This study investigated 4, 5, and 6 year old preschoolers' understanding of figurative language to describe emotions. It examined similes describing happiness, sadness and anger. The experimenter read the similes to each child, who chose one of 3 facial expressions shown on cards. Children could also select a white card if they did not know which emotion the simile described or felt the simile described an emotion other than happiness, sadness or anger. The first main finding was that age differences in simile comprehension varied according to type of emotion. In addition, while 4 year old children demonstrated only a partial ability to comprehend similes, simile comprehension was stable at ages 5 and 6. Finally, there were some common misunderstandings, e.g. when anger was described as hot liquid, some children misinterpreted the simile as describing sadness.

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Junior high school students (N=74) viewed CRT displays of two cars traveling in the same direction, for particular durations and distances. Participants judged which car ran for a longer time or distance, as pairs of cars were depicted in 13 different combinations. Each car moved as soon as it appeared, and disappeared as soon as it stopped, thereby equalizing spatial cues and temporal cues. In addition, two types of scenes were depicted. In the first type (track condition) the two cars ran on parallel tracks of the same length, and in the second condition (no-track condition), there were no tracks. The results were as follows. First, in the track condition, duration judgements were more difficult than distance judgements, while in the no-track condition both judgements were of approximately the same difficulty. Second, in the track condition, spatial stopping points affected error rates much more than did temporal stopping points, while in the no-track condition both effects were approximately equal.

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This study investigated the inclinations of Japanese families concerning whether or not their hospitalized elderly relatives would be cared for at home upon discharge. Questionnaires (N=561) were completed during the hospitalization and again two years later. The mean age of patients was 79.0 years, and most of the female participants were above the age of 75.0f the families, 37.8% intended to utilize home nursing. Factors which were associated with a family's inclination to choose home nursing included : hospitalization experiences and duration of previous hospitalizations, frequency of welfare service utilization, availability of staircases in the home, degree of the patient's dementia, and the frequency of the family's visitations with the patient. A follow-up survey after two years showed that 5.7% of the patients had left the hospital to live at home. Factors which predicted leaving the hospital included : hospitalization of under 6 months, the family's intentions regarding home nursing, and judgement by doctors and nurses that home nursing was advisable. These longitudinal findings indicate that factors which predict the choice of home nursing are similar to the factors which predict hospital discharge. It is necessary to provide advise and support to families so that they can make free and informed choices concerning home nursing.

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This study investigated the effects of growing green soybeans on preschool children's thinking about the growth process and life of plants. Five year old children (N=59) were asked to draw pictures of green soybeans and were interviewed before, during and after their 3-month experience growing beans. The main results were as follows. First, the experience had significant effects on children's understanding of the growth process, e.g. their representations of leaves and flowers at the respective stages of the growth process. Second, observations of roots and leaves in the early stages of the growth process had significant effects on children's thinking. Finally, the benefit of the experience generalized to in fluence children's ideas about the biology of sunflowers and trees.

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This study investigated developmental changes in Internal Working Models (IWM・・・・・・Bowlby) and the cognition of interpersonal experience, in a longitudinal assessment spanning late adolescence and early adulthood. Participants were 31 females, who wrote about their life histories and completed questionnaires 4 months after graduation from nursing school and 4 years thereafter. For the IWM scores ("secure", "ambivalent", "avoidant"), participants' sense of adaptation between the past and the present, their Egogram scores, and cognition about their parents' childrearing attitudes, there were moderately high correlations between the two times of measurement. Correlations between IWM scores and the other scores varied some what at the two times of measurements. There was a negative correlation with "ambivalent" in late adolescence and a negative correlation with "avoidant" in early adulthood. Although degree of security was relatively stable (especially for "insecure" individuals), it increased or decreased over time for several participants. These and other tendencies were related to women's experiences in the transition to adulthood.

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This research examined young children's understanding of Japanese notation letter systems (hiragana and katakana syllabaries ; kanji ideographs ; Arabic figures) as domains of knowledge. It focused on their understanding of perceptual-formal features and the relation between knowledge of systems and the ability to name letters. In Experiment 1, twenty 5- and twenty 4-year-old children performed 4 sorting tasks requiring them to differentiate between the Japanese notation systems. The results were as follows. 1) Overall, children could distinguish among the systems. 2) The elder children comprehended the notations better than did the younger children, as their knowledge approached that of adult-level comprehension. 3) Understanding was related to the total numbers letters children named. 4) Knowledge of one system didn't necessarily coincide with naming ability for that systems, and degree of understanding differed between the systems. To examine this relationship further in Experiment 2, two-thirds of 36 four- and 36 flve-year-old children were trained to improve their naming abilities or knowledge before performing the sorting tasks. The results of Experiment 2 suggested that naming ability increased first as a basis for the development of knowledge about notation.

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