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'''{{FULLPAGENAME}}''', {{BS}}, {{MS}}, {{PhD}}, ({{LifeData|1934-01-21}}), is an American developmental psychologist, whose research focused on the origins of violence, particularly as it relates to a lack of mother-child bonding.<ref name=WP>{{URLwikipedia|James_W._Prescott|James W. Prescott|2022-11-02}}</ref>
Prescott was a health scientist administrator at the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (NICHD), one of the Institutes of the US [[National Institutes of Health]] (NIH) from 1966 to 1980. He created and directed the Developmental Behavioral Biology Program at the NICHD where he initiated NICHD-supported research programs to study the relationship between mother-child bonding and the development of social abilities in adult life. Inspired by Harry Harlow's famous experiments on rhesus monkeys, which established a link between neurotic behavior and isolation from a care-giving mother, Prescott further proposed that a key component to development comes from the somesthetic processes (body touch) and vestibular-cerebellar processes (body movement) induced by mother-child interactions, and that deprivation of this stimulation causes brain abnormalities. By analogy to the neurotic behavior in monkeys, he suggested that these developmental abnormalities are a major cause of adult violence amongst humans.<ref name=WP/>