ABSTRACT
In 1869 at Promontory, Utah, railroad track begun in the east by the Eastern Union Pacific railway line was ceremoniously joined by a golden spike to railroad track begun in the west by the Western Pacific, creating the first transcontinental railway in the United States. By facilitating travel between the populated East and the still sparsely settled West, the driving of the golden spike marked the beginning of an era of development in the west and in many previously unpopulated areas in the country’s midsection. The four chapters in this volume that are the subject of this brief commentary indicate that developmental psychologists, on the one hand, and we social psychologists, on the other, are beginning to mine the gold from which a spike eventually will be fashioned to join these two critically important but still relatively distant and unintegrated areas of the interpersonal relationship domain.
