Kagan, Jerome 1929-

PERSONAL:

Born February 25, 1929, in Newark, NJ; son of Joseph (a businessman) and Myrtle Kagan; married Cele Katzman, June 20, 1951; children: Janet. Education: Rutgers University, B.S., 1950; Yale University, Ph.D., 1954.

ADDRESSES:

Home—Belmont, MA. Office—William James Hall, Harvard University, 33 Kirkland, Cambridge, MA 02138. E-mail—jk@wjh.harvard.edu.

CAREER:

Ohio State University, Columbus, OH, instructor in psychology, 1954-55; Fels Institute, Yellow Springs, OH, researcher in developmental psychology, 1957-64; Antioch College, Yellow Springs, OH, associ- ate professor psychology, 1959-64; Harvard University, Cambridge, MA, professor of human development, 1964-2000, Mind-Brain-Behavior Initiative, director, 1996-2000, research professor, 2000-05, professor emeritus, 2005—. Social Science Research Council, member of Committee on Learning and the Educational Process, 1966-70; National Institute of Child Health and Development, Advisory Committee on Training, 1966-68; National Academy of Sciences, Committee on Fellowship Evaluation, 1967 and 1974; President's Science Advisory Committee, Panel on Educational Research, 1969-72; National Institute of Education, Panel on Development, 1970-74; National Academy of Sciences, Committee on Brain Sciences, 1971-78. Member of board of directors, Foundation to Improve Television (Boston, MA), 1969—, and of Foundation's Fund for Research in Psychiatry, 1970-74. Consultant to Department of Pediatrics, Massachusetts General Hospital, 1965—. Military service: U.S. Army, 1955-57.

MEMBER:

American Association for the Advancement of Science, Society for Research in Child Development, American Psychological Association (member, board of scientific affairs, 1965-66; president, division of developmental psychology, 1966-67), American Academy of Arts and Sciences (fellow), Institute of Medicine, National Academy of Sciences, Eastern Psychological Association (member, board of directors, 1973-75; president, 1974-75).

AWARDS, HONORS:

Hofheimer Prize of American Psychiatric Association, 1963; Wilbur Lucius Cross Medal, Yale University, 1982; Phi Beta Kappa scholar, 1988-89; Distinguished Scientist Award; American Psychological Association; Kenneth Craik Award.

WRITINGS:

(With H. Moss) Birth to Maturity, Wiley (New York, NY), 1962.

(With J.J. Conger and P.H. Mussen) Child Development and Personality, Harper (New York, NY), 1963, 6th edition, 1984.

(With Julius Segal) Psychology: An Introduction, Harcourt (San Diego, CA), 1968, 1988, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich (Fort Worth, TX), 1992.

(With others) Change and Continuity in Infancy, Wiley (Hoboken, NJ), 1971.

Personality Development, edited by Irving L. Janis, Harcourt (San Diego, CA), 1971.

Understanding Children: Behavior, Motives, and Thought, Harcourt (San Diego, CA), 1971.

(With R. Kearsley and P. Zelazo) Infancy: Its Place in Human Development, Harvard University Press (Cambridge, MA), 1978.

Growth of the Child, Norton (New York, NY), 1978.

(With Cynthia Lang) Psychology and Education: An Introduction, Harcourt (San Diego, CA), 1978.

The Family, Norton (New York, NY), 1978.

(With O.G. Brim) Constancy and Change in Human Development, Harvard University Press (Cambridge, MA), 1980.

(Contributor) Essentials of Child Development and Personality, Harper (San Diego, CA), 1980.

The Second Year: The Emergence of Self-Awareness, Harvard University Press (Cambridge, MA), 1981.

The Nature of the Child, Basic Books (New York, NY), 1984, revised edition, 1994.

Unstable Ideas: Temperament, Cognition, and Self, Harvard University Press (Cambridge, MA), 1989.

(With Nancy Snidman, Doreen Arcus, and J. Steven Reznick) Galen's Prophecy: Temperament in Human Nature, Basic Books (New York, NY), 1994.

Three Seductive Ideas, Harvard University Press (Cambridge, MA), 1998.

(Contributor) States of Mind: New Discoveries about How Our Brains Make Us Who We Are, Wiley (Hoboken, NJ), 1999.

Surprise, Uncertainty, and Mental Structures, Harvard University Press (Cambridge, MA), 2002.

(With Julius Segal and Ernest Havemann) Kagan & Segal's Psychology: An Introduction, revised by Don Baucum and Carolyn D. Smith, Thomson/Wadsworth (Belmont, CA), 2004.

(With Nancy Snidman) The Long Shadow of Temperament, Belknap Press of Harvard University Press (Cambridge, MA), 2004.

(With Norbert Herschkowitz) Young Mind in a Growing Brain, Lawrence Erlbaum (Mahwah, NJ), 2005.

An Argument for Mind, Yale University Press (New Haven, CT), 2006.

What Is Emotion? History, Measures, and Meanings, Yale University Press (New Haven, CT), 2007.

EDITOR

(With John C. Wright) Basic Cognitive Processes in Children, Child Development Publications, 1963, published with new introduction, University of Chicago Press (Chicago, IL), 1973.

(With P.H. Mussen) Readings in Child Development and Personality, Harper (New York, NY), 1965, 2nd edition, 1970.

Creativity and Learning, Houghton (Boston, MA), 1967.

(With Marshall Haith and Catherine Caldwell) Psychology: Adapted Readings, Harcourt (San Diego, CA), 1971.

(With Nathan Bill Talbot and L.E. Eisenberg) Behavioral Science in Pediatric Medicine, W.B. Saunders (Philadelphia, PA), 1971.

(With Robert Coles) Twelve to Sixteen: Early Adolescence, Norton (New York, NY), 1972.

(With P.H. Mussen) Basic Contemporary Issues in Developmental Psychology, Harper (New York, NY), 1975.

Robert L. Solso, Cognitive Psychology, Harcourt (San Diego, CA), 1979.

Jerome L. Singer, The Human Personality, Harcourt (San Diego, CA), 1984.

Arlene S. Skolnick, The Psychology of Human Development, Harcourt (San Diego, CA), 1986.

Sandra Scarr, Understanding Development, Harcourt (San Diego, CA), 1986.

(With Sharon Lamb) The Emergence of Morality in Young Children, University of Chicago Press (Chicago, IL), 1987.

Edith D. Neimark, Adventures in Thinking, Harcourt (San Diego, CA), 1987.

Melinda Y. Small, Cognitive Development, Harcourt (San Diego, CA), 1990.

Robert B. McCall, Fundamental Statistics for Behavioral Sciences, Harcourt Brace College Publishers (Fort Worth, TX), 1994.

(With Susan B. Gall) The Gale Encyclopedia of Childhood and Adolescence, Gale (Detroit, MI), 1997, 1998.

(With Robert B. Cairns and Lars R. Bergman) Methods and Models for Studying the Individual: Essays in Honor of Marian Radke-Yarrow, Sage Publications (Thousand Oaks, CA), 1998.

(Section editor, with others) Robert N. Emde, John K. Hewitt, editors, Infancy to Early Childhood: Genetic and Environmental Influences on Developmental Change, Oxford University Press (Oxford; New York), 2001.

(With Lawrence Harrison) Developing Cultures: Essays on Cultural Change, Routledge (New York, NY), 2006.

Contributor to books. Consulting editor, Harcourt, 1965—. Editorial consultant to Child Development, Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, Journal of Consulting Psychology, Merrill-Palmer Quarterly, Psychological Bulletin, and Journal of Educational Psychology.

SIDELIGHTS:

Jerome Kagan, "one of today's most eminent child experts, enunciates the developing edge of consensus in his field," observed Daniel Goleman in the New York Times Book Review. A preeminent scientist and former director of Harvard University's Mind-Brain-Behavior Initiative, Kagan has devoted his career to advancing the understanding of early childhood emotional development. According to Mark Caldwell in the Voice Literary Supplement, Kagan "has contributed mightily to the literature of child development." New York Times Book Review correspondent Carol Tavris commended Kagan for his "spirited and eloquent defense of psychology in a world of biological determinism."

Kagan's The Nature of the Child challenges the widely held theory that an individual's personality is determined entirely by experiences during infancy. "The book begins and ends with [Kagan's] assertion that currently influential accounts of childhood—whether Freudian, Eriksonian, or Piagetian—are too rigid," said Caldwell. "They all see growing up as an inviolable, continuous, ultimately mechanical process that builds an adult personality the way drops of water doggedly amass a stalagmite." Caldwell felt that Kagan's view of the child, "while informed by a thorough knowledge of research, is refreshingly hesitant. He offers biology as a promising guideline, but warns that since we haven't found a fully workable theoretical construct for growth and development of the child, we shouldn't burden the models we have with too much emotion." Noting that the prevalent conception of parental influence upon child development is "sentimental rather than scientific," Anatole Broyard indicated in his New York Times review of The Nature of the Child, that modern parents "are in the paradoxical position of trying to create our children while regarding them at the same time as self-determining." Considering it "inappropriate" to ask whether heredity or environment is more important in child development, Maya Pines suggested in the Washington Post that they "work together to create a human being." As Caldwell summarized: "You can't take all the credit if your child grows up to be Eleanor Roosevelt, then again you don't have to take all the blame if she ends up in a Cheech and Chong movie." Broyard concluded that, "while it's not for a layman to say whether … Kagan is right or wrong, he certainly stirs up interesting issues and brings a lot of experimental evidence to bear on them."

Dr. Kagan has structured much of his research after 1979 around the study of temperament. His experiments attempt to determine how the factors of environment and biology combine to create a child's personality. In one study, he observed that infants who were particularly sensitive to external stimuli grew up to be timid, while children who had less sensitivity became outgoing and relatively fearless. In Three Seductive Ideas, Kagan challenges three universally accepted tenets of human psychology, including the notion that occurrences in the first two years of a child's life shape that individual into adulthood. Another "seductive idea" the scientist addresses is the belief that humans are powered primarily by hedonistic self-interest. In her review of Three Seductive Ideas, Carol Tavris declared: "Kagan's own work on temperament is important in understanding the biological contributions to personality (and the role of environment in shaping them). But Kagan argues that what we feel, who we are or what we are thinking cannot be reduced to the workings of brain circuits or physiological measures of arousal…. Meaning transcends physiology. Taken together, these essays remind us of what we gain when we resist the oversimplified stories of human behavior so popular in our culture and take the less traveled road to complexity." Tavris further declared that Kagan "is that rare commodity: a distinguished scholar who has always moved easily not only between academia and the public but also between his own field of child development and related disciplines."

Galen's Prophecy: Temperament in Human Nature, which Kagan cowrote with several others, refers back to the ancient Greek concept of varying human temperaments that help determine an individual's personality and means of dealing with different situations. Galen was a Greek physician during the second century, and is considered to have first suggested that the varying temperaments existed and were affected by imbalance in various bodily humors. A reviewer for Publishers Weekly noted that the book includes "tantalizing speculations on how innate temperaments might affect vocational and marital choices," among other things. A reviewer for the Economist remarked: "These are electrifying and disturbing conclusions, so Dr. Kagan is keen to get his caveats in first, and he buries his results in many pages of careful warning against oversimplifying or misinterpreting the work."

In his book The Long Shadow of Temperament, which Kagan cowrote with Nancy Snidman, Kagan addresses how much of a child's future development can be predicted simply through analyzing his or her behavior at a very early age. The theory proposed is that biology does play a strong factor in a child's social development. In one example, a four-month-old infant is settled into a bouncy seat and presented with a series of colorful new toys, one at a time. According to Kagan, the child's reaction can indicate how adaptable they are socially when they get a little older. Children who cry through the process are more likely to be unhappy in grade school and less likely to be highly sociable, popular students, whereas a calm reaction predicts a calmer individual later in life, though it also might be a sign of a child who will ignore parental authority as well. Christopher Shea, reviewing the book for the Boston Globe Online, commented of Kagan's theory that "although he would hate to hear it put this way, biology does sound an awful lot like destiny." Kagan, however, prefers to refer to it as a case of temperament, harkening back to his earlier work, and the still earlier efforts of Galen, the Greek physician. His ideas, though not new, are controversial as they buck the modern tide of accepted theories of child development that give a child's environment and experiences heavy weighting, and that consider the attachment of a child to its parent—in most cases the mother—as vital during the first year of development in order for the child to have a healthy life later on.

Much of Kagan's work and his theories were prompted during a trip he took to Guatemala in 1972. At that time, he was exposed to infants who received minimal stimulation but sufficient nurture because of the cultural belief that young infants were vulnerable to the evil eye and therefore should not be seen by others. These infants were apathetic and resembled those who are mentally retarded. But the five-year-olds in the same village were normal and resembled typical American children. In Kagan's estimation, whatever developmental stages were retarded during that early period of isolation the children were able to make up as soon as they emerged into what Westerners might consider a more typical and nurturing environment. The experience led Kagan to conduct numerous studies and experiments of his own over the years to determine how best to counteract early childhood deprivations.

In An Argument for Mind, Kagan reflects on the course of his career and examines the ways in which his research has developed, with some concepts growing to fruition and many others thrown to the side as inaccurate over the years. He goes on to include the work of other scientists in his analysis of where the investiga- tion of child development and psychology has advanced through their joint efforts. Regarding child development in the current age, he singles out what he considers to be major issues and failings on the part of American society, such as materialism and selfish, individualist prioritization, and how he believes these have altered the ways in which American children develop. He does, however, indicate that he sees a change on the horizon and a greater awareness of the necessity to promote a healthier environment for the future of the nation. E. James Lieberman, writing for the Library Journal, opined that "Kagan displays broad knowledge of science, literature, art, and history but relatively little self-disclosure." However, a reviewer for Publishers Weekly found the book to be "written with masterly clarity and accessibility." Edward Feser, writing for National Review, commented that "when he sticks to psychology Kagan has many wise and interesting things to say. If it is progress to abandon deep-seated errors and recover ancient truths, then modern psychology—should it heed Kagan's advice—promises to make great progress indeed."

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

PERIODICALS

Economist, July 23, 1994, review of Galen's Prophecy: Temperament in Human Nature, p. 85.

Library Journal, June 1, 2006, E. James Lieberman, review of An Argument for Mind, p. 138.

National Review, September 11, 2006, Edward Feser, "Mind over Matter," p. 48.

New York Times, September 14, 1984, Anatole Broyard, review of The Nature of the Child.

New York Times Book Review, November 18, 1984, Daniel Goleman, review of The Nature of the Child; February 7, 1999, Carol Tavris, review of Three Seductive Ideas, p. 13.

Publishers Weekly, April 11, 1994, review of Galen's Prophecy, p. 49; April 3, 2006, review of An Argument for Mind, p. 59.

Voice Literary Supplement, November, 1984, Mark Caldwell, review of The Nature of the Child.

Washington Post, January 11, 1981, Maya Pines.

ONLINE

Boston Globe Online,http://www.boston.com/ (August 29, 2004), Christopher Shea, "The Temperamentalist."