Here’s what they found about how childhood shapes later life
By Douglas Starr
In 1987, Avshalom Caspi and Terrie Moffitt, two postdocs in psychology, had adjacent displays at the poster session of a conference in St. Louis, Missouri. Caspi, generally not a forward man, looked over at Moffitt's poster and was dazzled by her science. "You have the most beautiful data set," he said. Not one to be easily wooed, Moffitt went to the university library after the meeting and looked up Caspi's citations. Yep, he'd do. "It was very nerdy," Caspi recalls. "We fell in love over our data."
It's been a personal and scientific love affair ever since. For nearly 30 years, Moffitt and Caspi have been collaborating on one of the more comprehensive and probing investigations of human development ever conducted. Launched in 1972, the Dunedin Multidisciplinary Health and Development Study is as fundamental to human development as the Framingham Heart Study is to cardiovascular disease and the Nurses' Health Study is to women's health. From detailed observations of the life courses of about 1000 New Zealanders, Dunedin has spun out more than 1200 papers on questions from the risk factors for antisocial behavior and the biological outcomes of stress to the long-term effects of cannabis use. Moffitt, who joined the study in 1985, and Caspi, who followed, have led much of the work. They "have done so much it's impossible to pigeonhole them," says Brent Roberts, a psychologist at the University of Illinois in Champaign who has collaborated with the now-married couple.
One early finding, on the transient nature of most juvenile criminality, was cited in the U.S. Supreme Court's 2005 decision to prohibit the execution of underage murderers. Moffitt and Caspi did pioneering research showing that self-control in early childhood predicts health and happiness in adults. They detailed how the genetic makeup of certain individuals can make them vulnerable to specific stresses, elucidating the complex interplay between genes and life experience. And last year, the Dunedin team published a study that drew on decades of data to show that, contrary to conventional belief, the vast majority of people experience mental health problems over the course of their lifetime.
"Their work has transcended psychology to influence thinking in psychiatry, genetics, criminology, epidemiology, sociology, and many other areas," the American Psychological Association said when it awarded Moffitt and Caspi its 2016 Award for Distinguished Scientific Contribution.
The field of psychology is rich with longitudinal studies, going back to 1946, when the United Kingdom's Medical Research Council began a survey of more than 5000 people from birth to old age. Other researchers have followed identical and fraternal twins over time to tease out the influence of nature versus nurture. Such studies, although slow, make it possible to observe phenomena in real time instead of having to reconstruct them from subjects' memories or medical records, or by comparing disparate groups.
Dunedin is the Goldilocks of longitudinal studies. It's not the biggest or the longest; but its high retention rate—about 95% of the original cohort has stayed with the study since it launched—and the intimacy of the data-gathering process make the group one of the most closely examined populations on Earth. Every few years, the team conducts intensive cognitive, psychological, and health assessments. They interview every member of the research cohort as well as their teachers, families, and friends and review their financial and legal records, promising them complete confidentiality in return for the fullest possible picture of their lives.
As a result, Moffitt, Caspi, and their colleagues have been able to tease out previously unseen patterns in human development. "It's been a remarkable resource," Columbia University psychiatrist Ezra Susser says of the study. "There really is no equivalent," Roberts adds. "Time after time they've anticipated where we've needed to go and done the work earlier than the rest of us."...