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ANNUAL PROGRESS IN CHILD PSYCHIATRY
AND CHILD DEVELOPMENT 2000–2001
ANNUAL PROGRESS IN
CHILD PSYCHIATRY
AND CHILD
DEVELOPMENT 2000–
2001
Edited by

MARGARET E.HERTZIG, M.D.


Professor of Psychiatry
Cornell University Medical College

and

ELLEN A.FARBER, Ph.D.


Clinical Assistant Professor of Psychology
Cornell University Medical College

Brunner-Routledge
New York and Hove
Published in 2003 by
Brunner-Routledge
29 West 35th Street
New York, NY 10001
www.brunner-routledge.com
Published in Great Britain by
Brunner-Routledge
27 Church Road
Hove, East Sussex
BN3 2FA
www.brunner-routledge.co.uk
Copyright © 2003 by Taylor & Francis Books, Inc.

Brunner-Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group.


This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2005.

“To purchase your own copy of this or any of Taylor & Francis or Routledge’s collection
of thousands of eBooks please go to www.eBookstore.tandf.co.uk”.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilized in
any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter
invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or
retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers.
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available from the publisher.

ISBN 0-203-44952-5 Master e-book ISBN

ISBN 0-203-45789-7 (Adobe e-Reader Format)


ISBN 0-415-93548-2 (Print Edition)
CONTENTS

Introduction viii
I.
DEVELOPMENTAL ISSUES
1. Child Development and the PITS: Simple Questions, Complex Answers,
and Developmental Theory
Frances Degen Horowitz 3
2. Developing Mechanisms of Self-Regulation
Michael I.Posner and Mary K.Rothbart 19
3. Implications of Attachment Theory for Developmental Psychopathology
L.Alan Sroufe, Elizabeth A.Carlson, Alissa K.Levy, and Byron Egeland 39
4. Attachment Security in Infancy and Early Adulthood: A Twenty-Year
Longitudinal Study
Everett Waters, Susan Merrick, Dominique Treboux, Judith Crowell, and
Leah Albersheim 57
5. Behavioral and Physiological Responsivity, Sleep, and Patterns of Daily
Cortisol Production in Infants with and without Colic
Barbara Prudhomme White, Megan R.Gunnar, Mary C.Larson, Bonny
Donzella, and Ronald G.Barr 66
6. Imaginary Companions of Preschool Children
Tracy R.Gleason, Anne M.Sebanc, and Willard W.Hartup 91
II.
PARENTING
7. Contemporary Research on Parenting: The Case for Nature and Nurture
W.Andrew Collins, Eleanor E.Maccoby, Laurence Steinberg, E.Mavis
Hetherington, and Marc H.Bornstein 113
8. Social versus Biological Parenting: Family Functioning and the
Socioemotional Development of Children Conceived by Egg or Sperm
Donation
Susan Golombok, Clare Murray, Peter Brinsden, and Hossam Abdalla 141
9. Parenting among Mothers with a Serious Mental Illness
Daphna Oyserman, Carol T.Mowbray, Paula Allen Meares, and Kirsten
B.Firminger 160
III.
ATTENTION DEFICIT-HYPERACTIVITY DISORDERS
10. Diagnostic Efficiency of Neuropsychological Test Scores for
Discriminating Boys with and without Attention Deficit-Hyperactivity
Disorder
Alysa E.Doyle, Joseph Biederman, Larry J.Seidman, Wendy Weber, and
Stephen V.Faraone 197
11. Efficacy of Methylphenidate among Preschool Children with
Developmental Disabilities and ADHD
Benjamin L.Handen, Heidi M.Feldman, Andrea Lurier, and Patty Jo
Huszar Murray 222
12. ADHD in Girls: Clinical Comparability of a Research Sample
Wendy S.Sharp, James M.Walter, Wendy L.Marsh, Gail F.Ritchie, Susan
D.Hamburger, and F.Xavier Castellanos 236
13. Stimulant Treatment for Children: A Community Perspective
Adrian Angold, Alaattin Erkanli, Helen L.Egger, and E.Jane Costello 251
IV.
OTHER CLINICAL ISSUES
14. The Altering of Reported Experiences
Daniel Offer, Marjorie Kaiz, Kenneth I.Howard, and Emily S.Bennett 272
15. Developmental Coordination Disorder in Swedish 7-year-old Children
Björn Kadesjö and Christopher Gillberg 288
16. Thirty-Three Cases of Body Dysmorphic Disorder in Children and
Adolescents
Ralph S.Albertini and Katharine A.Phillips 305
17. Case Series: Catatonic Syndrome in Young People
David Cohen, Martine Flament, Pierre-Francois Dubos, and Michel
Basquin 318
18. Toward a Developmental Operational Definition of Autism
Jane E.Gillham, Alice S.Carter, Fred R.Volkmar, and Sara S.Sparrow 331
19. Adolescent Onset of the Gender Difference in Lifetime Rates of Major
Depression: A Theoretical Model
Jill M.Cyranowski, Ellen Frank, Elizabeth Young, and M.Katherine
Shear 349
20. Social/Emotional Intelligence and Midlife Resilience in Schoolboys with
Low Tested Intelligence
George E.Vaillant and J.Timothy Davis 364
V.
TREATMENT ISSUES
21. Effectiveness of Nonresidential Specialty Mental Health Services for
Children and Adolescents in the “Real World”
Adrian Angold, E.Jane Costello, Barbara J.Burns, Alaattin Erkanli, and
Elizabeth M.Z.Farmer 382
22. Early Intervention Programs for Children with Autism: Conceptual
Frameworks for Implementation
Heather Whiteford Erba 395
23. Treatment for Sexually Abused Children and Adolescents
Karen J.Saywitz, Anthony P.Mannarino, Lucy Berliner, and Judith
A.Cohen 415
24. Neuroleptic Malignant Syndrome in Children and Adolescents
Raul R.Silva, Dinohra M.Munoz, Murray Alpert, Ilisse R.Perlmutter, and
Jose Diaz 435
25. AHA Scientific Statement: Cardiovascular Monitoring of Children and
Adolescents Receiving Psychotropic Drugs
Howard Gutgesell, Dianne Atkins, Robyn Barst, Marcia Buck, Wayne
Franklin, Richard Humes, Richard Ringel, Robert Shaddy, and Kathryn
A.Taubert 450
VI.
SOCIETAL ISSUES: VIOLENCE AND VICTIMIZATION
26. Twenty Years’ Research on Peer Victimization and Psychosocial
Maladjustment: A Meta-Analytic Review of Cross-Sectional Studies
David S.J.Hawker and Michael J.Boulton 461
27. Charting the Relationship Trajectories of Aggressive, Withdrawn, and
Aggressive/Withdrawn Children During Early Grade School
Gary W.Ladd and Kim B.Burgess 488
28. Violent Behavior in Children and Youth: Preventive Intervention from a
Psychiatric Perspective
Group for the Advancement of Psychiatry, Committee on Preventive
Psychiatry 521
29. Agents of Change: Pathways through which Mentoring Relationships
Influence Adolescents’ Academic Adjustment
Jean E.Rhodes, Jean B.Grossman, and Nancy L.Resch 534
30. Initial Impact of the Fast Track Prevention Trail for Conduct Problems:
II. Classroom Effects
Conduct Problems Prevention Research Group 553
Permissions 574
INTRODUCTION

This millennial edition of the Annual Progress in Child Psychiatry and Child
Development includes papers published in 1999 and 2000. The collection provides an
overview of the wide-ranging interests of both researchers and clinicians at the turn of the
twentieth century. Thirty papers, organized into six sections: Developmental Issues;
Parenting; Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder; Other Clinical Issues; Treatment
Issues; and Violence and Victimization include both research reports and reviews of the
literature.

DEVELOPMENTAL ISSUES

The six papers in this section cover a wide range of topics. The paper by Frances
D.Horowitz, written as the presidential address to the Society for Research in Child
Development, was a warning to researchers about how to present child development
knowledge to the public. She used the acronym “PITS” (person in the street) to refer to
the public. Horowitz was concerned that developmental scientists might oversimplify
child development in an attempt to respond to public interest. For example, if one were
asked whether child care had a negative or positive effect on development one should not
give a yes/no response. She presents a model that highlights the range of experiences
(environmental and relationship factors) that interact with constitution to result in
developmental outcomes.
The second paper by Posner and Rothbart is an intriguing forward-looking discussion
of the topic of self-regulation. The authors refer to studies of the self-regulation of
attention and cognitive processes. The paper highlights recent work in neuroimaging that
allows us to study brain plasticity and examine individual differences in self-regulation.
The authors believe that individual differences in effortful control have implications for
normal and pathological development.
The next two papers are on attachment. The paper by Sroufe and colleagues reviews
“implications of attachment theory for developmental psychopathology.” Attachment
categories typically have been proposed to be variations on normal rather than
pathological development. The authors elaborate on the transactional model for
understanding the various pathways underlying pathology and the role of attachment
relations within that model. Waters and his colleagues present new data on the stability of
attachment classifications. They assessed 50 21-year-old individuals who had been seen
in the Strange Situation when they were 12 months of age. The young adults completed
the Adult Attachment Interview. There was a significant correspondence of categories
between age one and age twenty-one. This is a nice, clean presentation of stability in a
middle-class sample.
The next paper by White and colleagues is an interesting study of an important topic,
the infant with colic. The authors used parent diaries and physiological measures. The
data suggested that colic might be associated with a delay in the establishment of the
circadian rhythm. Colic, although only lasting for a few months, can present significant
burdens on family relationships. An understanding of the physiological basis of colic will
one day lead to meaningful interventions.
The last paper in this section is a small data-gathering study of an intriguing topic.
Imaginary friends have long been noted in child development literature. However, there
have been little data to suggest which children develop imaginary friends and whether the
children who have imaginary friends have socialization difficulties. Gleason and
colleagues distinguish children with invisible friends, personified objects, and with no
imaginary companions.

PARENTING

Part II presents three papers on parenting. The first paper, “Contemporary research on
parenting: The case for nature and nurture,” is a collaborative effort by five
psychologists, all well-established researchers on parenting. This is a thoughtful
presentation of the different contexts for studying parental influence on child
development. These include behavior genetics models that tease apart the percentage of
nature and nurture on specific characteristics, gene-by-environment models, and parental
influence models. They also present a discussion of environmental influences such as
peers and neighborhood that affect parental influence.
The second paper by Golombok and Murray and colleagues, discusses issues in
parenting created by new reproductive technologies. They investigated parental and child
functioning in four groups of families in which the parentchild genetic link varied. The
groups included adoptive families, families created by in vitro fertilization, egg donation
families, and donor sperm families. It is only since the 1980s that woman can have donor
eggs implanted and conceive a child not genetically linked to them. Results are
counterintuitive and worthy of continuing investigation. The paper raises interesting
issues, including telling children about genetic parentage.
The third paper is, “Parenting among mothers with a serious mental illness.”
Improvements in medication, deinstitutionalization, and communitybased support
programs have resulted in more women with serious mental illness being able to have and
raise children. Oyserman and her colleagues review an important literature. They
describe what is known about mothers with serious mental illness, including
schizophrenia and affective disorders.

ATTENTION DEFICIT-HYPERACTIVITY DISORDER

The diagnosis and treatment of attention deficit-hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) is the


subject of increasing interest and concern among those devoted to enhancing the welfare
of children, including parents, pediatricians, child psychiatrists and psychologists, as well
as educators. Debate, often acrimonious, has tended to focus on the validity of diagnosis
and the appropriateness of various treatment options, most particularly pharmacological
interventions. The four papers in this section, which provide a sampling of recent
research, expand the empirical base for clinical decision making. As Doyle, Biederman,
Seidman, Webber, and Faraone indicate in the first paper in this section, clinicians have
long speculated that neuropsychological tests could aid in the diagnostic classification of
children with ADHD. However, the results of this important study clearly demonstrate
the limitations that attach to efforts to use neuropsychological test results to “validate”
the diagnosis of ADHD. Careful history taking, clinical interviewing, and reports of
informant observations of behavior, provide the basis for clinical diagnosis.
Neuropsychological tests of attention and executive functioning under-identify children
who exhibit abnormal patterns of inattention, impulsivity, and hyperactivity.
Nevertheless, by clarifying patterns of strengths and weaknesses, neuropsychological
testing may usefully supplement educational and treatment planning for individual
children.
The study reported by Handen, Feldman, Lurier, and Murray is a small N study, but
nevertheless, it provides much needed information regarding the effects and side effects
of methylphenidate (MPH) in preschool children with ADHD and developmental
disabilities. The issue of medicating preschool children with developmental disabilities
and/or mental retardation is controversial because it is often difficult to determine
whether activity level and impulsive style are in excess of what would be expected for
mental age. Nevertheless as the authors emphasize, the ADHD-like behaviors exhibited
by at least some developmentally disordered preschoolers may result in suspension from
intervention programs as well as severe family disruption. The results suggest that
preschool children with developmental disabilities respond to MPH at rates similar to
those of typically developing children, but might well be at greater risk of developing
significant adverse side effects. The authors provide useful guidelines for noting MPH
effects and side effects during standard office visits via observations of play and mother-
child interactions.
In the third paper in this section, Sharp, Walter, Marsh, Ritchie, Hamburger, and
Castellanos describe the clinical characteristics and response to stimulant medication of
girls with ADHD. As these authors point out, the investigation of ADHD in girls poses
complex questions of referral bias and selection criteria, and almost all research has
focused exclusively on boys. The clinical and medication response of this sample of girls
proved to be strikingly similar to a previously studied research sample of boys with
ADHD.
The final paper in this section provides a community perspective on the use of
stimulant medication for the treatment of ADHD. The study by Angold, Erkanli, Egger,
and Costello examines the use of prescribed stimulants in relation to research diagnoses
of ADHD in a community sample of children living in an 11-county region in the Great
Smoky Mountains. Data on a representative sample of 4,500 children and adolescents
aged 9, 11, and 13 years were collected in four waves between 1992 and 1996. The
results of this study provide evidence for both the over- and under-treatment of symptoms
of ADHD. Although the authors conclude that stimulant treatment was being used in
ways substantially inconsistent with current diagnostic guidelines in this geographic area,
it should be noted that the extent of inappropriate treatment is difficult to determine
because the diagnoses were based on parental report alone. Nevertheless, the results
underscore how important it is for every clinician to establish clear indications for
stimulant treatment on a case-by-case basis, to monitor the effectiveness of treatment in
reducing target symptoms on an ongoing basis and discontinue treatment in a timely
manner if clearly defined treatment goals are not met.

OTHER CLINICAL ISSUES

The seven papers in this section address a range of topics of interest to practicing
clinicians. In the first report, Offer, Kaiz, Howard, and Bennett direct attention to how
reported experiences may be altered. The authors utilized data from a longitudinal study
of development from adolescence to middle adulthood of a group of essentially normal
males to investigate the stability of memory concerning perceptions of events and
relationships that had occurred during adolescence. The findings indicate that the degree
of concordance between responses made during adolescence and adulthood was no better
than would be expected by chance. Whether these findings of this study of normal
mentally healthy individuals can be extended to reports of past experiences of those who
are medically or psychiatrically ill remains to be determined. Nevertheless, these results
direct attention to the importance of the use of collateral sources to enhance the validity
of relevant historical information when assessing adults and older adolescents.
That some children lack the motor skills required for everyday activities is well known,
but the prevalence, comorbidity, and outcome of developmental coordination disorder
(DCD) is less clear. Kadesjo and Gillberg remedy this gap in their report of a population
study of Swedish 7-year-old children, who were followed up at yearly intervals for an
additional three years. DCD is a common problem, frequently comorbid with ADHD.
Clinicians are urged to fully assess motor clumsiness, particularly in children with
ADHD, to provide a basis for the development of treatment plans to minimize the
functional impact of DCD.
Although body dysmorphic disorder (BDD), a preoccupation with a nonexistent or
slight defect in appearance, usually begins during adolescence, the disorder has been little
studied in this age group. In the third paper in this section Albertini and Phillips report on
the demographic characteristics, phenomenology, associated psychopathology, and
treatment history and response of 33 children and adolescents below the age of 17,
meeting DSM-IV criteria for the diagnosis of BDD. The results of this carefully executed
descriptive study clearly indicate that social impairment is nearly universal among
children and adolescents with BDD. Although surgical, dermatological, and dental
procedures appear ineffective, serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SRIs) often appear to be
helpful, even if the symptoms are delusional. The wealth of clinical information in this
paper will aid clinicians to recognize and more effectively treat this distressing, often
secret and underrecognized, but very debilitating condition.
In the next paper in this section, Cohen, Flament, Dubos, and Basquin direct attention
to catatonia, an infrequent but severe condition in young people. The authors’ augment
their review of all reports of catatonic adolescents found in the literature between 1977
and 1997 (boys=25, girls=22) with an additional 9 consecutive cases seen during the past
6 years. The clinical features of catatonia as well as etiologies, complications, and
treatment are similar to those reported in the adult literature. However, unlike adult
studies, in which catatonic women represent 75% of the cases, of the total of 51 children
and adolescents summarized in this report 60% were male. Although schizophrenia
appears to be the most frequent associated diagnosis in adolescents, comorbid organic
conditions, mood disorders, and developmental disorders have also been described. This
paper provides clinicians with crucial information necessary for the diagnosis and
treatment of this rare but sometimes fatal condition as it presents in children and
adolescents.
In their paper, “Toward a developmental operational definition of autism,” Gillham,
Carter, Volkmar, and Sparrow point out that traditional diagnostic schemes typically list
symptoms, but provide little guidance on how to incorporate information about
developmental level in making a diagnosis. This study explores the ability of the
Vineland Adaptive Behavior Scales to identify children with autism. The findings suggest
that evaluating children’s socialization in the context of their developmental level may
allow for a better appreciation of the ways in which symptoms change with age, and may
reduce confusion about diagnosis among clinicians and parents.
Depression is the next clinical issue addressed in this section. In it Cyranowski, Frank,
Young, and Shear offer a theoretical model for understand-ing the adolescent onset of the
gender difference in lifetime rates of major depression. In it the authors bring a vast array
of information to bear as they outline the affiliative proclivities and potential
depressogenic vulnerabilities of adolescent girls. As the authors indicate, the proposed
theoretical framework has considerable heuristic value because it connects multiple fields
of inquiry pointing the way to further programmatic research.
The final paper in this section examines social/emotional intelligence and midlife
resilience in schoolboys with low tested intelligence. As Vaillant and Davis point out, the
natural history of low intelligence has been largely ignored, and the findings of this study
will shatter many stereotypes. When the adult adjustment of 73 inner-city boys with a
mean IQ of 80, followed prospectively from age 14 to 65 were compared with a
socioeconomically matched sample of 38 boys with a mean IQ of 115, half of the low-IQ
subjects were found to enjoy incomes as high and had children as well-educated as did
highIQ men. Moreover the resilient low-IQ men were more likely to be generative, use
mature defenses, and enjoy warm object relations than the high-IQ group as a whole. The
authors provide several case vignettes to illustrate the proposition that “during the school
years, low tested IQ is a terrible curse, but IQ is not destiny.” Resilience with respect to
low tested intelligence appears to be mediated by those social skills often termed
“emotional intelligence,” which includes the ability to know and manage feelings.

TREATMENT ISSUES

The five papers in this section examine the current status of a range of treatments for
psychiatrically and developmentally disordered children and adolescents. In the first
paper, Angold, Costello, Burns, Erkanli, and Farmer provide an epidemiological
perspective on the effectiveness of psychiatric treatment in the “real world.” As these
authors note, efficacy studies usually take place in resource-rich, university-based
settings and involve highly selected, often nonreferred subjects who are willing to be
randomized and who have relatively homogeneous histories. Whether such treatments are
effective in the real world of the mental health practitioner’s office is clearly an important
question—and the results of this study provide some answers. The use of a large,
longitudinal, nonexperimental, community-based study to explore treatment effects
naturalistically trades experimental rigor for ecological validity. Within these constraints,
however, the results do suggest that the mental health care system for children can reduce
symptoms in the real world, provided that the length of treatment is of sufficient length to
be efficacious. Because real improvement does not become apparent until an individual
has received more than 8 sessions, it is incumbent upon both individual practitioners and
service planners to be cognizant of this important finding.
Although there is a growing consensus that the functional potential of children with
autism can be increased following exposure to intensive early intervention programs,
evidence regarding the differential effectiveness of different programmatic contents is
less clear. Nevertheless, families, physicians, and other service providers require
information in order to make informed decisions regarding various intervention
strategies. In the second paper in this section, Erba describes four diverse early
intervention programs—discrete trial training, LEAP, floor time, and TEACCH, for
children with autism. The theoretical underpinnings, intervention procedures, and
connections between theory and practice are illustrated and available research outcomes
are discussed. The paper is a useful resource for the practitioner, providing guidance to
the family of a recently diagnosed young autistic child.
Saywitz, Mannarino, Berliner, and Cohen provide an encyclopedic and very thoughtful
review of research demonstrating the variable effects of childhood sexual abuse, the need
for intervention, and the effectiveness of available treatment models. The authors
emphasize that there is no evidence of a single cohesive syndrome resulting from child
sexual abuse, although more than 50% of sexually abused children meet partial or full
criteria for post-traumatic stress disorder. This review explicates well-controlled outcome
studies that provide empirical evidence for extending and modifying treatment models
from mainstream clinical practice to sexually abused children. Sensationalistic fringe
treatments that treat sexually abused children as a special class of patients are not
considered. A continuum of interventions, ranging from psychoeducation and screening,
to short-term, abuse-focused, cognitive-behavioral therapy with family involvement, to
more comprehensive long-term plans for multiproblem cases are considered. This review
provides an invaluable guide, both to those who specialize in the area of the assessment
and treatment of children who have been sexually abused as well as the practitioner
seeking guidance regarding a rarely encountered individual case.
The final two papers in this section summarize currently available information
regarding serious and potentially fatal adverse effects of psychotropic medication.
Neuroleptic malignant syndrome (NMS), a cluster of symptoms including hypertonicity,
autonomic instability, fever, and cognitive disturbance, occurs in 0.5% to 1.4% of all
individuals exposed to neuroleptics. Silva, Munoz, Alpert, Perlmutter, and Diaz
summarize what is known about this condition as it occurs in children and adolescents.
Their review of 77 reported cases of NMS provides a guide to early detection and
treatment interventions that can reduce the mortality and morbidity of this serious
iatrogenic condition.
The official scientific statement of the American Heart Association summarizes the
cardiovascular effects of commonly used psychotropic medications in children and
adolescents. The review—which details drug effects on the electrocardiogram,
summarizes potentially dangerous drug interactions, and provides recommendations for
cardiovascular monitoring—was prompted by reports of sudden deaths in children and
adolescents receiving psychotropic medication. Its several tables and clearly stated
recommendations make muchneeded information readily available to the prescribing
practitioner.

SOCIETAL ISSUES: VIOLENCE AND VICTIMIZATION

This section contains five papers. In the past few years, there have been several highly
publicized cases of school violence. These incidences of children killing other children as
well as teachers were exceptionally dramatic because they occurred in “unexpected”
places, such as suburban and rural schools rather than urban, inner-city schools. These
incidents have led more child professionals to try to understand which children are at risk
for violence and what interventions might be successful at curbing violence.
The first paper in this section is a review of cross-sectional studies of peer
victimization on children’s adjustment. The meta-analysis by Hawker and Boulton
indicated that children who are bullied by others tend to be high on psychosocial distress,
particularly depression and loneliness.
The second paper presents two years of longitudinal data highlighting the early
behavioral characteristics that place children at risk for maladjustment and relationship
problems. Ladd and Burgess present data from the Pathways Project, a multisite study.
Teacher ratings of children’s aggressive and antisocial behaviors in the fall of
kindergarten were used to place children into one of four behavioral risk groups. The
trajectories of these groups were studied through the second grade in the current paper.
The withdrawn group in kindergarten did not have relationship difficulties in the early
years. Aggressive children had relationship difficulties with peers and teachers. The
aggressive/ withdrawn children had the most difficulty. They were most often friendless,
victimized, and dissatisfied. This study highlights the stability of behavioral risk and
maladaptive relationships in the early grade school years.
The third paper is a position paper by the Group for the Advancement of Psychiatry.
Based on a literature review, the committee presented rates of violence and identified
biological, psychological, and sociocultural factors that increase the risk of perpetrating
violence. Because attempts to treat violence on an individual basis are costly and of
limited success, the group advocates a tripartite model of prevention. This includes
introducing universal measures to affect populations, selective measures designed for at-
risk groups, and individual measures. In sum, the authors contend that violence is not
really a sudden event. Its associated psychopathology develops slowly and has numerous
psychiatric markers, thus putting child mental health practitioners in a position of early
identification and intervention.
Numerous interventions to reduce violence and victimization have been developed and
are being tested to determine their effectiveness. These include anti-bullying and conflict
resolution curricular. The last two papers describe interventions. One is an individual
intervention using mentors and the other is a “universal” classroom-based intervention.
Rhodes, Grossman, and Resch studied 959 youth who applied to the Big Brother
programs. Previous studies have found reduced rates of juvenile delinquency and
substance abuse. Approximately half of the sample was placed with mentors and the
remainder was used as controls. The children completed baseline and follow-up
interviews 18 months later. This study highlights that a consistent mentoring relationship
can serve as a corrective emotional experience for youth who have had unsatisfying
relationships with their own parents. A positive mentoring experience was associated
with improved parental relationships that in turn led to improved self-worth and
achievement.
The last paper is an interesting example of using entire schools to introduce
interventions aimed at reducing violence. The Conduct Problems Prevention Research
Group funded by NIMH and others is doing multi-site longitudinal studies. Someone
interested in the topic should see other papers by members of this group. This paper
describes the method of combining a universal intervention, the Fast Track PATHS
(Promoting Alternative Thinking Strategies) classroom curriculum with a selective
intervention. The selective intervention involved identifying the 10% of children with the
highest incidence of early conduct problems and offering weekly parenting support
classes, small-group social skills interventions, academic tutoring, and home visits. This
intensive intervention was deemed necessary to reduce risk factors and promote
protective factors in children on the path for antisocial behavior. It was believed that
providing services to the classrooms would allow children to generalize their newly
learned skills in a supportive setting. Promoting the development of social competence in
all children should improve classroom atmosphere and social relations for all. The
classroom was the unit of analysis in this paper and there is an interesting discussion of
teachers’ interest and ability to implement interventions. This is an early paper from an
ongoing study that will be of interest to many in education and school-age intervention.
In summary, the papers included in this edition of the Annual Progress in Child
Development and Child Psychiatry cover a multiplicity of topics. Some serve to deepen
our understanding of the diagnosis and treatment of long recognized and well-described
clinical phenomena, others direct attention toward issues of broader social concern,
whereas still others focus normal developmental processes from both a neural and
behavioral perspective—and as such, reflect the state of research interest and clinical
practice at the turn of the century.
Part I
DEVELOPMENTAL ISSUES
PART I: DEVELOPMENTAL ISSUES

1
Child Development and the PITS: Simple
Questions, Complex Answers, and
Developmental Theory
Frances Degen Horowitz

The enormous popular interest in the field of child development makes


it incumbent upon developmental scientists to convey with care the
complexity of development lest oversimplified popular accounts gain
credibility. Recent attempted models of development do include the
range of variables and complexities that need to be accommodated in
accounting for development. A model is presented here that
incorporates many of the elements of recent models but elaborates on
the role of experience in relation to the constitutional, cultural,
economic, and social factors that contribute to advantages and
disadvantages in children’s development. The importance of
accommodating data from prior theoretical perspectives and the
importance of the contributions from neuroimaging studies are
discussed as they are critical for successful theory building in the field
of child development.

INTRODUCTION

For those who have not yet heard or figured it out, “Child Development and the PITS”
translates into Child Development and the Person in the Street—the person in the street
who asks simple questions and wants simple answers, who is puzzled by complex
responses, and is terribly impatient with the nuances and qualifications that characterize
contemporary theories of development. Some of you might have thought PITS was a
reference to William James’ “TCPITS,” the common people in the street, but I actually
modeled it on the title of a 1940s book on symbolic and mathematical logic by Lillian
Lieber, MITS, WITS, and Logic (Lieber, 1960). MITS is the Man-In-The-Street and
WITS is the Woman-In-The-Street. That slim volume, in its several editions, was and is a
clever and sometimes humorous attempt to convey the essential aspects of symbolic logic
to the person in the street.

1999 Presidential address to the Society for Research in Child Development.


Annual progress in child psychiatry and child development 2000–2001 4
Now if symbolic and mathematical logic for the man and woman in the street was a
novelty 50 years ago, not so for child development. From the beginning of the modern
serious focus on the study of children, well before the founding of the Society for
Research in Child Development in 1933, surely dating back at least to the early days of
the child study movement in the 1880s, popularized information about children and their
development was aimed at people in the streets—at mothers and fathers and those
responsible for the health and welfare of children (Cairns, 1983; Sears, 1975; Senn,
1975). And certainly, throughout the twentieth century, there has been no dearth of
welland ill-informed books advising parents on the care of infants and children;
wonderful and sometimes scary admixtures of well-grounded evidence and passionate
advocacy.
And it continues, increasing geometrically. Hit “parenting” at Amazon.com and one
can browse the 75 bestsellers under the general title of parenting and families, or the 75
bestsellers on discipline, or on emotions and feelings, or on morals and responsibility. In
the 12 pages that you can print out listing the 75 bestsellers on parenting and families you
will note a number of volumes written by members of our Society along with the old
standards—Spock’s Baby and Child Care (Spock, 1998)—as well as recent books of
advice on raising the spirited child, the strong-willed child, the emotionally intelligent
child, the nonconforming child, and the happy child.
For the web sophisticate there is the National Parent Information Network
(www.npin.org) which lists, among other items, more than 150 national parent
information organizations. All this at the immediate—and literal—fingertips. As the
information base in child development and the information resources for parents increase
geometrically, we have a concomitant geometric decline in the amount of time it takes to
access that information, along with a geometric decline in the amount of time it takes for
information to go from academic debate and the research laboratory to translation and
mutation into advice books, into the Sunday supplement articles, onto the radio and
television talk shows, to be formed exquisitely and unforgettably into the media sound
bite.
All this—child development made easy for the PITS, the person in the street—is an
understandable response to expressed and unexpressed needs of parents, and caregivers,
and teachers. The media are only responding to the market. And responsive they are,
proffering advice made sometimes too attractive, especially if it is made up of one part
fact to three or four parts exaggeration, hype, and overgeneralization.
What we have is a seemingly insatiable hunger for simple answers to simple questions.
How else can we explain the relatively frequent headlines that claim the single-variable
responsibility for developmental outcomes: it’s all about peers (parents are irrelevant), or
the genes—more specifically, a gene—for shyness, for intelligence, for personality, for
grammar. “First Gene to Be Linked with High Intelligence Is Reported Found” headlined
science writer Nicholas Wade’s (1998) article for The New York Times with the
tantalizing inset teaser: “A new clue in the debate over what determines ability.” “Variant
Gene Tied to a Love of New Thrills” was The New York Times headline for Natalie
Angier’s (1996) rather informed article about the “partial genetic explanation for a
personality trait called ‘novelty seeking.’”
Even when the texts of such articles make reference to appropriate qualifications and
Child Development and the PITS 5
note the complexities, the headlines convey the simpler message. These simpler messages
get tucked into minds and shape popularized ideas into present and future belief systems.
A number of years ago it was bonding, with dire implications foretold if there was no
mother-infant skin-to-skin contact in the first hours after birth. More recently, the popular
media have reported new recommendations, liberally mixed with political ideology,
about infant feeding on demand needing to give way to feeding on strict schedules as
corrective for generations of poorly disciplined children.
Tomorrow, next month, next year, it will be other variables—identified in isolation,
heralded as all-important if not all-determining. And there will be no surcease in
supplying the stories for the reporters and the headline writers by those who, for a variety
of reasons, some sincere and informed, some ideological and self-serving, are more than
willing to satisfy the craving for simple answers to simple questions.
This is not to deny that the ultimate scientific ideal is nothing if not the embodiment of
the search for the simplifying and unifying assumptions that will integrate disparate
pieces of evidence to explain highly complex phenomena. For sure, given the current
state of affairs, our developmental science has a long way to go before we might achieve
such scientific elegance—if ever we will. Though one might think, looking at the
expansion of our database on children and their development, that we are making
significant advances toward an elegant integration of our vast database into overarching
theory. Witness the growth of “manuals” and “handbooks” from one volume to two
volumes to four volumes to four fatter volumes (Carmichael, 1954; Damon, 1998;
Mussen, 1970, 1983), to say nothing of the growth of the program of our own biennial
meeting over the years.
We have, I believe, the possibility of making significant progress toward the goal of a
theoretical integration of our vast and growing database, but not if we persist in some of
the peculiar tendencies of our science wherein each new theoretical formulation, rather
than being tested by how well it accommodates existing data, is used to delegitimize data
generated in the context of a previous theoretical fixation.
I say delegitimize rather than ignore in the Kuhnian (Kuhn, 1970) sense, because,
unlike in other sciences, where the success of new theoretical formu-lations is judged by
how much of the existing verified data can be accommodated by the new theory, in
human behavioral development new theories seem to be judged as successful by the
numbers of adherents who are eager to reject data and principles generated by existing or
older theories. Thus American Piagetian research ignored or rejected the data and
principles established in the behaviorist tradition; behaviorism dismissed Gesellian data
as uninformative and excoriated Freudian derived psychodynamic data. Behaviorism’s
data, demonstrating more or less efficacious strategies for learning, were dismissed as
nonlearning because they appeared to not consider more generic matters of cognition.
Behaviorists were severely criticized and caricatured quite dismissively because they
seemingly failed to include in the learning process the role of the “active child” acting on
the environment to foster his or her own development.
I’ve lost count of how often stimulus-response formulations of learning were said to be
completely invalid because the S-R approach viewed the child as an entirely passive
receptacle. One got the impression that critics were willing to suggest that it mattered
little to behaviorists whether their participants were alert or anesthetized. To turn the
Annual progress in child psychiatry and child development 2000–2001 6
tables, how often have behaviorists dismissed discussions of data that included difficult-
to-operationalize speculations and propositions that are, in some important ways, the stuff
of the imaginative musings that give rise to scientific and theoretical advances? How
often have they eschewed data analysis techniques as representing group fictions?

GROWING CONSENSUS?

All said, however, I detect important progress and some growing consensus in recent
years, if not yet widespread agreement in our science, that recognizes a need to embrace
data from a variety of theoretical perspectives in the service of formulating more
overarching developmental theories. To be sure, we may just be in an era of a new set of
buzzwords and phrases—dynamic, nonlinear, systems, plasticity, life-course trajectories,
bioecological, person-in-context, reciprocal influences, mediators, connectionism, and
attractors.
It may also be said that we seem to be in an era of enthusiasm for models. In 1983, the
first volume of the Handbook of Child Psychology was entitled History, Theory, and
Methods (Kessen, 1983); in 1998, the first volume of the Handbook is entitled
Theoretical Models of Human Development (Lerner, 1998). The models include
Overton’s Bio/Social-Cultural Action Matrix (Overton, 1998), Gottlieb’s systems view of
psychobiological development (Gottlieb, Wahlsten, & Lickliter, 1992), Fischer and
Bidell’s dynamic, domain-specific, skill structure developmental web model (Fischer &
Bidell, 1998), and Thelen and Smith’s dynamical systems and modified epigenetic
landscapes (Thelen & Smith, 1994).
Encouragingly, the current academic jargon and models involve more
acknowledgments of complexity than has been previously true, driven in large part by the
complexity of the data, especially in relation to large cross-sectional and longitudinal data
sets. Against the media popularity of single-variable stories, the science itself is moving
inexorably toward greater and greater data-driven, integrative theoretical complexity. An
exception to this is behavioral genetics. In contrast to the dynamic nonlinear interactive
models full of reciprocity between and among levels and variables, behavioral genetics
presents a relatively nondynamic linear additive model that tries to assign percentages of
variance in behavior and development that can be attributed to genes. The enterprise rests
on the assumption that genetic influence can be expressed as a value accounting for a
portion of the variance in a nondynamic linear equation for predicting behavioral
functioning, and, furthermore, that individual experiences of shared and nonshared
environments can be assessed inferentially by the degree of biological relatedness of
individuals without empirical observations of experience (Hoffman, 1991; Horowitz,
1993).
Behavioral genetics involves a relatively simplistic approach when compared with the
kinds of dynamic system theories currently being elaborated. Perhaps that is why, in the
mode of wanting simple answers to simple questions, behavior genetic reports are so
media-attracting. However, so as not to seem to be repeating the practice I’ve just
criticized of dismissing data in the face of new theoretical formulations, it needs to be
said that the data reported in behavioral genetics studies involving degrees of
Child Development and the PITS 7
relationships among twins, siblings, and biologically unrelated individuals are in
themselves interesting, even if it is doubtful that these relationships tell us anything about
the direct and unmediated impact of genes.
In formulating the more recent complex models of development one sees increasing
skepticism about what is to be learned from assigning variance percentages to genes (e.g.,
Elman et al., 1998; Kagan, 1998). The skepticism is informed by approaches that see
genes, the central nervous system, and other biological functions and variables as
contributors to reciprocal, dynamic processes which can only be fully understood in
relation to sociocultural environmental contexts. It is a perspective that is influenced by
the impressive recent methodological and substantive advances in the neurosciences.
Data from studies that employ neuroimaging techniques are providing extremely
important information about structural plasticity in neuropsychological function. Most
critically, this structural and functional plasticity across developmental time is being tied
directly to the amplifications and constraints of the social/cultural contexts that determine
the opportunities that children and adults have to experience and learn (Elman et al.,
1998; Lewontin, Rose, & Kamin, 1984; Nelson & Bloom, 1997).

TOWARD AN INTEGRATIVE THEORY

Let me suggest that these advances lead us, if not anywhere near the brink of an
integrative theory and the elegance to be achieved by a set of unifying and simplifying
assumptions, then at least toward a better understanding of the complex and dynamic
nature of the relationships that impact development and the operation of developmental
processes.
Permit me to enter, not a new model of development per se, but a graphic to represent
the range and complexity of what we must understand to achieve a fuller description of
development and developmental processes (see Figure 1.1). It represents a way of
thinking that I believe will accommodate and perhaps elaborate a number of the
developmental models now being described and the data they are generating. In other
words, this is not a de novo entrant into the arena of models but an attempt at a synthesis
that might better organize our data and how we think theoretically.
You will recognize in Figure 1.1 shades of a number of models and graphics by others
with respect to organism-environment reciprocity (e.g., Gottlieb, Wahlsten, & Lickliter,
1998; Wachs, 1992) and efforts to parse the environment (e.g., Bronfenbrenner, 1979;
Bronfenbrenner & Ceci, 1994; Horowitz, 1987; Horowitz & Haritos, 1998). In this
model, as in some of the others, the assumption is made (supported by data) that from the
moment of conception development is influenced by constitutional, social, economic, and
cultural factors and that these factors, furthermore, continue in linear and nonlinear
relationships, to affect development across the life span, with development broadly
defined to accommodate both the increase and decrease in ability and function.
Throughout the model, I use the word “experience” rather than “environment” to
emphasize that the operative aspect of environment is experience. What is suggested by
large amounts of data across many different studies (and not surprisingly to many in this
audience) is that, taken together or in various linear and nonlinear combinations and
Annual progress in child psychiatry and child development 2000–2001 8

Figure 1.1 A depiction of the constitutional, social, cultural, and


economic sources of influence on development with
respect to the nature of experience and in relation to the
circumstances of advantage, risk, and promise.

permutations, constitutional, economic, social, and cultural factors provide the set of
circumstances, or context, for development. These circumstances may, in aggregate,
generally provide normal advantage, poor advantage, or high advantage. Unaggregated,
as will be illustrated in a bit, they can also provide advantage or disadvantage in a
particular developmental domain. In this schematic, the greater the presence of poorly
advantaging circumstances, the more overall development is put at risk; the greater the
presence of highly advantaging circumstances, the more promise for overall
development.
The circumstances that condition the possibilities of risk and promise begin with
conception; past the moment of conception, in addition to the normal genetic and
biological processes during the prenatal period, social, economic, and cultural variables
of environmental origin, mediated by maternal biology, begin to operate. They contribute
to setting the base of the child’s initial constitutional circumstances at birth. The point
being made here is that already in the prenatal period, as a number of investigators have
Child Development and the PITS 9
shown, we have to consider experiential aspects of environmental origin, albeit mediated
through maternal biology.
Past the prenatal period, it becomes important and, I believe, useful to think about how
to organize our thinking and data with regard to parsing the functional dimensions of
experience in terms of what is the minimal level, amount, or nature of experience
necessary for the development of the universal human behavioral repertoire—experience
that is highly probable for the normally developing human organism; experience insured
by the extensive amount of naturally occurring redundancy. Beyond the minimal level, I
believe the data suggest there is a normal, highly likely range of experience provided
postnatally for most children growing up in normal and near-normal environments. These
experiences serve to sculpt and elaborate the basic species-typical universal human
behaviors. They begin also to shape the vast repertoire of nonuniversal behaviors
important to functioning in different social, cultural, and economic societies.
The conundrum for many is to explain the regularities of the postnatal emergence of
the normal universal species-typical behaviors in each individual child despite the
seeming variations in the gross nature of environments. The nativist answer is recourse to
instincts, to predetermined, architecturally and genetically driven explanations, both for
the species as a whole and for the individuals in particular (Chomsky, 1965; Pinker,
1994; Spelke, Breinlinger, Macomber, & Jacobson, 1992; Spelke & Newport, 1998). To
the Person in the Street these explanations seem to provide the simple answers to simple
questions though the nativist position is by no means simplistic and the position is often
supported by very interesting data.
The alternative view and, I believe, the more compelling view is to consider that within
all the gross environmental variations there is present the essential minimal experience
necessary for the acquisition—the learning—of the basic universal behaviors of our
species. There is a growing agreement that universal behaviors and physical structures
are not built into the organism but that humans are, at the very least, evolutionarily
primed to take advantage of the transactional opportunities provided by what Brandstäder
(1998) sees as the universal physical and social ecologies available to all normal human
organisms—the kinds of transactional opportunities so beautifully analyzed by Thelen
and her colleagues with respect to early motor development (Thelen & Ulrich, 1991). As
a result of these transactional experiences, the forms and functions of the universal
developmental domains are constructed, whether as described in Thelen’s dynamic
systems approach to motor development (Thelen & Smith, 1994; Thelen & Ulrich, 1991),
or in Katherine Nelson’s (1996) powerful analysis and synthesis of the role of language
in cognitive development, or in Kurt Fischer’s notion of the “constructive web” and his
attempts to document the linear and nonlinear mechanisms involved in the construction
and development of the hierarchies of skills (Fischer, 1980; Fischer & Bidell, 1998).
These points of view are gaining in credibility because, with the aid of neuroimaging
techniques (Nelson & Bloom, 1997), we are learning how actively responsive is the
developing brain to experience. In all, the evidence is accumulating that the regularities
of development are constructed as a result of the transaction of the individual with the
seemingly big, buzzing, confusing, noisy environmental surround—an environmental
context that provides a high level of redundant experiential opportunities for these
universal capacities to be sculpted and, at the same time, for the variations across
Annual progress in child psychiatry and child development 2000–2001 10
environments to begin to shape the development of the nonuniversal behaviors that define
individuals in linguistic, social, cognitive, economic, and cultural contexts (Horowitz &
Haritos, 1998). For example, the capacity for language is a universal species-typical
behavior of all normal humans. Its initial development and expres-sion rest on the
normally occurring prenatal environment and the minimal level of the postnatal essential
experience of hearing language and experiencing it in a social context. The acquisition of
language is then further sculpted by the normal range of experiences involving the
language of the cultural surround—Mandarin Chinese for one, Hebrew for another,
Portuguese for another, and so on. I use the word “sculpted” here not to refer to some
passive organism on which experience is writing the script but rather to an active
collaboration of organismic (read constitutional) characteristics with experiential
opportunities that impact the development of nonuniversal behaviors—nonuniversal
behaviors that are determined in a social, cultural, economic, and constitutional context.
In the normal range of experience, the capacity for language and the acquisition of a
specific language is embedded in the social contexts that influence the use of language in
communication, determining how language comes to serve the behavioral repertoire of
social and cultural exchange expected of individuals in that cultural and social context. In
turn, these experiences affect the development of constitutional characteristics in terms of
brain structure and function with the constitutional characteristics also in dynamic
relationship with experience and with the social, economic, and cultural contexts in
which development is occurring.
Until now, our attempts to parse and categorize experience have been relatively crude,
crude as in Figure 1—suggesting, without much specification, that there is a minimal
level of experience necessary for the development of basic universal behaviors, that a
normal range of experience further enables the development of universal behaviors as
well as the initial shaping of the nonuniversal behavioral repertoires. Beyond this,
environments can provide for a range of normal additional experience and, further,
extraordinary additional experience (all yet to be defined in terms of components and
dynamic processes) which may or may not be the same across different environments.
But there is a growing body of evidence that demonstrates the powerful effect of
variations in experience, assuming some minima, on language development, on cognitive
development, and on intelligence. In a detailed and painstaking study of the language
input experiences and of the consequent language output of very young children growing
up in different socioeconomic environments, Hart and Risley (1995) have shown that
although all of the children they observed learned to talk and acquired the basic
grammatical structure of English, children reared by professional parents had five times
more words addressed to them over the first three years of life than did children reared by
parents in poverty, with the concomitant effect of an increasingly widening gap between
the recorded size of the children’s vocabulary so that by 3 years of age children reared by
the more language-restricted parents in poverty had a vocabulary of less than 500 words,
while those reared by language-rich professional parents had a vocabulary of about 1,100
words; children reared by middleand lower-income parents had a vocabulary of about
700 words.
Huttenlocher and her colleagues (Huttenlocher, Levine, & Vevea, 1998) have shown
the sensitivity of cognitive growth involving language, spatial operations, and concept
Child Development and the PITS 11
development to the experience reflected in the simple measure of amount of time spent in
school. Brooks-Gunn, Klebanov, and Duncan (1996) have provided impressive evidence
of the powerful impact of impoverished family resources on IQ such that when they
controlled for the constellation of the social, economic, and cultural dimensions of
poverty, the oft-reported black-white differences in IQ all but disappeared.
It is almost 30 years since Sameroff and Chandler (1975), in their seminal chapter on
the “continuum of caretaking casualty,” alerted us to the effects of the advantaging and
disadvantaging macrosocial characteristics of environments on the postnatal
developmental journeys of high-risk infants. The accumulating data since the 1970s has
permitted us to refine our understanding of the variables and dynamics that impact the
developmental outcomes of those infants.
The data do, I believe, also permit us to conceptualize about the circumstances—
constitutional, social, cultural, and economic—that conspire, effectively, to bestow
normal, low, or high degrees of advantage during development—in general or with
respect to particular developmental domains.
The specific studies I have cited illustrate in a most general way that poorly
advantaged environments, defined as providing children with impoverished or limited or
sometimes only a little experience beyond the minimum, put the fullest realization of
children’s development at risk by offering few or fewer opportunities for enriching
additional experience or extraordinary additional experience. Conversely, highly
advantaged environments, defined as providing many more opportunities for additional
and enriched experiences, hold promise for the fullest realization of children’s
development.
At the extremes, at the ends of the continuum of advantage, a confluence of
constitutional, social, economic, and cultural circumstances for poor advantage or
enriched advantage can coalesce into what I call “swamping conditions.” That is, at the
extremes a dense concentration of resources made possible, for example, by high
socioeconomic advantage can have the effect of swamping development in a positive
manner. Conversely, a dense concentration of disadvantaged circumstances can swamp
development negatively.
However, the picture is likely more complex. Swamping conditions at the extremes of
disadvantage or advantage may or may not affect all domains of development, and they
may have their origin in particular social, economic, cultural, or constitutional
circumstances. For example, cerebral palsy or Down syndrome are constitutionally
swamping conditions. Cerebral palsy is a swamping condition that involves severe
constitutional compromises with respect to motor development. The presence of cerebral
palsy may or may not have constitutional disadvantages in other developmental domains,
and the child with cerebral palsy may be born into social, economic, and cultural
circumstances that hold normal, low, or high degrees of advantage.
In the case of cerebral palsy, its presence can render ineffective the minimal level of
experience necessary for the development of the basic species behavioral universals
related to human motor development. One can speculate that someday it will be possible,
as it is now possible with the inborn metabolic disorder involved in phenylketonuria, to
detect and then provide a physical/ biological/socially mediated intervention either
prenatally or postnatally that would nullify cerebral palsy as a swamping condition for
Annual progress in child psychiatry and child development 2000–2001 12
normal motor development. In the meantime, this swamping condition may be
ameliorated when children with cerebral palsy are provided with extraordinary additional
experience designed to moderate the effect of the condition on motor functioning.
This is not the occasion to explore the combinations and permutations and the linear
and nonlinear functions that need to be taken into account in a refined analysis of the
constitutional, social, economic, and cultural circumstances interacting with various
degrees of experience, by domain and across time. Suffice it to say it is likely that the
dynamics and constituents of developmental processes are not static across time, nor are
they linear. Further, a systems analysis of these variables accommodates the idea that we
are dealing also with the interactive impact of individual differences as well as the power
of suddenly appearing or enduring variables to change the dynamics of the system,
perhaps to function as disadvantaging swamping conditions: psychological trauma,
cultural upheaval, physical disability and disease, and social chaos. In the same way,
conditions of economic stability and affluence, social cohesion, high-quality education,
and consistent and saturating extraordinary additional experience can function as
advantaging variables and, if intensive enough, as advantaging swamping circumstances.
We must recognize, too, the confluence of organism and environment or of particular
constitutional and/or social and cultural circumstances that make for individual resilience
in the face of adversity, and individual vulnerability in the face of advantage.
As has been noted, poverty in our society is clearly a disadvantaging economic
variable, although under certain constitutional social, historical, and cultural contexts its
disadvantaging effects may well be attenuated (Elder, 1999; Werner & Smith,
1982, 1992), especially when not compounded by the added negative factors of racism
and discrimination. Affluence is an obviously advantaging condition, although under
certain constitutional social, cultural, and historical circumstances its advantaging power
may be diminished. In other words, the degree to which any constitutional, social,
economic, and cultural circumstance is relatively advantaging or disadvantaging is highly
contextualized. Further, the functional consequences of these circumstances will rest
strongly on the nature and extent of focused and fortuitous environmentally organized
and mediated experiences.
At the extremes, in certain domains the constitutionally or economically swamping
conditions may well play stronger roles than social and cultural variables in determining
the degree of advantage. The presence of cerebral palsy is a disadvantaging condition for
motor development, as is Down syn-drome for mental development, but not necessarily
for all aspects of social development. In the case of Down syndrome, we know that
providing early extraordinary additional experience attenuates some of the mental
retardation (Carr, 1992). In addition, children who may be constitutionally or otherwise
advantaged with respect to extraordinary giftedness and talent in athletics, in music, in
art, in language, typically require extraordinary additional experiences in learning,
training, and opportunity for such gifts to be fully expressed and realized (Feldman,
1986).
Toward an integrative theory of human behavioral development, the challenge for the
approach outlined here, or for any such attempt, is to determine how well this kind of a
theoretical approach accommodates, explains, and encompasses our reliable database. I
believe we may now be nearer to some partially successful efforts in this regard than we
Child Development and the PITS 13
have been in the whole history of our discipline. That is reason to step back and
acknowledge that as a result of the collective of our scientific enterprise across the globe,
we can say, with some satisfaction, that we are indeed making important progress.

ON SOCIAL RESPONSIBILITY

Of course, for the Person in the Street, our progress may not be all that comforting
because it doesn’t lend itself to providing simple answers to simple questions. Yet it is
often the simple answer that is wanted, the simple variable, the blanket relief from
parental responsibility, or the blanket prescription that will fix what is wrong, or,
prospectively, the blanket formula that will insure the best developmental outcome. Thus
the popularity of the 75 bestsellers giving advice on how to raise the spirited, the strong-
willed, the emotionally intelligent, the nonconforming, the happy child, to say nothing of
how to increase your child’s IQ. Thus the popular media interest in conceptualizations
that say not much will make a difference, just good enough parenting is all that is wanted.
It is interesting to think that while “good enough parenting” (Scarr, 1992) may have
some appeal, the idea of “good enough teaching” is currently quite out of sync with our
expectations of schooling and the almost epidemic fervor in this country about raising
academic standards and increasing the level of school achievement. Just a little
inconsistency here, especially when, increasingly, at both the micro and macro levels, we
are coming to understand parenting as teaching, the kind of nondidactic teaching
embedded in the subtle and notso-subtle variations in children’s parentally organized
experiences, the kind of parental teaching that increasingly appears to be critical for the
developing child, especially in relation to the nonuniversal behavioral repertoire.
Yet consider that if you give credence to the notion of “good enough parenting” and
combine that with the popularized simple answer that it is really the genotype that is the
determining factor and that little the parent does will make a difference, and if you
assume that what is true for parental efforts holds true for the teacher in the classroom,
then you have a seemingly scientific rationale for the failure to educate, a rationale you
can claim is sanctioned by scientific authority citing specific facts. But unlike Gertrude
Stein’s rose, a developmental fact is only a fact in a theoretical context, a lesson we
should have learned well from Piaget, an understanding generally resisted by doctrinaire
behaviorists.
Keeping control of facts in relation to theoretical context becomes increasingly
important as knowledge grows but also as the posing of simple questions and the desire
for simple answers just does not abate. The urge to simplify and especially to geneticize
is a strong one. I recall a request to reprint Figure 1 used in my book on developmental
theories. I had labeled one of the dimensions in the figure as organismic and the other as
environmental (Horowitz, 1987), but the colleague requesting to reprint the figure in a
book had crossed out the word organismic and substituted the word genetic. No, I said,
the two were not equivalent and, unless the original label was to be used, my permission
would not be granted.
Similarly, in this discussion, “constitutional” is not equivalent to “genetic,” and
purposely so. Constitutional includes the expressed functions of genes—which, in
Annual progress in child psychiatry and child development 2000–2001 14
themselves require some environmental input—but constitutional includes the operations
of the central nervous system and all the biological and environmental experiences that
impact organismic functioning and make constitutional variables part of the dynamic and
reciprocal interactions that change across the life span as they affect the development of
and the decline of behavior.
In this perspective, the scientific challenges before us are severalfold. One is, as I have
already indicated, to make significant progress in identifying the functional units and
roles of experience. We need to learn how best to parse experience for the purpose of
seeing its role within the dynamic systems responsible for development. Another
challenge is to integrate more fully into our account of behavioral development the
evidence emerging from the neurosciences about the effect of experience in shaping
neurological function and structure. Still another is to remain vigilant in submitting any
new theoretical formulation to the test of how well it accommodates the reliable database
of the phenomena it purports to cover. Beyond the scientific challenge, however, is the
challenge of helping the Person in the Street to learn to ask less simple questions and the
challenge of communicating our knowledge and making clear the limitations of our
knowledge in the most socially responsible manner possible.
A fact is a fact is a fact is not analogous to Gertrude Stein’s rose. Moreover, the image
of Stein’s unyielding rose does not carry with it serious social implications for the fabric
of a society, even though Stein’s formulation may have had some existential import and
influence on asthetic appreciation and theory. The social import of our facts and their
interpretation is something we must care about. For good or for ill, our knowledge base is
of enormous interest to the Person in the Street. None of us can singlehandedly deter the
determined maker of the sound bite but we can make it difficult. None of us can
singlehandedly cause the quest for simple answers to disappear but we can consciously
attempt to suggest, in every venue, in every forum, that at the present state of our
discipline most simple questions about human behavior and development require
complex, often incomplete and unsatisfying answers.
If we accept as a challenge the need to act with social responsibility then we must
make sure that we do not use single-variable words like genes or the notion of innate in
such a determinative manner as to give the impression that they constitute the simple
answers to the simple questions asked by the Person in the Street lest we contribute to
belief systems that will inform social policies that seek to limit experience and
opportunity and, ultimately, development, especially when compounded by racism and
poorly advantaged circumstances. Or, as Elman and Bates and their colleagues said in the
concluding section of their book Rethinking Innateness (Elman et al., 1998), “If our
careless, underspecified choice of words inadvertently does damage to future generations
of children, we cannot turn with innocent outrage to the judge and say ‘But your Honor, I
didn’t realize the word was loaded.’”
As SRCD has so clearly acknowledged in its effort to communicate responsibly what
we know for the purpose of informing enlightened social policy, we must do so only if
we repeatedly remind the people in the street who ask the simple questions that
development is complex, that our theories are incomplete, and that we do not fully
understand all the variables and systems in control of development and developmental
processes, even though, I believe, we can now say that our growing database points to the
Child Development and the PITS 15
critical role of experience interacting with the organism in affecting the realization of
human potential in all domains and across the life span.

ADDRESS AND AFFILIATION

Corresponding author: Frances Degen Horowitz, The Graduate School and University
Center, City University of New York, 365 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10016–4309; e-
mail: [email protected]

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PART I: DEVELOPMENTAL ISSUES

2
Developing Mechanisms of Self-Regulation
Michael I.Posner and Mary K.Rothbart

Child development involves both reactive and self-regulatory


mechanisms that children develop in conjunction with social norms. A
half-century of research has uncovered aspects of the physical basis of
attentional networks that produce regulation, and has given us some
knowledge of how the social environment may alter them. In this
paper, we discuss six forms of developmental plasticity related to
aspects of attention. We then focus on effortful or executive aspects of
attention, reviewing research on temperamental individual differences
and important pathways to normal and pathological development.
Pathologies of development may arise when regulatory and reactive
systems fail to reach the balance that allows for both self-expression
and socially acceptable behavior. It remains a challenge for our
society during the next millennium to obtain the information necessary
to design systems that allow a successful balance to be realized by the
largest possible number of children.

INTRODUCTION

We believe that understanding self-regulation is the single most crucial goal for
advancing an understanding of development and psychopathology. Early in this century,
Freud (1920) argued that the ego and superego developed to regulate largely unconscious
motivational systems. In the latter part of this century mechanisms of self-regulation have
begun to be uncovered through the study of attention and effortful control. There is also
substantial reason to believe that understanding mechanisms of self-regulation in normal
individuals will lead to advances in diagnosis, prevention, and possibly treatment of
developmental problems like attention deficit disorder and learning disabilities. In turn,
studies of these mechanisms in the developmental disorders will enhance our
understanding of normal functioning.
Self-regulation involves complex questions about the nature of volition and its relation
to our genetic endowment and social experience. Much of the work on self-regulation has
been purely behavioral. This is true in both attention studies carried out within cognitive
psychology and studies of effortful control as a temperamental dimension. The lack of
appropriate methods to study the physiology of the human brain has previously led to an
Annual progress in child psychiatry and child development 2000–2001 20
understandable hesitation in thinking about these processes at the neurosystems level.
Kandel (1998, 1999), however, has argued persuasively that new concepts in
neuroscience now make it possible to attempt to relate higher level cognitive concepts to
underlying brain systems. His goal is to use modern neuroscience to reinvigorate the
psychoanalytic approach to the mind, and he stresses the role of unconscious early
experience in shaping the brain systems that control adult behavior. Even if such
connections prove to be as yet premature, there is little question that they will be major
topics in the coming years.
A major goal of our chapter is to help the reader understand how new developments
related to neural plasticity and neuroimaging have transformed the potential for
understanding mechanisms that provide voluntary control of brain systems. Although
Kandel (1998, 1999) has emphasized the relation of genetic and cellular processes to
psychoanalytic concepts and therapy, our chapter concentrates mainly at the
neurosystems level and deals with the mechanisms that produce voluntary control of our
thoughts and actions.
Discoveries within neuroscience have moved the field toward viewing the brain as
plastic and open to influence by experience (Garraghty, Churchill, & Banks, 1998;
Merzenich & Jenkins, 1995). The advent of neuroimaging has provided new tools for
testing hypotheses about how the brain changes with experience and for exploring the
behavioral mechanisms of self-regulation (Posner & Raichle, 1994). In this chapter we
first examine some of the historical background for considering attention networks as
mechanisms of self-regulation in the human brain. Next, we take advantage of imaging
methods to examine how the brain might be altered by experience on a time scale from
milliseconds to years. We then examine the role of high-level attentional networks as a
vehicle for self-regulation and consider evidence that similar brain areas control
regulation of emotion and cognition. We consider how individuals differ in effortful
control and what some of the consequences of those differences might be for normal and
pathological development. In our final section, we speculate on future developments in
this field.

HISTORY

Within cognitive psychology, the mechanisms thought to be involved in self-control are


collectively called attention. In 1958, Donald Broadbent summarized British work in the
field of attention in his volume Perception and Communication. He proposed a filter that
held back messages from an unattended channel to keep them from interfering with
selected input. Broadbent’s beautiful studies, summarized in nearly every textbook in
psychology, provided a basis for studying how we make a selection of relevant
information from the masses of potential input. The studies reviewed in his book viewed
attention as a high-level skill that allowed some experts to perform selective feats such as
simultaneous translation and even novices to have a role in selecting their environment.
There were challengers to Broadbent’s ideas, but it is remarkable, in view of the four
decades that have passed since 1958, how even his strongest critics have followed his
general ideas. For example, Anne Treisman (1969) showed that the filter could better be
Developing mechanisms of self-regulation 21
described as an attenuator, with much less interference when input was to separate
modalities (eye and ear), rather than to one. Norman (1969) argued it would be better to
see the filter as operating later in the system, after input had already activated material
stored in long-term memory. Indeed, experiments rather quickly established that familiar
words could look up their meanings even prior to being perceived (Posner, 1978). Allport
(1980) challenged whether limited capacity was related to attention, and argued that
interference instead resulted from contradicting behavioral task demands. However, all of
the ideas about attention that dominated cognitive journals for the last half century were
clearly derivatives of the basic question Broadbent (1958) had posed about selective
listening: How was it that some aspects of the input were perceived and others not? The
connection between selective processes in perception and more general issues of self-
regulation had to await a link between cognitive and the neurophysiological level of
analysis.
An important early link between studies of attention within human cognition and those
using the methods of neurophysiology was provided by Sokolov (1963) in his treatment
of the orienting reflex. The orienting reflex provided a physical basis for filtering input
and presaged the intense interest within neurophysiology in how attention might
modulate activity within sensory specific areas (Hillyard & Lourdes, 1998). The concept
of the orienting reflex was readily adapted to the study of preverbal infants who could not
be instructed as to where to attend by experimenters (see review by Ruff & Rothbart,
1996). Ruff and Rothbart (1996) identify landmark periods in the first year of life with
regard to orienting to objects and control of distress and in the second year and beyond in
children’s ability to plan and regulate cognitive skills.
It was a relatively easy step to identify these changes in the ability of the child to
regulate behavior with the development of brain areas that carried out attentional
selection in adults. This step, however, has a powerful consequence. It allows us to
transfer knowledge on the anatomy and circuitry of attentional networks (Posner &
Raichle, 1994) to the development of orienting and regulation in infants and adults
(Posner & Rothbart, 1998), providing mechanisms for understanding self-regulation and
its development. In the following, we consider changes in the human brain that might
reflect both the rapid switch of content that occurs when adult subjects shift the focus of
their attention and the much slower accumulation of the ability to control attention that
occurs over the early years of development.

PLASTICITY

In neuroscience, the issue of plasticity in brain activity has been discussed mainly at the
synaptic level. For example, correlated neural firing among neurons in contact with each
other leads to a change in the probability of one neuron being able to induce firing in the
other. This principle of learning, first discussed by Hebb (1949), has been shown to be a
basic principle for synaptic plasticity.
The use of neuroimaging methods, however, has provided an altogether different level
of analysis of plasticity. Instead of individual synapses, the focus is on the question of
how experience influences the set of neural areas active within a task and their time
Annual progress in child psychiatry and child development 2000–2001 22
course of activation. This work has begun to allow us to consider possible neural
mechanisms for many of the kinds of changes involved in children’s learning and
education. Table 2.1 indicates some of the ways in which the person’s own activity or
learning from external-based events might work to change brain circuitry on a temporary
or more permanent basis.

TABLE 2.1
Mechanisms of Plasticity
Time Phenomenon Mechanism Reference
1. Milliseconds Shifts in Amplification Corbetta et al. (1990)
attention
2. Seconds to Priming Tuning Jiang et al. (2000)
minutes
3. Minutes to days Practice Pathway Raichle et al. (1994)
4. Weeks New Connections McCandliss et al. (1997)
associations
5. Weeks Rule learning Structures McCandliss et al. (1997)
6. Years Development Attention Posner & Rothbart
networks (1998)

The top row of Table 2.1 refers to the finding that attention allows rapid changes in
neural activity in local brain areas. Neuroimaging methods are sensitive to changes in
blood flow that accompany neural activity. When a brain area is being used to perform
computations in high-level skills, it will increase in activity (Corbetta, Miezin,
Dobmeyer, Shulman, & Petersen, 1990). As children learn a new skill, they may show a
high level of variability as they try different strategies (Siegler, 1997). Each of these
strategies is represented by a connected set of neural areas that carry out particular
computations in some order. In adult studies, it is possible to demonstrate how a
particular strategy may assume momentary dominance. Attention can provide priority to
some computations, reprogramming the organization of the circuits by which tasks are
executed. Priority is produced by amplifying the amount of neural activity within the area
performing the computation. Often this is done voluntarily, as one tries to select a set of
operations that seem most appropriate to a given task. This is what we call effortful
control by attention.
However, strategies may also arise from the physical situation. In the presence of a
calculator, the person may enter numbers and press the appropriate key. If the calculator
is absent, the numbers may be written down and the operations perform mentally. In this
way, the environment primes one network of areas rather than another. Priming (row 2 of
Table 2.1) is produced by the presentation of a sensory event (e.g., the calculator
mentioned in the preceding), or by thought (e.g., the activation of a visual or auditory
word), which changes the processing pathway so that stimuli sharing some or the entire
pathway will be processed more efficiently. Priming can produce reduced reaction time
for responding to a related target that follows the prime. Neuroimaging and cellular
studies suggest that the number of neurons activated by a primed target is reduced over
Developing mechanisms of self-regulation 23
those activated in nonprimed target processing. The prime apparently tunes the neurons
involved in the target event so that only those most appropriate to processing the
subsequent target are activated (Ungerleider, Courtney, & Haxby, 1998).
The mechanisms of rows 1 (attention shifts) and 2 (priming) of Table 2.1 provide two
means to improve the processing of a target. The first method requires the person to
attend to the computation. The involvement of attention sets up a network for processing
the stimulus, but at the cost of making attention less available for handling other events.
Priming, however, may occur when attention is now no longer involved in the process,
leaving it free to deal with other items. Nevertheless, the network remains active for a
period to make the processing of previously attended computations available. Priming
may also occur without attention as the result of a sensory process. A pathway that has
been tuned by a priming event does not require current attention and thus does not
produce interference with ongoing activity (Posner, 1978). Effortful control through
attention and automatic pathway activation apparently achieve the same behavioral
results by quite different underlying mechanisms.
Practice on a set of already learned but not recently rehearsed associations (row 3 of
Table 2.1) shows that automaticity can completely change the pathway used to
accomplish the task. In one study using PET (Raichle et al., 1994), people were required
to generate a use for a read or heard noun (e.g., pound as a use for a hammer). When a
new list of words was presented there was activity in the left frontal and posterior cortex,
anterior cingulate, and right cerebellum. Activity in the anterior insula was reduced over
what was found in simply reading the words aloud. A few minutes of practice at
generating an associated use shifted activation so that the left frontal and posterior areas
important in generating a new use dropped away and the anterior insula, strongly
activated during reading aloud, increased. When generating a given word became
automated with practice, the same circuit was used as when skilled readers read words
aloud. There appeared to be one circuit associated with the thought needed to generate a
familiar but unpracticed use, and another when the task was automated, as in reading
aloud or generating again a just practiced association. The circuit used for thought
includes attentional mechanisms involving effortful control, whereas an automated circuit
does not involve attention.
In the study cited in the preceding, people are dealing with already wellknown
associations; for example, the association between hammer and pound. Even when they
have not practiced them recently, connections between hammer and pound are available.
However, it is often necessary to acquire entirely new associations, as in learning the
words of a foreign language. This involves establishing new connections in the brain
(row 4 of Table 2.1) and may require many weeks of practice. In one study of learning 40
lexical items in a new artificial language, it took 20 to 50 hours of practice before the
words showed the same superiority in reaction time usually found for reading the native
language (McCandliss, Posner, & Givon, 1997).
Even more complex than learning a few new associations is developing a whole system
to carry out an important linguistic function (row 5 of Table 2.1). Studies using PET with
literate adults have shown that areas of the visual system of the brain become active when
strings of letters are possible words in English, whether they have meaning or not
(Petersen, Fox, Snyder, & Raichle, 1990). This area of the brain is not active for nonsense
Annual progress in child psychiatry and child development 2000–2001 24
strings like a series of consonants. It seems to represent English orthography and has
been called the visual word form system (Petersen et al., 1990). This system appears to be
a left posterior function that serves to group letters of a word automatically into a single
chunk. No such unified chunk occurs for a string of consonants. This system appears to
require some years to develop. Evidence suggests it is not present in 7-year-olds, even in
those who know how to read, and can be found in 10-year-olds to a limited degree.
Moreover, once this system is developed, it appears to be strongly resistant to change
(Posner & McCandliss, in press).
The final row of Table 2.1 refers to changes in brain structures that develop over the
early life span of the person. We have in mind the several years apparently required to
develop attentional networks. One form of attentional control deals with the selection of
information by orienting to a sensory modality or location (e.g., eye movements or shifts
of visual attention in vision). Orienting shows marked development in the first year of
life (Ruff & Rothbart, 1996). In the visual system, early development includes
improvements in acuity, control of fixation, ability to disengage, preference for novel
objects and locations, and the control of emotional distress (Ruff & Rothbart, 1996). A
second form of attention shows strong development in the second year of life and after
(Posner & Rothbart, 1998). It provides the child with the necessary independence from
his or her sensory world to develop an agenda of his or her own. The development of this
system and its significance for the child are described further in the following.

EXECUTIVE CONTROL

The central issue of this section is to describe an approach for examining executive
function as a developmental process in early childhood. The goal is to provide an
experimental means to link individual differences in self-regulatory behaviors developing
in early childhood to the maturation of underlying neural systems. Norman and Shallice
(1986) developed a model of adult attention very much in the spirit of the Broadbent
approach. They argued that a supervisory attention system comes into play in adults in
resolving conflict, correcting errors, and planning new actions. There now appears to be
excellent data that the ability to resolve conflict undergoes development in early
childhood.
Adult studies using positron emission tomography (PET) have been consistent in
showing activity in midline frontal areas during tasks that might be thought to involve
executive attention (Bush et al., 1998; Posner & DiGirolamo, 1998). One such task we
have already discussed is generating the use of a word. When blood flow due to reading
words aloud is subtracted from blood flow in generating a use, there is a strong activation
in the frontal midline along with language related areas of the left hemisphere and in
connected areas in the cerebellum. Subsequent studies using high-density electrical
recording have shown that midfrontal activity is detected very early, about 150 ms after
input. This suggests that the first activity involves marshaling the cognitive effort needed
to generate a use beyond that needed in the relatively effortless task of reading aloud.
This view also agrees with PET studies showing that midfrontal activity may occur even
before the task starts, when subjects know that a difficult task will occur (Murtha,
Developing mechanisms of self-regulation 25
Chertkow, Beauregard, Dixon, & Evans, 1996).
The most frequently studied task found to activate the frontal midline has been the
Stroop effect. In this task, subjects must respond to one dimension of a stimulus (usually
the ink color), while ignoring another prepotent dimension (usually the color word name).
A summary of the many results on Stroop effect conflict shows a remarkable
convergence on areas of the frontal midline in the anterior cingulate gyrus (Bush et al.,
1998).
Because the anterior cingulate is the major outflow of the limbic system, however, it
seems reasonable that its main function would be related to emotion, not cognition, and
there is clear evidence that anterior cingulate activity is a part of the brain’s system for
evaluating pain (Rainville, Duncan, Price, Carrier, & Bushness, 1997) and for distress
vocalization (Devinsky, Morrell, & Vogt, 1995). The pain studies have shown cingulate
activity when heat stimuli were judged as painful in comparison to merely warm.
Moreover, the cingulate activity appears to be more related to the amount of subjective
distress caused by the pain than to the intensity of the sensory stimuli involved (Rainville
et al., 1997). When an effort was made to control the distress produced by a given
stimulus using hypnotic suggestion, the amount of anterior cingulate activation reflected
felt distress, whereas the somatosensory cortex reflected stimulus intensity.
Recent studies of negative emotion in adults have suggested that distress is also related
to activity in the amygdala (Davidson & Sutton, 1995). When pictures depicting
frightening or horrible scenes are shown to subjects, there is strong activation of the
amygdala, and evidence now exists that activation of the amygdala can be modulated by
frontal activity (Davidson & Sutton, 1995).
There is some evidence that cingulate activity is related to our awareness of emotion
rather than to the emotion itself. To measure emotional awareness, people are asked to
describe how they feel about situations. Their written responses are coded for use of
emotional terms and descriptors (Lane & Schwartz, 1992) and the resultant score is taken
as a measure of their emotional awareness. In a recent study, twelve subjects were shown
each of three highly emotional movies and three neutral movies during a PET scan (Lane
et al., 1996). Differences in anterior cingulate blood flow between the emotional and
neutral movies were positively related to the person’s level of emotional awareness.
These data suggest that something about awareness of emotions during sad or happy
events is related to changes in the anterior cingulate. This result is similar to the finding
discussed in the preceding indicating that cingulate activity is more related to the painful
feelings than to the intensity of the stimulus inducing the pain (Rainville et al., 1997).
Control of distress is a major task for the infant and caregiver in the early months of
life, and attention plays an important role in this regulation (Harman, Rothbart & Posner,
1997). In the first few months, caregivers help control distress mainly by holding and
rocking. Increasingly, in the early months, visual orienting is also used. Caregivers then
attempt to involve the child in activities that will occupy their attention and reduce their
distress. These interactions between infant and caregiver may train the infant in control of
distress and lead to the development of the midfrontal area as a control system for
negative emotion. Later, when similar cognitive challenges arise, a system for regulating
remote brain areas may be already prepared.
Many psychologists agree with Denckla (1996) that “the difference between the child
Annual progress in child psychiatry and child development 2000–2001 26
and adult resides in the unfolding of executive functions” (p. 264). Luria (1973) also
referred to the development of a higher level voluntary social attention system. More
voluntary attentional mechanisms and individual dif-ferences in executive attention have
important implications for the early development of behavioral and emotional control
(Rothbart & Bates, 1998).
In an early example of cognitive control in a limited domain, Diamond (1991) showed
the stages from 9 to 12 months in the child’s resolving conflict between reaching along
the line of sight in order to retrieve an object in a box. At 9 months, the line of sight
dominates completely. Even if the infant’s hand touches the toy through the open side of
the box, if its movement is not in line with the side the child is looking at, the infant will
withdraw the hand and reach along the line of sight, striking the closed side. Three
months later, infants are able to look at a closed side but reach through the open end to
retrieve the toy.
However, being able to reach for a target away from the line of sight is only a very
limited from of conflict resolution. Gerstadt, Hong, and Diamond (1994) studied verbal
conflict modeled on the Stroop paradigm in children as young as 3.5 years. Two cards
were prepared to suggest day and night to the children: one depicted a line drawing of the
sun, the other a picture of the moon surrounded by stars. Children in the conflict
condition were instructed to say day to the moon card and night to the sun card. Children
in the control condition were divided into two groups and instructed to say day or night to
either a checkerboard or ribbon card. At every age, accuracy scores were significantly
lower for conflict relative to control trials. Other efforts have been made with Stroop-like
tasks (Jerger, Martin, & Piozzolo, 1988) and with the Wisconsin card sort task (Zelazo,
Reznick, & Pinon, 1995) to study children as young as 31 months; little evidence of
successful inhibitory control below 3 years has been found.
We believe that children as young as 18 months might be undergoing development in
frontal midline areas that would allow the limited conflict resolution related to eye
position to become more general. We had found that children at 18 months could show
context-sensitive learning of sequences (Clohessy, Posner, & Rothbart, in press). This is a
form of learning that, in adults, appears to require access to the kind of higher level
attention needed to resolve conflict. Adults can learn sequences of spatial locations
implicitly when each location is invariably associated with another location (e.g.,
locations 13241324). This occurs even when the adult is distracted with a secondary task
known to occupy focal attention (Curran & Keele, 1993). The implicit form of skill
learning seems to rely mainly upon subcortical structures. However, when distraction is
present, adults are not able to learn context-sensitive sequences (e.g., locations 123213)
in which each association is ambiguous. We found that infants as young as 4 months
could learn the unambiguous associations, but not until 18 months did they begin to show
the ability to learn ambiguous or context-sensitive associations (e.g., locations 1213).
Individual children showed wide differences in their learning abilities, and we found that
the ability to learn context-sensitive cues was positively related to the caregiver’s report
of the child’s vocabulary development.
According to the analysis of the last section, a more direct measure of the development
of executive attention might be reflected in the ability to resolve conflict between
simultaneous stimulus events as in the Stroop effect. Because children of this age do not
Developing mechanisms of self-regulation 27
read, we reasoned that the use of basic visual dimensions of location and identity might
be the most appropriate way to study the early resolution of conflict.
The variant of the Stroop effect we designed to be appropriate for ages as young as 2 to
3 years involved presenting a picture depicting a simple object on one side of a screen
directly in front of the child and requiring the child to respond with a key that matched
the stimulus they were shown (Gerardi-Caulton, in press). The appropriate key could be
either on the side of the stimulus (compatible trial) or on the side opposite the stimulus
(incompatible trial). The child’s prepotent response was to press the key on the side of the
target irrespective of its identity; however, the task required the child to inhibit the
prepotent response and to respond instead based on identity. The ability to resolve this
conflict is measured by the accuracy and speed of their key-press responses.
Results of the study strongly suggested that executive attention undergoes dramatic
change during the third year of life. Performance by toddlers at the very beginning of this
period was dominated by a tendency to repeat the previous response. Perseveration is
associated with frontal dysfunction, and this finding is consistent with the idea that
executive attention is still very immature at 24 months. Even at this young age, however,
toddlers were already showing a significant accuracy difference favoring compatible over
incompatible trials. By the second half of the third and beginning of the fourth year,
children showed a strikingly different pattern of responses. Children now performed with
high accuracy for both compatible and incompatible conditions, showing the expected
slowing for incompatible relative to compatible trials. The developmental transition
appeared to occur at about 30 months.
It was also possible to examine the relationship of our laboratory measures of conflict
resolution to children’s performance on a battery of tasks requiring the child to exercise
inhibitory control over their behavior. We found substantial correlations between these
two measures. Even more impressive, elements of the laboratory task were significantly
related to aspects of temperamental effortful control and negative affect. Children who
were less slowed by conflict were described as showing lower negative affect. As we
have seen, cingulate activity would be expected to relate well at this age to control of
distress. It appears that the cognitive measure of conflict resolution has a substantial
relation to the aspects of the child’s self-control that parents can report.

INDIVIDUALITY

Temperament refers to individual differences in motor and emotional reactivity and self-
regulation (Rothbart & Bates, 1998). The temperamental vari-able related to the
development of executive attention is called effortful control, representing the ability to
inhibit a dominant response in order to perform a subdominant response. The construct of
effortful control is extremely important in understanding the influence of temperament on
behavior. Until recently, almost all of the major theories of temperament have focused on
temperament’s more reactive aspects related to positive and negative affect, reward,
punishment, and arousal to stimulation. Individuals were seen to be at the mercy of their
dispositions to approach or avoid a situation or stimulus, given reward or punishment
cues. More extraverted individuals were expected to be sensitive to reward and show
Annual progress in child psychiatry and child development 2000–2001 28
tendencies to rapid approach; more fearful or introverted individuals, sensitive to
punishment, were expected to show inhibition or withdrawal from excitement (Gray,
1987).
Systems of effortful control, however, allow the approach of situations in the face of
immediate cues for punishment, and avoidance of situations in the face of immediate cues
for reward. The programming of this effortful control is critical to socialization. The
work of Kochanska (1995) indicates that the development of conscience is related to
temperamental individual differences in effortful control. Kochanska and colleagues
found significant prediction from infants’ 9-month sustained attention to their
contemporaneous restraint in touching a prohibited toy and to a multitask behavioral
battery assessing effortful control at 22 months (Kochanska, Murray, & Harlan, 1999;
Kochanska, Tjebkes, & Forman, 1998). In two large longitudinal studies (32 to 66
months and 9 to 45 months), Kochanska and her colleagues assessed children’s effortful
control in a laboratory test battery (Kochanska, Murray, & Coy, 1997; Kochanska,
Murray, Jacques, Koening, & Vandegeest, 1996, 1999). Although the number and
difficulty of tasks was varied to assure developmental appropriateness, beginning at age
30 months, children’s performance was highly consistent across tasks, suggesting that
they all measured a common process that developed over time. Children were also
remarkably stable in their performance across time, with the stability of a composite
measure of effortful control approaching that of some of the most enduring of traits such
as intelligence or aggression. In addition, children’s performance and their parents’
reports about their temperamental effortful control capacities in their daily lives also
converged significantly. Other research suggests longer-term stability of executive
attention during childhood. In Mischel’s work, for example, the number of seconds
delayed by preschool children while waiting for physically present rewards predicted
their parent-reported attentiveness, ability to concentrate, and control over negative affect
when the children were adolescents (Mischel, 1983; Shoda, Mischel, & Peake, 1990).
Although temperament researchers had originally believed that temperament systems
would be in place very early in development and change little over time (e.g., Buss &
Plomin, 1975), we have since learned that temperament systems follow a developmental
course (Rothbart, 1989; Rothbart & Bates, 1998). Children’s reactive tendencies to
experience and express negative and positive emotions and their responsivity to events in
the environment can be observed very early in life, but children’s self-regulatory
executive attention develops relatively late and continues to develop throughout the early
school years. Because executive attention is involved in the regulation of emotions, some
children will be lacking in controls of emotion and action that other children can
demonstrate with ease.
Questionnaire studies of 6- to 7-year-olds have found a broad effortful control factor to
be defined in terms of scales measuring attentional focusing, inhibitory control, low
intensity pleasure, and perceptual sensitivity (Rothbart, Ahadi, Hershey, & Fisher, 1997).
Effortful control scores are negatively related to children’s scores on a negative
affectivity factor. This negative relation is in keeping with the notion that attentional skill
may help attenuate negative affect. An interesting example involves the negative relation
between effortful control and aggression. Aggression relates negatively to effortful
control and positively to surgency and negative affectivity, especially anger (Rothbart,
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One of the things on which the members of the mission laid stress
in their request for the elevation of the school to the rank and title of
a college was that it already had “a good collection of philosophical
and chemical apparatus, believed to be the largest and best-
assorted collection in China.” Dr. Mateer also was accustomed to
speak of this apparatus with a pride that was an expression, not of
vanity, but of satisfaction in a personal achievement, that was
eminently worth while. For instance, in his letter to his college
classmates in 1897, he said: “I have given some time and
considerable thought and money to the making of philosophical
apparatus. I had a natural taste in this direction, and I saw that in
China the thing to push in education was physical science. We now
have as good an outfit of apparatus as the average college in the
United States,—more than twice as much as Jefferson had when we
graduated; two-thirds of it made on the ground at my own expense.”
It was a slow, long job to produce it. Early in his career as a teacher
in the Tengchow school he had little need of apparatus because the
pupils were not of a grade to receive instruction in physics; but it was
not very long until he recorded his difficulty, for instance, in teaching
pneumatics without an air pump. Some of his instruction at that
general period was given to a class of students for the ministry. He
was always careful to let it be known that his school was in no
degree a theological seminary; he held it to be vital to have it
understood that it was an institution for what we would call secular
instruction, though saturated through and through with Christianity.
But again and again throughout his life he took his share in teaching
native candidates for the ministry; and before the college proper
afforded them opportunity to study western science he was
accustomed to initiate these young men into enough knowledge of
the workings of nature to fit them to be better leaders among their
own people. Thus, writing in his Journal, February, 1874, concerning
his work with the theological class that winter, he said:

I heard them a lesson every day,—one day in philosophy


[physics] and the next in chemistry. I went thus over optics
and mechanics, and reviewed electricity, and went through
the volume on chemistry. I practically gave all my time to the
business of teaching and experimenting, and getting
apparatus. I had carpenters and tinners at work a good part of
the time. I got up most of the things needed for illustrating
mechanics, and a number in optics; also completed my set of
fixtures for frictional electricity, and added a good number of
articles to my set of galvanic apparatus. With my new battery I
showed the electrical light and the deflagration of metals very
well. The Ruhmkorff coil performed very well indeed, and
made a fine display. I had an exhibition of two nights with the
magic lantern, using the oxyhydrogen light. In chemistry I
made all the gases and more than are described in the book,
and experimented on them fully. They gave me no small
amount of trouble, but I succeeded with them all very well. I
made both light and heavy carbureted hydrogen, and
experimented with them. Then I made coal gas enough to
light up the room through the whole evening. Altogether I
have made for the students a fuller course of experiments in
philosophy or chemistry than I saw myself. They studied well
and appreciated very much what they saw. I trust the issue
will prove that my time has not been misspent. I have learned
a great deal myself, especially in the practical part of
experiment-making. It may be that I may yet have occasion to
turn this knowledge to good account. I have also gathered in
all a very good set of apparatus, which I shall try to make
further use of.

It was in this way that the collection was begun. As he added to it


in succeeding years, every piece had a history that lent it an
individual interest. Much of it continued to be produced by his own
hand, or at least under his own superintendence, and at the expense
of himself, or of his friends, who at his solicitation contributed money
for this use. Some of the larger and more costly articles were
donated by people to whom he appealed for help, and therefore
peculiar personal associations clustered about them. For instance,
when home on his first furlough, he met Cyrus W. Field, on a voyage
to Europe, and interested him in the Tengchow School. After
reaching China again, he wrote a letter to Mr. Field and solicited from
him the gift of a dynamo. In the course of some months a favorable
response was received; and, eventually, that dynamo rendered most
valuable service in lighting the buildings. Two friends, whose
acquaintance he had made in the United States,—Mr. Stuart, of New
York, and Mrs. Baird, of Philadelphia,—gave him money to buy a
ten-inch reflecting telescope, with proper mountings and
accompaniments; and when, as so often happens in such matters,
there was a considerable deficit, his “Uncle John” came to the relief.
In ordering through an acquaintance a set of telegraph instruments
he explained that the Board was not furnishing the means to pay for
it, but that it was purchased with his own money, supplemented by
the gifts of certain friends of missions and education.
This must suffice as to the history of that collection of apparatus. It
is, however, enough to show why he had so much pride in it.
It was in 1895 that he laid down the headship of the college. He
took this step all the more readily because in his successor, Rev. W.
M. Hayes, now of Tsingchow fu, he had entire confidence as to both
character and ability. On his arrival in China Mr. Hayes was
immediately associated with Dr. Mateer in the school, and showed
himself to be a thoroughly kindred spirit. He continued at the head of
the college until 1901, when he resigned his position in order to start
for the governor of the province a new college at Tsinan fu. It may
not be out of place to add here that the governor at that time was
Yuan Shih K’ai, a man of large and liberal views, and that there was,
as to the new college he was founding, in the requirements nothing
that made it improper for a Christian and a minister of the gospel to
be at the head of it. It is due to Mr. Hayes to say that in accepting
this position he was confident that he had the approval of nearly all
the missionaries associated with him. However, it was not very long
until Yuan was transferred to the viceroyalty of the province of Chi-li,
which dominates Peking, and a successor took his place in
Shantung, who was of a different mind, and who introduced such
usages into the new institution that Mr. Hayes felt conscientiously
bound to lay down his office. He is now one of the instructors in the
theological department of the Shantung Christian University, into
which the college at Tengchow has been merged.
In the request of the members of the mission for the elevation of
the Tengchow school to the rank and title of a college one of the
articles specifically left the ultimate location of the institution an open
question. The main objection to Tengchow was its isolation. It is
away up on the coast of the peninsula that constitutes the eastern
end of the province, and it is cut off from the interior by a range of
rather rugged hills in the rear. Though a treaty port, its commerce by
sea has long been inconsiderable, and gives no promise of increase.
At the time when that request was made, it is likely that some,
though signing, would have preferred that the college should be
removed down to Chefoo. To any project of that sort Dr. Mateer was
inflexibly, and with good reason, opposed; and it never assumed
such strength as to give him much apprehension. Along in the later
“eighties” and in the early “nineties” the question of location again
arose in connection with the Anglo-Chinese college which Dr. A. P.
Happer, of the Presbyterian missions in China, undertook to found.
He progressed so far as to raise a considerable sum of money for
endowment and had a board appointed for the control. The project at
no stage received the hearty support of Dr. Mateer, though, of
course, so long as it did not threaten hurt to his own college or the
ideas which it represented he did not make any fight against it. Dr.
Happer had long been a missionary in southern China, and was
beyond question earnestly devoted to his work; his idea was that by
means of the Anglo-Chinese college he would raise up an efficient
native ministry for the churches. The conviction of Dr. Mateer was
that, so far as this result is concerned, the institution, by the very
nature of the plan, must be a comparative failure. English was to be
given a large place in the curriculum, and for students it was to draw
especially on such as could pay their own way. In a long letter dated
March 18, 1887, called out by the question of the location of the
proposed college, and signed by Dr. Mateer and Mr. Hayes, they
frankly expressed to one of the secretaries of the Board their
reasons for believing so strongly that an institution conducted on the
plan proposed could not realize the main object which its founder
sought. They had found it necessary years before, in the Tengchow
College, to meet the question as to the introduction of English, and
the decision was in favor of using Chinese alone in the curriculum;
and so long as the school remained in charge of Mateer and Hayes,
they rigidly excluded their own native tongue. When the Tengchow
school was just emerging into the Tengchow College, Dr. Mateer
thus expressed his convictions on that subject:

If we should teach English, and on this account seek the


patronage of the officers and the rich, no doubt we could get
some help and countenance. We would be compelled,
however, to give up in good measure the distinctively religious
character of the school. We would get a different class of
pupils, and the religious tone of the school would soon be
changed in spite of us. Another result would also be almost
inevitable, namely, the standard of Chinese scholarship would
fall. The study of English is fatal to high acquisition in the
Chinese classics. We would doubtless have great trouble in
keeping our pupils after they were able to talk English; they
would at once go seeking employment where their English
would bring them good wages. Tengchow, moreover, is not a
port of foreign residents, but rather an isolated and inland city,
and it would not be a good place to locate a school in which
teaching English is made a prominent feature.

His observation since had served to confirm him in the conviction


of years before, and in the letter to a secretary of the Board, Hayes
united with him in stating clearly and forcibly their joint opinion on the
subject.
In casting about for a location for the Anglo-Chinese college, the
choice narrowed down so that it lay between Canton, Nanking,
Shanghai, and Tientsin. Chefoo was mentioned, but not seriously
considered, yet even the possibility of location there, although
remote, was so important a matter to the Shantung College that it
compelled the men at the head of that institution to be on the alert so
long as the question was undetermined. By and by Dr. Happer
became disposed to turn over the management of his projected
college to some other person, and he wrote to Dr. Mateer, sounding
him as to the vacancy, should it occur. The scheme at that time
seemed to be to locate the new institution at Shanghai, and to unite
with it the Shantung College; and in a long letter in response, written
January 9, 1890, Dr. Mateer went very candidly over the entire
situation. Among other things he said:

It will be necessary, however, to settle the policy of the


college, and also its headship, before making any definite
move. Whoever undertakes to make English and self-support
prominent features, and then aims at a Christian college, has,
as things are at present in China, a difficult contract on his
hands. I for one do not feel called to embark in such an
enterprise, and my name may as well be counted out.... Nor
can the school at Tengchow be moved away from Shantung.
We might go, and the apparatus might be moved; but not the
pupils. It is futile to talk of them or any considerable number of
them coming to Shanghai; nor will pupils go from central
China north to be educated save in exceptional cases. The
distance and the expense are both too great. Each section of
China must have its own schools.

Not long afterward the situation was such that Dr. Mateer and Mr.
Hayes addressed to the trustees of the endowment a paper in which
a suggestion was made that under certain conditions the fund raised
by Dr. Happer should be turned over to the Shantung College. In that
paper there was a frank statement of their attitude as to English.
They were entirely willing to introduce that language, but only under
such conditions that it could not seriously alter the character and
work of the institution. The paper is too long for introduction here. It
will suffice to quote from a letter sent by Dr. Mateer at the same time
to one of the secretaries of the Board, and dated February 9, 1891:

There are one or two things I want to say in a less formal


way. One is that in case our proposition in regard to English is
not satisfactory, you will take care that the proposed school is
not located in Chefoo as a rival of the college in Tengchow. It
would be nothing short of suicidal for the Board to allow such
a proceeding, and would be a great wrong, both to myself and
to Mr. Hayes. We do not propose to engage in such a contest,
but would at once resign, and seek some other sphere of
labor. Again, I wish to call your attention to what is the real
inwardness of our plan for English; namely, to teach it in such
a way, and to such parties only, as will insure its being used in
literary and scientific lines. We will not teach English merely to
anyone, nor teach it to anyone who wants merely English. We
will teach it to men, not to boys. Lastly, Mr. Hayes and I have
for several years had in mind the idea of a post-graduate
course in applied science, and have been waiting for my visit
home to push it forward; and even if the present endowment
scheme fails, we will still feel like pushing it, and introducing
some English as already indicated.

Nothing came of the suggestion that the money should be turned


over to the Shantung institution.
Dr. Mateer still continued to help in the college at Tengchow, as he
had time and opportunity. Early in the “nineties,” and after the
movement just considered had failed to materialize, he solicited from
the Board the privilege of seeking to raise an endowment fund, but at
that time he was unable to secure their consent. At the beginning of
1900 the Board changed their attitude, and authorized an effort to be
made to secure contributions for this purpose. Of course, in order to
be successful in this undertaking, a satisfactory plan for the control
of the college was a necessity; and as to this Dr. Mateer was
consulted, and he gave his opinions freely. His preference was
expressed for a charter giving the endowment a separate legal
status, but providing that the members of the Board of Foreign
Missions, acting in this distinct capacity, should be the trustees. The
general oversight of the institution he thought should be assigned to
a “Field Board of Directors,” composed of members of the Shantung
Mission. This was not a scheme that entirely satisfied him. The
specter, on the one hand, of a diversion of the college into a school
for teaching English, and, on the other, of making it a theological
seminary, would not altogether down; but in the ultimate appeal to
the members of the Board of Foreign Missions he recognized a
safeguard that was not likely to prove inadequate. When he was on
furlough in 1903, he spent a considerable part of his time in soliciting
permanent funds for the college, then already removed to its present
location; but he was unable to secure much aid. Ada was with him;
and she says of his experience in this work, “He was so accustomed
to success in whatever he undertook that it was hard for him to bear
the indifference of the rich to what seemed to him so important.”
The transfer of the college to another location was a question that
would not permanently rest. So long as it was whether it should go
from Tengchow to Chefoo, or be swallowed up in another more
pretentious institution at Shanghai, and not yet in existence, it was
comparatively easy to silence the guns of those who talked removal.
But at the opening of the twentieth century, even out there in north
China, important changes indirectly affecting this problem had
occurred. The missions had been strengthened by a number of new
men, who came fresh from the rush of affairs in the United States,
and eager to put their force into the work in China in such a way that
it would tell the most. Even China itself was beginning to awake from
the torpor of ages. In Shantung the Germans were building railroads,
one of them right through the heart of the province, on by way of Wei
Hsien to the capital, and from that point to be afterward connected
with Tientsin and Peking. It is not strange that, under the new
conditions, the young members of the mission especially should
desire to place the college which loomed up so largely and
effectually in the work to which they had consecrated their lives
where it could be in closer touch with the swarming millions of the
land and with the movements of the new times. February 26, 1901,
Dr. Mateer wrote to the Board:

At a meeting of the Shantung Mission it was voted to


remove the Tengchow College to Wei Hsien, and then give up
the Tengchow station. Being at Shanghai, engaged in the
translation work, I was not able to be present at the mission
meeting, and it seems incumbent on me to say something on
a matter of so much importance, and that concerns me so
much.... First, with reference to the college. The major part of
my life has been given to building up the Tengchow College,
and, of course, I feel a deep interest in its future. As you can
easily imagine, I am naturally loath to see it moved from the
place where Providence placed it; and to see all the toil and
thought given to fitting up the buildings, with heating, lighting,
and the other appliances go for nothing; as also the loss of
the very considerable sums of money I have myself invested
in it. The Providence which placed the college in Tengchow
should not be lightly ignored, nor the natural advantages
which Tengchow affords be counted for nothing. It is not
difficult to make out a strong case for Wei Hsien, and I am not
disposed to dispute its advantages, except it be to question
the validity of the assumption that a busy commercial center
is necessarily the best place to locate a college. In view of the
whole question, it seems to me that unless an adequate
endowment can be secured—one which will put the college
on a new basis—it will not pay the Board to make the sacrifice
involved in moving the college to Wei Hsien.... However, I
would rather go to Wei Hsien than be opposed strongly at
Tengchow.

On that part of his contention he lost; and it would be useless now


to try to ascertain the respective merits of the two sides to that
question. The second part of the letter just cited discussed the
abandonment of Tengchow as a mission station. The plan of those
who took the affirmative of this debate was to leave that city to the
Southern Baptists, who almost forty years before had preceded the
Presbyterians a few weeks in a feeble occupation, but who had been
entirely overshadowed by the development of the college. For the
retention of the station Dr. Mateer pleaded with his utmost fervor and
eloquence. Though the decision remained in uncertainty while he
lived, and the uncertainty gave him much anxiety, large gifts, coming
since, from a consecrated layman, have rendered the retention of
the Tengchow station secure. The wisdom of the decision is
vindicated by present conditions. At the close of 1909 the station
reported a city church with three hundred members; a Sabbath
school which sometimes numbers five hundred pupils; thirty out-
stations with about five hundred members; twenty-four primary
schools, giving instruction to three hundred and sixteen boys and
girls, and taught by graduates of the higher schools of the station; a
girls’ high school with an average enrollment of forty-six pupils, and
for the year then closing having twelve graduates, nearly all of whom
became teachers; a boys’ high school with an attendance of forty,
and sending up a number of graduates to the college at Wei Hsien or
to other advanced institutions, and having a normal department with
a model primary department; and also a helpers’ summer school;
besides other machinery for reaching with the gospel the three
millions of people gathered in the neighborhood of Tengchow. Nor
has the work of the Presbyterians in the least hampered that of the
Southern Baptists.
The actual removal of the college was not effected until the
autumn of 1904. In the interval between the time when it was
determined to take this step and when it was actually accomplished
a number of important things affecting the course of Dr. Mateer’s life
occurred. Mr. Hayes, as elsewhere stated, resigned the presidency;
and Rev. Paul D. Bergen, who had come out to the mission in 1883,
was chosen in his place. Dr. Mateer had been so closely associated
with Mr. Hayes, and had such complete confidence in him, that the
resignation came almost like a personal bereavement; but he rose
nobly out of the depths, and wrote home to the Board: “Mr. Bergen is
clearly the best man that our missions in Shantung afford for the
place. He is very popular with the Chinese, which is much in his
favor. The time is as auspicious as it is important. Educational affairs
are taking a great boom, and it looks as if Shantung was going to
lead the van. If it is properly supported the college should do a great
work.” During the interval here covered Dr. Mateer came to the
United States on his third and last furlough, reaching China again in
the autumn of 1903, and bringing with him some substantial fruits of
his efforts for the college.
On his arrival he was confronted by another great problem as to
the institution. A combination had already been almost effected by
the American Presbyterians and the English Baptists in Shantung for
a union in the work of higher education in the province. The matter
had already gone so far that, although he feared that the scheme
would bring about such radical changes as to endanger the real
usefulness of the institution, yet he made no serious opposition, and
it went steadily forward to consummation. Under the plan adopted
the Shantung Christian University was established; and provision
was made for a joint maintenance of three distinct colleges in it, each
at a different location, chosen because of mission and other
conditions—a college of arts and science at Wei Hsien, a theological
college at Tsingchow fu, and a medical college at Tsinan fu. The plan
also provides for a university council, to which is committed the
general control of the institution, subject, of course, to certain
fundamental regulations; and of this body Dr. Mateer was one of the
original members. The first meeting was held at Tsingchow fu near
the end of 1903. Writing to one of the secretaries of the Board of
Missions concerning this, he said: “All were present. Our meeting
was quite harmonious. We elected professors and discussed and
drew out some general principles relating to the curriculum and the
general management. Theoretically things seem quite promising; the
difficulty will come in practical administration. The buildings at Wei
Hsien are all up to the first floor. There should be no difficulty in
getting all ready by next autumn, at which time the college ought by
all means to be moved.” Early the next summer he wrote: “I started
to Wei Hsien about a month ago, overland. I spent over two weeks
taking down and packing my goods, and so forth, including
workshop, boiler, engine, dynamo, and so forth. I found it quite a
serious undertaking to get all my miscellaneous goods packed up,
ready for shipment on boats to Wei Hsien.... I remained in Wei Hsien
twenty-four days, unpacking my effects, getting my workshop in
order, and planning for the heating and lighting outfit.” In the same
letter he expressed himself as follows concerning the theological
college at Tsingchow fu: “It was certainly understood at the meeting
of the directors last winter that it was to be much more than a
theological seminary in the strict sense of the word. It was
understood, in fact, that it would have two departments,—a training
school and a theological seminary proper. In this way only can the
full measure of our needs be supplied.... With this organization it is
not unlikely that the school at Tsingchow fu will be larger than the
college at Wei Hsien.”
This narrative as to Dr. Mateer and the Shantung College is now
approaching its close, and most readers probably will prefer that, so
far as practicable, the remainder of it shall be told in his own words.
December 21, 1904, he wrote to a friend: “The college is now fully
moved to Wei Hsien, and has in it about a hundred and twenty
students. The new buildings are quite fine,—much superior to those
we had in Tengchow. Mrs. Mateer and I have moved to Wei Hsien to
live and will make this our home. We are living in the same house
with my brother Robert, making all one family. This arrangement
suits us very well. I am not teaching in the college, but I would not
feel at home if I were away from it. I hope it has a great future.” In his
report for himself and wife, for the year 1904-05, he says: “The
greater part of the autumn was spent in overseeing the building and
fitting up of a workshop, and in superintending the setting up of a
new thirty-two horse-power steam boiler for heating and lighting the
college, together with a system of steam piping for the same; also
the setting up of engine and dynamo and wiring the college for
electric lights. I also set up a windmill and pump and tank, with pipes
for supplying the college and several dwelling houses with water. I
also built for myself and Mrs. Mateer a seven-kien house in Chinese
style, affording a study, bedroom, storeroom, box room, and coal
room.” This little, narrow, one-story house constituted their home
during the rest of his life in Wei Hsien, though they still look their
meals with the other family. They sometimes called this house “the
Borderland,” for only a narrow path separated them from the small
foreign cemetery at the extreme corner of the compound. In
November, 1905, he wrote to one of the secretaries of the Board:
“The college is, of course, delighted at the prospect of a Science
Hall. I take some credit for having prepared the way for this gift from
Mr. Converse.” In his report for the year 1906 he said: “During the
early part of the winter I spent considerable time, planning,
estimating, and ordering supplies for the lighting, heating, and water
supply of the new Science Hall at Wei Hsien.”
We are at length face to face with the last stage in the active
connection of Dr. Mateer with the college. February 26, 1907, he
wrote to one of the secretaries of the Board of Missions:

I returned three days ago from the meeting of the College


Directors at Tsingchow fu. The meeting was prolonged and a
very important one. A number of important and embarrassing
questions were before us.... You will hear from others, of
course, and from the minutes, that Dr. Bergen resigned the
presidency of the college, and that in our inability to find a
successor I was asked to take the position temporarily, until
other arrangements could be made, and Dr. Bergen was
asked to remain as a professor, which he agreed to do. This
provided for the teaching, and makes it possible for me to
take the presidency without doing much teaching, which I
could not do under present conditions.

During the period of his service in this capacity the college not only
did well in its regular work; it also made some important advances.
The total attendance was one hundred and eighty-one, and a class
of ten was graduated at commencement. At Tengchow he had
always valued the literary societies very highly, and these now
received a fresh impetus. Several rooms of the new Science Hall
were brought into use; two additional rows of dormitories were built,
one for college and personal teachers and workmen, and one for
students; not to mention lesser matters.
Nevertheless he found his official position in certain ways very
uncomfortable. Some of the reasons of this were casual to the
internal administration, and cannot now be appreciated by outsiders,
and are not worth airing here. Others were of a more permanent
nature, and had to do with the future conduct and character of the
institution. The question of English had been for a while hushed to
sleep; but it was now awake again, and asserted itself with new
vigor. In a letter dated December 19, 1907, he said: “I am strongly in
favor of an English School, preferably at Tsinan fu, but I am opposed
to English in the college. It would very soon destroy the high grade of
scholarship hitherto maintained, and direct the whole output of the
college into secular lines.” His fear was that if English were
introduced the graduates of the institution would be diverted from the
ministry and from the great work of evangelizing the people to
commercial pursuits, and that it would become a training school of
compradors and clerks. Later the intensity of his opposition to the
introduction of English was considerably modified, because of the
advantage which he perceived to be enjoyed in the large union
meetings, by such of the Chinese as knew this language in addition
to their own. He saw, too, that with the change of times a knowledge
of English had come to be recognized as an essential in the new
learning, as a bond of unity between different parts of China, and as
a means of contact with the outside world. Looking at the chief
danger as past, he expressly desired that the theologues should be
taught English. At any rate he had been contending for a cause that
was evidently lost. At this writing the curriculum of the college offers
five hours in English as an optional study for every term of the four
required years; and also of the fifth year. Dr. Mateer, besides, was
not fully in sympathy with a movement that was then making to
secure a large gift from the “General Education Fund” for the
endowment of the institution. In the letter just quoted he says: “The
college should be so administered by its president and faculty as to
send some men into the ministry, or it fails of its chief object. I am in
favor of stimulating a natural growth, but not such a rapid and
abnormal growth as will dechristianize it. I do not believe in the
sudden and rapid enlargement of the plant beyond the need at the
time. It would rapidly secularize the college and divert it entirely from
its proper ideal and work.” These questions were too practical, and
touched the vitals of the institution too deeply, to be ignored by
earnest friends on either side. Some things as to the situation are so
transparent that they can be recognized by any person who looks at
it from not too close a point of view. The entire merits of the
argument were in no case wholly on one side; and as a
consequence it is not surprising that wise and good men differed as
they did; and the only decisive test is actual trial of the changes
advocated by the younger men. It is also perfectly plain that in this
affair we have only another instance of a state of things so often
recurring; that is, of a man who has done a great work, putting into it
a long life of toil and self-sacrifice, and bringing it at length to a point
where he must decrease and it must increase; and where in the very
nature of the case it must be turned over to younger hands, to be
guided as they see its needs in the light of the dawning day. He can
scarcely any longer be the best judge of what ought to be done; but
even if he were, the management must be left for good or ill to them.
That evidently is the fight in which Dr. Mateer came ultimately to see
this matter. He courageously faced the inevitable. In this, as in all
other cases, no personal animosity was harbored by him toward
anyone who differed from him.
October 27, 1907, he wrote to an associate on the Mandarin
Revision Committee: “I have now dissolved myself from the
management of the college, and shall have very little to do with it in
the future. It has cost me a great deal to do it, but it is best it should
be so. I am now free from any cares or responsibility in educational
matters.” In a letter to Secretary Brown, dated December 21, 1907,
he said: “In view of the circumstances I thought it best to resign at
once, and unconditionally, both the presidency and my office as
director. I have no ambition to be president, and in fact was only
there temporarily until another man should be chosen. I did not wish
to be a director when I could not conscientiously carry out the ideas
and policy of a majority of the mission. It was no small trial, I assure
you, to resign all connection with the college, after spending the
major part of my missionary life working for it. It did, in fact, seriously
affect my health for several weeks. I cannot stand such strains as I
once did.”
One of the striking incidents of his funeral service at Tsingtao was
the reading of the statistics of the graduates of the Tengchow
College, including the students who came with the college to Wei
Hsien. These have since been carefully revised and are as follows:
Total receiving diplomas, 205; teachers in government schools, 38;
teachers in church schools, 68; pastors, 17; evangelists, 16; literary
work, 10; in business, 9; physicians, 7; post-office service, 4; railroad
service, 2; Y. M. C. A. service, 2; customs service, 1; business
clerks, 2; secretaries, 1; at their homes, 6; deceased, 22. These
graduates are scattered among thirteen denominations, and one
hundred schools, and in sixteen provinces of China. About two
hundred more who were students at Tengchow did not complete the
course of studies.
The institution since its removal has continued steadily to go
forward. The large endowment that was both sought and feared has
not yet been realized, and consequently the effect of such a gift has
not been tested by experience; but other proposed changes have
been made. A pamphlet published in 1910 reports for the college of
arts and sciences an enrollment of three hundred and six students,
and in the academy, eighty. The class which graduates numbers
seventeen, all of whom are Christians. Down to that year there had
been at Wei Hsien among the graduates no candidates for the
ministry, but during 1910, under the ministration of a Chinese pastor,
a quiet but mighty religious awakening pervaded the institution, and
one outcome has been a vast increase in the number of candidates
for the ministry or other evangelistic work. The pamphlet already
quoted speaks of more than one hundred of the college students
who have decided to offer themselves for this work. It is
appropriately added that “such a movement as this amongst our
students inspires us with almost a feeling of awe.... Our faith had
never reached the conception of such a number as the above
simultaneously making a decision.” It has recently been decided to
bring all the departments of the university to Tsinan fu, the provincial
capital.
In the theological college at Tsingchow fu, according to the last
report, there were eleven students in the regular theological
department and one hundred and twenty-eight in the normal school.
In the medical college at Tsinan fu there were thirteen young men.
The aggregate for the whole university rises to five hundred and
thirty-eight. On the Presbyterian side this all began with those six
little boys, in the old Kwan Yin temple, in the autumn of 1864, at
Tengchow. To-day it is a university, and is second to no higher
institution of learning in China.
It is said that Dr. Mateer never led in prayer, either public or
private, that he did not most earnestly ask that the Lord would raise
up Chinese Christian men, who as leaders would bring many to
Christ. His prayers during the forty-five years of his missionary life
are receiving a wonderful answer at Wei Hsien and at Tsingchow fu.
XII
WITH APPARATUS AND MACHINERY

“The things most likely to be needed in China, are first, electrical


engineering, especially telegraphy, and second, civil engineering,
especially surveying and laying out of railroads. Special preparation in
one or both of these things would be very valuable. But what is more
necessary for immediate use, and as a preliminary to these things, is
a practical knowledge of scientific apparatus,—how to make and how
to use it. I have myself picked it up from books, without any instructor,
but only at a great expense of time and labor.”—letter to a
prospective teacher, October 29, 1888.

Whenever a group of the early acquaintances of Dr. Mateer talked


together about him, one thing certain to be mentioned was his
achievements with apparatus and machinery, both with the making
and with the using of them. Out in China his reputation for this was
so great that it at times came near to being a burden to him. We
have already seen that the temporary superintendence of the
mission press at Shanghai was thrust upon him, contrary to his own
preference, and because, as he expressed it in a letter at that time,
the men in control considered him a “Jack-of-all-trades,” able to do
anything at which he might be put. If they then did really think of him
as no more than a man who with machinery could do a great many
things without performing any of them thoroughly well, they did him a
great injustice, which their subsequent knowledge amply corrected.
As the years went by, and in this sphere of his multifarious activity he
rose to larger and more difficult achievements, his fame as to this
spread far and wide among both natives and foreigners. At no time,
however, did he permit his efficiency in this line to loom up in such a
form or in such a degree as to seem even to others to put his
distinctively missionary labors into the background. It is a significant
fact that in the eulogiums pronounced on him at his death this
feature of his character and work is seldom even mentioned. He was
—first, last, and all the time—a man whose life and whose abilities
were so completely and so manifestly consecrated to the
evangelization of the Chinese that when those who knew him best
looked back over the finished whole, his remarkable achievements
with apparatus and machinery scarcely arrested their attention.
Dr. Mateer himself regarded his efficiency in this sphere as due in
some measure to native endowment. He had an inborn taste and
ability for that sort of work; and stories have come down concerning
certain very early manifestations of this characteristic. It is related
that when he was a little boy he was suffering loss through the raids
made by the woodpeckers on a cherry tree laden with luscious fruit.
He pondered the situation carefully, and then set up a pole, close by,
with a nice lodging place for a bird at the top, and armed himself with
a mallet down at the foot. The woodpecker would grab a cherry, and
immediately fly to the pole in order to eat it; but a sharp blow with the
mallet would bring him from his perch to the ground. So the boy
saved his cherries. It is also related of him that when a mere boy he
had a friendly dispute with his father over the question whether a
sucking pig had the homing instinct. He maintained that it would
return to its mother under conditions that proved the affirmative; and
in order to satisfy himself, he placed a pig in a sack, and took it a
long way from its familiar haunts, and turned it loose. It had been
agreed that the result was to decide the ownership. To his delight,
immediately the pig started on a bee line for home, and never gave
up the race until it was back in its old place.
For the development and application of this natural gift he received
almost no help from others. Probably if that old workbench in the
barn at the “Hermitage” could speak, it might tell something as to
oversight and guidance of the boy by his father, in making and
repairing traps and tools for use in recreation and in work; but
beyond this he had no instruction. In his day at college a chemical or
physical laboratory was supposed to be exclusively for the professor
to prepare his experiments; the student was expected only to be a
spectator in the classroom when the experiments were shown. The
man who occupied the chair of natural philosophy at Jefferson when
we were there had a gift for supplementing his scanty outfit of
apparatus with the products of his own skill and labor, and if the
student Mateer had found his way down into the subterranean
regions where these were wrought, he and Professor Jones would
have rejoiced together in sympathetic collaboration; but no such
unheard-of violation of ancient custom occurred. In the academy at
Beaver he first turned his hand to making a few pieces of apparatus
which he craved as helps in teaching. But it was not until he reached
China that this field for his talent opened before him, and continued
to enlarge all the rest of his life. In fact, even when he was absent
from China, on his furloughs, he did not get away from his work with
apparatus and machinery. During one of his earlier furloughs, while
he was looking up everything that could be helpful to his Chinese
boys, he spent some time in the Baldwin Locomotive Works, by
special permission, in studying the construction of locomotives, so
that he might be able to make a model of one on his return to China.
In connection with this he showed such an acquaintance with the
structure of these engines that he could scarcely convince some of
the skilled mechanics that he had not been trained to the business.
Dr. Corbett wrote concerning him, after his death: “It was my
privilege to meet him at the World’s Fair at Chicago in 1893. He had
spent nearly a month there examining minutely many things of
special interest to him. As my time was limited he kindly became my
guide for a while, and gave me the benefit of his observations. We
first visited the department of electricity, which he had carefully
studied in all its various applications. We next went to Machinery
Hall, where he had spent days making drawings, measurements,
and so forth, of the most complex machinery. He seemed to
understand everything as though this had been the work of his life.”
Dr. Hayes says: “Dr. Mateer’s ability to meet exigencies was well
shown a few years ago in Wei Hsien, when suddenly the large
dynamo failed to produce a current. He unwound the machine until
he located the fault, reinsulated the wire and rewound the coil; after
which the machine furnished its current as usual.... Electrotyping
was hardly in general use in the west until he secured an outfit of
tools and taught a class of native artisans. When electric fans came
in vogue he purchased a small one as a model and proceeded to
make another.”
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