Arnold Gesell and the maturation controversy

This article examines the work of Arnold Lucius Gesell and argues that he not only paved the way for contemporary research in motor development, but that he and colleagues anticipated fundamental issues about growth that must be addressed by psychologists and neuroscientists who are committed to the advancement of developmental science. Arnold Lucius Gesell was a pioneer in developmental psychology when the field was in its infancy. He worked diligently for the rights of physically and mentally handicapped children to receive special education that would enable them to find gainful employment. Gesell's writings in books and popular magazines increased public awareness of and support for preschool education and better foster care for orphans. Despite these achievements, many of his successors have questioned his views about infant development. Developmental psychologists have criticized Gesell for proposing a stage theory of infant growth that has fallen into disfavor among contemporary researchers. His conception of development as a maturational process has been challenged for allegedly reducing complex behavioral, perceptual, and learning processes to genetic factors. The author rejects this overly simplistic interpretation and contends that Gesell's work continues to stand the test of time.

G. Stanley Hall's contribution to science, practice and policy: The child study, parent education, and child welfare movements

G. Stanley Hall influenced several social movements that had great implications for child wellbeing: the Child Study, Parent Education, and Child Welfare Movements. However, while Hall laid much of the foundation for the field of scientific child study and policy-relevant research, his legacy is virtually nonexistent. The current article reviews the life and contributions of G. Stanley Hall, and the dual role Hall played in history as a revered leader of the Child Study Movement and a controversial figure in the landscape of early child psychology.

SECTION II. TEACHING AND MENTORING

The Black Caucus of the Society for Research in Child Development(SRCD) was founded in 1973 to address concerns about the portrayal of Black children in scientific research, the lack of participation of ethnic minority members in the governance structure of SRCD, and the perceived need for a mutual support system for minority scholars aspiring to productive careers in the child development field. In this monograph, early members of the Caucus describe its history through the first 25 years, in 15 chapters distributed among sections on Caucus history, teaching and mentoring, publications and research-related issues, and supportive academic institutions. Among the topics explored are the formation and goals of the Caucus, its structure and membership, Caucus members' achieving stature and influence within SRCD, mentoring through the Toddler and Infant Experiences Study (TIES), response to the Atlanta child murders,the successful Pre-Conferences, SRCD Monographs and milestone developmental publications by Caucus members, the role of African American scholars in research on African American children (including the use of an ecological approach to study family processes), linkages between theory,research, and practice in Project Head Start, the contributions of the University of Michigan and Howard University, and looking to the future for students. Appendices trace Caucus chronological history and identify early sustaining members. This volume celebrates the accomplishments of the Caucus while also revisiting challenges that have arisen both internally and through membership in the SRCD parent organization. Key thematic issues include: cultural deficit versus cultural difference; linkages between poverty, race, and empowerment; advocacy versus objectivity in scientific research; and how the cultural or racial identity of the researcher informs scientific knowledge. The collaborations of Caucus members and others in SRCD modified the lens through which children of racially and ethnically diverse backgrounds are portrayed in the scientific literature.

Kurt Gottschaldt's ambiguous relationship with national socialism

Kurt Gottschaldt (1902-1991) was active in psychological research in Germany throughout much of the past century. His best-known contributions relate to three "twin camps" he ran in the late 1930s. These twin camps were designed help assess the relative contributions of heredity and environment in determining the development of psychological attributes and behavior. Gottschaldt's conclusions favored a hereditarian interpretation of his results, and Gottschaldt promoted the relevance of his twin research to "race psychology." Although Gottschaldt is sometimes described as a defender of scientific objectivity who maintained independence from Nazi ideology during the National Socialist era, some of his work suggests that a modest revision of this view may be required.

[Using fairy tales and narrative strategies with the help of a sandpit with children suffering from conduct disorders]

Our research, focussed on art therapy with primary school children, guided us to the footsteps of women pioneers in the research about children's psyche, like Anna Freud, Melanie Klein, Margaret Loewenfeld, Dora Kalff. We have been inspired by their very personal but nevertheless somehow similar type of research, to work with the children in a blue sand pit, where they could construct and play their personal fairy tales. Thus they share with us their momentary preoccupations, without being forced to talk about them. They are revealing their internal structures, and are integrating, by narration and projection on those figurines in action, their deficient defense mechanisms as well as their negative tendencies. Based on this approach, we expect that there will by an amelioration of their social skills, an enhancement of their intrinsic motivation, and a diminution of their conduct disorders. The analyze will be done by questionnaires and rating scales constructed especially for this research, as well as by sociograms, with the help of descriptive non parametric statistics.

Historical reflection on advocacy in the psychology of intellectual disability

Advocacy by psychologists has often been portrayed as requiring immersion in the processes of public policy. In the area of intellectual disability, many relevant laws have been passed, court cases fought, and administrative decisions made. These policy decisions have, however, sometimes been based on a division of labor, with psychologists doing the research and lawyers and representatives of parents' groups carrying out most of the advocacy. It now appears that some of the earlier advocacy by psychologists in this area had unfortunate results. This is partly because some of it was based on flawed research and partly because our values have changed over time. Some more recent instances of advocacy, better grounded scientifically, had more favorable effects. Nevertheless, there is clearly not a simple linear relation between research findings and policy. Ample illustrations of these statements are provided in the careers of four psychologists who were influential as advocates in this domain during their lifetimes: Henry Goddard, Cyril Burt, Jack Tizard, and Donald M. Baer.

The early evolution of Jean Piaget's clinical method

This article analyzes the early evolution of Jean Piaget's renowned "clinical method" in order to investigate the method's strikingly original and generative character. Throughout his 1st decade in the field, Piaget frequently discussed and justified the many different approaches to data collection he used. Analysis of his methodological progression during this period reveals that Piaget's determination to access the genuine convictions of children eventually led him to combine 3 distinct traditions in which he had been trained-naturalistic observation, psychometrics, and the psychiatric clinical examination. It was in this amalgam, first evident in his 4th text, that Piaget discovered the clinical dynamic that would drive the classic experiments for which he is most well known.

Disclosing the Details of Child Sexual Abuse: Can Imaginative Literature Help Ease the Suffering?

PROBLEM

Research indicates that full disclosure of the events surrounding child sexual abuse, while therapeutic, is often difficult to achieve.

METHODS

A nonconventional research approach was employed in order to examine more closely the lived experience of these children. Two novels were analyzed using close reading.

FINDINGS

Details of the events and resultant dehumanization of the children were uncovered, as well as the rescuing role of the ancestor. Writing emerged also as a therapeutic tool that facilitated disclosure and helped to promote healing.

CONCLUSIONS

The analysis of imaginative literature enables the reader to examine sensitive topics like sexual abuse and contributes to its treatment.

Are animals just noisy machines?: Louis Boutan and the co-invention of animal and child psychology in the French Third Republic

Historians of science have only just begun to sample the wealth of different approaches to the study of animal behavior undertaken in the twentieth century. To date, more attention has been given to Lorenzian ethology and American behaviorism than to other work and traditions, but different approaches are equally worthy of the historian's attention, reflecting not only the broader range of questions that could be asked about animal behavior and the "animal mind" but also the different contexts in which these questions were important. One such approach is that represented by the work of the French zoologist Louis Boutan (1859-1934). This paper explores the intellectual and cultural history of Boutan's work on animal language and the animal mind, and contextualizes the place of animal behavior studies within late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century French biology. I explore the ways in which Boutan addressed the philosophical issue of whether language was necessary for abstract thought and show how he shifted from the idea that animals were endowed with a purely affective language to the notion that of they were capable of "rudimentary" reasoning. I argue that the scientific and broader socio-cultural contexts in which Boutan operated played a role in this transition. Then I show how Boutan's linguistic and psychological experiments with a gibbon and children provide insights into his conception of "naturalness." Although Boutan reared his gibbon at home and studied it in the controlled environment of his laboratory, he continued to identify its behavior as "natural." I specifically demonstrate the importance of the milieu of the French Third Republic in shaping Boutan's understanding not only of animal intelligence and child education, but also his definition of nature. Finally, I argue that Boutan's studies on the primate mind provide us with a lens through which we can examine the co-invention of animal and child psychology in early-twentieth-century France.

The evolution of beasts and babies: recapitulation, instinct, and the early discourse on child development

The field of "child study" emerged at the end of the nineteenth century with the purpose of disclosing children's "nature" for the benefit of parents, educators, psychologists, and other interested groups. Borrowed from the biological sciences, narratives of biological recapitulation were common in the discourses about child development during this period. Such theories often measured children against "savages," but they also suggested that the study of childhood offered clues into the evolutionary relationships between humans and animals. By emphasizing the relevance of children's "instincts," observers of child development explained child behavior as the tissue that linked humans and animals.

[W. Bion's contribution to the discussion on nature vs. nurture. Early development and psychosis]

This papers presents a Mother-baby model of interaction that generates the capacity to think, linked to emotional life. With this model is possible to shorten the distances between those who think that mental pathology is caused by constitutional factors and those who use the "tabula rasa" model and assume that the environment failures are the cause of the pathology. The relation between concreteness and abstraction is explored as the basis for the capacity to mental development.

Situating gender and professional identity in American child study, 1880-1910

The boundaries of psychological expertise in modern America were often imagined in gendered terms. Studies of child development served as one area where dominant notions of masculinity and femininity collided at a historical moment in which women were increasingly present inthe traditionally male worlds of science and higher education. Attributes that many female authors regarded as necessary qualifications for understanding child development (such as patience, sympathy, and maternal care) were routinely dismissed by male writers as contrary to an authentic scientific disposition. Thus, disputes over the meaning of child development (and the methods of studying it) indicate some of the ways that women's labor was both acknowledged and demoted during the formative years of American social science.

Conceptual, methodological, and statistical issues in developmental psychopathology: a special issue in honor of Paul E. Meehl

With the passing of Paul E. Meehl, Regents Professor of Psychology at the University of Minnesota, on February 14, 2003, the world lost one of the most influential clinical psychologists of the 20th century. The breadth of his interests, the preciseness and clarity of his thinking, the elegance of his writing, and his ability to integrate scientific and clinical matters of import were hallmarks of his illustrious career (see, e.g., Meehl, 1954, 1973, 1991). Yet, it is the very magnitude of his professional pursuits that defy categorization or even placement within a single field of inquiry. Whether they pertain to philosophical matters, measurement and psychodiagnostic issues, or elucidating psychopathological processes, Paul Meehl's contributions were seminal and established a base on which scholars could build their own theoretical and research perspectives. Although Paul certainly did not consider himself to be a developmental psychopathologist, his influence can be seen in the theoretical and methodological streams that have nurtured the emergence and growth of the field. Thus, it seems a fitting tribute to Paul that this Special Issue, “Conceptual, Methodological, and Statistical Issues in Developmental Psychopathology,” be dedicated in his honor.