Birth to Maturity: A Study in Psychological Development

by Jerome Kagan, Howard A. Moss

This relevant and influential book is the analysis of a longitudinal study of eighty-nine individuals who were assessed at birth and again at regular intervals; observational, psychometric, and interview data were collected for each child and his family until the child reached adolescence, and seventy-one of the subjects were reassessed when they became adults. The book emphasizes the relationship between early experiences and adult characteristics, and has remained throughout the years a forceful argument for and illustration of the continuity thesis.

366 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1983

About the author

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. He was one of the key pioneers of developmental psychology.
Kagan has shown that an infant's "temperament" is quite stable over time, in that certain behaviors in infancy are predictive of certain other behavior patterns in adolescence. He did extensive work on temperament and gave insight on emotion.
In 2001, he was listed in the Review of General Psychology among the one hundred most eminent psychologists of the twentieth century. After being evaluated quantitatively and qualitatively, Kagan was twenty-second on the list, just above Carl Jung.