Explored infants' capability to request a partner's participation in social games. Nineteen infants who were 9, 12, 15, and 18 months old played games for 30 minutes in a laboratory setting with an adult partner. Children's nonverbal behavior and vocalizations after the adult discontinued play were compared with behavior during game-playing…

Examined influence of nondiscrepance and discrepance between situational and expressive cues on children's emotion recognition. Videotaped episodes in which actors portrayed emotions were presented to four- to eight-year-old girls. Girls' responses to questions regarding the perceived cues reflected a developmental trend from centration to…

Elementary school children of both sexes (n=132) saw a male peer film model either rewarded or punished for touching prohibited toys. The model either smiled, cried, or showed no reaction, and subsequently had a differential influence on the behavior of children who observed. (NH)

Examined visual perception of emotion in typically developing and physically abused children, focusing on the sequential, content-based properties of feature detection in emotion recognition processes. Found that physically abused children accurately identified facial displays of anger on the basis of less sensory input than did typically…

Examined electrical brain activity during negative and positive emotion expression in infants of depressed and nondepressed mothers. Found that, compared with infants of nondepressed mothers, infants of depressed mothers exhibited increased EEG activation in the frontal but not parietal region when expressing negative emotions. There were no…

Data suggest that infants with high vagal tone were more reactive than infants with low vagal tone to positive and negative events at 5 months, and were more sociable at 14 months. Infant reactivity to mildly stressful events seemed to be a stable dimension during the first year. (RH)

Behaviorism and psychoanalytic theory, prevalent early in this century, declined at midcentury. Theorists subsequently developed domain-specific theories of socialization, which were influenced by, or resulted in, changing conceptions of children's identification with their parents, changing definitions of optimal parenting, and an understanding…

Considers contributions of Sigmund Freud and Rene Spitz to developmental psychology. Freud's contributions include his observations about play, perspectives on developmental processes, and ideas about unconscious mental activity. Spitz's contributions include his assessments of infants, perspectives on developmental processes, and his concept of…

Investigated 4-month-olds' responsiveness to others' affective expressions in the context of a peekaboo game. Found differential patterns of visual attention and affective responsiveness to happiness/surprise, anger, fear, and sadness. Findings underscore importance of contextual information for facilitating recognition of emotion expressions and…

The predictive relation between neonatal behavior and temperament at 24 months was examined for 67 infants selected from the full socioeconomic status (SES) distribution. Initial ratings were made when the infants were one to four days old. Irritable neonates were rated as more upset, less attentive to stimuli, and less responsive to the staff at…

Investigates a proposed four-stage developmental sequence that describes how children explain changes in sad and angry feelings and how their ability to understand is related to their theories of how feelings change. (HOD)

The hypothesis tested was that the evaluations and affective responses which accompany ongoing behavior may operate as reinforcers and punishers, thus exercising control over the persistence of those behaviors. Results indicate potent systematic effects due to the differing content of such evaluations and the associated affect or affective tone.…

The developmental hypothesis that behavioral differences between subjects in the two temporal separation conditions would decline over grades was supported by the data. (Author)

Focuses on the relationship between conceptual tempo and control of humorous affect in young children. Records the responses of reflective, fast-accurate, impulsive, and slow-accurate fourth-grade children to a videotape of an adult telling a series of jokes, half of which are followed by audience laughter. (CM)

Examines the influence of socialization figures (parents, friends), emotion type (anger, sadness, physical pain), age, and gender on 66 second-grade and 71 fifth-grade children's reasons for and methods of affect expression. Found that girls reported using verbal means to communicate emotion, whereas boys cited mildly aggressive methods. (MDM)