The First Two Editions

Carl Murchison was a star scholar/impresario who edited the Psychological Register, founded important psychological journals, and wrote books on social psychology, politics, and the criminal mind. He compiled an assortment of handbooks, psychology texts, and autobiographies of renowned psychologists, and even ventured a book on psychic phenomena (Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and Harry Houdini were among the contributors). Murchison's initial Handbook of Child Psychology was published by a small university press (Clark University) in 1931, when the field itself was still in its infancy. Murchison wrote:

Experimental psychology has had a much older scientific and academic status [than child psychology], but at the present time it is probable that much less money is being spent for pure research in the field of experimental psychology than is being spent in the field of child psychology. In spite of this obvious fact, many experimental psychologists continue to look upon the field of child psychology as a proper field of research for women and for men whose experimental masculinity is not of the maximum. This attitude of patronage is based almost entirely upon a blissful ignorance of what is going on in the tremendously virile field of child behavior. (Murchison, 1931, p. ix)

Murchison's masculine allusion is from another era; it might supply good material for a social history of gender stereotyping. That aside, Murchison was prescient in the task that he undertook and the way that he went about it. At the time this passage was written, developmental psychology was known only in Europe and in a few forward-looking U.S. labs and universities. Nevertheless, Murchison predicted the field's impending ascent: “The time is not far distant, if it is not already here, when nearly all competent psychologists will recognize that one-half of the whole field of psychology is involved in the problem of how the infant becomes an adult psychologically” (Murchison, 1931, p. x).

For this first 1931 Handbook, Murchison looked to Europe and to a handful of American research centers for child study—most prominently, Iowa, Minnesota, University of California at Berkeley, Columbia, Stanford, Yale, and Clark—many of which were at the time called field stations. Murchison's Europeans included a young “genetic epistemologist” named Jean Piaget, who, in an essay on “Children's Philosophies,” cited data from his interviews with 60 Genevan children between the ages of 4 and 12 years. Piaget's chapter would provide U.S. readers with an introduction to his soon-to-be seminal research program on children's conceptions of the world. Another European, Charlotte Bühler, wrote a chapter on young children's social behavior. In her chapter, which still is fresh today, Bühler described intricate play and communication patterns among toddlers—patterns that developmental scientists would not rediscover until the late 1970s. Bühler also anticipated critiques of Piaget that were to be again launched during the sociolinguistics heyday of the 1970s:

Piaget, in his studies on children's talk and reasoning, emphasizes that their talk is much more egocentric than social…that children from three to seven years accompany all their manipulations with talk which actually is not so much intercourse as monologue…[but] the special relationship of the child to each of the different members of the household is distinctly reflected in the respective conversations. (Bühler, 1931, p. 138)

Other Europeans include Anna Freud, who wrote on “The Psychoanalysis of the Child,” and Kurt Lewin, who wrote on “Environmental Forces in Child Behavior and Development”—both would gain worldwide renown in coming years.

The Americans that Murchison chose were equally notable. Arnold Gesell wrote a nativistic account of his twin studies—an enterprise that remains familiar to us today—and Stanford's Lewis Terman wrote a comprehensive account of everything known about the “gifted child.” Harold Jones described the developmental effects of birth order, Mary Cover Jones wrote about children's emotions, Florence Goodenough wrote about children's drawings, and Dorothea McCarthy wrote about language development. Vernon Jones's chapter on “children's morals” focused on the growth of character, a notion that was to become mostly lost to the field during the cognitive-developmental revolution, but that has reemerged in the past decade as a primary concern in the study of moral development.

Murchison's vision of child psychology included an examination of cultural differences as well. His Handbook presented to the scholarly world a young anthropologist named Margaret Mead, just back from her tours of Samoa and New Guinea. In this early essay, Mead wrote that her motivation in traveling to the South Seas was to discredit the claims that Piaget, Lévy-Bruhl, and other “structuralists” had made regarding what they called animism in young children's thinking. (Interestingly, about a third of Piaget's chapter in the same volume was dedicated to showing how Genevan children took years to outgrow their animism.) Mead reported data that she called “amazing”: “In not one of the 32,000 drawings (by young ‘primitive’ children) was there a single case of personalization of animals, material phenomena, or inanimate objects” (Mead, 1931, p. 400). Mead parlayed these data into a tough-minded critique of Western psychology's ethnocentrism, making the point that animism and other beliefs are more likely to be culturally induced than intrinsic to early cognitive development. This is hardly an unfamiliar theme in contemporary psychology. Mead offered a research guide for developmental field workers in strange cultures, complete with methodological and practical advice, such as the following: (1) translate questions into native linguistic categories; (2) do not do controlled experiments; (3) do not try to do research that requires knowing the ages of subjects, which are usually unknowable; and (4) live next door to the children whom you are studying.

Despite the imposing roster of authors that Murchison had assembled for this original Handbook of Child Psychology, his achievement did not satisfy him for long. Barely 2 years later, Murchison put out a second edition, of which he wrote: “Within a period of slightly more than 2 years, this first revision bears scarcely any resemblance to the original Handbook of Child Psychology. This is due chiefly to the great expansion in the field during the past 3 years and partly to the improved insight of the editor” (Murchison, 1933, p. vii). The tradition that Murchison had brought to life was already developing.

Murchison saw fit to provide the following warning in his second edition: “There has been no attempt to simplify, condense, or to appeal to the immature mind. This volume is prepared specifically for the scholar, and its form is for his maximum convenience” (Murchison, 1933, p. vii). It is clear that Murchison, despite his impresario urges, was willing to sacrifice accessibility and textbook-level sales for scientific value in this instance.

Murchison exaggerated when he wrote that his second edition bore little resemblance to the first. Almost half of the chapters were virtually the same, with minor additions and updating. (For the record, though, despite Murchison's continued use of masculine phraseology, 10 of the 24 authors in the second edition were women.) Some of the authors whose original chapters were dropped were asked to write about new topics. So, for example, Goodenough wrote about mental testing rather than about children's drawings, and Gesell wrote a general chapter on maturational theory that went well beyond his own twin studies.

But Murchison also made certain abrupt changes. He dropped Anna Freud entirely, prompting the marginalization of psychoanalysis within U.S. academic psychology. Leonard Carmichael, later to play a pivotal role in the Handbook tradition, made his appearance as author of a major chapter (by far, the longest in the book) on prenatal and perinatal growth. Three other physiologically oriented chapters were added as well: one on neonatal motor behavior, one on visual–manual functions during the first 2 years of life, and one on physiological “appetites” such as hunger, rest, and sex. Combined with the Goodenough and Gesell shifts in focus, these additions gave the 1933 Handbook a more biological thrust, in keeping with Murchison's long-standing desire to display the hard-science backbone of the emerging field.

The Early Wiley Editions

Leonard Carmichael was president of Tufts University when he organized Wiley's first edition of the Handbook. The switch from a university press to the long-established commercial firm of John Wiley & Sons was commensurate with Carmichael's well-known ambition; and indeed Carmichael's effort was to become influential beyond anything that Murchison might have anticipated. (The switch to Wiley meant that what was to become known as Wiley's first edition was actually the Handbook's third edition—and that what is now called the seventh edition is really the Handbook's ninth.) Carmichael renamed the volume the Manual of Child Psychology, in keeping with Carmichael's intention of producing an “advanced scientific manual to bridge the gap between the excellent and varied elementary textbooks in this field and the scientific periodical literature” (Carmichael, 1946, p. vi).

Despite the small title change, there was significant continuity between the Murchison and Carmichael's editions. Carmichael acknowledged this in the prefaces to both of his editions, the 1946 and 1954 Manuals:

Both as editor of the Manual and as the author of a special chapter, the writer is indebted… [for] extensive excerpts and the use of other materials previously published in the Handbook of Child Psychology, Revised Edition. (Carmichael, 1946, p. vi)

Both the Handbook of Child Psychology and the Handbook of Child Psychology, Revised Edition, were edited by Dr. Carl Murchison. I wish to express here my profound appreciation for the pioneer work done by Dr. Murchison in producing these handbooks and other advanced books in psychology. The Manual owes much in spirit and content to the foresight and editorial skill of Dr. Murchison. (Carmichael, 1954, p. v)

The first quote comes from Carmichael's preface to the 1946 edition, the second from his preface to the 1954 edition. It is not known why Carmichael waited until the 1954 edition to add the personal tribute to Carl Murchison. Perhaps a careless typist dropped the laudatory passage from a handwritten version of the 1946 preface and its omission escaped Carmichael's notice. Or perhaps 8 years of further development increased Carmichael's generosity of spirit. It is also possible that Murchison or his family complained. In any case, Carmichael always acknowledged the roots of his Manual, if not always their original editor.

Leonard Carmichael took his 1946 Manual in the same direction established by Murchison back in 1931 and 1933. First, Carmichael appropriated five Murchison chapters on biological or experimental topics such as physiological growth, scientific methods, and mental testing. Second, he added three new biologically oriented chapters on animal infancy, on physical growth, and on motor and behavioral maturation (a tour de force by Myrtle McGraw that instantly made Gesell's chapter in the same volume obsolete). Third, he commissioned Wayne Dennis to write a chapter that focused exclusively on physiological changes associated with puberty. Fourth, Carmichael dropped Piaget and Bühler, who, like Anna Freud years earlier, were becoming out of step with then-current experimental trends in U.S. psychology.

The five Murchison chapters on social and cultural influences in development were the ones Carmichael retained: two chapters on environmental forces on the child (by Kurt Lewin and by Harold Jones), Dorothea McCarthy's chapter on children's language, Vernon Jones's chapter on children's morality (now entitled “Character Development—An Objective Approach”), and Margaret Mead's chapter on “primitive” children (now enhanced by several spectacular photos of mothers and children from exotic cultures around the world). Carmichael also stuck with three other psychologically oriented Murchison topics (emotional development, gifted children, and sex differences), but he selected new authors to cover them.

Carmichael's second and final Manual in 1954 was very close in structure and content to his 1946 Manual. Carmichael again retained the heart of Murchison's original vision, many of Murchison's original authors and chapter topics, and some of the same material that dated all the way back to the 1931 Handbook. Not surprisingly, the chapters that were closest to Carmichael's own interests received the most significant updating. As Murchison had done, Carmichael leaned toward the biological and physiological whenever possible. He clearly favored experimental treatments of psychological processes. Yet Carmichael still retained the social, cultural, and psychological analyses by Lewin, Mead, McCarthy, Terman, Harold Jones, and Vernon Jones, even going so far as to add a new chapter on social development by Harold and Gladys Anderson and a new chapter on emotional development by Arthur Jersild.

In 1946, when Carmichael had finished his first Manual, he had complained that “this book has been a difficult and expensive one to produce, especially under wartime conditions” (Carmichael, 1946, p. vii). But the project had been well worth the effort. The Manual quickly became the bible of graduate training and scholarly work in the field, available virtually everywhere that human development was studied. Eight years later, now head of the Smithsonian Institution, Carmichael wrote, in the preface to his 1954 edition: “The favorable reception that the first edition received not only in America but all over the world is indicative of the growing importance of the study of the phenomena of the growth and development of the child” (Carmichael, 1954, p. vii).

The Murchison and Carmichael volumes make fascinating reading, even today. The perennial themes of the field were always there: the nature/nurture debate; the generalizations of universalists opposed by the particularizations of contextualists; the alternating emphases on continuities and discontinuities during ontogenesis; and the standard categories of maturation, learning, locomotor activity, perception, cognition, language, emotion, conduct, morality, and culture—all separated for the sake of analysis, yet, as authors throughout each of the volumes acknowledged, all somehow joined in the dynamic mix of human development.

These things have not changed. Yet much in the early Handbooks/Manuals is now irrevocably dated. Long lists of children's dietary preferences, sleeping patterns, elimination habits, toys, and somatic types look quaint and pointless through today's lenses. The chapters on children's thought and language were done prior to the great contemporary breakthroughs in neurology and brain/behavior research, and they show it. The chapters on social and emotional development were ignorant of the processes of social influence and self-regulation that soon would be revealed through attribution research and other studies in social psychology. Terms such as cognitive neuroscience, neuronal networks, behavior genetics, social cognition, dynamical systems, information processing, and developmental psychopathology were unknown. Margaret Mead's rendition of the primitive child stands as a weak straw in comparison to the wealth of cross-cultural knowledge available in today's “cultural psychology.”

Most tellingly, the assortments of odd facts and normative trends were tied together by very little theory throughout the Carmichael chapters. It was as if, in the exhilaration of discovery at the frontiers of a new field, all the facts looked interesting in and of themselves. That is what makes so much of the material seem odd and arbitrary. It is hard to know what to make of the lists of facts, where to place them, which ones were worth keeping track of and which ones are expendable. Not surprisingly, the bulk of the data presented in the Carmichael manuals seems not only outdated by today's standards but, worse, irrelevant.

Carmichael's second and final Manual had a long life: Not until 1970 did Wiley bring out a third edition. Carmichael was retired by then, but he still had a keen interest in the book. At his insistence, his own name became part of the title of Wiley's third edition: The edition was called, improbably, Carmichael's Manual of Child Psychology, even though it had a new editor and an entirely new cast of authors and advisors.

Mussen's Transformation

Paul Mussen was editor of the 1970 edition; once again the project flourished. Now a two-volume set, the 1970 third edition swept the social sciences, generating widespread interest in developmental psychology and its related disciplines. Rarely had a scholarly compendium become both so dominant in its own field and so familiar in related disciplines. The volumes became essential sources for graduate students and advanced scholars alike. Publishers referred to Mussen's 1970 Carmichael's Manual as the standard against which other scientific handbooks were compared.

By 1970, the importance of theory for understanding human development had become apparent. Looking back on Carmichael's last Manual, Mussen wrote: “The 1954 edition of this Manual had only one theoretical chapter, and that was concerned with Lewinian theory which, so far as we can see, has not had a significant lasting impact on developmental psychology” (Mussen, 1970, p. x). The intervening years had seen a turning away from the norm of psychological research once fondly referred to as “dust-bowl empiricism.”

The 1970 handbook—still called, as noted above, Carmichael's Manual—had an entirely new look. The two-volume set carried only one chapter from the earlier books, Carmichael's updated version of his own long chapter on the “Onset and Early Development of Behavior,” which had made its appearance under a different title way back in Murchison's 1933 edition. Otherwise, as Mussen wrote in his preface, “It should be clear from the outset…that the present volumes are not, in any sense, a revision of the earlier editions; this is a completely new Manual” (Mussen, 1970, p. x).

And it was. In comparison to Carmichael's last edition 16 years earlier, the scope, variety, and theoretical depth of the Mussen volumes were astonishing. The field had blossomed, and the new Manual showcased many of the new bouquets that were being produced. The biological perspective was still strong, grounded by chapters on physical growth (by J. M. Tanner) and physiological development (by Dorothy Eichorn), and by Carmichael's revised chapter (now made more elegant by some excerpts from Greek philosophy and modern poetry). But two other cousins of biology also were represented, in a chapter on ethology by Eckhard Hess, and a chapter on behavior genetics by Gerald McClearn. These chapters were to define the major directions of biological research in the field for at least the next three decades.

As for theory, Mussen's Handbook was thoroughly permeated with it. Much of the theorizing was organized around the approaches that, in 1970, were known as the “three grand systems”: (1) Piaget's cognitive-developmentalism, (2) psychoanalysis, and (3) learning theory. Piaget was given the most extensive treatment. He himself reappeared in this Manual, authoring a comprehensive (some say definitive) statement of his own theory, which now bore little resemblance to his 1931/1933 catalog of children's intriguing verbal expressions. In addition, chapters by John Flavell, by David Berlyne, by Martin Hoffman, and by William Kessen, Marshall Haith, and Philip Salapatek, all gave major treatments to one or another aspect of Piaget's body of work.

Several other theoretical approaches were represented in the 1970 Manual as well. Herbert and Anne Pick explicated Gibsonian theory in a chapter on sensation and perception, Jonas Langer wrote a chapter on Werner's organismic theory, David McNeill wrote a Chomskian account of language development, and Robert LeVine wrote an early version of what was to become “culture theory.”

With its increased emphasis on theory, the 1970 Manual explored in depth a matter that had been all but neglected in the Manual's previous versions: the mechanisms of change that could account for, to use Murchison's old phrase, “the problem of how the infant becomes an adult psychologically.” In the process, old questions such as the relative importance of nature versus nurture were revisited, but with far more sophisticated conceptual and methodological tools.

Beyond theory building, the 1970 Manual addressed an array of new topics and featured new contributors: peer interaction (Willard Hartup), attachment (Eleanor Maccoby and John Masters), aggression (Seymour Feshbach), individual differences (Jerome Kagan and Nathan Kogan), and creativity (Michael Wallach). All of these areas of interest are still very much with us.

Wiley's fourth edition, published in 1983, was redesignated to become once again the Handbook of Child Psychology. By then, Carmichael had passed away. The set of books, now expanded to four volumes, became widely referred to in the field as “the Mussen handbook.”

If the 1970 Manual reflected a blossoming of the field's plantings, the 1983 Handbook reflected a field whose ground cover had spread beyond any boundaries that could have been previously anticipated. New growth had sprouted in literally dozens of separate locations. A French garden, with its overarching designs and tidy compartments, had turned into an English garden, unruly but often glorious in its profusion. Mussen's two-volume Carmichael's Manual had now become the four-volume Mussen Handbook, with a page-count increase that came close to tripling the 1970 edition.

The grand old theories were breaking down. Piaget was still represented in 1983 by his 1970 piece, but his influence was on the wane throughout other chapters. Learning theory and psychoanalysis were scarcely mentioned. Yet the early theorizing had left its mark, in vestiges that were apparent in new approaches, and in the evident conceptual sophistication with which authors treated their material. There was no return to dust-bowl empiricism. Instead, a variety of classical and innovative ideas were coexisting: ethology, neurobiology, information processing, attribution theory, cultural approaches, communications theory, behavioral genetics, sensory-perception models, psycholinguistics, sociolinguistics, discontinuous stage theories, and continuous memory theories all took their places, with none quite on center stage. Research topics now ranged from children's play to brain lateralization, from children's family life to the influences of school, day care, and disadvantageous risk factors. There also was coverage of the burgeoning attempts to use developmental theory as a basis for clinical and educational interventions. The interventions usually were described at the end of chapters that had discussed the research relevant to the particular intervention efforts, rather than in whole chapters dedicated specifically to issues of practice.

The Fifth and Sixth Editions

There was a long hiatus between the fourth edition in 1983 and the fifth edition, which was not to appear until 1998. The fifth edition fell to me to organize, and this was not at my own initiative. Two Wiley editors—Herb Reich, a legendary figure in academic publishing, and Kelly Franklin, an up-and-coming innovative star—approached me about reviving the project, which they correctly believed had a vital tradition behind it, but that they also believed was in danger of falling by the wayside. I had been editing the Jossey-Bass series that I founded, New Directions for Child and Adolescent Development, and the two Wiley editors believed that if we could impart a “new directions” tone to a new Handbook edition, the project could regain its past appeal. I agreed, and I proposed that this next edition be organized in an intuitively simple four-volume design: a theory volume, a volume on cognitive and linguistic development, a volume on social and personality development, and a volume on child psychology in practice. When Wiley accepted my proposal, my first action as general editor was to invite an incredibly talented group of volume editors—Nancy Eisenberg, Deanna Kuhn, Richard Lerner, Anne Renninger, Robert Siegler, and Irving Sigel—to collaborate on the selection and editing of chapters. The edition was to become the result of a partnership among all the editors; and the same team collaborated again to produce the sixth edition of the Handbook in 2006, with Richard Lerner assuming an added role as my co-editor-in-chief. The 2006 edition closely followed the model of the 1998 edition, with some important additions, such as chapters on the positive youth development approach, on artistic development, and on religiosity and faith in human development.

Our team approached the 1998 and 2006 editions with the same purpose that Murchison, Carmichael, and Mussen before us had shared: “to provide,” as Mussen wrote, “a comprehensive and accurate picture of the current state of knowledge—the major systematic thinking and research—in the most important research areas of the psychology of human development” (Mussen, 1983, p. vii). We assumed that the Handbook should be aimed “specifically for the scholar,” as Murchison declared, and that it should have the character of an “advanced text,” as Carmichael defined it. We expected that our readership would be interdisciplinary, given the tendency of scholars in human development to do work across the fields of psychology, cognitive science, neuroscience, history, linguistics, sociology, anthropology, education, and psychiatry. In Volume 4, we hoped that research-oriented practitioners would be among the scholars for whom the Handbook had value.

By the time of the 1998 and 2006 editions of the Handbook, powerful theoretical models and approaches—not quite unified theories like the “three grand systems” that had marked earlier editions—were again organizing much of the field's research. There was great variety in these models and approaches, and each was drawing together significant clusters of work. Among the powerful models and approaches prominent in the 1998 and 2006 Handbooks were the dynamic system theories, life-span and life-course approaches, cognitive science and neural models, the behavior genetics approach, person–context interaction theories, action theories, culture theory, ecological models, and neo-Piagetian and Vygotskian models. Although some of these models and approaches had been in the making for some time, by the end of the 20th century they had fully come into their own: researchers were drawing on them more directly, taking their implied assumptions and hypotheses seriously, using them with specificity and control, and exploiting all of their implications for practice.

The Present

The seventh Wiley edition of the Handbook continues and strengthens the trends toward specific theoretical analyses of multiple developmental processes, even highlighting this focus by including the term “processes” in three of the four volume's titles, a designation new to the Handbook's history. The volumes present a rich mix of classic and contemporary theoretical perspectives, but I believe it is fair to say that the dominant views throughout are marked by an emphasis on the dynamic interplay of all relational developmental systems that co-act across the life span, incorporating the range of biological, perceptual, cognitive, linguistic, emotional, social, cultural, and ecological levels of analysis. At the same time, the chapters together consider a vast array of topics and problems, ranging from sexuality and religiosity to law, medicine, war, poverty, and education. The emerging world of digital experience is also given a fuller treatment than in any previous Handbook edition, commensurate with our present-day technological revolution. All this gives this seventh edition of the Handbook a timely feel.

The present Handbook's combination of theoretical and methodological sophistication and topical timeliness resolves an old tension evident in the Handbook's prior cycling between theoretical-methodological and problem-centered approaches. My impression is that, rather than leaning in one direction or the other, this Handbook manages to be both more theoretical-methodological and more topical than the previous editions. As a developmental phenomenon, this puts the Handbook in a class of organisms that develop toward adaptive complexity rather than toward one or another contrasting polar dimension.

I wonder what Carl Murchison would think of the grown-up child that he spawned before the field of human development had become a mainstream endeavor in research and teaching around the world. Murchison's idiosyncratic assortment of fascinating studies bears little resemblance to the imposing compendium of solidly grounded knowledge in the present Handbook. Yet each step along the 83-year way followed directly from what had gone before, with only occasional departures or additions that may have seemed more like gradual revisions at the time. Over the long haul, the change in the Handbook has been dramatic, but the change process itself has been marked by substantial continuities. If Murchison were to come back to life today, he may be astonished by the size and reach of his child, but I believe he would recognize it—and proudly so.

W. D.
Stanford, California
2014