Childhood and Human Nature

The Development of Personality

Sula Wolff

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351656825
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Developmental Psychology
• Index: Psychology

How do we make sense of people? Human behaviour is complex, so that understanding ourselves and others calls for both objective and subjective viewpoints, as well as a flexible appreciation of human development over time. Dr Sula Wolff believes that knowledge about personality development is essential in three important domains: in the appraisal of deviant behaviour at all ages; in the development of social policy for children; and in therapeutic interventions for children and their families.

In this book, originally published in 1989, Dr Wolff gives a comprehensive account of the major aspects of personality development in childhood. She reports research findings and presents developmental theories in their historical context, stressing the interplay between biological and cultural influences on development. Her account includes a wealth of illustrative case histories, with children and parents speaking for themselves; these provide fascinating reading and give substance to statistical results and theoretical propositions.

Clearly and simply written, the book will be of interest to many people, and will still be of value to medical students, psychiatrists in training, students in social work and psychology, and teachers in special education.

Part I

lnborn aspects of personality and development

Chapter one

A biological view of personality

What is personality?

The definitions of personality are bewildering in their variety. Some psychologists use the word to refer only to observable behaviour; others include communications about introspective self-knowledge; some the organization of an individual’s patterns of thought, motives and feelings; some the internal integration or external adjustment of the person. All agree that personality refers to more enduring and hence predictable qualities. It can be no biological accident that we are all in part predictable. We can guess how we are likely to cope in different circumstances and we have some choice, at least as adults, about the settings to which we expose ourselves. The more enduring aspects of our natures also foster mutual adaptation between people: we attune what we say and do to the anticipated reactions of others.

Some definitions of personality exclude intelligence and aptitudes. Some focus only on individual differences, that is on features which distinguish one person from another. Sometimes the concept is not used at all for children because they are held to be so changeable and unpredictable that to talk of childhood personality is thought to be meaningless.

I shall use the term for all behaviour and self-reports of thoughts and feelings that have some permanence, recognizing that a great deal of behaviour is universal to the human race, much is common to all members of a particular culture or subculture, some is familial, and only a portion is unique. In childhood, predictable behaviour changes remarkably with age, from infancy to adult life. These transformations of behaviour patterns in the course of development are shared by all children. But for each child, the interactions between his or her particular constitution, culture and personal environment, including life events, contribute to the evolving personality and to the individual and unique patterns of his or her responses.

Components of personality

It has been helpful both in the study of personality and in the clinical understanding of people with personal troubles to think about three interdependent components of personality: (1) motivation and emotions; (2) temperament; (3) intelligence.

Motivation and emotions give direction, determining the what and why of behaviour. The content of our thoughts, the things in life that matter to us, our moral standards and our more public lives, our beliefs, attitudes and opinions, our goals, hopes and ambitions, the things we fear and those we reject, our joys and griefs, all make up this most important part of our personality which we identify as our self, and which psychoanalysts have called ‘identity’ (Erikson 1968).

Temperament, or style, concerns the how of behaviour. It has been described (Allport 1961:34) as ‘the characteristic phenomena of an individual’s emotional nature, including his susceptibility to emotional stimulation, his customary strength and speed of responses, the quality of his prevailing mood, and all peculiarities of fluctuation and intensity in mood’.

Intelligence refers to levels of achievement and in childhood to rates of development. Intelligence defines how much an individual can do.

The complexity of our inner life and the excellence of our performance in thought and action depend in large measure, although not entirely, on our intelligence. How we react to our surroundings and our style of self-expression reflect our temperament. And both intelligence and temperament have, as we shall see, firm biological roots. But our affective motivational self, although animated and coloured by these other parts of our personality, is most open to influence by the events and circumstances of our lives. Our behaviour is patterned by the family who brings us up, by our school, by the culture within which we live. We learn from our interactions with these environmental influences and from the events that befall us; and the patterns of this learning, the connections between the outer influences and the changes in our manifest behaviour at different stages of life, can be traced and laws established which govern these relationships.

Biological determinants have been identified even in this field, especially in relation to the development of that part of affective behaviour which is common to all human beings, for example, the child’s attachment to his mother, the teenager’s search for a sexual partner and the nurturing activities of parents. Later chapters in this book will be concerned with the development during childhood of this socio-emotional part of the human personality and with the effects on individuals of growing up under different life circumstances.

Much human behaviour is universal

It is sometimes overlooked that the differences between people may be smaller than what they have in common. Much human behaviour and experience and a great deal of the human environment is shared by everyone. Indeed, in some aspects of our personality, of our social environment, especially in early childhood, and of the developmental processes of infancy, we resemble the higher vertebrates. Perhaps the wordless, empathic understanding we can reach with animals of certain species through eye contact, gesture and tone of voice, phenomena we tend totally to take for granted, reflect such similarities.

All behaviour is the outcome of complex interactions between our constitutional make-up, largely genetically determined, and the social and inanimate environment in which we grow up. The extent to which we resemble each other reflects both a common gene pool and a common environment to which we have, through evolutionary processes, become adapted. Developmental processes, too, are shared by everyone. And in many studies of child development groups of babies or children have been observed at different ages or under different circumstances without regard to their individual differences. Such studies of the ‘universal’ infant or child have illuminated general processes of intellectual and socio-emotional development. In contrast, in studies designed to shed light on individual differences, including pathology, children are compared who differ in the qualities under investigation but who are otherwise as similar as possible.

Biological perspective: heredity, environment and constitution

There is no getting away from the fact that we live in our bodies and that our anatomy and physiology are prerequisites for all our actions and experience. Social processes alone cannot explain human behaviour. The increasing fascination in recent decades with the intelligence and sociability of the human baby, heightened when comparative studies revealed developmental similarities in animal infants, has revived a general interest in the biological basis of behaviour in childhood. Doctors and psychologists concerned with abnormalities of development and behaviour believe that assessments of individual children, and indeed of patients of all ages, must include biological aspects such as genetic predisposition, nutrition, organic illness and physical handicap. Biological determinants are important both for our understanding of personality development in general and of how individual differences and pathology can come about.

Charles Darwin demonstrated a structural continuity between species. His theory of biological evolution on the basis of natural selection (Plomin et al. 1980) was that characteristics, mental as well as physical, promoting survival of a species were passed on from one generation to the next, while harmful characteristics, interfering with the organism's adaptation to its environment, led to its extinction, either because affected individuals did not survive to pass them on or because they failed to find a mate and beget offspring. The Augustinian monk, Gregor Mendel, discovered the basis for biological variability and its hereditary transmission during his researches on peas. Each inherited trait depends on two elements, one coming from each parent. These elements, or genes, located on chromosomes, remain discrete, and different traits are inherited independently of each other. Individual variability is thus ensured by ever new combinations of genes in each individual person. In addition, new characteristics arise by mutation, that is by spontaneous changes occurring in a gene. Evolutionary theory rests on two tenets: genetic variation and selection. The modification and increasing complexity of living beings is, according to Darwinian theory, attributable to non-random survival (i.e. selection) of random variabilities.

Biological evolution also implies a changing environment calling for new adaptive patterns with consequent modification of the species over the eons. It is a very slow process as far as the species as a whole is concerned, and anatomically and physiologically man has changed little in 30,000 years. At the same time, as we shall see, genetic variations are of extreme importance for individuals, and genetic abnormalities can be devastating in their effects.

Biological evolution depends on the hereditary transmission of genes from parents to child. Parents do not choose each other at random. Marital choice, based on opportunities for meeting and on mutual selection, is called assortative mating. Parents resemble each other in many ways and the effect of assortative mating is to maintain the spread within a population especially of traits based on multigenic inheritance (Scarr and Kidd 1983).

Our genetic heritage affects not only how we are constructed and the way we function at any one stage of life, but determines also the actual processes of maturation and ageing in the course of our life span. And these include the changes with age of our potential for action and experience. Genes constitute a programme, implemented via biochemical bodily processes, for performance in time. But the manifestations of genetic influence are open to enormous variation as a result of the environment in which we live, with which we interact and which is increasingly man-made. The changing social environment of the human species in general, to which the activities and products of people themselves contribute most of all, is the basis for cultural evolution. Just as the genes transmit our biological heritage from one generation to the next, so language, written language and the other artefacts created by man transmit his cultural heritage.

Each one of us contains a complement of genes made up of those which all human beings share, that is those which determine our common biological potential, as well as genes which contribute to the characteristics of groups and individuals. Our environment too contains universal ingredients (called the environment of human adaptedness or our common expectable environment) as well as characteristics shared by cultures and families, and those that are unique.

Geneticists have discovered that some characteristics depend on a single gene, for example, eye colour and some inborn errors of metabolism such as phenylketonuria which can cause serious mental retardation. Some chromosomal aberrations have also been identified as the causes of specific syndromes of mental handicap: Down’s syndrome and Fragile X abnormality. Other human characteristics depend on the combined effect of very many genes (multigenetic inheritance) in interaction with the environment, for example height and intelligence. The patterns of inheritance of these characteristics vary, as does their distribution in the community.

Much has been learnt about the genetic basis of human attributes from the study of twins, since twins are of two kinds: identical or monozygotic twins formed by the division of a fertilized egg cell into two identical cells and giving rise to two genetically identical fetuses, and fraternal or dizygotic twins derived from two separate fertilized egg cells developing side by side from the start. The latter are genetically no more similar than ordinary brothers and sisters. Siblings resemble each other as they do their parents because they have a part of their genetic heritage in common, but also because they share a family culture. When we find similarities between members of a family we cannot know whether this reflects the effects of the family environment, or an interaction between this and a common genetic make-up. On the other hand, when we hear that for a given characteristic, for example intelligence, the similarities between monozygotic twins differ from those between same-sex dizygotic twins far more than do those of dizygotic twins from those of ordinary siblings, we can be sure that, whatever else determines the feature under investigation, it also has a genetic basis and is not merely brought about by the way in which families differentially react to identical twin partners, non-identical twins, and to ordinary brothers and sisters.

Robert Shields some years ago studied pairs of twins reared together and pairs reared because adopted or fostered in early infancy (Shields 1962). These twins were often very eager to meet up with each other, and twin partners were traced through television. Shields found that identical twins reared apart were almost as similar in intelligence as those reared together, while on some tests of temperament (extraversion and neuroticism) there were greater differences when monozygotic partners were brought up apart, but the differences between monozygotic twins overall were still less than between dizygotic twins. Another approach to the study of the genetic contribution to human attributes has been opened by the natural experiments of adoption and fostering. The extent to which adopted people resemble their biological parents rather than the parents who brought them up reflects the genetic rather than the environmental contributions to the quality of personality or physique or the illness or deviation in question.

The development of personality, like physical growth, is based on interactions of organism and environment. Here the concept of constitution is important. It means the structure of the individual at any one time. From the moment of conception each person with his or her particular genetic potential is open to influence by their surroundings and, in turn, exerts an effect to bring about change in these surroundings. Environmentally induced changes alter the individual’s constitution and this now differently constituted being then interacts with an environment slightly altered through his influence.

Scarr and McCartney developed an important theory to link genetic differences between people with individual differences in how these are expressed (Scarr and McCartney 1983). The effect can be a direct expression of the genetic predisposition, as in the case of a single gene abnormality like phenylketonuria, or a chromosome abnormality like Down’s syndrome, where the environment is of little importance. More commonly, the effect is indirect, via three types of possible interactions with the environment. (1) The first environmental mechanism is passive, through the upbringing provided by biologically related parents. It should not be overlooked that highly intelligent parents, for example, are not only likely to have children genetically predisposed to giftedness but to provide a more varied and stimulating environment for their children, thereby further enhancing these children’s intellectual progress. (2) The second mode of gene-environmental effects on behaviour is evoked, through the responses elicited from other people by genetically determined qualities in the child such as his appearance, temperament, or intelligence. Constitutionally cheerful babies are more likely to attract attention even in unfavourable conditions, unavoidable for example in a children’s home, and this extra nurturing care will then contribute further to their social responsiveness. (3) The third is active, through the selection of different environments or different aspects of the environment by genetically differently constituted children.

Quite apart from the single gene or chromosome abnormalities which we have mentioned, some circumstances present before birth can have profound effects on later personality. Biological accidents such as an attack of German measles early in pregnancy or the thalidomide tragedy of twenty years ago can so alter the constitution of genetically healthy babies that their development, including that of personality, is indelibly changed. Babies malnourished in the womb are born small and at increased risk of birth injury. They are also at risk of not developing their full genetic intelligence because of impaired brain growth.

It is unrealistic and indeed harmful to overlook constitutional personality impairments of children or parents which, although often inconspicuous, nevertheless, and especially under adverse conditions, impose severe constraints on adaptive capacities. Everyone accepts that not all children are equally capable at school learning. What is not always realized is that aspects of temperament, too, for example the restless distractibility of a developmentally impaired child, or the aloof withdrawal of a child with schizoid personality traits, may have a constitutional basis.

One other biological influence needs to be mentioned: the timing of physical maturity. In a longitudinal study (Magnusson 1988), girls who reached puberty early were found to have rather different social experiences at adolescence within an older peer group, to leave school early, establish their families at a younger age, and to be less career oriented in adult life.

Normality and abnormality

When people are ill, physically or mentally, the practical recognition of their disorder is usually not difficult. A change for the worse has come about and there are complaints (the symptoms) and observations (the signs) which identify the disorder. In childhood, psychiatric disturbance often consists of behaviour all children may transiently display, and a child is identified as dist...