A study of early differentiation of relatedness in relationship development among college students KAZUHIDE YAMANAKA (Nagoya University)The purpose of this study was to investigate early differentiation of relatedness in the development of interpersonal relationships among college students. Forty-three male and fifty-one female freshmen completed questionnaires regarding their relationship with a same-sex individual with whom they had just met. They were surveyed longitudinally at weeks 1, 2, 4, and 11 of their first term at the university. Major findings were as follows : (1) Ratings of relatonship intimacy at week 2 predicted intimacy level at week 11, while ratings at week 1 did not. The results suggest early differentiation in relationship development. (2) Ratings of friendship intimacy at week 2 was correlated with dyadic behavior pattern, in which there were some interesting sex differences. With female subjects, friendship intimacy ratings were correlated with all dyadic behaviors for the past two weeks. On the contrary, with male subjects, ratings were highly correlated with companionship behavior while they were low with affection behavior for the past week.

The focus of this article is to provide an over view of research trends in social psychology studies within the field of educational psychology published between July 2016 and June 2017, as well as to discuss some of the topics on school education. In the first part of the paper, social psychology studies presented at the 59th annual meeting of the Japanese Association of Educational Psychology held in 2017 are reviewed. Frequent research themes were as follows: interactive learning, teacher＇s behavior toward students, and social skills. In addition, the articles published in The Japanese Journal of Educational Psychology during the aforementioned period are reviewed. In the second part of the paper, the topics focusing on interactive learning within classroom and teacher education are discussed from a social psychological perspective. The main points of contention are as follows: (a) group structure and interactive learning within the classroom, (b) friendship and interactive learning within the classroom, and (c) reflective and collaborative practices in the field of teacher education.

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