This study examined the public behavior between adults and children in 557 groups and evaluated the effects of group size, number of children (16 years of age and younger), and number of adults on the cross-age interactions. For a 10-second period, all social interactions between members of a group were recorded using an unobtrusive observational…

Analysis of observations of 70 adults making public verbal threats to physically punish or hurt children indicated that adults typically attributed unshared responsibility for group problems to the child and normalized their own aggression by acting as though nothing unusual had happened. The role of the ongoing interaction and the social context…

This paper discusses findings from a study of the speech patterns of 10 mothers interacting with their own younger child, their own older child, and with an adult. Results are discussed in terms of the temporal-acoustic pattern and content of the mothers' speech. Two claims are made about the kinds of speech a child hears: (1) The flow of speech…

A project to determine how children and members of their social environment regulate the stimulation they receive from each other is presented. The general procedure employed was the descriptive and experimental analysis of the behavior of subjects in social interaction situations, as recorded on videotape. Types of dyads videotaped include…

This paper presents two studies of the development of social competencies in infancy. In the first experiment, the central issue investigated was whether facial configuration or height is utilized by infants to respond differentially to children and adults. Five different strangers, a male and a female child, a male and a female adult, and a small…

This collection of abstracts is part of a continuing series providing information on recent doctoral dissertations. The 18 titles deal with a variety of topics, including the following: a comparison of mother/child and father/child interactions; state anxiety responses in high and low speech anxious subjects; variables that predict listening…