 Just a couple of announcements. I've been told that we do have seats available in the forum, which is the building right next to us, if you'd prefer not to stand. We do have seats for you over there. We also have seats in the marketplace dining room in the Jackson Center over there. Secondly, for alumni, we have an alumni hospitality room, which can be found in the Hall of Fame room, which is on second floor, directly up the stairs there. If you'd like to meet your friends, please feel free to do that. And finally, if you were accosted in the yard by a young college student carrying a clipboard, they were not selling anything. They were part of some marketing research that we're doing, and I hope you'll do them the favor of helping them fill out a questionnaire. At this time, it's my privilege to introduce my colleague and good friend, Dr. Mark Krueger, who will introduce Dr. Jerome Kagan. Welcome back for the afternoon session. Well, it goes without saying that it's my privilege and honor to introduce Dr. Jerome Kagan of Harvard University. Dr. Kagan has graciously accepted our offer to come here, despite having been given a month in what he describes as Eden in Belogia, Italy, where he's been working at a villa provided to him by the Rockefeller Foundation working on a book. So we're glad to have brought him from that Eden to our place here in Minnesota. Dr. Kagan is one of the world's best-known and most respected developmental psychologists. His work on the biological and psychological underpinnings of shyness serve as a model for developmental research. My own graduate advisor, Dr. William Morris of Dartmouth, worked very hard to convince me that the study of development was much more than simply observing children at different ages and recording what happened. Looking at the development of the child involves seeing patterns, recognizing change and continuity, and looking for ways to explain those transformations. What I especially appreciate about Dr. Kagan's work is the richness of his explanations. I think his work is ideal at a liberal art setting. For those of you who have not looked at one of his books, I recommend it if only because it gives you a sense of the connectedness of knowledge. I'm especially enjoying his new book, Surprise, Uncertainty in Mental Structures, because it has many layers of explanation in it that help us to understand what it is that's going on in the changing child, to recognize the richness of our own human experience. And so without further ado, I think I'll bring Dr. Kagan up to tell you about that work and hope that you'll give him a warm welcome here to Gustavus. Thank you, Mark. Well, this is my second visit here, and it is lovelier than the first. And the first was lovely. As Dr. Candel said, at lunch to a small group, having lunch, you have a very precious community here. And in a fragmented world, not sure of its values, be aware of that. You're very privileged to be part of this community. And I appreciate the invitation. Yes, it was 7,000 miles, but I'm having a wonderful time. And the talk this morning was marvelous. In fact, although I've been in many symposia, I confess to you I've never been in a position to follow such a charismatic talk. And I've been talking for 45 years. The Sumatrans have a word for the state you're supposed to be in. The word is malu. And it's a very special state. The closest we can come to in English is intimidation. So all I can hope for is that since, oh what, over an hour has passed that perhaps some of your genes that put in long-term memory have already vanished. Although I'm going to talk about some of the social science evidence on the relation of nature to nurture, I'd like to take just a few minutes to set the evidence in perspective. Historically, bitter controversies surrounding the magnitude of the biological and experiential contributions to the development of psychological properties, especially human properties, have subsided a bit. Because many scientists have come to realize, and perhaps should have earlier, that the form of the original conceptualization was a bit misleading. The traditional question implied that two painters had been working simultaneously on the same canvas, and a visitor to a gallery where the painting was hung wanted to know how many square inches each artist had covered. I think a more fruitful view recognizes that nature makes the more substantial contribution to the early developmental stages, especially for psychological phenomena, and then hands the brush and the paints to nurture for completion. For example, the basic architecture of the brain is determined almost completely, not 100%, but almost completely by fixed genetic programs. Once that scaffolding is in place, the genes see the great deal of their power to experience, whose task is to sculpt the synapses into microcircuits and the microcircuits into patterns that render each of us unique. As you know, the same principle applies to bird song. The genome of the finch determines the basic form of its song, but that young bird must hear the songs of others and must hear its own sounds in order to produce the melody that bird watchers listen for each spring. Experiences fine tune the inherent competence nature delivered. I think a useful metaphor for this talk, especially when the reference is human development, is a loom of a particular width and length and threads of a couple of hundred different colors given to a weaver who can create a very, very large number of tapestries. The human genome guarantees that all children save the small proportion born with a compromised brain will perceive moving objects acquire a language, establish moral standards, anticipate the future, make inferences, recall the past, be aware of their emotions, and be capable of pride, joy, shame, anger, guilt, fear, and uncertainty. However, each of those competences is a rough sketch. It's the outline of an essay whose meaning is fuzzy and can only be filled in with experience. For example, all humans hold beliefs about the behaviors, feelings, and thoughts of self and others, but the content of those beliefs lies beyond the reach of our 40,000 genes and firmly in the grasp of the history of encounters at particular times and in particular places. Let me give you a wonderful example. Most Bostonians who reached adulthood in the early decades of the 19th century only, what, 100 years ago, were certain of the validity of an orderly world, laissez-faire economics, the superiority of the white race, an unquestioned and inflexible loyalty to one's standards, especially marital fidelity, and believe it or not, Boston as the hub of America. A century and a half later, unpredictable historical interventions that included the Civil War, Darwin, industrialization, the rise of science, urban sprawl, first European and then Mexican immigration to America, and two world wars mocked those truths by creating a new set that better accommodated to history's mischievousness, even though the dominant premises of Bostonians at the end of the 20th century will eventually appear as silly as those held by Bostonians in 1820 when history sends the surprises she is now wrapping for delivery later in this new but still young century. Yes, the content of the beliefs of Bostonians had been altered, but they still held beliefs because their biology demanded it. There's a wonderful Swedish writer you should, he wrote in 1910, 1920, named Pierre Lagerquist, he ended a short story in which an infinitely large number of dead people went to find God to ask why he had made life so tragic. When the group saw him, chopping wood, the leader stepped forward and asked, what was your purpose when you created humans? And Lagerquist had God answer, I only intended humans would never be satisfied with nothing. Lagerquist understood that all humans will hold beliefs that they regard as better, even though few are preserved indefinitely and very few have a privileged access to truth. Because societies are always changing, humans will always alter their ideas and their actions to avoid the terrible feeling of tension, psychologists call it dissonance, but pierces consciousness when beliefs and actions become discordant and forcing a replacement of the worn beliefs with new ones that better rationalize the behaviors the society requires of them. Although the similarities and psychological characteristics across all humans today and over the last 10 millennia are obviously more striking than the differences if you compared 100 randomly selected chimpanzees with 100 randomly selected humans, but the human mind is attracted to variation and it wants to understand why even though all humans share 99.9% of their genome, it's that last 0.1%, that rivets our attention because it has pragmatic consequences for differences in status, power, wealth, beauty, accomplishment, mood, and of course, psychopathology. The nature-nurture debate that is the theme of this meeting is about this 0.1%, and it asks how historical conditions and personal experiences shape the biologically given variation, some of which is temperamental, which I will talk about, into distinctive clusters of actions, emotions, and beliefs. But one line in the mantra, all of us must recite this afternoon while thinking about this issue, is that all psychological properties are not equally malleable, either to mutation or to experience. The content of beliefs about the world, self, motor skills, they're very malleable. The dysphoric chronic mood, a bit more difficult, though not impossible to change. Remember, Hippocrates and Galens said the melancholic and the sanguine were temperamental types. They were very, very prescient. It is relatively easy, as you shall see in a moment, to turn a shy two-year-old into a sociable 10-year-old, very easy, but much more difficult to turn an anxious tense-doer two-year-old into a bubbly, exuberant adolescent. And a similar principle applies to genes. The genes that control the beak and the body size of birds, very malleable, to changes in climate and food supply. But as you know, the Hox genes that determine the basic body form, they've been preserved for millions of years. We can approach the task of explaining human variation from two vantage points. The perspective of the social scientist is to emphasize the strong experiential contributions. Biologists emphasize the biological constraints. Social scientists have demonstrated to my satisfaction, and I hope to yours, the profound influence of culture, social class, family treatment. I hope that no one in this auditorium questions the following claim that experience is the main cause of, not the only cause, the main cause of the difference in values of Boston Puritans in 1650 and today, the variation the size of vocabularies of children from uneducated and well-educated families, and the emotional ability of those children who have been chronically abused. The single best predictor, always within a particular society of a child's vocabulary, high school grades, freedom from psychopathology, values that happen to be dominant in our society today is the level of education of the child's parents, which is a proxy for a chronic set of encounters and symbolic identifications that make a major contribution to most of the outcomes we talk about. However, the influence of biology on human development and variation is a new theme. That's what Professor Kandel said this morning. A half century ago, few scientists had any interest in that contribution. When I was a graduate student in 1950 at a relatively good university, the notion of talking about the effect of biology on behavior was absurd. So the remainder of this talk talks about human growth and variation from this biological perspective. Biology's influence on development assumes two forms. The most obvious is on the time of appearance of the universal characteristics that define homo sapiens. The second, very different, acts by establishing initial variation among infants and young children, and those are the influences that are called temperamental. By accident, this was not set out ahead of time. I worked on the first problem for the first 20 years of my career, and I worked on the second for the second 20 years. And believe it or not, and this does not bring a tear, I can summarize 40 years and 45 minutes. Now I want to present an example of each source of biological inference, of influence. First let's see how brain development constrains the time of a few universal characteristics that emerge in the first two years of life. Now note, this is really important. I am not saying that experience is unnecessary. If you lock a child in a closet and the brain matures, you may not see the behavior. Of course the experience is necessary, but this is not symmetrical. What I'm saying is that if the brain has not matured to that point of view, then nothing you can do will bring that behavior. That's the constraining influence. The newborn's brain is immature, but as it grows, a lawful set of competences appear. And I'm gonna describe two transitions in the first two years. One occurs at seven to 12 months, the title of my talk, and some of the wonderful people who have worked with me over the years can't thank them enough. Now, one occurs at seven to 12 months and the other occurs between one and two years of age. So let's go to seven to 12 months. Quite by accident, Professor Kandel's talk is so relevant and of course I had no idea what he was gonna say. There is a transition in almost all healthy infants between seven and 12 months, made possible by the growth of the frontal lobe right here and enhanced connectivity between frontal structures here and temporal and limbic sites on the other. See, let's find the hippocampus. Right here, remember Professor Kandel was talking about the hippocampus? It's the connections here. These are growing in the second half of the second year. The seminal psychological advance is the ability to retrieve schemata, parenthesis, schemata are representations of perceptual experiences, faces, people, action. It's the perceptual representations. To retrieve those for events that are no longer present. They're not in the perceptual field. To hold those schemata in working memory, I think Professor Kandel would say, putting them in long-term memory, but I'm gonna use the phrase working memory, while you compare them with the present in order to assimilate the former to the latter. Here's the analog. It's the ability to remember a telephone number for 30 seconds or to remember who is in the room 10 minutes after a half dozen people departed. A longitudinal study of eight infants assessed every two weeks from six to 14 months gives support. Each infant was administered tasks that varied in the difficulty of retrieving a schema for a past event, it was where was an object hidden, and the examiner hid the object under one of two cylinders. Then he puts down a screen, so the infant, I'm the infant, I can see where you hid it, and I impose a delay of either one, three, or seven seconds before removing the screen and letting the child reach. So here are the ages, eight, nine, 10, 11, 12, every child is seen every month, plenty of time for practice, this is percent correct, and here's the delays, one, three, or seven, as you can see, the whole thing is linear. No seven-month-old infant could solve the problem with a seven-second delay, think about that. That's only seven seconds. It's just very difficult for babies under seven or eight months to put things into long-term memory, while 70% of the 12-month-olds reach to the correct location when the delay was as long as seven seconds. Now, I could spend the whole day giving 20 studies. The general finding has been replicated so many times by so many scientists, no one questions that there's a clear increase in the ability to retrieve schema for past events following relatively long delays between seven and 12 months of age. And we now know, thanks to the work of neuroscientists, that this cognitive competence has a foundation in brain growth. The most important biological fact, now this is a slice of the brain, you know that the brain has six layers, layer one, two, three, four, five, six, one, two, three, four, five, six, is that neuroscientists have now determined that pyramidal neurons and inhibitory interneurons in the prefrontal cortex, especially here, these neurons, they begin to grow exactly at this time between six and 12 months of age. Moreover, if you test monkeys on the same problem, they've got to remember where something was hidden, guess what, they show the same improvement at the same age and the oxyglucose activity, that's a measure of the metabolism in the brain, it increases between two and three months, two and three months of an infant monkey corresponds exactly to seven to 11 months in the human infant, that's extraordinary. Now the improvement in retrieval and working memory from seven to 12 months, which is due to the maturation of the brain, renders infants vulnerable to a state of fear, to discrepant events if assimilation is not possible. The universal display of fear to an unfamiliar adult, which occurs in most infants between seven and 11 months, requires those new cognitive abilities. The face, body, and temple of gait of an approaching stranger are discrepant from the eight month old schema for her familiar caretakers. If the infant sees the stranger, tries to retrieve the schemata for the faces she knows, holds them and the present situation in the working memory circuit and can't relate them, then she will cry. The same explanation holds for separation anxiety, no three month old will show separation anxiety, but if you put a child in a room and then the mother leaves, the child cries, and notice how lawful this is. This experiment was done by Mel Connor with African Bushman, Connor's now a famous writer in Emory. This was done by Bar-Rogoff in Antigua, Guatemala. This was done by Nathan Fox on the Israeli Kibbutz, and this was done by myself with some Mayan isolated Indians. This is a proportion crying when the mother leaves and here's age, look at that. The rise is exactly the same. These babies are on their mother's bodies all the time. These babies see their mothers for an hour every day. So the growth of memory makes it possible to show fear, to discrepant events that you don't understand. Four advances occur in the second year, and I think they are dependent on brain maturation and you know what they are. The four, these four competences all appear after the first birthday. They are language, the ability to empathize with the state of another, the first understanding of right and wrong, and the first signs of self-consciousness. The remarkable concordance across the world in the age when children first understand language and speak indicates it must be under a biological constraint. Surprisingly deaf children who are learning sign language display meaningful hand signs at the same age and show the same rate of vocabulary growth as hearing children, even though the information perceived and expressed is represented by hand movements rather than by vocalizations. And if you've read the work of Ellen Markman of Stanford or Ursula Balugy in San Diego, they have really made marvelous contributions to our understanding. Let's take empathy. The ability to infer selected intentions and feelings in adults is a second competence that does not occur below one year. The ability, that ability makes a contribution to language because children must infer that adult speech refers to events in the world. If children did not assume that when an adult speaks to them, it means that they're trying to communicate something, I guarantee they would be less likely to link the words they hear to objects in their perceptual space. The ability to infer the feelings of others renders children capable of the emotion of empathy. If an examiner pretends to hurt herself by closing the fingers of a suitcase, holding her test materials, he goes, oh, my finger hurts. 20 month olds, but not one year olds, will show behavioral signs of concern and face, voice, or gesture. The third advance is an understanding of right and wrong and the semantic notions of good and bad. The sensitivity to these concepts cannot appear until children are able to infer the thoughts and feelings of others. That is to infer that my family, my parents disapprove of this action and to anticipate the adult's reaction to their behaviors. Two year olds, but not one year olds, will look at a parent when they're in a situation containing a temptation that might violate a family norm. The behavior that requires us to attribute to a two year old an initial appreciation of right and wrong acts is, and you can do this in the laboratory or at home, refusal to perform an action that is either too difficult or violates a family norm. Most two year olds will hesitate or not perform at all if a mother or an examiner says to the child, would you pour a cranberry juice on this tablecloth? Or would you scribble on this new book? Two year olds will turn away, some will even cry. Thank God they do that. That's why we're still a species. In different cultures, these are three cultures, Cambridge children, children raised on Fiji and atolls and Vietnamese children. If an examiner models some acts in front of the child with toys and then she says, okay, you can play now and she retires, she doesn't say do what I did. If you're 13 or 14 months, you don't cry and look, cross all three cultures. In the second year, you cry. Why do you cry? All the examiner was said was it's your turn to play. It's because they inferred that they ought OUGHT to do what the examiner did and they felt unable to do so. That interpretation assumes an initial understanding of a moral concept and therefore is the first foundation of what you and I know to be a moral sense. The fourth competence is self-awareness. Two year olds display behaviors implying they have some conscious awareness of some of their actions, intentions, their states. They will smile after a difficult task. They will tell adults what to do. They show distress when they can't imitate behavior and of course, you know the famous work of Gallup and Michael Lewis. If you put rouge on a child's nose and bring it up to a mirror under 14 months, they don't touch their nose. After 14 months, they touch their nose indicating that they recognize that the reflection in the mirror is themselves. Now, I'm gonna suggest that one way to understand all four is the following. Now please, I'm not saying that this is the only cause, it can't be, but you can understand why these four all occur at the same time if you have the following hypothesis and I offer this to you as an explanation. Schemata for your feelings, either some feelings of pain, your own states, or your perceptual representation of bottles of milk, cups. They're stored primarily in your right hemisphere while all the semantic representations, bad, hurt, cup, they're stored in your left. It is a fact that there's enhanced growth of neurons in layer three. You remember layer three of the cortex? Layer three of the cortex is the site of the cable of axons that connect our left and right hemisphere. And so the hypothesis is because as these neurons grow, now the connection between the left and right hemisphere is enhanced. So now when I see a cup, bang, I can connect immediately to the word cup. I say cup. Now when I see my mother in pain, the visceral Schemata of when I was in pain is rapidly integrated with my left hemisphere with the words for hurt, finger, and so I show empathy. It's a hypothesis worth pursuing. In general, it cannot be a coincidence that these four competences all appear between 14 and 24 months exactly at the time when these neurons in the corpus callosum are growing. Now I turn to my second theme and I'm on time fortunately. A second form of biological constraint applies to variation among humans in chronic mood and typical behavior. This variation is called temperamental and it has occupied the work of my laboratory for the past 20 years. Infants differ on a number of behavioral properties. The foremost obvious are activity level, irritability and ease or difficulty of regulating states of distress, smiling and laughter, fear reactions to unfamiliar events. When the variation in any of these characteristics is the partial result of inherited biological processes rather than only experience, that is, experience alone can make a child frightened or irritable, so only when the variation has a partially biological contribution then we call it temperamental. I suspect that many temperamental categories are the result of heritable variation in the concentration of or density and location of receptors for the more than 100 different molecules that affect brain function. You know them by these words you always misspell, corticotropin releasing hormone, norepinephrine, acetylcholine, dopamine, serotonin. That fact implies a very large number of distinct neurochemical patterns. Remember the number of combinations of 100 things is enormous. Even if a majority had little functional relevance for mood or behavior, given the extraordinarily large number of possible profiles, there have to be many temperaments, not seven or 10, each defined by a neurochemistry that affects the psychological reaction to particular events. Let me give you one example. Gabba is a very important molecule in our brain and it's inhibitory. It acts in a complementary pattern with glutamate. So imagine an infant who inherited compromised Gabba function. Either the receptors weren't working properly or there was actually less Gabba in the neurons. That child should have great difficulty regulating extreme distress and in a paper we're preparing for publication that we collaborated with Kevin Nugent of Children's Hospital, newborns who were very difficult to calm while they were being given the Brasselton newborn exam. They just would not stop crying and that's a rare group. When they were four months old, they became the high reactive infants I'm about to describe in a few minutes. Two extensively studied temperamental categories refer to young children's typical reaction to unfamiliarity, whether restraint, caution and avoidance on the one hand or spontaneity and a reliable tendency to approach on the other. There are three reasons why there's so much research on these two categories. First, they're relatively frequent. The behaviors that define them are obvious and they can be easily quantified. In addition, similar variation has been observed in almost every animal species studied. That includes mice, rats, wolves, fox, cows, monkeys, birds and fish and perhaps many more I haven't read about. Finally, a preferred reaction to unfamiliar events can be bred in animals following a very small number of generations of selective breeding. It takes only 20 generations of selectively breeding a small group of tame silver fox, most of whom are not tame. In 20 generations, you can produce a pedigree that are as tame as beagle puppies. 20 generations, that's tiny. We have been studying children who are shy, timid and avoidant or bold and sociable when they encounter unfamiliar people, objects and situations because the child inherited a particular temperamental bias. Here's our language, you don't have to use our words, but we call the shy children inhibited and we call the sociable children uninhibited. The heritability of these two types based on a very fruitful collaboration with Professor Robert Ploman who was really the lead investigator here, we did a study of twins at the University of Colorado and of course the heritability varies with the sample, but in general, the heritabilities for these traits approach 0.5, which is relatively high. Evidence from many sources suggests that variation in the excitability of the amygdala and its projections makes a critical contribution to the tendency to approach or to avoid unfamiliar events because the amygdala is always activated by discrepancy or unexpected events. Notice I didn't say fear. Unexpected events that are not threatening will activate the amygdala. Now here is a schematic amygdala and most anatomists say these are the major areas. The important thing is that the lateral nucleus receives information from vision, audition and touch and sends it to the central nucleus. And this is the important nucleus because it is the origin of a large number of projections to almost every site in the brain, the cortex, the brainstem, the autonomic nervous system, the hypothalamus. And when this discharges, then you get stress hormones, higher heart rate, higher blood pressure, changes in posture. You remember Professor Kandel talked about the mouse freezing when you shocked it, central nucleus mediates freezing and of course the startle reflex. Because the amygdala is activated by unfamiliar events and projects to brainstem sites that produce both motor activity and crying. And now here's the central hypothesis of our 20 years of work. Not proven, but we are pursuing it. It is the following. That infants who inherited a neurochemistry, we don't know what that chemistry is, that rendered the amygdala excitable should show thrashing of limbs and crying when you present them with unfamiliar stimuli and they should become inhibited two, three, four-year-olds. Infants born with a different neurochemistry that raise the threshold of the amygdala and its projections should show very little motor activity. They shouldn't cry, they should become uninhibited. That's the seminal hypothesis behind our work. We saw 500 healthy term Caucasian children from middle-class families and it followed them from four months through 11 years. Now, we don't need that. When they were four months old, they saw over a 45 minute battery of a visual stimuli that was heard. Auditory stimuli, they had olfactory stimuli and we filmed this and we just asked which children are showing a lot of motor activity in distress, they're high reactive and which don't, they're low reactive. Now you're gonna see what a high reactive and low reactive child look like. This is a high reactive child of four months. That's the stimulus, watch the legs, there you see. And the arching of the back, that's mediated by the central gray. The distress is now occurring. This is a pretty innocent stimulus. Remember, this is a healthy term baby with wonderful loving parents. All right, that's a classic. Now here's a low reactive child, same kind of family. All right, you got the idea. All right, so we evaluate those children again when they were 14 and 21 months, they came to our lab and for an hour and a half they saw unfamiliar people, unfamiliar rooms, unfamiliar situations. I guess I have to wait till the end. I think that's the end. Okay, so now they come back and the tester of course doesn't know how they were classified at four months and you just code whether they're fearful. Now fear is not a clinical judgment that the child looks anxious. This means you cried when a stranger came in or a bingo wheel was rotated and made noise. And you see the high reactive's in blue or higher fear than the low reactive's at 14 months and at 21 months. When they came in at four and a half years we had a play session with two other unfamiliar children and the mother's on a couch and the high reactive's were shy and inhibited. Oh, there it is. Someone Xeroxed the talk and they got the pages. Okay, I'm back on target. When the children were seven and a half years old we evaluated the presence of anxious symptoms like extreme shyness, worry about the future, afraid of large dogs, nightmares, worrying about being kidnapped, reluctance to go to school. And then we said, which children have these symptoms? Although only one quarter of the sample had anxious symptoms, that's all, 45% of the high reactive's, you only expect 22% had anxious symptoms. Only 12% of the low reactive's, you expect 40% had these anxious symptoms. We recently evaluated these children when they were 11 years old with a battery of both behavioral and biological variables and the child was interviewed at home by someone who was of course blind to their status. We assessed four biological variables that were under the potential influence of activity in the amygdala because that's what we're trying to prove. The four variables were a symmetry and the magnitude of desynchronization of alpha frequencies in the EEG. Now let me explain why we did that. When you're relaxed, alpha is in the EEG and Fox, Davidson, many others have shown if you're a generally relaxed person, not very introverted or tense, then there's greater, there's less alpha in the left, meaning your left hemisphere is more active. Well, tense, dysphoric, anxious, children and adults will show greater activity in the right. So we want to see if that was true. Second, this is very important. The amygdala sends projections down to the brainstem and especially to a place here in your midbrain called the inferior colliculus. It's the third waste, it's the basilar membrane, cochlear nucleus, olive. It's the fifth waste station when sound comes in. Basilar membrane, then cochlear nucleus, then the superior olive and right here is the colliculus and of course you, therefore if you have an excitable amygdala, you're gonna have a bigger evoked potential than a child with a less excitable amygdala and there's data to show that that's true. So we measure the evoked potential while a child is sitting with earphones listening to clicks, 90 seconds of clicks to measure this evoked potential. The third thing we measured was sympathetic tone in the cardiovascular system because the amygdala sends projections throughout the autonomic nervous system and finally, I don't know if you follow the data on event related potentials but work by Marta Kutis, by Hillier, by so many people, have made a very important contribution that when you're sitting in a laboratory with electrodes on your head and you suddenly see something you didn't expect, it doesn't have to be threatening. I mean it can be a chair upside down or it can be the sentence, the boy kicked the quickly. Anything that's unexpected, you get an event related potential usually between 400 and 500 milliseconds. So we wanted to measure that and so the children watch through goggles, familiar pictures, they actually saw 169 pictures, 70% of which were the same fire hydrant and then they saw the same flower but it was only 15% of the time and then they saw in one series, different objects but they were all ecologically valid like a cup or a pen. In the second series, each one's different but it's a crazy stimulus, non-threatening that couldn't occur like a chair on one leg or a baby's head on a animal's body and now we asked, do the high reactives show more of these and they do. First, the children who are high reactive at 11 years of age had greater activity in the right parietal area and in addition, if they were fearful in the second year, remember we brought them in the second year, then they were more likely, if they were high reactive to show right activation frontally in the frontal lobes either under eyes open or eyes closed. If you were any other kind of child and you were high fear, you didn't. In other words, only high reactives who were highly fearful showed right hemisphere activation which should make Davidson and Fox very happy. Here's way five. Remember, this is coming from the Caliculus. We varied whether you heard it under 70 or 80 decibels and of course we measured it both on the same side, it's a lateral or contralateral, didn't make any difference. High reactives have a larger way five. That is a very important finding and this doesn't go with behavior. High reactives who have a large way five are not shyer than high reactives who don't but high reactives have a larger way five. So there's our second prediction, I'm gonna skip that. Now, do they have greater sympathetic tone? We measured this by measuring their resting heart rate and in addition, we did a spectral analysis of their heart rate which separates out. You do a fast Fourier transform and see whether you have high vagal tone which is parasympathetic or you have greater variation in the lower frequency components of the cardiac spectrum which are more sympathetic. If you had greater power in the spectrum in the lower frequencies and in addition you had high heart rate, we called you sympathetic. 65% of high reactives were sympathetic but if you were low heart rate and had most of your frequencies in the vagal frequency, then you were low reactive. So all four predictions prove true. Now for the role of the environment. Not all high and low reactives actualize their infant temperamental bias and now from my point of view, I'm about to say the most important result. About one in four children who had been high reactive and one in four who had been low reactive developed both a behavioral, that is they're shy and subdued at age 11 and a biological profile on these four measures that was in accord with their expectation. However, less than 5% developed a behavioral or biological profile that was inconsistent, that is was characteristic of the low reactives and the same thing held the other way around. In other words, if you're high reactive to either one out of four were very shy and subdued and showed the biology it was rare to be exuberant and show low arousal the rest were in the middle. Low reactives were either very exuberant and low arousal or in the middle. Rare for them to be shy and high arousal thus the prediction that a high reactive infant will not become a social exuberant child with low biological arousal can be made with much greater confidence you'll be 95% correct. Then the prediction that such a child will be extremely subdued and shy and show high arousal in cortical and autonomic targets you'll only be right 25% of the time. Similarly, the prediction that a low reactive will not become inhibited and show high biological arousal is more certain 95% and the prediction that this child will be sociable and show low arousal. A temperamental bias constrains the development of certain outcomes more effectively than it determines any particular outcome. The fact that a temperamental bias constrains development applies to the environment. If all one knows about a group of 100 children is that they were born to economically secure well educated nurturing parents and your job is to predict the most likely psychological outcomes in adulthood. Your most accurate guesses will refer to the profiles that will not occur. Criminality, academic failure, drug addiction, poverty. Predictions of the specific features of the adult personality are far less likely to prove true. Thus each temperament and each environmental history eliminates many more possibilities than they determine. A principle that holds for the cells of the young embryo. If you had a guess what object I'm holding in my hand and I tell you it's metal, you can eliminate many, many more possibilities than those that remain as potentially true or correct candidates. Finally, we should honor the wisdom of the ancients, especially Hippocrates and Galen who recognized 2000 years ago without graduate students or any government funding that the most profound effect of a temperament was on chronic mood rather than on social behavior. The most distinctive behavioral difference at age 11 or at any age between high and low reactives was not in social behavior. It was in the frequency of smiling and laughter. No high reactive smiled spontaneously within the first minute of entering the laboratory at age 11, almost one third of the low reactive smile that once before they sat down and over one half smiled within the first minute. A final point, we believe that higher levels of cortical and autonomic arousal are experienced more often by high reactives and these experiences are accompanied by more frequent changes in feeling tone that have a dysphoric quality. When the change in feeling occurs, the person is motivated to understand why they feel uneasy. A frequent first guess, especially in our society which promotes a private conscience is that well, we probably violated one of our ethical standards. Maybe we were rude to a friend, told a white lie, harbored a silent prejudice or realized that we have not made enough of our lives. The list of possible moral lapses is so long. Few will have trouble finding some ethical flaw to explain this very unwelcome feeling and as a consequence, experience a brief moment of compromise virtue. A classic example is the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein who was a painfully shy child and an adult who had experienced pathological tension in unfamiliar settings. He was a deeply melancholic adult who tried unsuccessfully to rid himself of these feelings that caused suffering. On April 1st, 1942, and he was 53 years old, he confessed, quote, it is as though I have nothing before me but a long stretch of living death. I cannot imagine any future for me other than a ghastly one. Remember Sylvia Platt's diary from Smith, I am afraid, I am not solid. I feel behind my eyes a numb, paralyzed cavern, a pit of hell, a mimicking nothingness. It is here in each person's chronic mood, not their behavior that temperaments longest shadow falls. I hope I have persuaded you to reflect on two ideas. First, the timetable for the appearance of the universal psychological properties of our species during the early years is subject to constraints that are linked to brain maturation. Every three-year-old and no one-year-old with an intact brain living in an environment with people, no matter where they live, will speak in further thoughts of others, show empathy, and have moments of shame. Not, of course, if locked in a closet. However, the variation among the three-year-olds within a society in how big their vocabulary is, the insightfulness of their inferences, and the frequency of their bouts of shame, that will be a function of social experiences interacting with their temperaments. And as the years pass, each person's interpretations of their encounters always set against the value background of their culture, differentiate them from others, even though all humans seek the same prize, and the nature of that prize, Lagerkwist understood, because it emerges in the first time in the second year. Humans continually seek assurance that they possess some threads of wordiness, and they try each day to find evidence for that judgment as they understand the meaning of that idea. Thank you. I'd like to invite our panelists to come up, and our audience, you can submit questions to the ushers and the aisles. Well, we'll begin by asking if there are members of the panel that have questions or would like to comment on Dr. Kagan's talk. Yes, I have one. Dr. McAbee. At the very end of your talk, Jerry, you spoke of experience interacting with temperament, and that raised in my mind some questions, since as you know, and you and I have always been both very interested in parenting inputs and how much difference they make. Do you know anything about, have you studied at all, what kinds of parenting have what effects on children with which temperament? Studying parenting, as Professor McAbee knows, is very difficult. On this sample, we only have one study, which was done by Dorian Arcus for her thesis, and it shows that parenting has a profound effect. Now let me tell you what Arcus did. She picked 50 high-reactives and 50 low-reactives, and visited their home for three hours, five times, between five and 13 months, and then analyzed those videotapes. And the dependent variable was how fearful they were at 14 and 21 months. You remember I showed you fear at 14 and 21 months? For the low-reactives, remember, these are all middle class, I don't, I have very little variation in, so if I had great variation in class, then I wouldn't have different results. But for high-reactives, it made a difference. If the mother of a high-reactive interpreted her baby's sensitivity as meaning something like, quote, a sensitive baby, I better protect it, so she wouldn't let the baby cry too long. To be short, she was overprotective. That baby was extremely fearful. If, on the other hand, this mother educated had the following philosophy, something like, I have a sensitive baby, but that's a tough world out there, and I gotta get my baby ready, then that high-reactive was minimally fearful. And so there's no question that parenting has a profound effect on these temperaments. Otherwise, most of my high-reactives would be fearful, most of my high-reactives are not fearful. That has to be the role of the family and other experiences. The others? Dr. Rappaport. Well, I have a question that I think any clinician would be very tempted to ask, especially because you have been doing this work enough for long-term follow-ups, and that is, do you have a feeling for prediction of extreme outcomes that is clinically, sufficiently clinically deviant? Yeah. The only I don't, and my guess is that most of these children, because they have privileged homes, the vast majority will not have to see a clinician, even though some will be quiet, reserved, and introverted, as T.S. Eliot was, but Carl Schwartz, there was a sample before this that we began at one year, not four months. He saw them at age 14, and he was blind, and did a standard psychiatric interview, and the inhibitors were at high risk for social phobia, but not for specific phobia, or separation anxiety, or panic attacks, and the risk was like 30 or 35%. So I'd say given those data, our best prediction is that if high reactives are at risk for anything, it is for social phobia. Any others? Dr. Bloman? You began your, is this huh? You began your talk, I was warned not to into it. I get that. I do that all the time. You began your talk at the very beginning by talking about genetic influences being important early, and then environmental influences being important late, and I think that fits our common sense, like Shakespeare's slings and arrows about rage is fortunate, you go through life, these accidents and illnesses pile up, but in counter to that, it seems to me there's quite a bit of genetic evidence that suggests the reverse, that is heritable influence increases during life. You weren't at, John Lowland said that at a meeting in Stockholm, and my reading of the literature is that all that, that is true when interviews and questionnaires are the source of evidence, and I know of no behavioral evidence for that, and I said that to John, because he made the same point, you're right, that's what the literature says. I think that that's an artifact of the measuring instrument, that's my guess. Here's a question from the audience, is there a relationship between IQ and the highly reactive or low reactive child? Well, given our sample, no, we did give them an IQ test, and what we have other studies and other investigators who have worked on this problem do not find a relationship to IQ. There's a relationship to style, that is the high reactives when they reach school age will be more cautious, they'll be more reflective, but they're not gonna have a larger vocabulary, their scores on some of the tests that Professor Ploman might give in the Colorado study will not be higher or lower. I think that this is orthogonal to what all of us in the audience understand to be intellectual ability. Another question, if the same advances in memory and representation lead to separation anxiety and stranger anxiety, why do they occur at different ages? No, stranger anxiety may occur a month earlier, but that's because that's a more salient stimulus when a stranger approaches than a mother leaving, but in our experience, it's not a significant difference, that if you tested large numbers of children in different environments, you would find stranger anxiety and separation anxiety occurring almost at exactly the same age. So another question, what is the relationship between GABA activity and high reactivity? Second part, what is the frequency of alcohol use in these high reactive individuals? I wish I knew the GABA answer. I'm afraid that the prize here, which is to try to understand what the neurochemistry is and the genes behind it, that will have to come from another laboratory and I think sometime in the future. I've often asked Professor Sumi who works at NIH and is interested in monkey models to do some spec analyses and try to get at the neurochemistry. It's impossible to do that with the children who are in our samples. As far as alcoholism is concerned, I think that that will be a function of class that is if you are uneducated and in a poor job and you're experiencing the tension and uncertainty that this temperament leads you to, you might turn to alcoholism while I think in well-educated professionals, it turns you, for example, into work. TS Eliot is a classic example or talenturing. So I think alcoholism is very complicated and therefore a short answer is no. I don't think that either group is particularly at risk for alcoholism. Another question, what if your research leads to the possibility to eliminate high reactive temperament of the sort that you imply plagued Wittgenstein? Would this be desirable? Good question. That's an ethical question and so I announcing it to be an ethical, I would say it would be a tragedy to get rid of some of the most productive people in our society. I often say to students when I lectured, suppose we told TS Eliot's mother, you know you have an inhibited child and you should take him to a therapist or put him on Prozac. And if that therapy were effective, it is unlikely he would have ever become a playwright and we would not have enjoyed the products of his works. High reactives in our society who have the privilege of good schooling, they are our most productive members. They become computer programmers, they become writers, they become historians, they become bench scientists, they like working alone, they want a tighter uncertainty, they want to control uncertainty. And in our society, there are many vocations that we need reward and give respect to. So I don't think you wanna get rid of the high reactives. Are there any known correlations between temperament and birth order similar to those found for the Big Five? In our first study, we found a relationship but it was a small group. But then we lost it in this study and Nathan Fox tells me, he has at the University of Maryland, he's seen 400 children at the same ages and he doesn't have it. So given 900 children, I'm persuaded that birth order is not a variable of importance for these outcomes. Could you comment on the aspect of sex, male, female, are high, low reactives more common in one sex or the other? Professor McAbee would love this. There is no sex difference at four months. Absolutely not. And then as the children grow, girls are more likely to retain the shy, reticent persona. And in my view, that's obviously a result of differential socialization standards and the culture's attitude. So that at age 11, we have more shy, high reactives who are girls. The boys, there are shy boys, but fewer and that's because a lot of them became the complement and I'm sure you know such people. 20% of high reactive boys who came from families that said, you've got to get rid of this trait. Here's what they are. They talk incessantly. They're garrulous and if I had to, I don't have the time. If you watch the tapes, they come in and they just talk. They don't let the examiner talk. The pressure. And so that's how they deal with it. Now, if you're not reflecting, you say, wow, boy, that's an uninhibited person. It's at a price. It's at a price. And they keep a distance between themselves and other by talking all the time and that does control the uncertainty. But they, so they don't show the external persona of shyness. I'm sure that that's mainly a cultural phenomenon. Please comment on the amoral person. What happened? What happened? Comment on the amoral person. What happened? Well, morality has two meanings. It has a semantic meaning, mainly that you know right from wrong. People who are mean, murder and rape know right from wrong. So they have to be psychotic to not know right from wrong. So it's the second component. It is the capacity to anticipate guilt shame, anxiety for an act that you know to be wrong. And in my view, and this is not original, I think there are two ways to get there. The most prevalent way is to experience, beat a child up, abuse a child. That's probably the easiest way to get rid of the capacity for guilt, shame and anxiety. But I am prepared to believe that a small group, I don't know, 3%, inherit a temperament. I'm gonna tell you in one second, one case in our whole sample of 500, where, yeah, something's wrong with the ventromedial prefrontal cortex. One of our children in a play session, this was neither high or low reactant. This is a child from another group. Was in a play room with the mother's present and the child he was playing with, a stranger, crawled into a tunnel, which is part of the equipment in the play room. And this child got up, picked up a stick and started to hit the tunnel where the boy was. Let me tell you, that's very unusual. Eleanor has watched children for many years. That's a rare event. And I think that that child didn't experience what the Masiya would call anticipatory tension. Fortunately, those are rare people. But that's a temperament that's gonna be hard to study because it's so infrequent. But I'm sure there are people out there who inherit that temperamental bias. I think that that's less common than just a terribly harsh childhood. One last question here from the audience. Let's say I'm high reactive and also a golfer. Let's say that I also have a putt, which seems to me to be very difficult. Does this mean I will automatically get the yips if I miss the putt? And miss the putt? You will miss the putt and you'll have the yips. Is anybody else on the panel have any closing comments here? All right, well then, thank you very much. Dr. Kagan will adjourn until three o'clock. I don't think so. Tell you what, let's find your host. We'll find Mark. More about your study, I think, which is about to be published.