Examined three theories for predicting risk for delinquency during adolescence with sixth- and seventh-grade students: an individual difference perspective, social interactional model, and social contextual approach. Found that lack of nurturant and involved parenting indirectly predicted delinquency by increasing antisocial behavior and deviant…

Bruner's (1973) review of infant skill development is updated and extended by (a) placing it in the context of recent motor learning research; (b) discussing the concept of efference in its most recent conceptualization; and (c) explicating certain implicit themes relevant to a theory of infant motor intelligence. (ED)

This study examined the general importance of similarity in children's causal reasoning and the relation between similarity and the other principles of causal inference. Participants were 16 boys and 16 girls at each of four grade levels: K, 2, 4, and 6. (Author/JMB)

This article reports two attempts to demonstrate the discrepancy hypothesis prediction that visual fixation time for human infants should be an inverted-U function of the magnitude of discrepancy between a new stimulus and a familiar standard. (Author/JMB)

Children aged 5 to 12 years and college students were asked to judge hypothetical persons' ability or effort from information about task outcome, task difficulty, and magnitude of the complementary personal characteristic, effort, or ability. (JMB)

Maintains that Teyler and Fountain's presentation (1987) contains several limitations, namely, that the authors do not (1) distinguish between learning and memory, nor between storage and retrieval; (2) address the role of knowledge-based influences in memory and learning; or (3) employ concepts that can accommodate developmental phenomena in the…

Children 5 to 15 years old answered questions on causal attributions of their own and their mothers' emotions, and methods for inferring and changing maternal emotion. Parents were asked reciprocal questions. (PCB)

Results indicated that (1) fathers who were less involved in child care attributed lesser competence to infants than did more involved fathers; (2) fathers generally attributed lesser competence to infants than mothers did; and (3) as fathers' involvement in infant care increased, their attributions became more similar to mothers'. (RH)

The purpose of present experiments with subjects approximately three, five, and seven years of age was to provide additional evidence for the obviousness of the generative transmission principle and to provide initial evidence for the secondary principles of absence and facility. Empirical support was found for each of these selection principles,…

The theoretical relations between regression and progression in developmental stage theories are discussed. A detailed analysis of stage transition in adolescent moral judgments is presented. (ST)

Reports two studies whose purpose was to explore the relationship in middle childhood of the child's ability to take the role of another and his ability to make qualitatively higher-level moral judgments. (WY)

A perceptual analogue of Kelley's augmentation principle was created in animated films depicting the movements of two objects toward a goal. Experiment 1 examined children's causal attributions in the presence and absence of inhibitory causes. Experiment 2 investigated children's causal attributions in the presence of inhibitory causes of…

Three studies examined whether and when preschool children are willing to attribute internal and immanent causes to motion. Found that preschool children were more likely to attribute immanent cause to motion in animals than in artifacts and more likely to attribute human cause to motion in artifacts than in animals. (MDM)

Two experiments investigated whether children, averaging three years old, used a transition theory in their developing understanding of mind or whether their interpretation moved from a desire-focused theory to a mature theory that attributed a greater role to beliefs. Findings supported a transition theory interpretation over competing…