Forty-two families with children in transition to early and mid-adolescence were interviewed in a follow-up study of parent-child agreement in beliefs concerning the child, and of children's awareness of parental beliefs. Results indicate increases in accuracy of prediction of parental beliefs by children between the ages of 10 and 13. (RJC)

Examined the relative power of measures of perceived family support, hopelessness, and depression for the classification of suicide attempters and nonattempters in a series of 8- to 13-year-old psychiatric inpatients (N=25). Results indicated that a measure of a child's perceived family support discriminated between suicide attempters and…

Reports a study comparing the way children process information about television characters and real peers. Suggests that understanding of both is based on the same construal process, is based on a common set of perceptual dimensions, and is a function of both target characteristics and the common underlying construal system. (JAD)

Notes that today's heroes are drawn more often from the world of entertainment and sports than from the political arena where history is being shaped. Suggests that students need more local heroes, who will be there for them. Discusses SMO--Student Mentor Outreach programs. Outlines experiences of one such program, and evaluates the program's…

Outlines some of the ways in which the application of technology to increase productivity, the affluence generated by it, and the related structural changes in society have contributed to the creation of adolescence in the North American urban-industrial society. Highlights seven important structural factors that make adolescence essentially a…

Twenty-four socially rejected children were coached on the importance of displaying behaviors known to be used by peers in making inferences of liking and then were encouraged to communicate these behaviors toward selected friendship targets within their own classroom groups. Significant treatment-related improvements were found in these…

Mothers' and fathers' subjective distress and self-restraint when their sons were preadolescents were related to 14 measures of sons' outcomes 4 years later. Subjects were 82 adolescent boys. Sons of fathers prone to low self-restraint were uniformly found to have subsequent difficulties across domains, including poor academic achievement, poor…

Illustrates some of the analytic tools and conventions associated with the construction and evaluation of dynamic models of the processes underlying learning, memory, and development. Describes a study finding that children may exhibit slower disintegration of verbatim memory traces than adults due to interference; however, adults may be more…

Examined the relationships between individual psychological characteristic, social contextual levels of family and culture, and mathematics performance in young adolescents. Found that scholastic ability perception is associated with the mathematics performance of students and that, at different levels of the social context, young adolescents'…

Compared models of depressive symptoms in a 6-month prospective study of 95 nonreferred 11- to 13-year olds. Results showed that adolescents who perceived their parents, siblings, and friends as supportive, suffered fewer depressive symptoms. Life stress failed to correlate with concurrent depressive symptoms. Attributional style was primarily a…

This study examined the relationship between age-interval between siblings and children's creative abilities, as well as parental views on the creative abilities of 116 children (ages 9-12 years). The study found that larger age intervals resulted in greater creativity and that age intervals also interacted with birth order, family size, and age.…

In a follow-up study, it was found that children with good early phonological awareness had well-developed lexical and sublexical reading and spelling procedures. Results suggest that early phonological skills relate more strongly to the development of sublexical than lexical processing systems. (Author/LB)

Children, mothers, and mothers' parents completed questionnaires about the children's involvement with their grandparents. Grandparents were more involved with grandchildren from single-parent than from two-parent families. As grandchildren's pubertal development progressed, grandparents became more involved with grandsons, and grandfathers became…

Measures of family stress and social support were administered to 80 mothers with a child with mental retardation in 1 of 3 normative transition periods. There were no significant differences in family stress scores across the groups, but mothers of preschoolers utilized social support more than mothers of preadolescents and adolescents. (JDD)

Children whose mothers were consistently more responsive during the children's infancy and early adolescence achieved higher IQ and arithmetic scores, had more positive self-esteem, and were reported by teachers to exhibit fewer behavior problems than children of mothers who were consistently less responsive. (BC)