Discusses reading with pre-teens Francine Pascal's "Sweet Valley Twins: Best Friends," one of a series of pre-romance novels featuring identical twin sisters. Interviews six girls using the Symbolic Representation Interview (SRI) about the good girl/bad girl dichotomy in novels and other media. Provides comments by Tom Romano and Diana Mitchell.…

Teachers in junior high schools using the Channel One newscasts were surveyed. Results indicated high levels of support for the programming content, journalistic professionalism, and media production values. Teachers revealed most of its teenage audience is more aware of current events. A minority of respondents objected strongly to the…

Investigated the role of emotionality and self-regulation in understanding 3rd- through 5th- graders' adjustment responses to multiple risk. Found that negative emotionality predicted adjustment problems, positive emotionality predicted positive adjustment, and self-regulation predicted both. Children low in self-regulation were more vulnerable to…

Describes a study of university students that examined the influences of navigation in hypertext learning environments and discusses advantages and disadvantages of hypertext as instructional media. Discusses active (self-directed) versus passive (pre-sequenced) access; knowledge acquisition; emotional outcomes; and knowledge utilization with a…

Analysis of data from 661 students with cultural-familial mental retardation yielded a 37-item, 7-scale personality instrument that confirmed five hypothesized factors of Positive Reaction Tendency, Negative Reaction Tendency, Effectance Motivator, Expectancy of Success, and Outerdirectedness and identified two additional factors of…

The first purpose of this article is to present research on specific child (e.g., temperament), family (e.g., family adversity), and transactional characteristics that have been documented to contribute to the manifestation of externalizing disorders in children. The second purpose is to present screening and intervention strategies school…

Presents an action plan for the many developmental educators who have been enraged by the entry of private companies into the developmental education field. Asserts that developmental educators should combine the best that learning assistance has to offer with the best that the private companies have to offer, within a framework and language that…

Notes that "Loveys," or transitional comfort objects, are an important prop in some children's emotional and intellectual development. Provides developmental information, and describes types of children who typically use loveys, challenges to child care programs when the object comes to school, and how children give up their attachments.…

Examined role of age, gender, and dating in Israeli high school students' romantic behaviors/perceptions and linkages between family/peer relationships and affective intensity with romantic partners. Found that intimacy and level of emotional involvement were similar across adolescence. Girls emphasized attachment and care more than boys.…

Computational models of infant categorization often fail to elaborate the transitional mechanisms that allow infants to achieve adult performance. In this article, we apply a successful connectionist model of adult category learning to developmental data. The Supervised and Unsupervised Stratified Adaptive Incremental Network (SUSTAIN) model is…

Teaching styles were investigated in 28 middle-class sibling dyads (older sibling M age = 8.2 yrs; younger sibling M age = 5.11 yrs) using two sets of block design tasks (five easy; five hard). Older siblings employed a greater number of strategies (i.e. physical demonstrations, scaffolding, corrective feedback) in the hard than in the easy tasks,…

Cultural expectations provide meaning to human perceptions of who-does-what-to-whom-where. However, the effects of actions directed at oneself have been much less systematically studied. This article replicates the American factorial design of Britt and Heise (1992) in a Japanese setting. The analysis demonstrates both cultural similarities and…

The Conflict Cycle model offers a practical strategy for understanding how mutual interactions can create timelines of stress, feeling, and thinking that can easily escalate into undesirable outcomes. This article applies this model to resolving conflicts which arise in family situations. (Contains 1 figure.)

During the winter and spring of 2003, the Survey Research Laboratory conducted a survey of residents of the Ida Wells and Madden Park housing developments on Chicago's near-south side. This article reviews existing research findings on using indigenous interviewers and reports the findings about the benefits and challenges of using residents as…

Data from 520 British secondary school age children were used to explore determinants of and mental health outcomes (measured with the Strengths and Difficulties Questionnaire) from their non-resident fathers' relationships (child-reported father's involvement and frequency of contact) with them. Frequency of contact was negatively related to time…