Used data from a longitudinal study of 16-year-old girls to test predictions about psychosocial factors in the onset of menarche. Found that family conflict and father's absence in childhood predicted an earlier age of menarche, and these factors in combination with weight showed some evidence of an additive influence on menarche. (Author/GLR)

Used a longitudinal sibling research design and a large, nationally representative sample of 15- to 22-year-old siblings to study shared and unshared environmental influences on delinquency. Although no unshared family environmental influences were found for sisters and mixed-sex siblings, they may have existed for brothers. Data suggested…

Examined differential treatment of siblings in families with a disabled child and other families. Assessed connections between differential treatment, both children's adjustment, and sibling relationships. Results revealed greater levels of differential treatment in families with disabled children but no context differences in the correlations…

Examined the relationships between parental behaviors and sibling relationships. Only one difference emerged between rates of maternal and paternal behavior toward children. Paternal behavior accounted for unique variance in sibling relationship quality more often than maternal behavior did. (Author/GLR)

Examined potential differences in psychological correlates between mothers with high and low levels of separation anxiety when their children were 8 months, 3.5 years, and 6 years of age. Mothers with extremely high levels of anxiety about short-term separation from their six year olds tended to have higher levels of depressive symptomatology.…

Examined differences in perceptions of relationships in preadolescence, early adolescence, midadolescence, and late adolescence. Findings were largely consistent with seven propositions derived from major theories of the developmental courses of personal relationships. Discussion centers around the role that various relationships are perceived as…

Causes of preschoolers' anger, and preschoolers' reactions to anger, were studied. Measures of social competence and popularity were obtained. Sex, age, and context differences in coping strategies were found. Socially competent and popular children coped with anger in relatively direct and active ways that minimized conflict and damage to social…

Investigated preschool, second, and fifth grade children's definitions of, moral standards for, and internal evaluative reactions to lies and truthful statements. Older children correctly identified almost all statements, whereas preschoolers correctly identified about 70 percent. Lies were rated as worse than truthful statements by all age…

Examined children's ability to describe, understand the causes of, and realize the value of three types of pain. Preschoolers, elementary school students, and college students were interviewed using open-ended questions. Although older children had more complex and precise understandings of pain, this pattern differed according to the type of pain…

Examined empathy and conservation abilities of nonretarded children with autism and compared their performance to that of normally developing children. Autistic children performed surprising well, but not as well as normal children. There was a closer association between cognitive abilities and affective understanding among the autistic children…

Spontaneous speech samples collected from six autistic and Down's Syndrome children were analyzed for language referring to various psychological states. Autistic children were comparable to Down's Syndrome controls in their talk about desire, perception, and emotion. However, they used less language to call for attention and to refer to cognitive…

Examined four and seven year olds' recall of standard features of a repeated event as opposed to features that deviated from that event. Younger children had more difficulty determining which features occurred in the events. Concludes that younger children organize their memory for general and specific event episodes differently than older…

Investigated the manner in which the temporal order and variability of events influence three and seven year olds' event representation. Children participated in three events: a logical-invariant, a logical-variable, and an arbitrary-invariant event. Both the structure of the event and children's representational capabilities influenced children's…

Examined qualitative developmental change in the use of category organization between ages 8 and 10 and the supportive functions of task environment and category knowledge in this development. Results support the hypothesis that most 10 year olds are capable of strategically activating category knowledge in appropriate task environments when items…

Investigated the possibility that previous reports of a relation between locomotor status and stage-4 object permanence performance could be generalized to performance on an object localization task. Findings suggest that the effects of locomotor experience on infants' search performance are quite specific and mediated by a variety of factors that…