This study examined the age at which children understand that a display of apparent crying may create false beliefs in another person. In addition, it examined whether it is necessary to have acquired recursive thought to understand such false beliefs. Mizokawa and Koyasu (2007) showed that even 6-year olds cannot fully understand such false beliefs. In the present study, 525 children, ages 6 to 12, were given a booklet including "crying tasks" and a "Second-order false belief task." Crying tasks contained two "apparent crying tasks" and one "real crying task." In each "crying task," the protagonist looked as if she was crying. After each story, participants judged whether the protagonist was really crying, and whether the other character believed that the protagonist was crying. The results showed that children can understand false beliefs about apparent crying at around age 9, and there is a relationship between understanding of such false beliefs and performance on a second-order false belief task. These findings suggest that recursive thought is an important cognitive basis for understanding another's emotion.

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Do young children recognize that knowledge is required for pretending? In Study 1,5- to 6-year olds predicted that other children who have knowledge of an object unfamiliar to the participants themselves can nevertheless pretend to be the object, whereas those lacking that knowledge cannot. However, 3- to 4-year olds predicted that other children who have knowledge of an object unfamiliar to the participants themselves cannot pretend to be it. In Study 2,5- to 6-year olds demonstrated an ability to make judgments about the others' abilities for pretense based on the other's false knowledge. But, 3- to 4-year olds did not demonstrate such ability. The data from this study suggested that 5- to 6-year olds understand the relationship between knowledge and action in pretense.

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Forty-four mother-child dyads participated in this study, including 15 1-year-olds, 15 2-year-olds, and 14 3-year-olds. Each dyad was observed at home during lunch time, and all utterances were transcribed and categorized. The main findings were as follows. With increasing age, children made gradual progress in feeding skills. The typical way of being fed among 1-year-olds was spoon-feeding by mothers. This was gradually replaced with age by self-feeding with utensils. Among 1-year olds, stereotyped routines were frequently observed as developing in children's eating behavior. Mother-child interaction was also related to children's appetite level. When children were not chewing, mothers seldom responded to their children's "chatting." Instead, they let children eat foods and tried to discourage off-task behaviors at mealtime. Many mothers adjusted mealtime settings in accordance with children's appetite levels. When children were chewing, mothers provided more foods and utensils and expanded children's free area. But when children were not chewing, mothers narrowed their free space.

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This study used analogy tasks to measure proportional reasoning in young children. Participants were 100 children from 4 to 6 years of age. The materials were a round pizza, a square chocolate bar and small round pieces of chocolates. Children were shown a base substance, e.g., a whole pizza, from which a proportion was then removed, e.g., a half of the pizza. Children were asked to complete an analogy by removing an equivalent proportion of their target set, e.g., a whole square chocolate bar changed to half a square of chocolates. The experimenter's pizza or chocolates were eight-segmented, and the subject's pizza or chocolates were four-segmented. The borders dividing the segments were clearly visible. The results showed that 4- to 6-year-old children understood proportional equivalence, even when the materials to be matched were not isomorphic. It was found that the tasks were more difficult when the eight-segment circle was presented to the children. Proportional reasoning in young children depended on the shapes. Eight-segment circles were more difficult than eight-segment squares, as children used reasoning to solve proportional analogy tasks.

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This study analyzed a clinical-developmental consultation service (Hamatani, 2005), which was provided to kindergartens in a Japanese city. The purpose of the study was to specify the functions and structure of support in consultation. Support functions for kindergartens were compared to those for nursery daycare facilities, in reference to studies of itinerant consultation. In Study 1, the following five support functions were extracted by factor analysis of the evaluations of consultations by kindergarten teachers (N=110): 'teaching method and plan,' 'encouragement, understanding the child,' 'understanding parents,' and 'collaboration.' Study 2 consisted of a group interview with teachers and the principal about a typical consultation case. It was suggested that 'encouragement' through 'understanding the child' and 'collaboration' were the core functions of support structure in itinerant consultation.

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This study explored coping differences that depended on social constraints, in the process of achieving goals determined by external standards. Based on the dual process model of Brandtstadter and Renner (1990), social constraints were defined as situations where multiple social roles hinder individuals' study to obtain a nursing license. Participants were two groups of nursing school students, including first those who balanced study and work (multiple-role students, n=105) and secondlry those who only studied (single-role students, n=142). They completed a questionnaire about accommodative and assimilative coping styles, and their psychological health. The results revealed the following: (1) multiple-role students reported accommodative coping to a greater degree than did single-role students; (2) there were no differences between multiple-role and single-role students in psychological health; and (3) high accommodative coping predicted better psychological health. These findings suggested that social constraints facilitate individuals' tendency to use accommodative coping to maintain their psychological health. In addition, the association between accommodative and assimilative coping was positive only for multiple-role students.

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In this research, identity- and location-based functions of dementia were examined using Stroop and SRC tasks, and intelligent and frontal lobe functions of dementia were examined using MMSE and FAB tasks. It was shown the inhibitory, intelligent, and frontal lobe functions of individuals with dementia were deficient, compared with those of healthy elderly adults. In addition, different results between the healthy elderly group and the dementia group were shown for identity- and location-based functions. There were significant differences between the groups for some but not all sub-items of the MMSE. The dementia group had significantly lower performance on all the sub-items of FAB except dependency. These results were discussed from the viewpoint of differences and development of identity- and location-based functions. In addition, individuals with dementia were considered very low in cognitive functions such as inhibition, memory and conceptualization, compared to the healthy elderly adults.

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The purpose of this study was to clarify the length of postpartum depression and the factors which affect the onset and recovery from it. 407 primiparous women provided longitudinal data five times: during pregnancy, at 5 weeks, and 3, 6, and 12 months postpartum. The factor that significantly affected depression at all five time points was one's score on the Edinburgh Postnatal Depression Scale (EPDS) at pregnancy. Self-preoccupation, as an indicator of vulnerability to depression, showed no significant influence on depression at 5 weeks and 3 months postpartum, which suggested that early postpartum depression was mostly affected by physiological factors. Latent growth curve modeling analysis revealed that factors which influenced the slope were the EPDS score at pregnancy, self-esteem and attachment safety, negative affection toward the infant and parenting attitude at 3 months. It was evident that about 3 months postpartum was the turning point for recovery.

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The present study examined two processes by which parents' marital relationships affected adolescents' attitudes toward marriage. The first was the Direct Route, in which parents' marital relationships directly affected adolescents' marital attitudes by a simple mechanism such as associative learning. The second process was the Modeling Route, in which parents' marital relationships indirectly affected adolescents' marital attitudes through the medium of adolescent courtships. Structural Equation Modeling of data from 213 university students showed that the Direct Route occurs regardless of adolescents' evaluations of their parents' marital relationships, while the Modeling Route occurs only when adolescents have high evaluations of their parents' marital relationships.

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The identity status approach has been the typical way to examine identity development during middle adulthood, and has considered adult identity development to be a repetition of adolescent identity formation. This paper reviews studies of midlife identity development using the identity status approach, and recent studies that have begun to point out some limitations of the identity status approach. One recent issue in this research area concerns how to investigate processes and mechanisms to maintain optimal identity through a series of new aging experiences. Another is to try to define the successive task of identity in the stage of middle adulthood. In conclusion, the view that adult identity develops through reconstructions is insufficient to answer the question of how different the two identity achievements are before and after the reconstruction.

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This study investigates the relationship between interaction with children of different ages and the Development of Theory of Mind (ToM). Perner et al. (1994) suggested that sibling interactions affect the development of ToM. The present study was of children with and without siblings who attended either of two types of nursery. In a nursery school with children of mixed ages the participants were 17 children without siblings and 40 children with siblings. In the other nursery, with same-age grouping, the participants were 29 children without siblings and 39 with siblings. Both groups were given two false-belief tasks, a representational-change task, and a false-photograph task. With regard to only the false-belief tasks, the results indicated that children who did not have siblings and were in the same-age-grouped nursery school fared poorly compared to those from the mixed-age nursery. The data suggested that interaction with children of different ages or siblings accelerated the development of a ToM. However, this interaction may not affect physical representations as in the false-photograph.

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