Second-grade and fourth-grade subjects were required to listen to a congruent or scrambled story, followed by a recognition test of the sentences included in the story. The importance of information included in the story had previously been rated by college students. Older children were found to recognize the information more accurately than younger children. Both second and fourth graders performed better in the congruent condition than in the scrambled one. No difference was found between recognition accuracy for important and for unimportant information. The results supported previous findings for the age effect and the type of story. The lack of significant effects involving the type of information may have resulted from the lack of sensitivity of the indicator of importance used.

Four studies were designed to examine the effects of stimulus novelty on looking time, preference, and processing efficiency in hyperactive children. Two control groups were selected; normal children and nonhyperactive poor readers. According to underarousal theories of hyperactivity, the hyperactives should show a unique, heightened attraction to novel stimuli. / Novelty was defined in two ways, as incongruity and as unfamiliarity. The responses of all three groups varied systematically as a function of the changes in novelty. There was limited evidence that the hyperactives were unusually attracted to the novel materials. Although they initially spent more time viewing the incongruous stimuli, this heightened interest was short-lived. Furthermore, this attraction was not apparent in their preference judgments, or in their looking time for unfamiliar stimuli. Tests of recognition and speeded matching indicated that the hyperactives needed more time than normals to process both ordinary and novel stimuli. However, they did not take this extra time unless they were motivated by the presentation of incongruous stimuli or were guided by the experimenter. Poor readers, in contrast, showed no special attraction to novelty. They tended to adopt a slower free-viewing pace than normals, possibly due to difficulty processing complex materials. However, they did not differ from normal children in speed or accuracy of matching simple stimuli.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Wisconsin--Madison, 1983. / Typescript. Vita. Description based on print version record. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 137-145).

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Few studies have examined depression in children from an Information Processing (IP) perspective. In this thesis a number of domains of IP (known to be associated with adult depression)are examined in children and adolescents, in particular, autobiographical memory specificity in both clinical and non-clinical samples. Foremost, overgeneral memory (OGM) was found for the first time, to be characteristic of dysphoric (Study 1) and clinically depressed children (Study 2). Similarity in the extent of the OGM bias in depressed and dysphoric children was observed. OGM was also comparable across child, adolescent and adult depressed groups (Study 2). Second, OGM predicted depressive symptoms in children during a stressful life event, in the first longitudinal diathesis-stress investigation of OGM to date (Study 3). OGM was also linked for the first time to an overgeneral thinking style and to a depressive attributional style (Study 3) thereby offering possible mechanistic insight in OGM. Third, in support of Williams' (1996) developmental origins hypothesis, OGM was also demonstrated in children in residential care who had suffered significant independently verified negative life events (Study 5). OGM in these youth was positively correlated with deficits in social problem solving and facial-affect identification, in part contextualizing OGM in children alongside depresso-typical biases. Performance on the AMT also varied as a function of severity of abuse with more abused children demonstrating less OGM -a recency memorial coping strategy is proposed to account for this effect. Fourth, a new measure of EF was introduced and highlights the importance of encoding preferences in explaining 0GM (Studies I& 5). Finally, considerable attention is paid to the pattern of valence results across studies. It is noted that effects most often lie with biases in the processing of positive information and that future studies may benefit from a concentration on this aspect of depressogenic bias utilizing a developmental perspective. Several key theoretical and practical implications are carefully discussed.

The study examined children's evaluations and attributions in response to ingratiating acts directed at different targets in the presence or absence of an ulterior motive. According to an attributional analysis of ingratiation (Jones & McGillis, 1976; Jones & Wortman, 1973), attributions of enduring behavioral dispositions to ingratiators and evaluation of these ingratiators should vary as a function of presence or absence of ulterior motives and as a function of target status, because very high status targets are likely to control desirable benefits even when these are not made explicit. Ingratiators with ulterior motives and those who ingratiate high status targets should be evaluated less positively, and they should be seen as less likely to repeat their "nice" acts in other situations or to other targets. These "idealized predictions rest on the assumption of differential perception and evaluation of ingratiators ' motives under different circumstances. Children's ability to use motives in making moral evaluations of others has long been a subject of debate. However, few researchers have asked children about the dispositional implications of their moral evaluations. The present study was thus intended to examine children's evaluations and attributions in response to a morally relevant behavior (ingratiation) somewhat different from the behaviors most studies have investigated. It was expected that age-related changes in evaluation of strategic behaviors and changes in patterns of attribution would reflect a shift away from reliance on adult rules in judging acts and a corresponding increase in reliance on peer group norms. Male and female first, third, and fifth graders and an adult control group heard four stories about children who opinion conformed or did favors . The target of the acts was either a disliked (low, status) peer, a well-liked (high status) peer, or an adult (the ingratiator's teacher). Each act either occurred with no explicit ulterior motive, or it occurred after the ingratiator learned that the target controlled a benefit that the ingratiator very much desired, so that an ulterior motive was prominent. Subjects used rating scales to evaluate the ingratiators , to estimate the probability that they would repeat their acts, and to rate the effectiveness of the ingratiation. Subjects' were also asked for free response explanations of the ingratiators' behaviors, and they explained what they would do if they wanted to get a desirable benefit from one of the story targets. Favor doing was regarded far more positively than opinion conforming, and evaluation of ingratiation declined steadily with age. First graders tended to see all ingratiation as quite positive, likely to generalize, and likely to be effective. First graders were able to explain strategic favor-doing, but they had difficulty with opinion conformity. Among the other groups , motive became increasingly important with age as a determinant of both evaluations and predicted repetition of the act. Motive effects were not always in the expected direction, however. Ulterior motive opinion conformity to an adult was evaluated more positively than no ulterior motive opinion conformity, indicating that ingratiation of this target was less deplorable if the ingratiator was strongly tempted. Third graders in particular showed signs of regarding opinion conformity to an adult in a fairly favorable light. They thought an adult would be relatively likely to pick an opinion conformer to receive a desirable benefit, where- as the other age groups saw favor-doing as much more effective with an adult target. I^en asked how they themselves would try to influence a target, younger subjects of ten mentioned providing physical benefits while adults were more likely to suggest a straightforward request. The patterns of main effects seen on the measures pertaining to predictions of future behavior appeared to strongly resemble the one predicted by an attributional analysis of ingratiation. Children seemed more sensitive than adults to the power of the very high status adult target to elicit ingratiating acts . Patterns of attribution among third graders sometimes appeared more adult-like than those appearing among fifth graders . This paradoxical finding and third graders' relatively favorable responses to adult oriented opinion conformers are discussed in terms of third graders’ greater tendency to judge behavior in line with adult rules, while fifth graders may be more sensitive to peer groups norms. / This thesis was digitized as part of a project begun in 2014 to increase the number of Duke psychology theses available online. The digitization project was spearheaded by Ciara Healy.

NOTE: Presented in Partial Fulfillment of Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Educational Leadership in the Department of Curriculum and Instruction in the College of Education, Georgia State University Purpose: The content and language structure of stories created by young children have been for many years an interest to researchers who have attempted to investigate children's thinking as reflected in their stories. These stories, believed to consist of children's actual thoughts during the story creation process, may reflect thinking and can be examined and analyzed according to identified criteria. The five characteristics of plot structures investigated for this study were story length, T-units, words per T-unit, characters, and incidents. Piaget's decreasingly egocentric speech features were causality, logical justification, and sequence. The purposes of this study were first, to examine nonconserving and conserving first grade children's oral expression as reflected in their stories, and second, to determine if a relationship existed between characteristics of plot structures and egocentric speech features. Procedures: The subjects for this study were 181 first grade children enrolled in four elementary schools located in largely suburban residential areas of DeKalb County of metropolitan Atlanta, Georgia. The study consisted of two phases. Phase one involved a study of conservation tasks to identify the children as nonconservers or conservers. A standardized test of conservation was administered individually. There were 134 nonconservers and 47 conservers. Phase two consisted of the collection and analysis of two language experience stories for each subject for a total of 362 stories and of establishing the reliability of the judges. The language samples were studied to determine any significant differences in the frequency of the plot structures and the presence or absence of the decreasingly egocentric speech features. To establish interrater reliability four judges rated a random sampling of ten subject's stories and a two-way analysis of variance was employed. Results: The results of the interrater reliability revealed that the judges were highly consistent in their ratings with the exception of the variable incidents. The median reliabilities for story one and story two were each .99, respectively (p Conclusions and Implications: Nonconserving and conserving children can retell a story previously heard much better than they can create their personal stories. Conserving children's language is more linguistically complex than nonconserving children's language. Nonconserving and conserving children's cognitive functioning and understanding of story structure can be inferred to some degree from their stories. Examining children's oral language production merits further research to investigate additional features of story structure and cognitive development. Story retelling is a better measure of children's linguistic complexity than creation of stories. Classroom teachers and reading specialists can use children's stories as sources of diagnostic information to study children's levels of cognitive functioning and understanding of story structure.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Wyoming, 2005. / Title from PDF title page (viewed on Oct. 16, 2007). Includes bibliographical references (p. 36-39).

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Toronto, 2004. / Adviser: Daniel P. Keating.