About the Editor

ABOUT THE EDITOR

A prominent researcher in child development, Jerome Kagan is currently Daniel and Amy Starch Professor of Psychology at Harvard University. Professor Kagan received his undergraduate training at Rutgers University, and his Ph.D. in psychology from Yale University.

Kagan's early research, a collaboration with Howard Moss at the Fels Research Institute at Yellow Springs, Ohio, was an evaluation of adults who had been members of a longitudinal study of children from infancy to early adulthood. The question of interest was what factors, if any, predicted later behavior. Their findings, published in 1962 in the book, Birth to Maturity, argued persuasively that, although infant characteristics were poor predictors of later outcomes, the child's sex and social class were powerful predictors of adult personality. Kagan applied this observation in later years to point out that social class, not race, was the critical factor in predicting IQ.

Birth to Maturity brought Kagan prominence. The book won the Hofheimer Prize from the American Psychiatric Association in 1963, and Kagan joined the faculty at Harvard University in 1964. He has won numerous honors and awards in the intervening years. He has been an active advocate for children and science through many organizations, including the Social Science Research Council, the National Institute of Child Health and Development, the President's Science Advisory Committee, the National Institute of Education, the National Academy of Sciences, and the Foundation to Improve Television.

A prolific contributor to the field of child development, Kagan has published numerous influential papers on a wide range of topics, including the psychology and physiology of child temperament, determinants of infant attention, the emergence of self, children as witnesses, the measure of personality characteristics, and the contributions of social class to measures of intelligence. He has edited several textbooks in psychology and social science. His published works include Change and Continuity in Infancy (1971); The Growth of the Child (1978); Infancy: Its Place in Human Development (with R. Kearsley and P. Zelazo, 1978); The Second Year: The Emergence of Self Awareness (1984); Unstable Ideas (1989); and Galen's Prophecy: Temperament in Human Nature (1994).