Research supported in part by Office of Economic Opportunity contract No. IED 1-66-12.

In 1979, reports of sexual harassment and accusations of sexual assault at the University of Rhode Island led to the formation of a Sexual Harassment Committee. One of the tasks undertaken by a subgroup of this committee was a survey of the university community to identify actual experiences of and the attitudes of student and staff toward sexual…

Although alcohol is frequently cited by battered wives and the general public as a cause of marital violence, few researchers actually propose a direct causal relationship between alcohol and marital violence. Interviews were conducted to investigate the role of alcohol in the violent marriages of 185 women and the nonviolent marriages of 89…

The purpose of this paper is to explore the role of the preschool teacher in dealing effectively with aggression in the classroom setting. First, assertiveness, aggression and hostility are differentiated and theories of aggression are reviewed. Subsequently, social, home, family, and temperamental factors influencing aggressive behavior of…

The relationships between economic stress on the family and child and parental adjustment were examined for a sample of 199 girls and boys in grades one, four, and seven. These associations were examined separately for families in which both parents were present and in which mothers only were at home. Economic stress was associated with boys'…

Childhood aggression is among the most common and least transitory of childhood dysfunctions. Mother-only families have higher rates of childhood aggression than do intact, father-present homes. The effect of father presence and father absence on the aggressive behavior of family members was examined, along with the behavior patterns in families…

Compared were two samples of 173 and 95 aggressive and normal 5- to 8-year-old boys on measures of verbal and cognitive development. Aggressive boys were significantly lower than normal boys on nonverbal tests but not on verbal tests. The pattern of test performance which distinguished aggressive and normal was consistent with the hypothesis that…

A follow-up study of 135 4-to-12-year-old boys, all of whom displayed symptomatology associated with the hyperkinetic minimal brain dysfunction syndrome, was undertaken in an attempt to specify those factors which predict delinquent behavior. The follow-up interviews queried norm-violating and delinquent behaviors. The Ss' answers were compared…

Aggression, tantrums, and self-injury can function as escape behaviors, allowing children to terminate aversive demand (teaching) situations. In one group of six psychotic children, these behaviors were frequent in demand situations, and rare in nondemand situations. Further, when stimuli correlated with the termination of demands were presented,…

Predicting occurrences of violent behavior in the population of emotionally disturbed criminal offenders was investigated by identifying a pattern of characteristics that significantly discriminates between violent and nonviolent offenders. Subjects were 149 current and former male patients in the Forensics Division of St. Elizabeths Hospital in…

This study examined the patterns of ongoing play manifested over a year's time by 141 three- and four-year-old boys and girls at nursery schools and daycare centers. The relationships between such play and concurrent language usage and the child's patterns of television viewing at home were examined during this period. Parents of the children were…

This 20-page booklet contains very brief, anonymous and anecdotal stories about teachers' success with young children in the early childhood education programs in Dayton, Ohio. The teachers' stories focus on individual children and reveal the scope of classroom problems faced every year. Five anecdotes illustrate problems of children with…

This paper identifies limitations of previous investigations of the relation between televised violence and viewer aggression and suggests a framework for future research concerning the effects of media viewing on child development. It is suggested that typical research is short-term, cross-sectional, and laboratory-based. Factors which mediate…

A study was conducted to explore the relationship between a child's exposure to television content portraying various levels of physical agression, verbal aggression, altruism, and affection, and that child's enactment of these four types of behavior under different conditions of parent-child co-viewing and discussion of the television content.…

This report is an attempt to analyze the aggression which occurs within extended dyadic interchanges of parent and child, husband and wife, or sibling and peers. An argument is made for a "performance" theory of children's noxious behaviors based on the assumption that most children, exposed to modeling and reinforcing contingencies through which…