I have always been fascinating by how some presumably intelligent people have such a negative view of life and change. The reactionary or mostly conservative approach to life puzzles me as I wonder how a person who lives in this complex world arrives at that position. I do not believe in the blank slate concept and you only have to watch infants develop to know how much of ourselves is given, but still why are some so adverse to change. This article points to a reason.
Understanding the Anxious Mind By Robin Marantz Henig
"Jerome Kagans Aha! moment came with Baby 19. It was 1989, and Kagan, a professor of psychology at Harvard, had just begun a major longitudinal study of temperament and its effects. Temperament is a complex, multilayered thing, and for the sake of clarity, Kagan was tracking it along a single dimension: whether babies were easily upset when exposed to new things. He chose this characteristic both because it could be measured and because it seemed to explain much of normal human variation. He suspected, extrapolating from a study he had just completed on toddlers, that the most edgy infants were more likely to grow up to be inhibited, shy and anxious..."
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/04/magazine/04anxiety-t.html?em
Understanding the Anxious Mind By Robin Marantz Henig
"Jerome Kagans Aha! moment came with Baby 19. It was 1989, and Kagan, a professor of psychology at Harvard, had just begun a major longitudinal study of temperament and its effects. Temperament is a complex, multilayered thing, and for the sake of clarity, Kagan was tracking it along a single dimension: whether babies were easily upset when exposed to new things. He chose this characteristic both because it could be measured and because it seemed to explain much of normal human variation. He suspected, extrapolating from a study he had just completed on toddlers, that the most edgy infants were more likely to grow up to be inhibited, shy and anxious..."
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/04/magazine/04anxiety-t.html?em
