Maltreatment status and mothers' facial behavior predicted children's scores on an emotional expression recognition task. There were positive relations between mothers' and children's expressive behavior. Findings indicate that children's recognition and production of facial expressions depends in part on the expressive environment provided by…

Adults and five and seven year olds were presented with slides of facial expressions with different parts of faces exposed. Subjects judged either discrete emotions of happiness, surprise, fear, and anger or global emotions of feeling good and bad. Subjects more easily recognized global than discrete emotions. (BC)

Wayfinding abilities of 6- and 12-year-old children were compared with those of young adults. Six-year-old children's wayfinding performance was poorest. Twelve-year-old children and adults had similar performances. (GLR)

When 32 monolingual Korean and 24 English children were asked to respond "right" or "wrong" on a sentence-picture or sentence-knowledge verification task, members of both groups found true negatives the hardest sentences to verify. When 16 Korean speakers between 4 and 7 years of age were asked to deny statements, they produced…

Examined sex differences in 4- to 6-year olds' spatial skill. Found that performance on spatial transformation task showed a substantial male advantage by age 4 years 6 months, with the advantage no more robust for rotation than for translation items. Comparable vocabulary task performance indicated that male advantage on spatial tasks was not…

Four studies examined 2- and 3-year olds' word order and verb morphology productivity. Findings indicated that younger children neither used nor comprehended word order with novel transitive verbs. Older children comprehended and used word order to mark verbs' agents and patients. Children as young as 25 months added "-ing" but not…

Three experiments are reported that examined conceptual negative priming effects in children 5 to 12 years of age. Experiment 1 used a negative priming variant of a flanker task requiring the naming of a central color blob flanked by irrelevant distractors. Experiment 2 used a negative priming variant of the Stroop color-word task. Experiment 3…

Cultural and age differences in responses to contamination and conceptions of purification were examined in Hindu Indian (N = 125) and American (N = 106) 4- to 5-year-olds and 8-year-olds, who were provided with stories of juice contaminated by contact with a cockroach, a human hair, and a stranger (via sipping). Children who rejected the juice as…

This study examined 3- to 5-year-olds' (N = 128; 54% girls) ability to discriminate emotional fantasy and reality. Children viewed images depicting fantastic or real events that elicited several emotions, reported whether each event could occur, and rated their emotional reaction to the image. Children were also administered the Play Behavior…

Reply by Jerome Kagan to a recent article by Block, Gjerde, and Block (1986) which questions the validity of the construct of reflection-impulsivity. Kagan alleges flaws in the logic of the authors' (Block, Gjerde, Block) position and in the inferences drawn from their data. (Author/RWB)

Responds to the arguments and evidence adduced by Kagan (1987) in his reply to the Block, Gjerde, and Block (1986) study questioning the validity of the Matching Familiar Figures Test (MFFT) as a measure of "reflection-impulsivity." (Author)

Examined whether representational changes in digit memory are functions of children's expertise in mental abacus operation when abacus operators reproduced series of digits forward or backward. Found skilled operators equally facile with forward and backward reproduction, but novices slower going backward. Suggests advanced operators apply their…

Presents two studies that describe behavior of very young children in tasks requiring self-control. Behavior of 27 two-year-olds completing a task was observed and coded in Study 1 using a 10-category coding system. In the second study, 82 children 24 to 36 months old were observed in three delay tasks. Significant effects were found for age and…

The solution of relational size problems was facilitated when children were told to find the smallest member of the series. Children who could not do so could not solve the problem. (ST)

A study of children's incentive preferences revealed reliable age and sex differences, and significant discrepancies with adults' estimates of what children like. Implications for research with children are discussed. (DP)