An open-ended interview, a picture-recognition task, and a forced-choice rating task were administered to 64 four- to seven-year-old boys and girls to assess development of conceptions of friendship. Findings suggested that as children grow older they place increasing emphasis on affectively based friendship characteristics. (Author/MP)

Holograms of faces were used to study two- and five-month-old infants' discriminations of changes in facial expression and pose when the stimulus was seen to move or to remain stationary. While no evidence was found suggesting that infants preferred the moving face, evidence indicated that motion contrasts facilitate face recognition. (Author/RH)

Examines the relationship between young children's spatial exploration and their cognitive representations of environments. Children ages 20-28 months and 36-44 months explored a museum room; measures of the quantity and mode (active versus passive) of their exploration were recorded. Results indicate individual differences in the extent to which…

Provides a demonstration of the existence of the McCollough effect in children ages six to nine and tests for any obvious differences in interocular transfer of the effect. (MP)

Sex differences in risk-taking were examined by observing 480 three- to 11-year-old children at four different risk-taking locations at the San Antonio zoo. While girls were just as likely as boys to enter the zoo, at all four of the risk-taking situations, significantly more boys than girls engaged in risk-taking behavior. (Author/RH)

In the first study, observation and labeling behavior were investigated in 5-, 8-, 11-year-olds, and adults. Subjects were asked to find differences in stimuli. In the second study, an attempt was made to determine whether children can learn to adapt their attention to tasks requiring exhaustive or selective observation and to transfer such…

The relationship between children's concepts of life and their judgments and revisions of sentences with violations of animacy restrictions was examined. (Author/MP)

Examines the effect of age of encoder (first graders, seventh graders, and college students) on the decoding of nonverbal facial expressions indicative of verbal deception. Results showed the ratings of untrained, naive adult judges to be more accurate in decoding the first-grade stimulus persons than the older ones. (JMB)

Preschool children's ability to infer an object's position in a room from information contained on a map was assessed under five conditions: (1) map aligned inside the room; (2) map aligned outside the room; (3) map rotated 180 degrees inside the room; (4) map rotated 180 degrees outside the room; and (5) map held vertically outside the room. (JMB)

Four studies investigated how differential input affects preschoolers' abilities to learn novel color words. Found that four- and five-year olds interpreted novel words as shape terms when ostensive information was provided but as color terms when additional information, contrastive or inclusive, was given. Three-year olds generally did not make…

Examined time-sampling reports obtained from 9-15 year olds concerning their emotional states. Findings suggest that the onset of adolescence is not associated with appreciable differences in the variability of emotional states. (RH)

Two studies investigated children's perceptions of how the cause of achievement outcomes affects children's emotional responses. Children aged 6, 7, 9, 10, 12, and 13 rated the reactions of children in stories to success or failure in study one, and the cause of the stories' outcomes in study two. Age differences were found in both studies. (SKC)

Infant cortisol and behavioral responses to receiving one versus two inoculations on one pediatric office visit were observed at two and six months of age. The findings indicate a developmental trend for a decline over age in adrenocortical reactivity to inoculation for infants showing a cortisol release following perturbation. Results were…

Autonomic responses of 5- to 10-year-old children were measured while the children watched a videotape in which a doctor and child expressed negative, neutral, or positive affect. For 5- and 6-year-old children, autonomic responses were greatest while watching, and errors in subsequent memory tasks greatest after watching, the negative affect…

Examined the main technique used to show a basic inability in three-year olds to make judgments about a person's thoughts when that person's knowledge happens to be false. Results reveal that test questions that are temporally specific and syntactically straightforward enable most three-year olds to attribute false beliefs to others. (RH)