A study involving 26 children, aged five to eight years, employed a clinical interview method to examine the children's recognition and knowledge of rule violations in communication. The rules, derived from H. P. Grice's "be cooperative" principle, referred mainly to the maxim "be perspicuous, unequivocal, clear, and…

Some older adults experience difficulty in decentering their own viewpoint on tasks requiring spatial and communicative role-taking. To examine the social perspective-taking skills of older adults and the kinds of strategies older people would suggest to solve social dilemmas, adults were interviewed about their typical interpersonal problems. A…

Social cognitive abilities were evaluated in 23 deaf students (3 to 6 years old) through tasks requiring spatial perspective taking, cooperation, and receptive language. As hypothesized, language ability proved to be a prediction of both other variables, with the high correlation between language and perspective taking indicating a definite…

Using computer controlled text presentation that permitted the measurement of reading time for individual sentences, a study tested two hypotheses concerning how schemata guide reading comprehension. The focusing hypothesis suggested that the schemata activated by the reader's perspective might identify relevant information to which additional…

Several related studies of empathy and altruism in children were conducted to answer such questions as: (1) What are the very early signs of empathy and altruism in children? (2) What kinds of transformations in these behaviors take place during development? and (3) How do rearing experiences influence these behaviors? Data related to these…

A model of identity formation, based on the cognitive developmental stages of social perspective-taking, was tested to determine if identity is achievable through cognitive strategies of considering the self in relation to friends, family, peers, and society. Two separate studies, one involving college students (N=28) and one involving high school…

Three questions were addressed in this study: 1) What are the levels of relationships among level of moral development, attitudes toward teaching and role specific self-concept in a group of entering teacher education candidates? 2) What differences exist between elementary and secondary candidates in areas of moral development, teacher attitudes…

Three "deep structures" of the literary curriculum (contexts within which teachers teach literature) have been identified: (1) the imitative structure, in which students learn about the background of the text, (2) the analytic structure, and (3) the generative approach, dealing with a work's effect on readers. While experienced literary critics…

Empathy has been defined in a number of different ways. Some, such as Sarbin and Flavell, have emphasized the cognitive aspects of empathy by defining it as the ability to take-the-role-of-the-other. Others, such as Stewart, Borke, Iannotti, and Feshbach, have emphasized the affective processes involved in empathy. Although it is difficult,…

This study investigated the interrelationships among the development of role-taking skills, moral judgments, and sharing behavior of boys and girls in K-3. A total of 160 lower middle class white children (20 boys and 20 girls from each grade) participated in the study. Data were collected on four measures: (1) sharing candy with a friend, (2)…

This paper presents a summary of behavior concepts that together provide the outline of a possible developmental theory of prosocial motivation. These concepts, based on human role-taking capacities, include empathic distress, sympathetic distress, personal guilt, and existential guild. At first, a child cannot discriminate between himself and…

This article discusses conflicts that arise between teachers and administrators due to the role system of the schools and reviews research on the necessary ingredients for cooperative conflict resolution and collaborative decision making. (SJL)

Shows how business letter writers at an inservice workshop improved their skills by ovserving their own writings from the viewpoint of others and by making their styles more flexible. (RL)

The categories under which references are cited are the following: (1) general, (2) values analysis, (3) values clarification, (4) moral development, (5) moral development (role taking), and (6) inculcation. (AM)

A modified replication of a study by R. C. Anderson and J. W. Pichert indicates that, even though the retrieval framework can operate selectively in making certain information more accessible for output, it is ultimately constrained by the accessibility of information as determined by the encoding framework. (JD)