The purpose of this symposium was to review the trend of personality studies and clinical studies in Japan during the period from 1957 to 1977, and to clarify their characteristics.
Takuma: The ratio of personality studies among all papersread in annual meetings of the Japanese Association of Educational Psychology has beengetting smaller since the second half of 1960. In the field concerned more studies were done on the development of personality of child and dolescent.
Hoshino: It can be said that the period between 1962 and 1967 was a “clinical boom” in the psychological studies, including the original papers and brief reports appearing in “The Journal of Educational Psychology” and the papers read at each annual meeting of the Japanese Association of Educational Psychology during the same period as compared with the period preceeding it. The clinical studies include studies of feeble-minded children, mental disorders, juvenile delinquents and so on, by means of questionnaires, non-verbal tests, especially projective techniques such as Rorschach, TAT, Picture-Frustration Studies and others as well as studies on counseling and psychotherapy.
These trends, however, turned into somewhat fewer clinical studies during the eriodfrom 1968 to 1973 probably due to the radical social movement on university campuses and clinical settings.
After 1972 it was very rare to find a pure original clinical study in the journal, and the more papers were read at the annual meeting of J.A.E.P. about school-phobia, child-autism, psychotherapy the less papers on testings (including projective techniques) became.
Sugiyama: Many studies on the psychological function and pathology of anxiety from the experimental and clinico-educational standpoints have been developed during the past twenty years in Japan.Various anxiety scales have been standardized for Japanese and agreat deal of clinical research has also been carried out in order to reduce anxiety.
Kikuchi: After several value studies in educational psychology, mainly those of discussants. were reviewed, and some necessary researches were suggested: i.e. studies on value changes, examination on value concepts in personality theory and studies of emic values.
Uchisugawa: There are few educational and psychological articles concerned with speech handicapped children except stuttering and communication disorders due to feeble-minded ness.
During the following ten years (1968-78), the variety and frequency of articles have increased year by year. However, in respect to the content of articles showing the up-to-date researches, the following two features have been closed up: the speech behavior of autistic children and the speech modification of the heavy feeble-minded from the viewpoint of operant conditioning.
Ito: For Japanese psychologists the expectation of the personality-researchers in foreign countries is not the follow-up studies of western psychological theories, but just our Japanese researchers' original studies based on the eastern psychology, I believe.Japanese psycholo gists should consider this point, and get to work on Japanese theory,of personality from the viewpoint of Buddhism thoughts.
