Children in kindergarten, first, second, and third grades heard scenarios in which a child experienced an emotionally equivocal or unequivocal event. Subjects were asked questions which assessed their ability to discriminate between equivocal and unequivocal situations. Two follow-up studies were conducted. Implications for children's social…

Children six, nine, and 12 years of age were asked to recall stressful episodes to describe how they responded in each instance. Responses were coded as primary coping, secondary coping, or relinquished control. Findings indicated that children report that they cope with everyday stress and that their coping approaches are influenced by…

Children's reasons for adhering to classroom achievement, moral, and conventional norms were collected. Reasons were coded into intrinsic and extrinsic categories. Developmental change and individual consistency in offering of intrinsic reasons across domains was assessed. (PCB)

Analyzes results of four experiments using noun category and thematic stimuli and suggests that the associative structures of memory help constrain and mediate retrieval search for stimulus information. Also, that these structures as well as representations of the stimulus events in memory seem to differ for thematic and category events, and for…

Studied first- and fifth-grade children at different levels of reading skill in four familiarization experiments concerned with word encoding processes. Overall, supports the view that word encoding undergoes qualitative change as reading progresses from beginning to more advanced levels, although the reason for this change is unknown. (Author/NH)

Assesses the relationship between the self-perceptions of cognitive competence and achievement orientations of 117 academically competent fifth graders. Children who underestimated their abilities adopted lower standards, perceived lower teacher expectations, considered unstable effort the most important cause of their high grades, and were…

Explores links between aggression in elementary school children and their perceptions of self-efficacy as well as their response-outcome expectancies. (HOD)

A study of children's expectancies about their general success or failure in adult life revealed that the overwhelming majority were quite optimistic and minimally pessimistic. Children's optimism or pessimism about their distant future was not related to their current social success or failure. (DR)

Investigates children's ability to distinguish the literal meaning of a message and a speaker's communicative intent. Either knowing or not knowing the speaker's intended referent, first- and second-grade children evaluated brief referential communication messages for ambiguity. In the first experiment, messages were written on cards and read to…

Investigates whether unpopular children exhibit a bossy interpersonal style in a problem-solving situation. A detailed sequential category coding system was constructed and focused on patterns of influence among children. Sociometric measures were used to pair 44 third- and fourth-grade children into 22 dyads containing an average-status child and…

Investigates the relationship between children's cognitive and affective processes in 30 four and five year olds who were interviewed individually to probe affective understanding, administered a series of Piagetian tasks, and given the Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test. Performance on affective and cognitive tasks correlated significantly.…

Considerable stability was observed on measures of acceptance, rejection, preference, and impact in a one-year longitudinal study of sociometric stability and friendship choice consistency in an early-adolescent peer group. Findings provided new information about patterns of stability in early adolescent peer groups and revealed the need for…

First and second graders were exposed to a memory task in which their recall performance varied as a function of their incidentally elicited sorting behavior. When asked what had affected their recall, only some children at each grade identified sorting as a causal factor. Causal attributions predicted use of sorting strategy in a standard…

Evaluates use of spelling-sound correspondences to read and spell by third-graders defined as good readers and good spellers, good readers and poor spellers, or poor readers and poor spellers. Indicates that all groups used correspondences but that children in mixed and poor groups used them less systematically and had weaker knowledge of…

Investigates several variables' effects on children's inferential processes, including cause of target event, presence and timing of questions prior to recall, and inference type that the questions demanded. Children four and seven differed in logical, constrained, and unconstrained inference production; causal connections between story events…