ABSTRACT
This is not a chapter about aggression at Iowa. Rather, it is an account of a series of laboratory studies on aggression conducted by my students and me while I was a faculty member at the University of Iowa. For the past 35 years my research and scholarship have been concerned primarily with gaining an understanding of how individuals learn to be aggressive. The studies which have gained most prominence have been field studies, primarily two large-scale longitudinal investigations. One of these comprised 875 eight-year-old subjects from a semi-rural area in New York State who have been followed for 22 years to date (Eron, Walder, & Lefkowitz, 1971; Huesmann, Eron, Lefkowitz, & Walder, 1984; Lefkowitz, Eron, Walder, & Huesmann, 1977). The other is a 3-year longitudinal study of 700 subjects ages 6 and 8, living in a Chicago suburb. They were followed for 3 years (Eron, Huesmann, Brice, Fischer, & Mermelstein, 1983). The latter study has been replicated in four other countries: Australia, Finland, Israel, and Poland (Huesmann & Eron, 1986). This research has yielded important insights into the learning conditions for aggression. However, equally important, although perhaps not as well known, is a series of laboratory studies done while I was on the faculty at the University of Iowa. This 100th anniversary volume affords me an opportunity to summarize these studies in one chapter, to indicate their importance in shaping an understanding of how aggressive behavior can develop as a problem-solving strategy in children, and to acknowledge the contributions of my former students, a very bright, competent, and dedicated group of young persons with whom I had the privilege of working while at Iowa. The researches were carried out primarily as doctoral dissertations and masters’ theses. Unfortunately, with a few exceptions, they have largely remained unpublished, although I have often referred to the findings in my own writing.
