ANN ARBOR—L. Rowell Huesmann has been appointed director of the University of Michigan Institute for Social Research Center for Group Dynamics, effective Sept. 1, 2006.

A psychologist with deep roots at Michigan, Huesmann is internationally known for his work on the causes of aggressive behavior, including the long-term effects of viewing media violence.

Named the Amos N. Tversky Collegiate professor of communication studies and psychology at U-M last spring, Huesmann joined ISR in 1992 as a senior research scientist and director of the Aggression Research Program at the Research Center for Group Dynamics. He received a Bachelor of Science degree in psychology and mathematics from U-M in 1964, a Master of Science in psychology from Carnegie Institute of Technology in 1967 and a doctorate in systems and communications science and psychology from Carnegie-Mellon University in 1969.

At Michigan, Huesmann has focused on longitudinal studies following children as they grow up and investigating what causes some of them to become violent. According to Huesmann, the results from his Oak Park Longitudinal Study spanning 15 years and his Columbia County Longitudinal Study spanning 40 years clearly show that the amount of violence children watch on television when they are young predicts how violently they will behave in adulthood. These effects are significant even when the researchers statistically control for childhood aggressiveness, social class, intelligence, and parenting practices.

The co-author of three books on violence and aggression and of numerous articles, Huesmann received the 2005 Award for Distinguished Lifetime Contributions to Media Psychology from the American Psychological Association. Well known for his international collaborations, he is the current editor of Aggressive Behavior, a member of the LIFE program at the Max Planck Institute and the U-M, and a past-president of the International Society for Research on Aggression. He has been a Fulbright Fellow, a Deutscher Akademischer Austauschdiest Fellow, a James McKeen Cattel Fellow and is a Life Member of Clare Hall College at Cambridge University. He is also a fellow of the Association for Psychological Science and the American Psychological Association.

Established in 1948, the Institute for Social Research (ISR) is among the world’s oldest survey research organizations, and a world leader in the development and application of social science methodology. ISR conducts some of the most widely-cited studies in the nation, including the Survey of Consumer Attitudes, the National Election Studies, the Monitoring the Future Study, the Panel Study of Income Dynamics, the Health and Retirement Study, and the National Survey of Black Americans. ISR researchers also collaborate with social scientists in more than 60 nations on the World Values Surveys and other projects, and the Institute has established formal ties with universities in Poland, China, and South Africa. ISR is also home to the Inter-University Consortium for Political and Social Research (ICPSR), the world’s largest computerized social science data archive. Visit the ISR Web site at www.isr.umich.edu for more information.

Institute for Social ResearchL. Rowell Huesmann