Misplaced Pages

This is an old revision of this page, as edited by Former user 20 (talk | contribs) at 04:42, 22 January 2006 (AfD). The present address (URL) is a permanent link to this revision, which may differ significantly from the current revision.

This article is being considered for deletion in accordance with Misplaced Pages's deletion policy.
Please share your thoughts on the matter at this article's entry on the Articles for Deletion page.
You are welcome to edit this article, but please do not blank this article or remove this notice while the discussion is in progress. For more information, particularly on merging or moving the article during the discussion, read the Guide to Deletion.

Template:AfD doc

James W. Prescott is a developmental psychologist, whose research focused on the origins of violence, particularly as it relates to a lack of mother-child bonding.

Prescott was a health scientist administrator at the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (NICHD), one of the Institutes of the US National Institutes of Health (NIH) from 1966 to 1980. He created and directed the Developmental Behavioral Biology Program at the NICHD where he initiated NICHD-supported research programs to study the relationship between mother-child bonding and the development of social abilities in adult life. Inspired by Harry Harlow's famous experiments on rhesus monkeys, which established a link between neurotic behavior and isolation from a care-giving mother, Prescott further proposed that a key component to development comes from the somesthetic processes (body touch) and vestibular-cerebellar processes (body movement) induced by mother-child interactions, and that deprivation of this stimulation causes brain abnormalities. By analogy to the neurotic behavior in monkeys, he suggested that these developmental abnormalities are a major cause of adult violence amongst humans.

Prescott followed up on this study of behavioral effects through anthropological surveys of primitive cultures including the effects of sensory deprivation of human sexual pleasure and affection during adolescence, which he wrote up in the paper Body Pleasure and the Origins of Violence. In this paper, he presents evidence suggesting that societies open to touch and sexuality suffer from less violence than intolerant societies. He has derived from this a theory of somatosensory-affectional deprivation (S-SAD).

Prescott also served as assistant head of the Psychology Branch of the Office of Naval Research (1963 to 1966) and as president of the Maryland Psychological Association (1970 to 1971).

External links

• http://www.violence.de/ has the essentials of Prescott's work
• James W. Prescott: Curriculum Vitae
• Body Pleasure and the Origins of Violence
• K5 discussion on the validity of Body Pleasure and the Origins of Violence

• Pages for deletion
• Psychologists
• Atheists