The progressive gains of college faculty since the 1960s (affirmative action, ethnic studies, expansion of access to higher education, emergence of faculty unions) are threatened by social and political shifts toward conservatism. Senior, tenured faculty are challenged to use their privileged positions and the gains made in recent decades to…

Examined the relationship of kindergartners' to second graders' dispositional sympathy to individual differences in emotionality, regulation, and social functioning. Found that sympathy was associated with relatively high levels of regulation, teacher-reported positive emotionality, and general emotional intensity; and, especially for boys, high…

"Living in a Supervised Home: A Questionnaire on Quality of Life" was used to study the relationship between age, disability, and the quality of life of 57 older adults with mental retardation. Results indicated that age was associated with greater self-help skills but more mobility and continence problems; also, age was positively associated with…

Offers practical information in chart and list format for presenting literature to infants and toddlers in group settings. Highlights include developmental characteristics; sample book titles to match to age characteristics; strategies for planning and presenting storytimes; related resources; and a bibliography. (Author/LRW)

Examined age differences in the use and effectiveness of social support processes emitted during conversations about real life negative events between preadolescent, adolescent, and adult friends. Participants were 86 same-sex friendship dyads. Results indicated that talking to friends alleviated negative affect in all ages, but factors predicting…

Investigated mothers' instructional strategies during concept-learning tasks, and the effect of this interaction on subsequent child performance. Found that interaction with mothers influenced children's posttest performance positively; more assistance was provided to three-year-olds than to five-year-olds and more on difficult than on easy tasks;…

Includes "Introduction" (Zvonkovic); "Work-Family Conflict and the Quality of Family Life" (Weigel et al.); "Generational Differences in the Meaning of Retirement from Farming" (Marotz-Baden et al.); "Economic Resources, Influence and Stress among Married Couples" (Greaves et al.); "Needs and Priorities in Balancing Paid and Family Work" (Nichols…

Compared the recognition of emotion from facial expression by 72 Chinese and 72 Australian children using photographs of Chinese and Caucasian faces. Results provide some evidence for an ethnic bias effect in emotion recognition and demonstrate an increase in overall accuracy with age. Cultural differences are discussed. (SLD)

Focal theory is a framework for looking at psychosocial and leisure transitions in middle and later adolescence. Using cross-sectional survey data, found few gender differences in age-related relational transitions, but gender differences were apparent in shifting focuses of leisure involvement with age. Findings suggest a linkage between…

Compared 28- to 53-month-olds' writing and drawing. Scores on a writing scale composed of graphic, "writing-like," and symbolic schemes improved with age. Recognition of drawings as drawings preceded recognition of writings as writings. Writing and drawing scores were substantially correlated, even with age partialed out, suggesting that…

Compared coupling characteristics of clapping simultaneous with walking or galloping, consistency across trials, and phasing variability among 4-, 6-, 8-, and 10-year-olds. Found that for walk/clap tasks, children adopted adult-like coupling patterns by age 8 and with the same consistency by age 10. Across age, children became less variable in…

Changes in patterns of maladaptive behavior related to age-associated adaptive declines were investigated in 529 adults with mental retardation (ages 30 to 84), 202 with Down syndrome. Certain maladaptive behaviors were related to the onset of adaptive declines, (e.g., lack of boundaries). Findings suggest similarities in the course of…

Examined contributions of cognitive processing speed, short-term memory capacity, and attention to infant visual recognition memory. Found that infants who showed better attention and faster processing had better recognition memory. Contributions of attention and processing speed were independent of one another and similar at all ages studied--5,…

Two experiments investigated kindergarten through fourth-graders' and adults' ability to evaluate the certainty of deductive inferences, inductive inferences, and guesses, and explain the origins of inferential knowledge. Findings indicated that children rated their own deductions as more certain than guesses, but when judging another person's…

Three experiments examined 6- to 11-year-olds' judgments about appropriate self-descriptions in front of different audiences. Findings indicated that only older children differentiated between an unfamiliar peer and unfamiliar adult audience in selecting one of two self-descriptive statements. Even the youngest children differentiated between…