The present study attempts to explore what kind of "personality theory" preschoolers have. For this purpose, preschoolers' understanding of characteristics in their friends' behavior was investigated. "Friends" in this study were defined as children of the same gender who chose each other as close companions, and "acquaintances" were those who knew each other but were not as close as friends. Twenty-four 5-year-old and twenty-eight 6-year-old children were asked how their friends would behave toward themselves and their acquaintances in various situations, such as play, help, and trust. It was found that they predicted their friends to behave more favorably to themselves than to their acquaintance in play situations, but not necessarily in other situations. The finding suggested that preschoolers understood their friends' patterns of behavior not merely based on their friends' general characteristics but on the specific personal relationship between them.

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The purpose of this study was to examine the effects of a personality trait (trait anxiety) and a stress event (exams) on the frequency of dream recall (DRF). One hundred and twenty-five senior high school students were asked to recall and record dreams for two three-day periods, just prior to examinations and summer vacation, for stress and control conditions, respectively. The students who perceived the examinations as stressful recalled more dreams during the stress period than the control period. ANOVA of the stressful students' DRF showed a significant interaction effect of trait anxiety and stress event, in addition to a stress-event main effect. The results therefore supported the stress-event main-effect model, as well as the trait-by-stress interaction model for the frequency of dream recall.

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In Study I, Social Avoidance and Distress Scale (SADS) was administered to l82 male undergraduates, and their seat choices when talking with an unacquainted woman and impressions of others who would take different seats during an interaction were examined with a questionnaire. Fewer high anxiety students chose the seat directly opposite to the woman than the low; most chose a seat next to the opposite one. In contrast, the low most often chose the opposite. As for impressions, the high tended to rate the other, a woman, as more tense, and seat directions became more important, as the other chose a closer seat. In Study II, female graduate students interviewed 28 high anxiety male students four times. Half of the interview pairs sat across the corner of a table, while the others sat in the next-to-opposite seat, the seat most favored by the high in the first study. Although the interviewers rated the subjects who sat across the corner as more tense at the beginning than the other seat arrangement, their impressions became progressively more relaxed, and ended up with more relaxed. The corner seats appeared to have beneficial effects for clinical interviews.

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The purposes of the present study were to examine whether the process underlying social-category applicability effect (Banaji, Hardin, & Rothman, 1993) was automatic, and to investigate the effects of need for cognition and sex-role stereotype on the process. Forty-eight female undergraduates were exposed to dependency-related or neutral primes that were subliminally or supraliminally presented, and subsequently rated a hypothetical target who was male, female, or neutral. Main findings were: a) Subjects exposed to dependency-related primes rated the male target more dependent than the female, while the opposite was true for those exposed to neutral ones. This result contradicted Banaji et al.'s. b) The result was found regardless of whether primes were subliminal or supraliminal. c) The effect was more pronounced for subjects with strong need for cognition, and those with negative attitudes toward traditional gender roles. Based on the results, it is argued that the process is indeed automatic, and that difference in subjects' sex-role stereotypes of the two studies most probably accounts for the contradictory findings.

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This article reviews psychological and psychiatric research on the adjustment of children of depressed mothers. With development of research paradigm and methodology of developmental psychopathology, a great number of studies of children with depressed mothers were conducted during the last decade. These studies in general found that children with depressed mothers were at risk for a wide variety of adjustment problems including mental illness, and that the mechanisms for emergence of maladjustment were considerably complex. Not a simple effect model of maternal depression on child development, but an interactional model with multiple risk factors seems effective in understanding why maladjustment of children of depressed mothers are frequent. Methodological issues in the studies are discussed, along with suggestions for future investigations.

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