Four current approaches to understanding temperament are discussed. Theorists representing four postions--Goldsmith, Buss and Plomin, Rothbart, and Thomas and Chess--outline their views by reponding to six common questions. Commentaries highlighting differences and similarities between the positions are offered by Hinde and McCall. (Author/BN)

Spontaneous expressive control of negative emotion was examined in two studies of children three- to nine-years-old using an experimental "disappointing" situation. Study 1 examined facial expressions, verbalizations, and spontaneous references to emotional expression control. Study 2 examined the expressive behavior of 20 preschool girls in the…

Children's conflicts with one another during free play were observed to determine the relation between the child's rate of conflict participation and his or her rate of aggressive behavior during conflict episodes and between these variables and the degree to which the child was liked or disliked by peers. (Author/SO)

Type A behaviors were observed in a group of 48 preschool children in different free-play and competitive situations. Results are consistent with other findings on type A behavior in preschool children and suggest that the behavioral dimensions of type A (competitiveness and impatience-aggression) may emerge as early as the preschool years,…

Groups of 30 children (kindergarten, second, fourth, and sixth grades) were shown videotapes of four types of conversations between two stimulus children. In each videotape, one child began conversation, and other child responded, each of them making either a high- or low-intimate self-disclosure. Findings indicated that norm of reciprocity…

The sustained altruism of volunteers at a telephone crisis-counseling agency was examined. The rate of sustained altruism of normative volunteers in highly cohesive training groups was increased to a level comparable to that of autonomous volunteers, while the altruism of autonomous volunteers was not affected by the training group experience.…

A study involving 56 boys and 64 girls ranging in age from 9 to 11 years, approximately, found that defensiveness was significantly and positively correlated with impulsivity among boys, both directly and indirectly. Defensiveness did not contribute to impulsivity for girls either directly or indirectly, although test anxiety did correlate with…

Three experiments investigated (1) whether developmental differences in the information integration rule apply to ulterior motive information; (2) whether such developmental differences are limited to situations involving parental reward; and (3) how related age differences among children can best be explained. (RH)

Involving second, fourth, sixth, eighth, and tenth graders and undergraduates, three experiments evaluated the prediction that representations of knowledge of the weeks and months of the year develop from a verbal-list stage to a stage at which image representations are present. Results are interpreted as supporting the two-stage model and appear…

To examine children's comprehension monitoring (CM) ability more comprehensively, this study treated CM as a complex phenomenon involving multidimensional evaluation and regulation procedures and used several different measures to assess them. Results highlight the sensitivity of different measures and the importance of treating CM as a…

A total of 61 children from first through sixth grades participated in four balance-scale and four inclined-plane problem types in a study testing for invariance of subject classifications as rule-users across problems whose products differed but whose type did not. Results indicated that many children's classifications differed across…

A developmental progression in 6-, 8-, and 10-year-old children's use of strategies for gathering information was revealed in a study involving partial recall, total recall, and similarity/difference judgments. When subjects chose stimuli for exposure from an array, older children showed more ability to match strategy to task demands. Strategy…

Autistic children's direction of hemispheric asymmetry in response to linguistic stimuli differed significantly from that of normal subjects, showing reversed but not necessarily reduced patterns. Autistic children with more advanced language abilities were more likely to exhibit a normal direction of hemispheric asymmetry. Implications are…

Findings from studies exploring role of joint attentional focus in children's acquisition of language indicated that language of 24 mothers and their 15- to 21-month-olds inside episodes of joint attentional focus involved more utterances, shorter sentences, more comments, and longer conversations than outside of episodes. Also, object references…

Reveals that different aspects of the environment differentially contributed to variability in communication performance of one-year-old infants. Findings support the environmental specificity hypothesis and underline the need to consider physical environmental parameters when investigating environmental influences. (Author/RH)