Cognition in the elderly has been widely investigated, but there has been some disagreement concerning this phenomenon fostered in part by differences in instruments used, in data collection methods, and in analytic methods used. This study used Immediate and Delayed Recall data collected by the Health and Retirement Survey housed at the…

Motivation orientation research consistently finds two factors, Performance and Learning, that overlap substantially with other factors coming from different theoretical perspectives of motivation. Similar to related work in the Big-Five Theory of Personality, researchers posited a Big-Two-Factor Theory of motivation orientation and evaluated the…

Used the National Education Longitudinal Study database to examine student and school factors associated with dropping out in different grades. Results show that the mix of student risk factors changes between early and late dropouts. School factors can account for approximately two-thirds of the difference in mean school dropout rates, but do not…

Four studies investigated children's explanations for family resemblance and species-typical characteristics, under different conditions of biological parentage and rearing environment. Participating were 226 children between 3 and 11 years. Children Children were presented with a number of different tasks, some involving people and some domestic…

The concept of relational complexity is applied to explain the persistent difficulties of young children with theory of mind. Relational complexity has been found useful as a general cognitive complexity metric. Children must understand that the relation between an object and a person's percept is conditional on a third variable, such as a filter…

Relational complexity has been found to be an effective metric for cognitive tasks. The hypothesis that the greater difficulty and later age of attainment of hierarchical classification as compared to category induction are attributable to differences in structural complexity was tested. Hierarchical classification entails a ternary relation…

Stress is the result of demand placed on the body by either positive or negative events. Locus of Control (LOC) refers to personal perception of the cause of events and reinforcement within the environment. Previous literature has indicated that low LOC scores are positively related to low stress scores. This study applied these concepts to female…

This study examined conflictual interactions between adolescent girls and their mothers. Four levels of argumentation were distinguished according to theoretical notions about the development of adolescents' relationships with their mothers. It was assumed that in conflictual conversations with their mothers, adolescents express separation…

Two studies tested the observation that infants learn to use a "whole object assumption" between the ages of 8 and 15 months, meaning that they expect a word to apply to the whole object to which it refers. The first study investigated the possibility that infants of 8 to 10 months may attend differently, and more selectively, to events…

Using data collected through telephone interviews with a national sample of adults, this study searched for evidence as to whether interviewers have stronger effects on the responses given to a wide range of questions by older people than on the responses of younger people. Responses to 30 items for which significant interviewer effects had…

Post-formal operational thought is characterized by both relativism and dialecticism. To examine age differences across adulthood in relativistic and dialectical thought, and to determine whether formal operations are necessary but not sufficient for these forms of thought, 20 young (mean age, 19.6), 20 middle aged (mean age, 46.2), and 20 older…

Research findings suggest the existence of three types of primitive regulation in the behavior of 1 1/2- to 2 1/2-year old children in memory tasks. When children are presented with a game of hide-and-seek to be played with a small stuffed animal, regulatory behavior appears to be related to children's use of stimulus information, precursors of…

This study investigated the issue of whether a shift occurs in infant play goals at around the beginning of the second year in terms of the organization of object-directed and caregiver-directed attention and preference for toys that require the caregiver's involvement. A total of 108 infants of 10, 15, and 29 months were observed playing with…

It is proposed that middle- and upper-middle-class slang used among white young people in modern America shows age-related themes. For youngsters between the ages of eight and early adolescence, the major theme in slang use is to establish in-group and out-group membership, with standards of judgment based on clothes, manners, and physical appeal.…

The literature on social cognition and intergroup relations suggests that gender and age are social concepts which, because they are at the same level of abstraction, may produce interactive effects on person perception judgments. The purpose of this study was to explore gender stereotypes that therapists hold about people who differ in age;…