Radke-Yarrow, Marian J. 1918-2007 (Marian Jeanette Radke-Yarrow)

OBITUARY NOTICE—

See index for CA sketch: Born March 2, 1918, in Horicon, WI; died of leukemia, May 19, 2007, in Bethesda, MD. Psychologist, educator, and author. Radke-Yarrow was former chief of the developmental psychology laboratory at the National Institute of Mental Health. She was a 1939 graduate of the University of Wisconsin who then received her Ph.D. from the University of Minnesota in 1944. During her early career, Radke-Yarrow pursued an academic career. She taught at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Queens College, and the University of Denver before joining the National Institute of Mental Health, where she worked from 1974 until her 1995 retirement. A respected child psychologist and researcher, she studied the development of social behavior in children as young as one year old, including cases involving early depression and racial prejudice. One of her studies, carried out in the 1980s, was on altruism in children, which she learned could occur in infants as young as twelve months. On the other side of the coin, her 1950s research showed that undesirable behavior such as prejudice was learned by children as young as five years old and was clearly picked up from adults who expressed racist beliefs. This went against commonly held attitudes at the time, and Radke-Yarrow's work was cited in the U.S. Supreme Court's Brown v. Board of Education decision. The psychologist also studied how young children could become depressed if their parents were also depressed. Radke-Yarrow found, however, that when children were able to find positive role models outside their immediate families they could still thrive. Radke-Yarrow was the author of The Relation of Parental Authority to Children's Behaviorand Attitudes (1946), and cowrote They Learn What They Live: Prejudice in Young Children (1952), Development of Antisocial and Prosocial Behavior: Research, Theories, and Issues (1986), and Children of Depressed Mothers: From Early Childhood to Maturity (1998), among other works.

OBITUARIES AND OTHER SOURCES:

PERIODICALS

New York Times, May 23, 2007, p. A21.

Washington Post, May 22, 2007, p. B7.