Ninety 5- and 6-year-old children equally divided by sex were assigned randomly to one of three emotion-inducing conditions (self-focused happy, other-focused happy, or neutral emotion-inducing) and then given varying numbers of rewards. Results are discussed in terms of cognitive processes initiated by emotional states that may influence…

Compares maternal ratings of temperament obtained for 50 preschool children with measures of children's intellectual achievement taken at age four and when children were in second grade. Implies that a child's ability to attend to tasks and modulate behavior may be the best predictor of performance on achievement tests. (Author/DR)

Discusses the extent to which certain key aspects of functioning in two-year-old children in 46 families, followed from mid-pregnancy to two years, are anticipated by pre-birth parent personality and marital characteristics, and how these characteristics interact with postbirth development. (Author/DR)

Attention patterns of 93 preterm infants were observed and measured at term, at four months of age, and at eight years. Suggests that preterm infants who continued to fixate an unchanging stimulus for protracted periods of time were less intellectually able in childhood. (Author/DR)

Examines the development of the child's concepts of certainty and uncertainty within the context of concrete and propositional reasoning tasks. Subjects were first, third, and fifth graders. Findings support the position that reasoning about concrete certainty and uncertainty requires a different competence than that required for reasoning about…

Describes two studies of the theoretical relation between adolescent egocentrism and formal operations. Study 1 used the Adolescent Egocentrism Scale (AES) and Lunzer's battery of formal reasoning tasks to assess 183 adolescents. Study 2 administered the AES, the Imaginary Audience Scale (IAS), and the Test of Logical Thinking to 138 adolescents.…

Reports a study of mathematically and verbally talented children which investigated hypotheses that (1) mathematically related fields are sex typed as male domains and (2) parents give differential encouragement to sons and daughters in math. Results indicated that neither hypothesis related to current sex differences in mathematical reasoning…

As part of a longitudinal study, Matching Familiar Figures Test (MFFT) performance was assessed at age 11 and related to California Child Q-Sort evaluations obtained both concurrently and at age 14. Offers evidence for a "competence" interpretation rather than a "conceptual tempo" interpretation of the MFFT and strongly questions using the MFFT as…

The category breadth indexes of 128 children at each age (4 and 11) were related to personality data available at ages 3, 4, 7, 11, and 14 in form of independent California Child Q-Sort (CCQ) description. Results suggested that breadth of categorization at age four correlated negatively with intelligence, while at age 11 it correlated positively…

Black children (N=233) from three age levels and two socioeconomic (SES) levels were given five Piagetian tasks to determine if differences in sex were associated with differences in cognitive development levels. Results showed that higher SES children performed better than lower SES children on all five measures of reasoning, seriation,…

Using a series of alternating sort/recall trials, this study explored whether elementary school children's experience with categorically related items would facilitate their subsequent organization and recall of low-associated items. (Author/DR)

Fourth-, sixth-, and eighth-grade children were tested with different methodologies for deriving measures of their knowledge of interlandmark distances and directions on their school campus. Overall results emphasized that measures derived from children's estimates of direction information were not comparable with measures derived from their…

Eisenberg's prosocial moral reasoning interview, adapted to the setting, was administered to members of a small-scale, traditional, collectivistically oriented society. The sample consisted of 69 elementary school children, 8 adolescents, and 24 adults from the Maisin people. Results of the study support the idea that moral reasoning patterns…

Identifies a coordinative structure of action that integrates hand and mouth activities within hours after birth. Found that presenting neonates with a sucrose solution focused gross motor patterns of hand movement on the oral and perioral regions. (SKC)

Studied neonatal imitative responses in the first hour postpartum of 12 infants in rural Nepal. Found that the newborns were able to imitate pursed lips and widened lips, which suggests that imitative capacity is present at birth. (SKC)