Prenatal Determinants of Behaviour

373 Pages·1969·5.612 MB·English

by  J. M. Joffe and H. J. Eysenck (Auth.)

OTHER TITLES IN THE SERIES IN EXPERIMENTAL PSYCHOLOGY
Vol. 1 GRAY Pavlov's Typology
Vol. 2 HOLLAND The Spiral After-Effect
Vol. 3 LYNN Attention, Arousal and the Orientation
Reaction
Vol. 4 CLARIDGE Personality and Arousal
Vol. 5 FELLOWS The Discrimination Process and
Development
Vol. 6 BEECH AND FRANSELLA Research and Experiment
in Stuttering
Prenatal Determinants
of Behaviour
BY
J.M.JOFFE
Department of Psychiatry,
Stanford University Medical School,
Palo Alto, California
Φ
PERGAMON PRESS
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Copyright © 1969
J. M. Joffe
First edition 1969
Library of Congress Catalog Card No. 68-57888
PRINTED IN GERMANY
08 012966 8
To my wife
DARYLL
and my parents
HARRY AND RITA
PREFACE
THIS book is an attempt to gather together from diverse sources the
research which relates events prior to birth to effects on the post-
natal behaviour of organisms. Such studies are an extension of the
widespread and intensive interest in the behavioural effects of
events in the early environment to the organism's earliest environ-
ment—the prenatal environment. It is hoped that bringing together
studies which arose from a variety of experimental interests and
appeared in a wide range of publications will stimulate further inter-
est in a field which is only now being delineated as a research area
in its own right.
This summary of work on prenatal determinants of behaviour
does not attempt to be impartial, either in the selection of material
for inclusion or in its treatment. My bias takes the form of an
emphasis on methodology. Studies—especially those in adjacent
areas such as experimental teratology—are included if they demon-
strate principles or methods of investigation which need to be con-
sidered in studies of the effects of prenatal events on behaviour.
Studies which do not bear on these questions are excluded. In deal-
ing with experiments which are presented, the primary focus is on
methods of investigation rather than on substantive findings, since
satisfactory methods must precede reliable findings. The emphasis
is thus placed on an examination of experimental design in the be-
lief that progress in explaining behaviour depends on researchers
recognizing in the way in which they design experiments that behaviour
is determined by a multitude of complexly interacting events.
It is hoped that the emphasis on research methods will make the
summary of research in this book useful to workers in the area.
Since the studies discussed have not previously been considered
fully in works on early development, this book may also be of
interest to those concerned with the influence of the early environ-
ment on psychophysiological development. The emphasis on method-
ology may make it of interest to those whose primary concern
is research methodology rather than early development.
IX
X PREFACE
I am grateful to many people for their help in the preparation of
this book. Professor HJ.Eysenck initially suggested that a review
of work on prenatal influences which was included in my Ph.D.
thesis might usefully be expanded to the present proportions and
was of considerable help throughout the preparation of the book.
Professor P.L.Broadhurst was closely involved in the work reported
in Chapter 8 which was carried out in the Institute of Psychiatry
Animal Psychology Laboratory at the Bethlem Royal Hospital. The
work reported in Chapter 8 was supported by a grant from the
Maudsley and Bethlem Royal Hospitals Research Fund. The manu-
script was written while I worked in Professor Broadhurst's depart-
ment at the University of Birmingham and I am particularly grate-
ful for his advice and critical suggestions. Professor J.L. Jinks of the
Genetics Department, University of Birmingham, helped consider-
ably in my understanding of the biometrical methods which were
applied to the data in Chapter 8.
I am grateful, too, to the authors, editors, and publishers who
have given permission for the reproduction of material. Acknow-
ledgement is given in the text, either directly or by linking the mate-
rial to the references, except in the case of quotations, which are
linked to the references; for permission to use excerpts I am grateful
to the authors and to the following: the Williams and Wilkins Co.,
Baltimore (p. 262); the publishers of Lancet, London (pp.251,
252-253); the American Association for the Advancement of Sci-
ence (copyright 1966, p. 108); S.Karger, Basel/New York (pp. 281-
282); Year Book Medical Publishers Inc., Chicago (p. 230); the
publishers of Nature, London (pp. 2-3); the C.V.Mosby Co.,
St. Louis (p. 240); E. and S. Livingstone, Ltd., Edinburgh (pp. 233-
234, 242).
Mr. Alan Steel of Pergamon Press has shown a great deal of pa-
tience and much helpfulness in preparing the manuscript for publi-
cation.
Finally, but most of all, my thanks to my wife, Daryll, whom I
can never hope to repay for her help, both formal and informal,
and her understanding at every stage.
Palo Alto, California
June, 1968.
EDITORIAL INTRODUCTION
FOR many years a pseudo battle has been raging in the pages of
many psychological journals between environmentalists and here-
ditarians. That this is not a real battle becomes apparent when one
tries to look for the alleged hereditarians who attribute all in-
dividual differences to the genotype;unlike 100%environmentalists,
they do not exist. No one trained in genetics could fail to be aware
of the importance of environment, or the difference between geno-
type and phenotype. The so-called hereditarians are, in fact, inter-
actionists; they hold that heredity and environment in interaction
produce individual differences in behaviour, and that the most care-
ful analysis is required to sort out the respective contributions of
these two sets of causes in any particular case. The Maudsley
Animal Laboratory has for many years specialized in the genetic
analysis of emotionality, and has bred some thirty generations of
emotionally reactive and non-reactive rats under the leadership of
Professor P. Broadhurst, who is now continuing this work in the
University of Birmingham. This approach, however, is far from
being "hereditarian" in the sense that only genetic influences
are studied, and environmental ones forgotten and uncontrolled.
Dr. Joffe, working first at the Maudsley and then in Birmingham, has
conducted a whole series of studies on prenatal determinants of
behaviour, and he now presents in book form a summary of all the
work done in this field, with particular attention to the many method-
ological problems which arise. This is the first comprehensive
survey to be done in this rather new field, and while most of the
findings are derived from animal work, they obviously have im-
portant implications for human behaviour and personality as well.
The subject is a highly technical one and does not make for easy
reading, but Dr. Joffe has succeeded admirably in breaking the
mass of material down into appropriate sub-groups, and is a most
trustworthy guide through the intricacies of the field. It is very much
to be hoped that careful scientific study of environmental influences,
such as this, will replace the uninformed clamour of environmental-
XI
XÜ EDITORIAL INTRODUCTION
ists whose far-reaching claims are based far more on prejudice than
on empirical evidence. Hereditarians (if any such exist) and en-
vironmentalists will have to agree to becoming interactionists; no
other position is tenable in the light of our present knowledge.
H.J. EYSENCK
CHAPTER 1
INTRODUCTION
And surely we are all out of the computation of our age, and every man is
some months elder than he bethinks him; for we live, move, have a being,
and are subject to the actions of the elements, and the malice of diseases,
in that other World, the truest Microcosm, the Womb of our Mother.
(SIR THOMAS BROWNE'S Religio Medici, 1642)
IN MOST areas of present-day scientific inquiry antecedents of
varying antiquity can be found. This probably reflects little more
than the continuity of man's curiosity about unanswered questions
and in most cases it is a mistake to regard biblical, Grecian, or
medieval pronouncements on certain problems as anticipations of
detailed and replicable experimental evidence. This is particularly
so in the case of prenatal influences. Much has been said through-
out recorded history on the questions it raises. Many reviewers of
the recent evidence have emphasized the "long past" of this topic:
it is reported in Genesis (30: 37-39) that Jacob affected the colour
of the sheep and goats born in Laban's flock by placing striped
rods before them at the time of conception. A great many other
precedents of a similar kind can be found and oral accounts of
apparent prenatal effects are available today.
The fluctuation in the belief in prenatal influences over the cen-
turies is partly an indication of the inadequacy of the evidence.
Medical opinion appears to have accepted the general proposition
at times and to have ridiculed it at others. The status of the area
did not depend so much on the evidence available as on the pre-
vailing climate of opinion and a hundred years ago there was little
evidence which now merits serious consideration. However, in the
last hundred years increased knowledge of normal embryogenesis
and of teratogenesis has made it clear that the developing organism
is susceptible to changes in its prenatal environment. Since, in mam-
mals, this environment is provided by the mother, agents in her
1 PDB
1
2 PRENATAL DETERMINANTS OF BEHAVIOUR
environment are potentially capable of affecting the unborn organ-
ism through their effects on the mother or, in some cases, directly.
The more dramatic examples of such events have ensured that
this general proposition is widely known, and few literate people
are unaware of the possible effects on the unborn child of maternal
rubella (German measles) or of thalidomide during early pregnancy.
Far less widely known is the fact that events during pregnancy may
affect the behavior of offspring without detectable morphological
effects—or that among the events which can have such effects are
psychological stress and emotional arousal. As in the case of pre-
natal influences on physical structure, the popular impression that a
mother's emotions could affect the child she was carrying has long
been prevalent but with little evidence to support it. The belief rested
on old wives' tales for hundreds of years and evidence of this kind
gained circulation even in scientific publications. In 1893 Dr. Al-
fred W.Wallace wrote to Nature: "The popular belief that prenatal
influences on the mother affect the offspring physically, producing
moles and other birth-marks, and even malformations of a more or
less serious character, is said to be entirely unsupported by any
trustworthy facts, and is also rejected by physiologists on theoretical
grounds. But I am not aware that the question of purely mental
effects arising from prenatal mental influences of the mother has
been separately studied .... I think, therefore, that it will be ad-
visable to make public some interesting cases of such modification
of character which have been sent to me by an Australian lady in
consequence of reading my recent articles on the question whether
acquired characters are inherited." The lady wrote: "I can trace
in the character of my first child, a girl now twenty-two years of age,
a special aptitude for sewing, economical contriving, and cutting
out, which came to me as a new experience when living in the coun-
try amongst new surroundings, and, strict economy being neces-
sary, I began to try and sew for the coming baby and for myself.
I also trace her great love of history to my study of Froude during
that period, and to the breathless interest with which my husband
and I followed the incidents of the Franco-German war. Yet her
other tastes for art and literature are distinctly hereditary. In the
case of my second child, also a daughter (I having interested myself
prior to her birth in literary pursuits) the result has been a much
acuter form of intelligence, which at six years old enabled her to
read and enjoy the ballads which Tennyson was then giving to the