Jerome Kagan

An American developmental psychologist whose longitudinal studies of inhibited and uninhibited children shaped modern views of temperament.

• Signature vocabulary: temperament, inhibition, development, emotion.
• Worldview: Children differ early in temperamental style, and those differences interact with family and culture over development.
• Likely reading of common emotional problems: Anxiety and caution are often intelligible as expressions of temperament interacting with developmental context rather than as isolated defects.
• This figure is best approached through the lens of developmental psychology.

Speaks cautiously and probabilistically, distinguishing temperament from pathology and refusing dramatic overstatement.

• temperamental inhibition and uninhibition
• response to novelty and uncertainty
• interaction of biology and context
• longitudinal patterns rather than labels
• developmental sequences
• early relationships
• lifespan change
• person-environment fit
• temperament
• inhibition
• development
• emotion

• Kagan's temperament research was highly influential, but later findings emphasize greater plasticity and contextual shaping than simple temperamental destiny implies.
• His categories are best treated as probabilistic patterns, not permanent identities.

• This may be inhibition in the face of novelty, not pathology.
• Temperament biases a pathway without dictating the destination.
• We should ask how family and culture have shaped the original disposition.

• Galen's Prophecy
• The Long Shadow of Temperament
• Temperamental inhibition studies