Tested the ability of 19 older adults, given additional training in a mental imagination technique, to approach the performance of 16 younger adults on serial word recall tasks. Results indicated that negative age differences in older adults' performance were substantial, resistant to extensive practice, and applicable to all subjects. (BC)

A study compared child and adult dyslexic readers to normal readers. Results indicated that dyslexics do not acquire appropriate levels of phoneme awareness, regardless of their age or reading levels. However, their awareness of onsets and rimes developed as their reading skills developed. (BG)

Studied 120 children's understanding of indebtedness. Fifth graders reported a diminished obligation to reciprocate help that was given at a low cost to the helper; the obligation remained high for first and third graders. All children reported more obligation to reciprocate help from acquaintances than help from friends. (LB)

Nonword spellings were obtained from children in kindergarten through third grade in a study of the development of young children's phonological and orthographic knowledge. Results indicated that young children's nonword spellings reflected the joint influences of linguistic knowledge and psychological processes. (GLR)

Assessed the cognitive readiness for parenting of 171 pregnant adolescents, 48 nonpregnant adolescents, and 38 pregnant adults. Found that adolescents were less cognitively prepared, experienced more stress in parenting, and were less adaptive in their parenting style than adult mothers. Relationships between cognitive readiness and parenting…

Measured the facial expressions, heart rate variability (HRV), and skin conductance of 37 third graders and 29 sixth graders while they viewed a film about a distressed child. Found that high HRV was predictive of children's sympathetic rather than distressed reactions and that, for boys, sympathetic responsiveness positively predicted a…

Two studies investigated 4- to 7-year-olds' understanding that trait can be causal mechanisms based on desires or mere summaries of behavioral regularities. Results suggested that children change from viewing traits as behavioral regularities to understanding them as internal mediators and that advances in understanding desire underlie this…

Korean, Chinese, and American children were given identical free-narrative interviews about life events and were shown a narrated story. Children were then interviewed about the story. Compared to others, Americans provided more references to specific past events, more descriptives, more references to internal states, and more mentions of…

Examined impact of shame and attributional style on adjustment following sexual abuse. Found that once adjustment at discovery was accounted for, shame and attribution style explained additional variation in adjustment 1 year later; abuse severity did not. Relations between abuse severity and subsequent depressive symptoms and self-esteem were…

Examined in six experiments toddlers' use of syntactic cues to learn proper names and count nouns. Found that by 24 months, both girls and boys were significantly more likely to select a labeled object if they had heard a proper name than if they had heard a count noun. At 20 months, neither girls nor boys demonstrated this effect. (Author/KB)

Personally important autobiographical memories are the smallest unit of the life story, which begins to emerge in adolescence. This study examined 2 features of self-defining memories in late adolescence, the meaning made of the memories to garner an understanding of the narrative construction of identity as a life story and how those memories…

A self-report measure of conflict and aspects of warmth in the parent-child relationship was completed by 1,330 11-year-old twins, 1,176 of whom completed the inventory again 3 years later. On average, adolescents' perceptions of the quality of the parent-child relationship declined consistently and moderately between age 11 and age 14. Conflict…

Investigated the general relationship between children's performance on social and physical measures of cognitive functioning, possible sex differences in performance on the two types of tasks, and the relationship between boys' and girls' performances on these tasks and age and IQ. (SDH)

Interest in babies was assessed for 32 children aged 8 to 9 years and 32 children aged 14 to 15 years. Data were collected by means of a 6-second time sampling of waiting room behaviors in the presence of a live baby and by reactions to pictures of babies versus other objects. (Author/JMB)

The relation between conceptual development and visual exploratory behavior was investigated by engaging eighty-four 3-, 4-, and 8-year-old children in a picture-sorting task to determine whether they would spontaneously and readily discriminate between animate and inanimate objects. (Author/JMB)