Jay Belsky#
Short laudatio by Terrie E. Moffitt#
Jay Belsky is one of the most influential and highly visible social scientists in Europe (and in the world, as he is on the ISI list of highly cited researchers). According to ISI bibliometrics, Belsky stands out as one of the most frequently cited psychologists, with 11,095 citations, 44 average citations per item, and H-index = 54, as at Sept 2009. This is an under-estimate, because many of Besky's most oft-cited collaborative papers are authored by "The NICHD Early Child Care Network" and thus cannot be attributed to his name by ISI search engines. Belsky is a developmental psychologist, who has made lasting contributions to knowledge in evolutionary psychology, early childhood development, and in early intervention to enhance children's development. He is widely known as an innovative theorist, whose insights have pushed developmental science in novel directions. He is known for five lines of strong empirical research and elegant theoretical scholarship:
l. Belsky's path—breaking work on the social ecology of child abuse in the l970's first established child maltreatment as a legitimate topic in the social sciences. Until that point, it was assumed that child maltreatment was too rare to study, or empirically intractable, but Belsky’s early work had the effect of stimulating the subsequent branch of research that has generated a huge evidence base on child abuse since the l970's.
2. His theory in the l980's (with L Steinberg) states that conditions in early life programme individual differences within a species in reproductive strategies: individuals who experience adverse conditions in infancy grow up to have more offspring but invest less in parental care, whereas individuals who experience positive conditions in infancy grow up to have few offspring and invest more in parental care. The theory highlights the plasticity of individual differences in response to early—life environmental conditions, and offers an explanation for inter-generational transmission of parenting styles. The theory anticipated by 20 years the recent discovery that maternal neglect has epigenetic effects on the genome influencing later parenting behaviour. This influential theory has spawned hundreds of published empirical tests of its hypotheses.
3. Belsky embarks on policy-relevant research, in addition to his theoretical scholarship. His first major project upon arrival in the UK was to design and direct the evaluation of the UK national Sure Start intervention program, which was launched by government to enhance school readiness among children in disadvantaged local areas. Findings indicate keys ways in which Sure Start can be shaped to enhance its effectiveness.
4. His findings in the US NICHD-funded National Child Care Study in the l990's showed that children who entered day care very young developed higher scores on measures of aggression toward their peers. The implications of this surprising finding were highly controversial. Pro-child-care special-interest groups in the USA objected vigorously to the finding, prompting Belsky to take a brave public stance in defense of academic freedom, at some personal cost.
5. Belsky's newest and current work is his novel hypothesis of "differential susceptibility" which posits that genetic and temperamental characteristics operate to make individuals susceptible to BOTH harmful and salutary experiences. Belsky points out in a new theoretical paper that the field of behavioural genetics has unquestioningly assumed that genetic characteristics render individuals vulnerable to harmful environmental input and thereby engender disease. But Belsky explains that this assumption arises from psychiatry's exclusive focus on illness rather than health, and it has not been tested. Belsky's newest publications, which are getting a lot of attention in both psychology and genetics, summarise emerging evidence that genetic variants have at times been associated with differential susceptibility to salutory and healthful social environments, such as warm consistent parenting. This insight is redirecting a whole area of inquiry.
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