Marian Radke-Yarrow

She died of leukemia at her home in Bethesda, Maryland, aged 89. She was predeceased by her husband, psychologist Leon Yarrow, in 1982. They had one son.

Her 1952 book, They Learn What They Live: Prejudice in Young Children, which she co-wrote with Helen G. Trager, was cited in the Brown v. Board of Education desegregation case. As part of the Philadelphia Early Childhood Project, Radke-Yarrow and Trager interviewed 250 Philadelphia public school students between the ages of five and eight, and they looked at concepts like self-hatred as root causes of anti-Semitism and racism. She became one of few women who headed a laboratory at NIH, leading the developmental psychology laboratory at the NIMH from 1974 to 1995.

Radke-Yarrow completed undergraduate work in 1939 at University of Wisconsin–Madison, where her professors included Harry Harlow. A faculty member named Hulsey Cason encouraged her to go to graduate school and helped her to identify child development as a specialization. She then earned a doctorate in psychology from the University of Minnesota in 1944. She taught at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Queens College and the University of Denver early in her career. The University of Minnesota later awarded her an "Outstanding Achievement Award" in 1982.

Marian Radke-Yarrow (March 2, 1918 – May 19, 2007) was an American child psychologist known for studying topics such as prejudice, altruism, and depression in children. She worked in academia in the early years after completing graduate school, and then she became a National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) researcher who observed child behavior and parent-child interactions.