Michael Lewis

Introduction

Michael Lewis (born January 10, 1937) is an American developmental psychologist at Rutgers Robert Wood Johnson Medical School, where he is University Distinguished Professor of Pediatrics and Psychiatry and directs the Institute for the Study of Child Development. Over a career of more than fifty years he has worked on two questions that most researchers treat separately and that he has always insisted are one: how an infant comes to have a self, and how the emotions that depend on having one — embarrassment, shame, pride, guilt — emerge once it exists.

His standing in the field is unusually well documented. A 1995 survey of developmental scientists' impact, conducted at the University of Notre Dame, ranked him first in the discipline (University of Notre Dame survey, 1995), and he has since received the American Psychological Association's Urie Bronfenbrenner Award (2009) and the Society for Research in Child Development's Distinguished Scientific Contributions to Child Development Award (2013). He is also the founding director of the Rutgers Robert Wood Johnson Medical School Autism Center.

Early Life and Education

Lewis was born in Brooklyn, New York. He took his doctorate at the University of Pennsylvania in 1962, at a moment when developmental psychology was still organised around learning theory and around the study of children old enough to talk. What became his signature problem — how to study a mind that cannot report on itself — did not yet have a method.

His early research supplied part of one. Working in the 1960s with infant attention, he helped develop the habituation–dishabituation paradigm: show an infant a stimulus until responding drops, change the stimulus, and see whether responding recovers. Recovery means the infant noticed the difference, and therefore retained something about the first stimulus. The logic is simple and it gave researchers a way to ask about perception, memory and categorisation in preverbal infants without requiring a verbal answer. It remains one of the standard tools of infant research.

Academic and Professional Career

Lewis's posts before Rutgers included positions in which he built infant laboratories at a time when such units were rare. At Rutgers he became the director of the Institute for the Study of Child Development and later founded the university's autism centre, reflecting a long-standing interest in what happens to the developmental processes he had mapped when they go wrong.

His career has had a strongly editorial as well as empirical dimension. With Jeannette M. Haviland-Jones he created the Handbook of Emotions, first published in 1993 and now in its fourth edition. The Handbook did for emotion research what a good reference work ought to do: it established a canonical table of contents for a field that had been scattered across physiology, social psychology, clinical psychology and anthropology.

Major Contributions to Psychology

The emergence of the self

Working with Jeanne Brooks-Gunn in the late 1970s, Lewis adapted the mirror-mark test — rouge placed on a child's nose, out of sight — and showed that the age at which children reach for their own marked face, typically around eighteen to twenty-four months, marks a genuine transition rather than a gradual improvement. In Social Cognition and the Acquisition of Self (1979) he argued that this behaviour indicates objective self-awareness: the child has become an object to itself.

The claim was stronger than it sounds. Lewis's position was not just that infants recognise their faces but that a categorical shift in the organisation of experience occurs, and that this shift has consequences that can be observed.

Self-conscious emotions

The consequence Lewis pursued is the class he called self-conscious emotions: embarrassment, shame, pride and guilt. Unlike fear or disgust, these emotions require an evaluative audience and a standard against which the self is measured — you cannot be embarrassed without a self that has been exposed, or proud without a self that has achieved. Lewis argued that these emotions appear only after objective self-awareness, and he produced observational evidence that behaviours researchers code as shame or pride emerge in the same window as mirror self-recognition.

This work did much to move shame and guilt from the humanities into developmental science. Shame: The Exposed Self (1992) remains one of the few sustained psychological treatments of the topic, and its central distinction — shame targets the whole self, guilt targets the action — has shaped clinical thinking ever since.

Emotional development and measurement

Lewis was also concerned that "emotion" was being used loosely in developmental research. Children's Emotions and Moods (1983), co-written with Linda Michalson, pressed for operational definitions and for measurement that distinguished a transient state from a disposition, and it offered one of the first systematic attempts to say what it would take to measure a child's emotional life rather than infer it.

Stress, physiology and multiple channels

Lewis has consistently resisted the idea that an emotion is whatever a coder can see. Alongside his behavioural work he studied infants' physiological responses to stress, including cortisol reactivity, on the argument that emotional development has to be measured on more than one channel and that the channels do not always agree. A child who shows no distress on its face may be showing it in its endocrine response, and a theory of emotional development that only samples behaviour will miss it. This commitment to converging measures is one reason his laboratory's findings have generally been easier to replicate than the more purely observational work of the period.

Atypical development as a test case

A second strand runs through his later career: what the theory predicts when development goes differently. As founding director of the Rutgers Robert Wood Johnson Medical School Autism Center he worked on the assumption that a mechanism proposed for typical emotional development should say something specific about children who do not show it, and that a theory which cannot generate that prediction has not really specified the mechanism.

Against the determinism of early experience

In Altering Fate: Why the Past Does Not Predict the Future (1997) Lewis argued that the developmental literature had overstated the power of early experience. Prediction from infancy to adulthood, he pointed out, is modest at best, and the field had built an intervention apparatus on correlations that do not support it. The book is a corrective to a certain kind of developmental pessimism, and it sits uneasily with the much more deterministic turn the field took in the following two decades.

Major Publications

Lewis, M., & Brooks-Gunn, J. (1979). Social Cognition and the Acquisition of Self. Plenum Press.
Lewis, M., & Michalson, L. (1983). Children's Emotions and Moods: Developmental Theory and Measurement. Plenum Press.
Lewis, M. (1992). Shame: The Exposed Self. Free Press.
Lewis, M., & Haviland-Jones, J. M. (Eds.). (1993). Handbook of Emotions. Guilford Press.
Lewis, M. (1997). Altering Fate: Why the Past Does Not Predict the Future. Guilford Press.
Lewis, M., Haviland-Jones, J. M., & Barrett, L. F. (Eds.). (2016). Handbook of Emotions (4th ed.). Guilford Press.

Impact and Legacy

Lewis's influence runs through three generations of infant research. The habituation method is everywhere. The mirror-mark test is the default instrument for self-recognition. And the category of self-conscious emotions is now standard vocabulary in developmental, clinical and personality psychology alike.

The criticisms are equally substantial, and they converge on one point: the inference from behaviour to a concept is harder than Lewis's programme sometimes allows.

Cecilia Heyes made the sharpest version of this case about mirror self-recognition. She argued that a child's reaching for a mark on its own face can be explained by learning about the contingency between felt movement and seen movement — a kinesthetic-visual association — without positing that the child has any conception of a self at all. On her account the mark test measures a particular kind of body knowledge, not the acquisition of selfhood, and Lewis's "categorical shift" is an interpretation read into a behaviour that admits of a simpler description.

Cross-cultural work has pressed the same objection from another direction. Heidi Keller and colleagues (2004) compared toddlers in rural Cameroonian Nso families, urban Greek families and urban German middle-class families, and found large differences in the age and rate of mirror self-recognition. The Nso children, socialised toward relatedness rather than autonomy, were markedly slower to show the behaviour. If a universal maturational mechanism were producing objective self-awareness on a fixed timetable, this spread should not appear; what appears instead looks like a culturally shaped self-construal.

The theory of self-conscious emotions has a related vulnerability: it is close to unfalsifiable in the form Lewis stated it. If the theory says the emotions require self-awareness, and the evidence for self-awareness is the child's behaviour, then a child who shows no embarrassment can always be described as not yet self-aware rather than as a counter-example. Lewis has responded by working to specify behavioural criteria independently of the self claim, but the circularity worry has not gone away.

Measurement is the practical version of the same problem. The facial and postural indicators used to code shame, embarrassment and pride in toddlers overlap heavily, and coding schemes differ across laboratories. Independent observers do not always agree about which emotion they are looking at, which limits how strongly any single study can bear on the theory.

Altering Fate attracted a different kind of criticism. Critics accepted his point about weak prediction but argued he had thrown out the baby with the bathwater: the fact that early experience does not determine outcomes does not mean it has no cumulative effect, and the subsequent literature on childhood adversity has pushed the field back toward the view he was correcting. On this reading the argument of 1997 looks less like a settled finding than like one swing of a pendulum that has still not stopped.

Finally, the eminence ranking that placed Lewis first among developmental scientists deserves a caveat of its own. Rankings of this kind measure visibility — citations, awards, textbook presence — and they tell you who a field talks about, not which of that person's claims survived. Lewis's own career is a good illustration: the two things he is most cited for, the habituation method and the mirror-mark test, are instruments, and instruments can be indispensable while the theory they were built to support is contested.

Learn More

John Bowlby — attachment theory, the framework Lewis's infant work was written against
Mary Ainsworth — the Strange Situation and the measurement of early social bonds
Jeannette M. Haviland-Jones — co-editor of the Handbook of Emotions and Lewis's long-standing collaborator

References

Lewis, M., & Brooks-Gunn, J. (1979). Social Cognition and the Acquisition of Self. Plenum.