Jerome L. Singer



Professor Emeritus (Ph.D., 1950, University of Pennsylvania)

Learning Through Play Website,
Family Television Research and Consultation Center

Conscious experience as reflected in an ongoing stream of thought, fantasies, and daydreams, interior monologues, and the more general issues of imagination, emotion, and nocturnal dreaming are features of the human personality to which my research has been devoted. The research I direct strives to move beyond clinical anecdote and reports of individual introspection towards development of systematic, rigorous, replicable methodologies that can address these seemingly evanescent characteristics of human behavior. Studies developed in this area range from psychometric, normative questionnaire approaches through laboratory procedures using signal detection methods and psychophysiological measurement and to studies of the determinants of the content and structure of ongoing thought following stress or other forms of affective arousal. Questions concerning the early childhood origins of adult imagination have led to studies of children's play and to the effects of television-viewing or family communication styles on children's cognition, emotions, and aggressive behavior. The role of imagery processes in various forms of psychotherapy, in overcoming creative blocks, and in the relationship of personality patterns such as repression to emotional arousal and physical health have also been explored.

Singer, D., & Singer, J. L. (Eds.) (2001). Handbook of children and the media. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publishing Co.

Singer, J. L. (1998). Daydreams, the stream of consciousness and self-representations. In R. Bornstein & J. M. Masling (Eds.), Empirical research on the psychoanalytic unconscious (pp. 141 - 186). Washington, D.C.: American Psychological Association.

Rosen, C. S., Schwebel, D. C., & Singer, J. L. (1997). Preschoolers' attributions of mental states in pretense. Child Development, 66, 1133 - 1142.

Singer, J. L., & Bonanno, G. A. (1990). Personality and private experience: Individual differences in consciousness and in attention to subjective phenomena. In L. Pervin, (Ed.), Handbook of personality. New York: Guilford Press.

Singer, D. G., & Singer, J. L. (1990). The house of make-believe: Children's play and the developing imagination. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.