We investigated children's personal representations of significant sibling conflicts. Forty pairs of siblings were interviewed separately about the same disputes. Although they described the same episodes, both older (M age = 7.0) and younger (M age = 4.4) siblings ascribed more serious transgressions to their opponents than to themselves. They…

The teacher relations and self-perception of children with externalizing (n = 26) and internalizing behavior problems (n = 25) and a nonproblematic group (n = 44) were studied prospectively. The children were assessed with the Rutter CBQ in 1st grade. Classroom observations of teacher-child interactions were performed in 2nd grade. The teacher…

This research examined two strategies for encouraging preschoolers' narratives. Thirty-two lower-SES and 31 middle-SES children (mean age = 4.85) participated. Children were assigned randomly to either high or low elaborative narrative style conditions. Afterward, each child participated in two activities and then narrated about them on two…

Recent research supports the idea that both the content and style of mother-child discourse is important in shaping a child's early moral understanding. This study was designed to further this research by examining how the clarity, elaborativeness, and emotional content of conversations about the past related to a child's sociomoral development.…

This study examined two distinct moral reasoning interventions: an interindividual intervention, in which students discussed moral dilemmas, and an intraindividual intervention, in which students individually reflected on moral dilemmas. Ninety-seven 6th- and 7th-grade students were administered pre- and posttest measures of the Sociomoral…

Siblings between 4 1/2 and 9 1/2 were interviewed concerning positive and negative actions of self or sibling that either did or did not occur in past conflicts, and then asked to describe these disputes. Children evidenced self-serving biases, ascribing positive actions to themselves more than to their siblings. Additionally, younger siblings…

Provocative ideas about the nature, development, and effects of children?s friendships were included in the lectures of Harry Stack Sullivan, which were edited and published in the 1950s. Sullivan emphasized the love, intimacy, and collaboration found in the close friendships that children form around 8 to 10 years of age. Later research has…

Trait conceptions, such as smart, antisocial, and shy, can serve as tools for interpreting and making predictions about the social world. An understanding of children?s trait conceptions can lead to important insights into the way children acquire an understanding of human mental life. The present study was designed to examine positivity biases…

Emotion-related regulation is a topic of considerable current interest; however, this was not always true. We briefly discuss the history of interest in the topic and then the current state of the field, including definitions of the construct. In addition, we summarize some of the important issues for future attention, including definitional…

The study of children?s peer relationships has been well represented within the pages of Merrill-Palmer Quarterly. Particularly over the last decade, the pace of publishing studies on peer relationships has increased. Despite this upswing in interest in peer relationships, significant gaps remain. In this article, we focus on a particularly…

This review begins with a brief history from Piagetian perspective-taking development, through metacognitive development, and into the past and present field of theory-of-mind development. This field has included research on what infants and children know about a variety of mental states, on possible causes and consequences of mentalistic…

Many concepts in developmental psychology are inferred or confirmed from very particular experimental or naturalistic observations but investigators often generalize their validity to a broad domain of situations. This permissiveness is affecting progress. This paper provides examples of this error and criticizes the tendency to award essences to…

We ask three questions: What are the components of young children?s conscience? How are they organized? How does early conscience develop? We discuss the changing perspectives on each of those questions. We describe the shift from a focus on a single component of conscience (moral emotions, conduct, cognition) to a growing emphasis on their…

The contentious nature-nurture debate in developmental psychology is poised to reach a rapprochement with contemporary concepts of gene-environment interaction, transaction, and fit. Discoveries over the past decade have revealed how neither genes nor the environment offers a sufficient window into human development. Rather, the most important…

In this article we focus on a major advance of the past few decades: the introduction of mental representation as a tool for understanding social development. We argue that despite the considerable contributions made by this approach, it is underrepresented in social developmental research, except in the area of attachment. We go on to show that…