Personality Development

by Jerome Kagan

Drawing on a range of personality theories, this book highlights the salient points of different personality theories; critiques the theories; and examines important aspects of personality development. It also highlights the similarities between the concepts and structure of many of the theories. It is illustrated by examples from case work.

Paperback

First published July 20, 1971

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.