Examined children's ability to distinguish between reality and misleading appearance. Used a standard appearance-reality task and either a trick task or a reduced information processing task. Found that subjects could grasp the distinction when their goal was to trick someone or when they did not need to hold conflicting object identities at the…

Used computer-administered tests to measure the reaction time to nonverbal stimuli of 4- through 6-year-olds and adults. Found age-related increases in processing speed that could not be attributed to increased accuracy and error rate monitoring. Used these results to evaluate R. Kail's (1991) model of processing speed, which adequately accounted…

Sixty-four young children were induced to feel angry, sad, happy, or "just okay" before their exposure to interadult anger. Findings indicated that negative emotions increased children's distress and negative appraisals and expectations in reaction to interadult anger, whereas positive emotions reduced distress reactions and increased children's…

Using naturalistic methods, examined effect of awareness and valuation of gender on children's social group interactions. Subjects were 96 3rd and 4th graders. Found that children do exaggerate differences and similarities when forming first impressions of new boys and girls and do use gender stereotypes in relating to the other sex. (JW)

Examined the relationship between 147 4- to 8-year-olds' performance on physical and affective appearance-reality (AR) tasks. As expected, older children performed better than younger children on both tasks, and the children's physical and affective AR performance differed significantly only when the affective task required greater use of…

Examined effects of participation in an event on four and seven year olds' reports of the event. Results showed that participation lowered susceptibility to suggestion. Older children were less suggestible about actions that took place. Children showed high resistance to suggestions about actions that might be associated with abuse. (SH)

Examined the evidence for the reciprocity of negative affect between mothers and young children in disciplinary encounters. Although children responded contingently and reciprocally to maternal negativity, they also reacted negatively to maternal positive affect. (SH)

Two studies explored relations between young children's peer social skills and theory of mind. Study 1 found positive, but moderate, zero-order correlations between false-belief measures and social skills, and false belief accounted for a significant amount of additional variance in social skills after covarying age and language measures. Study 2…

Two studies with 80 5- and 8-year olds found that initial recognition tests elevated children's false-memory responses on delayed tests, and that false-memory creation exceeded true-memory inoculation in 5- and 8-year olds, producing net loss of accuracy over time. (MDM)

Followed the development of 57 women from childhood to adulthood and the development of their children from infancy through the early school years. The academic competence of the mothers, when they were children, was related to their children's academic competence. Correlations between measures of the aggression of the mothers, when they were…

In Study 1, 4-year-olds avoided 2 names for an object when exposed to a common or a proper noun in a puppet's presence or to a common noun in a puppet's absence, but not when exposed to a proper noun in a puppet's absence. In Study 2, 3-year-olds avoided 2 names for an object when the requester for the referent of a second label in a different…

This study investigated social attention impairments in autism (social orienting, joint attention, and attention to another's distress) and their relations to language ability. Three- to four-year-old children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD; n = 72), 3- to 4-year-old developmentally delayed children (n = 34), and 12- to 46-month-old typically…

The authors examined the longitudinal effects of the Family Check-Up (FCU) on parents' positive behavior support and children's school readiness competencies in early childhood. It was hypothesized that the FCU would promote language skills and inhibitory control in children at risk for behavior problems as an indirect outcome associated with…

According to autobiographical memory theorists, past event conversations provide children with a framework for evaluating and connecting past events into a coherent autobiography (R. Fivush, 1994; K. Nelson, 1993; M. K. Welch-Ross, 1995). Two studies were conducted to empirically examine the association between past event conversation style and an…

Improvements in 5- and 7-year-olds' acquisition and retention of related concept pairings were examined when additional similarities and differences between pair members were provided. Using a standard paired-associate learning paradigm, children learned 18 related picture pairs; some of the children either were given or produced additional…