When children apologize, they accept responsibility for wrongdoings and act to reconcile social relationships. Apologies to siblings were coded in 40 families that were observed for 9 h when children were 2 1/2 and 4 1/2 years old, and again 2 years later. We found that sibling apologies were rare, generally simple in form, and more frequent after…

In Roberts and Strayer (1996), we reported that emotional expressiveness and anger were important predictors of empathy for school-age children, and that empathy strongly predicted prosocial behaviors aggregated across methods and sources. In this paper, we report how empathy was associated with direct observations of anger and aggression in peer…

Investigated the relationship between psychological understanding and positive social behavior in preschool children. Found that both mental state understanding and emotion understanding were positively related to teacher ratings of social skills, behavioral observers' global ratings of social skills, and peer popularity. When language ability was…

Interviewed 32 families concerning their narrative practices, basic information about the children's story attachments, and the mothers' beliefs and practices concerning their children's attachments. Found that story attachments were social in two ways: Children created relationships with story characters, and formed story attachments with…

Seventy-six fourth-grade children and their parents participated in a study of the linkages among parental control and positive affect, children's display rule use, and children's social competence with peers. Using observational measures of parental behavior and children's display rule use, it was found that parental positive affect and control…