Jack Block, a prominent psychologist of personality who in 1968 began studying a group of California preschoolers and for decades kept watch as they moved from childhood through adolescence and into adulthood, died on Jan. 13 at his home in El Cerrito, Calif. He was 85.
The cause was complications of a spinal cord injury he suffered 10 years ago, his daughter Susan Block said.
At his death, Professor Block was an emeritus professor of psychology at theUniversity of California, Berkeley, where he had taught from 1957 until his retirement in 1991.
Professor Block’s project began with more than 100 3-year-olds in the San Francisco area. He studied them again when they were 4, 5, 7, 11, 14, 18, 23 and, finally, 32, when the study ended. Much of the work was conducted with his wife, Jeanne Humphrey Block, a collaborator until her death in 1981.
While other longitudinal studies examined the effects of I.Q. or social class on later life, the one by the Blocks focused on psychological makeup. At bottom, the questions they asked were these: What makes people turn out as they do, and to what extent can adult personality be predicted by childhood temperament?
“It was probably the only one of its kind that started with such young children,” Per F. Gjerde, a professor of psychology at theUniversity of California, Santa Cruz, said of the Blocks’ study. Nowadays, Professor Gjerde said, “you would start at birth, but in 1968, age 3 was a very, very early beginning.”
Investigating the ways in which subjects’ early lives informed their later ones, the Blocks looked at issues like childhood responses to parental divorce, adolescent drug use and adult political affiliation.
In a study published in 1986, but conducted years earlier, they examined members of the original group whose parents eventually divorced. Conducted with Professor Gjerde, the study upended the received wisdom that divorce in and of itself causes disruptive behavior in children.
Instead, the authors found, children from the divorced families — in particular the boys — had displayed antisocial behavior years before the divorce took place. In other words, the boys’ behavior, with the stresses on family life it entailed, could have been a cause of divorce as well as a consequence.
A 1990 study, by Professor Block and Jonathan Shedler, found that teenagers who experimented with drugs in a limited way tended to be better adjusted than those who either used drugs habitually or abstained entirely.
Jacob Block, always called Jack, was born in Brooklyn on April 28, 1924. He earned a bachelor’s degree fromBrooklyn Collegeand a Ph.D. in psychology from Stanford in 1951.
Besides his daughter Susan, Professor Block is survived by two other daughters, Jody Block and Carol Block; a son, David; and four grandchildren.
His books include “Lives Through Time” (Bancroft, 1971; with Norma Haan).
One of Professor Block’s studies drew particular notice in the news media. Published in The Journal of Research in Personality in 2006, it found that subjects who at 3 years old had seemed thin-skinned, rigid, inhibited and vulnerable tended at 23 to be political conservatives. On the other hand, 3-year-olds characterized as self-reliant, energetic, somewhat dominating and resilient were inclined to become liberals.
Pundits’ responses to the study ranged from enthusiastic approval to caustic dismissal, depending on the politics of the critic.
This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:
Correction: February 18, 2010
Because of an editing error, an obituary on Feb. 7 about the psychologist Jack Block referred imprecisely to a study he conducted with his wife, Jeanne Humphrey Block, and Per F. Gjerde. While the study, which credited Ms. Block, was indeed published in 1986, it had been conducted years earlier. (As the obituary noted, Ms. Block died in 1981.)
