Jerome Kagan

Daniel and Amy Starch Research Professor of Psychology Emeritus Jerome Kagan

Discusses temperament, cognitive development, and consciousness, and suggests new research techniques for studying child development.

Temperament, Cognition, and Self

Unstable Ideas

In the distinctive manner that has made him one of the most influential forces in developmental psychology, Kagan challenges scientific commonplaces about mental processes, pointing in particular to the significant but undervalued role of surprise and uncertainty in shaping behavior, emotion, and thought.

Surprise, Uncertainty, and Mental Structures

In this sophisticated overview of human emotions, a widely respected psychologist and author addresses the ambiguities and embraces the controversies that surround this intriguing subject. An insightful and lucid thinker, Jerome Kagan examines what exactly we do know about emotions, which popular assumptions about emotions are incorrect, and how scientific study must proceed if we are to uncover the answers to persistent and evasive questions about emotions. Integrating the findings of anthropological, psychological, and biological studies in his wide-ranging discussion, Kagan explores the evidence for great variation in the frequency and intensity of emotion among different cultures. He also discusses variations among individuals within the same culture and the influences of gender, class, ethnicity, and temperament on a person's emotional patina. In his closing chapter, the author proposes that three sources of evidence - verbal descriptions of feelings, behaviours, and measures of brain states - provide legitimate but different definitions of emotion. Translating data from one of these sources to another may not be possible, Kagan warns, and those who study emotions must accept, at least for now, that their understanding is limited to and by the domain of their information

History, Measures, and Meanings

What is Emotion?

The second year is that daunting time when the previously docile and adorable infant inevitably develops a mind of her own. In this book, Jerome Kagan takes a provocative look at the mental developments underlying the startling transitions in the child's second year. It is Kagan's premise that the roots of self-awareness emerge in the second half of the second year of life. He also suggests that the underlying cause may be more biological than social. His book develops these ideas through a series of brilliant observations on the behavior of two-year-olds. Kagan charts, for example, the emerging sense of standards (the possibility of right and wrong) that reveals itself positively when the child suddenly begins to smile after a successful action, and negatively when the child starts to become concerned about flaws in objects and mistakes in her own behavior. When this concern with standards spreads to the child's irresistible impulse to imitate adults, Kagan observes a remarkable phenomenon: the twenty-month-old child suddenly begins to show signs of distress before she even tries to imitate an action that is beyond her ability. Kagan argues that this distress could arise only from the child's growing sense of what she can and can't do--her awareness of herself.

Daniel and Amy Starch Research Professor of Psychology Emeritus Jerome Kagan

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