Investigated play-fighting and chasing among 7-, 9-, and 11-year-olds in their school playground, where rough and tumble behaviors occupied approximately 10 percent of the time of 94 students. Findings indicated that rough and tumble tended to occur in a friendly, nonaggressive context. The importance of partner's strength increased with age.…

The normative rule began to predominate at age 10 and was the only rule employed by 13-year-olds. In contrast, almost all 7-year-olds simplified the equalization task to an ordinal level. Four different nonalgebraic rules were identified. Neither young children's tendency to simplify nor older children's capacity to quantify could be detected in…

Investigated relationships between mothers' perception of infants temperament at 6 months and their behavior toward their infants at 6 and 12 months of age among 40 firstborn Israeli infants. Temperamental intensity ratings were related to auditory stimulation and contingent positive vocalization for girls and to increased physical contact for…

The logs of two ships transporting juvenile convicts from Great Britain to Australia in the early nineteenth century have been transcribed. Data on the backgrounds of the boys and height data are presented and analyzed. Comparisons are made with ninteenth- and twentieth-century data sets. (Author/RH)

Results of two experiments on kindergarten children in Japan indicate that young children can, and often do, apply personification as an analogy to animate objects to generate a reasonable prediction. It was also found that children try to constrain the personification by using additional knowledge. (PCB)

A sharp improvement in children's understanding of the role of visual perception and linguistic communication in knowledge functions was found between the ages of three and five years. (PCB)

Results indicate specific and positive effects of Quranic schooling on serial memory but not on other memory or cognitive tasks. These findings replicate earlier reports that Quranic schooling affects specific (and not general) memory skills. (PCB)

Quantitatively describes the gait development of a group of African children to determine how pattern changes would relate to growth and maturation. A total of 65 children from the Gusii tribe of southwestern Kenya, ranging in age from 13 to 69 months, were selected for study. (Author/RH)

Acquisition of sentient-nonsentient distinction in 48 children between four- and seven-years-of-age occurred later than animate-inanimate distinction. The children's use of naturalistic or nonnaturalistic explanations depended on the logical nature of events in which objects were involved rather than familiarity with objects themselves. Ability to…

Examines the understanding of the pragmatic function of mental terms ("think,""know,""guess") to express the relative certainty of 69 children aged 3-11. Results showed an improvement with age for the "know-think" and "know-guess" contrasts, but no improvement with age for the…

Findings confirmed that newborns turn toward laterally presented sounds, habituate with repetition, recover to novel sounds, and extend demonstrations of recovery to discrepant stimuli. Recovery was found to be a curvilinear function of degree of discrepancy. Newborns systematically turned away from redundant stimuli. (RH)

Developmental changes in the conceptualization of empathy were studied by testing and interviewing kindergartners, first graders, and fourth graders in Sweden. (PCB)

Reports a combined interview and observation study of parent-child relationships in families with an eldest child aged six to seven years. Interview data focused on time spent with children, performance of child-need tasks, and frequency of parent-child interactions. (PCB)

Day care has a significant effect on children's conceptions of social rules that is not related to egocentrism or a lack of stimulus familiarity. Moral transgressions were regarded as equally serious by veterans and newly enrolled, while the distinction between morality and convention was unclear for the newly enrolled. (RH))

Western and Chinese children six years of age judged that an initially intense positive or negative emotional reaction would wane gradually over time. Children four years of age were less consistent, but, when steps were taken to insure their comprehension, they too judged that emotion wanes gradually over time. (Author/RH)