Background: It is well-established that children and adolescents with developmental language disorder (DLD) have social-emotional difficulties. This is reflected in their behaviour, for instance, by (social) withdrawal, hyperactivity or difficulty with peer relations. Children with DLD are also known to have poorer quality of life (QoL). This is…

Negation is a universal component of human language; polarity sensitivity (i.e., lexical distributional constraints in relation to negation) is arguably so while being pervasive across languages. Negation has long been a field of inquiry in psychological theories and experiments of reasoning, which inspired many follow-up studies of negation and…

This article had four goals. First, the authors identified a set of general challenges and questions that a life-span theory of development should address. Second, they presented a comprehensive account of their Motivational Theory of Life-Span Development. They integrated the model of optimization in primary and secondary control and the…

The selection of play materials has long been of concern to parents and educators. Many play materials simply do not engage children. In this study toys were openly displayed for free selection and play within a children's recreation center. Data were collected on the subject population, toy selection and toy usage. The results indicated that…

The effects of 80 second- through fifth-grade boys and girls of three types of adult commentary (anti-aggressive, nonaggressive, neutral), presented during a violent TV show, were examined and compared to a nonviolent control film group. Subjects' latency in seeking responsible adult assistance when witnessing "real" aggression among…

Three myths about the cognitive processing of television and its effects on children and adults--television is a passive medium, viewing decreases creativity, and viewing is an addictive behavior--are discussed and compared with relevant research findings. (MBR)

A series of studies on observer biases revealed that simply informing observers of experimental hypotheses does not produce observational data consonant with those hypotheses. However, questionnaire responses following an experiment with different induced expectations does produce global data consonant with experimental hypotheses. In addition, if…

The desired choice patterns of friendship, leadership, and classroom workship of children attending a desegregated/integrated elementary urban school were determined. Utilizing quota sampling, 159 children were examined on a three-choice, six-criteria, non-ranked sociometric test. Children were not asked to make rejections. Cliques and…