Mission

    One of the oldest Berkeley Campus Organized Research Units, the Institute of Human Development (IHD) was founded in 1927. Our primary mission is to foster the study of biological, psychological, social, and cultural factors that affect human development from birth through old age. What unites the members of our Institute is a commitment to viewing human biological, psychological, and sociocultural phenomena from a developmental perspective.


Central Questions about Human Development

    While the study of human development necessarily involves the description of change across the lifespan, human development scientists are equally concerned with the questions of when, how, and why individuals and relationships remain stable or predictable over time. We examine development in multiple domains: physical/motor, cognition, language, emotion, social, and personality. Early work in human development emphasized the role of the scientist as mapmaker, charting developmental norms and individual differences in "what develops when," and describing similarities and differences in development across domains. More recently, investigators have become invested in the search for mechanisms or processes that explain both developmental change and stability. The field has also seen increased emphasis on identifying and understanding contexts affecting development such as families, peers, schools, and cultures. An open question in the field is whether or not developmental change normally involves movement toward states characterized as qualitatively or quantitatively "higher," more differentiated and integrated, or more adapted. At the Institute of Human Development, members are addressing all of these central questions.


Noteworthy Features of the Institute

  1. Initially world-renowned for its lifespan longitudinal studies of Berkeley and Oakland families, IHD is unusual, if not unique among centers and institutes of human development in the range of (i) age and social contexts in populations studied, (ii) methods used, and (iii) domains of development investigated.

     

  2. A strength of the Institute lies in its mix of basic research on human development and its applied research relevant to Education, Clinical Psychology, Public Health, and Social Welfare.

     

  3. Most research centers focus on either normal development or psychopathology. At IHD there is a synergistic combination of the two lines of study. Research on normal populations informs our assessment and understanding of psychopathology, while research on clinical populations sheds light on what happens when normal development is disrupted. This is a central tenet of the discipline of developmental psychopathology.

     

  4. Few centers of developmental science include both descriptive and intervention studies. At IHD, descriptive studies of normality and psychopathology are used to inform the design of intervention studies, and intervention studies provide tests of hypotheses about the mechanisms affecting normal and pathological development.

     

  5. As one might expect in an Institute focusing on human development, a majority of the members come from Psychology, but over the past five years interdisciplinary participation has increased; about 1/3 of the 19 full members come from other departments (Education, Public Health, Sociology). We are in the process of creating new models of collaboration within the institute (clusters of interest, Centers) and new collaborations with a broad array of faculty from other on-Campus organizations (see below).

     

  6. The staff infrastructure of the Institute provides high level support to Principal Investigators and graduate students in the management of grants, personnel, computers and electronic equipment, special laboratories, birth record files for infant research, and coordination with research settings outside the Institute.

     

  7. Since the inception of IHD, our special relationship with the Harold E. Jones Child Study Center (CSC) has been part of our scientific and educational mission. A research coordinator and administrative assistant paid by IHD helps to maintain the CSC as a site for (a) research by faculty, postdoctoral, graduate, and undergraduate students, (b) training of teachers in "best practices," and (c) outreach to the community, primarily to parents and teachers.

     

  8. The Institute plays an important role in the training of graduate students at Berkeley, many of whom go on to teaching and research careers. In recent years, IHD has taken an increasingly active role in the research training of undergraduates, many of whom go on to graduate school to study human development.

     

  9. Although the Institute has long been involved in dissemination of findings by individual investigators, a new Institute-wide outreach emphasis involves the creation of programs to reach teachers, parents, medical providers, and the media, so that findings of use to the public can be communicated in a differentiated and responsible manner.

    This report presents a summary of IHD’s contributions to the field of human development over the past five years, new directions emerging in 1998-99 that built on past strengths, and future plans that flesh out the current new directions.

Contributions of IHD to Knowledge about Human Development

    G iven that the story of human development cycles across generations, the point at which we begin our account of IHD’s research contributions is somewhat arbitrary. We have chosen to start in the pregnancy phase of the life cycle and to describe research in progress on successive periods of the life course. Our focus is on the past five years, with some descriptions of earlier research to provide a context for understanding our current directions.

Contributions of IHD to Knowledge About Human Development

    G iven that the story of human development cycles across generations, the point at which we begin our account of IHD's research contributions is somewhat arbitrary. We have chosen to start in the pregnancy phase of the life cycle and to describe research in progress on successive periods of the life course. Our focus is on the past five years, with some descriptions of earlier research to provide a context for understanding our current directions.

Pregnancy and Childbirth

    J ulia Walsh has just begun a study of the occupational and other risk factors associated with the deteriorating pregnancy outcomes observed among Hispanic women in Stockton after they migrate to the United States. The identification of risk factors associated with low birthweight and other problematic birth outcomes has both practical and theoretical import because of the known association between birth outcomes and longterm development for children - particularly in the domains of motor skills, learning and achievement, and behavioral self-regulation.

    Philip and Carolyn Cowan's longitudinal study of two-parent families making the transition to first-time parenthood has played a leading role in the United States and Europe in (a) establishing the fact that men's and women's satisfaction with marriage declines during this period, and (b) identifying some of the social and psychological mechanisms accounting for much of this decline. The drop in satisfaction with marriage is important not only for understanding parents' distress, but also because the longitudinal data reveal that individual differences in the quality of parents' marital relationships affected their children's academic and social adaptation during the early years of elementary school.

Infancy

    I n a set of studies over three decades, Jonas Langer has shown that logical and mathematical concepts evolve from infants' actions on objects. His latest research, studying primates, finds that although species-specific differences are central, the sequence of logic and number development in children, monkeys, and apes is quite similar. Langer's work is noteworthy not only for the detailed tracing of logic and number concepts from their earliest manifestations, but also because the results tell us, especially in the primate comparative work, that the roots of logic and number development lie in pre-verbal actions, not in language.

    Using a research paradigm in which infants could make mobiles move by moving their bodies, John Watson helped to change researchers' views of infants as passive responders. In new work, he and a colleague are investigating how mothers' mirroring of infants' emotion through facial mimicking and exaggerated vocalization helps the infant to establish emotional understanding and expression. Watson has also been engaged in a study of Rett Syndrome, which occurs only in girls. These girls develop normally up to about 18 months and then go into a dramatic decline with symptoms that resemble Autism.

    Prentice Starkey and Alice Klein's research on early language development addresses several fundamental questions about infant speech perception. Can infants organize their perception of continuous speech by segmenting it into temporally ordered units, and if so, what is the nature of those units? In this project, they investigated infants' segmentation of natural speech, and found that 2- to 8-month-old infants can segment continuous infant-directed utterances into syllables or units associated with syllable structure.

    Joseph Campos' studies of the development of infants' emotion in the context of parent-child systems has stimulated much work on "emotion regulation" - one of the exciting new topics in the study of development during the last decade. His work shows how emotional expressions of infants serve a communicative function and become regulated in the process of interaction with caretakers. Campos' recent research findings are quite revolutionary. He finds a profound shift in toddlers' cognitive development and perspective-taking when they make the transition to crawling. In new research he plans to tests this idea in (a) experiments that provide some infants with increased motoric experience in an electronic walker, and (b) comparative studies of early locomotion in different cultures.

Early Childhood

    A lthough much has been discovered about language development in the past five decades, the process by which young children shift from rote repetition of single words to the production of original sentences remains a mystery. Since the 1950s, an environmentalist view of language development that focused on what children were taught has clashed with a nativist view that the basic structure of language is hard-wired. Using an extensive cross-linguistic, cross-cultural comparative method, Dan Slobin, acknowledged as a leading figure in language research, has come to a more differentiated view; although there may be some general universal language patterns, major structures of the child's language vary with the language in question. In a new study conducted in the Netherlands and the U.S., Dan Slobin and Nini Hoiting are studying the use of sign language by both deaf and hearing parents of deaf children. Very little is now known about the development of sign language use. The findings from this study will have a great deal to teach us about (a) the connections among culture, language and thought, (b) whether early sign language acquisition facilitates later language and cognitive development, and (c) the risk factors that might be targeted for early intervention with deaf children and their families.

    Susan Ervin-Tripp's work is foundational in the field of psycholinguistics. Her studies have led to the emergence of the new field of Developmental Pragmatics, a field that identifies a set of programmatic skills and units of organization in children's talk. Ervin-Tripp's work demonstrates that this talk is an important component of language development, especially in peer conversations that occur in the absence of adult control. Together, Slobin and Ervin-Tripp have established the Child Language Research Laboratory at IHD, where they have gathered extensive archives of child language data in 18 different languages along with computer and video support for continuing data collection and analysis of both spoken and signed language.

    Alison Gopnik's work on "theory of mind" - a field of study that she played a central role in creating - describes when and how young children come to the understanding that others see and understand things differently than they do. This new understanding of the relation between self and others becomes a fundamental tool in the further development of social cognition and social interaction. Gopnik shows that there are significant advances between age 2 and 3, 3 and 4, and again between 5 and 7. Her newest work on the "theory theory" asserts that young children understand the world in terms of causal relations between people and objects, and shows how children behave as active scientists in the course of their attempts to understand their physical and social environments.

    With regard to recent controversies about the importance of the early years in later development, the work of Langer, Watson, Campos, Slobin, Ervin-Tripp, Gopnik, and other investigators described below, come down strongly in support of those who see infancy, toddlerhood, and early childhood as providing the cognitive and emotional foundations for middle childhood, adolescence, and adulthood.

Transitions from preschool to school

    D espite the widespread belief that the transition to elementary school is an exceptionally important period in the life of young children, there are very few studies that follow children and assess them systematically before and after this transition. Three major studies at the Institute focus specifically on this period with children between the ages of 4 and 8.

    Tom Boyce has been investigating the developmental psychobiology of stress in middle childhood and its relation to childhood health and psychological functioning. Boyce's work examines differences between children in behavioral and biological (e.g., cardiovascular, autonomic, immunologic) responses to psychological stressors in the laboratory and in response to stressful life situations such as the child's entrance to kindergarten. Boyce is especially interested in understanding the difference between children who are vulnerable to stress and children who seem to be resilient, in that they adapt well in spite of highly stressful home or school environments.

    Prentice Starkey and Alice Klein's work focuses on the development of mathematical thinking and the environments that support it in early childhood. They have (a) conducted research that has revealed cross-socioeconomic and cross-cultural differences in the breadth and extent of children's mathematical knowledge prior to entry in elementary school, (b) studied the mathematical-learning environments of young children at home and in preschool classrooms, (c) developed a research-based mathematics curriculum for use in preschool classrooms and at home, and (d) conducted intervention research to determine the effects of their pre-kindergarten curriculum on children's readiness for school mathematics. Both low- and middle-income children's mathematical development was significantly enhanced by this curriculum relative to comparison groups of children. Starkey and Klein have begun work on disseminating the curriculum on a national level.

    In a new longitudinal, preventive intervention study of family factors in children's adaptation to school, Philip and Carolyn Cowan randomly offered parents whose first child was about to enter kindergarten a chance to participate in a 16-week couples group led by trained mental health professionals. Compared with control couples one year later, the parents fought less in front of their children and were more effective during a parent-child interaction task. Positive changes in the intervention parents were accompanied by higher levels of academic achievement in their children, and lower levels of aggression or depression in the early grades of elementary school. In a widely-publicized recent controversy, it has been claimed that parents' behavior has very little influence on their children's development. Given the fact that intervention-induced changes in parents were accompanied by higher levels of adaptation in children, the results suggest strongly that parents do "matter" to children's development.

School Age Children in Families, Schools, and Summer Camps

    S tephen Hinshaw is a leading figure in the study of families with a school age children with Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD). Studying children in the lab and more naturalistically in summer camps he directs, Hinshaw investigates the risk factors and mechanisms associated with ADHD, including neuropsychological, cognitive, peer-related, and familial influences. A key feature of his work has been the uncovering of the role of both mothers and fathers in maintaining, exacerbating, or reducing dysfunctional behavior. His discoveries provide a clear counterpoint to the increasing focus on genetic inheritance associated with attentional deficits. Hinshaw has also been collaborating with investigators in 5 other sites in the U.S. and Canada to conduct the first systematic randomized clinical trials of longterm medication treatments, intensive psychosocial treatments, and their combination for children with ADHD. His newest research is noteworthy as the first large-scale systematic study of ADHD in girls.

    Lisa Capps uses both laboratory and field observation techniques to study ten-year-old high functioning (non-retarded) Autistic children. Even at the high-functioning end of the continuum, these children have severe limitations in forming intimate relationships. In independent studies and in collaboration with Alison Gopnik, Capps describes core psychological deficits but also identifies emotional understanding and cognitive skills that are essential to maintaining social exchanges and facilitating the development of relationships. In a separate study Capps examines the psychological factors that facilitate or interfere with parents' adaptation after their child has received a diagnosis of Autism.

    Two members of IHD investigate the links between social contexts and children's development. Comparing low-income communities in Los Angeles and Oakland, Barrie Thorne uses a variety of ethnographic methods to discover how the daily environments of children's lives (home/family, school, neighborhood, ethnicity, government institutions) influence their developmental pathways.

    Rhona Weinstein is a leading researcher on the topic of how various aspects of school environments, especially teachers' expectations, affect children's achievement. She is currently completing a book about the power of expectations in schooling from the perspectives of children, parents, teachers, principals, and universities. In the planning stages is a new project - the creation and evaluation of a prevention program involving a collaborative partnership between UC Berkeley and a neighboring community. This project, using what is already known about the risk and protective factors affecting young children, will target the promotion of children's development from pregnancy through third grade.

Childhood to Adolescence and Adulthood

    S tephen Hinshaw is following up, from childhood to adolescence, (a) 100 boys with ADHD and 70 matched controls who participated in naturalistic summer programs, (b) 140 girls with ADHD and 90 matched controls, who also participated in naturalistic summer programs, and (c) 100 intensively treated ADHD children and 50 matched controls, as part of his ongoing research. Prediction and explanation of psychopathological outcomes (e.g., delinquency) and of strengths and competencies are the key foci of this pioneering research. His work presents another example of the new interest at IHD in developmental psychopathology--studying the interplay between normal and atypical development.

    Elliot Turiel's longlasting contribution to understanding the development of social cognition lies in his demonstration that there are regular developmental stage sequences in justifications about moral judgments (e.g., about fairness and harm to others), conventional judgments (e.g., about politeness, dress), and personal judgments (about personal values), but that these domains do not develop at the same time in the same ways. Turiel's new work places culture at center stage. Critiquing cross-cultural or cross-national comparisons that assume homogeneity within cultures, he assesses social judgments in adolescents and adults from so-called collectivist and individualist cultures. He finds that in certain context, adolescents and adults in both collectivist and individualistic cultures make similar judgments of what is just, good, or appropriate behavior.

    A renowned longitudinal study of development originated by Jeanne and Jack Block began with children at three and followed them at 4, 5, 7, 11, 14 18, and 23 years of age. The Blocks were the co-creators of the constructs of ego resilience and ego control, which describe two basic organizing dimensions of personality. Earlier work helped to settle a long-running controversy concerning whether there is continuity (predictability) of personality across situations and over time. The Block and Block study provides clear evidence in support of the argument for continuity, and also for the hypothesis that boys and girls follow different pathways toward adaptation. Using this rich longitudinal data set, recent publications describe childhood and early adolescent precursors of depression and drug use in late adolescence, and the consequences of adolescent depression for later adult functioning. All of these studies reveal different patterns of personality development for males and females.

    Diana Baumrind's Family Socialization project, another major longitudinal study at Berkeley, began when children were pre-schoolers at age three, and then followed the children and their families at age 9 (middle school) and again in early adolescence (age 14-1/2). In research cited in almost all discussions of research on parenting, Baumrind has shown that when parents use an authoritative parenting style (warmth and appropriate control), their children and their adolescents have greater social and cognitive competence than do children of parents with an authoritarian (control but not warmth) or permissive (warmth without control) parenting style. Furthermore, authoritative parents who are highly responsive but also demanding are remarkably successful in protecting their adolescents from problem drug use. In addition to reports on her empirical findings, Baumrind's recent publications have begun to address important social issues having to do with policies relevant to social science concerning harsh physical punishment, spanking, and child maltreatment.

Research Across the Lifespan: IHD's Intergenerational Studies

    H ere we describe the Intergenerational Studies (IGS) that were the raison d'etre for the creation of the Institute and the central work of Institute faculty and staff in the period from 1927 through the early 1950s. During the late 1920s and early 1930s, three related studies at IHD enlisted over 300 Berkeley-Oakland families with young children and 200 families with young adolescents. The children were assessed frequently until late adolescence, and then again as adults in their 30s, 40s, 50s, and 60s, while their parents were assessed again in their 70s and 80s. The Intergenerational Studies were one of four major longitudinal efforts begun during the same period of time in the United States (Fels, Stanford, Harvard, and Berkeley), but IGS spanned the widest age range and had the broadest scope in terms of the aspects of development that were studied.

    When the Intergenerational Studies began in 1927 there was little systematic evidence about whether development was continuous from childhood to adulthood and predictable over time, discontinuous and unpredictable over time, or discontinuous but predictable. The IGS studies established conclusively that there is significant predictability from childhood characteristics to adult personality, and from adolescent personality and functioning to adaptation through the lifespan. In a classic book based on the IGS data, Jack Block (1971) showed that the question of developmental continuity is complex. Some individuals remain remarkably consistent over time while others change a great deal, and some of these differences in developmental pathways are predictable from what is known about family and personality in childhood. Another classic study by Glen Elder (1974) used the IGS data to examine the impact of historical change. The economic depression of the 1930s had different effects depending on whether children were in early or late adolescence when the depression began.

    New studies of older participants in the IGS (aged 74-93) by Dorothy Field and Meredith Minkler confirm what we have learned about continuity of development and tend to dispel myths about the aged. For example, for a majority of the IGS participants, neither IQ nor positive personality traits showed declines between midlife and old age. Most of the older adults do not look back nostalgically on their early years but say that the time "right now" is the most satisfactory in their lives.

    Although publications from IGS continued to emerge over the last decade (e.g., Clausen, 1993; Swanson, 1993; Field, 1997; Peskin, Jones, & Livson, 1997), the Intergenerational Studies were in a relatively fallow period until recently. As we will show, they are now on the upswing again, with exciting plans in progress for a major grant application by a collaborative group of faculty from UC Berkeley and four universities across the country.

Visiting Scholars

    T he list of Visiting Scholars to the Institute over the past five years highlights the fact that IHD is an attractive and exciting place in which to study. Each year, we have an average of 8 Visiting scholars a year, including one or two postdocs, two or three from around the U.S. (Harvard, Wellesley, University of Virginia, University of Wisconsin) and others from abroad (Norway, Germany, Poland, Japan, China, Canada, Bulgaria, England, and France), and some local scholars from Bay Area academic and community institutions working on specific projects central to the Institute's mission.

    Current Visiting Scholars include: John McArdle (Professor, University of Virginia) is gathering cognitive test data on the older participants in the Intergenerational Studies. Marilyn Schatz (University of Michigan) spent a sabbatical semester writing a book on the development of memory. Thierry Nazzi (Ph.D. in Cognitive Science at the Ecole des Haute Etudes en Sciences Social, Paris) is completing two studies in collaboration with Alison Gopnik, one on infants' perception of the causal properties of objects, and the other on linguistic and cognitive development in 16-20 month olds. Ben Rosenberg (Professor emeritus, Bowling Green University), studies the only child in China and Afghan refugees in Pakistan and in the west. Three collaborators are working on new personality data from the Intergenerational Studies - Harvey Peskin (Professor emeritus, California State University, San Francisco), Norman Livson (Professor emeritus, California State University, Hayward), and Connie Jones (Professor, California, State University, Fresno). A. J. Malerstein (Clinical Professor, UC San Francisco) is writing a book on the development of personality styles, using data from the Intergenerational Studies and from Baumrind's Family Socialization Project. Two scholars, affiliated with community agencies have been working on projects important to the Institute. Jacquelyne Jackson (Contra Costa County Children's Services) studies risk factors in African American youth, and Donna Weston (Children's Hospital Oakland and the Wright Institute Berkeley) is developing a research, training, and intervention project focused on evaluating a new set of diagnostic tools assessing infants' and toddlers' mental health.

Thematic Trends Not Captured by the Chronological Presentation

    A dding to the Institute's traditional focus on individual psychological development, investigators in recent years have become interested in the biological substrates of development, and the social and cultural contexts in which development occurs. At the biological-comparative level, we have Walsh studying pregnancy and low birthweight, Langer studying primates, Boyce looking at stress, and Hinshaw conducting extensive neuropsychological evaluations of disordered and normally-developing youth, and evaluations of drug interventions for ADHD children.

    Studies of individual psychological development are conducted by Langer, Campos, Gopnik, Slobin, Ervin-Tripp, Turiel, and Block, and by the investigators associated with the Intergenerational studies.

    At the social level of analysis, Watson, Baumrind, Hinshaw, Block, and the Cowans study the family context of development, while Starkey, Klein, Thorne, and Weinstein study the school context. Hinshaw and Capps have focused extensively on peer relationships and friendships.

    Institute studies reflect a growing interest in the impact of culture on human development. Slobin's work comparing linguistic patterns across many countries has already been cited as has the comparative work of Turiel on moral and conventional judgment. Baumrind has been supervising graduate students in the Multicultural Parenting Project (see below), and Campos has been involved in comparisons of parental treatment of infant motion and locomotion in China and the US. Starkey and Klein, who study factors in the school and home that promote or hinder the development of mathematics concepts have just received a new grant to support a cross-national comparative study of school and home environments in the treatment of mathematics learning in China, Japan, and the US.

Summary of Future Plans

    After several years of transition in leadership at the Institute of Human Development, we have embarked on a program to continue what has been fruitful, and to expand in important new directions that will enhance the Institute's leadership in the field of human development. The major programmatic directions involve:


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