Current Trends in Studies of Behavioral Development in Japan

Abstract

Japanese have had strong concern on child rearing and socialization since ancient years. Earlier publications on those topics date back to around 1400 AD. But scientific studies of behavior development belong to modern years, and it was after 1950 that the studies of psychological development have become prominent. Especially during the last 20 years, the number of studies of behavior development reported at psychology conventions increased rapidly, and during the period of 1976-1980, the behavior development studies account for more than one fifth of all psychology papers. Among them, the number of studies of personality development is the largest, followed by that of studies of cognitive development. Works on language development are also increasing in recent years, gaining their share in terms of percentage against the total number of behavior development studies. The method of research most frequently used is experimental, accounting for more than half of reported studies.

Some research topics which are attracting attention are exemplified by recently conducted studies, which include language acquisition, "Kanji" as cognitive tool, mother-child interaction and cross-cultural studies.

Get full access to this article

View all access options for this article.

References

Azuma, H. , K. Kashiwagi and R. Hess , 1981. Child's cognitive development and mother's attitude and behavior style. (Text in Japanese; a monograph in English is forthcoming.) Tokyo: University of Tokyo Press .

Azuma, H. , Y. Nakazawa and N. Yamawaki , 1981. How the returnee children feel about Japanese schools. Faculty of education proceedings. Tokyo: University of Tokyo . pp. 159-172.

Caudill and Weinstein , 1969. Maternal care and infant behavior in Japan and America . Psychiatry 32, 12-43 .

Conroy, M. , R.D. Hess , H. Azuma and K. Kashiwagi , 1980. Maternal strategies for regulating children's behavior in Japanese and American families . Journal of Cross-Cultural Psychology 2(2), June.

Fujinaga, T. , 1980. 'Development'. In: T. Hidano (ed.), Trends in contemporary psychology. Tokyo: Kawashima-Shoten .

Hatano, G. and K. Kuhara , 1981. Kanji helps Japanese people infer meaning of unfamiliar word. LCHC Newsletter, U.C.S.D.

Hatano, G. et al., 1980. Paper presented at the JPA Annual Convention .

Hatano, G. et al., 1981. Paper presented at the JPA Annual Convention .

Hatta, T. , 1979. Hemisphere asymmetries for physical and semantic congruency matching of visually presented Kanji stimuli . Japanese Journal of Psychology 50, 273-278 .

10.

Higa, M. , 1980. 'The linguistic environments of bilinguals'. In: Bilingualism in Japan. Tsukuba: Tsukuba University .

11.

Kosawa, Yorio, 1980. The influentiability of the infant upon the early development of mother-child relationships. Unpublished doctoral dissertation. Tokyo: University of Tokyo.

12.

Matsubara, T. , 1980. 'Adjustment of returnees'. In: Bilingualism in Japan. Tsukuba: Tsukuba University .

13.

Nomura, Y. , 1978. The information processing of Chinese characters . Japanese Journal of Psychology 49, 190-197 .

14.

Oka, N. , T. Mori and S. Kakigi , 1979. Learning of reading Kanji and Kana moji in young children . Japanese Journal of Psychology 50, 49-52 .

15.

Steinberg, D.D. and N. Oka , 1978. Learning to read Kanji is easier than learning individual Kana . Japanese Journal of Psychology 49, 15-21 .

16.

Usui, H. , K. Miyake and N. Tajima , 1980. Paper presented at the 1980 Convention of JAEP .

17.

Yamazumi, M. and K. Nakae , (eds.), 1976. Kosodate no sho, vols. 1-3. (Books on child rearing.) Tokyo: Heibon-sha .