24 Facts About Jerome Kagan

Jerome Kagan was an American psychologist, who was the Daniel and Amy Starch Research Professor of Psychology at Harvard University, as well as, co-faculty at the New England Complex Systems Institute.

Jerome Kagan was one of the key pioneers of developmental psychology.

Jerome Kagan did extensive work on temperament and gave insight on emotion.

Jerome Kagan then was accepted at Yale University to study psychology, where he earned his Ph.

Once he had finished his time at the US Army Hospital, the director of the Fels Research Institute contacted Jerome Kagan to ask him to direct a project that was funded by the National Institutes of Health, which he accepted.

Jerome Kagan won the Hofheimer Prize, awarded by the American Psychiatric Association in 1963.

Jerome Kagan examined whether or not early experiences of the participants affected their future personalities talents, and characters.

Jerome Kagan researched all of the longitudinal information that was prepared, specifically, the responses to intelligence tests that were administered to them.

When Jerome Kagan was reviewing the material collected in childhood and adulthood, he found that the first three years in childhood showed little relation to the data collected in adulthood.

The results of the Fels study was discussed in Jerome Kagan's book, entitled Birth to Maturity, that was published in 1962.

Once the children were walking and could leave the home, Jerome Kagan found that the psychological delay in development was only temporary, suggesting that cognitive growth is malleable.

In 2010, Jerome Kagan was involved in a similar study that focused on specific parts of the brain involved in behavioral inhibition in infants.

Jerome Kagan's research found that there were major changes in psychological functioning between nineteen and twenty-four months, and that one-year-old children were sensitive to events that deviated from their normal experiences.

Jerome Kagan examined the effects of infant daycare in response to a congressional proposal to fund federal day care centers for working mothers.

Richard Kearsley, Philip Zelazo, and Jerome Kagan created their own daycare in Boston's Chinatown, and compared infants in their day care center to infants who stayed at home with their mothers.

Jerome Kagan proposed that emotion is a psychological phenomenon controlled by brain states and that specific emotions are products of context, personal history, and biological make-up.

Jerome Kagan explained emotion as occurring in four distinct phases, including the brain state, the detection of changes in bodily movement, the appraisal of a change in bodily feeling, and the observable changes in facial expression and muscle tension.

Jerome Kagan questioned relying on individual's verbal statements of their feelings.

Jerome Kagan provided several reasons for this; he argued that the English language does not have enough words to describe all emotional states, the words to explain emotional states do not convey the differences in quality or severity, and attempts to translate words about emotion from one language to another produces variations and inaccuracies.

The study of temperament is perhaps what Jerome Kagan is best known for.

Jerome Kagan began his work on temperament after his research in Guatemala.

Jerome Kagan defined two types of temperament; inhibited and uninhibited.

In Jerome Kagan's first published work on behaviourally inhibited children, he established the connection between his work on behavioural inhibition to the works of neuroscientists such as Joseph LeDoux and Michael Davis.

Jerome Kagan believed that there is no guarantee of an indefinitely stable profile considering that environmental factors are always changing and that both genes and environmental factors influence a child's temperament.