The literature in economic psychology and quality-of-life studies alludes to a negative relationship between materialism and life satisfaction. In contrast, the macroeconomic literature implies a positive relationship between material consumption and economic growth. That is, materialism may be both good and bad. We develop a model that reconciles…

In this study, the authors assessed children's ability to use information overheard in other people's conversations to judge the reality status of a novel entity. Three- to 9-year-old children (N = 101) watched video clips in which two adults conversed casually about a novel being. Videos contained statements that explicitly denied, explicitly…

This study investigated Korean and U.S. preschoolers' personal and fictional narratives, their classroom book environments, and their teachers' attitudes about reading aloud. The participants were 70 Korean and American 3- and 4-year-olds enrolled in 2 university lab preschools and their 4 teachers. The structures and content of the preschoolers'…

Western Europe has been constructed in the field of education abroad as a "traditional" location: in some sense or another that label is used to suggest that it has a kind of static or dormant significance. In reality, Western Europe is an enormously rich location for study abroad precisely because it is a fluid learning environment that…

Research on career development has focused primarily on adolescents and adults. However, in Gottfredson's theory of circumscription and compromise (2002) it is proposed that career aspirations originate in the preschool years and that the earliest work aspirations of children are sex typed in relation to the activities of same sex adults. This…

This article reports the potential of online role-playing games to be a powerful tool for English as a second language (ESL) learning. When Professor Edd Schneider and game designer Kai Zheng suggested to attendees gathered in San Francisco last spring for the annual Game Developers Conference that massively multiplayer online role-playing games,…

Violent incidents occur frequently in schools and suicide ranks second to accidents as the leading cause of death among adolescents. The purpose of this presentation is to summarize the findings of six studies that used a stimulus-drawing task for access to fantasies, thoughts, and feelings. The studies were based on the theory that the task can…

The films "Star Maps" and "El Norte" reveal the real political, socioeconomic, and psychic costs of divided cities by bringing the simulated realities of mass media to their logical end, thereby sacrificing each character to the disorder of the city. In "Star Maps", Carlos dreams of becoming the next major Latino…

The arts and sciences have been identified as two specific domains that are dependent upon the creative process. A total of 369 undergraduate students served as research participants in two separate studies. In the first study, participants (N = 238) completed a measure of Openness to Experience (NEO-PI; McCrae & Costa, 1999) and a…

Seventy-seven contemporary realistic fiction children's books portraying a dyslexic character were published in the United States between 1993 and 2003. This study examined the texts to determine what types of issues the reading difficulty posed for the character. Texts were analyzed to determine if there was a relationship between the gender of…

Although "The Equalizer" and "Finder of Lost Loves" are different kinds of prime time fiction--urban thriller on the one hand and fantasy melodrama on the other--they share an underlying dramatic structure and symbolic problematic in their repeated enactments of a therapeutic cure overseen by a mediating, authority figure. The…

The author found "This Bridge Called My Back" at the local public library when she was, at age thirty-three, finally beginning to write again, and write honestly. There were Indian voices in "Bridge"--a few poems or personal narratives that moved her, but which barely began to represent the range of the writers or the…

J. K. Rowling's series about the young, orphaned Harry Potter who escapes his often hostile, nonmagical Muggle (or human) existence for a world of ghosts, spells, and potions, magical objects, and exotic creatures to be found at the Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry has captivated a worldwide audience. Since the publication in England of…

This document contains three papers from a symposium on adult learning in the workplace. "Coaching: Facilitating the Training of Subject-Matter Specialists. Development and Evaluation of an Andragogical Model of Continuing Vocational Education" (Jost Reischmann) describes the new insights into the problems of continuing vocational…

This annual report presents several articles related to the work of the Clinical Center for Child Development at Hokkaido University in Sapporo, Japan. The articles are: (1) "Maternal Speech and Behavior during Mother-Infant Play: Comparison between the United States and Japan" (Sueko Toda, Marc H. Bornstein, and Hiroshi Azuma); (2)…