Examined effect of age and conceptions of ability on information seeking, performance, and motivation among middle graders. Found that students who had acquired the concept of ability responded to the task condition with strivings to learn and requests for information relevant to acquiring mastery, and to the ego condition with strivings to…

First-, third-, fifth-, and tenth-grade children listened to eight stories designed to elicit prosocial or self-protective display rules. Children predicted protagonists' verbal and facial expressions to emotion-laden situations. Findings indicated knowledge of control of emotional displays increases between first and fifth grades, but then levels…

Describes two experiments comparing how children evaluate three types of uninformative messages (ambiguous, incomplete, inconsistent) and whether and why the speaker's age affects the evaluation of each. (HOD)

Investigates transfer of direct and indirect forms of social influence on children's judgments of criminal cases. One hundred forty-two children in grades 4, 5, 7, and 8 were asked to impose sentence twice on criminal cases, the second time after hearing that the judge had imposed a harsh sentence. (SS)

Examined whether children's causality beliefs about school performance show similar developmental profiles across six distinct sociocultural settings. Found markedly similar developmental patterns in their beliefs about the importance of effort, ability, luck, teachers, and unknown factors as influences on school performance. Found that factors…

The first of two studies found direct effects of sixth and seventh graders' perceptions of their parents' marital conflict on the children's internalizing behaviors; and indirect effects, through parent-child relationships, on externalizing behaviors. The second study found indirect effects of marital conflict and parent-to-child hostility,…

Experiment 1 suggested that age differences in line-drawing interpretation among subjects between 6 and 24 years reflected changes in short-term memory for features and changes in strategies used to integrate features over space and time. Experiment 2 suggested that older observers were more active in their attempts to interpret drawings and that…

Mothers who were more sympathetic and better perspective takers had girls who reported more sympathy and negative affect and less happiness after exposure to needy others. Mothers who reported more distress had girls who reported less negative affect and more happiness after exposure. (RH)

A peer nomination scale was designed to assess the degree to which children were subjected to direct physical and verbal abuse by peers. Subjects were 165 third through sixth grade students. Children's victimization scores were uncorrelated with their aggression scores, negatively correlated with peer acceptance, and positively correlated with…

Two experiments used causal models to examine possible relationships among age, learning rates, learning opportunities and forgetting rates. Found that forgetting rates declined markedly between early and late childhood. (ET)

Examined age- and schooling-related influences on memory and phonological segmentation skills of 19 children who missed and made the school-entry cutoff date in a given year. Tested recall ability, short term memory strategies, and phonological awareness. Found that growth of memory skills and strategies, particularly short term, is primarily a…

Kindergartners and first and second graders viewed a videotape of a classroom scene in which a child who exhibited behaviors characteristic of peer-rejected children received teacher feedback. Positive feedback resulted in higher preference and moral judgment scores and more positive descriptions of the child in the video. (BG)

Achievers and underachievers were tested on multiple measures of ability, attributions, self-esteem, reading awareness, and reading performance. Achievers differed from underachievers in beliefs about utility of effort, self-esteem, enhanced reading awareness, and strategic performance. Achievers, but not underachievers, associated their skills…