This study investigated effects of gender, emotion, and family expressiveness on preschool children's reactions to narrative characters' emotion expressions. Forty-five preschool children rank-ordered playmate preferences for male and female story characters who expressed happiness, anger, sadness, fear, and neutrality and indicated how much they…

This research reports on an ethnographic study of Marquesas Islanders and their concepts of violent and aggressive behavior. The study interviewed six mothers about their children's behavior at three stages of early life: (1) infants and toddlers; (2) school-aged children; and (3) adolescents. Analysis of the research suggests that violence is…

Self-regulation is a major developmental accomplishment that begins in infancy and continues throughout childhood. This study focused on early socialization of self-regulation, and examined whether there was a common core of self-regulation in young children cutting across contexts and age, and whether the same maternal behaviors operate similarly…

Individual differences in the regulatory processes involved in managing difficult interpersonal interactions were investigated. Interpersonal systems that easily escalate to produce coercive or violent encounters in adult-child relationships were of particular interest. Adults who were predisposed to view adult-child interactions as containing…

In studying the lyrics of popular music, and particularly aspects of violent attitudes toward women, teachers discover what language represents to students and what students experience through the songs. The texts created about artifacts like song lyrics suggest more about the students as knowers than about the objects being studied. Exploring…

This study examined the relationship of nonverbal encoding and decoding skills to the level of exposure to television. Subjects were children in second through sixth grade. Three nonverbal skills (decoding, spontaneous encoding, and posed encoding) were assessed for each of five emotions: anger, disgust, fear or surprise, happiness, and sadness.…

This paper presents findings of a study that: (1) identified the most salient organization, personal, and professional factors contributing to administrator burnout; and (2) determined the relationship among these variables to each of the three dimensions of burnout. Data were obtained from a survey of 1,000 school administrators--169 elementary…

Specialists committed to an examination of speech communication patterns have emphasized the interpersonal aspects of communication over the intrapsychic realities of various subjective statuses. If the rhetorical model operates at a psychological level, invention and disposition might be said to characterize the thinking mode, perhaps growing out…

Young children's nonverbal affective expression and communication reveals an emotional complexity and sensitivity which exceeds their verbal abilities. To investigate the development of nonverbal emotional communication in young children, two studies were undertaken. In the first study, equal numbers of 5- and 11-year-old children from two schools…

The transition from high school senior to college freshman reflects the emergence of the adolescent into the young adult and can result in separation anxiety for parent and senior. In order to support the parents and seniors, a seminar on the topic of separation was given to parents and seniors by a child psychiatrist and two high school college…

A theory of normal mother-infant relationship based on Margaret Mahler's theories is the basis of a treatment program for disturbed mother/infant relationships. This theory includes the concept of symbiosis which for the child is an undifferentiated condition, a fusion with the mother where the two have a common outward border, thereby protecting…

To account for cognitive and affective responses to popular music, a pilot study used an information processing model to show that affect results largely from the activation of affect-laden schemas by the music stimulus. Subjects, 196 students from an introductory course in interpersonal communication at a medium-sized university, listened to a…

Although emotions have been widely studied, researchers have rarely focused on the elderly. Consequently, many questions remain unanswered concerning the emotions of older adults. This study examined age differences in emotional intensity of short- and long-term emotion. Older adults (N=61) and younger adult college students (N=93) completed the…

Empathy and prosocial moral values are often identified as antecedents of helping behavior, but interest in their relationship and joint operation has only recently emerged. To investigate the relative contribution of empathy and values to helping responses, 87 college students were confronted with a request for help delivered either in person or…

A fundamental problem in social cognition and person perception is the issue of consistency in impressions. Some conditions encourage people to stereotype others while other conditions encourage people to abandon their stereotypes. A study was conducted to identify the different kinds of eliciting conditions for piecemeal vs. stereotype processing…