Monographs of The Society for Research in Child Development 

About: Monographs of The Society for Research in Child Development is an academic journal published by Wiley-Blackwell. The journal publishes majorly in the area(s): Cognitive development & Child development. It has an ISSN identifier of 0037-976X. Over the lifetime, 895 publications have been published receiving 78865 citations.

Security in infancy, childhood, and adulthood: A move to the level of representation.

Abstract: We are grateful to the Institute of Human Development, Berkeley, and to the Society for Research in Child Development for funding that made the study of our sample at 6 years possible. In its earlier phases, the Social Development Project was supported by the William T. Grant Foundation, by the Alvin Nye Main Foundation, and by Bio-Medical Support Grants 1-444036-32024 and 1-444036-32025 for studies in the behavioral sciences. The Child Study Center at the University of California was invaluable in its provision of subjects and in the training provided for our observers and examiners. The National Center for Clinical Infancy Programs provided support and assistance to Nancy Kaplan. This project would not have been possible without the direction and assistance provided by Donna Weston and by Bonnie Powers, Jackie Stadtman, and Stewart Wakeling in its first phases. For the initial identification of infants who should be left unclassified-an identification critical to the present study-we gratefully acknowledge both Judith Solomon and Donna Weston. Carol George participated in the designing of the sixth-year project; Ruth Goldwyn served as adult interviewer; and Ellen Richardson served as the child's examiner. The videotapes and transcripts of the sixth-year study were analyzed by Jude Cassidy, Anitra DeMoss, Ruth Goldwyn, Nancy Kaplan, Todd Hirsch, Lorraine Littlejohn, Amy Strage, and Reggie Tiedemann. Mary Ainsworth, John Bowlby, Harriet Oster, and Amy Strage provided useful criticism of earlier versions of this chapter. The overall conceptualization was substantially enriched by suggestions made by Erik Hesse.

Emotion regulation: a theme in search of definition

Abstract: Contemporary interest in emotion regulation promises to advance important new views of emotional development as well as offering applications to developmental psychopathology, but these potential contributions are contingent on developmentalists' attention to some basic definitional issues. This essay offers a perspective on these issues by considering how emotion regulation should be defined, the various components of the management of emotion, how emotion regulation strategies fit into the dynamics of social interaction, and how individual differences in emotion regulation should be conceptualized and measured. In the end, it seems clear that emotion regulation is a conceptual rubric for a remarkable range of developmental processes, each of which may have its own catalysts and control processes. Likewise, individual differences in emotion regulation skills likely have multifaceted origins and are also related in complex ways to the person's emotional goals and the immediate demands of the situation. Assessment approaches that focus on the dynamics of emotion are well suited to elucidating these complex developmental and individual differences. In sum, a challenging research agenda awaits those who enter this promising field of study.

Social Cognition, joint attention and communicative Competence from 9 to 15 months of age

Abstract: At around 1 year of age, human infants display a number of new behaviors that seem to indicate a newly emerging understanding of other persons as intentional beings whose attention to outside objects may be shared, followed into, and directed in various ways. These behaviors have mostly been studied separately. In the current study, we investigated the most important of these behaviors together as they emerged in a single group of 24 infants between 9 and 15 months of age. At each of seven monthly visits, we measured joint attentional engagement, gaze and point following, imitation of two different kinds of actions on objects, imperative and declarative gestures, and comprehension and production of language. We also measured several nonsocial-cognitive skills as a point of comparison. We report two studies. The focus of the first study was the initial emergence of infants' social-cognitive skills and how these skills are related to one another developmentally. We found a reliable pattern of emergence: Infants progressed from sharing to following to directing others' attention and behavior. The nonsocial skills did not emerge predictably in this developmental sequence. Furthermore, correlational analyses showed that the ages of emergence of all pairs of the social-cognitive skills or their components were inter-related. The focus of the second study was the social interaction of infants and their mothers, especially with regard to their skills of joint attentional engagement (including mothers' use of language to follow into or direct infants' attention) and how these skills related to infants' early communicative competence. Our measures of communicative competence included not only language production, as in previous studies, but also language comprehension and gesture production. It was found that two measures--the amount of time infants spent in joint engagement with their mothers and the degree to which mothers used language that followed into their infant's focus of attention--predicted infants' earliest skills of gestural and linguistic communication. Results of the two studies are discussed in terms of their implications for theories of social-cognitive development, for theories of language development, and for theories of the process by means of which human children become fully participating members of the cultural activities and processes into which they are born.

Behavioral problems and competencies reported by parents of normal and disturbed children aged four through sixteen.

Abstract: The study was designed (a) to provide prevalence data on behavioral problems and competencies, (b) to identify differences related to demographic variables, and (c) to compare clinically referred and demographically similar nonreferred children. Data were obtained with the Child Behavior Checklist (CBCL), consisting of 20 social competence items and 118 behavior problems. Parents of 1,300 referred children completed the CBCL at intake into outpatient mental health services, while parents of 1,300 randomly selected nonreferred children completed the CBCL in a home interview survey. Intraclass correlations were in the .90s for interparent agreement, 1-week test-retest reliability, and inter-interviewer reliability. Indices of the reported prevalence of each item are graphically portrayed for children grouped by age, gender, and clinical status. Multiple regressions and ANCOVAs showed minimal racial differences but significant tendencies for lower SES children to have higher behavior problem and lower competence scores than upper SES children. There were numerous gender differences on specific items but no significant gender difference in total behavior problem or competence score. Age showed more and larger differences than the other demographic variables, but these differences were dwarfed by differences related to referral status. Across all demographic groups, referal status accounted for more variance in total behavior problem and social competence scores than in the scores for any single item. However, some behavior problems that have traditionally received little attention were much more strongly associated with referral status than problems that have received much attention. Cutoff points on the distributions of total behavior problem and social competence scores yield good separation between referred and nonreferred samples.