Examined relationships among aggression, viewing and enjoyment of television violence, and personality traits of extraversion, neuroticism, and psychoticism in sibling pairs (N=386) ages 11 to 16. Found no support for theory of causal effect on amount of viewing television violence on aggression. Found no within family correlations between amount…

Youths (N=334) evaluated their families on Personal Attribute Inventory for Children. Results revealed no significant main effects for birth order or gender. Males from divorced remarried families and females from divorced nonremarried families evaluated their respective families significantly more negatively than did counterparts from other…

Describes the activities of and responses to a summer reading program for preschool and elementary school children offered by the Tulsa City-County Library System. Suggestions for developing and implementing such programs are offered, including planning guidelines, the design of print materials, and publicity strategies. (CLB)

Reports that mothers' responsiveness to young infants' distress predicts language capacity at two years. Mothers' responsiveness to older infants' nondistress vocalizations predicts cognitive performance, perceived self-esteem, social competence, and family relations in preadolescents. (PCB)

Findings from 1,027 subjects followed longitudinally from age 10 through age 26 revealed strong connection between aggressiveness ratings at early ages and adult delinquency for boys. Aggressiveness was not predictive of later crime for girls until they reached age 13. For both genders, relation between aggressiveness and crime was largely…

Reports on an evaluation of the Bangalore/Madras Communicational Teaching Project (CTP), a content-based approach to language learning. Analysis of 21 lesson transcripts revealed a greater incidence of error treatment of content than linguistic error, consonant with the CTP focus on meaning rather than form. (26 references) (Author/CB)

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'…