Three studies were conducted to examine how children come to distinguish between the private affairs of an individual and the legitimate scope of group decision-making, and under what conditions children first become aware of individual rights. Participants were children and adolescents ( Study 1 n 119, Study 2 n=120). The participants were presented with stories about situations in which members of a class were to make a group decision. They were asked to judge whether a group decision was appropriate in each situation, and gave reasons for their judgements. Then they were asked to judge how binding the group decision would be and rated how wrong a person would be to go against the group decision. Studies 1 and 2 showed that group decisions that benefit individuals met more approval, and that reasoning associated with individual rights became more common with age. Study 3 showed that group decisions were approved of more often when the decision benefited the group, and when decisions were made in the context of school rather than a home context.

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The focus of this study was young children's self-recognition involving the understanding of temporal perspectives. Three-, 4-, and 5-year-olds (N 56) played a game while an experimenter covertly placed stickers on their heads. Three minutes later, children were shown a video of the scene in which they had been marked. After the mark test, children were asked when they and the experimenter, respectively, discovered the sticker. Most 4- and 5-year-old children passed this mark test. But some children who passed the mark test could not report when they found out about the sticker. Children who could report the time performed better on theory-of-mind tasks, and were unwilling to show their own images to others, compared with children who could not report the time. These results suggest that an explicit understanding of temporal perspectives is related to the development of self-recognition and theory-of-mind.

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How do children initiate interactions with peers? Preschoolers' free play behavior was observed using a videotape recorder, and scenes in which children initiated peer interactions were analyzed to understand the children's types of explicit and implicit strategies. In addition, the stream of initiation behavior (strategy, peer response, consequent condition) was analyzed as a sequence. The results included age differences in initiation styles during ages 3 and 4. There were various implicit strategies besides direct and explicit ones to initiate interactions with peers. Three year-olds imitated others' behavior to engage peers more often than did 4 year-olds. Between ages 3 and 4, children came to use implicit strategies and participate in peer play more often. But in the latter half period of 4 year-olds, children tended more to invite peers to join in their activities, and to attract peers' attention. This latter style might reflect the fact that older children know each other better. The number of explicit entry attempts increased as children became more familiar with the rules of entry into preschool play.

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This study examined whether amount of information affects children's expression of visually realistic drawings. Participants, 169 children 4-6 years of age, were each assigned to one of two conditions. In the partial condition, children were shown the back of a doll before drawing, and in the whole condition, they were shown entire doll. While the children were told to draw what they saw, the doll was set with its back facing them. The results showed that 5 year-old children in the partial condition composed more view-specific drawings than in the whole condition. In addition, view-specific drawings became more common with age in the partial condition. In the whole condition, however, the view-specific drawings of the 4- and 6-year olds were more common than those by the 5-year olds. Finally, non-view specific drawings of 4-year olds were canonical and among the 5- and 6-year olds' drawings were communicative. The results suggested that 5-year olds draw objects in consideration of the information presented to them.

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This study investigated middle-aged married couples' attitudes toward communication with their partners, and analyzed the relationship between communication attitudes and demographic variables (educational background and income level). Participants were 277 pairs of married couples who ware parents in nuclear families. The main results were as follows. (1) Factor analysis of communication attitude extracted four factors, "high-and-mighty", "sympathetic", "dependent/friendly", and "ignoring/avoiding". (2) Husbands' attitudes were significantly higher than wives' on 2 negative dimensions ("high-and-mighty" and "ignoring/avoiding"), while wives' attitudes were higher than husbands' on 2 positive dimensions ("sympathetic" and "dependent/friendly"). (3) Husband' attitudes were characterized primarily on the "high-and-mighty" dimension, whereas wives' were strongest on "dependent/friendly". (4) Educational background was found to have no significant association with communication attitudes to their partner. Finally, wives' income level was significantly related to husbands' "sympathetic" attitude, i.e., the higher the wives' income level the more sympathetic husbands were toward them.

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Six year-old children interpreted 3 domains of mental metaphors : container (e. g., "The mind was empty."), object (e. g., "The mind was heavy."), and agent metaphors (e. g., "The mind hesitated."). In Study 1, 16 children were presented two picture stories: a correct interpretation of the metaphor and a foil, and were asked to select the correct interpretation. In each of Studies 2 and 3, 20 children were presented with a metaphor and 4 picture stories: metaphorical'correct, metaphorical incorrect, literal/incorrect, and an unrelated interpretation of the metaphor. They were asked to make the same choices as in Study 1. In all three studies, most children made more correct selections for container metaphors than for agent metaphors. These results were discussed in terms of preschoolers' image of the mind.

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