by Morton Hunt
Here again we see the vague old terms “nature” and “nurture” taking on more precise meaning; we see mind being constructed not by the addition of nurture to nature but by the interaction between them, each affecting and being affected by the other. Mysteries begin to fade away; wonders take their place.
Personality Development
Unlike personality researchers, whose primary interest is measurement, developmentalists are concerned with natural history. They watch personality grow from birth on, and seek to identify the forces that shape it. And in contrast to psychoanalysts, who base their theories of personality development chiefly on what they hear from adult patients, develop-mentalists base theirs on firsthand evidence.
Part of that evidence adds much detail and meaning to psychoanalytic ideas about mother-infant attachment. This has been a leading topic of developmental research ever since 1952, when the World Health Organization published Maternal Care and Mental Health by the English psychoanalyst John Bowlby, who studied children raised in institutions, found them deficient in emotional and personality development, and attributed that to their lack of maternal attachment.
Bowlby theorized that the infant is genetically programmed to behave in certain ways (crying, smiling, making sounds, cooing) that evoke care and hence survival, and that the mother’s nurturance engenders attachment in the infant at a “sensitive period” of his or her development. This powerful special bond, which gives the infant a sense of security, is crucial to normal personality development; without it, said Bowlby, the child is likely to develop “an affectionless character” and to be permanently vulnerable to psychopathology.66
Bowlby’s views aroused great interest—and discomfort—in America, where the rising divorce rate and, a little later, the women’s movement caused a growing number of mothers to work, leaving their children with caretakers. Many child psychologists and developmentalists doubted that the sensitive period is as specific and crucial, or the mother as all-important and irreplaceable, as Bowlby said. But most of them agreed that, under normal circumstances, attachment to the mother (or mother substitute) does occur and is a major force in personality development.
Intriguing evidence of the harm done by the lack of attachment was shown in a 1965 study of infant smiling conducted in Israel. It compared babies raised under three conditions: in their own families, in kibbutzim (collective settlements) where they are reared in large houses by professional caretakers but often fed by their mothers for the first year, and in institutions. It is rare for one-month-old infants to smile at a strange human face, but with each passing week they do so more and more often, the behavior reaching a peak at about four months and then declining slowly. In the study, all three groups smiled often at strange female faces by the fourth month, but at eighteen months while the family-reared infants were only slightly less responsive than at four months, the kibbutz-reared infants were only about half as much so, and the institution-reared infants less likely to smile than they had been at one month.67
But smiling is a byproduct of attachment, not a measure of it. Researchers needed such a measure, and in the late 1960s Mary Ainsworth, a former colleague of Bowlby’s who had come to America, devised a relatively easy one. Known as “the Strange Situation,” it has been the mainstay of attachment research ever since. In the Strange Situation, the infant and mother are put in an unfamiliar playroom while the researcher watches them through a one-way mirror. Eight different scripts are followed, one at each visit. In one, the mother leaves the room briefly; in another, a stranger comes in while she is there; in a third, when she is not; and so on.
From about eight months to two years, the infant typically cries when the mother leaves the room (“separation anxiety”), and when she returns goes to her and clings to her. (There are, of course, temperamental differences that make one infant more anxious than another; the findings of the Strange Situation are generalizations.) If a stranger enters and does not smile or talk, an infant of seven or eight months will look at the mother and in a little while start to cry (“stranger anxiety”), although at three or four months the same infant probably would have smiled. Stranger anxiety dissipates within a few months, but separation anxiety continues to rise until early in the second year, then declines gradually throughout the year.68
There are several explanations for the appearance and disappearance of the two reactions, but the most widely held is that with growing mental capacity, the infant is better able to evaluate the situation. Stranger anxiety wanes as the infant gains the ability to recall pleasant experiences with other strangers, separation anxiety as the infant becomes capable of understanding that the mother will return.69
Ainsworth’s original aim was to see how infants react when their mothers are absent, but she unexpectedly found that how they react when the mother comes back was even more interesting. Some are glad to see her and go to her to cling or be held; others ignore or avoid her; and still others squirm, hit, or kick her if she tries to hug them. Ainsworth called the first reaction (shown by about 70 percent of one-year-olds) “secure attachment,” the second kind (20 percent) “anxious-avoidant attachment,” and the third kind (10 percent) “anxious-resistant attachment.”
After studying all three kinds in greater depth, Ainsworth and other researchers concluded that avoidant attachment occurs when the mother is emotionally inexpressive, resistant attachment when the mother has been inconsistent in responding to the infant’s needs. Still other researchers have ascribed avoidant and resistant attachment to such factors as the mother’s personality traits, lack of expressiveness, negative feelings about motherhood, rejection of the infant, and harsh responses to the infant’s crying or demands.
Some psychologists later identified variants of Ainsworth’s three attachment styles, finding her explanations too pat. Jerome Kagan is one.
A child whose mother has been otherwise attentive and loving, but has successfully encouraged self-reliance and control of fear, is less likely to cry when the mother leaves and, therefore, is less likely to approach her when she returns. This child will be classified as “avoidant” and “insecurely attached.” By contrast, the child whose mother has been protective and less insistent that her child “tough it out” is likely to cry, to rush to the mother when she re-enters the room, and to be classified as “securely attached.”70
In a study of his own, Kagan found that mothers of the ostensibly less securely attached babies had careers outside the home and, while psychologists might regard them as less nurturing, may have tried to make their infants self-reliant and able to cope with separation. The mothers of the more securely attached infants may have been overprotective and prevented them from developing such inner security.71
A valuable study conducted in the 1980s used the Strange Situation to measure the attachment of 113 one-year-olds to their mothers and five years later evaluated their behavior and mental health by means of a questionnaire given their mothers and another given their teachers. Of the boys who had been securely attached at one year of age, only 6 percent showed signs of psychopathology; of those who had been insecurely attached, 40 percent did. (Girls, for unknown reasons, showed no such connection between the quality of early attachment and later psychopathology.) The research team cautiously concluded that the results “lend partial support to the hypothesis that the quality of the early mother-infant attachment relationship predicts later social-emotional functioning.”72
Most research on the development of the emotions has been focused on the first two years of life, and for good reason. According to Michael Lewis and his colleagues at the Institute for the Study of Child Development, University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey, the primary emotions (joy, fear, anger, sadness, disgust, and surprise) appear during the first half year, the secondary or “derived” emotions (embarrassment, empathy, and perhaps envy) in the second half of the second year, and other secondary emotions (pride, shame, and guilt) soon after. Studies of infants’ videotaped fac
ial expressions by Carroll Izard and his colleagues and students at the University of Delaware have yielded related findings.73
Until a generation ago, developmentalists had no theory of the development of emotions; now they have several. These differ on various issues, the most important being whether the development of the emotions is due chiefly to the maturation of specific neural circuits or to social learning of emotional behaviors and their displays. In both views the emotions are said to assume specific form through learning, but one holds that the major determinant is maturation, and the other, cognitive capacity and training. Consider a piece of the evidence for each side:
First, the maturational view:
A team of researchers at the National Institute of Mental Health set out to pinpoint the earliest appearance of altruism or care giving in children by observing children in play groups and at home. Altruism is a form of behavior based on the emotion of empathy; the team expected to see the first signs of empathy at about age six, as predicted by psychoanalytic theory, but they could see that younger children—as young as three—seemed distressed when another child was in pain or unhappy. Going back still farther, they looked for empathy in toddlers by having mothers simulate pain or a choking cough at home in the presence of their child. Some years ago, Dr. Carolyn Zahn-Waxler, a member of the team, told the author of this book what the team, to its own surprise, found: “Even a one-year-old might look distressed when his mother cried, and in children only a few months older, we’d see unmistakable expressions of concern for the other person.” These reactions are almost universal and show up in predictable forms at relatively predictable stages and ages. “That suggests to me,” she concluded, “that whatever part experience plays, the organism is hard-wired with a tendency to respond empathetically.”*74 In very recent years she has been proven quite right: Brain scans—a subject we’ll come to later—provide abundant evidence that particular brain circuits respond in similar ways to the circuits of others in emotional states, and that this empathy-generating neural architecture develops very early in the infant brain and hence is very likely hard-wired.
Second, the cognitive-developmental view:
A curious bit of methodology, first used with children several decades ago, consists of unobtrusively dabbing rouge on a child’s nose and then putting him or her in front of a mirror. Until they are about twenty months old, most children either do nothing or try to touch the rouge spot in the mirror; at twenty months and older, most of them touch the spot of rouge on their noses. This is taken as evidence of the emergence of a sense of self; children realize that the image in the mirror is of them.75 Michael Lewis and a group of colleagues used the mirror-rouge technique to find out when and why the emotion of embarrassment first appears. Most children who touch the rouged spot, they reported, also looked embarrassed (the criteria: an embarrassed smile, a turning away of the head, and a nervous touching of the body), but most non-touchers did not. The team’s conclusion:
The ability to consider one’s self—what has been called self-awareness or referential self—is one of the last features of self to emerge, occurring in the last half of the second year of life… [and] is the cognitive capacity that allows for all self-conscious emotions such as embarrassment.76
There seems to be good evidence, then, for both the maturational and the cognitive-developmental views; the truth, one suspects, is probably an amalgam of the two.
An influence on personality development that has long been a leading subject of research is parenting style. Researchers have explored it by means of an array of techniques—observation, questionnaires, experiments, correlation analysis—and their findings, which have been quickly picked up by the media, are familiar to most literate people. Here, in brief, ignoring passing fads in parenting, is a handful of enduring findings gathered in recent decades. Bear in mind, however, that both genetic tendencies and external factors exert significant influences on personality development; the connections listed here between parent behavior and child personality are only correlations, and not always strong ones.
Discipline: Power assertion (threats and punishment) and withdrawal of love are forms of external control; they may produce compliance, chiefly while the parents are watching or can carry out sanctions. But discipline by induction (explaining why a certain act is wrong, how it violates a principle, how it makes the other person feel) leads the child to absorb the parents’ values and make them part of his or her own standards; it creates self-control.77
Child-rearing style: The children of authoritarian (dictatorial) parents tend to be withdrawn, low in vitality, mediocre in social skills, and often prejudiced, and, for boys, low in cognitive skills. The children of permissive parents have more vitality and sunnier moods but poor social and cognitive skills (the latter is true of boys in particular). The children of authoritative (firmly governing but democratic) parents tend to be self-assertive, independent, friendly, and high in both social and cognitive skills.78
Modeling: Parents are models for their children’s behavior and traits of personality. An aggressive parent tends to produce an aggressive child, a gentle parent a gentle child. When parents preach particular values but themselves behave differently, children will imitate the behavior rather than follow the preachments. Children are especially likely to model themselves on a nurturing or strong parent, less so a cold or weak one.79
Parent-child interaction: Children whose parents talk to them a lot develop higher verbal and social skills than those whose parents talk to them little. Children whose parents play with them a lot tend to be popular with other children and good at recognizing and interpreting other children’s moods and emotional expressions. The way the parent and child interact is likely to be the model for the child’s other relationships.80
Sex-role behavior: While many of the behavioral differences between boys and girls have some basis in biology, much sex-typed behavior is learned from the parents. It begins at birth, when parents unconsciously respond differently to boy infants and girl infants. It continues in direct instruction about how to behave and, even more important, in the child’s identification with the same-sex parent and imitation of that role model. Macho men tend to have macho sons, seductive women seductive daughters, and so on. The child tends to imitate even non-sex-role traits of the same-sex parent more than those of the other-sex parent.81
We could look at dozens of findings about parenting and personality development, but we have tarried long enough. It is time to see what develops when the child goes outside the home.
Social Development
“Go to the ant, thou sluggard; consider her ways and be wise.” The formicine activity that Solomon (or whoever wrote Proverbs 6) would like us to emulate concerns gathering and putting by food in good times. But the social cooperation of ants is far more remarkable. From the moment they emerge from the larval stage, they are perfectly socialized, their minuscule nervous systems programmed to respond automatically to the chemical signals and touches of their fellows with appropriate social behaviors—food gathering, housekeeping, defensive combat, and the tending of larvae and the queen. We, in contrast, need fifteen to twenty years to become relatively socialized and even then are not done but must adapt our behavior as our roles change throughout life.
For well over half a century, developmentalists have been using a variety of techniques to gather evidence about the processes of human social development. Clipboard on knee and stopwatch in hand, they have observed babies and toddlers at home and in nurseries, preschoolers and schoolchildren on playgrounds and in classrooms; interviewed parents and plied them with questionnaires; recorded and analyzed volumes of child conversations; told children the beginnings of stories and asked what they thought happened next; designed hundreds of experimental situations to measure the level of social development at different ages; and calculated the correlations between blood hormone levels and sex-typed behavior.
From all this (and much more) they have gleaned a mass
of findings. Some lend support to the psychoanalytic view of development, others to the social-learning view, others to the cognitive-developmental view, others to the cultural psychology view, and, finally, still others to the evolutionary psychology perspective. We need not sort them out but merely glance at a sample of the more interesting highlights.
Turn taking: The earliest lessons in social behavior are learned in the family, where in addition to the fundamental one of trusting another human being, infants learn the lesson, crucial to social relationships, of taking turns when communicating. Parents talk to the infant, wait until the infant responds with a sound or smile, and then talk again; the infant senses the pattern and, by the age of toddlerhood, even before uttering a word, will carry on with another toddler in turn-taking fashion. In the following bit of dialogue from a study of this process, Bernie, thirteen months old, has been watching Larry, fifteen months, mouthing a toy. He finally “speaks”:
BERNIE: Da…da.
LARRY:(Laughs very slightly as he continues to look)
BERNIE: Da.
LARRY:(Laughs more heartily this time)
The same sequence is repeated five more times. Then Larry looks away and offers an adult a toy. Bernie pursues him.
BERNIE:(Waving both hands and looking directly at Larry) Da!
LARRY:(Looks back at Bernie and laughs again)
