INTRODUCTION

One of the important contributions to the understanding of antisocial and aggressive behavior has come from research that spanned the areas of animal research (Cairns, Hood, & Midlam, 1985), genetic processes (Cairns, McGuire, & Gariepy, 1993), attachment (Cairns, 1966), social interactions (Cairns & Valsiner, 1984), and developmental epistemology (Cairns, 1990). Unlike much other research, this integrative vision of science was not blinded by the interdisciplinary rivalries that have both pervaded and impeded the study of antisocial behavior. Instead, by viewing genetic, biological, psychological, and social influences as equal partners in the explanation of antisocial and aggressive behavior, more significant and lasting advances can be made in this field.

In this context, important progress has been made in delineating replicable psychosocial risk factors for antisocial and violent behavior (Farrington, 2000; Loeber & Farrington, 1998; McCord, 2001; Rutter, Giller, & Hagell, 1998). Within the past 15 years, important progress has also been made in uncovering biological risk factors that predispose to antisocial behavior (Lahey, McBurnett, Loeber, & Hart, 1995; Susman & Finkelstein, 2001). Despite this progress, we know surprisingly little about how these different sets of risk factors interact in predisposing to antisocial behavior. Furthermore, although passing heuristic and theoretical references are frequently made to such interactional influences, there are remarkably few investigators who are conducting serious empirical research on this interface in humans (Raine, Brennan, & Farrington, 1997).

INTRODUCTION

Violence is a national health problem. Understanding the etiology and pathophysiology that predispose certain individuals to behave in an inappropriate, excessively aggressive way is critical to reducing the incidence of personal violence in the United States. It is clear that traumatic events in early life make children more vulnerable to future stressors and enhance the probability of antisocial behaviors (Luntz & Widom, 1994). Children exposed to early stressful environments and maltreatment prior to kindergarten are more aggressive and have more social problems than control children (Lansford et al., 2002; Sanson, Smart, Prior, & Oberhlaid, 1993). Children exposed to early physical and emotional neglect may develop learning patterns that affect the interpretation of hostile social information, resulting in inappropriate aggressive behavior and general conduct disorder (Dodge, Bates, & Pettit, 1990). Furthermore, children with conduct problems are at risk for alcohol and drug abuse, a predisposition exacerbated by the fact that alcoholism and drug-taking foster antisocial behaviors and violence (Ito, Miller, & Pollock, 1996).

Although psychosocial developmental studies on children have provided insight into the long-term behavioral consequences of early abuse and alcoholism, the biological changes that accompany exposure to these risk factors are not well understood. For ethical reasons, there can be no prospective human studies looking at changes in neurobiology and neuroendocrinology in response to early life traumas. Therefore, biological data must be gleaned from animal studies that try to model certain aspects of the human condition.

INTRODUCTION

Professor Robert B. Cairns was a giant in the field of developmental science. His theoretical vision and his empirical rigor and persistence drove a lifelong research and academic career that uniquely helped shape this emerging, dynamic interdisciplinary field. He was a remarkable teacher, researcher, and scholar who profoundly influenced countless students and colleagues and whose legacy will long be with us.

I first got to know Bob Cairns during a mutual stint at the Center for Interdisciplinary Studies (ZIF) at the University of Bielfeld in Germany during the fall and winter of 1977–78. We were both at the ZIF as part of a 9-month-long program entitled “Early Development in Animals and Man” organized by the late ethologist Professor Dr. Klaus Immelmann, who had brought together a group of prominent researchers, representing a wide range of disciplines, who studied developmental phenomena both in humans and in a variety of other mammalian and avian species. I had known about Bob Cairns and his research since my very first days in graduate school at the University of Wisconsin – at that time Jim Sackett was telling all the graduate students at the Primate Laboratory about this guy in Indiana who hauled sheep to his lab in back of his station wagon in order to run studies that demonstrated the power of contiguity conditioning in establishing social bonds.

A BIOSOCIAL PERSPECTIVE ON AGGRESSION

Problem aggression in young children is viewed as more biologically driven than antisocial patterns that appear in adolescence and thought to be influenced mainly by peer socialization (Moffitt, 1993). Early-onset aggression is more chronic, serious, and linked to long-term maladaptive outcomes. By virtue of disposition or temperament, some young children are more likely than others to behave in ways that reflect disregard for the rights and welfare of others. Several constitutional factors have been implicated in early externalizing problems. These include neuropsychological problems, hyperactivity, and difficult temperament. Different antecedents and outcomes of early versus delayed onset of antisocial behavior have been identified (e.g., Moffitt & Caspi, 2001). Even early-onset aggression has poor parenting correlates, however, suggesting a complex interplay of biological and environmental processes from the start.

In this chapter we focus on early-appearing aggression and the ways in which socialization and child sex interact with it to alter forms of expression and developmental course. We consider, as well, early-appearing prosocial behaviors that may deter aggression. We draw on two high-risk longitudinal studies that have benefited from the teachings of Robert Cairns. He and his colleagues have been at the forefront in guiding the development of theories, research designs, and analytic approaches that illuminate bio-social interactions in different species and at different points in human development (Cairns, 1997, 2000; Cairns, Cairns, Neckerman, Ferguson, & Gariépy, 1989; Magnusson & Cairns, 1996).

Adolescence has fascinated developmental scholars because the transition into adolescence involves biological, psychological, and social changes (Graber & Brooks-Gunn, 1996). At the same time, adolescence has been a focus for research on psychopathology as rates of several disorders increase dramatically during this time period. Most notably, the past few decades have witnessed volumes of studies and theories on adolescent depression, conduct disorder, and subclinical psychopathology (Steinberg & Morris, 2001). Many of these studies have sought to understand the confluence of bio-psychosocial developmental factors that result in the emergence of serious behavioral and emotional problems. In this chapter, we consider several bio-psychosocial models that have been used to explain changes in internalizing and externalizing behaviors during adolescence. Examples from our own work highlight the role of pubertal development in understanding behavioral plasticity during adolescence.

Discussions of plasticity in developmental processes have frequently focused on early development and gene–environment interactions in understanding development and behavior (Baltes, Lindenberger, & Staudinger, 1998). Despite a focus on the early periods of development, the notion that adaptation occurs in neural and behavioral development throughout life has been a cornerstone of life span developmental perspectives (Baltes et al., 1998; Cairns, 1998). Recent studies in neuroscience have demonstrated that new neural connections continue to be made across the life span (e.g., Bruer & Greenough, 2001) and specific changes in the prefrontal cortex and limbic regions of the brain occur during adolescence (see Spear, 2000 for a review).

INTRODUCTION

Increasing trends for suicidal ideation and attempts among adolescents highlight the need for identifying risk factor profiles and interventions. In a recent survey study we reported that depression, anger, number of friends, and marijuana contributed to 66% of the variance on suicidal ideation in adolescents. In other studies with depressed adolescents we were able to reduce depression and suicidal ideation by massage therapy. The model explored in this paper on adolescents' suicidal ideation and suicidal attempts is (1) that depression, aggression, and body dissociation (physical anhedonia and higher thresholds to stimulation and pain) that may have derived from early touch deprivation/abuse may mediate suicidal ideation and attempts; and (2) that suicidal ideation and attempts might be reduced by massage therapy, a treatment that has already been effective with depressed adolescents. Underlying the risk factors for suicidal ideation and attempts are abnormal physiological factors including EEG alpha asymmetry and biochemical imbalances including depressed serotonin and elevated cortisol levels. Thus, some of the intervening mechanisms between touch deprivation/abuse and suicide may be the physiological (EEG asymmetry) and biochemical imbalances (depressed serotonin and elevated cortisol levels) that accompany depression and self-destructive behavior. Massage therapy may reduce suicidal ideation/behavior via reducing depression and cortisol levels and elevating serotonin levels and thereby reducing self-destructive behavior.

TOUCH DEPRIVATION AND AGGRESSION AGAINST SELF (SUICIDE) AMONG ADOLESCENTS

The critical importance of researching adolescent suicide is underscored by the fact that suicide is the biggest killer of adolescents in the United States (Madge & Harvey, 1999), and the United States has one of the highest suicide rates among industrialized countries (Weissman et al., 1999).

In this paper we examine changing arrangements of human development that have accompanied societal shifts to mass, compulsory “Western” schooling. We draw attention to the often taken-for-granted role of schooling in children's lives once extensive schooling has become the childhood norm in their communities. To do so, we examine two cases, involving very different histories and current conditions. We first examine the life patterns associated with the growth of mass schooling across the past centuries for European-heritage families in the United States, integrating the work of historians who have described the process. Then we examine the phenomenon across three generations of Mayan families in Guatemala, using our own interviews and observations.

In the United States one can generally assume that if a child is 6 years old, she is in the first grade, or if a child is in the first grade, she is about 6 years old. As Irwin et al. (1978) put it, “In Western industrialized countries, going to school has the same inevitability for children that death and taxes have for their parents” (p. 415).

Although psychologists often identify developmental transitions in terms of children's ages, age indexes both biological maturation and changing roles in cultural institutions. As White (1975) has pointed out, age 5 to 7 years has for some centuries marked societal shifts in treatment of children, such as the standard onset of formal schooling in Europe and the United States.

Most early founders of sociology adhered to an evolutionary view of societal development as moving through stages from simple to ever more complex forms of social organization. These models fell into disfavor in the early decades of the 20th century, only to be resurrected in the 1960s (Lenski, 1966; Parsons, 1966). At about the same time, a new kind of evolutionary theorizing was emerging, one that sought to explain human behavior and social organization in terms of the effect of natural selection on the human genome.

For many sociologists, the emergence of sociobiology, as it was first called (Wilson, 1975, 1978), posed a threat to the discipline because its proponents came from biology and seemed to be arguing that the subject matter of sociology could be explained by reference to genetics. Such reductionism naturally aroused the suspicions, if not outright hostility, of sociologists who were reluctant to explain complex sociocultural formations by reference to elementary biological processes. It was bad enough, many sociologists argued, that behaviorists kept trying to explain human social organization with principles of individual behavior, but for biologists to enter into sociology and attempt to explain sociology's subject matter with notions of genetic fitness was too much. Moreover, it raised for sociologists the ghost of Social Darwinism and eugenics from earlier decades. The notion that genes are “selfish” (Dawkins, 1976), and by virtue of blind natural selection seek to sustain the information that they contain in the gene pool, could hardly account for the topics of interest to sociologists.

In exchange theories, interaction is a process of giving and receiving valued resources. An individual gives up resources to receive resources that are viewed as more valued, thereby earning a “profit” from the exchange. Exchange theories owe their inspiration to two branches of social science: behavioristic psychology and neoclassical economics. Within the behavioristic tradition, organisms are conceptualized as reward seeking and punishment avoiding. As a consequence of this propensity, animals will emit behaviors that bring rewards or positive reinforcement and avoid behaviors that bring punishments or negative reinforcement. Those behaviors that have brought rewards in the past will be repeated; if the receipt of rewards has been associated with a particular stimulus, the presence of this or a similar stimulus will initiate the same behaviors that in the past were reinforced. Repetition of behaviors will continue until they no longer bring rewards. The more an organism has received rewards of a given kind in the recent past, the less valuable will additional increments of these rewards be as the organism becomes “satiated” with a particular type of reward.

The original program in behaviorism avoided the “black box” of human cognition, preferring instead to study observable stimuli and behaviors (Skinner, 1938, 1953; Watson, 1913). For such a program to be of interest to sociologists, however, the original restrictions on studying only directly observable behaviors had to be compromised.

This is a chapter about why we teach. I do not ask what the best way is to teach this subject matter or that. Nor do I ask how we can assess children's learning as a result of teaching. Instead, I ask a deceptively simple question: Why do we teach in the first place? The search for answers to that question takes us to the borders between our biological, psychological, and cultural endowment as humans.

Teaching, or folk pedagogy, the social transformation of knowledge from one person to another or the attempt to engender it in others, is one of the most remarkable of human enterprises. I propose that teaching, which is central to education in the broad sense of that term, can also be seen as an essential domain of inquiry for the cognitive sciences. This is so because, as I attempt to show, teaching may be a natural cognitive ability and is essential to what it means to be a human being. Furthermore, I believe that a search for the cognitive underpinnings of teaching may lead to a description of some of the fundamental building blocks of human cognition and its development.

Learning, teaching's mirror image, has been a major focus of the cognitive sciences, to be sure, but intentional pedagogy aimed to cause learning has, by and large, been flying below the cognitive sciences' radar.

As Professor Sheldon (Shep) White approached retirement from his position as William James Professor of Psychology at Harvard University, his colleagues and students began organizing an event in his honor. Barbara Rogoff and Alex Siegel were especially active in pursuing this idea. When I approached Shep for his input, he stated clearly that he did not want a traditional festschrift. Rather, he preferred to co-organize a lively, substantive conference and to co-edit an accompanying book that would concentrate on the three main foci of his life work: research, history, and policy in developmental psychology, and especially their intersections. The conference, titled Developmental Psychology and the Social Changes of Our Time, was held at Wellesley College, June 20–22, 2002. We adopted the more personal title, “Three Faces of Shep Conference,” because Shep has represented and promoted each and all of these faces – research, history, policy – throughout his career. Connections between the three faces of his work provide the foundation for a new way of thinking about developmental psychology and the lives of children. Contributors were asked to write chapters that addressed the intersection of at least two of the three faces.

In addition to the chapter authors, conference participants included Alex Siegel, Edward Zigler, Emily Cahan, Jack Shonkoff, Tami Katzir, Robert Lawler, Julia Hough, Ruby Takanishi, and Bob Granger. Conference assistants Susan Camuti and Kate Collins were invaluable to this project.

It is somewhat surprising that sociology, as the discipline concerned with the dynamics of social structures, has developed relatively few theories on how social structures determine the arousal and flow of emotions. For sociologists, social structures are generally viewed as patterns of social relationships among individual and collective actors that persist over time. At the microlevel of social organization, individuals are viewed as located at a position within a set of positions. Most theories conceptualize locations within social structures as status positions, with each position carrying cultural contents (norms, ideologies, values), prestige or honor, authority, and other characteristics. A person's behavior, often seen as role behavior, will reflect the cultural prescriptions, honor, and authority of the position vis-à-vis other positions in the structure.

Another way to conceptualize structure is as a network, with positions being conceptualized as nodes that reveal relationships with other nodes. Rather than focus on the characteristics or incumbents of the nodes per se, the form of the network as a whole is analyzed in terms of certain basic properties, such as density (the level of connectedness among all nodes), centrality (the degree to which connections among nodes run through one or a few key nodes), cliques (the extent to which the overall network reveals subsets of high density of relations among closely connected nodes), bridges (the number of positions connecting cliques), brokerage (the capacity of nodes to control the flow of resources across subsets of nodes in the network), and equivalence (the number and nature of subsets of nodes that reveal similar forms).

The dramaturgical metaphor comes from William Shakespeare, who proclaimed, “All the world is a stage, and all men and women merely players” who have their entrances and exits and play many parts during the course of their lifetime. In viewing social interaction as theater, attention is drawn to the script, stage, audience, staging props, and actors who play dramatic roles. Let us begin with the script. All dramaturgical theorists adopt the view that interaction is guided by a script written by culture. All actors are aware of the norms, values, beliefs, and other symbolic elements that direct how they are to talk, act, and otherwise play their roles.

Interaction is also performed on a stage in front of an audience. People act as if they are on a stage, and so each person in an interaction views others in a situation as constituting the audience to whom a presentation of self is given. In seeing people as actors performing on a stage, one's attention is drawn to the props – from clothing to physical objects – that individuals use to play their roles and to interpret the cultural script guiding their performance. Culture is not a straightjacket; although it is constraining, all actors are given some dramatic license in their playing of a role. Indeed, dramaturgical approaches emphasize impression management by actors as they present their selves to their audiences.

It was presumably the philosopher George Santayana who commented that those who do not know the past are doomed to repeat it. Yet study of the history of psychology has rarely, if ever, been used as a tool by social scientists to help them avoid the pitfalls of the past. Instead, social scientists use the study of the history of the discipline as a tool to plan and organize their work. Sheldon (Shep) White represents a distinctly different model of how to view the history and practice of psychology. In the 1970s, Shep began writing articles on the history of psychology that were pointedly designed to be used by the current practitioners of the discipline to help them to reflect upon their own practices (White, 1976, 1978; Cahan & White, 1992).

The Nature of Knowledge in Science: From Crises to Potentials

Contrary to the fast-paced reporting of science to the lay public – by journalists and scientists – scientific knowledge grows slowly and is subject to various periods of stagnation and even regression. Both evolution and involution in scientific thinking are linked with social events (Danziger, 1990). Usually such periods are filled with the tension created between the avalanche of new ideas (in new contexts) and the rigidities of the previous habits of thought. This tension may emerge along a multitude of parameters – between theory and (social) practice; ways of knowing and religious dogmas (remembering Galileo's troubles about moving celestial objects at his time and arguments about stem cell research in our own); generality and fragmentation within a discipline; and the “stress of interdisciplinarity” – a discipline resisting the incoming streams of ideas from other disciplines.

Introspection leaves the impression that personal event memories are private, self-generated products of an individual's experience in the world. When we reflect on the past, “we can accept with little question that biography or the lifetime is the appropriate or ‘natural’ frame for individual memory” (Schudson, 1995, p. 346). Historically, investigations of memory processes have resided at this phenomenologically justified level of analysis. For example, early studies focused on the nature of adults' childhood memories with limited reference to the particulars of history or other contextual factors situated outside the individual (e.g., Dudycha & Dudycha, 1941; Sheingold & Tenney, 1982; Waldfogel, 1948).

In the past several decades, memory researchers have gained an increasingly sophisticated perspective on context. Autobiographical memory offers a rich platform from which to view contextual effects, and research on the topic has benefited from this perspective. Currently, theory and burgeoning empirical evidence support the notion that both proximal and distal influences have the potential to shape autobiographical remembering in complex ways (Bronfenbrenner, 1979; Ceci & Leichtman, 1992; Leichtman, Wang, & Pillemer, 2003; Wang, 2003).

In the present chapter, we consider context through an exceptionally broad lens. Our overarching goal is to identify the possible roles that socio-historical factors, including government policies and culturally shaped aspects of the social environment, play in shaping the personal event memories of individuals. Researchers have only recently begun to consider connections between such macro-level environmental elements and the personal sphere of autobiographical memory; thus, some of the ideas that follow are speculative.