Early Childhood Upbringing Influences Future Psychotype

V. L. Talanov, July 2011

Disputes among socionists still continue over which factors shape a person’s socionic type. The candidates include genetic factors (the determining role of the fetal genotype), intrauterine factors, and factors of upbringing in early childhood that intensively train particular mental functions and thus allegedly create a basis for the preferential formation of one sociotype or another.

It is reliably known only that socionic functions show a fairly close association with particular neurotransmitter systems of the brain (for example, extraverted sensing corresponds to a developed nicotinic cholinergic system). Since the preferential development of particular neurotransmitter systems may depend on both genetic and intrauterine factors, the involvement of the corresponding mechanisms in the formation of sociotype at least cannot be ruled out. For example, sensitization of fetal neurons by particular cholinergic or noradrenergic agents reaching the fetus from the mother’s body may well lead to accelerated or, conversely, slowed formation of the corresponding neural networks in the fetal brain. Medical statistics indicate, for example, that mothers who smoke during pregnancy (nicotine crosses both the placental and blood-brain barriers, enters the fetal brain, where it is a powerful stimulator of nicotinic cholinergic neurons) are several times more likely to give birth to children with aggressive psychopathy whose clinical course corresponds to pathologically strong development of Se (extraverted sensing).

Can, however, features of a child’s upbringing in early childhood, rather than chemical effects on the developing brain or genetic factors in neuronal formation, also influence the preferential formation of particular socionic functions? It turns out that they can — this is shown by the results of our study.

If we attempted to investigate how particular parental influences intended to instill particular interests in a child affect the formation of psychotype, we would in any case fail to obtain an unambiguously interpretable result. Suppose one child’s parents are athletes and, in early childhood, gave the child increased training in movement and motor coordination. Suppose that such children indeed more often grow up to be Sensing types (we state this merely as a hypothetical example; we did not test whether this is actually the case). But we would still be unable to interpret this result as specifically a consequence of upbringing that leads to selective training of sensing functions and therefore to their preferential development. We would be unable to do so because, in the final result, it would not be possible to separate the influence of upbringing and training factors from the possible influence of parental genetic factors. If the parents are athletes and, as a result of upbringing, the child becomes an athlete, this can be interpreted both as the role of childhood upbringing and as the influence of the parental genotype.

However, there are features of a child’s early upbringing that are practically unrelated to the parents’ psychotype because they are in no way related to parental interests. Such features include the child’s birth order (first child, second, or last), as well as whether the child had any brothers or sisters at all (regardless of the parents’ psychotype, only children generally receive more parental attention, communicate more often with adults, but communicate less with peers). If, for some reason, a child does not attend kindergarten and is raised at home by parents or other adults, this leads to the same consequences as being an only child in the family — communication with adults becomes more intensive at the expense of reduced intensity of communication with peers. If these factors really lead to a selective shift in the sociotype being formed, then the influence of early childhood upbringing factors on type formation will thereby be fully demonstrated. This is the task we set for our study.

During socionic diagnostic testing using questionnaires or during diagnostic interviews, respondents were asked either whether they were the only child in their parents’ family, or whether they had attended a nursery and kindergarten in childhood — or, conversely, had spent most of their time within their family communicating with adults. The results of the study are shown below.

1. Socionic characteristics of only children in the family (the total number of respondents with reliably diagnosed sociotypes who answered the corresponding question, irrespective of how they answered it, was 600 in the study)

In the diagram showing the expression of the 15 socionic traits, the positive pole of a trait is taken as the trait name. If a bar in the diagram extends not upward but downward, into the negative range of values, then the pole of the trait corresponding to “only children” is accordingly not Positivism but Negativism; not Questimity but Declatimity; not Constructivism but Emotivism, and so on. All trait names, including Constructivism-Emotivism, are given in the original terminological tradition of Aušra Augustinavičiūtė. The diagram shows that, with a sufficient degree of reliability, one can speak only of a trend among “only children” toward Intuitives, Logical types, Statics, and perhaps Negativists. The other trends have low reliability. Of all the socionic characteristics, the most pronounced contrasts (and highly reliable group-level tendencies) are the shifts in the mean values of socionic functions. Among “only children,” extraverted intuition (Ne) and introverted logic (Ti) are reliably strengthened, whereas extraverted ethics (Fe), by contrast, is substantially reduced.

2. Socionic characteristics of children who did not attend a nursery or kindergarten and therefore communicated predominantly with adults within the family (the total number of respondents with reliably diagnosed sociotypes who answered the question about attending nursery-kindergarten was 250 in the study)

3. Weighted-average indicators (taking the number of respondents into account) of two characteristics: being raised as an only child and not attending a nursery-kindergarten in early childhood

What circumstances allow the obtained results to be interpreted as a directional causal relationship between intensified intuitive-intellectual upbringing in early childhood (through communication predominantly with adults and partial isolation from peers) and the subsequent formation of sociotype?

1. If the matter concerned only the factor of a child not attending nursery-kindergarten, then the results could, in principle, be explained on the basis of the child’s genotype — for example, that parents avoid subsequently placing a child who is initially an Intuitive in preschool institutions because of the child’s high morbidity and poor adaptation to a group. But analogous, extremely similar shifts in psychotype are also found among only children — regardless of whether they attended nursery-kindergarten. The fact that a child is the parents’ only child cannot in any serious way be explained by the child’s initial genotype or initial psychological phenotype - unless, jokingly of course, one assumes that after the birth of a Scientist or a Huxley the parents decide - out of revulsion and disgust - to limit themselves to this one child. The profiles of the socionic consequences of being an only child and of not attending nursery-kindergarten are very close. At the same time, these are different children. As we established in the course of the study, there is no overlap or even any sufficiently large correlation between the two sets. Nevertheless, the socionic profiles of the children from these two sets turn out to be very strongly correlated with one another (almost identical).

2. The averaged socionic profiles of children in both groups obtained in the experiment (measured when they were adults) fully correspond to the expected specific shifts in mental functions resulting from home upbringing. Ethics of Emotions, which requires group interaction and is trained through group interaction, decreases. Both Scientist functions, Ti and Ne, whose training requires solving intellectual tasks that obviously arise more often in communication with adults, increase. Within the hypothesis of a causal relationship between upbringing and type formation, the obtained results appear entirely expected even in their details (for example, extraverted ethics (Fe) decreases more strongly among only children — because, in the absence of brothers and sisters, they have no one to whom to demonstrate it, whereas introverted ethics (Fi) decreases more strongly among children who do not attend nursery-kindergarten — because of the absence of the training in perceiving other people’s emotions and moods within a broad social group of peers that is necessary for the development of Fi). Thus, within the hypothesis of the causal relationship under discussion, the experimental results obtained prove to be quite predictable and appear logical and natural.

3. In our earlier studies of 2001-2004, possible relationships between sociotype and the level of general intelligence were investigated (the ШТУР tests — School Test of Mental Development — were used, as well as modifications of the Wechsler and Amthauer tests of intelligence and its profile). Relatively weak (R=0.2), but sufficiently reliable correlations were found between general intelligence and the development of the subject’s intuition and logic, primarily in the Ti+Ne complex. This naturally gives rise to the supposition that, by stimulating the development of a child’s general intelligence, we also stimulate the development of the child’s Ti and Ne. In addition, it is known from a large number of pedagogical studies that the factor of a child’s predominant communication with adults in early childhood is equivalent to intensified intellectual upbringing directed toward the development of imagination and logical intelligence, but worsens indicators of social intelligence (from the standpoint of contemporary socionics, conditioned by Ethics). Thus, the interpretation of the experimental results discussed in the present work from the standpoint of a causal relationship between upbringing and the formation of logical, intuitive, and emotional functions is also confirmed by other data.

Conclusions:

In children who, in early childhood, are deprived of communication with peers but at the same time receive an increased intellectually stimulating impulse because of more intensive communication with adults, Ne and Ti develop significantly more actively, while at the same time the formation of Fe and Fi is slowed.

The conditions of children’s upbringing in early childhood, by selectively stimulating and training particular mental functions at the stage of their early formation, undoubtedly influence the final level of development of these functions in adulthood and thus exert a certain influence on the final psychotype of the adult person as well. For example, psychotypes belonging to the Socials club are formed significantly less often if the child received insufficient communication with peers during childhood. However, the influence of early childhood upbringing conditions on a person’s final psychotype is clearly neither the sole nor the decisive factor — the shifts in the magnitude and hierarchy of mental functions observed under the influence of different upbringing conditions are not large enough for this.

Copyleft V. L. Talanov 2011

The author permits free reproduction of the work on Internet websites, provided that a hyperlink to the present source is included: http://sociotoday.narod2.ru/vospitanietipa.htm