Jerome Kagan

Jerome Kagan was an American developmental psychologist who spent most of his career at Harvard University, where he held the Daniel and Amy Starch Research Professorship of Psychology and helped create the university's first human development program. Born in Newark, New Jersey, in 1929 and raised in Rahway, he studied at Rutgers, Harvard and Yale, worked at Ohio State University and the Fels Research Institute, and died in 2021. He is best known for his longitudinal and cross-cultural work on infant temperament, showing that behaviours such as high or low reactivity in infancy tend to predict later patterns of inhibition in childhood and adolescence. His other research included the Fels longitudinal study published as Birth to Maturity in 1962, studies of children in San Marcos, Guatemala, a comparison of infant day care with home care in Boston, and a theory of emotion in which feelings arise from brain states shaped by context and personal history. He also argued that psychologists should avoid relying on single emotion words. A 2001 survey in the Review of General Psychology ranked him twenty-second among the most eminent psychologists of the twentieth century.