The experience of empathy has been described as involving both emotional and cognitive components. The primary hypothesis tested in this study is that cognition and emotion are integrated within 2 distinct types of abilities--control and perspective taking--and that interactions between emotional and cognitive control and between affective and…

Elementary school students (N=144) determined which set of pictures looked to them the way a set of blocks looked to a second observer from different perspectives. Results indicated that correct spatial judgments were facilitated when a landmark was present. (Author/DB)

Examines the possibility that the detection of developmental differences in spatial egocentrism may depend in part on the use of percentage of total responses vs the percentage of errors as the operational definition of egocentrism. (BD)

Role-taking ability and level of moral development were measured in three groups of boys and girls including 16 moderately retarded adolescents (mean chronological age 15; mean mental age 9), 16 nonretarded adolescents matched for chronological age, and 16 nonretarded children matched for mental age. (CM)

Ninety-six first- through fourth-grade children were administered four cognitive perspective-taking tasks in order to assess their ability to coordinate simultaneously their own viewpoint and another person's differing cognitive viewpoint. (CM)

Results support the hypothesis that certain classification skills underlie two types of role-taking ability: (1) in which children were asked how another child would think a cartoon ended if shown only the beginning; and (2) in which children were asked how another child would think a cartoon began if shown only the end. (Author/DB)

A sample of 182 male and female third and fifth graders were administered Miller, Nessel, and Flavell's measure of recursive thought and Bill's Index of Adjustment and Values. Recursive thought was found to increase with age and was related to a lowering of the self-concept. However, the strongest relationship observed was between intelligence and…

The production and comprehension of pointing and their developmental relationship in the young child was examined in a study of 36 male and female 9- to 14-month-old infants. (CM)

Results provide little support for viewing decentering ability as the major cognitive skill underlying developmental trends on tasks of cognitive perspective taking, peer description, humor understanding, and causal attribution. (Author/BH)

One hundred thirty-six 5-to-10-year-old Israeli children were given three black and white photographs of a highway, a column of identical tanks, and a row of elephants, and were asked some questions on each one of the photographs in order to elicit responses of three-dimensional perception. (CM)