In Memoriam John R. Nesselroade
* March 13, 1936 – † July 24, 2024
UVA LIFE founder John R. Nesselroade passed away on July 24, 2024, at the age of 88. In commemoration of his achievements as one of the most important methodologists working on variability and change, we reproduce the laudatio I wrote on the occasion of the bestowal of an honorary doctorate by Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin in 2010. We will honor his memory and treasure his manifold actitivities in commitment to LIFE.
Ulman Lindenberger, LIFE Speaker Berlin
Conferral of an Honorary Doctorate by the Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin
Prof. John R. Nesselroade, PhD
Laudatio
To pay homage to Prof. John R. Nesselroade, PhD, is a great honor and pleasure. John R. Nesselroade has been the leading methodologist in the multivariate study of behavioral variability and change for decades. He is one of the most eminent, influential, and independent minds in psychology. John R. Nesselroade continues to refine and expand the scientific construal of the human life space up to the present day. He is most deserving of receiving an honorary doctorate from the Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin.
The Articulation of Variability and Change in Behavioral Development
Developmental psychology requires theories and methods that connect mechanisms supporting constancy and promoting change across levels of analysis, domains of functioning, and timescales. Short-term variability, which refers to fluctuations across smaller scales such as seconds, minutes, or days, and long-term change, which refers to less reversible and cumulative trends across larger scales such as years and decades, exist simultaneously and exert reciprocal influences upon each other. John R. Nesselroade has equipped developmental psychology and the behavioral sciences in general with the conceptual and statistical tools to represent the dynamics of short-term variability and long-term change, and to explore their interrelations.
To characterize this research agenda, John R. Nesselroade, in a highly influential chapter, once invoked the metaphor of weaving:
The texture, strength, pattern, and character of cloth is supplied not just by the long threads (warp), not just by the cross threads (woof or weft) but, rather, by the combination of the two, interlaced by the process of weaving. Just as both kinds of threads are equally involved in the process of weaving, both kinds of intraindividual phenomena appear to be involved in defining the fabric of development. … Thus, we visualize a developmental pathway not as a set of lines projected over time but as a surface. That surface has some of the character of a cloth, character dependent for its definition not only on the warp of developmental change but also on the woof of intraindividual variability.
Nesselroade, 1991, p. 230ff.
The Individual as The Privileged Unit of Inquiry
This conception of variability and change entails that the privileged unit of inquiry in developmental research is the individual. By averaging across people and inspecting mean trends, the “process of weaving,” which happens at the individual level and constitutes his or her development, is hidden and can no longer be reconstructed. Throughout his career, John R. Nesselroade has put forward this position with unyielding and gentle force, which, for many years, ran against the mainstream of developmental psychology. Continuing the legacy of Joachim Wohlwill and expanding the statistical tools provided by his mentor Raymond B. Cattell, John R. Nesselroade has reminded several generations of colleagues and students that the science of behavioral development fails to do justice to its core mission if it does not provide an adequate rendition of individual development.
In recent years, however, John R. Nesselroade’s view of development as a dynamic process that needs to be measured, described, and explained at the individual level has been met with growing acclaim and support. What has been a minority view for long is increasingly recognized as a central assumption for understanding behavioral development. The person-oriented methods developed by John R. Nesselroade and his colleagues allow developmental researchers to represent the time- varying and time-invariant properties of individual behavior with unprecedented accuracy.
Prominent and eminently rich tools include the latent difference score model (with Jack McArdle), dynamic factor analysis (with Peter Molenaar), the use of latent differential equations for oscillatory processes (with Steve Boker), and the idiographic filter approach (with Peter Molenaar). In combination, these tools have laid the foundation for a paradigm shift in developmental psychology, away from aggregate trends to a full appreciation of the developing individual.
Productivity, Honors, and Awards
John R. Nesselroade has published widely since the mid-1960s. Currently, his oeuvre comprises 120 journal articles, over 50 book chapters, and 7 books and monographs. Many of these have become citation classics and are of seminal importance to the field.
John R. Nesselroade has been honored in many ways: He is a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the American Psychological Society Charter, the American Psychological Association (Divisions 1, 5, 7, and 20), and the Gerontological Society of America. Among other awards, he received the American Psychological Association Division 20’s “Distinguished Contribution Award” in 1994 and its “Master Mentor Award” in 2001, the “Distinguished Career Contribution Award of the Behavioral and Social Sciences Section of the Gerontological Society of America” in 2003 and the “Robert W. Kleemeier Award” in 2006. He was also bestowed the Society of Multivariate Experimental Psychology’s “Raymond B. Cattell Award for Distinguished Multivariate Behavioral Research” in 1972 and the “Saul B. Sells Award for Distinguished Lifetime Achievement in Multivariate Experimental Psychology” in 2003.
A Mentor of Lasting Influence
As indicated by the APA’s “Master Mentor Award,” it is one of John Nesselroade’s great scientific and personal strengths that he has been and continues to be a treasured and highly effective mentor to many pre- and post-doctoral students as well as junior colleagues. His modest and unassuming nature makes him easy to approach, even as a first-year student with little knowledge of statistics. With patience and generosity, he has taught students methodology and found much talent. Through his intellectual and personal presence, he has given students a sense of the continuity and progress in the study of behavior, and has taught them to respect the great insights of earlier generations of scholars, such as Raymond B. Cattell, Karl Pearson, and Don Tucker. Giving this historical depth to the field has allowed younger scholars to put their own contributions into perspective, and too feel both proud and humble about their own work.
John R. Nesselroade’s serene and modest self-confidence and autonomy has given him the freedom to accept autonomy in others, and to engage in longstanding relations of trust and cooperation. Over the years, he has mentored such important innovators as Christopher Hertzog, Alexander von Eye, Jack McArdle, Steve Boker, Nilam Ram, and Sy-Miin Chow. His easy-going character has also enabled long-term collaborations and friendships with his peers in the field such as Paul B. Baltes, Steve Boker, Peter Molenaar, and K. Warner Schaie. Since 1981, he has been a frequent and very welcome guest to Berlin’s Max Planck Institute for Human Development, and has provided invaluable advice to many of its projects.
Biographical Sketch
As described in his autobiographical essay, “Getting there was half the fun” (Nesselroade, 2000), John R. Nesselroade came from a West-Virginian working background without a tradition of higher education. Despite his family’s financial hardships he managed to do well in school (including basketball). After a period in the Marine Corps from 1954–57, which included an electronics course, he returned to civilian life and initially enrolled in an electrical engineering curriculum at Marietta College in Ohio, completing a Bachelor of Science in Mathematics in 1961. During the periods of his undergraduate studies, he was first introduced to psychology (and also to his wife Carolyn to whom he has been married since 1959). Equipped with the best recommendations from his mentor Bruce Blackburn at Marietta College he was offered a research assistantship by Raymond B. Cattell at the University of Illinois, Champaign-Urbana, and began his graduate training in psychology there. Under the tutelage of Cattell he encountered P-technique factor analysis and discovered his interest in the study of intraindividual variability. He was promoted to research associate and completed his Ph.D. in 1967.
Then, K. Warner Schaie offered John Nesselroade an assistant professorship at the West Virginia. It was there that he met Paul B. Baltes, and began a lifelong friendship and decades of fruitful scientific collaboration with him. At the same time he moved firmly into the field of lifespan development and taught his first graduate students. In 1972, he followed Paul Baltes to the Division of Individual and Family Studies at The Pennsylvania State University and collaborated with a wide range of colleagues in the field of developmental psychology. During this 19-year period, he became increasingly interested in issues of aging research and was involved in projects such as the Swedish Adoption/Twin Study of Aging (SATSA) study and the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation Research Network on Successful Aging. In 1988 he set up the Center for Developmental and Health Research Methodology which attracted numerous postdocs interested in rigorous methodological training. In 1991, he decided to leave Penn State and moved to the University of Virginia (UVA) as Hugh Scott Hamilton Professor of Psychology where he remains until today.
Since 1981 he has been a regular visiting scientist at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development and has interacted with many of the scientists there and in the wider Berlin area over the years. In 2004, the UVA joined the International Max Planck Research School on the Life Course (LIFE) which involves graduate students at four sites: Berlin, Ann Arbor, Charlottesville, and Zurich. John Nesselroade is the UVA’s LIFE speaker, and thus young graduate students from all over the world continue to profit from his mentorship and experience.
Summary and Conclusion
In John R Nesselroade’s scientific oeuvre, conceptual and methodological insight and innovation are seamlessly interwoven. His analysis and synthesis of “the warp and the woof of the developmental fabric” have helped scholars in many fields of developmental psychology, gerontology, and beyond to better apprehend the nature of developmental processes, and to measure them with greater precision and scope. John R. Nesselroade has encouraged behavioral scientists to liberate themselves from static interpretations of classical test theory, and to endorse a dynamic world of variability and change. In this world, true scores may change over time, factor structures may differ across people, and residual variances may tell important stories about variability and change. As a life- time pioneer of developmental science, John R. Nesselroade has populated this world with new data-analytic tools and groundbreaking conceptual questions.
John R. Nesselroade has promoted a multivariate dynamic systems approach to the study of behavioral change long before the need to adopt such an approach had become evident to larger factions of the developmental research community. At the same time, Dr. Nesselroade’s writings, lectures, and mentoring have been pivotal in assimilating the great discoveries of Cattell, Thurstone, Thorndike, Tucker, and Pearson for today’s developmental science. His contributions have influenced several generations of scientists, and he continues to be active as an academic teacher and mentor. After many years of exchange with Berlin academia, he is predestined for an honorary doctorate of the Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin. With the doctorate, we honor John R. Nesselroade as an inspiring example of an excellent and deeply humane scientist.
Berlin, January 24, 2010
Ulman Lindenberger
References
Nesselroade, J. R. (1991). The warp and the woof of the developmental fabric. In R. M. Downs, L. S. Liben, & D. S. Palermo (Eds.), Vision of aesthetics, the environment, and development: The legacy of Joachim Wohlwill (pp. 213–240). Erlbaum.
Nesselroade, J. R. (2000). Getting here was half the fun. In J. E. Birren & J. J. F. Schroots (Eds.), A history of geropsychology in autobiography (pp. 211–224). American Psychological Association.