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What makes a person an individual, distinct and recognizable as such? What gives him his style, personality, and stamps him with particular characteristics? In an effort to answer these recurrent questions, Dr. Escalona has used her extensive theoretical and clinical background to devise an approach to the study of the emerging personality of the child in infancy. She categorizes her work as 'descriptive research' and acknowledges her indebtedness to the contributions of Piaget, Kurt Lewin, and a number of psychoanalysts.
After a brief critical review of recent research in the field of infant behavior, she declares her intention to compare systematically a series of 'active' and 'inactive' infants. She defines eight major areas or 'dimensions' of behavior: activity level, perceptual sensitivity, motility, bodily self-stimulation, spontaneous activity, somatic need states and need gratifications, object-related behavior, and social behavior. A discussion of the influence of the experiences of the child on his developmental course leads the author to the conclusion that current research has often failed in its efforts to correlate particular experiential variables with particular components of the developmental process. Her own contribution is a design which attempts to bring an empirical research model into accord with the theoretical research model, a point she discusses fully and illustrates by means of diagrams.
The second part of her book consists of a detailed comparison of three groups (according to age) of 'active' and 'inactive' infants ranging from four weeks to thirty-two weeks of age. The designation of 'active' or 'inactive' is determined by the 'amount and vigor of body motion typically (author's italics) shown by a given infant in a wide variety of situations'. The data support the author's thesis that what regularly happens to the child ('stable