Heinz Rudolf Schaffer HonFBPsS; FRSE | |
---|---|
Born | 1926 Berlin |
Died | 2008 |
Nationality | German/ British |
Alma mater | Birkbeck, University of London; University of Glasgow |
Scientific career | |
Institutions | University of Strathclyde |
Thesis | Psychological factors in the development of cerebral palsied children (1962) |
Heinz Rudolf Schaffer (1926-2008) was a German-born British developmental psychologist.
He was born into a Jewish family in Berlin in 1926. With the rise of Nazism, his parents arranged his escape to England on the kindertransport. His father died of pneumonia in Theresienstadt concentration camp, and his mother was gassed in Auschwitz. [1]
He started studying architecture at the University of Liverpool but left before completion. He moved to London, took a job with a glass exporting company, and enrolled at Birkbeck College to study psychology in the evenings.
From 1951–55, he worked at the Tavistock Clinic under the direction of John Bowlby.
In 1955 he took a position as a clinical psychologist at the Hospital for Sick Children in Yorkhill, Glasgow where he worked until 1964. At the same time, he gained his PhD from the University of Glasgow.
In 1964, he joined Gustav Jahoda to help establish the Department of Psychology at the University of Strathclyde. [2] He began his academic career as Lecturer, was promoted to Professor and was then Head of Department from 1982 to 1991 when he retired as Emeritus Professor. [3]
Schaffer was one of the most influential developmental psychologists in Britain. He researched and published prolifically in all aspects of child social development. Reflecting his own traumatic childhood, he was particularly interested in early child socialisation, attachment and mother-infant interaction. In 1992 he established the journal Social Development. [3]
Developmental psychology is the scientific study of how and why humans grow, change, and adapt across the course of their lives. Originally concerned with infants and children, the field has expanded to include adolescence, adult development, aging, and the entire lifespan. Developmental psychologists aim to explain how thinking, feeling, and behaviors change throughout life. This field examines change across three major dimensions, which are physical development, cognitive development, and social emotional development. Within these three dimensions are a broad range of topics including motor skills, executive functions, moral understanding, language acquisition, social change, personality, emotional development, self-concept, and identity formation.
Lev Semyonovich Vygotsky was a Russian and Soviet psychologist, best known for his work on psychological development in children and creating the framework known as cultural-historical activity theory. After his early death, his books and research were banned in the Soviet Union until Joseph Stalin's death in 1953, with a first collection of major texts published in 1956.
Harry Frederick Harlow was an American psychologist best known for his maternal-separation, dependency needs, and social isolation experiments on rhesus monkeys, which manifested the importance of caregiving and companionship to social and cognitive development. He conducted most of his research at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, where humanistic psychologist Abraham Maslow worked with him for a short period of time.
Attachment theory is a psychological and evolutionary framework concerning the relationships between humans, particularly the importance of early bonds between infants and their primary caregivers. Developed by psychiatrist and psychoanalyst John Bowlby (1907–90), the theory posits that infants need to form a close relationship with at least one primary caregiver to ensure their survival, and to develop healthy social and emotional functioning.
In psychology, developmental stage theories are theories that divide psychological development into distinct stages which are characterized by qualitative differences in behavior.
Edward John Mostyn Bowlby, CBE, FBA, FRCP, FRCPsych was a British psychiatrist, and psychoanalyst, notable for his interest in child development and for his pioneering work in attachment theory. A Review of General Psychology survey, published in 2002, ranked Bowlby as the 49th most cited psychologist of the 20th century.
Sir Michael Llewellyn Rutter was the first person to be appointed professor of child psychiatry in the United Kingdom. He has been described as the "father of child psychiatry".
Mary Dinsmore Ainsworth was an American-Canadian developmental psychologist known for her work in the development of the attachment theory. She designed the strange situation procedure to observe early emotional attachment between a child and their primary caregiver.
Robert Aubrey Hinde was a British zoologist, ethologist and psychologist. He served as the emeritus Royal Society research professor of zoology at the University of Cambridge. Hinde is best known for his ethological contributions to the fields of animal behaviour and developmental psychology.
In psychology, an affectional bond is a type of attachment behavior one individual has for another individual, typically a caregiver for their child, in which the two partners tend to remain in proximity to one another. The term was coined and subsequently developed over the course of four decades, from the early 1940s to the late 1970s, by psychologist John Bowlby in his work on attachment theory. The core of the term affectional bond, according to Bowlby, is the attraction one individual has for another individual. The central features of the concept of affectional bonding can be traced to Bowlby's 1958 paper, "The Nature of the Child's Tie to his Mother".
Anthony Stevens was a British Jungian analyst, psychiatrist and prolific writer of books and articles on psychotherapy, evolutionary psychiatry and the scientific implications of Jung's theory of archetypes.
Cupboard love is a popular learning theory of the 1950s and 1960s based on the research of Sigmund Freud, Anna Freud, Melanie Klein and Mary Ainsworth. Rooted in psychoanalysis, the theory speculates that attachment develops in the early stages of infancy. This process involves the mother satisfying her infant's instinctual needs, exclusively. Cupboard love theorists conclude that during infancy, our primary drive is food which leads to a secondary drive for attachment.
Maternal deprivation is a scientific term summarising the early work of psychiatrist and psychoanalyst John Bowlby on the effects of separating infants and young children from their mother. Although the effect of loss of the mother on the developing child had been considered earlier by Freud and other theorists, Bowlby's work on delinquent and affectionless children and the effects of hospital and institutional care led to his being commissioned to write the World Health Organization's report on the mental health of homeless children in post-war Europe whilst he was head of the Department for Children and Parents at the Tavistock Clinic in London after World War II. The result was the monograph Maternal Care and Mental Health published in 1951, which sets out the maternal deprivation hypothesis.
Attachment theory, originating in the work of John Bowlby, is a psychological, evolutionary and ethological theory that provides a descriptive and explanatory framework for understanding interpersonal relationships between human beings.
Gustav Jahoda, FBA, FRSE was an Austrian-born psychologist who made a sustained contribution to the development of cross-cultural psychology and cultural psychology.
Charles Hulme, is a British psychologist. He holds the Chair of Psychology and Education in the Department of Education at the University of Oxford, and is a William Golding Senior Research Fellow at Brasenose College, Oxford. He is a Senior Editor of Psychological Science, the flagship journal of the Association for Psychological Science.
William Emet Blatz was a German-Canadian developmental psychologist who was director of the University of Toronto's Institute of Child Study from 1925 until his retirement in 1960. He authored numerous books and was known for his creation of security theory, a precursor to attachment theory.
Jude Anne Cassidy is Professor of Psychology and Distinguished Scholar-Teacher at the University of Maryland. Cassidy was awarded the American Psychological Association Boyd McCandless Young Scientist Award in 1991 for her early career contributions to Developmental Psychology. She is a Fellow of the American Psychological Association, Division 7 and the Association for Psychological Science.
Adrian Frank Furnham is a South African-born British BPS chartered occupational psychologist and chartered health psychologist. He is currently an adjunct professor at BI Norwegian Business School and a professor at University College London. Throughout his career, he has lectured in the following post-secondary institutions: Pembroke College, Oxford, University of New South Wales, University of West Indies, Hong Kong University Business School, and the Henley Management College.
Joyce Robertson was a British psychiatric social worker, child behavioural researcher, childcare pioneer and pacifist, who was most notable for changing attitudes to the societally acceptable, institutionalised care and hospitalisation of young children, that was prevalent. In the late 1940s Robertson worked with Anna Freud first at the Well Baby Clinic and later in the Hampstead Child Therapy Clinic. She was later joined by her husband James Robertson. In 1965, both of them moved to the Tavistock Institute of Human Relations to work with John Bowlby on the Young Children in Brief Separation project and the development of attachment theory. This was to research the mental state and psychological development of children who underwent brief separation from their parents. Later in her career, Robertson worked with her husband to produce a series of celebrated documentary films that highlighted the reaction of small children who were separated from their parents. These were shown in hospitals, foster care and state run hospitals. Later she was known for promoting the idea of foster care instead of residential nurseries.