New advances in neurobiology are revealing that brain development and the learning it enables are directly dependent on social-emotional experience. Growing bodies of research reveal the importance of socially triggered epigenetic contributions to brain development and brain network configuration, with implications for social-emotional…

The aim of the present study was to explore and compare systematically the developmental patterns of certain aspects of imitation, longitudinally from 2 to 10 months, in interactions of infants with grandfathers and grandmothers. Sixteen infants were video-recorded at home in the course of spontaneous dyadic interactions with maternal grandfathers…

Fifty-nine healthy infants were filmed with their mothers and with a researcher at two, four, six and nine months in face-to-face play, and in toy-play at six and nine months. During toy-play at both ages, two indices of joint attention (JA)--infant bids for attention, and percent of time in shared attention--were assessed, along with other…

The ideas of Vygotsky [Vygotsky, L. S. (1987). "Thinking and speech." In "The collected works of L. S. Vygotsky," (Vol. 1). New York: Plenum. (Original work published 1934.)] have been increasingly influential in accounting for social-environmental influences on the development of social understanding (SU). In the first part of this article, I…

Examines Piaget's and Vygotsky's conception of the relation of the social to the individual, including individualism versus holism, Piaget's alternative of relationalism, and Vygotsky's views of the nature of the social. Suggests that Piaget's denial and Vygotsky's advocacy of explanatory emergence leads to the question of domain-general versus…

Preschool, third-grade and sixth-grade children, and adults were shown vignettes depicting eight types of experiences and asked for their own (for children) or the children's (for adults) expected emotional reactions. Overall, adults showed an absence of developmental considerations in their implicit theories of children's emotional…

Examined preschoolers' judgments regarding affect experienced by four participants in three social events. Found that preschoolers expected actors across all events to feel happy and recipient-observers in moral and conventional, not personal, events to feel unhappy; teachers witnessing the acts to feel happy in personal, not moral and…

To investigate whether Chicanos and Anglos show the same progression through Kohlberg's general levels of moral reasoning, 169 second through ninth graders--selected controlling for age, grade level, socioeconomic status, IQ, sex, and religion--were presented five video-taped moral dilemmas and were administered a derivation of the Defining Issues…

The Educational Attitude Scale was administered to 371 mothers and 23 teachers from 22 schools to determine what they thought about the value of early academics for prekindergartners. Parents had significantly higher expectations, and placed more value on early skill experiences, than did teachers. (SH)

A critical analysis of the current knowlege concerning the development of the concept of death in childhood is the purpose of this paper. Theoretical models and methodological limitations of the literature are addressed. Many factors have been implicated as contributing to the development of the concept of death. (Author/BN)

Proposes the use of a distancing strategy model as an approach to studying the social genesis of representational competence in children. Explains how the model describes teaching strategies that make cognitive demands on children. (HOD)