When I received the email informing me that I was to receive APA’s Division 7 Urie Bronfenbrenner Award for Lifetime Contribution to Developmental Psychology in the Service of Science and Society for 2023, I had to read the email several times to make sure I had read it correctly. Nevertheless, I am humbled and honored to accept such a significant distinction.
My interest in the study of human development began in 1975 as an undergraduate at the University of Colorado where I was fortunate to have Elizabeth Bates as my professor for my Developmental Psychology course. It was an early morning class and because I am not a morning person, it was difficult for me to get excited for any classes that started that early. But her class was different. The passion and brilliance she conveyed for the study of development was inspiring and lit a fire within me to pursue graduate training in developmental science.
I had not thought much about that influence until almost 25 years later when I had a discussion with colleagues about how we became interested in the study of development, and I told them the story about Liz’s class. One of my colleagues encouraged me to let her know and I soon sent her an email. She replied quickly and said that up until receiving the email it had been a terrible day for her, but the email lifted her spirits. She noted that after 30 years of being a professor she sometimes got tired and discouraged and said that receiving a “note like yours is enough to keep me going for a while” (I still have that email). She did not take much credit for her influence on me but said that “it was a blessing and a relief to find out that I actually made a difference for somebody at some point.” Unfortunately, it was not long after that email exchange that we lost her to pancreatic cancer, and I am forever grateful that I took the time to let her know the influence she had in my life.
I often tell this story to my students to highlight to them that the influences in our lives come from often unexpected sources and at unexpected times. I also tell them this story to emphasize the impact that we can have on those we work with and teach, and to be mindful of this. And it is this impact on others, at least for me, that has been the greatest source of pride in my career.
After graduate school, I moved to Arizona State University in 1983 (where I have been since) and met up with Nancy Eisenberg, who quickly became a cherished friend and colleague. Our work together primarily focused on the study of vicarious emotional responding (empathy, sympathy) and we collaborated at an intensely productive pace for more than two decades to pioneer new ways of measuring these responses in children and adults (Eisenberg et al., 1989) , how they develop and are socialized (Fabes et al., 2002), what accounts for individual differences (Fabes et al., 1994), and how these responses relate to important outcomes (Eisenberg et al., 1989). We also collaborated on several significant handbook and review chapters on the development of empathy, sympathy, and prosocial behavior (Eisenberg & Fabes, 1991, 1998).
In some of this work, we used intensive daily naturalistic observations of children’s behavior, and this led me to become more interested in children’s peer interactions and how these affect the trajectories of positive and negative behavior. In particular, given the influence of Carol Martin in my life (both personally and professionally), I began to study children’s gender-segregated peer relationships – boys playing primarily with other boys and girls playing primarily with other girls. Eleanor Maccoby (Maccoby & Jacklin, 1987) provided compelling arguments that it is one of the most powerful social phenomena in development, occurring across most contexts and developmental periods, with potentially long-lasting effects (Maccoby, 1998). Although it was well recognized (noticeable on almost any playground in the U.S.), gender segregation was not well understood. In our work, we showed that patterns of gender segregation in young children were stable and that individual differences in these patterns influenced important outcomes (Martin & Fabes, 2001). We have now spent more than 20 years documenting the significance of homophily in children’s peer relationships (Fabes et al., 2003) and have used what we learned in this work to create interventions designed to broaden the diversity of peers with whom children interact (Martin et al., 2017). This research also led to a significant multi-authored article in Science in which we debunked the pseudoscience that has been used to promote gender-segregated teaching practices (Halpern et al., 2011).
Throughout my career, the impact of Bronfenbrenner’s ideas can be seen in attention to context and its importance in children’s development. Moreover, in discussions with colleagues, it became clear that context affects the work we do as developmental scientists. This point was highlighted in an article I wrote with several colleagues for the special issue of Child Development celebrating the new millennium (Fabes et al., 2000). In this piece, we used Bronfenbrenner’s model to emphasize the point that developmental scientists live and work within multiple contexts and that these contexts affect the scientific choices and decisions we make and how our work is perceived and assessed. We proposed that there will be “increasing pressure to use new criteria when assessing the significance of twenty-first century developmental science” (Fabes et al., 2020, p. 212). In addition to the common ways of assessing the significance of our research (e.g., internal, external, and ecological validity), we predicted that socio-cultural forces of change in the new millennium would produce new types of influences and pressures on researchers and on the ways in which the topics we study are evaluated (e.g., we introduced the notions of incidence, impact, sympathetic, and salience validities; see Fabes et al., 2000). We suggested that developmental scientists would have to increasingly walk a fine line between the rigorous demands of our science and the public’s demand for and access to quick, usable, and digestible information. We believe that our predictions generally have been borne out considering the increased accessibility and popularity of internet search engines and social media and their potential to be both a source of information and knowledge about human development, as well as a source of misinformation and the sowing of doubt, division, and mistrust (Fabes et al., 2022). Moreover, the increased calls to align our research with social justice themes (Killen et al., 2021) also place new demands on our work and the decisions we make. Thus, how we think about our research and how it is evaluated have changed (and continue to change) over time.
But beyond the academic footprint left by my research and the related grant dollars, publications, and presentations, I believe that my most significant impacts on the field have come as a result of my 24+ years as Department Chair and then School Director. In these roles, I was able to hire, assist, and work with some of the most talented and diverse young faculty and students, many of whom have now gone on to become senior leaders in our fields (there are too many to name, but you know who you are). Also, in these roles, I was able to provide some support, and worked hard to promote some harmony, for our faculty, staff, and students when professional or personal issues arose. And it is in these promotive interactions and relationships that I feel I have made my most significant and generative contributions to the field and to the broader communities in which we live and work. To paraphrase Pericles, whatever legacy and impact we leave behind is not engraved in stone monuments (or in publications in our journals or in programs in units of higher education), but it is woven into the lives of others. Thus, as Elizabeth conveyed almost 25 years ago, what matters most is knowing that the work you do makes a difference for someone at some point, and I take pride that I was able to be a leader who made such a difference for so long to so many.
Bronfenbrenner also reminds us that our proximal interactions are reciprocal, and I am grateful to the many gifted and giving undergraduate and graduate students, postdoctoral fellows, faculty, staff, community members, and funders I have collaborated and worked with in my career. I am honored that my contributions have been deemed worthy of this award; an award named for a leading thinker and someone who has clearly left a mark on so many and on the field itself. I am humbled (and continue to be surprised) by it.
References
Eisenberg, N., & Fabes, R. A. (1991). Prosocial behavior and empathy: A multimethod developmental perspective. In S. C. Margaret (Ed.), Review of personality and social psychology: Prosocial behavior (Vol. 12, pp. 34-61). Sage.
Eisenberg, N., & Fabes, R. A. (1998). Prosocial development. In W. Damon & N. Eisenberg (Eds.), Handbook of child psychology: Social, emotional, and personality development (Vol. 3, pp. 701-778). Wiley.
Eisenberg, N., Fabes, R. A., Miller, P. A., Fultz, J., & et al. (1989). Relation of sympathy and personal distress to prosocial behavior: A multimethod study. Journal of Personality & Social Psychology, 57(1), 55-66. https://doi.org/https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.57.1.55
Fabes, R. A., Bodman, D. A., Van Vleet, B. B., & Martin, C. L. (2022). Google Trends search information related to breastfeeding in the U.S. Proceedings of the Conference on Advanced Research Methods and Analytic, 41-48. https://doi.org/https://dx.doi.org/10.4995/CARMA2022.2022.15030
Fabes, R. A., Eisenberg, N., Karbon, M., Troyer, D., & Switzer, G. (1994). The relations of children's emotion regulation to their vicarious emotional responses and comforting behaviors. Child Development, 65(6), 1678-1693. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-8624.1994.tb00842.x
Fabes, R. A., Martin, C. L., Hanish, L., & Updegraff, K. (2000). New criteria for evaluating child development research. Child Development, 71, 212-221. https://doi.org/ https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-8624.00136
Fabes, R. A., Martin, C. L., Hanish, L. D., Anders, M. C., & Madden-Derdich, D. A. (2003). Early school competence: The roles of sex-segregated play and effortful control. Developmental Psychology, 39(5), 848-858. https://doi.org/10.1037/0012-1649.39.5.848
Fabes, R. A., Poulin, R. E., Eisenberg, N., & Madden-Derdich, D. A. (2002). The coping with children's negative emotions scale (CCNES): Psychometric properties and relations with children's emotional competence. Marriage & Family Review, 34(3-4), 285-310. https://doi.org/10.1300/J002v34n03_05
Halpern, D. F., Eliot, L., Bigler, R. S., Fabes, R. A., Hanish, L. D., Hyde, J., Liben, L. S., & Martin, C. L. (2011). The pseudoscience of single-sex schooling. Science, 333, 1706-1707. https://doi.org/10.1126/science.1205031
Killen, M., Yee, K. M., & Ruck, M. D. (2021). Social and racial justice as fundamental goals for the field of human development. Human Development, 65(5-6), 257-269. https://doi.org/10.1159/000519698
Maccoby, E. E. (1998). The two sexes: Growing up apart, coming together. Belknap Press.
Maccoby, E. E., & Jacklin, C. N. (1987). Gender segregation in childhood. In W. R. Hayne (Ed.), Advances in child development and behavior (Vol. 20, pp. 239-287). Academic Press.
Martin, C. L., & Fabes, R. A. (2001). The stability and consequences of young children's same-sex peer interactions. Developmental Psychology, 37, 431-446. https://doi.org/10.1037/0012-1649.37.3.431
Martin, C. L., Fabes, R. A., Hanish, L., Gaertner, B., Miller, C. F., & Foster, S. (2017). Using an intergroup contact approach to improve gender relationships: A case study of a classroom-based intervention. In A. Rutland, D. Nesdale, & C. S. Brown (Eds.), Handbook of group processes in children and adolescents (pp. 437-454). Wiley-Blackwell.