The main purpose of this study was to examine how 15 Japanese women conceptualized their first pregnancies. Focused on two terms, sazukaru (to be given by the supernatural being) and tsukuru (to make as the human conduct). Informants (26-39 years old ; residing in Metoropolitan areas) were intreviewed mainly with unstructered and semi-structured questions. The main findings included the following : (1) the word Tsuhuru was more often used than sazuharu as a conversational term, (2) when women explained their terms, they tended conversely to use the term sazukaru, and (3) informants used the word sazukaru with various meanings depending on context. These two terms are not mutually exclusive as they have been unclerstood and discussed by the preceding researchers, but their meanings are related to two separate phases. They seem to coexist in the lexicon of an individual.

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Infant's fear of strangers was examined longitudinally between ages six and eighteen months. At 6 months (N=817) and 12 months (N=722), fear of strangers was assessed by mothers using a questionnaire concerning infant's reactions to strangers. At 18 months, a subsample of 33 infants were observed using a experimental procedure based on the work of Thompson and Lamb (1982). There were significant positive correlations between fear longitudinal study of strangers scores at 18 months and maternal reports at 6 and 12 months. This result suggests that individual differences in fear of strangers are relatively stable between 6 and 18 months. There were gender differences in fear of strangers at all three periods : as females tended to be more fearful than males.

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Preschoolers, third graders, and adults, in three types of triads, performed under one of three conditions. The three types of triads were : (1) same-level concept triads, in which a target and a taxonomic stimuli were connected by a same-level concept [e.g., apple (target) / grapes (stimuli) : fruit (concept)] ; (2) superordinate triads, in which the target and stimuli were subsumed under a superordinate concept (e.g., apple / carrot : food) ; and (3) functionally related triads, in which the target and stimuli were related in terms of function (e.g., leg / hand : body parts). The three conditions were as follows : (1) concept / related word-labeling condition "CC" where subjects were given a concept or a word related to the target word (e.g., "fruit" or "apartofbody") ; (2) instance-labeling condition "IC" where they were given the objects name (eg., "apple" or "leg") ; and (3) no-labeling condition "NC" where they were not given any label. The results showed that : in under the IC, preschoolers and the third graders made more taxnomic responses than did adults. In addition, under the CC, third graders and adults made more taxnomic responses than did preschoolers, although this was the case only for superordinate and functionally related triads. These results were interpreted in terms of age differences in the utilization of concept labels for taxonomic responses.

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The purpose of this study was to clarify the future time perspectives of adolescents from the view point of age norms. An investigation of how age norms are recognized by young people was conducted on 4999 high school students and 701 university students. The following ten items were assumed to be age norms : responsibility for children's upbringing, to be psychologically independent, to be economically independent, to find a job, to behave properly as a worker, to change one's job, to marry, to gain career status, to spend one's leisure time well, and to prepare for old age. The main findings were as follows : (1) most items were recognized by young people as norms ; (2) the career planning made in accordance with the normal expected life-cycle is common regardless of gender or educational level ; and (3) the career planning of subjects who recognized age norms was closer to the normal expected life cycle than that of those who did not recognize the norms. In addition, some items unrelated to age norms were discussed.

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This paper exarmined to what extent and when parents influence their children's book-reading activities. The following were assumed to be the four aspects of the family environment which mediate this influence : (1) provider of physical environment (PP), measured by the number of books at home ; (2) model of expert book-reading (ME), parents' own frequency of book-reading ; (3) encouragement of children's reading activities (RE), the taking children to the library, etc. ; and (4) co-participant in reading (CP), frequency of reading books with children, etc. Third, fifth and eighth graders (N=506) answered a questionnaire about their family's influence on their reading. The main results were as follows. (1) The parents performed these roles more frequently the more they personally liked reading. (2) Direct parent-child interactions such as RE and CP scores were positively related to their influence on children's feelings, but PP and ME scores were not so related. (3) PP scores were positively related to the frequency of reading. These latter two results show that some roles relate to children's feelings and some roles relate to the frequency of activities. (4) The influence of parents declined at children's higher age levels.

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