In three experiments, children of three through six years of age were generally better able to reproduce a perceiver's perspective if a visual cue in the perceiver's line of sight was salient. Children had greater difficulty when the task hinged on attending to configural cues. Availability of distinctive cues affixed to objects facilitated…

Eighteen second-grade boys and girls identified as being high or low role-takers were videotaped teaching two same-sex kindergartners to make construction-paper caterpillars. High and low role-takers differed on eight dimensions of the 16 categories of prosocial behavior coded during videotaped observations. (Author/MP)

College students who took the Defining Issues Test (DIT) were instructed to simulate the responses of 11-, 15-, and 19-year-old adolescents; other college students selected moral issues which they believed should be presented to adolescents in those age groups who were faced with the moral dilemmas in the DIT. (Author/DB)

Sixty-four 3- and 4-year-olds were asked to identify another's view of a spatial array either verbally or by picture selection. Results indicate that verbalization leads to substantially more correct responses. Girls' performance was significantly better than boys' performance across both response modes. (Author/DB)

Preoperational and concrete-operational first and second graders performed on a training task and a generalization task prior to and after serving in one of five instructional groups. The instructional groups were: no-training control, specific self-instruction, specific didactic control, general self-instruction and general didactic control.…

Investigates relations among young preschoolers' social cognitive abilities, expression of emotions, and prosocial responses to others' emotions. Results suggested that subjects' social cognitive acuity and differential responding to emotion have heretofore been underrated. (Author/DR)

Seventy-two children were presented with a series of stories involving psychological harm in a game context. Found that older children were more likely than younger ones to base their evaluations on intentions, or both intentions and consequences, and to take into account the recipient's perspective. Game context interacted differentially with…

Evaluated the effects of stimulus complexity and rule usage on a visual perspective-taking task administered to preschoolers, first, third, and fifth graders, and adults. Errors decreased with age, and more errors occurred with the more complex visual arrays. Very young children could not reliably match a photograph to a physical array. (Author/RH)

Examined individual differences among third-, fourth-, and fifth-grade children (N=59) in the tendency to remember and utilize dispositional as opposed to situational information in predicting and explaining the behavior of story characters. (JMB)

Results suggested that preadolescents and adolescents understand but reject or subordinate parents' conventional interpretations of family conflict, and reinterpret them as issues of personal jurisdiction. Parents understand but reject children's claims to personal jurisdiction, and state the issues in conventional terms. (RH)

Two studies of 7-, 8- and 9-year-olds assessed the effect on cognitive development produced by varying degrees of physical isolation of family dwellings and the consequent variation in the amount of verbal communication children had with peers and adults. (JMB)

Describes two experiments that examined children's understanding of the distinction between real and apparent emotion. Discusses the findings in relation to research concerning children's concept of mind, their grasp of the appearance-reality distinction; their ability to produce complex, embedded justifications; and their ideas about emotion.…

Evaluates the growth of social-cognitive knowledge in deaf and hearing children during the early- and middle-school years and assesses the relative importance of language in two domains of social cognition. In addition, separately examines the child's ability to evaluate the concepts of good and bad and to take another person's perspective. (RH)

Examines the social, cognitive, and social-cognitive correlates of nonsocial play in 122 four-year-olds observed for 20 minutes during free play. Subjects were given a role-taking test and tests of social and impersonal problem-solving skills. Sociometric popularity and social competence, as rated by teachers, were also assessed. (Author/RH)

Examined judgments of intolerance given by children, adolescents, and adults toward disagreeing others. The evidence suggested that intolerance may be a lower level of reasoning in a social cognitive developmental progression. (Author/DB)