Richard Tremblay
Tremblay is founding director of the Research Unit on Children's Psychosocial Maladjustment (known by its French acronym GRIP), which was created in 1984 and now comprises some 40 researchers from six universities. He is the author of more than 500 studies that have been cited 40,000 times, according to Google Scholar. As a specialist in child development he is known in particular for having developed a database in 1984 to trace the origins of delinquency. The Montreal Longitudinal and Experimental Study contains data on approximately 1,000 boys at 53 schools in disadvantaged neighbourhoods, as well as on their parents and the families' social environment. When Tremblay and his colleagues created the database, which at the time was unique in the world, the goal was to focus preventive interventions on more accurate targets in order to increase their effectiveness. The database has made it possible to identify, from kindergarten, boys most at risk of developing serious problems and behaviours during adolescence and early adulthood. Its experimental element has demonstrated the long-term effectiveness of intensive interventions with young boys most at risk. The boys are now nearly 40 years old and continue to participate in the study with their own children.
“Richard Tremblay has traced the roots of chronic aggressive behaviour back as far as infancy. Now he hopes to go back further,” said a lengthy article on his work, published in Nature in December 2013. The epigenetic direction Tremblay has taken in the past ten years is “provocative,” wrote journalist Stephen S. Hall, because it rests on the assumption that the environment influences gene expression.
In an article published in 1999 in Criminal Behavior and Mental Health, Tremblay and his colleagues provided data showing that human aggression did not peak at 25 or 16 years of age, but rather at 17 months. Even the most dangerous criminals, violent offenders and serial murderers are not, relatively speaking, as aggressive as kids in daycare.
“Any child care professional will tell you that children have to be protected from one another. We do not let them play with kitchen knives, for example: they could hurt someone. Even for developmental experts like us it wasn't obvious," Tremblay said with a laugh. The old adage, coined by French philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau in 1772, is that humans are born good but are made bad by their environment. But even though that view still holds sway in the social sciences, for Tremblay it's no longer true. Physical aggression, he believes, is the default setting in human behaviour and usually disappears as children are socialized, especially as they learn language. Violence, delinquency and even homicide are not rooted in adolescent trauma but in early childhood. From the first day of school, the incidence of physical aggression diminishes and persists for only a minority of young people. These are the ones who, as they say, “turn out bad.”
“For years, researchers have been wondering why some adolescents become violent adults and others do not," Tremblay said. "They were looking for the elusive 'onset.' By following a group of children from kindergarten to adulthood, I had the evidence in front of me. But I had to look first.”
from: *Richard E. Tremblay wind the Nobel Prize of Criminology
Prize Winning Research: The jury selected four key findings to highlight from Professor Tremblay’s research.
The peak age for violent behavior is not age 20, but age three - with many implications for violence prevention and intervention policies. The predictors of early and persistent violence are epigenetic as well as genetic, which means that they can be changed rather than accepted as inevitable. These predictors cannot be ignored, as demonstrated by the increased risk of violence he found among Montreal children who went to preschool at age 4 after suffering traumas at birth, compared to children with similar traumas who did not attend preschool. Using the same predictors to select children for intensive support at age 7 to 9 resulted in a 34% reduction in criminal records by age 24, compared to highly aggressive children who were not selected for an intensive program for the children, their parents and teachers. All of these, and other, important findings come from carefully executed studies using highly precise theoretical formulations. The intervention experiments include well-documented implementation of program elements, many with large sample sizes.
Tremblay’s first longitudinal-experimental study began in 1984, when behaviour ratings of 6-year-old male pupils, were obtained from 87% of the kindergarten teachers in 53 schools in areas of low socio-economic status in Montreal, for a total of 1161 boys, of whom 895 met the criteria for a homogeneous, French-speaking sample.
The life course study of violent conduct from age 1.5 was based on a population sample (N = 2223) representing 5-month-olds in the province of Québec in the fall of 1997 and the spring of 1998. His genetic and epigenetic studies include careful comparisons between behavioural similarities of identical vs. fraternal twins, as well as studies of DNA methylation and brain development. His matched sample comparisons between children who did or did not attend pre-school were comprehensively examined for confounding differences, while his randomized controlled trial of the prevention program for high-risk seven-year-olds was thoroughly documented as to how much of the program was delivered to children, parents and teachers.