In two studies, 5-and 6-year-old children were questioned about the status of the protagonist embedded in three different types of stories. In realistic stories that only included ordinary events, all children, irrespective of family background and schooling, claimed that the protagonist was a real person. In religious stories that included…

Children are able to distinguish between regular events that can occur in everyday reality and magical events that are ordinarily impossible. How do children respond to a person who brings about magical as compared with ordinary outcomes? In two studies, we tested children's acceptance of informants' claims when the informants had produced either…

Experimental studies of children's responses to apologies often present participants with hypothetical scenarios. This article reports on an experimental study of children's reactions to experiencing an actual disappointment and subsequent apology. Participants (ages four to seven) were told that another child was supposed to share some attractive…

Three- and 4-year-old children were asked to judge which of a set of 3 lines was the longest, both independently and in the face of an inaccurate consensus among adult informants. Children were invariably accurate when making independent judgments but sometimes deferred to the inaccurate consensus. Nevertheless, the deference displayed by both age…

Can young children frame their own choices in terms of moral considerations, particularly when those choices do not match the practices of immediate authority figures? To answer this question, we studied 6- to 10-year-old independent vegetarians--children who have elected to become vegetarians, despite being raised in non-vegetarian families. In…

In a longitudinal study of attachment, children (N = 147) aged 50 and 61 months heard their mother and a stranger make conflicting claims. In 2 tasks, the available perceptual cues were equally consistent with either person's claim but children generally accepted the mother's claims over those of the stranger. In a 3rd task, the perceptual cues…

In three experiments, children's reliance on other people's testimony as compared to their own, first-hand experience was assessed in the domain of ontology. Children ranging from 4 to 8 years were asked to judge whether five different types of entity exist: real entities (e.g. cats, trees) whose existence is evident to everyone; scientific…

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)

Compared performance of children with autism, with learning disabilities, and normally developing 4-year-olds on reasoning problems with and without instruction to use imagery. Found that instruction to use imagery led to persistent logical performance. Children with autism displayed a distinctive response pattern, performing around chance levels,…