A child abuse analog was created by placing an adult in a frustrating teaching situation with a child. Failure was programed regardless of the adult's efforts. Intensity of responses to the child's signals of success and failure, particularly responses to signals of failure, increased without the adult's awareness. (Author/DB)

Examined changes in low-accepted children's behavior and peer acceptance resulting from a social learning approach to social skill training. Three social skills were taught: asking questions, leading, and offering peer support. Trained children performed significantly better at follow-up than did control children. Results generalized to classroom…

National Health Survey data of 12- to 17-year-olds were used to determine links between dating behavior and level of sexual maturation as well as age. Analyses indicated that individual levels of sexual maturation add very little to the explained variance in dating after age has been taken into account. (Author/DB)

Observation indicated that children most frequently represent objects by performing actions appropriate to the represented objects. With increasing age, children represent objects without using functional actions and with objects bearing little physical similarity to the represented objects. (Author/DB)

One- and two-month-old infants were shown schematic drawings of a human face with features arranged (1) naturally, (2) symmetrically but scrambled, and (3) asymmetrically and scrambled. Two-month-olds discriminated among all arangements and preferred the natural arrangement; one-month-olds showed no discrimination or preference. (Author/DB)

Investigated three-month-olds' abilities to discriminate and recognize smiling and frowning expressions of mothers and strangers. Discrimination and recognition occurred regardless of the adult who was involved; however, more infants discriminated the mothers' expressions than the strangers', and boys looked at their mothers' faces longer than did…

Describes the relationship between neonatal crying and anthropometric indices of fetal growth. No differences were found between cry features of underweight and overweight infants; both groups required more stimulation than average weight infants to elicit crying. It is suggested that certain cry features may reflect the risk status of neonates…

Presents longitudinal data regarding detrimental effects through 36 months of age on intellectual, behavioral, and social-interactional development in a nonsupportive caregiving environment, and the continuing amelioration of those effects in a supportive caregiving environment. Suggests that mothers of fetally malnourished infants may have had…

Investigated the relationship between anthropometric indices and behavioral development during the first two years of life in rural Guatemala. Body length and weight most strongly correlated with behavioral development. When length and weight were controlled statistically, variance in behavioral development was accounted for. (Author/DB)

Two studies of visual recognition memory in infants demonstrated 9-month-olds had greater retention ability than 6-month-olds. Six-month-old infants had difficulty recognizing stimuli over short delays, even when distractors were absent. Results are discussed in terms of memory changes possibly occurring at 9 months. (Author/DB)

Investigated the relationship of two memory components involved in the retrieval of information from long-term memory--one process-oriented and one structure-oriented-- to variability associated with age and ability differences. Striking developmental differences obtained for retrieval efficiency were highly related to scores on tests of ability,…

The visual short-term cued recall memory of 8-, 12-, and 16-month-olds was assessed in two experiments using an operant indirect delayed-reaction procedure. In each experiment, 12- and 16-month olds performed better than chance, whereas 8-month-old infants did not. (Author/DB)

First- and sixth-grade students, as well as college- age students, were examined with a procedure that generates separate measures for storage and retrieval components of the probability of correct recall. While recall performance was found to improve with each advancing grade level, it was found that storage and retrieval processes develop at…

Sixty 9-year-old Highland Mayan children whose schooling varied from kindergarten level to third grade were given tests of scene recognition, scene reconstruction, sentence recognition, and story recall. Results demonstrate that in this sample the relationship between schooling and memory test performance is not simply due to family background…

Nine experimental conditions were partitioned into three experimental designs. A total of 576 children, drawn in equal numbers from kindergarten, second, fourth and sixth grades, memorized a 32-pair list of common nouns by the study-test recognition procedure. Among the results, in the storage phase of task performance an increasing superiority of…