Primary care clinician expectations regarding aging.

Purpose: Expectations regarding aging (ERA) in community-dwelling older adults are associated with personal health behaviors and health resource usage. Clinicians' age expectations likely influence patients' expectations and care delivery patterns; yet, limited research has explored clinicians' age expectations. The Expectations Regarding Aging Survey (ERA-12) was used to assess (a) age expectations in a sample of primary care clinicians practicing in the United States and (b) clinician characteristics associated with ERA-12 scores.

Maternal epistemological perspectives and variations in mental state talk.

Purpose: This study examined how complexity of maternal epistemological beliefs predicted mothers' and children's talk about the mind.

Method: Twenty-eight mothers of 5- to 10-year-olds completed a measure of receptive vocabulary, and mothers and children participated in a storytelling task specifically designed to elicit talk about the mind. Their use of mental state terms to encode pragmatic functions and mothers' epistemologies were assessed and compared.

Mothers' beliefs about knowledge, child development, and parenting strategies: expanding the goals of parenting programs.

This study examined the relationship between mothers' beliefs about knowledge (epistemology) and conceptions of child development and parent-child communication strategies. One hundred twenty mothers of preschool-aged children completed the Ways of Knowing measure and Parent Communication Strategies Interview; a subset of 38 also completed the Concepts of Development Questionnaire. Analyses revealed that mothers with more complex understanding of knowledge have less categorical and more multi-faceted conceptions of child development and are more likely to endorse parenting strategies that are less authoritarian and more cognitively challenging for children.

Building bridges.

Abstract Friendships between lesbians and heterosexual women were explored using a sample of 47 mostly White women (23 lesbians and 24 heterosexual women), ages 18 to 25, that reported at least one close lesbian-heterosexual woman friendship. A majority of participants indicated that friendships between lesbians and heterosexual women had both uniquely positive and negative aspects that could be attributed to the difference in sexual identity. Positive aspects included socio-emo-tional benefits, opportunities for learning, and societal benefits.