Twenty-one autistic and 21 nonautistic retarded adolescents and young adults were compared on British Picture Vocabulary Scale items considered emotion-related or highly abstract. Autistic subjects' lower scores on emotion-related items suggest autism-specific impairments in grasping these concepts. No differences were found for abstract/concrete…

Asserts that emotions are based on cognitive appraisals of occurrences. Argues that cognitive models have heuristic value for research and practice and examines objections concerning the validity of those models. Discusses the usefulness of these models for several educational and developmental goals. (KO)

Examines the course of emotion expression development during the first 2 years of 58 full-term and preterm children through videotapes of mother/infant pairs. Mothers' contingency behavior appeared to have an effect on emotional development, as did birth status and gender. Prematurity was associated with differential socioemotional development.…

The study of affect comprehension in 15 children with pervasive developmental disorders (ages 7-10) and normal children matched for mental age found that the disabled children were impaired on affect matching compared to the controls and were impaired on face and affect matching relative to their own performance on object matching. (Author/DB)

Examined empathy and conservation abilities of nonretarded children with autism and compared their performance to that of normally developing children. Autistic children performed surprising well, but not as well as normal children. There was a closer association between cognitive abilities and affective understanding among the autistic children…

This paper examines the affective components of reading and related learning disorders. A dynamic-developmental-interaction approach to etiology is suggested to allow for integration of constitutional, developmental, and environmental factors. The paper considers parental dynamics, intrapsychic factors, and interpersonal factors. (Author/JDD)

Examined preschoolers' judgments regarding affect experienced by four participants in three social events. Found that preschoolers expected actors across all events to feel happy and recipient-observers in moral and conventional, not personal, events to feel unhappy; teachers witnessing the acts to feel happy in personal, not moral and…

Examined role of parent-child discourse within a supportive relationship in children's early conscience development. Found that children's attachment security predicted maternal and child references to feelings and moral evaluatives in narratives about previous behavior incidents. Attachment security, shared positive affect between mother and…

Examined emotion regulation decisions and outcome expectations following emotionally expressive behavior in fifth, eighth, and eleventh graders as a function of goals, age, and gender. Found that participants distinguished between vignettes characterized by prosocial versus self-protective goals. Goal type influenced emotional regulation decisions…

Examined relation of early attachment relationships and preschoolers' emotion regulation. Found that preschoolers who ignored younger siblings' distress were more likely to experience personal distress and use avoidant coping strategies. Preschoolers with insecure-resistant infant-mother attachment at 1 year were more likely to seek comfort from…

Leading scholars in the fields of neurology and psychology recently have published persuasive arguments linking cognition and the emotions as well as proclaiming the significance of emotional intelligence. This paper documents some of those assertions and connects them to the importance of formal education in the skills of critical feeling through…

This study was designed to investigate whether depressed mothers would show a predominantly negative affect or fail to provide a positive frame of experience for their babies. Two field studies of depressed mothers and their infants were conducted. A subgroup of 13 subjects and their babies from a larger project conducted in Cambridge…

Discusses the value of elementary science in promoting both cognitive and affective growth in children. (JR)

This study attempted to provide some initial normative data to help professionals and researchers to distinguish between playful and stimulating suicidal fantasies as opposed to serious and compulsive thoughts and behaviours characterized by negative affects. It is argued that the former is a natural consequence of cognitive development, the entry…

A promising avenue for characterizing individuals lies in an examination of the antecedents of recorded behaviors. Autobiographical information from college students was used as an alternative to traditional personality methodology to demonstrate the scientific utility of biodata. The traits selected for investigation were positive and negative…