How Did I Become Interested in Psychology?

Such an interest had its roots in a father-son conflict or disagreement, on the one hand, and my curiosity about human behavior, on the other. Psychology was not my first idea for a university study program. That was engineering due to the influence of my father. But convinced by a classmate from high school, I enrolled in the psychology program of the University of Muenster, with the famous Gestalt psychologist Wolfgang Metzger at the helm. In hindsight a look at the bookshelves in my room at home showed that I had scientific interests from early on in high school. I was good in biology and conducted an empirical study on the influence of sex hormones on frog metamorphosis at the age of sixteen. Konrad Lorenz was on the shelf, and books on cybernetics. My latent engineering background manifested itself later (when I was already a professor in my early thirties) as a restorer of antique model trains. Starting in childhood I always wanted to see what worked in toys and machines.

Beyond those activities, I was driven by a social motivation. For instance, while a young university student I supervised a group of working-class youngsters during a trip to the Italian alps, sponsored by the Red Cross, meant to take them out of jeopardized neighborhoods during school vacation. Later during my university education and lasting through my first tenured position as professor, I was engaged in liberal and leftist political groups. I learned a lot about the reasons for societal divides and how one might overcome them. Such activities were not overlooked by the authorities, and I faced a lot of challenges during the beginning of my career because there were doubts expressed in a hiring situation “whether I stand on the ground of the political constitution of the country.” (Ironically in a later, similar hiring situation in the USA, the question raised instead was which languages I speak.)

And that sense of social engagement remained firm. During all the years of the Cold War I was involved in youth research in the West and the East of the political divide in Europe. I had good colleagues in East Germany (DDR) and in socialist Poland, and in the latter case we even collaborated in a research project, unique at that time, on youthful problem behavior.

How Did My Thinking about Development Emerge and Crystallize During My Career?

I want to illustrate this by the paradigmatic case of ideas and publications about pressing social issues and their effect on well-being. We chose this outcome because it is an enabler of adaptive development. All studies were influenced by my interest in the role of contexts on all the levels Urie Bronfenbrenner had distinguished in his ecosystemic approach, from the macro level of societies and cultures to the micro level of families. Certainly, this was a consequence of how I became interested in human development in the first place.

When conceiving of my PhD project, I came across research on perspective-taking during childhood. At that time, in the 1970s, there were two approaches to the topic. One was in the Piaget tradition and focused on structural stages of development, extended from cognition to social cognition. The other was more influenced by social interactionism and sociology, applied the construct of role-taking, and had more of a socialization perspective. In the latter framework, it made sense to ask which social experiences would promote age-related changes in role-taking skills during childhood. I focused on differences in perceived parental styles as antecedents of increased role-taking abilities, and found that maternal support and control correlated with the levels of role-taking.

Here it was – the micro level of family contexts played a role. This finding left a lasting impression. Years later and as a professor, in research on adolescent heroin addicts, I found that the main cause of their maladjusted development was not a long accumulation of deviant behavior, but a particular serious mishap in an otherwise almost orderly development that disrupted positive contexts and took away opportunities for adaptive development. One example – living in the streets after a split in the parental family.

I now want to turn to the case of an abrupt context change in life conditions and development of an entire population,that is, German unification in 1989, and its sequelae for years to come. With my research team at the Justus Liebig University of Giessen, from 1986 I was interested in learning what significant societal and political changes (macro level of contexts) may imply for the resolution of age-appropriate developmental tasks in adolescence and young adulthood. Our approach utilized an already planned survey on youth development in (West) Germany, that was about to go into the field. In 1991 we decided to expand the study to former East Germany. As we were able to replicate the study in 1996 in both regions, five years into unification, we accomplished a period comparison with large representative samples. This is a valuable way to assess the overall effects of social change affecting the political order, economy, law, and many other social institutions in the East.

We found a rapid accommodation of the timing of some developmental tasks to the new circumstances, triggered by relevant contextual changes in the life of individuals and families. For instance, the timing of puberty did not differ between the two regions, neither in 1991 nor 1996, and the same applied to the timing of first romantic involvement. The timing of first vocational interests, however, was earlier in the East in 1991; but by 1996 it was the same as the Western average, due to changes in the system of education and training after unification. Likewise, the timing of the age of steady romantic relationships and marriage were earlier in the East compared to the West in 1991, and in 1996 a movement to later ages emerged. When changes occurred, it was easy to see the mechanism, namely, the influence of relevant social institutions that had changed due to unification. The earlier marriage age in the East, for instance, was related to the scarcity of apartments. These were regulated and provided by city authorities, and being married and having children was a crucial criterion for access. Otherwise one could not leave the parental home and had to stay with the family of one of the marital partners.

In summary, my view is that social institutions provide the clocks for the pace of major aspects of social development. And one can only see this effect when comparing contexts that differ in a particular way in their affordances for development in a particular period. Otherwise such effects are hidden. All of which is a strong argument for adopting a comparative perspective in developmental research.

The system of multi-level variables, and their relationships and interactions that I illustrate further in the following, is known as the “Jena Model of Social Change and Human Development,” named after the Friedrich Schiller University of Jena, my academic home since the mid 1990s. Our aim in conceptualizing this model was to come closer to assessing the manifold manifestations of social change in individuals’ lives and the role of such change in the social development of, say, adolescents. What we called “new demands” are changes as perceived by the individual, typically for the worse, concerning work, family, and civic life, changes rooted in political transformation, globalization, and individualization (societal trend toward greater individual responsibility for choices in everyday life), all of which characterized Germany in the mid 2000s. The questionnaire items we used for assessment were worded such that they implicated an aversive psychological state and loss of resources in behavioral domains that represent age-typical developmental tasks people have to resolve. We considered these demands to be the result of a “filtering out” by individuals from the challenges around them. As expected, we found that demands were less prevalent and less severe when people had more resources to withstand them, for example, a stable job, an intact family, better education, or living in ecological contexts (administrative regions) less affected by social change.

These demands were conceived to be the input into a complex cognitive-motivational process of developmental regulation; and following concepts introduced by Jutta Heckhausen, engagement and disengagement were regarded as ways of coping that emerge from this process. In our framework engagement means to be active in directly tackling aversive experiences concerning developmental tasks, thereby gaining energy and motivation, not giving up easily, and when confronted with failures, trying to solve the problem by other means. Conversely, disengagement covers either face-saving excuses or giving up tackling the problem by leaving the field and dispensing with energy and motivation for alternative action.

Our results showed that the demands precipitated by social change were indeed stressful overall, as revealed by a negative effect on indicators of well-being. This effect, however, was smaller when both high engagement and a high sense of control are present, whereas it was aggravated when a non-congruent combination of engagement and control occurred. Personal resources in addition to control were also relevant. For instance, people with a higher disposition to scrutinize contexts and embrace novelty for personal growth called exploration, “reaped” new life-style options and expanded learning opportunities as benefits of unification more than others with a lesser inclination toward exploration. This effect was particularly strong in administrative regions characterized by high levels of individualization.

As tremendously rising unemployment in the East was a major challenge in the years after unification, we wanted to see whether this context change affected the negative relationship between high demands and well-being. We indeed found a moderating effect. In regions with high unemployment the association was less negative. Probably under such circumstances the corresponding demands are not seen as reflecting an individual failure and are thus less threatening. Consistent with this view, in such contexts the effect of engagement was less positive on well-being. Disengagement, however, even had a positive effect on well-being in regions devastated by high unemployment and associated high demands, probably reflecting attempts to avoid futile struggle to overcome life challenges.

Who and What Inspired My Approach Over the Years?

My overall scholarly framework originated with a particular institutional feature of my academic home for about two decades from 1977 on. The psychology department at the Berlin University of Technology was founded to complement the natural and engineering sciences by the “humanities”; consequently, the program there was influenced by old philosophical traditions in German psychology. Already as a student I joined others in bringing forward a more empirically oriented approach. My MA thesis dealt with frequency band manipulations of voices by filtering out segments of the speech spectrum, in order to observe what the effects of such a manipulation meant for the recipient as assessed by semantic differential scales. Yet I found such research not meaningful enough for my social interests and commitments.

The prologue to a new agenda for my work was an observational study on the behavior of young people. We observed their behavior in youth settings, like public swimming pools, commercial discotheques, and shopping malls. An interesting case was a discotheque comprised of an upper floor with seats and tables, and below the dancing floor. We found out that the young did a lot of observing others from above. First, they obviously watched how one behaves as an adolescent out meeting old friends and making new friends. Second, they chatted with others about their experiences and thus came up with a validation or correction of their own views. We found similar events or dynamics in other contexts and concluded that the young use opportunities to initiate their own social development. In another study, we demonstrated that a desire for romantic relationships at a particular year increases over the coming year the frequency of attending such public contexts where one could meet potential partners. In this sense experienced adolescents later fell back to private contexts, as novices had done, but now of course with more intimacy including sexual contacts. In other words, the observed behavior reflected adolescents’ attempts to gain control over friendship development. Such results led to the book I co-edited entitled Development as Action in Context.

It was, in fact, our research on Berlin youth that led to my making invaluable contact with Urie Bronfenbrenner. When he learned about the observation study, he invited me to visit his group at Cornell University. The close association we found between contextual affordances and adolescent behavior was obviously what he had expected, but I offered the result of an empirical study. An important related association: in part because at that time Bronfenbrenner was on an advisory board for Paul Baltes at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development in Berlin, I suggested, as Dean, that the University of Technology Berlin bestow an honorary degree on him. (One argument in support came from the College of Architecture whose members were aware of Bronfenbrenner’s ecological theory of socialization.)

Bronfenbrenner introduced me, in turn, to Glen Elder. We then replicated some of his classic studies on the psychological consequences of family economic hardship during the Great Depression (e.g., having too little money or too few resources to make ends meet) with our data and showed that economic hardship experienced by the families was as relevant in Berlin as in California. In socialist Warsaw, however, the hardship did not affect parents’ well-being; so a direct connection between parents and adolescent behavior was absent. We interpreted this context effect such that the people in Poland did not attribute the economic hardship to their own fault but saw it as failure of the political system.

Our research in Berlin also prompted contacts with Richard Jessor, whose problem behavior theory influenced our thinking about this issue (his view was that social context is crucial), and with Michael Rutter. The latter was influential because of his insight that developmental psychopathologies were not a one-way street, but could be corrected by new experiences and changes of context. This position represented hope given all the misery around at that period in history, especially in former communist countries in Eastern Europe, and fueled my interest in the application of developmental theory and research. An example is the design and evaluation of a school-based prevention program against substance use among German adolescents.

Some Obstacles Impeded My Work

After my PhD the only opportunity for a university career in Germany at that time was to achieve a professorship; and that, ultimately, was a political decision by the ministry of science and education. (Virtually all universities were state universities then.) A colleague with knowledge of the political dynamics told me that the expansion of the higher education sector would soon come to an end, and that I had to move quickly to secure a full professorship. Indeed, for seven years after I had achieved my first tenured position on the associate professor level, there was not a single position offering in my field anywhere in (West) Germany. As an in-house promotion, then and now, is virtually impossible in the German university system, over the years I had to apply for various positions, and ended up at three universities in Germany and one in the USA.

Overall it was a successful journey, as it involved many new contacts and new views on my science. (One instance – behavioral genetics and epigenetics, the latter again an example of context effects.) But there were also downsides to the many moves. As one important example, for years I had no permanent home for my data, was away from various samples, and collaborators changed repeatedly. The circumstances also involved a lot of personal separation and a heavy travel schedule.

Research on Human Development Has Transformed Remarkably During My Career

My professional career in the discipline began in the Piagetian tradition, focusing on cognitive development during childhood. The influence of socialization and thus the importance of contexts was basically not addressed. Over the decades this changed dramatically, along with a broader lifespan perspective. Two major transformations occurred concerning adolescence, in particular. The first was that a focus on biological development began. Research on the consequences of maturational timing was an example. It also became very clear that brain development, lasting longer than originally thought, is behind many changes in youth behavior, such as risk taking. Similarly, epigenetics is now seen as part of the dynamic in coping with stress and producing lasting changes in behavior. And a related personal observation – as a young child (born in 1944) I was reportedly easily irritated and unruly (in contrast to my seven years younger brother); I now believe that this was a delayed effect of my pregnant mother’s stressful experiences during bombing raids in World War II.

The second major transformation has been the emphasis on environmental contexts and their interaction with the person’s development. This is an important amendment of the earlier ignorance of biology in favor of the role of social forces. Now both are understood as relevant, working in intricate interaction, again as underscored by epigenetics.

Which Direction Should Psychology and My Field Pursue in the Future?

With the growing importance of biological perspectives and especially of neuroscience, the question that arises is whether it still makes sense to conceive of psychology as a unified discipline, or whether it should be subsumed under other fields, such as neuroscience. I am not convinced that this would make sense. When scientists started to decipher the DNA, the relevant role of certain segments of the code became clear. But there was and still is a need for a psychological phenomenology that would reveal what experience corresponds to this or that genetic element. Epigenetics has revealed the processes through which particular experiences like strain and stress influence the expression of genetic inclinations in behavior and during development, even across connecting generations. And even though we may soon be capable of gene-engineering, psychology nevertheless provides a rich system of concepts and methodologies that helps in describing, explaining, and changing human experience and behavior.

This is not to say that everything must stay as is. We have to incorporate views from other disciplines, thereby enriching the depth and breadth of our understanding and explanations (and methodologies). Experience and behavior are multifaceted and dynamic, and so should be our approach. We have to factor in historical and ecological contexts, and we have to incorporate biological processes affecting populations and individuals; and there are many layers of interactions among these levels. Such a view, or paradigm, is not entirely new. What is new is the gradually growing understanding of the processes that are relevant in this dynamic system.

Our “Jena Model of Social Change and Human Development” is a case in point. It is a framework for understanding what kinds of influences lead from social change on the aggregate or macro level to parallel manifestations at the family level of individuals who sort out what are new demands for them, and then try to cope with such challenges, following different modes of experience and action acquired over time and development. How this is accomplished in conjunction with available social and personal resources shapes psychosocial outcomes and their change. Empirical research and publications by my group originally focused on demands for young people in times of social change under German circumstances (meanwhile expanded to demands for active aging in older groups), but were soon complemented by similar research in Italy, China, and Ghana. And we generalized the framework to investigations of migration, civic engagement, and entrepreneurship, always with a focus on contexts and how they change. More research is certainly needed, and other models and frameworks may be helpful. And biological processes have not yet been addressed. But based on my decades of experience, this is an overall perspective very much worth adopting or pursuing. The Jena model provides building blocks that can be enriched by additional concepts and measures from various relevant disciplines, such as sociology and political science.

What Suggestions May I Have for Future Generations?

I should have probably shown more consistency in sticking to a chosen research field rather than hunting for new research opportunities and changing my focus in research. Nevertheless, I have always found the various waystations and moving interests satisfying in themselves. The role of contexts was a guiding orientation or “principle” from early on. It led me to focus on various kinds of contexts and the importance of context change in human development, looking from intimate contexts close to the individual to remote and even abstract contexts in the aggregate, and their interactions. My belief always was that in principle even young individuals are active in choosing contexts that potentially enhance their development, unless they are constrained by conditions such as political and ideological systems that restrict freedom of movement and expression, poverty that undercuts opportunities to grow and find a positive role in society, experience of discrimination due to ethnicity, or lacking educational facilities, to mention a few.

I started out with basic research, but soon became aware that my interest ultimately is “relevance,” admittedly a complex concept. In my understanding this means to raise questions, provide research designs, and present results that potentially make a difference in the conditions of people’s lives in their communities. Most often I turned to a large-scale societal challenge, be it the rise in unemployment in the 1980s in (West) Germany, or the breakdown of the socialist system in parts of Europe and after German unification in the 1990s. All these macro changes were not unique to Germany, but in order to identify what may have been specific to the German situation, a comparative perspective on the national and cultural level was needed. This led me to compare adolescent development in capitalist Berlin with socialist Warsaw, similarly, adolescence and young adulthood in Germany West and Germany East soon after unification, as well as after immigration from Eastern Europe to Germany and Israel. In addition, political and economic challenges in Italy and China were addressed in a series of collaborative studies on how people deal with new demands. The published research results were recognized by political decision-makers in various countries, and consequently I became involved in advisory boards to governments.

For future generations of researchers in developmental science my advice would be not to stick to a narrow understanding of concepts and samples within one context, but to reach out to other contexts and investigate variations in outcomes. This necessarily means cooperation with researchers from other disciplines and other nations. Differences in scientific views along with differences in contexts can only enrich one’s own understanding. Often such comparisons work like natural experiments and shed light on the likely consequences of emerging adaptations of and to dynamic contexts. Cultural or disciplinary preferences in the use of particular methods, including qualitative approaches, are also worthwhile in promoting a better understanding of the rich fabric of influences on human development.

A related observation: given the permanent pressure to “publish or perish,” many young scholars concentrate exclusively on their specific scientific work and increasingly disregard other relevant, even important activities. In my own life I was always involved in science politics, expressed via various board memberships and presidencies in national and international scientific societies, editorships of international scientific journals, plus many activities as a reviewer and expert member of advisory groups to policymakers. I want to underscore the significance of such experiences for one’s own development as both scientist and human being. My suggestion would be for newcomers to the field to envisage a worthwhile and manageable plan for such activities, not too much and not too little.

Finally, I want to mention that I always engaged in extensive collaborations with other social and behavioral sciences because studying the role of social change in human development requires concepts and methods from various traditional disciplines. A good example for the fruitfulness of such interdisciplinary collaboration is the fact that our research concepts on social change are inspired by the explanation of the rise and fall of civilizations the philosopher Arnold J. Toynbee offered. He introduced the term “challenges” for major threats that have an impact on entire populations, and the term “response” referred to actions taken by the population to deal with the threats. Part of his view was that social change has no predetermined direction, and thus empirical research is needed. As psychologists we translated these aggregate level concepts to the individual level, described them as demands and ways of coping, designed assessment tools, and developed a complex research program.