A History Of Developmental Psychology In Autobiography

Dennis N Thompson

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• eBook ISBN: 9780429721106
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Psychologie
• Subtopic: Entwicklungspsychologie

The ten original essays presented here chart the personal and professional life experiences of these remarkable contributors from the discipline of developmental psychology. Employing the autobiographical approach, the book provides a unique view of how research and scientific inquiries are conducted while adding the human dimension generally absen

1
Louise Bates Ames

Birth, Family Background, Early Years

I was born in Portland, Maine, in 1908, the oldest child of Samuel L. and Annie E. Bates. I had two brothers, John and Silas. Looking back, I appreciate that I must have had a rather unusually privileged childhood—as of course did many who grew up in that time and place.

Life was for the most part, for many of us, serene and secure. The area of Portland in which I lived (Deering) housed an extremely homogeneous population— mostly WASPs. In fact, at our elementary school a very large proportion of the children (some said as high as 75 percent) had parents who had attended the same school. The major diversity actually seemed to be a matter of what church one attended, and most people did belong to one church or another.

Ours was a very close-knit neighborhood. School, church, and shopping areas all were within walking distance, and "everybody" knew everybody. This may in part have accounted for the good behavior of the children—anyone attempting to get away with anything was inevitably spotted by some familiar adult.

My father, Judge Samuel L. Bates, was a very firm disciplinarian. We accepted this, in fact took it for granted, since we admired him vastly. We thought he knew everything and could solve any problem. This notion was shared by many people in town, and to some extent I basked in my father's reflected glory. "Oh! Judge Bates's daughter," people would say, as later they might comment, "Yes, she works with Dr. Gesell!"

Our family atmosphere was more intellectual than emotional. Ours was a bookish household. We spent many a pleasant evening by the fire, our parents reading to us, until, or even after, we were able to read for ourselves. Also, since my father was a devoted naturalist and there were plenty of woods available, both in Portland and in South Brooksville, where we spent summer vacations, we spent a good deal of time with him in the woods learning about trees and flowers.

Our lives flowed along rather evenly, with the understanding that we would do well in school and eventually go to college and on to professional lives. I was in the fifth grade when the notion hit me that it would really be fun to be a secretary, but since I would be going on to college I supposed I should choose a profession. I chose law, and from then on during summer vacations spent a good deal of time in my father's office.

I attended Leland primary school, Longfellow grammar school, and Deering High, My choice of a college was influenced more by the high school than by my parents. They both had attended normal school but not college and so had no special affiliation. Our high school for some reason favored Wheaton College in Norton, Massachusetts, and I spent my first two college years there.

College and Graduate Education

Wheaton turned out not to be a happy choice. I did not enjoy it, and they were not entirely satisfied with me. In the middle of my sophomore year, at my own suggestion, I arranged to transfer to the University of Maine for my junior and senior years.

Maine and I were a much better match. At Wheaton there was a good deal of talk about people's coming out parties and whether or not they were going to Europe for the summer. At Maine people asked one another if they had a job for the summer, and I knew some students who came to college with as little as one hundred dollars (all their families could spare) and earned the rest of what they needed.

The level of instruction, too, seemed far superior at Maine. In fact, the contrast in one area was so great that after a course in psychology at Wheaton I was so bewildered as to what it was all about that I vowed never to take psychology again. At Maine, the psychology courses under Dr. Dickinson, head of the department, were so superior that when an early marriage made it seem impractical for me to pursue my idea of being a lawyer and working in my father's office, I decided to choose child psychology as my profession.

The University of Maine turned out to be a good choice in many respects. To begin with, I had a wonderful time. Wheaton had been more or less a convent— no riding in cars even in the daytime, and no being off campus (with or without boys) after 6 P.M. Maine was a holiday in comparison. We really did enjoy ourselves, and I learned a lot.

My undergraduate courses, especially psychology but also other courses, were interesting and comfortable. And after eloping in my senior spring and taking a year off to pursue parenthood, my husband and I returned to campus in the fall of 1932. I worked half-time and studied half-time, ending up in the spring of 1933 with a master's degree in psychology and a minor in education.

Among the courses I perhaps enjoyed the most were project courses in psychology. In these projects I could choose what I wished to study. Before marrying, I had carried out a project on dreams. After marriage, I completed a second project comparing dreams during pregnancy with dreams during nonpregnancy.

Possibly my most useful bit of study at Maine, however, was the work I did toward my master's thesis—"Growth of Motor Coordination in One Child from Birth to Two Years" (Ames, 1933)—in which I used my own daughter¹ as my subject. With my great personal enthusiasm for language, I would have preferred to have studied language. Dr. Dickinson discouraged me on the grounds that McCarthy and others had adequately covered this area. Actually, my work on motor behavior fit in more effectively with the work I was to do at Yale than language would have, so it turned out to be a happy choice.

Not so fortunate was my graduate work at Yale, which was neither pleasant nor productive, so it's perhaps best to comment on it only briefly. For detail, see my autobiographic chapter in C. Eugene Walker's The History of Clinical Psychology in Autobiography (Ames, 1993).

Though I went to Yale to study child behavior with Dr. Gesell, it was not possible to get a degree in child behavior or even clinical psychology. In fact, no courses were offered in either field. I was forced to get my Ph.D. in experimental psychology. Yale's position appeared to be that any proper psychologist would be doing experiments, in all likelihood experiments of such an esoteric nature that we would need to be able to make our own equipment (thus our classes in "shop").

Both assumptions were ludicrous as far as I was concerned, and I did not star. In fact, at the end of the first year, Dr. Roswell Angier, then head of the psychology department, called me in and asked me, "Why don't you go away, Mrs. Ames? You will never become a psychologist and even if you did no one would hire you."

During the years in which I was a student at Yale, Clark Hull and his students were the dominating force in the psychology department. Their contempt for clinical and child psychology was not hidden. Hull and his students, especially Kenneth Spence and Neal Miller, who with their "neobehavioristic" theories of conditioning and learning dominated psychology at Yale, did not appreciate Dr. Gesell and his work.

Enough said. I endured the requirements of the psychology department and thoroughly appreciated my work as research assistant to Dr. Gesell. The good more than balanced the bad, and in 1936, at the end of three years, I did receive my degree.

Research: The Early Years, 1933-1950

Though a modest amount of my time in my years at Yale was spent in clinical work, for the most part my work with Dr. Gesell was primarily in the field of research. Few researchers can have been offered a more fruitful opportunity. Dr. Gesell, himself enamored with the cinema and its possibilities in the study of infant and child behavior, assigned me to an analysis of the massive amount of film material that had been gathered at the Yale Clinic of Child Development.

My first research thus was conducted almost exclusively by the method of cinemanalysis. Perhaps the significance of this was in my doctoral dissertation, "The Ontogenetic Organization of Prone Behavior in Human Infancy," published jointly with Dr. Gesell (Gesell & Ames, 1940). This thesis demonstrated that infant behavior does indeed develop in a patterned, predictable way.

However, the study had far more than this rather predictable outcome. It demonstrated to our surprise that behavior does not develop in what we had expected to be more or less a straight line—the infant when first placed prone on a flat surface being pretty much flexed as to arms and legs and gradually, age by age, becoming more extended. Instead, as my notes suggested, "Oddly enough this 20 weeks infant is more flexed than he was four weeks earlier." Time and again this kind of seeming regression was noted.

It was also noted that ages when arms and legs were adducted seemed to alternate with ages when they were abducted—again a lack of straight-line development. These rather simple observations eventually led to what Dr. Gesell termed a principle of "Reciprocal Neuromotor Interweaving" (Gesell, 1939).

My observations about prone behavior, and Dr. Gesell's conceptualization or this observation, fit with a notion that Dr. Frances L. Ilg of our staff was developing through the 1930s. Her concept was that just as each human being has his or her own individuality that is in some ways unique, so does each age level have its own individuality. Thus, a two-and-a-half-year-old child is not simply a bigger and more mature two-year-old but is in many ways a quite different personality. A three-and-a-half-year-old is not simply a bigger and more capable three. But rather, fitting in with our newly developing theory of Reciprocal Interweaving, ages of equilibrium seemed systematically to alternate with ages of disequilibrium as the child grows older, and also ages of inwardized behavior might alternate systematically with ages of outwardized behavior.

This notion or the way behavior develops caught on rather slowly, but now in the 1990s it is rather generally accepted by scientists and parents alike—some of whom may not even be familiar with the name Gesell. The phrase "the terrible twos" (incorrect in that it tends to be the two-and-a-half-year-old who actually is in a state of disequilibrium) is today part of common parlance.

At any rate, it does seem fair to say that this now common way of looking at child behavior had its roots in this early study of prone progression, in Dr. Ilg's inspiration that each age level does have its own individuality, and in Dr. Gesell's combining these notions into his now accepted theory of Reciprocal Interweaving.

Our findings were eventually written up in three books for parents—Infant and Child in the Culture of Today (Gesell, Ilg, Arnes & Learned, 1943), The Child from Five to Ten (Gesell, Ilg, Ames & Bullis, 1946), and Youth: The Years from Ten to Sixteen (Gesell, Ilg & Ames, 1956).

Though professional people who are environmentally oriented have for the past seventy years or so objected vigorously to much of our work and to our basic notion that much of any individual's behavior is determined by his or her body, for some reason our descriptions of the various ages seem not to have aroused much antagonism. Not only parents but many psychologists and educators seem to accept this basic concept.

This lack of opposition is very likely due to the fact that our books that deal with the kinds of behavior to be expected at the various ages have been directed primarily to parents rather than psychologists. Parents for the most part are interested in information and advice that fits their own experience and that "works." They tend to be less contentious and less opinionated than professionals.

Though many people like to think of the broad sweep provided by viewing age changes for a long range of behavior—one to five, six to ten, ten to sixteen—it gradually became evident that most parents were primarily interested in obtaining information about their own child's immediate age. Thus, with the help of our attorney, Harriet Pilpel, and with the permission of Harold Grove, then our editor at Harper & Row, we began what turned out to be our most widely accepted series of books for parents. Titled, perhaps rather unimaginatively, Your One-(Two-, Three-, Four-, Five-, Six-, Seven-, Eight-, and Nine-)Year-Old, these are as of this writing our best-selling books, and books that do not seem to arouse the kind of opposition to our work that some of our other publications have elicited (Ames, Ilg & Haber, 1976-1987).

Your Ten to Fourteen-Year-old (Ames, Ilg & Baker, 1988) is a revision or our earlier Youth: The Years from Ten to Sixteen, originally published by Harper & Row. That book, when revised at the request of the publisher, was rejected by a feminist editor on the grounds that it was "sexist and old-fashioned." We then extracted this book from Harper and shaped it into Your Ten to Fourteen-Year-Old to cover the upper ages of our Delacorte series.

This rather long digression from my own early research is included here to illustrate the continuity of much of the work of Dr. Gesell and his staff. One idea or bit of work so often led to the next in a seemingly inexorable progression over many decades. It also seems important because, even as of this writing, the current versions of these books for parents are being translated into Polish, German, and Chinese.

Going back to my earliest research, I should note that cinemanalysis offered an ideal method for determining the ways in which the early motor behavior of the infant (at that time a rather unknown territory) developed. Cinema records permitted the analyst to observe the same behavior over and over again, thus enabling him or her to note fine points that may indeed have been missed at the time the behavior was first observed.

At any rate, in addition to my work on prone behavior, seven other studies (for a complete listing see Ames, 1974d) were carried out between 1937 and 1945. Most of these were published in the Journal of Genetic Psychology or the Genetic Psychology Monographs. Several were also made into edited films. Other research studies published in the years before 1950 (when the original Gesell group left the university) covered such topics as "The Gesell Incomplete Man Test" (Ames, 1943), "Variant Behavior as Revealed by the Gesell Developmental Examination" (Ames & Ilg, 1943), and an analysis of imaginary companions in the young child (Ames & Learned, 1946).

A subsequent small group of studies was carried out in our nursery school and focused on observations of smiling behavior and the development of the sense of time and space and the sense of self (for a listing see Ames, 1974c). Children's Stories, a book about children's stories as revealing their emotional interests, was also published (Ames, 1966).

I was in an unusually favorable position so far as publishing was concerned since Dr. Ge...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface
• 1 Louise Bates Ames
• 2 James Emmett Birren
• 3 Marie Skodak Crissey
• 4 David Elkind
• 5 Dale B. Harris
• 6 Lois Wladis Hoffman
• 7 Çiğdem Kağitçibaşi
• 8 Lewis P. Lipsitt
• 9 Paul Mussen
• 10 Seymour Wapner
• About the Book and Editors