A group of 91 fifth and sixth graders kept diaries of liked and disliked peer behaviors and important peer activities for a week. Another group of 81 fifth and sixth graders rated the importance and prevalence of each activity and indicated most liked and disliked positive and negative behaviors. Three main functions were evident. (RH)

Students with larger number of classroom friends at time of entering school had more favorable perceptions of school. Children who maintained their friendships increasingly liked school as year progressed. Making new friends was associated with school performance gains. Early peer rejection forecasted less favorable perceptions of school, higher…

Examined the hypotheses that intimacy of friendship is more integral to socioemotional adjustment during adolescence than during preadolescence, and that competence in close relationship skills is more important during adolescence than preadolescence. Findings suggest the importance of the ability to establish close friendships increases during…

Results give considerable support to the hypothesis that most of the relation between marital conflict and adolescent adjustment problems can be explained by perturbations in the parent-child relationship. Results also suggest that mediational patterns are different for intact and divorced families, and that the model used best fits the context of…

Children as young as eight years of age can discriminate between affect-eliciting statements, differentially rate up to five concurrent emotional responses, and predict response patterns similar to those predicted by adults. During adolescence, there are sex differences in the prediction of secondary emotions. (RH)

Blood pressure and heart rate responses during serial subtraction, mirror image tracing, and isometric exercise tasks were longitudinally reliable for all measures except heart rate responses during isometric exercise. Systolic blood pressure responses to all tasks increased with age for boys, but not for girls. (RH)

Measures of likability, knowledge of emotion, prosocial and aggressive behavior, peer competence, and expressed emotions of happiness and anger of 65 subjects between 33 and 56 months of age supported the notion of early development of stable peer reputations and the hypothesized centrality of emotion-related predictors of likability. (RH)

Individual differences in inhibition were moderately but significantly stable over the two years of the study. Compared to other children, inhibited children engaged in less high quality peer play at home and in day care, and were less able to play alone in the mother's absence. Other findings underscored the predictive and construct validity of…

Children at 12, 18, 24, and 30 months of age were observed in same-age, same-sex dyads while they attempted to solve a simple cooperation problem. Each child was given an elicited imitation task that was used to index decentration. Although no dyad of 12 month olds could cooperate, 24 and 30 month olds could coordinate behavior quickly and…

Measures of positive and negative affect and affect ability; of look, approach, and proximity behavior; and of overall response pattern were obtained from 66 infants of 12 months. These measures and other results suggested that both parents are significant sources of emotional guidance for infants in conditions of uncertainty. (RH)

In a laboratory procedure, 66 infants of 12 months were given happy, fearful, and conflicting emotional signals by their mothers and fathers with reference to five unusual toy stimuli. There were marked differences among infants in their capacity for and style of coping with conflict. A variety of specific responses to conflict were observed. (RH)

Confirms the existence of a right-hemisphere advantage in the process of discriminating between face stimuli. The advantage was weaker in females than in males. No hemispheric transfer of learning was observed. Subjects were 18 infants of 42 weeks who were presented with an operant conditioning situation in which they discriminated between their…

Activities of 28 primiparous mothers and their infants that occurred during naturalistic interactions at home were observed when infants were two and five months of age. Findings indicated that infants appeared to be flexible and plastic in their behavioral repertoires, and were influenced by their mothers. Mothers adapted to the behaviors of…

Variations in the aversiveness of a newborn's distress cry were examined by means of manipulation of features of fundamental frequency, intonation, and spectral complexity, and of information given to subjects about the infant's health status. Findings suggest that the listener's reaction to cry characteristics can be altered by the inducement of…

Findings indicated that zygosity was not related to behavioral scores during the neonatal period, and that environment substantially influenced neonatal temperament. Specific perinatal indicators of risk were found to account for some of the intrapair differences in behavioral variables. (RH)