Triumphs of Experience: The Men of the Harvard Grant Study

by Vaillant, George E.

  The third column in Table 4.1 refers to the NEO-related scores. It is more speculative than the other two, but it suggests that a high score on the Big Five trait of Extraversion (that is, thriving on challenging environments, social interactions, and keeping busy) and a low score on the trait of Neuroticism (that is, anxiety, hostility, depression, and self-consciousness) predicts a high Decathlon score. Indeed, the association (for the statisticians, rho = .45) was as strong as the benchmark correlation between people’s height and their weight.

  Some of the traits that the men had been rated for in college—Humanistic, Vital Affect, Friendly—had been significantly associated at that time with a soundness rating of A. Others—Inhibited, Ideational, Self-conscious and Introspective, Lack of purpose and values—had been significantly associated at the time with a college adjustment rating of C, or unsound.20 In midlife, however, none of these adolescent traits were associated positively or negatively either with psychopathology or with good adjustment. In retrospect, the traits associated with poor college adjustment seem to have been part of normal adolescence (which adults do sometimes view as pathological!). Surprisingly, the one trait that proved to be strongly associated with healthy midlife adjustment was a trait rather uncharacteristic of adolescents, called Practical, Organized. It included the ability to delay gratification, and proved to be strongly associated with healthy midlife adjustment, but not after age seventy-five. On the other hand, we found a “sleeper” trait—one that didn’t appear to be important in my first foray when the men were forty-seven, but became notably so afterward. This was our old friend Well Integrated, which I defined in Chapter 2, and which, while not so important in midlife, significantly predicted a physically active and cognitively intact old age. The reason for this appears to be that Well Integrated was the one Woods variable that (like a warm childhood) independently predicted the absence of vascular risk factors like smoking, obesity, and elevated blood pressure. Self-starting was another trait not important early in midlife but very important at the end of life.

  What does it mean that a variable is predictive at one time of life but not at another? It could mean that what once looked significant really wasn’t, or vice versa. But it could also mean that some things really are significant at certain times, but not at others. This makes prediction a much more complicated issue, and it also points up a crucial aspect of lifetime studies. They never let us forget that something that is true at one time of life may not necessarily be true at another. The longer our view, the better a chance we have to figure out why some correlations endure and others don’t. Sometimes the missing link is in our data; sometimes it’s in our science; sometimes it’s in our intuition. But even during the (admittedly uncomfortable) periods when we know a shift has taken place, or a predictor has stopped predicting, but we don’t know why, at least we know that it’s happened. It is only by studying lives over time that we become aware of changes like this, which may be markers of important developments, such as physical maturation in the brain. The vicissitudes of associations and correlations that we can follow only in longitudinal studies remind us to keep our eyes and our minds open and to guard against premature closure.

  MOTHERING VERSUS FATHERING

  Here’s an example of how these vicissitudes look. When I first began to analyze the effects of childhood upon adulthood, it looked like the total childhood environment was more important than the maternal relationship per se; as a psychiatrist, I found this surprising. After eighty, however, the men’s childhood relationships with their mothers look more significant—another “sleeper” effect. What its meaning might be we don’t yet know.

  The Study found some facets of adulthood in which a good relationship with one parent or another exerted the more important influence. As the men approached old age, their boyhood relationships with their mothers were associated with their effectiveness at work, but their relationships with their fathers were not. A man’s maximum late-life income was significantly associated with a warm relationship with his mother, as was his continuing to work until seventy. His military rank and his inclusion in Who’s Who were also marginally significantly associated with a warm relationship with his mother.

  A warm childhood relationship with his mother was significantly associated with a man’s IQ in college, and, more important, with his mental competence at eighty. A poor relationship with his mother was very significantly, and very surprisingly, associated with dementia. For example, of the 115 men without a warm maternal relationship who survived until eighty, 39 (33 percent) were suffering from dementia by age ninety. Of the surviving men with a warm maternal relationship, only 5 (13 percent) have become demented—a Significant difference. In the Grant Study, dementia has not been significantly associated with vascular risk factors. One senior colleague of mine insists that this finding must be wrong, on the grounds that no one has noted it before. He forgets that seventy-year prospective studies are as rare as hen’s teeth. Only time—or replication—will resolve the matter.

  None of these issues were even suggestively associated with the quality of the man’s relationship with his father. However, warm relationships with fathers (but not with mothers) seemed to enhance the men’s capacity to play. Men with warm paternal relationships enjoyed their vacations significantly more than the others, employed humor more as a coping mechanism, and achieved a very significantly better adjustment to, and contentment with, life after retirement. Counter-intuitively, it was not the men with poor mothering but the ones with poor fathering who were significantly more likely to have poor marriages over their lifetimes. All five of the men who reported that marriage without sex would suit them had poor paternal relationships, but these men were evenly distributed as to the adequacy or inadequacy of their mothering.

  Men with good father relationships also manifested less anxiety—a significantly lower standing pulse rate in college, for example, and fewer physical and mental symptoms under stress in young adulthood. Men with poor father relationships were much more likely to call themselves pessimists and to report having trouble letting others get close. And good father relationships very significantly predicted subjective life satisfaction at seventy-five, a variable not even suggestively associated with the maternal relationship.

  Nonetheless, a mother who could enjoy her son’s initiative and autonomy was a tremendous boon to his future. Judge Holmes was by no means the only successful man whose mother admired his assertiveness. Other mothers of successful sons boasted: “John is fearless to the point of being reckless”; “William could fight any kid on the block. . . . he was perfectly fearless”; and “Bob is a tyrant in a way that I adore.” Not all the men were so lucky; certainly Frances DeMille (in Chapter 8) was not. Yet as the men moved into adulthood, their mothers, as if by magic, were remembered as progressively weaker, and their fathers as progressively more dominant, childhood figures.

  RECOVERY OF LOST LOVES

  No one whom we have loved is ever totally lost. That is the blessing and the curse of memory. As Tolstoy wrote, “Only people who are capable of loving strongly can also suffer great sorrow; but this same necessity of loving serves to counteract their grief and heals them.”21 There’s a distinction to be made here between privation and deprivation. Privation—never having loved or been loved—leads to psychopathology, not to grief. Deprivation—the loss of those whom we have loved or been loved by—leads to tears, but not to sickness. Grief hurts, but it doesn’t kill.

  The psychodynamic work of mourning has less to do with saying good-bye and letting go than with bringing down from the attic the old pictures that re-evoke forgotten moments of intimacy. I believe, though it has not yet been proven, that the primate brain is constructed to retain love, not to relinquish it. It is much easier to conceptualize the searing pain of loss than the subtle and almost imperceptible ways that we absorb the people we love into ourselves, and perhaps this is one reason that some psychotherapists emphasize the pain of grief over its work of remembra
nce. But dynamic psychotherapy must attend as carefully to the recovery of lost loves as it does to the experience of pain, or, worse, the retrieval of old resentments.

  The recent years of the Grant Study have shown that our lives when we are old are the sum of all of our loves. It is important, therefore, that we not let any of these go to waste. One task of the last half of life is to recover the memories of the loves of the first half. This is an important way that the past affects the present. The rediscovery of a love once lost, or of the power to forgive, may be a source of great healing. To participate in the recovery of others’ lost loves is yet another joy of conducting a longitudinal study.

  I will revert once more to pictures to convey this joy. Godfrey Camille, whom we met in Chapter 2, wrote when he was eighteen, “I am sorry that my family was so terribly strict with me from the ages of 5 to 12.” He was charitable about this, but realistic: “They can’t be blamed for it because they were brought up in 1890 New York. . . . Dad and I have never gotten on very well.”

  Over the years, as Camille uncovered his past through psychotherapy, he tried to help me understand what that uncovering meant to his life.

  Is it the re-finding of the love that matters? Or is it the chance to re-celebrate and to re-celebrate again and again the bond that holds? An image comes to mind—the empty wine bottle used as a candlestick. The wine may have been the initial warmth in life, but once it is gone only the cold and empty glass bottle remains—until in memory we re-light the candle of conviviality, and as it drips, it transforms the symbol of the warmth that was spent into a differently shaped, differently colored object—alive with new warmth. Early loves may be “lost” because they were taken for granted and never reinforced by review. Recollection and retelling have a way of making them increasingly visual and real. It is the visual perception that’s particularly effective when it comes to learning.

  Long before he wrote those words, however, Godfrey Camille had engaged himself in the process of turning the cold, empty bottles of his life into vessels of new light, hope, and strength. At sixty-five he reminded me (as if I could forget) that “empathy was not my father’s strongest suit,” and he offered an old, but newly remembered, example. Having climbed a cherry tree to look at the blossoms, he lost his balance and fell twelve feet to the ground. He got no comfort, only a spanking for disobeying a parental injunction not to climb that tree. But now he was remembering something else. A few days later his father had picked him up in his arms, and . . .

  Once beneath the shimmering canopy of the cherry tree, my father pulled a small branch towards me and let me hold it in my fist while we traded glances and smiles. Before he drove off to work, he used his pocketknife to cut a sprig, which he put in a tumbler of water, placing this on the little table where I ate my meals. . . . I knew I was both understood and forgiven. . . . This was my first mystical experience.

  Camille had always had an abstract interest in genealogy, but late in his life he translated that into a new source of actual love. He discovered that his father had a whole network of French cousins, and through correspondence and travel he made relationships with them. Out of this relational archeology he created the warm extended family his painful childhood had denied him, mining memories of time past and investing them in real people in time present. This is one form of resilience. In his renewed religious involvement and his new relatives, he was finding fresh sources of strength, and fresh connections with his father. Creative writing and extensive psychotherapy promoted his discoveries of these lost loves; he is not alone in making good use of those activities to that end.

  Despite such happy transformations as Camille’s, however, at the end of the day Conrad is more right than wrong. When we contrasted the lives of the men whose childhoods were bleakest—the Loveless—with the lives of those whose childhoods were sunniest—the Cherished—poor childhood was very significantly associated with poor later adjustment. Still, while being unloved as a child is painful, it isn’t the bottom line. The bottom line is what being unloved does to a child’s capacity to be loved, and to be loving, later. Some children manage to develop this capacity in spite of everything. But the ones who do not learn to love, or cannot let themselves be loved, do indeed live lives of woe.

  SURPRISING WAYS THAT CHILDHOOD DID NOT AFFECT OLD AGE

  Prospective studies of normal development are only now attaining the many decades they need to accompany adolescents into maturity, let alone old age. But in the process they are demolishing many cherished assumptions. We all “know,” for instance, that childhood affects the well-being of adults. But recent scientific reviews reveal that many popular explanations of how this happens—for example, through the loss of a parent—are rather less conclusive than we have long thought.22

  It’s not hard to explain the way people turn out—however they turn out—after the fact. I can evidence a crazy aunt, a rejecting mother, a clubfoot, a bad neighborhood, or any other circumstance I like to explain a poor outcome. And I can prove anything at all with single case studies. That is why I accompany the biographies here with their statistical context, and why I harp on how important it is to keep looking for statistical validation, even though we may not always like what it shows us.

  Now, therefore, having used Study data to illustrate prospectively assessed childhood contingencies that were statistically important, I want to discuss some commonly held beliefs that are not supported by the data on the College (and sometimes the Inner City) men. It is very important for developmental psychologists to keep careful track of the interface between theory and fact, and to strive to bring the two into ever closer agreement. That is our best hope of keeping the children of the future from the devastating effects of destructive childhoods. It is true, and it is a hopeful truth, that some of the men with the worst childhoods enjoyed the period of end-of-life. Still, sixty years is a very long time for a Sam Lovelace to have to wait for happiness—and even then his happiness was only relative. Furthermore, whereas a warm childhood, like a rich father, tends to inoculate a man against future pain, a bleak childhood is like poverty; it cannot cushion the difficulties of life. Yes, difficulties may sometimes lead to post-traumatic growth, and some men’s lives did improve over time. But there is always a high cost in pain and lost opportunities, and for many men with bleak childhoods the outlook remained bleak until they died, sometimes young and sometimes by their own hands. We must get better at intervening when childhood conditions bode ill for the future, and that means finding ways to recognize them, not by sentiment but by data-based understandings of development and its antecedents.

  The Grant Study, which approaches development from the front rather than from the back, has called many popular theories into question. The early Study staff did examine the effects of strict vs. liberal toilet training, and Earnest Hooton concluded in Young Man, You Are Normal that toilet training seemed to be entirely without significance for future behavior.23 Hooton’s book was published in 1945; sixty-five years of further study has done nothing to prove him wrong. Freud’s theories about the deleterious effects of strict toilet training were based on retrospection, in the form of the memories of his usually middle-aged patients; yet again, prospective studies rule!

  More recently, other childhood conditions that have been thought at times to have powerful implications for the future have failed to correlate significantly with the events of the Decathlon. For example, the pre-Spock Grant Study men were disciplined strictly by their parents. Eighty-six percent of them were breast-fed, but more than 50 percent were out of diapers by eighteen months. Thumb-sucking was inhibited with aluminum mitts and bitter aloes, even sometimes by tying an infant’s arm to his body so as to keep hands away from mouth. None of this mattered. Physical health in childhood didn’t hold up. Neither did the distance in age between the subject and the next child. Birth order was insignificant too, except that being the eldest child was correlated with occupational success. Even the death of a parent was relatively unim
portant predictively by the time the men were fifty; by the time they were eighty, men who had lost parents when young were as mentally and physically healthy as men whose parents had lovingly watched them graduate from high school.

  Even that old standby, the cold, rejecting mother, failed to predict late-life emotional illness or poor aging. It was good not to have mentally ill relatives, since genes so often trump environment. But basically it wasn’t the absence of a loving mother that made all the difference, but the presence of one, or of an adored father, or of an otherwise warm childhood surround. This is what I mean when I say that our lives are shaped more by what goes right than by what goes wrong.

  Another common assumption, based on retrospective “evidence,” is that alcoholism is the result of an unhappy childhood. Certainly both alcoholics and clinicians may point blaming fingers in that direction after the fact. But prospective evidence suggests that this may be a reversal in which the results of alcoholism are being misconstrued as its cause. Alcoholism is passed on genetically, not environmentally, which means that an alcoholic parent appears in many alcoholics’ backgrounds.24 Alcoholism in a parent certainly ups the likelihood that childhood will be unhappy, but in that case the unhappy family is the cart; the horse constitutes the genes conducive to alcoholism. And as we shall see in Chapter 9, alcoholics’ memories of their childhoods may be unwittingly altered either by physiologic changes due to alcoholism or defensively, to reduce guilt.

  Another example. Ten years ago, I believed that the Loveless died sooner because they were careless of their own well-being. I wrote in Aging Well, “The Loveless, believing that they belonged to no one, failed to remember the old song’s advice to ‘button up your overcoat when the wind blows free.’” In this I was wrong; today’s data reveal that the Loveless and the Cherished differ only slightly in the way they take care of themselves, at least with regard to the common vascular health risk factors of smoking, blood pressure, weight, and diabetes.