There are two broad views of children's theory of mind. The mentalist view is that it emerges in infancy and is possibly innate. The minimalist view is that it emerges more gradually in childhood and is heavily dependent on learning. According to minimalism, children initially understand behaviors rather than mental states, and they are assisted…

Twenty-four adults (aged 19-35) and 27 adolescents (aged 13-14) played as "Trustee" in an iterated Trust Game against a pre-programmed set of "Investor" moves, said to belong to an unknown co-player. Trustee behaviour was examined first in response to normative Investor cooperation, and then in response to a period of social rupture caused by…

Evolutionary psychologists explore the adaptive function of traits and behaviors that characterize modern Homo sapiens. However, evolutionary psychologists have yet to incorporate the phylogenetic relationship between modern Homo sapiens and humans' hominid and pongid relatives (both living and extinct) into their theorizing. By considering the…

Socioemotional selectivity theory (SST) has been used successfully to explain age differences in interpersonal conflict behavior: older adults are generally less likely to engage in destructive responses, and more likely to employ nonconfrontational ones. However, this research has focused almost exclusively on conflict with intimates (spouses,…

This study sought to determine whether coaches' immediacy behaviors serve as predictors of athletes' satisfaction and team cohesion levels. Participants included 307 male and female high school athletes who completed measures assessing perceptions of their coaches' verbal and nonverbal immediacy behaviors, as well as their own levels of…

The study of social dominance has a long tradition within the peer relationships literature, but rarely has the topic been investigated observationally and longitudinally within other salient close relationships. The present study investigated the role of experiences in social relationships and adjustment indices in childhood in predicting later…

The evaluation of rewards and costs incurred in the context of interaction is central to equity and exchange theories of interpersonal behavior; however, the question of how this assessment is affected by the anticipation of future interaction has not been directly investigated. If the maintenance of equity in relationships is important, then the…

Individuals interacting with an unfamiliar target person behave according to prior impressions of the target. A perceiver's pre-interaction expectancy can mediate both his and the target person's behavior, resulting in behavioral confirmation or compensation. Male subjects (N=96) participated in dyadic interactions in which one subject (perceiver)…

Direct observation and sequential analytic techniques were used to analyze rates, antecedents, and predictive sequences of aggressive behavior for 28 elementary school-aged children with emotional/behavioral disorders. Results indicated that low rates of positive social interactions characterized the daily classroom ecology of students displaying…

A self-report inventory was compared with a situational test as a predictor of the verbal behavior of individual members of small interpersonal skills training groups. As hypothesized, the situational test was a better predictor than was the self-report inventory. A powerful social conformity effect may have operated in both the situational test…

A study was done to investigate the relationship between a selected set of personality dimensions and the propensities of supervisors to use varying levels of both positive and negative reinforcements. Data were collected during exercises involving 129 male undergraduate business students carried out in a behavioral laboratory wherein a…