This study investigated the hypothesis that background television affects interactions between parents and very young children. Fifty-one 12-, 24-, and 36-month-old children, each accompanied by 1 parent, were observed for 1 hr of free play in a laboratory space resembling a family room. For half of the hour, an adult-directed television program…

In the current study (a) maternal insightfulness into the experience of the child and (b) resolution with respect to the child's diagnosis and their associations with children's security of attachment were examined in a sample of 45 preschoolers (mean age = 49 months) with autism spectrum disorders (ASD). It was hypothesized that mothers who were…

Individual differences in parental reminiscing style are hypothesized to have long-lasting effects on children's autobiographical memory development, including the age of their earliest memories. This study represents the first prospective test of this hypothesis. Conversations about past events between 17 mother-child dyads were recorded on…

In the United States, racial-ethnic differences on tests of school readiness and academic achievement continue. A complete understanding of the origins of racial-ethnic achievement gaps is still lacking. This article describes social equity theory (SET), which proposes that racial-ethnic achievement gaps originate from two kinds of social process,…

Processing the self-relevance of information facilitates recall. Similarly, processing close-other-related information facilitates recall to a lesser degree than processing self-relevant information. This memory advantage may be viewed as an index of the degree to which the representation of self is differentiated from representations of close…

Home environment quality is a well-known predictor of school readiness (SR), although the underlying processes are little known. This study tested two hypotheses: (a) child language mediates the association between home characteristics (socioeconomic status and exposure to reading) and SR, and (b) genetic factors partly explain the association…

The present experiments were aimed at testing Karmiloff-Smith's (1992) assumption that representational flexibility in drawing behavior requires the relaxation of a sequential constraint. A total of two hundred and forty 5- to 9-year-old children produced cross-category drawings (e.g., a house with wings) in 4 conditions. The results indicated…

Caution is advised in utilizing the univariate F test as the initial screening device for hypothesis testing in the analysis of repeated measures data. (JMB)

Contrary to the deterministic nature of the adipocyte- number hypothesis, correlations between adiposity data recorded during infancy and data recorded during the school- age period or later are very low. There is no convincing evidence the obese infant has more than a slight tendency to become an obese adult. (Author/MP)

Attempts to differentiate the serial habituation hypothesis from the regression to the mean hypothesis as explanations for the reduction of visual fixations in the form perception of four-month-old infants. Results support a regression to the mean interpretation of the data. (JMB)

Parental supportiveness and protective overcontrol and preschoolers' parasympathetic regulation were examined as predictors of temperamental inhibition, social wariness, and internalizing problems. Lower baseline vagal tone and weaker vagal suppression were expected to mark poorer dispositional self-regulatory capacity, leaving children more…

Examined time-sampling reports obtained from 9-15 year olds concerning their emotional states. Findings suggest that the onset of adolescence is not associated with appreciable differences in the variability of emotional states. (RH)

Two hypotheses--high self-esteem leads children to act on antisocial cognitions (disposition-activating hypothesis) and high self-esteem leads children to rationalize antisocial conduct (disposition-rationalizing hypothesis)--were investigated in two longitudinal studies. In Study 1 (N = 189; mean age = 11.1 years), antisocial behavior was…

Investigated the effectiveness of a training procedure corresponding to a component analysis of a hypothesis-testing task in improving kindergarten children's problem-solving abilities. (Author/JMB)

Two studies with three-year-old children tested the hypothesis that, whereas errors of phenomenism predominate when children are asked about objects' real and apparent properties, errors of intellectual realism predominate when children are asked about objects' real and apparent identities. Results provided some support for the property-identity…