AFFECTIVITY AND GROWTH IN CHILDREN1

Abstract

The affective or feeling side of personality is playing a role of increasing importance in current research in child development. Whenever one wants to know how children learn, why they behave as they do, or even to fully appreciate their states of health, he must sooner or later find out how they feel about the situation. The importance attributed to affectivity or feeling states in general psychological literature is apparent throughout the history of psychology. The general historical trend seems to have been in the direction of gradually establishing a closer connection between mental and physical functions. Affectivity has been conceived as related to mental and physical processes in varied and contrasting ways. As psychologists join and relate the mental and the physical, affective areas must then be investigated in terms of both. The present study of the affective area of personality adds another approach to the problem attempted by the University of Michigan growth studies, that of describing the child through time. Olson and other members of the University Elementary School staff have been engaged for the past decade in collecting continuous growth records of the children enrolled in the preschool and elementary grades. The general point of view of the growth studies has been that the unique problem of research in child development is to see what the child as a whole is like now, what he was, and what he may be later. When an individual child is chosen for special study he is less often compared with others and more often studied by comparing his present status with his own previous status. The University of Michigan growth studies have emphasized consecutive measures of height, weight, dentition, wrist bone development, educational achievement, mentality, strength of grip, and maturity of inter-