Copyright 1995 The New York Times Company
The New York Times
March 7, 1995, Tuesday, Late Edition - Final
SECTION: Section C; Page 1; Column 3; Science Desk
LENGTH: 2109 words
HEADLINE: 75 Years Later, Study Still Tracking Geniuses
BYLINE:
By DANIEL GOLEMAN
BODY:
IN 1921, Dr. Lewis M.
Terman, a Stanford University psychologist and a pioneer of the I.Q. test, scoured
California's schools to identify 1,521 children who scored 135 or over on his
new intelligence test, the Stanford-Binet.
Terman's little geniuses -- who as the study went on took to calling themselves
"Termites" -- are now in their 80's, and have been contacted by researchers every 5 or 10
years, making the
Terman Study of Genius the grandfather of all life-span research.
Now entering its 75th year, the study is still going strong. Just last month
the data yielded an article on links between childhood traits and longevity; in
April Stanford University Press will publish a volume by Dr. Terman's
successor, the late Dr. Robert R. Sears, a psychologist at Stanford, on the
Terman children late in life. Over the years more than 100 scientific articles
and almost a dozen books have been based on the Terman data.
In the world of social science, such longitudinal studies are the method of
choice for assaying the mysteries of the seasons of life. Such studies allow
researchers to analyze large groups of people over many years, and so tease out
the hidden and often murky links between cause and effect that would be missed
in other kinds of
studies. Recent findings from other studies include, for example, that harsh
sentences for young criminals shut them off from key opportunities to avoid a
criminal career, indications of the traits of preschool children that put them
at heightened risk of drug use as teen-agers, and the personality traits that
lead symptoms of post-traumatic stress to wane as life goes on.
"It's only by following people over years that you can most accurately track the
relationship of early traits or influences on the course of later development," said Dr. Anne Colby, a psychologist and director of the Murray Research Center
at Radcliffe College.
The Radcliffe center has become the largest repository for longitudinal
studies, including a duplicate set of the Terman data and more than 150 other
such studies done in this country. Typical of the information available to
scholars at the center are data on the life course of 510 parolees first
assessed in 1921, or 300 newlyweds first tested in 1935. The main alternative
to such studies is retrospective research. Because retrospective research
relies
"on recollections of what happened in childhood," Dr. Colby said, it may be
"distorted by people's notoriously imperfect memory."
Shepherding data over the course of lifetimes is itself a logistical challenge.
The Terman study, for example, is in its third generation of overseers, having
outlived its first two directors. Dr. Terman was the head until 1954, when he
turned the study over to Dr. Sears, who was himself a Termite. When Dr. Sears
died in 1987, Dr. Al Hastorf, a colleague, became director.
The Terman study, the first to follow such a large number of people since
childhood
over their entire life span, continues to yield new insights about each stage
of life. Only now that the Terman boys and girls have reached their 80's have
investigators discovered that those children whose parents divorced faced a 33
percent greater risk of an earlier death than those whose parents remained
married until the children reached age 21.
For men whose parents divorced while they were children, the average age of
death was 76, compared with 80 for those whose parents remained married,
according to findings by Dr. Howard Friedman, a psychologist at the University
of California at Riverside. To do the study Dr. Friedman had to track down
hundreds of death certificates throughout California and 20 other states.
The Terman children were born, on average, in 1910; in those days divorce was
rarer and carried more stigma than is now the case.
Dr. Friedman believes, based in part on a large body of recent research, that
it was the stress and anxiety caused by their parents' strife that took its
toll in later life.
Perhaps surprisingly, there was
"very little" effect on mortality for those boys and girls who had a parent die, Dr.
Friedman said, suggesting that the tensions of divorce were detrimental, rather
than simply the absence of a parent.
"The children whose parents divorced also tended to have less marital stability
themselves," Dr. Friedman said.
"They followed a different track through life."
The Terman study adds to the debate about the influence of I.Q. in life
success, suggesting that intelligence itself is not the only ingredient
necessary for outstanding achievement.
In 1968 Melita Oden, a research associate of Dr. Terman's, published a study of
100 Termites
who at midlife had attained the most success and 100 whose careers had
foundered. The successes, whom she called A's were in professions like law and
medicine, or were university professors or business executives. The other
group, the C's, were in occupations like sales clerks, far below their
intellectual potential. One, who had earned an advanced degree in engineering,
was working as a technician.
The A's, to be sure, on average had I.Q.'s seven points higher than the C's:
157 versus 150. But small differences in scores at the extreme high end of the
I.Q. curve translate into little actual difference in ability. Such a
difference is
"meaningless," said Dr. Hastorf, the current shepherd of the Terman data and a psychologist
retired from Stanford University.
But other differences were telling. The A's were more motivated from the start;
they skipped more grades
in grammar school, and went further in their education than the C's. As
youngsters, the A's were rated as more lively and engaged than the C's, taking
part in more extracurricular activities in school and, throughout their lives,
in more sports.
Perhaps most significant in explaining the difference in career success, said
Dr. Hastorf, were character traits. From childhood on, the C's showed a lack of
persistence in pursuing their goals, whether in school or work; the A's, at an
average age of 11, already showed greater
"will power, perseverance and desire to excel."
Similar findings have come from another longitudinal study, a 1992 follow-up of
379 Boston children first observed in 1951, when they were 5 years old. It
found that parents' putting pressure on the children to achieve was a stronger
predictor of their
earnings and job achievement than were childhood I.Q. scores. That study was
begun by Dr. Sears and colleagues while he was at Yale, and ended up in the
archives of the Center at Radcliffe. The follow-up was done in 1992 by Dr.
David McClelland and Dr. Carol Franz, then at Boston University.
Some of the relationships teased out of such long-term data can challenge
conventional wisdom. Such is the case with recent findings that suggest
sentencing juvenile offenders to long prison terms may have the unintended
effect of shutting them off from the most promising avenues of exit from a life
of crime.
That conclusion follows from a new analysis of data first collected in the
1940's on 1,000 teen-age boys from impoverished areas of Boston, half of whom
were juvenile delinquents, the other half carefully matched case by case but
with
no criminal record. The boys were followed by the original researchers, Dr.
Sheldon Glueck and Dr. Eleanor Glueck, Harvard psychologists, for up to 45
years.
Recent re-analysis of the Glueck data (which is in the archives at the
Radcliffe center) revealed that two influences in the boys' lives between ages
17 and 25 turned them away from committing further crimes: getting a stable job
that they cared about and where the employer valued them, or marrying a woman
with whom they felt a strong tie, and supporting her and any children.
For those teen-age delinquents who managed to find a stable job, only 32
percent went on to commit crimes, while the crime rate among those who did not
was 74 percent. Similarly, for those delinquents who became committed to a
marriage, just 34 percent went
on to engage in crime, while for those without such a strong marital bond 76
percent engaged in crimes.
"Teen delinquents are more than twice as likely to be still committing crimes in
their late 20's if they have low job stability or a weak marriage," said Dr. John Laub, a professor of criminal justice at Northeastern University
in Boston and a visiting scholar at the Radcliffe center.
"From our findings I'm convinced that the current policy of locking up young
criminals for long periods is counterproductive," added Dr. Laub, who published his findings in a 1994 book,
"Crime in the Making" (Harvard University Press), written with Robert Sampson, a University of
Chicago sociologist.
"Putting young offenders in prison cuts them off from the very opportunities
that might allow them to become
productive members of society."
By allowing connections to be made between childhood traits and later habits,
longitudinal data allow researchers to identify early factors that put people
at risk for later problems.
"From nursery school data we can identify the kids most likely to be in the drug
scene 15 years later," said Dr. Jack Block, who for more than two decades has directed a study of
several hundred children in Oakland, Calif., who were recruited as subjects
when they were 3.
In interviews when the children were 14, Dr. Block found that for girls, those
who in preschool were sulky and whiny, prone to teasing, anxious, unkempt and
showed less interest in pleasing others were most likely to be using drugs at
age 14. For boys in preschool the markers for those most
likely to use drugs in their teen years included being uncooperative, prone to
upsets and open in their expression of negative feelings, inattentive and
aggressive.
A study by Dr. Block four years later, when the teen-agers reached 18, however,
found that not all adolescent drug use boded a grim future. In this study,
those teen-agers who had experimented with drugs like marijuana during their
teen-age years -- compared both to those who used them heavily and those who
abstained -- were the best adjusted.
The teen-agers who used drugs most frequently were the most alienated, had the
poorest impulse control and the most emotional distress, while those who had
never tried any drugs were more anxious, emotionally constricted and socially
inept. Other data show that nearly two-thirds of young adults in the United
States have
experimented with marijuana at one time or other.
Dr. Block's conclusion was that drug use is a symptom of maladjustment, not a
cause, and that it can best be understood in the context of the larger course
of life.
While data collected years or even generations ago can still yield such
insights, one drawback -- particularly with studies begun many decades ago --
is that the original measures used can sometimes be out of date or irrelevant
to a contemporary investigator. The psychological measures fashionable in the
1920's or 1940's, like elaborate measures of body type, are sometimes museum
relics to researchers in the 1990's.
"When you walk in to a set of longitudinal data you benefit from the years of
toil the original researchers put in, but you also inherit the flaws," said Dr. Franz, a psychologist at the University of California
at Berkeley.
Researchers must be resourceful in how they use what can otherwise be useless,
antiquated data. That was true of Dr. George Vaillant, a psychiatrist at
Harvard Medical School, when he first encountered data that had been collected
on Harvard graduates in the 1940's. Called the
"Grant Study" after the W. T. Grant Foundation, which provided the original financing,
"the data sat unused at Harvard for years," Dr. Vaillant said.
But by tracking down the men, now in middle age, and conducting follow-up
interviews with them, Dr. Vaillant has been able to harvest ample research
results. The most recent, a study of recovery from post-traumatic stress
disorder done with Dr. Glen Elder, a sociologist at the University of North
Carolina, will be published this year in The American Journal of Psychiatry.
Interviews and writings of the men while in college, and after returning from
combat allowed Dr. Vaillant to determine that those who were most emotionally
vulnerable before their traumatic experience were most likely to continue to
suffer from symptoms like flashbacks and nightmares almost a half century later.
The Grant data, when Dr. Vaillant first encountered it,
"was regarded by Harvard's psychology department as an embarrassment," Dr. Vaillant said.
"They thought the wrong questions had been asked," he said.
"But for me it was a gold mine."
GRAPHIC: Photos: Anne Colby and Al Hastorf at Stanford University. (Terrence McCarthy
for The New York Times) (pg. C1); Dr. Lewis M. Terman (1950); Dr. Robert R.
Sears (Photographs courtesy of Al Hastorf, Stanford University; 1960) (pg. C9)
LANGUAGE: ENGLISH
LOAD-DATE: March 7, 1995
