International Journal of Behavioral Development

The guiding question was how past life experiences are linked with adults’ assessments of their present and future well-being. Typical events and transitions (normative experiences) were contrasted with atypical stresses (non-normative experiences). A sample of 308 men and women, divided between young, midlife, and older adults, completed past life event inventories and rated themselves on multiple dimensions of well-being (concurrently and prospectively). Hierarchical regression analyses revealed that normative events were significant predictors of multiple aspects of present and future wellness, but there were marked age differences in which domains were key influences: For young adults, life activities were primary; for midlife adults, greatest variance was explained by the family and friends domain; in late life, prior work and educational experiences were strongest predictors of well-being. Non-normative events were significant positive predictors of only personal growth in young adults.

In an attempt to explore cultural and subcultural similarities and variations in the patterns of child care, two culturally and economically distinct groups were studied. Twenty-one 3-month-old infants had well-educated Euro-American mothers and another 17 had recently migrated Central American mothers. Observations of parent-infant interaction and behaviour were conducted at home throughout the day to ensure coverage of complete 12-hour cycles. Descriptive analyses revealed remarkable similarities and few differences in the everyday experiences of infants in these two diverse groups. Both groups of mothers spent most of their time playing with, feeding, or caring for their infants. Fathers spent little time with their infants during the day but their presence affected the amount of time spent in various contexts, with significantly less object play occurring when the fathers were present. Mother and infant vocalisations and mutual attention occurred more frequently during social interaction and caretaking than in bouts of feeding. These descriptive profiles expand our basic understanding of infants’ everyday experiences in diverse subcultural groups.

Williams and Best’s (1990) study of the development of sex stereotype knowledge among young children in 24 countries was extended to Portuguese subjects living in Portugal and abroad. Subjects were 720 children (aged 8-11 years), with each age group evenly divided by gender, and each age/gender group evenly divided into three places of residence: urban and rural areas in Portugal, and in France. Subjects were administered the Sex Stereotype Measure II (SSM II) in which children select between male and female silhouettes as the person described in brief stories containing highly sex-typed psychological characteristics (aggressive, emotional, etc.). The results of the study indicated an increase in sex stereotype knowledge from 8 to 11 years, a greater knowledge of the migrants’ children in France than of the children living in urban and rural areas in Portugal, and a greater knowledge of female stereotype traits than male stereotype traits.

This study uses a movie-viewing instrument to assess patterns of resource utilisation in South African township adolescents. The degree to which resource utilisation and other task behaviours were associated with gender, age, and individual differences form the focus. Boys used more gestures denoting dominant and subordinate status, were more physically aggressive, and were generally more coercive than girls. Older children shared the resource more equitably, showed more positive affect, and spent less time issuing directives. There were inequities in children’s access to the movie. However, neither on-task behaviours nor participants’ academic achievement were consistently associated with some children accessing the movie more than others.

The main purpose of this study was to investigate whether a child’s phonological awareness and visual skills before instruction in school had any predictive power for later Chinese reading ability among 1st-graders in Taiwan. The study also examined the extent to which phonological awareness and visual skills varied in three separate testing sessions during the 1st grade. These testing sessions took place just before the children had learned the alphabetic system Zhu-Yin-Fu-Hao, immediately after the children had learnt Zhu-Yin-Fu-Hao, and, finally, at the end of the first year of schooling. Forty 6-year-old Chinese children from Taiwan took part in the study. The test materials included a Chinese Characters Reading Test, a set of Phonological Awareness tests, a Visual Paired Associates learning test, and a vocabulary and IQ test. Phonological awareness at the first testing session was found to be significantly related to the ability to read Chinese characters at the end of the first year. However, the predictive power of early phonological awareness decreased markedly when the effects of preschool reading scores were partialled out. Therefore, the study provided evidence that phonological processes are significantly related to success in the first year of Chinese reading, but was unable to establish whether or not differences in phonological skills are a cause of differences in the reading ability of Chinese children. In addition 10 weeks of instruction in Zhu-Yin-Fu-Hao led to an increase in performance on all tests of phonological awareness. This is consistent with the view that learning an alphabetic script improves phonological awareness ability.

Levels of cognitive development and perceived self-competencies have been shown to predict attitudes held by children in both minority and majority groups toward own-group members. Teacher appraisals may also influence children’s own-group attitudes by enforcing category-based expectancies and stereotypes about children’s group membership. To test this idea, White and Native Indian children in kindergarten, grades 1 and 2, answered recognition, similarity, and evaluation questions by pointing to pictures of Whites, Natives, and Blacks. Measures of children’s concrete operational thought and self-competency were obtained, as were classroom teacher ratings, of each child’s cognitive ability, peer acceptance, and physical development. Structural equation models indicated that teacher evaluations predicted White children’s, but not Native children’s own-group attitudes. Teacher ratings of Native children’s competencies did not predict minority children’s attitudes about themselves or own-group members. Implications of these findings for teacher expectancy effects and factors influencing teacher’s judgements of majority and minority group children were discussed.

To determine whether the transmission of attachment across generations is free from contextual constraints, adult attachment representations were assessed in two kibbutz settings, home-based and communal sleeping. It was hypothesised that under extreme child-rearing circumstances, such as the communal sleeping arrangement, the transmission of attachment is not evident, whereas in the more regular home-based environment the expected transmission of attachment will be found. The participants were 45 mothers and 45 infants, about equal numbers of boys and girls, from 20 kibbutz infant houses with communal sleeping arrangements, and from 25 kibbutz infant houses with home-based sleeping arrangements. Mothers were administered the Adult Attachment Interview (AAI), and infants were assessed through the Ainsworth Strange Situation. Among the home-based pairs, a correspondence of 76% was found between AAI and Strange Situation classifications, whereas the correspondence was only 40% in the communal sleeping group. It is argued that living in a communal sleeping arrangement reduces the expected transmission of attachment.

Described preschoolers’ conceptions of the consequences of their own emotions within the family demonstrated the linkage between this aspect of social cognition and emotional competence with peers, and examined contributions of parental emotion to both child variables. A total of 77 4- and 5-year-olds enacted dollhouse vignettes depicting consequences of their emotions. Parents completed questionnaires on negative emotion and sharing of positive affect, and teachers rated children’s emotional competence with peers. Children attributed plausible parental reactions to their own emotions; affective sharing/distress relief conceptions of parents’ reactions were most strongly associated with emotional competence in the preschool classroom. Socialisation of emotion indices exerted both direct and indirect influences on emotional competence, and conceptions of parents’ positive reactions also exerted a direct effect, as expected.

The study addressed the phenomenon according to which even educated adult individuals often confuse sensations received from physical objects (such as colour, sound, taste, weight, temperature) with physical properties of the objects that initiated these sensations. This means that in many cases scientific education fails to achieve its goal, which is to create in an individual the physical-scientific view of the world. To examine this phenomenon four experiments were conducted with the aims to determine to what extent: (1) children of various ages and adults were able (a) to acknowledge the fact that sensations appear due to the work of the human mind or sense organs and are not physical properties of the objects that produce them; (b) to appreciate the difference between the mind and sense organs as contributors to the production of sensations (Exp. 1); (2) various types of training could enhance children’s and adults’ understanding that sensations do not belong to the physical properties and objects (Exps. 2-4).

The results of Experiment 1 conducted with 6- and 9-year-old children and adults did not reveal an age-related increase in the appreciation of the subjective character of sensations. However, 9-year-old children and adults (but not 6-year-old children) showed a diffentiated approach to various types of sensations, attributing pain mainly to the subject and softness-hardness mainly to the objects. Experiment 2 (direct explanation treatment), and Experiment 3 (cognitive conflict treatment) yielded no improvement in 6- and 9-year-old children’s appreciation of the subjective character of sensations and only partial improvement in adults. In Experiment 4 (social conflict treatment) adult subjects only were involved; the experiment showed a significant improvement in the subjects’ judgements about colour sensations and a marginal improvement in their judgements about weight sensations.

Most studies that have investigated the connection between syntactic awareness and reading acquisition involved English-speaking subjects and have not considered the influence of the teaching method. These studies have consistently reported strong connections between performance in syntactic awareness tasks and measures of decoding. The purpose of the present study was to investigate the connection between syntactic awareness and reading acquisition in a group of 48 Brazilian children who were taught to read by a phonic method. The children were given syntactic awareness and phonological awareness tasks before they began to read and were evaluated in contextual facilitation, decoding skills, and reading comprehension during their first year of reading instruction. The results suggest that although the connection between syntactic awareness and contextual facilitation is an essential one, the link between syntactic awareness and the development of decoding skills is sensitive to how often children are encouraged to use contextual strategies in learning to read. Children learning a regular orthography through explicit teaching of letter-sound correspondences can make considerable progress in decoding which is not dependent on syntactic awareness.

Forty preschool-aged children were videotaped while carrying out paper-folding and story-sequencing tasks, during a series of three experimental sessions. During the first session, participants worked on both easy and difficult items, and in the second and third sessions they worked on familiar items (the first session difficult items, presented repeatedly) and novel items, of each task type. Participants used more private speech on difficult/novel items than on easy/familiar items, during all three sessions. Private speech production declined across sessions when participants worked on the repeated items. A greater percentage of participants’ private speech preceded action when they worked on difficult/novel items, compared with easy/familiar items. On the paper-folding items, a cross-session increase occurred in the percentage of private speech that preceded action, supporting some of Vygotsky’s (1934/1987, 1978) claims about the emergence of verbal planning in private speech. The potential of microgenetic experimental methodology for research on private speech is emphasised.