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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
and
Brunner-Routledge
New York and Hove
Published in 2003 by
Brunner-Routledge
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New York, NY 10001
www.brunner-routledge.com
Published in Great Britain by
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BN3 2FA
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Copyright © 2003 by Taylor & Francis Books, Inc.
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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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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).
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
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.
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
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
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:
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:
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
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