, culturally sensitive developmental psychology and recently the cultural conceptions of attachment. For more than 30 years, he has also been active as a practitioner for children, adolescents, and adults. Javier Tapia-Balladares is Professor and Researcher of Developmental Psychology at the University of Costa Rica, where he has worked since 1993. He obtained a degree in psychology at this University (1985-1993) and an academic doctorate in developmental psychology and psychology of religion at the Université Catholique de Louvain, á Louvain-la-Neuve, in Belgium (1996-2000). He is the author of Biopoetics of Adolescence: Identities, Beliefs, Bonds" (2019), which was awarded the "National Cultural Research Award 2019" by the Ministry of Culture of Costa Rica. He was previously the Director of the Institute of Psychological Research (2019-2023), where he founded the seminar on developmental psychology and was director of the journal Actualidades en Psicología. For over twenty years he has taught developmental psychology, research methodologyg, and psychology of religion in the School of Psychology. He has been a visiting professor in Belgium, Colombia and Chile and served as an adolescent and adult psychotherapist for twelve years. He is a contributor to the Semanario Universidad, as a columnist and translator, and has published two collections of poems Esta Coraza Tuya (2016) and Juego de Máscaras (2022).