Institutions make new forms of acting possible: Signing executive orders, scoring goals, and officiating weddings are only possible because of the U.S. government, the rules of soccer, and the institution of marriage. Thus, when an individual occupies a particular social role (president, soccer player, and officiator), they acquire new ways of…

Humans possess a tendency to rapidly and consistently make character evaluations from mere facial appearance. Recent work shows that this tendency emerges surprisingly early: children as young as 3-years-old provide adult-like assessments of others on character attributes such as "nice," "strong," and "smart" based…

P. M. Greenfield's new theory of social change and human development aims to show how changing sociodemographic ecologies alter cultural values and learning environments and thereby shift developmental pathways. Worldwide sociodemographic trends include movement from rural residence, informal education at home, subsistence economy, and…

Examines short-term longitudinal relationships between test measures of cognitive processes and ratings of classroom behaviors observed during free play. Subjects were 64 middle-class preschool children. (Author/MP)

Social learning theory is evaluated from a historical perspective that goes up to the present. Sears and others melded psychoanalytic and stimulus-response learning theory into a comprehensive explanation of human behavior. Bandura emphasized cognitive and information-processing capacities that mediate social behavior. (LB)

Describes four experiments conducted among adults and 3- to 7-year-olds to validate a task analysis that indicates that the equality, group enhancement, and superiority social decisions require a greater information processing load than the altruism, rivalry, and individualism social decisions. (HOD)

Mother-child play of 12-month-old infants (N = 130) from maltreating (N = 78) and nonmaltreating (N = 52) families was analyzed as a context that integrates infants' developing social and cognitive skills. Play was coded from semistructured and unstructured play paradigms. No group differences were found in infants' play maturity. Infants from…

Examines the relation between dyadic synchrony and child compliance during the toddler period. Demonstrates that children are more likely to comply with synchronous caregiver instructions than with asynchronous instructions. Discusses results in light of both cognitive and emotional factors of toddlers. (Author/RWB)

Evaluated a social process model describing how aggression and withdrawal lead to negative social self-perception. Subjects were 793 French Canadian elementary school children. Found that withdrawal behavior uniquely predicted social self-perceptions. Both negative peer status and peer victimization successively mediated the impact of social…