Jerome Kagan


Jerome Kagan is an American psychologist, and Daniel and Amy Starch Research Professor of Psychology, Emeritus at Harvard University, and co-faculty at the New England Complex Systems Institute. He is one of the key pioneers of developmental psychology.
Kagan has shown that an infant's "temperament" is quite stable over time, in that certain behaviors in infancy are predictive of certain other behavior patterns in adolescence. He did extensive work on temperament and gave insight on emotion. Kagan was listed as the 22nd most eminent psychologist of the 20th century, just above Carl Jung.

Biography

Born in Newark, New Jersey to Joseph and Myrtle Kagan, Kagan grew up in Rahway, New Jersey. He chose to study psychology due to his attraction in being a scientist and to preserve his grandfather's interest in human nature. He was accepted at Yale University to study Psychology, where he earned his Ph.D. and he earned his master's degree from Harvard University. He earned a B.S. Degree from Rutgers University in 1950. While at Yale University, he assisted Frank Beach, a well respected researcher.
After he graduated from Yale University, he accepted his first faculty position at Ohio State University. Six months later, in 1955 he was recruited to be a part of the research team at the U.S. Army Hospital during the Korean War.
Once he had finished his time at the U.S. Army Hospital, the director of the Fels Research Institute contacted Kagan to ask him to direct a project that was funded by the National Institutes of Health, which he accepted. After that project was completed, he accepted the offer he received from Harvard University to be involved in creating the first Human Development program. Once he moved to Harvard, he remained there until retirement, with the exception of a leave to go and study children in San Marcos. He did this for a year, from 1971 to 1972, and then returned to Harvard as a professor.
Kagan won the Hofheimer Prize of the American Psychiatric Association in 1963. In 1995, he won the G. Stanley Hall Award of the American Psychological Association.

Research

While at Fels, Kagan did extensive research on personality traits beginning with infancy and continued through adulthood. He looked at whether or not early experiences affected the participants' future personalities, talents and characters. Kagan read up on all of the longitudinal information that was prepared, specifically, the responses to intelligence tests that were administered to them. When Kagan was reviewing the material collected in childhood and adulthood, he found that the first three years in childhood showed little relation to the data collected in adulthood. The results of the Fels study was discussed in Kagan's book, Birth to Maturity, in 1962.
Kagan's next research was in San Marcos, Guatemala. During this time, Kagan discovered that biological factors play a huge role in development and an even larger part in child development. Specifically, he found that these children had slower Psychological development when in their homes due to their restricted experiences. Once the children were walking and could leave the home, Kagan found that the psychological delay in development was only temporary, and that cognitive growth is malleable. In 2010, Kagan was involved in a similar study that focused on specific parts of the brain involved in behavioral inhibition in infants. Schwartz et al. performed a longitudinal study involving 18-year-olds and used neuroimaging to detect whether or not the ventromedial or orbitofrontal cerebral cortex are associated with the high/low reactivity of their 4-month-old selves. After undergoing a battery of tests, the infants were later categorized into two groups: low-reactive and high-reactive temperament. Results showed that the adults who had low-reactive infant temperaments had greater thickness in the left orbitofrontal cortex than the high-reactive group. The adults categorized as high-reactive infants displayed greater thickness in the right ventromedial prefrontal cortex.
While at Harvard University, Kagan studied infants up to two years and published his work in his book, The Second Year. Kagan's research found that there were major changes in Psychological functioning between 19 and 24 months, and that one-year-old children were sensitive to events that deviated from their normal experiences. Kagan also looked at the effects of infant daycare in response to Congress' proposal to fund federal day care centers for working mothers. Richard Kearsley, Philip Zelazo and Kagan created their own daycare in Boston's Chinatown, and compared these infants to infants who stayed at home with their mothers. This research revealed very little difference between the infants in day care and those whose mothers stayed at home with them with respect to cognitive functioning, language, attachment, separation protest, and play tempo

Emotion

Kagan proposed that emotion is a psychological phenomenon controlled by brain states and that specific emotions are products of context, the person's history, and biological make-up. Kagan also explained emotion as occurring in four distinct phases, including the brain state, the detection of changes in bodily movement, the appraisal of a change in bodily feeling, and the observable changes in facial expression and muscle tension. These emotions vary in magnitude and usually differ across ages and when expressed in different contexts.
Kagan questioned relying on individual's verbal statements of their feelings. He provided several reasons for this; he argued that the English language does not have enough words to describe all emotional states, the words to explain emotional states do not convey the differences in quality or severity, and translating emotion words from one language to another produces variations and inaccuracies. In addition, Kagan argued that research in emotion studies should be free of ambiguous and coded terms, and this emphasis on specificity remains a recurring theme in his current research on emotion. He called for a moratorium on the use of single words to write about emotional process, urging experts to instead use full sentences.

Temperament

According to Kagan, :
Temperament is perhaps what Kagan is best known for. He began his work on temperament after his research in Guatemala. Kagan primarily focused on children's fear and apprehension. He defined two types of temperament; inhibited and uninhibited. Inhibited refers to a shy, timid, and fearful profile of a child, whereas uninhibited refers to the appearance of bold, sociable and outgoing behaviours. Kagan found that at four months, inhibited infants tend to fuss and show heightened responses to novel objects and display intense physiological arousal to situations that barely attract uninhibited infants. In Kagan's first published work on behaviourally inhibited children, he established the connection between his work on behavioural inhibition to the works of neuroscientists like Joseph LeDoux and Michael Davis.
In 2008, Kagan and several other researchers conducted a study to examine if behavioral inhibition in adulthood can be predicted by certain behavioral characteristics in infants. The research hypothesized that the frequency of infant reactivity based on motor and crying dimensions is predictive of behavioral inhibition. As a result of his ground breaking work on temperament, we know that these characteristics have the ability to influence later behavior depending on how they interact with the environment. Kagan also believed that there is no guarantee of an indefinitely stable profile considering environmental factors are always changing and that both genes and environmental factors influence a child's temperament

Publications

He is the author of:
Some of the books Kagan has written or co-written include: