What You Can Change _. And What You Can't - Martin E. Seligman [165]
3. Useful reviews: Divorce: R. Forehand, “Parental Divorce and Adolescent Maladjustment: Scientific Inquiry vs. Public Information,” Behaviour Research and Therapy 30 (1992): 319–28. This review is a good corrective to the alarmist popular literature on divorce. It seems to be conflict, and not divorce per se, that does the harm. Parental Death: G. Brown and T. Harris, Social Origins of Depression (London: Tavistock, 1978). Birth Order: R. Galbraith, “Sibling Spacing and Intellectual Development: A Closer Look at the Confluence Models,” Developmental Psychology 18 (1982): 151–73. Adversity (generally): A. Clarke and A. D. Clarke, Early Experience: Myth and Evidence (New York: Free Press, 1976); M. Rutter, “The Long-term Effects of Early Experience,” Developmental Medicine and Child Neurology 22 (1980): 800–815.
4. When investigators actually go and look, rather than just declare that we are products of childhood, the lack of strong continuity from childhood to adulthood is what hits you between the eyes. This is a major discovery of life-span developmental psychology. “Change” is at least as good a description as “continuity” for what happens to us as we mature. For good reviews of this very large literature, see M. Rutter, “Continuities and Discontinuities from Infancy,” in J. Osofsky, ed., Handbook of Infant Development, 2d ed. (New York: Wiley, 1987), 1256–98; H. Moss and E. Sussman, “Longitudinal Study of Personality Development,” in O. Brim and J. Kagan, eds., Constancy and Change in Human Development (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1980), 530–95; G. Parker, E. Barrett, and I. Hickie, “From Nurture to Network: Examining Links Between Perceptions of Parenting Received in Childhood and Social Bonds in Adulthood,” American Journal of Psychiatry 149 (1992): 877–85; and R. Plomin, H. Chipuer, and J. Loehlin, “Behavior Genetics and Personality,” in L. Pervin, ed., Handbook of Personality Theory and Research (New York: Guilford, 1990), 225–43.
Especially instructive is the finding that divorce itself is heritable. If you have an identical twin who divorces, your chances of divorce increase sixfold, whereas a divorced fraternal twin only increases your chances of divorce twofold. See M. McGue and D. Lykken, “Genetic Influence on the Risk of Divorce,” Psychological Science 3 (1992): 368–73.
5. The twin studies and adoptive studies are cited in chapter 3. See especially R. Plomin and C. Bergeman, “The Nature of Nurture: Genetic Influence on ‘Environmental Measures,’” Behavioral and Brain Sciences 14 (1991): 373–427. For other important studies, see S. Dinwiddie and R. Cloninger, “Family and Adoption Studies in Alcoholism and Drug Addiction,” Psychiatric Annals 21 (1991): 206–14; T. Bouchard and M. McGue, “Genetic and Rearing Environmental Influences on Adult Personality: An Analysis of Adopted Twins Reared Apart,” Journal of Personality 68 (1990): 263–82; A. Heath, L. Eaves, and N. Martin, “The Genetic Structure of Personality: III. Multivariate Genetic Item Analysis of the EPQ Scales,” Personality and Individual Differences 12 (1988): 877–88.
There continues to be a flourishing field investigating childhood antecedents of adult problems. Occasionally reliable effects emerge, but what astonishes me—given the heritability literature—is the absence of any genetic theorizing in this field. So, for example, there are two recent, otherwise competent studies that find (1) correlations between mothers’ treatment of children and the children’s later criminality, and (2) correlations between childhood trauma and later suicidal attempts. Both interpret the childhood events as causal. Both fail to explore the possibility that the adult behavior and what happened in childhood result from third, genetic variables. These studies are H. Stattin and I. Klackenberg-Larsson, “The Relationship Between Maternal Attributes in the Early Life of the Child and the Child’s Future Criminal Behavior,” Development and Psychopathology 2 (1990): 99–111; and B. van der Kolk, C. Perry, and J. Herman, “Childhood Origins of Self-Destructive