Mussen, Paul H.

Paul H. Mussen was born on March 21, 1922, in Paterson, New Jersey, to Harry and Taube Mussen. He received his AB in June 1942 and his masters in April 1943 from Stanford University, both with an emphasis in clinical psychology. During the latter part of World War II, he worked with the Office of Naval Intelligence in Hawaii. Here he wrote bulletins on the culture of the islands of the South Pacific in preparation for military operations. It was here, he later stated in his autobiography (Mussen, 1996), that he began his lifelong interest in cultural differences.

He received his PhD in clinical psychology from Yale in 1949 under Leonard Doob. Even before leaving Yale, however, Mussen's interests had begun to shift toward developmental psychology. His dissertation investigated the effect of social contact on racial attitudes among school-aged children. Working at an integrated summer camp for boys, he reported that the month-long experience changed racial attitudes among the white boys, especially for those who had scored low on aggression as measured by a projective test.

He accepted an academic appointment at the University of Wisconsin–Madison in 1949, moving on to Ohio State University in 1951, and finally to the University of California at Berkeley in 1956, where he remained for the rest of his career. His clinical background, along with his interest in developmental psychology, motivated him during the early years of his career to study identification and its underlying processes. His early Berkeley studies yielded evidence that satisfying relationships with the same-sex parent for male children led to a secure masculine identity. While these studies were well received at the time, and frequently cited, Mussen came to believe that they were of limited value because conformity with the stereotypical values and roles used in his research was culturally specific and not always generalizable to other cultures.

At about the same time, he teamed up with John Conger to publish the first edition of Child Development and Personality in 1956. The favorable reception of his textbook and his other publications led to offers to edit larger works. Shortly after he came to Berkeley, the National Research Council's Committee on Child Development proposed publishing a handbook of research methods. The resulting volume, Handbook of Research Methods in Child Development, edited by Mussen (1960), was used for many years as a critical resource in the field of developmental psychology.

In 1964 Mussen was invited to edit the third edition of Carmichael's Manual of Child Psychology. The two-volume edition (Mussen, 1970) became the major resource book for researchers, theorists, and practitioners in all fields of developmental psychology. In 1978 he was approached again to edit a fourth edition of Carmichael's Manual, now called Handbook of Child Psychology, published in four volumes in 1983.

As Mussen's career evolved, his research interests became focused on predictors of prosocial behavior in children. Participants in his research ranged in age from preschool to adolescence. In summarizing the results of his research line, he wrote that high levels of prosocial behavior in children are associated with warm nurturant relationships with strong identification with prosocial parental models, along with personal characteristics such as self-esteem and self-confidence (Mussen, 1996).

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