Two naming tasks were simultaneously presented to either one visual field/hemisphere combination or were divided between visual fields/hemispheres. Hypotheses that bilateral presentation would improve performance by insulating conflicting tasks from mutual interference and that there would be a developmental shift in the bilateral advantage was…

Young and older nursery school children were taken to three locations in their school and asked to point to five targets on the school grounds. Older children were more accurate than younger children, but children's spatial representations were relatively nonintegrated at both age levels. Consistent sex differences in favor of males were found.…

Evaluated the effects of stimulus complexity and rule usage on a visual perspective-taking task administered to preschoolers, first, third, and fifth graders, and adults. Errors decreased with age, and more errors occurred with the more complex visual arrays. Very young children could not reliably match a photograph to a physical array. (Author/RH)

The ability of 96 children (five, eight, and 12 years old) to nominate strategic social action that would alter a peer's ongoing emotional state was examined. Nominated strategies were appropriate to the emotional state to be altered; a shift with age from material intervention strategies to strategies involving verbal intervention or helping was…

Acquiring the norm of altruism is conceived as a three-step process involving presocialization, awareness that others value altruistic behavior, and internalization of the norm. The present studies investigated how first-, second-, and third-grade children attain the second step. Attainment, occurring around second grade, was a function of…

Second-, third-, and fourth-grade children judged 12 covariation problems and were asked to identify the direction of the relationship between event states. With increasing age, children were more likely to make judgments based on pictured event-state combinations. Second graders spontaneously used a strategy involving covariation judgments. First…

Young children and adolescents regarded the crossing of stereotyped gender boundaries as more wrong and expressed a greater personal commitment to sex-role regularity than did children in middle childhood. Although young children and adolescents viewed gender differentiations as an aspect of psychological-personal identity, their conceptions of…

Social play emerged earlier than social pretend play with a similar structure; the incidence of social pretend play increased with age. Four strategies for integrating pretense into social play were isolated; among them, verbal recruitment and "join" were found to be more effective than imitation or nonverbal recruitment. (Author/RH)

Harter's Perceived Competence Scale for Children was administered to 714 Taiwanese fifth graders; results were compared with those from American samples. Cultural differences were found. Results among Chinese replicate the measures' factorial validity and, across the two groups, indicate a high correlation between perceived cognitive competence…

Presents evidence that the manual actions of infants as young as nine weeks of age may occur in relation to their facial expression, gaze direction, and vocalization. Results are discussed in terms of their implications for the ontogeny of nonverbal communicative gestures. (Author/RH)

Findings indicated that attachment-related affect may reflect an affect continuum that underlies certain mother- and stranger-directed behaviors in the Strange Situation. However, not all aspects of reunion behavior can be predicted by prior separation reactions. (Author/RH)

Infants whose mothers were supportive of their autonomy displayed greater task-oriented persistence and competence during play than did infants of more controlling mothers; securely attached and avoidant infants tended to exhibit greater persistence at tasks than anxious-ambivalent babies, and ambivalent babies were the most negative in affect.…

Three hypotheses were investigated among 121 maltreating and adequate mother/child dyads: that (1) there would be qualitative differences in the supportiveness of mothers' networks; (2) differences would be related to differences in child attachment to mother; and (3) differences in mothers' approaches to relationships might have influenced their…

Early temperament was assessed at ages six, 13, and 24 months via mother ratings on age-appropriate versions of the Infant Characteristics Questionnaire (ICQ). Home observations of mother-toddler interactions at age 24 months were made, and behavior sequence variables were analyzed. The 24-month form of the ICQ was developed in this study.…

Contrasts effects of three modes of mother/child interaction on children's subsequent compliance with maternal directives. Subjects were 39 children from lower-middle-class families, ranging in age from approximately three to four-and-a-half. Responsive play and noninteractive conditions produced higher levels of compliance than the untrained free…