A task was developed to allow young children to demonstrate their understanding of opposite-valence simultaneous emotions. A total of 69 children in grades K, 2, 4, and 6 heard eight very brief stories describing everyday events expected to arouse conflicting feelings toward a single target. For four of the stories, subjects were asked to detect…

Orienting responses to visual and auditory stimuli were compared in 3 cohorts of preterm infants born between 1977 and 1987. The sample consisted of 128 infants born between 1977 and 1979, 129 infants born between 1980 and 1983, and 94 infants born between 1984 and 1987. The sample was divided into one group of 140 infants born between 25- and…

This study is a re-analysis of four waves of data from the National Youth Survey (NYS) begun in 1976 on 1,725 adolescents and comprising a representative national sample. A subset of 423 subjects were selected for this study. Subjects were categorized into three delinquency onset groups: early onset (onset at age 12 years or younger); late onset…

The first part of this paper discusses presentations by other symposium participants which addressed different facets of the developmental paths involved in understanding one's own emotional states, the emotional states of others, why one feels what one does, and whether or not one shows these feelings expressively to others. It is the premise of…

Social gerontological studies have found little relation between family availability and interaction and well-being of the elderly. Friendship and neighboring interactions seem more consistently related to well-being, but even this is not universal. This study, conducted to examine whether similar patterns exist in other age groups, included young…

The term "gold digger" is often applied to women and to the younger spouse in marriages with unconventional age diffferences. While this follows the view that women derive their class position from their husbands, the status gain or loss in age heterogamous studies has not been empirically tested. To examine status gain or loss in these marriages,…

To understand the change and development of people's attitudes toward death over the life span, a 62-item attitude questionnaire on death and dying was administered to 90 adults. Participants included five females and five males in each of nine age categories: 18-20, 20-24, 25-29, 30-34, 35-39, 40-49, 50-59, 60-64, and 65 or older. Participants…

The two studies reported here explore recent findings indicating that few relationships exist between environmental stimulation and cognitive development during the first 6 months of life. In the first study, three separate home visits (two 90 minutes and one 30 minutes long) were used to assess the physical and social environments of 100…

Data obtained under naturalistic conditions do not support the notion of a close fit between the growth of geometric concepts during the concrete operational period and "realism" in art. Realism here refers to the ability to portray the objective proportions of a figure, to coordinate spatial relations and distances, and to represent a…

The impact of divorce on children seems to vary according to the child's age. Previous studies on the impact of divorce on children have generally focused on pre-schoolers and elementary-age children. Since more long-term marriages are ending in divorce, attention should also be given to adolescent and adult children of divorce. Subjects (N=26)…

The specific purposes of this study were to examine (1) age differences in the sophistication of influence strategies children use to affect parents' consumption decisions, and (2) whether or not parents differentially reinforce such strategies according to the child's age. Data were gathered by observing the interactions of 145 parent-child dyads…

Alcohol studies, like most psychological studies, have traditionally focused on males. Several psychosocial theories have been used to explain male alcoholism, including dependency, the power drive, and sex role theory. This latter stance may provide a theoretical framework for the etiology of drinking which will apply to both sexes; however,…

This paper describes three experiments which demonstrated the presence of binaural perception abilities (the ability to use both ears) in 4-month-old but not in 2-month-old infants. All of the experiments employed a visual fixation habituation-dishabituation paradigm in which infants were given a series of visual fixation trials while binaural…

This study was concerned with distinguishing between two kinds of immature reasoning, both of which lead children to draw the same conclusions from arguments and which, therefore, cannot be distinguished by the usual tests. A total of 20 second-graders and 16 sixth-graders were tested on a logic game in which winning depended on drawing correct…

The purposes of this study were twofold: (1) to investigate the effect of movement for several inanimate objects on children's judgments of "aliveness;" and (2) to examine the nature of explanations given by three age groups of children in support of their judgments as to whether animate and inanimate objects were "alive" or…