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MINNESOTA SYMPOSIA ON CHILD PSYCHOLOGY, VOLUME 5 This page intentionally left blank MINNESOTA SYMPOSIA ON CHILD PSYCHOLOGY Volume 5 JOHN P. HILL, EDITOR THE UNIVERSITY OF MINNESOTA PRESS • MINNEAPOLIS © Copyright 1971 by the University of Minnesota. All rights reserved. Printed in the United States of America at the Lund Press, Minneapolis Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 67-30520 ISBN 0-8166-0614-5 PUBLISHED IN GREAT BRITAIN, INDIA, AND PAKISTAN BY THE OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS, LONDON, BOMBAY, AND KARACHI, AND IN CANADA BY THE COPP CLARK PUBLISHING CO. LIMITED, TORONTO Preface THE PAPERS in this volume are based upon the 1970 Minnesota Symposium on Child Psychology, the fifth in the series which began in 1966. With the publication of this book, twenty-nine papers from fortyfive contributors representing twenty-two universities, federal research agencies, and private research institutes will have been made available to readers in child psychology and related fields. Departments of anthropology, education, human development, pediatrics, psychiatry, psychology, social relations, and sociology, and institutes and laboratories of child psychology, child development, human development, and human learning have been represented. In fourteen programs of research, populations of children have been studied who are other than white, urban, American, and living in intact families: in five, various social classes are contrasted; in three, institutionalized children are the subjects of study; in five, the special population consists of emotionally disturbed or mentally retarded children; in two, cross-national comparisons are involved; and, in three, the subjects are nonhuman offspring and their parents. Seven of the twenty-nine papers span two or more periods of the life cycle; five focus upon infancy; five upon early childhood; eight upon middle childhood; and two each on adolescence and adulthood. When it comes to methodology, three crosscutting variables apply: longitudinal versus cross-sectional, experimental versus differential, and field versus laboratory. Twelve of the programs are longitudinal; fifteen are experimental; and nine consist in field studies. Substantive trends are more difficult to characterize. With some double and a rare triple classification or two permitted, seven of the papers V MINNESOTA SYMPOSIA ON CHILD PSYCHOLOGY have featured perceptual development and eight cognitive development; twelve have dealt with problems of learning, early experience, and behavior modification; and eighteen are classifiable within the broad domain of personality, social influence, and social development. In six of the twenty-nine papers research is reported which is either applied or has immediate practical applications. But this does not tell much of the story. Original, programmatic work in the social and personality development areas has seemed to be increasingly difficult to locate over this five-year period; with the exception of work on behavior modification, the same generalization would hold for the kind of work on children's learning which brought behavior theory and the developmental psychology establishment together for the first time in the 1950's. Commensurately, programmatic work in perceptual and cognitive development is more easily located. Whatever the substantive trends, a look backward over the twentynine articles is testimony to the heterogeneity and heterodoxy that has been claimed for child psychology in these prefatory remarks over the years. Good programmatic research is going on in many areas of inquiry, and it is being carried out in a variety of ways with many different populations of children. Our invitational policy has been to represent this diversity within the important constraint that an able investigator be at that point in