How siblings resolve their conflicts: the importance of first offers, planning, and limited opposition.

Sixty-four sibling dyads (4-12 years old; 61% males; 83% European-American) were asked to resolve an ongoing conflict. Older siblings provided leadership by suggesting, modifying, justifying, and requesting assent to plans for conflict resolution. Younger siblings countered and disagreed, but also contributed to planning and agreed to their siblings' plans.

Story understanding and counterfactual reasoning.

D. Kahneman and A. Tversky (1982), in a seminal study on counterfactual reasoning, claimed empirical support for a simulation heuristic wherein ease of converting unusual conditions determines their selection as causes over normal conditions.

Appraisal and goal processes as predictors of psychological well-being in bereaved caregivers.

Narratives of 30 caregivers were scored for appraisals and coping responses following the death of their partners from AIDS. Appraisals were identified as valenced beliefs, emotions, and goal outcomes, whereas coping responses included goals and plans of action. The proportion of positive appraisals predicted long-term goals and plans and psychological well-being at both bereavement and 12 months later.

Constructing inferences during narrative text comprehension.

The authors describe a constructionist theory that accounts for the knowledge-based inferences that are constructed when readers comprehend narrative text. Readers potentially generate a rich variety of inferences when they construct a referential situation model of what the text is about. The proposed constructionist theory specifies that some, but not all, of this information is constructed under most conditions of comprehension.

Seeing, hearing, and doing: a developmental study of memory for actions.

The ability to recall and organize actions was studied in children from 5 to 11 years in age. 8 different auditory or visual commands were successively presented for 10 trials in each modality in a free-recall task. Younger children performed fewer commands but recalled relatively more recent ones, and they showed the same degree of subjective organization and the same degree and structure of hierarchical clustering as the older children.