On belief-desire reasoning tasks, children first pass tasks involving true belief before those involving false belief, and tasks involving positive desire before those involving negative desire. The current study examined belief-desire reasoning in participants old enough to pass all such tasks. Eighty-three 6- to 11-year-olds and 20 adult…

A naturalistic home study delineated earlier and later walking groups. Age-held constant analyses indicated that earlier walkers and their mothers generally showed a rise of positive exchanges as well as a testing of wills across the transition to walking. Changes were less clear for the later walkers, and differences were also observed between…

Studied developmental changes in the experience of solitude between late childhood and early adolescence. Fifth through ninth graders (N=483) provided experience-sampling reports on their companionship and subjective states at random times over a week. Found that in early adolescence solitude comes to have a more constructive role in daily life as…

Reviews bases for contemporary discontinuity theories of mental development, presents findings that support alternative proposition of continuity and scrutinizes assessment methods from which these continuity results derive. Also offers several models that help explain the continuity findings, and argues that individual differences in mental…