Psychologist Robert Sears; Was Subject, Then Study’s Director

Psychologist Robert R. Sears, who was studied as a gifted child and who grew up to guide the continuation of the same study, has died, it was learned Friday.

Sears was 80 and died Monday at his home in Menlo Park, said a spokesman for Stanford University, where he was professor emeritus.

Sears was chairman of Stanford’s psychology department from 1953 until 1961. He took over one of the longest-running studies in psychological history in 1956, when Lewis Terman, its original director and founding professor, died.

Study Began in 1921

Sears had been one of the 1,500 children with high IQ scores selected by Terman for the study, which began in 1921. It was intended to see whether bright children were prone to social maladjustment or mental or physical illness as they grew up.

In 1986 Sears said researchers had found that the “Terman kids” did better than average in some ways--making more money, for example--but did not necessarily have better marriages.

“Their family lives have been no better than the general population,” he wrote. “Brains don’t guarantee some kinds of outcomes in life.”

The study will go on “until the last person dies,” Sears said then.

Sears received his undergraduate degree from Stanford and, in 1932, a doctorate from Yale University. Before joining the Stanford faculty he taught at Yale, Harvard and the universities of Illinois and Iowa.

Studied Preschool Children

He had been part of the Child Welfare Research Station at Iowa, where he studied preschool children and the effects on them of home discipline. He found that children who were punished most severely for aggression showed the fewest outward signs of it but were prone to express it in play situations.

Children of permissive parents also showed few outward signs of aggression. The most aggressive of the study group were those who were not subjected to either permissiveness or excessive discipline.

Sears, a past president of the American Psychological Assn., is survived by his wife, Pauline; a son; a daughter, and several grandchildren.