Socialization of emotion: Pathway to preschoolers' emotional and social competence

Aspects of 47 preschoolers'emotional competence—their patterns of emotional expressiveness and reactions to others' emotion displays—were observed in two settings, with mother and with peers, and their general social competence was rated by their preschool teachers. Intrapersonal and interpersonal (i.e., socialization correlates of children's emotional competence were identified, and a causal model incorporating direct and indirect influences on social competence was evaluated. Maternal patterns of expressiveness, reactions to children's emotion displays, and self-reported affective environment were associated with children's emotional competence in the preschool. Children's emotional competence with mother predicted their emotional competence in the preschool somewhat less strongly, suggesting that emotional competence may differ according to the interpersonal relationship studied. Taken as a whole, findings reassert the importance of the domain of emotional expression to the development of social competence.Reprint requests can be sent to the author, Department of Psychology, George Mason University, 4400 University Drive, Fairfax, VA 22030. Grateful acknowledgment goes to the mothers and children who so clearly expressed and reacted to emotions; thanks also are due to Christine Alban, Joanne Ayyash, Michael Casey, Elizabeth Couchoud, Huynh Dung, Merlina Hemingway, Soueang Lay, Vanna Nguyen, Emilianne Slayden and Kimberly Sproul, as well as the director and teachers of the Project for the Study of Young Children. An earlier version of this material was presented at the 1991 Biennial Meetings of the Society for Research in Child Development, Seattle, WA. University support from Grants #2-10150, 2-10176 and 2-10073 also made the research possible.     

Poverty and social trends in Russia

The article describes the socioeconomic situation of the Russian population and its dynamics in 1992. The analysis is based on series of regional sociological surveys led by the All-Russian Living Standards Research Center and on official Russian statistical data. The basic unit of analysis is the family, and hence family typology approbated both in research and in practical social work is introduced. Besides describing and discussing the growing poverty tendencies in contemporary Russia, the article also contains methodological recommendations for social policy bodies and social workers on the strategy of work in social maintenance and social support of the least secure population strata.     

Unions,PAC contributions,and the NAFTA vote

Political action committees (PACs), especially those controlled by organized labor and business, have been shown to affect Congressional voting. We explore how PACs influenced the House of Representatives’ vote on the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA). The NAFTA vote is analyzed because organized labor strongly opposed the treaty while business generally supported it and because of the straight-forward voting generated by its fast-track status. Probit analysis of a unique, unpublished data set containing information about PAC and non-PAC contributions to the 1992 House election campaigns demonstrates that Representatives who depended largely on labor PACs tended to oppose NAFTA, while Representatives who derived a large proportion of their campaign contributions from business PACs tended to favor its passage.     

Violations of dominance in pricing judgments

The dominance principle states that the judged price of gamble A should be equal to or greater than the judged price of gamble B whenever A's outcomes are equal to or better than the corresponding outcomes of B, holding everything else constant. Subjects often violate the dominance principle by assigning a higher price to a gamble with some probability of winning a positive amount, Y, otherwise zero, than to a superior gamble with the same chances of winning Y, otherwise winning X. Violations also occur with losses. Results are consistent with a configural-weight theory in which the decision weight for each outcome depends on the rank of the outcome with respect to the other outcomes in the lottery and the value of the outcome (zero vs. nonzero).The authors thank Shi-jie Chang, Duncan Luce, and Lisa Ordóñez for comments on an earlier draft. This research was supported by a National Science Foundation grant to the first author (BNS-8451368). Requests for reprints should be sent to Barbara Mellers, Dept. of Psychology, University of California, Berkeley, CA 94720.