Examined relationships among parenting, sibling aggression, and peer outcomes in 8- to 10-year old boys, their siblings, and mothers. Found that siblings with more rejecting mothers were more aggressive with one another than siblings with less rejecting mothers. Boys with more aggressive sibling interactions were more likely to be nominated by…

Evaluated relationship of behavior problems, friendship, and peer rejection to peer victimization in third through seventh graders. Found that behavior problems were more strongly related to victimization when children had few friends, friends who could not protect them, or were rejected by peers than when children had more friends, friends who…

Used growth modeling to examine relationship of early parenting to cognitive, language, and social development from 6 to 40 months in full-term and very low birth weight (medically low or high risk) children. Found that behaviors that were sensitive to children's focus of interest and did not highly control or restrict their behaviors predicted…

Maintained that preschoolers' class inclusion task judgments and justification may be modeled as mixtures of different probability distributions, with different response strategies equivalent to different distributions. Found that justifications lagged behind judgments in development. Concluded that, if a single response variable is to be…

Three experiments examine how preschoolers partition their basic level categories to form subordinate level categories and whether these have inductive potential. Results suggest that contrastive information promotes the emergence of subordinate categories as a basis of inductive inference and newly established subordinate categories can retain…

Examined the moral and ecological reasoning of second, fifth, and eighth graders regarding the Exxon Valdez oil spill. Found that children understood negative effects of the spill, cared that harm occurred to shoreline and marine life, and thought it violated a moral obligation. Fifth and eighth graders used a greater proportion of anthropocentric…

Examined whether newborns were able to discriminate different stress patterns in multisyllabic stressed Italian words that varied both in consonants and in number of syllables. Found that newborns were sensitive to words' rhythm, as carried by stress patterns, and that this prosodic information was salient even in the presence of substantial…

Observed infants' responses in a food-requested procedure to explore their understanding of other people's desires. Found that only the 18-month-olds were able to engage in some form of desire reasoning. Children not only inferred that another person held a desire, but also recognized how desires were related to emotions and understood something…

Examined the effect of attention on infants' responses to briefly exposed visual stimuli. Found that the duration of stimulus exposure in the familiarization phase was positively correlated with the preference for the novel stimulus in the paired-comparison procedure, and processing of briefly presented visual stimuli differed depending on the…

Examined claim that associations between emotional responses to maternal separation and cognitive performance would change with cognitive development over the first year. Emphasized the measurement of separation and reunion distress. Found that emotional responses and cognitive performance may be linked by individual differences in self-regulation…

Examined the relation between developmental suggestibility effects and preschoolers' emerging ability to reason about conflicting mental representations. Subjects were 42 three- to five-year-olds. Found in the children significant initial encoding and ability to retrieve event details. Also found an integration between children's theory of mind…

Examined children's ability to distinguish between reality and misleading appearance. Used a standard appearance-reality task and either a trick task or a reduced information processing task. Found that subjects could grasp the distinction when their goal was to trick someone or when they did not need to hold conflicting object identities at the…

Assessed the quality of home and out-of-home care environments, child temperament, and the development of verbal abilities among infants at 18 months and then at 8 years of age. Found that both tested and rated cognitive abilities at age 8 were related to earlier measures of verbal ability and to paternal involvement during preschool years. (MOK)

Examined when and how children distinguished deductive and inductive problems. Found that by fourth grade, confidence ratings for deductive problems were higher than those for inductive problems, and responses were faster. Explanations differed as a function of the type of problem. (MOK)

Three studies explored children's distinctions between mental and bodily reactions to contamination. Found that children distinguished reactions mediated by representations from those mediated by physical interactions. Data suggested that preschoolers distinguished between physical and mental reactions to contamination but had a poor understanding…