Several authors consider high and frequent conflicts between friends during childhood as a serious risk for subsequent conduct problems such as generalized physical aggression toward others (e.g., Kupersmidt, Burchinal, & Patterson, 1995; Sebanc, 2003). Although it seems logical to assume that friendship conflict could have some negative…

Why do some adolescents respond to interpersonal conflicts vengefully, whereas others seek more positive solutions? Three studies investigated the role of implicit theories of personality in predicting violent or vengeful responses to peer conflicts among adolescents in Grades 9 and 10. They showed that a greater belief that traits are fixed (an…

This report examines young adults' states of mind regarding their early attachment experiences in relation to the observed and perceived quality of their sibling relationships. Sixty sibling pairs (18-25 years of age) were (a) administered the Adult Attachment Interview (George, Kaplan, & Main, 1985), (b) videotaped during a conflict…

Although there are frequent calls for the study of effects of children on families and mutual influence processes within families, little empirical progress has been made. We address these questions at the level of microprocesses during marital conflict, including children's influence on marital conflict and parents' influence on each other.…

Performance on the task-switching paradigm is greatly affected by the amount of conflict between tasks. Compared to adults, children appear to be particularly influenced by this conflict, and this suggests that the ability to resolve interference between tasks improves with age. The authors used the task-switching paradigm to investigate how this…

Theories of socialization propose that children's ability to handle conflicts is learned at home through mechanisms of participation and observation--participating in parent-child conflict and observing the conflicts between parents. We assessed modes of conflict resolution in the parent-child, marriage, and peer-group contexts among 141 Israeli…

Two studies presented 5- to 6-year-old and 9- to 10-year-old children with videotaped scenarios of interadult conflicts ending in various ways. Study 1 demonstrated that negative effects of adults' disputes on children are reduced even by "resolution behind closed doors," whereas study 2 showed that negative reactions are also reduced by…

Compared how 8-, 10-, and 12-year-olds responded to provocation by a same- or an other-gender peer in a laboratory play session. Found that responses to other-gender peer were more negative than to same-gender peer during baseline and provocation periods. With other-gender partners, participants reported liking them less, trying less to get along,…