Under the direction of her mentor, the anthropologist, Franz Boaz, Margaret Mead sought to study whether adolescence was a 'period of mental and emotional distress for the growing girl as inevitably as teething is a period for the small baby? Can we think of adolescence as a time in the life history of every girl which carries with it symptoms of conflict and stress as surely as it implies a change in the girls' body.' Many contemporaries believed that the 'storm and stress' of adolescence was biologically determined following a three-volume study of largely male adolescents by American psychologist G.

Mead's work had taken shape against a backdrop of broader anxieties about American youth generally and female adolescents specifically who were openly challenging social and sexual mores.

In Mead's book that became a best seller and unleashed a storm of controversy, she argued that it was cultural factors rather than biological forces that caused adolescents to experience emotional and psychological stress.

Typical contributors include political scientists and political behaviorists biosecurity and international-security experts life scientists, clinicians, health-policy scholars, and bioethicists moral and evolutionary philosophers environmental scientists and ecological economists political-behavioral and environmental historians science-policy scholars and historians of science and legal scholars.In 1928, Martha Mead published Coming of Age in Samoa, an anthropological work based on field work she had conducted on female adolescents in Samoa. The PLS topic range is exceptionally broad: evolutionary and laboratory insights into political behavior, including political violence, from group conflict to war, terrorism, and torture political analysis of life-sciences research, health policy, environmental policy, and biosecurity policy and philosophical analysis of life-sciences problems, such as bioethical controversies.

PLS is owned and published by the Association for Politics and the Life Sciences, the APLS, which is both an American Political Science Association (APSA) Related Group and an American Institute of Biological Sciences (AIBS) Member Society. Politics and the Life Sciences is an interdisciplinary peer-reviewed journal with a global audience.

Coming of Age in Samoa by Margaret Mead