Child Development

the world-renowned Berkeley Growth Study, a longi-
tudinal study she initiated in 1928 that followed sub-
jects from infancy through adulthood. Her
productive career produced more than 200 publica-
tions about child development and she received many
awards. Bayley was the first woman to receive the Dis-
tinguished Scientific Contribution Award of the
American Psychological Association in 1966. Other
awards included the Gold Medal Award of the Ameri-
can Psychological Association in 1982 and the G.
Stanley Hall Award for distinguished contributions to
developmental psychology in 1971.

Prior to taking an introductory psychology course
with Edwin R. Guthrie, Bayley planned to teach En-
glish. With her interest in psychology sparked, Bayley
earned her master’s degree from the University of
Washington just two years after earning her bache-
lor’s degree at the same institution. She earned her
Ph.D. at the University of Iowa in 1926.

Bayley was descended from pioneering ancestors
including paternal grandparents who sailed around
Cape Horn to Victoria, British Columbia, and mater-
nal grandparents who traveled west by covered
wagon. Like her ancestors, Bayley has been described
as a pioneer who extended the study of human devel-
opment to a lifespan perspective and meticulously
studied a wide range of interests. She demonstrated
her adventuresome spirit when she carried out a se-
ries of studies measuring fear reactions on a galva-
nometer. According to a 1930 news account, she shot
off a .38 revolver in class to elicit and measure fear re-
sponse. Most of her studies were concerned with de-
tailed exploration of physical and mental growth and
intelligence predictability. She explored relation-
ships among measured characteristics and carefully
considered environmental and other influences on
her subjects. Bayley’s interests included the study of
physical maturation, body build, androgyny, and sex
differences. By 1962, through her studies of skeletal
maturation, she developed a means of predicting
adult height within one inch. The tables she devel-
oped are still used by endocrinologists.

Bayley’s career focused on developing tests for in-
fants and young children that correlate with other
measures and/or predict later intelligence. While
looking for data trends and groupings, she highlight-
ed individual differences in human development. She
did not believe intelligence was fixed and studied the
cause of variability in scores across the lifespan. She
was ahead of her time when she examined changes in
intelligence in adulthood in the 1950s. She was one
of the first to consider the impact of child-rearing atti-
tudes and behaviors on child development, and rec-
ognized that there are so many factors influencing
development that it would be difficult to isolate any

one factor, genetic or environmental, as possessing

the greatest importance.

Bayley was an outstanding developmental psy-

chologist distinguished by her contributions and her

early anticipation of current topics. Although she

spent most of her professional life at the University

of California, Berkeley, she also spent ten years at the

National Institute of Mental Health in Maryland be-

ginning in 1954 as chief of the Section on Early Devel-

opment, Laboratory of Psychology. Bayley was a

leader in her field who left a legacy of work and con-

tributions worthy of further study.

See also: INFANCY; INTELLIGENCE; MILESTONES OF

DEVELOPMENT

Bibliography

Lipsitt, Lewis P., and Dorothy H. Eichorn. ‘‘Nancy Bayley.’’ In

Agnes N. O’Connell and Nancy Felipe Russo, eds., Women in

Psychology: A Bio-Bibliographic Sourcebook. New York: Green-

wood Press, 1990.

Rosenblith, Judy F. ‘‘A Singular Career: Nancy Bayley.’’ Develop-

mental Psychology 28 (1992):747–758.

BAYLEY, NANCY 49