Relations between current paternal drinking status, attachment to parents, and psychosocial functioning were examined to determine whether previously reported findings on children of alcoholics were replicated, and to evaluate perceived attachment to parents as a mediator and/or moderator of adult children's adjustment. One hundred thirty-eight college students under age 23, 66% female, 80% White, 49% with alcoholic fathers and all with non-problem-drinking mothers, completed self-report measures of parental drinking status, security of attachment to parents, anxiety, depression, self-esteem, adult attachment style, alcohol involvement, and drug use. Most subjects scored in normal ranges for anxiety and depression, were moderate drinkers, and reported little drug use. Subjects with alcoholic fathers reported lower self-esteem and less-secure attachment to father; they also more frequently reported that their father's parenting style was inconsistent, and less frequently reported that it was responsive. With psychosocial functioning variables hierarchically regressed on demographics, paternal drinking status, attachment to father, and attachment to mother, paternal alcoholism added to prediction of only self-esteem, attachment to father improved prediction of secure adult attachment style rating, and attachment to mother added to prediction of mental health, self-esteem, adult attachment, and alcohol use. In separate tests of statistical mediation, results are consistent with the role of attachment to father as a mediator of the relation between paternal alcoholism and both mental health and security of adult attachment style, and with attachment to mother as a mediator of the relation between paternal alcoholism and mental health, self-esteem, and adult attachment. Neither security of attachment to father nor to mother was a linear moderator of statistical relations between paternal alcoholism and psychosocial adjustment; thus results did not support a buffering hypothesis. Findings warrant caution against assumption of psychopathology in alcoholics' children; most function within normal ranges on multiple measures. Knowledge of paternal alcoholism is, alone, a poor predictor of psychosocial adjustment; knowledge of the child's perception of parent-child relationships, particularly attachment to mother, appears to have relatively greater predictive utility. Future research should include replication with a population not limited to college students.

Children can learn aspects of the meaning of a new word on the basis of only a few incidental exposures and can retain this knowledge for a long time. The process of rapidly learning and remembering new words has come to be known as fast mapping. It is often maintained that fast mapping is the result of a dedicated language mechanism, but it is possible that this same capacity might apply in domains other than language learning. The present studies explore the nature of fast mapping, with the goal of revealing more about the mechanism underlying word learning in children. One possibility is that the capacity for word learning is mediated by a specialized language mechanism. A second view posits that all of language acquisition depends on more general cognitive processes. Alternatively, the acquisition of words and grammar may involve different mechanisms. To test these alternative proposals, children and adults were taught a new object name and an arbitrary fact about a novel object, and were tested for their retention immediately or after a delay. The findings revealed that fast mapping is not limited to word learning, suggesting that the capacity to learn and retain new words is the result of learning and memory abilities that are not specific to language. Three further studies then explored the specificity and development of the capacity for fast mapping. The implications of these findings for theories of word learning are discussed.

Almost nothing is known regarding infants' abilities for parsing the ongoing activity in their surroundings into distinct and meaningful parts. However, the individuation of actions is a fundamental ability, as explicated in a four-part introduction. Based on a review of general principles of individuation across multiple ontological domains, three possible mechanisms for action individuation in infants are identified and tested. The results of a series of studies show some important limitations in infants' abilities to parse actions from continuous motion. Although infants can perceptually discriminate different types of actions (such as jumps and falls) performed by a puppet, and can individuate and enumerate sequences of such actions when the acts are separated by brief motionless pauses, their ability to individuate actions embedded within a continuous strewn of motion is limited: Neither repeating cycles in the action sequences nor marked differences in extent of motion are sufficient cues. The results instead suggest that tangent discontinuities in the path of motion are an important cue to infants' ability to parse actions from on-going motion. Implications for infants' conceptual structure for actions, and additional potential mechanisms of action individuation, are also discussed.

Depression is a common source of morbidity and mortality in elders and has a significant impact on their quality of life. Meaning in life and self-transcendence, indicators of spirituality, have been linked to the experience of well-being in the elderly. Nurses are challenged to find ways to tap these natural health resources as a means of addressing the serious problem of depression in the aged. The purpose of this study was to explore and compare patterns of depression, meaning in life and self-transcendence as manifested in instruments and life stories of depressed and nondepressed elders. Life span development psychology, existential psychology and narrative theory provided the conceptual framework for this triangulated study of depression, meaning in life and self-transcendence in those over 75 years of age. The Geriatric Depression Scale, Purpose in Life Scale and Self-Transcendence Scale were completed by 77 people over the age of 75 and living in one of three retirement communities. Those individuals achieving the five highest and five lowest scores on the Geriatric Depression Scale were interviewed. Significant negative relationships were found between depression and meaning in life, and between depression and self-transcendence. A significant positive relationship was found between meaning in life and self-transcendence. Narrative analysis of the interviews generated 11 themes of meaning in life. Different patterns of behaviors and perceptions related to life story themes of meaning in life and self-transcendence were identified in the Depressed and Nondepressed Group. The study conclusions support the importance of meaning in life and self-transcendence for well-being in the elderly.

Using the DRM paradigm and a short story format, elementary age children demonstrate immediate false recall and recognition effects. Results from using the DRM lists showed that, relative to adult false recall levels, older children falsely recalled fewer critical words from DRM lists, and younger children's false recall of critical words was near floor levels, suggesting that gist processing did not predominate during the free recall task. Developmental trends were not in the direction of increased accuracy in memory performance, but rather in the direction of increased false memory. Contradiction within a short story format increased levels of false memory in younger and older children to levels that were not reliably different from information that repeated sentence meaning. Results from both experiments demonstrate that increases in false memory occurred when gist memory representations were strengthened, i.e., when the meaning of words or sentences was repeated. False memory effects were more pronounced over a delay interval. Fuzzy trace theory's assumptions explain the preponderance of the memory testing results obtained in these two experiments. Results run counter to suggestibility studies, where younger children produce false memory that surpasses older children and adults.

The effects of visual experience on perception were examined using two classic research paradigms: visual deprivation and perceptual adaptation. The present study evaluates the extent to which children in the 5- to 14-year-old age range have the capacity for visual plasticity with respect to recovery from the effects of astigmatism-related visual deprivation and adaptation to spatially distorted visual input. Visual experience was altered through eyeglass correction of astigmatism, a condition of the eye that induces degraded (blurred) visual input and causes a form of visual deprivation. Lenses that correct astigmatism cause two changes in sensory input: they alleviate the deprivation effects of astigmatism, and cause spatial distortion. Perception was initially measured when the children first received eyeglass correction, and change in perception was measured after 1 month of wear, and after 1 year of wear. Measures included recognition acuity, resolution acuity, vernier acuity, contrast sensitivity, stereoacuity, and form perception. Baseline analyses of normal (non-astigmatic) subject data indicated that recognition acuity, resolution acuity, vernier acuity, and contrast sensitivity continue to develop within the 5- to 14-year-old age range. Baseline analyses also revealed that children who experienced astigmatism-related deprivation demonstrated perceptual deficits, in comparison to non-astigmatic children, on all measures of perception (although deficits within some measures depended on stimulus orientation (grating acuity and contrast sensitivity) and spatial frequency of the stimulus (for contrast sensitivity)), and demonstrated measurable distortions in form perception. However, primary outcome analyses revealed little evidence of plasticity with regard to recovery from the effects of deprivation and no evidence of plasticity with regard to perceptual adaptation to distortion. The results suggest that children in the 5- to 14-year-old age range may be beyond the sensitive period for recovery from astigmatism-related deprivation through simple restoration of clear visual input. Discussion focuses on theoretical views on conditions necessary for plasticity (Bedford, 1993a, 1993b, 1995, Banks, 1988), and their implications regarding another intervention, discrimination learning, that might be more effective at inducing plasticity in children and adults who are beyond the sensitive period for plasticity, and their implications for interpretation of data on adaptation to spatial distortion observed in the present study.

Several researchers have hypothesized that implicit memory remains stable across the lifespan. Empirical support with children has been difficult to interpret due to methodological weaknesses including baseline variation, floor and ceiling effects, and lack of experimental dissociations. A new measure of repetition priming, the picture fragment completion task, was developed to account for these weaknesses while being appropriate for both children and adults. Adults and children aged 4, 6, and 8 (N = 156) completed either the picture fragment completion task or an explicit memory test made from same materials. Subjects of all ages performed equally on the priming test while performance increased with age on the explicit memory test. For all ages, the levels of processing manipulation affected only the explicit memory test. Thus, subjects were not using effortful strategies on the priming test. These results form a solid foundation for studying other developmental issues in implicit memory.

The purpose of the present investigation is twofold: (1) to develop a measurement scale of intimacy; and (2) to compare self-reports of intimacy across four types of relationships using the same conceptualization and measurement. Intimacy is conceptualized in this study as a component of the internal working model of relationships. This model is assumed to include components of self, relationship, other, and social world in general. The instrument used in this study was designed to measure qualities of the first three components. Two hundred fifty-one late adolescents completed the measure three times, once describing each of the following relationships: (1) mother; (2) father; (3) same gender peer; and (4) opposite gender friend, dating partner, or spouse. Repeated measures ANOVAS and post hoc Tukey analyses revealed two trends: (1) adolescents reported less intimate relationships with their mothers than with other relationship partners; and (2) males reported more intimate relationships than females, especially with their fathers.

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