Kagan: Mind matters, but so does morality
Harvard psychologist Jerome Kagan has been deciphering the behavior of infants and children for more than 50 years. His research has cast light on the influence of inborn temperament and on the limits of that influence: timid infants and toddlers do not all grow into shy teenagers. Kagan has also helped explain milestones in child development -- such as the onset of separation anxiety in babies -- as due to changes in brain growth. In his new memoir, ''An Argument for Mind," he contends that the language of neuroscience can never replace the vocabulary of psychology; that despite the important research on neurons, circuits, and hormones, we will always have to talk about morality, meaning, and love as psychological processes. He talked last week with Globe staff writer Carey Goldberg, and these are edited excerpts of their conversation.
Q: You say that science is a wonderful human endeavor, but that it cannot guide our morality. What do you mean?
A: Let me give you an example. Scientists have discovered that the male primate is naturally sexually promiscuous. If our society believed that morality, and therefore our laws, should always be in accord with what is true in nature, then there should be no laws against adultery. But most Americans would defeat that proposition on a November referendum because it violates their ethical premises.
Q: Some say that thinking you can make your child smart and well adjusted is as wrong-headed as thinking that you can make your spouse smart and well adjusted.
A: That's a little too loose, even though it has a germ of truth to it. . . . If you want your child to be Michael Jackson or Tiger Woods, Einstein or Mozart, with an extraordinary level of talent, then, no, parenting is not enough. But let's say you want your child to be able to get pretty good grades in high school. Not valedictorian, but good grades. For that outcome, parents have a lot of power. If parents praise and show an interest in intellectual skills and children love and admire their parents, then they will automatically want to be like them and will develop a desire to improve their intellectual abilities.
Q: You say that over the last 50 years, we've learned that the family is not the only important force in forming a child's personality, and our first three years do not set us in stone. If you combine that knowledge with the passing of the Freudian assumption that parents are to blame for their children's faults, is this a better time to be a parent?
A: No, I think each historical era has a different set of advantages and disadvantages. The mothers of my parents' generation felt they knew what they were supposed to do to raise happy, productive children. The mothers of the current generation are more uncertain. And because more than 50 percent of mothers are working, many feel guilty over not being with their children more of the time. On the other hand, contemporary mothers have fewer children and can invest more resources in them.
Q: Your work suggests that to some extent, biology determines a child's personality.
A: Biology doesn't determine a personality, it contributes to it. A temperament doesn't determine a particular set of traits, but it does bias a child to grow in certain directions. Consider our research over the last 30 years on the infant temperaments we call ''low-reactive" and ''high-reactive." A low-reactive infant, because of its biology, is biased to become a relaxed, easygoing, sociable child who is hard to frighten, but only if it grows in a loving, secure home. If that same infant is developing in a cruel, harsh environment, it is far less likely to become a sociable child who deals with new challenges easily. The small proportion of children who possess a temperament that makes it more difficult for them to experience fear, shame, or guilt can still be socialized by their family to adhere to the values of the community. It is dangerous to be lulled into believing that an adolescent who commits a violent act of aggression ''couldn't help it" because of temperament or life experiences and, therefore, should not be held responsible. Every adolescent, save the tiny proportion with serious brain damage, knows that harming another is wrong and has the ability to inhibit that behavior.
Q: I'll bet that one of the questions you've gotten most over the years is, ''I think my child is 'high-reactive,' " implying she's likely to grow into a shy, anxious adult. ''What should I do to prevent that?"
A: The values and economy in contemporary America favor a child who will interact easily with strangers, leave home to go to college, and find a job in a large city far from home. For that reason, most parents don't want a child who's excessively shy and reluctant to take risks. So if American parents have a high-reactive infant, the best advice is: Do not overprotect them, do not protect them from their feelings of apprehension, and encourage them gently to cope with their fear, the way you would with a child who's afraid to go into the ocean -- You say, ''Put your toe in," then ''a foot," then ''both legs," and finally, ''Go all the way in."
Q: When you titled your book ''An Argument for Mind," the subtext seemed to be that a person's mind -- their thoughts, plans, and feelings -- amounts to much more than just the sum of functions in the brain.
A: Of course we want to know what is happening in the brain when thought and emotion are generated. But we can't use the vocabulary that describes brain activity for psychological phenomena. It won't work. It's like trying to describe the liver with the names of the DNA base pairs that are the origin of the liver.
Q: What are brain scans good for, then?
A: They're providing important information about thoughts and emotions. For example, two people might say they are afraid of snakes. But one person shows a great deal of activity in brain areas that contribute to fear whereas the other does not. Hence the two people are probably not experiencing the same intensity or quality of fear. The more information we have, the more likely we are to arrive at the right answer. In the game 20 questions, if I ask you, ''Animal, vegetable or mineral?" and you say, ''Animal," now I can eliminate thousands of alternatives, even though I don't know what specific animal you're thinking of. If a scientist or clinician who does a brain scan sees that the frontal lobe of an alcoholic patient is healthy, that information is important, for it eliminates one possible reason for the symptom.
